Full text of "The Catholic world"

THE 



CATHOLIC WORLD. 



MONTHLY MAGAZINE 



OF 



GENERAL LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 



PUBLISHED BY THE PAULIST 

A? 
2. 

C3 



VOL.. XCII. 
OCTOBER, 1910, TO MARCH, 1911. 




NEW YORK : 
THE OFFICE OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD, 

120 WEST 6oth STREET. 



1911, 



CONTENTS. 



"Bertram" (Saint) of Ham. Louise 

Imogen Guiney, .... 23 

Carra and Tirawley, County Mayo, In. 

Wilfrid St. Oswald, 37 

Catholic Conscience of History, The. 

Htlatre Belloc, ..... i 

Catholic Layman and Social Reform, 

The. Joseph McSorley, C.S.P., . 185 

Catholic Revival in Denmark and Ice- 
land, The. /. Faber Scholfield, . 353 

Charities, The National Conference of 

Catholic. William /. Kerby, Ph.D., 145 

Chesterton, G. K., " What's Wrong 
With the World." W. E. Camp- 
bell, . 205 

Christian Science, Reflections on. 

Francis P. Duffy, . . . .721 

Christmas Carols, Anglo-Irish. W. II. 

Grattan Flood, . . . .318 

Church Schools, State Aid to. Michael 

H. Lucey, Ph.D., . . . .789 

Commonplace, The Worth of the. 

Walter Elliott, C.S.P., . . .514 

Communion, Frequent, for Young and 

Old. fames A. Moloney, . . 633 

Denmark and Iceland, The Catholic 

Revival in./. Faber Scholfield, . 353 

Dialogue, A. Vincent Me Nabb, O.P., . 315 

Divorce, Family and, in Japan. Joseph 

Freri, . . . . . . 464 

Episcopal Church, The General Con- 
vention of the. Tohn F. Fenlon, 
D.D., 645 

Eucharistic Congress, The Montreal. 

John /. Burke, C.S.P., ... 84 

Events, Recent, 127, 268, 413, 556, 705, 847 

Faith, How Ireland Kept the. H. P. 

Russell, . . . . . .786 

Ferrer, McClure's, Archer and. An- 
drew /. Shipman, . . . 376, 521 

Foreign Periodicals,, 

118, 261, 404, 550, 695, 839 

Hamilton, The Intimate Life of. 

Charles H. MacCarthy, . . . 752 

History, The Catholic Conscience of. 

Hilaire Belloc, . . . . i 

How Ireland Kept the Faith.//". P. 

Russell, 7 86 



Iceland, ^The Catholic Revival in Den- 
mark and./. Faber Scholfield, . 353 

Irish Sisters, The Work of. Wilfrid 

St Oswald, 180 

Japan, Family and Divorce in. Joseph 

Freri, ...... 464 

Journal of My Life, The. A Nun, 300, 449 

Lambert, Father. R. S. F. L., . . 328 

Looking for a Job. William M. Lei- 

serson, 603 

Master of Language, A. Edward F. 

Curran, ....... 796 

McClure's, Archer, Ferrer. Andrew /. 

Shipman, 376, 521 

Meynell (Mrs.): An Appreciation. 

Katherine Bregy, .... 494 

Nations, The Beginnings ot,ihe.Hi'aire I # 
Belloc, 765 

New Books, . 96, 246, 382, 529, 673, 818 

Oases of the Souf, The. Z. March 

Phillips, 612 

Passionsspiele of 1910, The. Katherine 

Bregy, . . . . . . 42 

Picturesqueness and Piety. Agnes Rep- 

Pter, 730 

Pillar of Cloud, The. Walter Elliott, 

C.S.P., 780 

Religions, The History of . C. C. Mar- 

tindale, S./., . . . . .767 
Roman Empire ? What was the Hi- 
laire Belloc, ..... 289 
Roman Empire ? What was the Church 

in the. Hilaire Belloc, .. . 433 
Roman Empire ? What was the " Fall " 

of the. Hilaire Belloc, . . .617 
Thompson, Francis, His Life and Work. 
A. B. Purdie, . . . . 223 

Vandalism of the Reformers, The. 

Caryl Coleman, .... 196 
Vaughan (Cardinal; in America. Henry 

E.&Keeffe,C.S.P.,. ... 75 
Vaughan, Henry, Cardinal.^. H. 

Kent, O.S.C. 212 

"What's Wrong With the World." 

W. E. Campbell, . . . . 2O5 
With Our Readers, 137, 277, 423, 570, 715, 857 
Worth of the Commonplace, The. 

Walter Elliott, C.S.P., . . . 514 



CONTENTS. 



in 



STORIES. 



A Lowland Tale. Margaret Kerr, . 505 
A Night Adventure. Mary Austin, . 157 
Cords of Nature Christian Reid, . 591 
Noel. Christian Retd, . . . 359 
Notre Dame de la Misericorde. Katha- 
rine Tynan, . . . .'."". 739 



Patricia, the Problem. Esther W. 

Meill, 10 

The Mace Bearer. Helen Haines, . 476 

The Star of the Sea. Katharine Tynan, 62 

The Wayside Stations. Jeanie Drake, 340 

The Will to Live. Katharine Tynan, 662 



POETRY. 



Chaunting. Mysteries. R. M. Burton, . 374 
Saul. John Jerome Rooney, . . . 672 
The Call of the Sea. Julian E. John- 
stone, . . . . . .178 

The Coliseum. Julian E, Johnstone, . 325 



The CQ\\Qq\\y. Katharine Tynan, . 492 
The Heat of the Day. Caroline D. 

Swan, 95 

To the Savior. Julian E. Johnstone, . 787 



NEW PUBLICATIONS. 



A Book of the Christ Child, . . . 388 
A History of the United States for 

Schools. ...... 115 

A Life for a Life, 542 

A Manual 6f Church History, . . 99 

A Minister's Marriage, .... 396 

A Poet's Way and Other Stories, . . 693 

Andros of Ephesus, .... 117 

Art, Religion and the Renaissance, . 403 

Astronomical Essays 99 

Back to Holy Church, . . . .680 
Belief in a Creative Power in the Light 

of Science, ...... 694 

Bishop Potter, . . . . .115 

Blessed Mary of the Angels, . . . 694 

Brazil and her People of To-Day, . . 692 

By Inheritance, ..... 102 

Carl Marx : His Life and His Work, . 690 
Catholic Religion, . . . . .252 

Catholic Theology, . . . .824 

Christian Apologetics 254 

Christianity and Social Questions, . 676 
Christianity and the Leaders of Modern 

Science, .'.'. . . . 826 
Christian Origins, . . . . .105 

Christmas Tales, . . . . J . 258 

Church and State, no 

Comrades of the Trails, . 113 

Criminal Psycology, .... 827 

Dieu : Son Existence et Sa Nature, . 548 

English Accentuation, .... 402 

Eric, or the Black Finger, . . . 686 

Etude Historique, 549 

Eyes of Youth, ..... 823 

Famous Scouts, '. . . . . 837 

Fenelon et Ses Amis, .... 693 

Ferrer the Anarchist, . . . . 664 

Flamstead Quarries, .... 225 

Florida Trails, 679 

Footsteps in the Ward, and Other 

Stories, ...... 694 



Forest and Town, ..... 837 

Gounod, . . . . ^, . . . 396 

Graduate Romanum, . . . .114 

Groundwork of Christian Perfection, . 116 

Handbook of Church Music, . . . 114 
Heavenwards, . . . .98 

Heroes of California, .... 829 

Heroic Spain 533 

Hints for Catholics on Instructing Con- 
verts, ". 829 

Home Life in Spain, .... 679 

Houseboating, . . . * . 98 

Industrial Insurance in the United States, 831 

Imitation of Christ, . . . . 259 

Jeanne d'Arc, . . ,*/,...' : , . 388 

John Cecil Rhodes, .... 109 

Joseph de Maistre et la Papaute, . . 260 

Joseph Hayden ; the Story of His Life, 687 

Keith of the Border, .... 260 

Knighthood in Germ and Flower, . 537 
La Correspondance d'Ausone et Paulin 

de Nole, 

La Sainte Vierge, . 
La Vie de Saint Benoit, 
La Vie Privee de Talleyrand, 
La Vielle Morale a L'Ecole, 
Le Pontificat, 



Les Peres Apostoliques, 
L'Heure du Matin, . 



. 117 

549 
. 117 

- 548 
. 838 
. 117 
. 260 
. 400 

L'Histoire des Religions et de la Foi 

Chretienne, 117 

L'Idee Individualisteet 1'Idee Chretienne, 117 
Life in the Roman World of Nero and 

St. Paul, 390 

Little Books on Art, . . . .389 
Mad Shepherds, and Other Human 

Studies 395 

Makers of Sorrow and Makers of Joy, . 398 

Marriage, ...... 694 

Marjorie in Command, .... 399 

Martha Vine, ...... 689 






iv 



CONTENTS. 



534 
540 
694 



343 

837 



Mary Aloysius Hardy, Religious of the 

Sacred Heart, 

Mary Magdalen, 

Medical Notes on Lourdes, . 

M editations for Every Day in the Year, 

..according to St. Alphonsus de Li- 

gouri, 

Mere Hints, Moral and Social, 

Michael Servetus 113 

'Mid Pines and Heather, ... 694 
Modern Biology and the Theory of Evo- 
lution, 3 8 4 

Modern Theories of Criminality, . . 827 

Mysticism, 3 8 7 

Ned Reider, 400 

Oberammergau, 116 

Ordo for 1911, 43 

Our Catholic Heritage in English Liter- 
ature in Pre-Conquest Days, . . 834 

Our Lady in Art, 389 

Our Lady's Lutenist, . * 39 8 
Outlines of Bible Knowledge, . . 830 

Peggy Alone, 4 

Pentateuchal Criticism, . . . . in 

Perejean 402 

Problems of Your Generation, . . 402 
Qu'est-ce-que le Quietisme, . . . 117 
Rituale Romanum, . . . .838 
Romantic California, . . . . 678 
Royal Palaces and Parks of France, . 690 
Saint Augustine and African Church 

Divisions, 54* 

Saint Leon le Grand, .... 403 
Saint Teresa of Spain, . 547 

Service Abroad, . . . ,-' . 115 
Shelburne Essays, . . . . . 831 
Sicily in Shadow and Sun, . . . 830 
Simple Catechism Lessons, . . .116 
Socialism and Success, .... 688 

St. Clare of Assisi, 818 

State Socialism in New Zealand, . . 687 
Story Telling ; What to Tell and How 
to Tell It, 538 

Tales of Irish Life and Character, . 393 

The Arizona Canyon, . . . .113 

The Attributes of God as Mirrored in 
the Perfections of Mary, 

The Battle of the Wilderness, . " . 

The Boy's Cuchulain, . . . . 

The Catholic Encyclopedia, . 

The Charity of Christ, .... 

The Christ Child in Legend and Art, . 

The Christmas Angel, .... 

The Doctrine of the Communion of 
Saints, , 

The Cost of a Crown, .... 

The Devil's Parable ; and Other Essays, 

The Divine Minstrels, .... 

The Durable Satisfactions of Life, 



835 
821 

399 
545 
383 
401 
402 



The Dweller on the Borderland, . . 257 
The Empty House, .... 39 2 
The Formation of Character, . . 115 
The Form of Perfect Living, . . .529 
The Friendly Little House, . . .393 
The Gospel According to St. Mark, . 694 
The History of Church Music, . .114 
The History of the Popes, . . .681 
The Holy Eucharist, . . . .114 

The Holy Land, 401 

The Iliad of Homer, .... 692 
The Lead of Honor, .... 393 
The Life of Reginald Pole, ... 96 
The Life of the Lady Saint Clare, . 818 
The Liturgical Year (Historically Ex- 
plained), n6 

The Lives of the Popes, . . .53^ 
The Lost Ambassador, .... 258 
The Man and the Dragon, . . . 256 

The Middle Age, 583 

The Mirage of the Many . . .104 
The Mount of Vision, . . .529 

The Old Mill on the Withrose, . . 686 
The Pittsburg Survey, . . . 391 

The Poetry of Ireland, . . . 246 

The Prodigal Pro Tern, . . .685 

The Promise of American Life, . . 100 
The Science of Art and the Philosophy 

of Language, 389 

The Scourge, . . . . * . 539 
The Small People, . . . .823 
The Song Lore of Ireland, . . .675 
The Spaniard at Home, . . , , 384 
The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales, . 251 
The Story of Old Japan, . . .675 
The Story of Our Lord's Life, . . 833 
The Tariff History of the United States, 684 
The Turn of the Tide, . . . .537 
The Vedic Religion, . . . . 403 
The Whistler Book, . . . .546 
The World and the Prime Cause, . . 694 
The Young Christian Teacher En- 
couraged, 684 

Three Wise Men, 387 



834 
535 
544 
100 
248 



Trails Through Western Woods, 
Twentieth Century Socialism, 
Under the Ban, .... 
Unemployment and Trades Unions, 
Venezuela and Columbia, 
Vie de Sainte Radegonde, 
Victor Hugo, Apologiste, 

Voices from Erin, 549 

Watchwords from Dr. Brownson, . . 693 
What Eight Million Women Want, . 684 
What Pictures to See in Europe in One 
Summer, ...... 826 

Why I Am a Catholic, . . . .694 

Within the Soul, 838 



no 
382 
114 
685 
108 
117 
838 




THE 

CATHOLIC WORLD. 

VOL. XCII. OCTOBER, 1910. No. 547. 

THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY. 

BY HILAIRE BELLOC. 

|T is a modern habit to talk of "aspects." It is 
little more than a fashion in the clouded phil- 
osophy which insists upon the multiplicity of 
ways in which a thing may be regarded, and 
concludes that any one way, and all our ways 
are imperfect. 

The way of speaking is modern and therefore ephemeral; 
let us not fall into it even for the space of this short article, 
nor talk of the Catholic "aspect" of history. 

I will rather do homage to my own conscience by saying 
that I am profoundly convinced that there is no such thing as 
a Catholic "aspect" of history I mean a Catholic "aspect" 
of European history. There is a Protestant aspect, a Jewish 
aspect, a Mohammedan aspect, a Japanese aspect, and so forth. 
But there is no more a Catholic " aspect " of European his- 
tory than there is a Jones " aspect " of Jones. True, false 
philosophy does pretend that there is a Jones aspect of Jones; 
but in nothing does false philosophy prove itself more false. 
For Jones' way of looking at himself when he looks straight 
and true is in line with his Creator's, and therefore with re- 
ality: he looks from within. 

Let me pursue this metaphor. We Catholics believe that 
man has in him conscience, which is the voice of God : not 

Copyright. 1910. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE 

IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK. 
VOL. XCII. I 



2 THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY [Oct., 

only that the objective world is real, but that a personality is 
self-consciously real. 

When Jones, flattered by the voice of another, yet says 
within himself, " I am a mean fellow," he has hold of reality. 
We believe that though Jones does not know an infinite 
amount about himself, yet that the finite amount he does 
know is all in the map; it is all part of what is really there. 
What he does not know about himself would, did he know it, 
fit in with what he does know about himself. There are 
" aspects " of Jones to everybody else, except two, Jones and 
God Who made him. These two, when they regard Jones, see 
Jones wholly as he is : all creatures other than Jones have 
their aspects of Jones, and their aspects differ, but Jones' view 
of himself is not an aspect: it is a comprehension. 

Now then, so it is with the Faith and the story of Europe. 
A Catholic as he reads that story understands it not from 
without but from within. He cannot understand it altogether, 
because he is a finite being ; but he is also that which he has 
to understand. He brings to history (and when I say "his- 
tory " in these pages I mean the history of Christendom) self- 
knowledge. As a man in the confessional accuses himself of 
what he knows to be true and what other people cannot judge, 
so a Catholic, talking of European civilization, when he blames 
it, blames it for motives and for acts which are his own, which 
he could have committed in person, and which in committing 
them he would have understood. He is not relatively right in 
his blame, he is absolutely right. As a man who is unjustly 
accused can testify to his own motive, not relatively but ab- 
solutely, so can the Catholic testify to unjust, irrelevant, or 
ignorant conceptions of the European story, for he knows why 
and how it proceeded, while others, not Catholic, look upon 
it externally. Ihey have to deal with something which pre- 
sents itself to them by its phenomena: he sees it all in its 
essence. 

The Catholic conscience of history is not a conscience 
which begins with the development of the Church in the basin 
of the Mediterranean; it goes back much further than that. 
He understands also the soil in which that plant of the Faith 
arose. In a way that no other man can, he understands the 
Roman military effort; why that effort clashed with the gross 
merchant empire of Carthage; what it derived from the light 



i9io.] THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 3 

of Athens; what food it found in the Celtic tribes and their 
dim but awful memories of immortality ; what analogy it had 
with the ritual of false but profound religions, and even why 
and how the Jewish people, the little violent corporate tradi- 
tion of Palestine, was so essential that he has a right to call 
it, in the old dispensation, divine. For the Catholic the whole 
perspective falls into its natural order; nothing is distorted to 
him, and the procession of our great story is easy, natural, 
and final. 

This being so, the modern Catholic, especially if he is con- 
fined to the use of the English tongue, suffers from a curious, 
and it is to be hoped, a passing accident. No book, nor even 
as yet the writings of one man in that tongue, gives him a 
conspectus of the past; he is compelled to study authorities, 
North German or English copying North German, whose view 
is never that of the true and balanced European. He comes 
perpetually across phrases which he sees at once to be absurd, 
either in their limitations or in the things they connote, but, 
unless he has the leisure for an extended study, he cannot 
put his finger upon the precise characteristics of the absurdity. 
In the books he reads if they are in the English language 
at least he finds things lacking which his Catholicism tells 
him should be there; but he cannot supply their place, because 
the non- Catholic who wrote those books was himself ignorant 
of such things, or rather could not conceive them. 

Let me take a particular example to prove what I mean : 
to greater examples I will come in a moment. 

I defy any man to read the story of Thomas a Becket in 
Stubbs, in Green, in Bright, in any one of the hundred hand- 
books to medieval history, and to make head or tail of it. 
It is a highly limited subject of study, it concerns only a few 
years, a great deal is known about it, there are many con- 
temporary accounts, and the Catholic may well ask : " No 
matter who tells the story, why is it I cannot understand the 
story ? " 

The story is briefly this (and all non- Catholic authorities 
of any sort of value have told it, according to their lights, 
quite justly and have certainly told it most amply): A certain 
prelate, the Primate of England at the time, was asked to ad- 
mit certain changes in the administration of criminal law. 
The gist of these was that men attached to the Church in 



4 THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY [Oct., 

any way by minor orders (not necessarily priests) should, if 
they committed a crime amenable to temporal jurisdiction, be 
brought before the ordinary courts of the country. The claim 
was, at the time, a novel one. The Primate of England re- 
sisted that claim. In connection with his resistance he was 
subjected to many indignities, many things outrageous to cus- 
tom were done against him; but the Pope doubted whether 
his resistance was justified, and he was finally reconciled with 
the civil authority; on returning to his See at Canterbury, he 
became at once the author of further resistance and the sub- 
ject of further outrage, and within a short time he was mur- 
dered by his exasperated enemies. 

This death raised a vast public outcry. His monarch did 
penance for it. But all the points on which he had resisted 
were waived by the Church, and the monarch's original claim 
was almost immediately recognized. To-day it appears to be 
plain justice. 

So far so good. The non-Catholic will say, and has said 
in a hundred studies from one as admirable as The Memorials 
of Canterbury , by Stanley, to one as worthless as England Un- 
der the Normans and Angevins, by Davis that this resistance 
of St. Thomas was but an example of the resistance always 
offered by an old organization to a new development. 

Of course it was! It is equally true to say of a man who 
objects to an aeroplane flying over his back garden without 
leave, and smashing in the top of his studio, that it is the re- 
sistance of an old organization to a new development ; but such 
a phrase in no way explains the business ; and when the Catho- 
lic begins to examine the particular case of St. Thomas, he 
finds a great many things to wonder at and to think about 
upon which non-Catholic historians are hopelessly silent. 

I say " hopelessly," because their attitude is hopeless ; they 
have to record these things, but they are bewildered by them. 
They can explain St. Thomas' action simply enough : too sim- 
ply; yet when they are asked to explain what followed his 
death, they have to fall back upon the most inhuman and im- 
possible hypotheses, that "the masses were ignorant" that is 
as compared with other periods in human history; that "the 
Papacy engineered an outburst of popular enthusiasm." As 
though the Papacy were a secret society, with a machinery 
for " engineering " such things, as though the type of enthu- 



THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 5 

siastn produced by the martyrdom was the wretched mechanical 
thing produced by " engineering " to-day, and as though noth- 
ing besides such interference would have roused the populace. 

As to the miracles which undoubtedly took place, the non- 
Catholic historian had and has three ways of dealing with them: 
First, to say nothing about them (which is the easiest way of 
telling a lie) ; secondly, to say that they were the result of a 
vast conspiracy in which the maim, the halt, and the blind, 
etc., were connected ; and, thirdly, to give them modern jour- 
nalistic names, which he hopes will get rid of the miraculous 
character, notably to talk of "auto-suggestion." 

Now the Catholic approaching this wonderful story, when 
he has read all the original documents, understands it easily 
enough from within. 

He sees that the stand made by St. Thomas was not very 
important in itself, and was probably (taken as an isolated 
action) unreasonable. But he soon gets to see, as he reads 
and as he notes the rapid and profound transformation of all 
civilization which was taking place in that generation, that St. 
Thomas was standing out for what had been the concrete sym- 
bols of the Church's liberty against a movement that might 
have done what was done in parts of Europe four hundred 
years later, to wit, destroyed the unity and the discipline of 
Christendom. He had to fight on ground chosen by the enemy, 
he fought and he resisted in the spirit dictated by the Church. 
He fought for no dogmatic point, he fought for no point to 
which the Church five hundred years before or five hundred 
years after would have attached the slightest importance, he 
fought for things which were purely temporal arrangements, 
which had until quite recently been the guarantee of the 
Church's liberty, and which were in his time upon the turn 
soon to be negligible; but the spirit in which he fought was 
the determination that the Church should never be controlled 
by the civil power, and the spirit against which he fought was 
the spirit which either openly or secretly believes the Church 
to be a merely human institution to be subjected, as an inferior 
to a superior, to the processes of civil law. 

A Catholic sees, as he reads the story, that St. Thomas 
obviously and necessarily lost, when he died, every point on 
which he had stood out, and yet saved the thing for which 
he was standing out. A Catholic perceives clearly why the 



6 THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY [Oct., 

enthusiasm of the populace rose; the guarantee of the plain 
man's healthy and moral existence against the wealthier classes, 
and the all power of the State the self-government of the 
general Church had been defended up to the point of death. 

Further the Catholic reader is not content, as is the non- 
Catholic, with a priori and dogmatic assertion with regard to 
the miracles. He reads the evidence, he cannot believe that 
there was a conspiracy of falsehood (in the lack of all proof 
of such conspiracy), he is moved to a conviction that the events, 
so minutely recorded and so amply testified, took place. 

The miracles for a Catholic reader are but the extreme 
points fitting in with the whole scheme; he knows what Euro- 
pean civilization was before, he knows what it was to become, 
he knows why and how the Church would stand out against a 
certain spirit of change, he appreciates why and how a char- 
acter like that of St. Thomas would resist; he is in no way 
perplexed to find that the resistance failed on its technical 
side, and succeeded so thoroughly in its spirit as to prevent, 
in a moment when its occurrence would have been far more 
dangerous than the sixteenth century, the overturning of the 
connection between Church and State. The enthusiasm of the 
populace he particularly comprehends, and he sees, without 
very much difficulty, the connection between that enthusiasm 
and the miracles that attended St. Thomas' intercession; not 
because those miracles depended upon the fantasy of those 
who enjoyed them, but because a popular recognition of de- 
served sanctity is the later accompaniment and the recipient 
of miraculous power. 

It is the details of history which require the closest analy- 
sis. I have, therefore, chosen a significant detail with which 
to exemplify my case. 

Just as a man who thoroughly understands the character 
of the English squires and of their position in the English 
country-sides would have to explain at some length and with 
difficulty to a foreigner how and why the hardships and the 
injustices involved in the English system of land ownership 
were yet not anti-national but national, and just as a particu- 
lar case of peculiar complexity or violence might afford him a 
special test, so the martyrdom of St. Thomas makes for the 
Catholic who is viewing Europe a very good example whereby 
he can show how well he understands what is to other men 



i9io.] THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 7 

not understandable, and how simple is to him, and how human, 
a process which to men not Catholic can only be explained 
by the most grotesque assumptions, such as : that universal con- 
temporary testimony must be ignored; that men are ready to 
die for things in which they do not believe; that the philoso- 
phy of society does not permeate that society ; or that popu- 
lar enthusiasm, widespread, ubiquitous, and unchallenged, is 
mechanically produced by order from some centre of govern- 
ment. All these absurdities are connoted in the non-Catholic 
view of the great quarrel, nor is there any but the Catholic 
conscience of Europe that plainly explains it. 

The Catholic sees that the whole of the a Becket business 
was like the struggle of a man who is fighting for his liberty and 
is compelled to maintain it (such being the battleground chosen 
by his opponents) upon a privilege inherited from the past- 
The non- Catholic simply cannot understand it and does not 
pretend to understand it. 

Now if we turn from this one small point, highly definite 
and limited, to the general aspect of history, we can make a 
list of the great lines on which the Catholic can appreciate 
what other men only judge, and can determine and know those 
things upon which other men have no more than a puzzled 
guess. The Catholic Faith spreads over the Roman world, 
not because the Jews were widely dispersed, but because the 
intellect of antiquity, and especially the Roman intellect, ac- 
cepted it in its maturity. 

The material decline of the Empire is not co- relative with 
nor parallel to the growth of the Catholic Church, it is the 
counterpart of that growth, and, as one of the greatest of 
modern scholars has well said, "the Faith is that which Rome 
accepted in her maturity ; nor is the Faith the heir of her de- 
cline, but rather the conservator of all that could be con- 
served." 

There was not so much an awakening of civilization by the 
advent of barbaric blood, as the imperiling of civilization in 
its old age by some infiltration of barbaric blood ; that civili- 
zation so attacked did not permanently fail we owe to the 
Catholic Faith. 

In the next age the Catholic proceeds to see Europe saved 
against a universal attack of the Mohammedan, the Hun, the 
Scandinavian : he notes that the fierceness of the attack was 



8 THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY [Oct., 

such that anything save something divinely instituted would 
have broken down. The Mohammedan came within three 
days of Tours, the Hun to within a week of the Rhine, the 
Scandinavian into the mouths of all the rivers of Gaul, and 
almost overwhelmingly over the island of Britain. There was 
nothing left of Europe but a nucleus or an island. Neverthe- 
less it survived. In the refloresence which followed that dark 
time, the Catholic notes not hypotheses but documents and 
facts; he sees the representative system and the parliaments 
springing up from the great monastic orders, in Spain, in 
Britain, in Gaul never outside the old limits of Christendom. 
He sees the Gothic architecture arising spontaneous and autoch- 
thonic, he sees the Universities inheriting much but copying 
nothing and, in a word, he sees the marvelous new civili- 
zation of the Middle Ages rising as a transformation of the 
old Roman society, a transformation wholly from within, and 
motived by the Church. 

The trouble, the religious terror, the wild, mystic mad- 
nesses of the fifteenth century, are to him the diseases of one 
body in need of medicine. The medicine being too long de- 
layed, there comes the disruption of the European body. It 
ought to be death ; but since the Church is not subject to 
mortal law it is not death. Of those populations which break 
away from religion and from civilization none (he perceives) 
were of the ancient Roman stock save Britain. The Catholic, 
reading his history, watches that struggle, not for its effect on 
the fringes of Europe; he is anxious to see whether Britain 
will fail. He notes the keenness of the fight in England and 
its long endurance; how all the forces of wealth are enlisted 
upon the one side, how in spite of this a tenacious tradition 
prevents any sudden transformation of the British polity or its 
sharp severance from the continuity of Europe. He sees the 
whole of North England rising, cities standing siege, and ulti- 
mately the court, the great nobles, and the merchants victori- 
ous, and the people cut off, apparently forever, from the life 
upon which they fed. Side by side with all this he notes that, 
next to Britain, one land only that was never Roman land, 
by an accident quite miraculous, preserves the Faith, and, as 
Britain is lost, he sees side by side with that loss the preserva- 
tion of Ireland. 

To the Catholic reader of history (though he has no Cath- 



i9io.] THE CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE OF HISTORY 9 

olic history to read) there is no danger of the foolish bias 
against civilization which has haunted so many contemporary 
writers, and which has led them to frame fantastic origins for 
institutions, the growth of which are as plain as an historical 
phenomenon can be. He does not see in the Pirate raids 
which desolated the eastern and southeastern coasts of Eng- 
land in the sixth century the origin of the English people. 
He perceives that the success of these small polities dated 
from their acceptance of Roman Christianity, and that the 
ultimate hegemony of Winchester and London over Britain 
depended upon this early picking up of communications with 
the Continent. He knows that Christian Parliaments are not 
dimly and possibly barbaric, but certainly and plainly monastic 
in their origin ; he is not surprised to learn that they arose 
first in the Pyrenean valleys during the struggle against the 
Mohammedans; he sees how reasonable such an origin was in 
one of the chief centres of European effort. 

In general the history of Europe and of England develops 
naturally before the Catholic reader; he is not tempted to 
that succession of theories self-contradicting and apparently 
put forward for the sake of novelty which has confused and 
warped most modern reconstructions of the past. He does 
not, above all, commit the prime historical error of " reading 
history backwards," which is the main error of our time. He 
feels in his own nature the nature of its progress. 

But with all this the Catholic has no Catholic history to 
read if he is English-speaking ; and this it seems to me it 
should be our next business to supply him with at a moment 
when in nearly all other branches of learning, the reaction 
towards the Faith is making itself so plainly felt, even in the 
English-speaking world. 




PATRICIA, THE PROBLEM. 

BY ESTHER W. NEILL. 

CHAPTER XII. 

|HE next week Patricia and Mrs. Delarue left for 
Europe. Hugh was at the dock to see them 
start on their long journey. His aunt clung to 
him tearfully. " I've grown so fond of you, 
Hugh," she said. "Somehow poverty seems to 
bring relatives closer together. 11 

Hugh patted her pompous back a bit awkwardly. He hated 
to appear conspicuous, and the gleam of humor in Patricia's 
eyes showed that she enjoyed his discomfiture. When Mrs. 
Delarue allowed him to escape from her affectionate demon- 
strations he turned to say good-bye to Patricia. She gave 
him her finger tips for a moment. 

"You will come back to me?" he said; and his tone held 
more of a conviction than a question. " Perhaps, if I can beg, 
borrow, or steal the money, I may join you in the spring." 

She seemed to wince at the words. " Don't," she said, 
and she turned quickly from him, her eyes upon the sea. 

" Is it such a painful proposition ? " he asked. 

"You don't understand," she answered. "Oh, how can 
you understand ? " 

" Well I would like my weak intellect to make the effort " ; 
he smiled. " I don't want to remain in a state of invincible 
ignorance. I feel that you are at least an acquaintance." 

" An enemy," she said. 

That was their parting; many friends surrounded her. She 
seemed lost to him a whirling world in which he had no 
voice. He felt that he had returned to his old role of a mere 
interested observer, with the difference that he rebelled against 
the part and he realized, with a sense of surprise, for introspec- 
tion was not natural to him, that his poverty for the first time 
appeared poignant it seemed to place Patricia at such an 
unattainable distance, Europe was so far away, travel so ex- 



19 io.] PATRICIA, THE PROBLEM n 

pensive, and Patricia's money a barrier between them unsur- 
mountable if Tom Cuthbert's last confession was not true. 
And if it was true, there was no proof; and if there was proof, 
he had refused to hunt for it. His position was difficult and 
most uncomfortable. All his life he had given little thought 
to his own individual happiness. He had been so engrossed 
in his work, and a satisfaction with life had come with his 
energetic endeavor. He had had no time for women, and now 
he was amazed to find Patricia's image following him all through 
the long days. 

Patricia's stateroom was piled high with boxes of candy 
and flowers. She opened them indifferently, looked at the 
cards, and threw them aside. One she lingered over, it held 
a small bunch of violets; there was no name, but on a slip of 
paper inside the little envelope was written : " This is a promise 
of the spring. You will come back to me some day, and then 
you will tell me that you are sorry." 

Sorry for her trifling words, her rage, her laughter as she 
buried her face in the flowers these things seemed more real 
than robbing him of his inheritance and when Mrs. Delarue 
came puffing into their narrow quarters to examine the gifts 
and the cards, Patricia had pinned the violets on her coat and 
the bit of paper was crumpled quickly in her hand. 

There was something about her expression that roused Mrs. 
Delarue's motherly interest. 

" Who sent the violets ? " she said, with a well-tempered 
mixture of sympathy and curiosity. 

Patricia hesitated. "There was no name/' she said. 

" It makes a poor showing in the midst of all these 
American beauties,' 1 continued Mrs. Delarue, feeling free to 
criticise an admirer who was nameless, " for my part I do 
not care for violets, they seem funereal and dismal and dark, 
and they do not seem to suit you, Patricia. You were never 
intended for shady woodland places, you should live in a 
blaze of glory." 

" Where ? " she said dully. 

" I wish you would marry a title/' went on Mrs. Delarue. 
" I am so disappointed in Marie." 

" Why ? " questioned the girl, " I thought you could see 
things." 

"See things? My dear Patricia I see many things; but I 



12 PATRICIA, THE PROBLEM [Oct., 

am no saint, and wh*en I think of the life of continual self- 
sacrifice that Marie will lead so many privations and no 
pleasures I am not pleased, I am frightened." 

"But you must feel that she is so safe 11 ; and she smiled 
at the thought of her championing a cloistered existence. 
" She seems so happy ; while I I am miserable." 

"But you ought not to be," said Mrs. Delarue, who could 
not frankly understand why any one should grieve greatly 
over the removal of Tom Cuthbert from a world that had 
little respect for him. "Of course," she added quickly, "I 
know you feel your father's loss, but we must be resigned. 
We have all got to die." 

" Oh, I know," said Patricia, flinging herself down amid 
her scattered flowers, " and I am so afraid. Come, let us go 
up on deck, this little place is like a tomb, and the flowers 
can't we give them to the captain, the steward, or somebody? 
I can't stay shut up in this tiny place all night with all 
these flowers." 

" Of course. I'll attend to it at once. You go on deck, 
my dear. No doubt there are some interesting people on 
board. What you need is distraction of mind." 

But Patricia could not find forgetfulness. Europe was an 
old story to her; and though she went 'sight- seeing with all 
the feverish energy that her Baedeker seemed to demand, she 
showed little interest in people or places. She grew tired of 
England in one week and crossed to the continent. Mrs. 
Delarue hoped that she would be contented in Paris, and she 
suggested renting an old chateau just outside of the city and 
remaining there a year or more; but Patricia, much to the 
good lady's disappointment, refused to settle anywhere. 

" I cannot rest in one place," she said. " I want to travel 
travel. Let's go to Russia. Life might be interesting if we 
could get arrested as anarchists." 

" Oh, no, not there " ; it was the first time that Mrs. 
Delarue had offered a protest. " I really am afraid of Russia ; 
and the winters are so cold." 

Patricia laughed and put her arm affectionately around her 
friend. "Then we won't go," she said, as if she were toler- 
ating some childish whim. " But I've always thought it would 
be so simple to be blown up and not enough fragments left 
or a funeral." 



1 9 io.] PATRICIA, THE PROBLEM 13 

"I wish you would be serious dear." 

Patricia held her friend's chin in her hands and made her 
look up into her face. "Now, aren't you hard to satisfy?" 
she said. "You have been telling me that I was too serious 
of late." 

"You are hard to understand," said Mrs. Delarue, forced 
into candor. " So much of your old Western indifference and 
recklessness is coming back to you, I don't know what people 
will think of you." 

"And I don't care," said Patricia. "That idiotic little 
count you want me to marry is such an aristocrat that I told 
him all about my life at the Golden Eagle, just to watch his 
fervor fail ; but he regarded it all as a child listens to a fairy 
tale. He wants my money no matter how I got it or kept it." 

"But, Patricia dear, don't you intend to marry?" 

Patricia was silent, she looked through the parted damask 
curtains of her window at the hurrying crowds on the Paris 
street. 

" Never," she said decidedly. " I cannot I cannot." There 
were tears in her tone and Mrs. Delarue, who always felt in- 
capable of dealing with Patricia in her rare emotional moods, 
hastily changed the subject a confusing habit she had ac- 
quired in her effort to ward off momentous issues. 

"If Hugh would only join us in Rome," she began. 

" He can't." 

" Why not ? " 

"He has no money." 

" Oh, dear," sighed the older lady, "I believe that poverty 
is the worst of all evils. Hugh has always been accustomed 
to doing exactly as he pleases. He could make some of his 
miserable patients pay him if he tried. He has so many 
friends in Rome. You know his mother had relatives living 
there. A man can make it so pleasant for two women travel- 
ing alone. I know you don't care much for each other, but 
you might become better acquainted you wouldn't have much 
sympathy with Hugh's notions of slums and settlements, and 
of course Hugh wouldn't dream of falling in love with any 
one who was not a Catholic, so we could have a platonic kind 
of a time together, with some one to look after the baggage 
and get us an audience with the Pope." She was too much 
in earnest to see the humor of the combination. 



i 4 PATRICIA, THE PROBLEM [Oct., 

" I don't want an audience with him," said Patricia. " He 
is a holy man he would make me feel so wicked/ 1 

"But that is no reason for remaining away. Every one 
who goes lo Rome wants an audience with the Pope." 

" Then let us be different." 

" There is no doubt about your being different," said Mrs. 
Delarue resignedly, "but I must write to Hugh and see if he 
will not come." 

" Please don't," said Patricia beseechingly. " He cannot 
come, he told me so he has his work. We cannot ask him to 
leave everything for us. We can be very comfortable alone." 

Mrs. Dslarue sighed. Patricia was fast becoming a real 
trial. Heretofore she had been so amenable to suggestions ; 
but now she failed to fall in with any restful, sensible plan. 
The good lady would not have confessed it even to herself, 
but she experienced a real sense of relief, tempered by affec- 
tionate anxiety, when Patricia, after having been in Rome a 
short time, was taken ill with the fever and had to remain in 
the hospital for many weeks. Meanwhile Mrs. Delarue, after 
hearing Mass to pray for Patricia's recovery, and spending a 
portion of each day at the hospital, felt at liberty to enjoy a 
much-deserved calm. She wandered joyously through ruins, 
visited all the churches without having to consider Protestant 
prejudice, and she passed many hours in art galleries ecstat- 
ically viewing her favorite pictures that she had not seen for 
years. Patricia had always been kind, even in her most way- 
ward moods, but Mrs. Delarue found genuine pleasure in not 
having to consult the wishes of her charge. 

CHAPTER XIII. 

Father Chatard sat in the gloom of his study; a house- 
wifely haze of twilight concealed the dust that lay thick on 
his open shelves of books and on the uncarpeted floor; a 
shabby rug, with raveled ends, lay in front of the fire, the 
cheerful blaze and the big Morris chair, full of friendly up- 
heavals made by a human body and not by an upholsterer's 
art, gave a look of comfort to the dreary, high-ceiled room. 

Father Chatard was dozing, his long, tapering fingers held 
a place in his worn breviary, since the light had grown too dim 
to see, and he was wondering dreamily whether his fat, for- 



1 9 10.] PATRICIA, THE PROBLEM 15 

getful housekeeper had filled his student's lamp that morning, 
when some one knocked upon the door. He called* out sleep- 
ily : "Come in"; and seeing a woman enter, he rose from 
force of habit, not recognizing his visitor in the shadow. 

"Does a year blot out all remembrance ?" she said, seeing 
his bewilderment. 

"Patricia," he exclaimed, holding out both hands to her. 
"Bless my soul, I thought you were in Italy." 

" And so I was," she said, warmed by his welcome, " but 
you wouldn't want me to remain in Italy a lifetime." 

" I could," he said with a regretful, reminiscent look, "but, 
then, I am an old man and it's restful to be where all things 
else are old; and then he added, with twinkling eyes, "a 
horseless city like Venice suits an equestrian like me." 

" I should think it would," she laughed, taking the small 
stool on the opposite side of the fire. "What a ride I gave 
you. Remember the mountain road? Sometimes I believe 
that is where I belong, far away among those mountains. 
They seem to give me the right proportions of things they 
are so eternal they seem to tell me that 'nothing matters 
much.' " 

" What pessimism ! " he exclaimed. " Have you lost all 
your spontaneity, your freshness, your joyousness in one 
year's travel in Europe ? " 

" I lost it before I went," she said sadly, " and now I have 
grown tired of trying to be happy." 

He watched her searchingly in the uncertain flickering of 
the fire. 

" Can I help you ? " he said. 

" How ? " she asked, throwing off her heavy furs with a 
nervous gesture. 

"Well, I don't know that," he smiled. "Would you give 
an old man a man old enough to be your grandfather one 
guess ? " 

She looked frightened for a moment, then she said dar- 
ingly: "I think I might; but I don't promise to tell you, 
even if you guess right." 

"You have been living solely for yourself," he said, "that 
cannot bring you happiness. All women must spend their en- 
ergies, their affection, on some one something. It is the law 
of God. You should marry " 



1 6 PATRICIA, THE PROBLEM [Oct., 

" Whom ? " she laughed, seeking to relieve the seriousness 
of his tone. 

The old priest laid aside his breviary and began to make 
bridges with his fingers by touching the tips together, a habit 
that seemed to aid him in his hesitation. 

" There is Hugh," he said. 

"No, no"; she protested, and her face was white in the 
firelight. He would not want me he does not care." 

" Hasn't he told you the contrary ? " 

She felt forced into frankness. " He was sorry for me one 
afternoon and strove to comfort me by some meagre assur- 
ances." 

"And you said?" 

" I said many things." 

"And that was?" 

"Oh, I don't remember now, it was so long ago. I've 
tried to forget I would not answer his letters I suppose I 
have been very rude to him." 

" I wish you wouldn't be," he said slowly. " He is not 
happy he cannot understand you he thinks that you mean 
all that you say " 

"And how do you know that I do not?" 

" I am an old man, Patricia ; the only benefit that old age 
brings is a little clearer vision." 

She stared dreamily at the fire, apparently unmindful of 
his presence. " Sometimes," she said at last, " I see the reason- 
ableness of the Catholic viewpoint of confession " 

"Sometime, Patricia," said the old priest, "you will ask me 
to show you the reasonableness of all our faith." 

"I could not," she said, and the frightened look returned 
to her eyes. " Oh, I could not. I have come to ask you a 
question this evening. You know why we returned home, 
Marie is to take the veil to-morrow. Her mother wanted to 
be there ; and I I thought I would like to see. Marie has 
asked me to play at the Mass. I wanted to ask you if un- 
believers, great sinners, are counted worthy, or perhaps I should 
say permitted, to be present at the solemn ceremony ? You see, 
I spent a good deal of time delving among the catacombs in 
Rome, and I know in ancient times some people were not per- 
mitted to remain throughout the ceremonies." 

"But we are not living in ancient times, Patricia." 



1 9 io.] PATRICIA, THE PROBLEM 17 

" Then I may go ? " 

" Why not ? " 

" I am not good," she said, " and my music you must lend 
me some Mass music. After six months spent in Rome most 
of the Masses are familiar, but I want to place the parts cor- 
rectly in my mind. That is another reason why I came to- 
day." 

"The music is in the choir," he said. "Come, we will go 
into the church and get it." 

He rose and led the way across the narrow hall into the 
sacristy; the church was in darkness only the red light burn- 
ing before the white gothic altar relieved the gloom ; the old 
priest knelt for a moment upon the marble steps before the 
tabernacle. Patricia stood with bowed head beside him. 

"I learned many things in Rome," she said, as they passed 
down the aisle together. " Mrs. Delarue was quite convinced 
that she had me converted, but she did not know " 

" Did not know what ? " 

"That I could not be," 

It was impossible to see her face in the darkness, and her 
voice was full of studied repose. 

" Some day you will think differently ; but I'm not going 
to preach, Patricia. We will turn on the light at the foot of 
these steps. See, the light is symbolic: we were staggering in 
the darkness, and now we see. Come, we will have to mount 
to the organ loft and find the music. Go ahead of me, dear 
child, and select what you please. The Masses are in the 
little cupboard on the right of the gallery. 

He followed more slowly, the steps were steep and gave 
him an excuse for loitering. Patricia's words had roused 
thoughts that he put from him as wickedly unjust; but in 
spite of his struggle they kept returning with added force. 

The scene in Tom Cuthbert's bedchamber seemed to be 
projected against the screen of darkness. Tom Cuthbert's last 
words kept repeating themselves in his ears. Did Patricia hold 
the proof of her father's iniquity ? Was she concealing her 
knowledge so that she might reap the benefit ? He watched 
her closely as she sorted the music. Her face had lost much 
of its color, but that might be attributed to the Roman fever. 
Her large hands seemed to tremble, and every movement 
proved the effects of long nervous strain. 
VOL. xcn. 2 



1 8 PATRICIA, THE PROBLEM [Oct., 

"I think these are all that I need," she said. "Do you 
suppose" she hesitated her eyes fixed on the red light that 
n|ade the dark of the sanctuary more intense " do you sup- 
pose I could ever turn my music to any practical account ? " 

" How for what ? " 

He noted her confusion as she answered : " Concerts, re- 
citals, choirs, the usual thing," she said. 

" You have a wonderful gift," he answered slowly, " and 
perhaps when I tell you what I think you will say I am a 
strange old man. I do not like to see music commercialized. 
I wish that all great musicians could find patrons, so that they 
might use their talent freely, gladly, so that we might have 
more melody, more joyousness in this troubled world of ours." 

" But but suppose one must make money to live ? " 

Again he was puzzled and he searched Patricia's face for a 
clue. " Ah, yes ; we must live." 

"But must we?" 

" Why, Patricia" 

" Is life so valuable ? " she asked. 

" It is our greatest possession." 

"I do not think so." 

" Dear child, you have grown morbid. I shall telephone 
Mrs. Delarue to put you to bed and keep you there. She 
wrote me that you had been ill in Rome, and these low fevers 
often leave one strangely depressed." 

" Perhaps," she said. " So many things are attributed to 
low fevers. I'll go now. You have been very kind and I 
fear I have delayed your dinner. You will come to see us 
some day soon; and some day I I may come to confession." 
She hurried down the steps and he opened the high church 
door for her, then he put out the lights, and going slowly up 
the wide, dark aisle he knelt again on the marble steps of the 
altar, and he spent a long time in prayer. 

CHAPTER XIV. 

The convent chapel looked as if it were prepared for a wed- 
ding. Mrs. Delarue had hinted that she wished that she could 
afford floral decorations, and Patricia had given some lavish 
order to her florist, who set his men to work transforming the 
austere room into a tropical bower. The little sister who had 



i9io.] PATRICIA, THE PROBLEM 19 

charge of the chapel, and who had to depend upon the con- 
vent garden for her meagre flower vases, was prayerful with 
delight when she saw the change that two hours' work had 
made. For the last few months she had had to content her- 
self with cedar boughs and dyed immortelles for her beloved 
altar steps, and here were palms, lilies, orchids, and other un- 
dreamed-of exotics blooming with the snow upon the ground; 
the profusion almost bewildered, and, as she unconsciously 
counted the cost, she felt that the donor had been almost sin- 
ful in her extravagance; even the black wooden grating be- 
tween the sanctuary and the choir for the nuns was strung 
with white roses. 

Mrs. Delarue was greatly pleased. If Marie insisted upon 
taking vows it was a great comfort to have her profession sur- 
rounded by all this grandeur to make it memorable. 

" Patricia ordered it done," she said to Hugh, who sat in 
the front pew beside her. "She seems singularly sympathe- 
tic for a non-Catholic." 

" Yes " ; he agreed absently. He was glad that the sanctity 
of the place precluded conversation. He had seen Patricia pass 
on her way to the high organ loft, and he had been startled 
by her pallor and the listlessness of her expression. He had 
not been left alone with her since her return. She had plainly 
tried to avoid a tete-a-tete with him, and Mrs. Delarue uncon- 
sciously assisted her by assuming with maddening conviction 
that these two young people were distasteful to each other. 
All the time of Patricia's absence Hugh had planned for this 
first talk with her. He believed that she cared for him, and 
yet why did she refuse him this small mark of her favor? 
Why had she allowed his frequent letters to remain unanswered ? 
Why had she sent him no word of hope or cheer when he had 
been tortured by anxiety during her long illness? 

When the priest in his rich brocade vestments appeared in 
the sanctuary Hugh tried to follow the familiar Latin of the 
Mass, but his thoughts were difficult to control. Once he turned 
and looked up at the choir, to find Patricia's eyes fixed upon 
him eyes full of tenderness, that made her attitude towards 
him seem more inexplicable than ever. To him the barrier of 
her money, which had first seemed to stand between them, 
had been razed. Father Chatard and he had discussed the 
matter so often, that he had almost convinced himself of the 



20 PATRICIA, THE PROBLEM [Oct., 

truth of Tom Cuthbert's last statement. In retrospect the old 
man on his deathbed seemed so positive, so free from deliri- 
ous fancy, and he had been so reluctant to confess his own 
dishonesty if Patricia could be saved in any other way. 

Mrs. Delarue roused Dr. Hugh to some consciousness of 
his present surroundings by leaning weakly up against him, as 
if she needed physical and moral support in an emotional crisis. 
Marie had come forward to the opening in the grating. She 
was dressed as a bride in some soft, white stuff; her face was 
pale but radiant, her voice calm and even. Mrs. Delarue shook 
with excitement. It would have been difficult for the good 
lady to analyze her own feelings. One moment she seemed to 
experience a saintly ecstacy in sacrificing her only child ; the 
next she was rebellious and angry with Marie for choosing 
such a life. 

At that solemn part of the ceremony, when the young postu- 
lant is covered with a black pall, to signify her death to the 
world, a strange thing happened. 

Patricia, who had been sitting motionless at her harp, intent 
upon the interesting spectacle before her, let her fingers stray 
mechanically over the strings, and suddenly from the little 
organ loft there seemed to come the wailing cry of a despair- 
ing soul seeking to express itself in a passionate melody. 

The priest halted for a moment, the nun at the organ, who 
had accompanied Patricia during the Mass, was lost in admiring 
wonder she had never heard such music and she was too 
bewildered to protest. Old Father Chatard, kneeling within 
the sanctuary, guessed the truth. It was Patricia's confession. 
He buried his head in his hands and almost prayed aloud in 
the intensity of his purpose. Hugh could understand but one 
thing, Patricia was suffering but, why ? And why in this 
holy place should she improvise music so full of misery and 
hopelessness? Was she trying to express her sense of loss of 
Marie's presence. But the strains were wild, tempestuous, there 
was something more personal depths that he could not fath- 
om 

The music stopped more abruptly than it had begun. Pa- 
tricia leaned over and touched the wide sleeve of the little 
sister on the organ bench. "I did not know what I was doing," 
she said by way of apology. 

During the rest of the ceremony she sat white and inert, 



1910.] PATRICIA, THE PROBLEM 21 

and as soon as the priest left the altar she hurried down the 
narrow steps to Hugh's side. 

" You must come home with me," she whispered hoarsely. 

Mrs. Delarue, whose emotions had filtered down to a wet 
pocket handkerchief wiped her eyes and murmured: "Won't 
you wait to see Marie ? " 

" I cannot not now, I cannot. Come please come at 
once." 

" You are ill ? " he questioned tenderly, 

"No; oh, no; but I must see you at once. Please come." 
She passed through the long corridor that led to the street 
door, Hugh followed anxiously ; the few friends, who had been 
present in the chapel, stared after them in some amazement. 
Some of them nodded knowingly, as if they comprehended the 
romantic situation, others looked offended. Miss Cuthbert was 
a personage whose acquaintanceship they valued she had never 
ignored them before. 

A big touring car was drawn up to the curbing. Patricia 
stepped in and motioned Hugh to follow. 

" It will be but a moment before we are home, and then " 

"Then, Patricia" 

She interrupted him. " Don't say it. Oh, please don't. I 
cannot bear it." 

"But, Patricia dear, I have waited so long to see you; I 
have something to say " 

" Don't," she said, huddling into the furthest corner of the 
car. " Don't say it. Oh, I wonder how long I could have 
kept up the deception it has been a year of torture." 

"Torture," he repeated in bewilderment. 

" Life is so short, so terribly short," she went on, clasping 
and unclasping her hands nervously. "It is what you Catho- 
lics all believe ; you have it preached to you, read to you, 
talked to you. It fills you with a horror of sin, or it makes 
it seem not worth while, and I think oh, I think it makes 
some of you intolerant with sinners." 

His bewilderment was apparent now. " Fatricia, you are 
talking wildly to keep me from saying " 

"You must not," she cried, "you must not it will only 
make it harder for both of us." 

They had reached the house ; she again hurried away from 
him up the wide steps, into the shadowy hall; he followed 



22 PATXJCJA, THE PROBLEM [Oct. 

her, with growing wonder. She appeared more baffling than 
even he had ever dreamed she would become. She led him 
into the library, and, going up to the gloomy Daubigny that 
he remembered so well, she pushed it aside with such force 
that the picture fell to the floor, but she gave no heed. 

"Open the little door for me," she said, "my hands trem- 
ble so oh, you do not know the combination now, there 
there is your inheritance." 

She stood motionless before him, leaning against the paneled 
wall for support; her large black hat and black furs added to 
the whiteness of her face. "I have robbed you," she said, " my 
father robbed you before me ; but, oh, you must believe one 
thing it was because of him because I could not have him 
called a thief that I bought the papers and hid them you 
helped me. You remember putting them here ? The Larimee 
mine is yours your father bought it, and my father leased it 
from him, and then kept it. Everything I have is yours." 

He looked at her for a moment, made speechless by her 
revelation; then he took the papers from the safe and threw 
them in the fire. 

" Oh, you must not " ; she cried, making an effort to save 
them. 

He caught her in his arms. " They are burning," he said, 
" the proof of my inheritance is gone. There is only one way 
to share it Patricia one way." 

She was trembling now. All her bravado was gone. " And 
and you care for that way?" 

"Listen your father told me this story a year ago." 

" And you did not tell me." 

" I could not, for I found that I loved you. Now, will you 
believe that I love you ? " 

She looked up at him, surrender in her eyes. 

(THE END.) 




SAINT "BERTRAM" OF ILAM. 

BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. 

[LAM,* in Dovedale, is one of the sweetest spots 
in England. It is in Staffordshire, just across the 
border of Derbyshire, cradled among the two 
ranges of hills which hem in a most romantic 
valley: the very high bleak tors, all stone, with 
the merest powdering of turf upon their gray flanks, and that 
thick plume of woods which hangs far up, and crowds low down, 
on the south. And in the fields below Ham two exquisite 
rivers, the Dove and the Manifold, run together, flashing and 
singing. The soil, thanks to the deposits of these waters, which 
in spring [become great torrents, and thanks to the abundant 
wells on every side, is most fertile and fragrant : a very play- 
ground for wild flowers and the flowers of cottage gardens. 
Many are the bridges, as is natural in a land of streams; they 
are all of stone, all arched, all picturesque. 

Ham is no huddled village, but spacious exceedingly. Most 
of the little houses are set rather shyly apart, well gabled, 
porched, bowered in roses, and with a distinct and real grace 
of privacy. Strange to say, there is hardly any visible an- 
tiquity about, such as delights the eye often in the adjacent 
countryside. The " restorings " and re-buildings, in Victorian 
Gothic, have been unobtrusive, however; and what more can 
one expect ? The Tractarian note, so to speak, is struck at 
the very entrance of the village, near its second bridge, by the 
great Cross, like one of Queen Eleanor's, erected in 1840 to 
the memory of Mrs. Jesse Watts-Russell. Very near it are the 
gates of the Hall, just now tenantless : a magnificent modern 
Elizabethan manor on the site of an older one, with a wide 
range of oriel windows, open cloisters, and battlemcnted roof, 
set in a slope of close-cut lawn; the latter, while looking illim- 
itable as to size, is beyond all the velvets of Lyons in compact 
smooth beauty of summer greenness. The Hall hangs on a 
knoll, just above the rocky, winding bank of the silver river. 

* Accent on the first syllable, and long 1. 



24 SAINT " BERTRAM" OF ILAM [Oct., 

There are terraces, there are vast dark isolated trees, besides 
coppices and sociable groves of them, and yonder, caught in 
among leaves, like a conical nest, is the Saxon saddle-back tower 
of the charming church. The house and the church stand open 
across the greensward, each to the other, in the sweet misty 
sunshine: the churchyard has no wall, and the sleepers within 
it lie beneath ornate crosses of stone, all copied from their 
local prototypes, those wonderfully lovely monuments of the far 
Catholic past such as abound in no country except northern 
England and her sister isles. The sounds which break this 
Sabbath stillness are in themselves an enchantment. A whole 
colony of bees is humming where they find uncut clover; a 
swarm of white doves is wheeling around the mower, as he 
moves with horse and dog, pleasantly clicking up and down; 
and the river rushes over its two little weirs, making the most 
glad-hearted Laudate Dominum in the world. It is all so ideal, 
such an unbelievable vision of peace ! The vast yew, and the 
everywhere-climbing roses, the broken sun-dial, the trailing 
feathery clouds, the strange immemorial erect pillars near the 
church, fretted all over with braided or knotted ornaments all 
these breathe upon the Catholic stranger who comes alone 
among them a sort of magic to make his feet unsteady, and 
" run up his thoughts upon the Ancient of Days." Very es- 
pecially magical are the pillared stones, for they may be a 
saint's own work, set up, after a fashion old even in that old 
time, as his own memorial. Towards Bunster, nearer the chan- 
nel of the Dove, is yet to be seen " St. Bertram's well " ; and 
what was called " St. Bertram's ash " was examined and de- 
scribed by Dr. Plot sometime before the year 1686, when he 
published his Natural History of Staffordshire. It was evident- 
ly aged even then, and had particularly sharp-pointed leaves. 
According to the village superstition, it was highly unlucky 
to break a twig of it. This accounts for the assurance, in 1730, 
that it was " taken great care of " (Lysons* Magna Britannia, 
Vol. V., p. 118). In Nightingale's Beauties of England and 
Wales, 1813 (Vol. XIII., Part II., p. 975), Ham is said to be 
noted for the tomb, the well, and the ash of St. Bertram, the 
latter objects having been " formerly much venerated " ; but 
that "little, however, is now thought of the saint 1" The 
great tree, flourishing as late as 1813, must have perished be- 
tween that and 1844, as Harwood, editing Erdeswick's History 



1 9io.] SAINT " BERTRAM" OF ILAM 25 

in that year, mentions only the tomb and the well among the 
memorials of St. Bertram at Ham. No one now living in the 
neighborhood can remember the ash. 

But who, pray, everybody will ask, is St. Bertram ? The 
Acta Sanctorum does not tell. The holy men and women of 
the Heptarchy could not all be known to Continental scholars, 
and the solitary who is called " Bertram " was one of those can- 
onized only by a local veneration kept up for ages, but duly 
and truly canonized thereby, according to the opinion of the 
Holy See. Now the name Bertram, an adapted Norman form 
by origin, is, in this case, merely a popular corruption. Almost 
all the Saxon saints underwent just such changes of nomen- 
clature at or after the Conquest : Mildreda for Mildrith, Chad 
for Ceadda, Frideswide for Frithuswith, and so on. 

Capgrave, in his hagiology, gives us one Bertellin or Ber- 
telinus; Plot identifies him with the "Bertram" living in the 
memories of Ham, though Erdeswick, writing a century before 
Plot, had been much at sea regarding his " Bertie/' the Staf- 
fordshire hermit. An excellent antiquary, the Rev. G. F. 
Browne, F.S.A., who is now the Rt. Rev. Bishop of Bristol, 
suggests that Capgrave himself, or his predecessors, misread 
the Latinized name in the ancient manuscript, in a way entire- 
ly natural: Berteh'wus for Bertelwus. There is no Bertelin, nor 
any such name, in the copious lists of Birch's Cartularium Sax- 
onicum, but at the end of many a charter we get the signa- 
tures "Byrhtelm," " Birthelm," "Berhrtelm," etc. It is a 
perfectly recognizable Saxon name, this of a " King's " son, 
who at almost every step of his striking career can be traced 
by the singularly staying powers of English tradition. Two 
monastic writers have left us some account of him: Ingulf, 
Abbot of Croyland, in the late eleventh century, and Alexan- 
der, a Prior of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine, who 
lived three hundred years after Ingulf. The latter tells us that 
in his youth Bertelm aspired to break away from the licentious 
court and camp of his earliest associations and took ship, 
therefore, for holy Ireland. But, alas, "in a strange land, he 
found the temptation, and fell beneath the sin, which had 
frightened him in his own." Uneasy beneath the sense of 
guilt, he started before long to return to his native country. 
His "princess," herself presumably also a Christian, though 
a faithless one (her name has perished), went along with him. 



26 SAINT "BERTRAM" OF ILAM [Oct., 

While they were pursuing their difficult journey through the 
woods, a wolf, in Bertelm's momentary absence, slew and partly 
ate the poor woman and her little 'child. This dreadful grief 
became to the man on whom it fell the turning-point of his 
life. Bertelm gave himself up to salutary contrition, resignation 
to God's will, and long silence, prayer, and fasting in that 
very spot, where he lived some time as a penitent in the 
wild. It was, says the medieval biographer, called after him 
Bertelmes-ley, the "ley" or place of Bertelm. The patient 
and critical Bollandists, willing to enroll him among their care- 
fully authenticated saints, could find no such name upon any 
British chart. But it is quite obvious that it is Bartholmey 
in Cheshire (which appears as Bertemeleu in Domesday), un- 
less, by chance, it should be the Betley near it. Chester was 
the port in those far-off days for persons crossing the Irish 
Sea ; and the one road to Stafford ran hard by Bartholmey, 
which is itself actually on the Staffordshire border. 

It is asserted by Ingulf that Bertelm afterwards went to 
Crowland, to be with the famous St. Guthlac, and that he re- 
mained with him in his Cambridgeshire fens until the elder soli- 
tary died in his arms. Of his life there, one semi-farcical and 
blood-thirsty incident is recorded by the good chronicler, but 
it need not detain us, as it is pretty certain that Ingulf con- 
fused Bertelm with Beccelin, known to have been one of the 
four disciples of St. Guthlac. What our hermit really did do, 
in the course of time, seems to have been this : he set out 
towards the more southerly domain of his father, and persuaded 
that noble to give him possession of Bethnei, where Stafford, 
the county town, now is, as an anchor- hold. But at Bethnei 
considerable disturbance soon arose. Erdeswick, an Elizabethan 
Protestant, makes the sympathetic guess that the 'young Ber- 
telm may have been the butt of unregenerated neighbors and 
kinsmen, and "ridiculed for the severity and sanctity of his 
life/' His father, who would have protected him, having died, 
the succeeding " King," or tribal chief, determined to drive the 
man of God away. In pursuance of this antagonism, he sent 
a champion warrior of gigantic size to wage combat against 
any single defender of Bertelm who should dare oppose the 
royal will. In answer to the saint's earnest prayer, there came 
from somewhere, according to the charming legend, an angel, 
a " little man " in white armor, who charged upon the giant 



1 9io.] 



SAINT "BERTRAM" OF ILAM 



27 



and overcame him ! Bertelm, however, would not stay in the 
Bethnei thus won for him. Perhaps he now ran the risk of 
being held in too great esteem by those who flocked to his 
cell. The saint, at any rate, after the manner of saints, fled 
away, to more mountainous parts, going some sixteen or seven- 
teen miles straight northeast. Half-way between Stafford, 
whence he is said to have started, and Ham, where, having set 
up his tabernacle in the untenanted vale, he lived, labored, 
and died, is a village called Checkley. At Checkley there are 
some most extraordinary upright stones, chiseled on every 
side : these are now called, and have always been called by 
the inhabitants, the " Battle " stones. The word is surely a 
variant of " Bertelm." One may find it useful to remember 
that " er," in an English mouth, is never " ur," but something 
far more like "air," and frequently " ar." A "Bertelm" or 
" Bertel " stone was bound, under the wear and tear of lan- 
guage rapidly spoken, to become " Battle." That name, once 
formed and used familiarly, was bound, on its part, to breed 
folk-lore in its own uneducated neighborhood. And so among 
the common people all about Checkley, to this day, runs a tale, 
originally of three bishops, but latterly and more properly, of 
three kings, slain in an unidentified scrimmage of armed men ! 
The provoking cause of it all is first the thousand-year-old 
popular label itself of the "Bertel" stones; secondly, the fact 
that there are three sculptured figures upon them. But to 
this point we shall recur. 

At Ham there are other stones unique in almost all re- 
spects, except that they are similar to those at Checkley. 
When the largest of these was discovered some seventy- five 
years ago, among the foundations of a cottage (probably con- 
signed to that ignoble use at the Reformation) its presence there 
was not unknown : the people called that, too, a " Battle " of 
stone. There was little interest in archaeology in those days ; 
Checkley and Ham had no intellectual communication ; and it 
is impossible that the name could simultaneously in both vil- 
lages have been invented by caprice. It is not uniformly wise 
to hang historical inferences upon place-names ; [yet one must 
recognize the very remarkable fact that a map of .England is 
to this day marked all over with British, Danish, but more 
especially Saxon nomenclature, which is always worth study, 
and, in most cases, is richly significant. Says Dr. Browne 



28 SAINT "BERTRAM" OF ILAM [Oct., 

in his carefully worded and extremely valuable pamphlet on 
the subject (published by George Bell & Sons, London, 1888): 
" The straight line from Stafford to Ham passes through Check- 
ley about half-way, where are the only other stones like those 
at Ham, and they are so like, in one remarkable detail after 
another, that it is quite certain there is a very close connection 
between them, such, for instance, as that a man wandering from 
Bethnei towards the recesses of the mountains might have 
stopped half-way to rest, and there set up sculptured stones, 
and then passed on to where now is the happy valley, and set 
up an almost exact copy of the stones he had left at Checkley." 

Dr. Browne does not disturb his theorizing by remember- 
ing the existence, and the approximate resemblance, of other 
stones in the same district : those at Alstonefield and Nor- 
bury. All four are called by Mr. Romiily Allen "the Dove- 
dale sub-group of the larger Mercian group of pre-Norman 
crosses . . . priceless treasures of early Christian art in 
England." But it is quite true, though we know nothing of 
the exact chronology of any among them, that the double set 
of " Battle " stones stand together, and somewhat apart from 
the rest. 

This stonework, may it not now very reasonably be believed 
to be, like much stonework of the morning of history, of 
a personal and even biographical character ? Such is the 
tempting thought which besets those minds, naturally synthetic, 
who go through the annals of the world under a craze for 
putting two and two together. No reputable historian dare 
assert without proof (and proot will never be forthcoming) that 
the long-ago pilgrim of Checkley and hermit of Ham, so re- 
corded, with blunt instruments and through slow weeks or 
months, hints of his own sad human experience. But the pro- 
bability must remain that he did so. The result is not con- 
ventional; no rules apply to it; such analogies as one can 
reach tend to confirm it. What are these hieroglyphics of a 
heart broken, then made whole in Christ, at Ham ? 

There are three pillars and a baptismal font, of unknown 
antiquity; it might be a fair guess to attribute them to the 
eighth century, or thereabouts, and then be sure the date was 
too recent. One of the pillars, the smallest, is cylindrical and 
of red sandstone. All are broken and so greatly marred by 
time, weather, and misuse, that only a patient eye in a good 



1910.] SAINT "BERTRAM" OF ILAM 29 

light can now make out the lines of the panels, which are in 
sections, and were once covered from top to bottom with carv- 
ing. The ornament, were it symbolical once, or not symboli- 
cal, is in itself an absorbing study. Let it be enough to say 
here that that ornament consists chiefly of the old Etruscan 
key-pattern, the foliaginous scroll-pattern, rings and pointed 
loops, an arrangement of concentric circles and half-circles, 
and another interlacement, better known as the " Staffordshire 
Knot," which " has been used as a crest ever since there were 
crests." Serpents and bird-dragons also adorn the lower por- 
tions, in dim and nearly perished indentation. On two of the 
three pillars (the two which Dr. Browne suggests may have 
been set up at one time as the headstone and footstone of St. 
Bertelm's grave) are unmistakable human figures. They are 
very curious, being what is called "basket-work men." (Good 
accounts of these curious features of the pre-conquest crosses 
may be found in Archceologia, Vol. I., and in the Journal of 
the Derbyshire Arc hceo logical and Natural Historical Society, 
Vol. VIII.) The body is formed of inbraided bands, the ends 
passing up from the neck, making at the top a blank oval for 
the head, thus set as it were in a frame. There is no attempt 
to represent faces or even arms; but legs and feet, perfectly 
well- drawn, are appended to the interlacement, which ends at 
the knee. The whole is just such a convention as a very clever 
child might produce. Plait-work, especially the 8-figure, was 
used by the Romans in broad, unrelieved masses for the first 
five hundred years of the Chiistian era. The Celts, with their 
more subtle minds, brought it to greater perfection. The an- 
cient Britons and their Druids were famous for their skill in 
basket- weaving, as Caesar and the Roman poets tell us; and it 
does indeed seem probable that the early missionaries would 
urge their skillful converts to dedicate their peculiar art to the 
service of religion : wicker-work crosses would be a very natural 
result. (See a paper by Mr. G. J. French, Journal of the British 
Archaological Association for 1859, Vol. XV.) Among the early 
Angles stonecutting of this description would almost inevit- 
ably have been learned from the people whom they supplanted. 
One only of these smaller figures on a south base in Ham 
churchyard has arms, and with those short, stuck- out arms, 
themselves forming the ends of the knot which is himself, he 
firmly grasps his two long staves. " The early medieval paint- 



30 SAINT " BERTRAM" OF ILAM [Oct., 

ers represented hermits in coats of plaited reeds," Dr. Browne 
reminds us; and goes on to suggest that he would like to con- 
sider, if he dared, that the little figure was meant to represent 
"the original hermit of Ham." There is also a strong sugges- 
tion of travel, of pilgrimage, about this primitively vigorous 
design. The other human beings are sculptured in threes, 
and, especially on the great mysterious Cross under the drip 
of branches in what is called the Ley, are fairly decipherable. 
They stand dressed in tunics to the knee, exactly alike, and 
very close together, head touching head, the six feet pointed 
one way. It has not been noticed by the few who write of 
such things, that the middle person is the tallest, and that of 
the others, one is appreciably less tall, and the other short by 
comparison. It has never been claimed, nor perhaps should it 
be, that here we have commemorated, in their rude forest dress, 
Bertelm, and the two loved beings whom he lost in so sudden 
and terrible a way. The design, if mere design it be, is thrice 
repeated, but the positions vary. The old Latin legendary 
states that the child slain by the wolf was but an infant new- 
born. However, the idea of sonship was very often conveyed 
under quite arbitrary forms, and as long as it did get conveyed, 
size and age went for little. This is true of almost all ancient 
art, and even of late medieval art, where the "chrisom-babes" 
of English tombs, set up chronologically in their tight little 
shrouds between other members of the same family, are often 
not appreciably smaller than their adult brothers and sisters, 
kneeling a-row. This lopped Cross just mentioned is not, 
ot course, its original site. Some five minutes' walk away, is 
the churchyard (elder than the church) in which, at the end 
of his holy vigils, on the ninth of September, in some unre- 
corded year, St. Bertelm was buried, and the tall Cross was 
planted by his grave. The similar stones at Checkley, two in 
number, are now crowded up against the railing of a tomb, 
too close for a very successful inspection. But it is plain that 
on the reverse side. of the larger one are three basket-work 
figures of varying heights, just as at Ham; and below them, 
a design of three again. On the north side is what remains 
of a very long figure, alone, in the braided coat to the knee, 
with non-anatomical legs. Beside each foot is a round object 
difficult to identify. These might be called puddings or cannon- 
balls ! But it is at least as possible to call them human heads. 



i9io.j SAINT " BERTRAM" OF ILAM 31 

Much knotted ornament adorns the surface. The next stone 
is quite as ornate. Only two figures, still rather boldly out- 
lined, are distinguishable on two of its sides; but the coping 
is broken; the original design may possibly have held three. 
The west side of the column has the double row of three 
figures again. This constant playing, both at Checkley and 
at Ham, on a design in which one, or two, or three persons 
figure indifferently, is rather curious. 

The Ley at Ham, where the Cross has stood since about 
1835, is a remote, beautiful walk in the grounds of Ham Hall, 
overhung by rocks and verdue. It is not without modern as- 
sociations. Congreve, whose family were at one time seated 
there, wrote one of his amazingly brilliant but heartless come- 
dies, and also his tragedy of " The Mourning Bride," in a 
leaf- hung recess of the natural wall. And a century later, Dr. 
Johnson hung over the foot-bridges, wondering disbelievingly 
at the perfectly attested natural phenomena under his feet : for 
there in the rock, gurgling up deep and cool, a few yards apart, 
the Hamps and the Manifold come from their underground 
caverns: each having entered its subterranean channel, three 
miles, and five miles, away. Drayton does not fail to note, in 
his accurate and quaint Polyolbion, how one stream lies here 
a moment in wait for the other, and then catches him " by 
the throat." The old bed of the river, bow-shaped, is there, 
too, now rather a sluggish backwater which dries up entirely 
in warm weather. But all this is a digression. 

The interior of the church, to which we return, looks, 
thanks to the too- anxious intelligence of the " restoring "epoch, 
as if it had been built yesterday. It has some features good 
of their kind, but nothing of any interest comparable to that 
of the font and the shrine. The font is massive and rude, and 
has a deep band of absolutely distinct and almost barbaric 
sculptures, unique in their association, and all but unique in 
the presentation of any single figure. Between these are diverse 
pillars and capitals curiously grooved. Speculation about this 
font may well be endless. The one subject on it which will 
bear an authentic interpretation is the Agnus Dei t itself some- 
what complicated by the extra and unusual symbolism of the 
Dove perched upon the top of the cross carried by the Lamb. 
Apart from a single inexpressive figure, with a looped belt, 
and the Agnus Dei t there are four incised representations 



32 SAINT " BERTRAM" OF ILAM [Oct., 

around the bowl which play into the hands of any one who 
comes to Ham with the preconceived idea of finding memorials 
of St. Bertelm in everything old enough for the purpose which 
meets his eye. A certain monster with short ears, a long tail, 
and cloven, or rather fringed, hoofs, is repeated twice at full 
length. He may be a purely metaphorical concept ; or he may 
be an historical annotation of a kind : for in one panel he is 
devouring a human head ; in the other he holds, in a slightly 
different position, one human head in his jaws, and another under 
one of his vicious- looking forepaws. No explanation can be 
made to quite fit such a puzzle. Shall we say the whole thing 
is forgotten symbolism; or else that it bears upon a concrete 
tragedy ? It seems to have passed unnoticed that the monster 
mauling the two heads has a slight noose or ring about three 
of his feet, which in the other sculpture are free. Need it be 
altogether absurd to surmise that such a feature may be meant 
to express the capturing of the Bartholmey wolf as he was in 
the act of accomplishing his second slaughter? If so, two 
delineations of the scene force us to assume that the crude 
artist could think of no way of conveying a record of the dou- 
ble destruction of mother and child, except by making the 
monster, as in a moving picture, first gnaw at one, and then, 
trampling that one under foot, seize upon the other. There is 
no appreciable difference in the size of the heads. The pos- 
sible " heads " at Checkley seem to be a larger and a smaller 
one. Two more panels remain on the Ham font. One has a 
skirted group, a man with a woman ; his right hand is upraised, 
his right foot almost in a dancing attitude ; his left hand closes 
on hers, which rests on the knot of her girdle. They are evi- 
dently going somewhere; the notion is clearly conveyed that 
he is the leader, and that she is being led willingly, as she 
inclines decidedly towards him. On the west side is a com- 
position excessively primitive. Dr. Browne calls it a man 
" standing at ease." It certainly is not that, but a man under 
the greatest possible stress of grief, yet with hands clasped re- 
signedly in front. The head is, in proportion to the body 
and the other figures on the font, enormous, and the turned- 
down corners of the large mouth have had blow after blow 
struck in deep, in order to emphasize their doleful expression. 
That expression is almost grotesque, but it is meant for nothing 
if not for heart-rending sorrow pure and simple. While it is 



i9io.] SAINT " BERTRAM" OF ILAM 33 

implied by no one that St. Bertelm himself made the font, 
the ornamentation on the isolated columns introduced into it 
is now known to date from very remote times, and as St. 
Bertelm is known locally as the founder of Ham Church, the 
font may very well have been coeval with his life and death. 

The one other thing associated with him in the place he 
once hallowed, is his grave. Though St. Bertelm was buried 
at his own Ham, tradition has it that, centuries after he died, 
his body was borne back to Stafford, to a church dedicated in 
his honor, and under his name. And there, says the chroni- 
cle (whether at the translation or after it, or both, we know 
not), " the Lord made the lame to walk, the dumb to speak, 
the deaf to hear, the blind to see . . . for love of the 
Blessed Bertellin." In the year 1486, when King Henry VII. 
was reigning, occurred there a renowned miracle : the com- 
plete restoration to sight of one Wilmot, a blind man, a cook 
by trade. It made such an impression that the contemporary 
writer of the legend concludes his manuscript by beseeching 
good Christians to pay increased veneration to so manifest a 
friend of God as "Bertellin." Dr. Plot makes the splendid 
guess (temp. Charles II.) that for that reason, and at that time, 
the shrine was set up at Ham; and the architectural remains 
there surely bear him out. The gravestone lies in its old 
place. It had once been in the consecrated ground south of 
the first small church dedicated to the Holy Cross ; when the 
church was added to, the builders were made to overarch 
and include the undisturbed sleeping-place of the saintly 
founder, only the upright crosses at head and foot being nec- 
essarily taken away. Even when the body was restored to 
Stafford, the Ham priest and his people would have been sure 
to preserve relics; and these relics would have had their own 
feretory, and been set in an ornate and precious coffer on top 
of the existing base. The holes for the stanchions of the cof- 
fer yet remain, all around the stone sub-structure, in the well- 
lighted chapel to the south of the present chancel. 

Shrines, or even parts of shrines, are far from common in 
England since " hateful Henry " put in such thorough work in 
destroying them. St. Edward's was spared at Westminster, and 
is entire, and in that unique, although all its glory is departed. 
The supports of St. Alban's shrine, those of St. Frideswide's, 
at Oxford, and those of St. Werburgh's, at Chester (in this 

VOL. XCII. 3 



34 SAINT " BERTRAM " OF ILAM [Oct., 

case only to be worked into the episcopal throne), have been 
found and pieced together; but, beyond these, there is no other 
base of a shrine extant except this far less-known one of St. 
Bertelm's. Unlike the two last, this has no lovely carving to 
delight the eye; but it resembles St. Edward's in having open 
quatrefoils through which devout clients might get access. In 
the case of St. Bertelm's, indeed, the approaches were made 
not only into a recessed shelter to harbor one through a night's 
vigil, or a day of prayer, as in Westminster Abbey, but here 
the quatrefoils were placed opposite and cut clear through, in 
order that the faithful might, if they wished to follow the 
penitential medieval custom, crawl in and out, over the actual 
burial-stone of their favorite saint. There are three of these 
large quatrefoils on each side of the altar-tomb, and one at 
each end ; the old stone beneath, forming the floor of the 
structure, is ridge-shaped, six feet six inches long, and less 
than three feet broad, measured across the peak of the ridge. 
"There seems no reason to doubt," writes an authority already 
quoted, " that this stone covered the body . . . and that 
to this stone pilgrimages were made centuries before it was 
covered, as we now see it, and enclosed within the church." 
The stone has a rough and unequal surface; rubbings of it 
seem to prove pretty conclusively that at one time it must 
have been a mass of sculptures now obliterated. 

At Wirksworth, in Derbyshire, some nine miles from Ham 
as the crow flies, is a grave-cover familiar to antiquaries, 
which is shaped like this, but smaller, and which bears, carved 
all over its sloping sides, in bold relief, scenes from the na- 
tivity, public life, passion, and resurrection of our Lord, as like 
as can be to the great early Christian sarcophagi at Rome. 
The Saxon nobles were always traveling to Rome, and noth- 
ing would be more natural than for them either to bring 
home a sepulchral monument, or to copy what they had seen 
and admired in the Holy City. Had the Ham stone been un- 
incised to begin with, the generations, whose obsolete devotion 
prompted them to go over it on hands and knees, would un- 
doubtedly have worn it to a smooth polish very different from 
its present lumpy and irregular appearance. Of the relics con- 
tained in the shrine proper, which must have stood upon the 
upper slab, we have no record. The little village in the dale 
lost these, in all probability, at the time of the national breach 



i9io.] SAINT "BERTRAM" OF ILAM 35 

with Christian unity, and lost with them its only real link with 
the world without. In its isolated beauty, it sees many a sum- 
mer tourist whisking by in motor-cars which blanch the wild- 
rose hedges and profane the wayside streams. St. Bertelm, 
whose stormy youth was drowned in a torrent of sorrow, and 
whose mild, innocent age was passed in solitary communion with 
Him in Whom there is no shadow of change, seems far away 
indeed to the "tripper." 

One point more. Every Catholic or Anglican reader, at 
some time or other, hears of a certain famous peroration in 
the series of Lives of the English Saints which Newman planned, 
and partly carried out, in his retreat at Littlemore. "And 
this is all that we know, and more than all yet nothing to 
what the angels know of the life of a saint of God who sinned 
and repented, and did penance, and washed out his sins, and 
became a saint, and reigns with Christ in heaven/' 

The passage just italicized has raised many a smile, friendly 
and otherwise. It was written of the Ham saint; and it was 
not written, as many have supposed, by the young James 
Anthony Froude. The final authority on this subject is the 
Rev. Arthur Wollaston Hutton, editor of the six- volume re- 
print of the series which was published in London in 1901. 
Of the authorship of the passage in question, Mr. Hutton 
says (Vol. VI., p. 410): 

John Henry, Cardinal Newman, the projector and, in the 
case of the first two numbers, the editor of this series, was 
the author of the Life of St. Gundleus (the I^atin form of 
Gwynllyn), Hermit, and of the prose portion* of St. Bettelin 
(or Bertelin) , Hermit, and possibly also of part of the Life of 
St. Edelwald. With regard to the authorship of St. Bettelin, 
Mr. C. Kegan Paul affirms that when he was an undergradu- 
ate (in 1845) it was commonly ascribed to Froude (who wrote 
St. Neot, that comes next in this series of Hermit Saints, 
which was issued as one volume), and, further, that it was 
commonly asserted that, in consequence of the touch of scep- 
ticism in the concluding sentence "and this is all that is 
known, and more than all yet nothing to what the angels 
know of the life of a servant of God," etc. (Vol. III. p. 79), 
Newman had dubbed Froude Young Judas. Perhaps, how- 

* The Scott-like ballad incorporated in the Life was by Dalgairns. 



36 SAINT " BERTRAM" OF ILAM [Oct. 

ever, the touch is rather humorous than sceptical ; and 
Father Thurston, S.J., has pointed out that the gentle irony 
is instantly qualified ; while, but ior these words, the internal 
evidence is all in favor of Newman's authorship. Moreover, 
in a letter to the limes (2yth December, 1897), Mr. Edward 
Bellasis has asserted that a letter in Newman's handwriting 
exists (he did not say where) , in which his authorship of the 
Life is admitted. It is conceivable indeed that Froude in a 
cynical moment may have inserted the words " and more than 
all " when correcting Newman's proofs for him. But this is a 
mere conjecture, only suggested as accounting for the Kegan 
Paul tradition, and in itself unlikely, since Newman would at 
any cost have withdrawn the whole issue had such a trick 
been played on him. And he may very well have written the 
whole sentence as it stands ; for, as Father Thurston also 
says, "the most devout must regard the story as mainly 
legendary." 

Like Newman, Father Herbert Thurston, S.J., was never at 
Ham, a lair of the beguiling spirit of poetry. His great 
scholarship might have received there some ticklish promptings 
towards " all that is known, and more than all," where a holy 
hermit called Bertelm was surely once an historical person- 
ality. 



IN CARRA AND TIRAWLEY, COUNTY MAYO. 



BY WILFRID ST. OSWALD. 




II. BY BALLINA AND CASTLEBAR. 

OT many miles, as birds fly, but miles many 
more of curving roadway, separate Crossmolina, 
on Conn's northern shore, from Ballina, a note- 
worthy town six miles from the estuary of the 
Moy, more easily reached from Pontoon by car 
via Foxford. Less mountainous, after passing the heights of 
Lissaniska, though hardly less rugged than the Moy country 
between Foxford and Pontoon, is the bleak land north of Fox- 
ford, a region rich in early religious memories; for there St. 
Patrick himself, once in danger of drowning in the swiftly 
flowing river near Bouleyfadrick, south of Ballina, firmly 
planted the Faith, and founded, besides other churches in 
North Tirawley, those of Donaghmore, Killala, and Kilmore- 
moy; while local tradition has it that he baptized nine hun- 
dred persons at Tobernacreeva still further north. To St. 
Cormac, one of his successors in missionary work in Tirawley, 
is attributed the foundation of the Abbey of Killala which, 
though a great religious centre in the early days of Chris- 
tianity, disappears from history in medieval times, probably 
from having been absorbed by one of the adjacent religious 
houses of later foundation. 

If Ballina, as we know it, is of comparatively modern ori- 
gin, dating only from the early years of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, when the Lord Tirawley of the time gave an impetus to 
local industry by establishing cotton and linen warehouses 
there, the district can have been by no means a desert in 
medieval days. The house of Augustinian hermits at Arc- 
narea on the Moyside, nearly opposite the modern town of 
Ballina, was founded before 1402 ; and coeval with it was the 
fine Franciscan Friary of Rosserk, now a venerable ruin, little 
more than five miles further north on the river bank ; while 



38 IN CARRA AND TIRAWLEY, COUNTY MAYO [Oct., 

between Rosserk and Killala, also on the Moy, the Observan- 
tine Franciscan Friars had an important house at Moyne, 
founded in 1458 by Thomas Burke MacWilliam, and now in 
ruin, recalling more than a century of good work for God arid 
the people. Some three or four miles yet further north was 
a Dominican Friary at Rathfran, a foundation of the de Exe- 
ters, dating from the thirteenth century. It would certainly 
seem, therefore, that before the dissolution of monasteries, 
these friaries by Killala Bay were, what we know the great 
Abbeys to have been elsewhere, not only centres of religious 
life and rural population but likewise hostels at which tarried 
traders as they entered or left the country, and wayfarers on 
their divers wanderings. In the days of the " MacWilliams of 
Mayo, great men in whose lands are many goodly harbors/' 
there was commerce at Killala with France and Spain; and 
the road and river traffic on its way inland passed close by 
Moyne and Rosserk and Ardnarea; so that the site of Ballina 
was at all events in the track of the commercial activity 
which, here as elsewhere, was developing by seaboard and 
river, despite the continuous faction fights of rival local chief- 
tains. 

This part of the country comes into general history later 
on, in the Armada year, when of the twelve Spanish ships 
wrecked on the coast of Connaught four or five were cast on 
the rocky seaboard of County Mayo, and one of these was 
hurled ashore in North Tirawley, where William Burke of 
Ardnarea took seventy-two prisoners, and another strong man 
of the district was reported to have killed eighty Spaniards 
with his single gallow- glass axe alone. Neither then nor ear- 
lier do Spaniards seem to have been made welcome ; nor is 
there any record or other evidence of Spanish settlements in 
Mayo, which in this matter is totally unlike its neighbor, 
County Galway. 

Such prosperity as Ballina actually enjoys came to it appar- 
ently in the last century, when enterprising traders settled 
there, recognizing local facilities for carrying on the provision 
trade, which is still the town's most valuable commercial asset, 
though it is not without other sources of revenue connected 
directly or indirectly with the salmon fame of the Moy. On 
what we may differentiate as the Ardnarea bank of the river, 
is the Catholic Church, a modern Gothic building of fine pro- 



i9io.] IN CARRA AND TIRAWLEY, COUNTY MAYO 39 

portions, close to the ruins of an apparently ancient Gothic 
structure. A crowded post-office, busy banks, well-filled shops, 
a main street of generally slated houses, two of which are 
quite good hotels, give a look of prosperity to the Monday 
market days. The more interesting, if more humble, features 
are to be found in picturesque thatched houses and in the by- 
ways lined by barrows in refreshing topsy-turveydom of set- 
ting. Not far off goes on the greater business of the day, 
when after excited bargaining, which to unaccustomed ears 
seems to presage a fray, but is really merely good- humor and 
good business, crates of eggs, chickens, bleating lambs, and 
grunting little pigs change owners, and are triumphantly borne 
down the main street. Many were the French names and many 
more the French features we noted among the market day 
crowds at Ballina reminders of bygone French trade, French 
raids, and French settlements in County Mayo, just as County 
Galway through its people speaks of Spain. 

The last French raid in North Tirawley was also the last 
foreign invasion of the British Islands on August 22, 1798, 
when three French frigates suddenly appeared in Killala Bay, 
and landed about a thousand soldiers, veterans most of them, 
commanded by General Humbert, who issued a manifesto 
headed, " Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, Union/ 1 and proclaim- 
ing an Irish Republic. Gaining very few adherents among 
the peasantry on its way south, the invading army marched 
to Castlebar, and on the outskirts of the town surprised and 
defeated a small British force, when the laurels of the day 
were won by the valiant " Fraser Fencibles," a Scottish com- 
pany of the vanquished army. The memory of this little 
battle lives in history under the name of the " Castlebar 
Races." Having sent to the French Directory a magnified 
account of his victory, Humbert issued another manifesto, 
proclaiming Castlebar the seat of the Republican Government 
of Connaught, and ordering every Irishman above the age of 
sixteen to repair to the French camp. Upon the prompt 
rallying of the British troops, however, Humbert wheeled off 
northward, and was overtaken and defeated, on September 8, 
at Ballinamuck, by Lord Cornwallis. That General Humbert's 
raid was intended to be the forerunner of more serious inva- 
sion, seems evidenced by the fact that, some weeks after his 
abortive fortnight in Ireland, several French frigates, having 



40 IN CARRA AND TIRAWLEY, COUNTY MAYO [Oct., 

on board more than five thousand fighting men destined to 
land in Donegal, were captured off County Mayo. 

After skirting Cullin's water by a bleak mountain range, 
(whose name of seventeen letters baffles the capabilities of our 
Anglo-Saxon tongue), the nine miles of roadway between Pon- 
toon and Castlebar pass through bleak bog- lands and stony 
^wastes acquired of recent years by the Congested Districts 
Board, whose work is seen both in new roads connecting dis- 
tant hamlets with each other and with the highway, and in a 
number of new houses. Of transient interest is the fact that this 
roadway was in the route of the raiders in 1798, that it passes 
the scene of the " Castlebar Races," described to us as "where 
once was a great battle between France and Ireland, 1 ' and that 
a rude wayside cross marks the grave of a brave Irish peasant 
who, from his cottage door, fired at the whole company of 
French troops as they passed by, and was, of course, at once 
overpowered and killed. Here St. Patrick lived awhile, hard 
by the church he had built at Turlough itself. 

Very little about its past tell the stones of Castlebar. The 
medieval fortress of the de Burgos, many times razed by their 
enemies and again rebuilt, and at a later period alternately 
held by the Binghams and captured by their foes, Castlebar, 
as seen to-day, cannot in its oldest buildings be of earlier date 
than the eighteenth century, and it bears hardly a trace of its 
transient occupation by the French in 1798. Indeed, most of 
the town is much more modern, though it has a note of dis- 
tinction usually associated with honorable record in earlier 
history. Castlebar stands serenely on the banks of the River 
Clydagh, prosperous looking, and almost guiltless of crime, for 
its assizes are innocent of local cases, while the weekly petty 
sessions hardly ever record any charge graver than an occa- 
sional "drunk and disorderly. 11 Like Ballina, Castlebar has a 
fine modern Gothic Catholic Church by its riverside, but Cly- 
dagh's banks are of kinder earth than are the Moy rocks, and 
make a brave show of spreading trees. 

Leaving them and noting, as we go, that streets wide and 
narrow, and shop-fronts great and small, have their names 
writ large always in Irish, and sometimes both in Irish and 
English, we are prepared to find that land richer than that 
near Conn and Cullin, lies south of Castlebar. The inviting 
prospect of seeing the sites or ruins of the Abbeys of Cong 



i9io.] IN CARRA AND TIRAWLEY, COUNTY MAYO 41 

(founded in 623 by St. Fechin of Fore) and of Mayo is, how- 
ever, a possibility not yet actualized.* The famous Cross of 
Cong, now in the Dublin Museum, keeps alive the memory 
of the abbey where this witness to medieval Irish art was 
fashioned by one of the brethren early in the twelfth century. 
Interest of a different kind attaches to Mayo Abbey, which 
was founded in the seventh century by British monks from 
Inishboffin, where monasticism had been planted by Colman 
of Lindisfarne on his retirement from Northumbria, with a 
small body of monks. Mayo Abbey remained a great insti- 
tution until the twelfth century ; but the Columban House at 
Inishboffin was very soon lost to history. Still nearer Castle- 
bar, and in the barony of Carra, are the Gothic ruins of 
Ballintubber, an Augustinian house founded in 1216 by King 
Cathal O'Conor, 

In Carra too is Manulla, which takes us very far back into 
the old world, though we actually made acquaintance with it 
in most modern wise as a railway junction between Dublin 
and Foxford. "It's nothing to see, and it's nowhere to live; 
it's only a junction, is Manulla," we were assured by a railway 
official surprised at our interest in local lore. Not much is 
there to see, certainly; possibly there is nowhere to live, as 
he assured us; but there are memories of Manulla to hold in 
reverence memories of St. Patrick who uncovered a dolmen 
built over the Holy Well of Manulla, in the presence of a 
crowd of Druids and other heathens of the country who had 
worshipped the Well. It was called Slan, and from it the 
church and parish were called Slanpatrick down to the six 
teenth century. The uncovering seems to have marked the 
end of paganism, for the Druids and local tribes embraced 
Christianity. This is the last recorded incident of St. Patrick's 
tour in Mayo before his return to Meath. Surely there was 
inducement for us to bide awhile at Manulla, where Ireland's 
great Apostle had trod and tarried and brought to the people 
the glad gospel tidings of great joy. 

* Cong is in the barony of Kilmaine ; Mayo in the barony of Clanmorris. 




THE PASSIONSSPIELE OF 1910. 

AN IMPRESSION. 
BY KATHERINE BRfiGY. 

P in the heavens the stars were keeping watch, and 
the quiet, fleet little Ammer tossed back their 
lights as she flowed beneath her low stone bridge. 
A something tense, expectant, unfulfilled, brooded 
in the air, as on the vigil of a great feast day. 
Within the quaint, thrifty shops of Oberammergau zealous 
tourists were accumulating pictures of the great play, or the 
peasants' handiwork in carved wood and pottery. Through 
the streets passed an ever- varying pageant: youthful couples 
in the heyday of the lune de miel ; German families from up 
and down the Fatherland ; English and Americans (those ubiq- 
uitous voyagers !) ; priests with their Roman collars and priests 
equally recognizable without Roman collars; the alert, inquisi- 
tive Jew ; a whole multitude of just and unjust men from every 
nation under heaven ! All were eager, a few dreamful, as they 
threaded the dark yet sheltering streets of that picturesque 
Old World village. But at last the little streets are silent 
again; the most belated traveler has mounted, candle-lit, to 
bed. Only the unwearied moon, and upon Kofel's heights 
that towering cross, hold watch until the morning. 

It is not long to wait. At five o'clock the sun is well risen, 
and a booming of bells, which might almost be heard across 
the Atlantic, calls the peasant actors to their Mass. The vil- 
lage is awake after that. Hour by hour the white-towered 
church is thronged with worshippers, and in the ancient grave- 
yard, with its harvest of crucifixes, foreign men and women 
wander among the Oberammergauers of to-day and yesterday. 
By eight o'clock we are gathered together in the huge, 
curious, mountain theatre, upon the curtain of which Michael 
Angelo's Moses breathes a silent message from the far-off 
Renaissance world. A few moments later the Prophet has given 



1910.] THE PASSIONSSPIELE OF 1910 43 

place to a chorus of Guardian Angels young men and maidens 
with honest, sunburnt faces, straight tunics of white, and vivid 
togas, which somehow harmonize into a sumptuous whole, 
primitive, barbaric, beautiful. Some of these, peradventure, 
have been our hosts of the night before; some may have served 
our breakfast this morning, and indeed shall return to serve 
our luncheon ; for there is nothing more attractive in these 
peasant folk than the perfect simplicity and earnestness with 
which they turn from their sublime drama to the humble 
service of everyday. 

Welcome to all, whom here the tender love 
Of the Savior calls, mourning, to follow Him 

Throughout His dolorous journey 

To the place of His burial lest. 

To Him lift up your heart! Lift up your soul! 
Pray with us. Yea, pray as the hour draws nigh, 

And the debt of our sacred vow 

To Almighty God we pay ! 

Slowly, in a rhythm somewhere between plain-chant and primi- 
tive Wagnerian, the words float out upon the morning air, and 
the keynote of the Passionsspiele is sounded. The chorus draws 
back, and in the centre of the stage the Expulsion from Eden 
is revealed in tableau. There is a second symbolic group, the 
Adoration of the Cross; then the real action of the tragic 
play begins. 

It is a street scene in Jerusalem. At one side rises the 
house of the High Priest, at the other the house of Pilate; 
but no premonitory shadow falls from either little tribune as 
the eager peasant crowd pours upon the scene. From every 
side they come thronging; men and women with simple, elo- 
quent gestures, little children unspeakably lovely with their 
waving burden of palm an endless and dramatic procession, 
the universal gaze focussed backward to some unseen central 
figure. There is a moment of fine suspense, while the pageant 
is arrested and every voice shouts its glad thrice-hail to David's 
Son. Then, very simply and quietly the Christus enters, a 
figure of surpassing dignity, already of surpassing pathos, 
riding upon the foal of an ass. God's sunshine is the only 



44 THE PASSIONSSPIELE OF ipio [Oct., 



limelight which falls upon the patient, manly face, the soft, 
light brown hair and beard, the sombre, serviceable vesture of 
gray. And there is nothing spectacular, nothing even sacer- 
dotal about Anton Lang. There would seem a manifest pur- 
pose on the chief actor's part (as it were a Domine, non sum 
dignus /) to depict the human side of Jesus Christ that Son 
of Man Who was also the Man of Sorrows ! as He must have 
shown to the dull eyes of His contemporaries. The eternal 
significance of it all is prefigured by symbol and allegory, by 
chorus and tableau: he comes not to be ministered unto but 
to minister ! Only by inference, never directly, does the mys- 
tic Priest according to Melchisedech's order speak to us. And 
yet, one recognizes in the deep eyes of this Bavarian potter 
a something which knows the heart of man: which needs not 
that any should foretell the coming treachery and denial of these 
very throngs; which comprehends with sadness, indeed, but 
without surprise and which still blesses ! 

In silence, upon every side, the benediction is given. 
Then the scene changes suddenly, and in a storm of righteous 
wrath the traders and money-changers are driven from the 
Temple. An admirable Teutonic deliberation (very conspicu- 
ous to nations of other blood) marks not only the anger with 
which Jesus cleanses his Father's house, but likewise the in- 
dignant protests of merchant and priest. 1*>\tfC Blessed is He 
that cometh in the name of the Lord, persist the children and 
the populace, as David's Son withdraws into the inner court 
to pray. And meanwhile, without, is inaugurated that intri- 
cate drama of hatred and destruction which is so tirelessly 
developed during the following hours. " Children of Israel, 
will you cease to be God's chosen people?" cry the infuriated 
Jewish hierarchy. Innovation and sacrilege are urged the 
curse of Jehovahthe practical argument of interrupted traffic; 
and a great council of deliberation is planned for the coming 
night. Mournful and ominous becomes the burden of the 
chorus; while a symbolic tableau, representing the sons of 
Jacob conspiring against Joseph, ushers in Act Second, the 
Plot of the High Council. It is a scene of high dramatic 
power, acted out with astonishing truth and vigor. The smil- 
ing urbanity of the fair-haired Caiphas, the less effectual, 
more aged and querulous expostulations of Annas, the alter- 
nate craft and desperation of the various priests and mer- 



19 io.] THE PASSIONSSPIELE OF 1910 45 

chants, combine to color a scene singularly real, and destined 
to bear its fruit with tragic promptitude. 

But we are soon far off in spirit from the contentious plot- 
ters of Jerusalem. A touching little tableau brings before us 
the departure of the young Tobias ; again, the Bride of the 
Canticles is seen mourning for her Beloved. One of the chorus 
a little peasant maid quite ripe for human love, feeling 
strongly but a trifle shamefaced steps forward to sing that 
plaintive, piercing, sweet refrain : 

Wo ist er hin, wo ist er hin, 
Der Schone aller Scbonen? 

What does it all mean ? one questions. Just Bethany ! 
Who shall say what spirit of poetry, profound and immemo- 
rial, has revealed to these humble people the hidden symbol 
of human love ? Perhaps it was the intuition of a faith at 
once vivid, simple, and practical; perhaps it was Mary at the 
foot of the Cross ! 

Jesus, walking with his little band, approaches the scene. 
He is trying by quiet reiteration to warn the mystified apos- 
tles of the sorrow which shall overtake them at Jerusalem. 
Then Simon, the quondam leper, comes forth to welcome this 
Best of Teachers to his home; while Lazarus, Martha, and 
Mary Magdalen press about him in adoring greeting. To- 
gether, for the last time, they sit at table. It is a strangely 
evangelical scene: yet as we gaze at the simple breaking of 
bread, at the box of precious ointment spilt by the penitent 
Magdalen, at the baffled questioning of these toil-worn disci- 
ples, we are not thinking solely of the Gospel story. We are 
thinking of painted Tuscan canvas and painted Gothic glass 
of all the centuries of patient art which have striven to im- 
mortalize the scene now being lived before us ! 

But Jesus is rising from the table. A weight of sadness 
and apprehension lies upon the faithful friends who crowd 
about him for farewell; to the women, Martha and Magdalen, 
comes a clearer foresight of this terrible journey. And then 
the one supremely pathetic figure of the Passion Play draws 
near Mary, searching for her son ! It is a wistful, tender, 
German Maria, youthful and very piteous as she flutters into 
the arms of Jesus. So soon the crown of sorrow is to rest 



46 THE PASSIONSSPIELE OF ipio [Oct., 



upon her bowed head, so soon the seven-times sharpened 
sword shall find its scabbard in her heart ! The brief colloquy 
is poignantly natural and unoratorical. He goes to Jerusalem 
whither once, as a little babe, she bore him in her arms ! 
to fulfill the will of his Father. The nature of that divine 
will, the extent of the coming sacrifice, are in this moment 
perfectly revealed to mother and to son. Mary has but one 
prayer, that she may follow her Well Beloved into the fierce 
struggle on to death itself. And it is granted her. "Thou 
shalt combat with me my death-combat,' 1 says the Knight of 
the Cross, " with me shalt thou celebrate the victory. There- 
fore be comforted." And now we are thinking not at all of 
art, whether in pigment or marble, but just of the woman's 
voice which rings out suddenly, brokenly: "O God, give me 
strength that my heart may not break ! " 

In every part of the Passion Theatre men and women are 
sobbing, as the infinitely suffering Christus gathers together 
his disciples, and hastens away from this Mother of Sorrows. 
For He set his face to go up to Jerusalem ! And she, half- 
swooning, gazes after her son. Is there little hint here of the 
Deipara, the priestess who shall yet "stand" at Calvary's foot, 
offering up her sacrifice with his ? Peradventure : and yet this 
bowed and weeping figure is she who will lead many up to 
the heights of the Cross. Regina Cceli, Regina Mundi, we have 
learned to call her. But the wise, simple Bavarian folk have 
realized an equal truth : after all, 

" A woman is a little thing, 
And in things little lies her comeliness." 

As the drama unfolds, there are perhaps half a score of 
scenes which strike the mind like a thunderclap for their 
power and their poignancy. No one can forget the character 
study of Judas, so consistently and dramatically portrayed by 
that veteran actor, Johann Zwink the father, as it happens, 
of this year's Maria! It is not a subtle conception; it is not, 
as a fallen apostle, wholly credible; yet there is a haunting 
reality about this awkward, sinister, mercenary peasant. He 
is the little villain. He questions and soliloquizes and excuses 
himself. He is semi-humorous at moments like the medieval 
devil, like the Gothic gargoyle ! He is pushed on, half-hearted, 



i9io.] THE PASSIONSSPIELE OF ipio 47 



unwilling yet unresisting, from sin to sin : from doubt to 
treachery, from treachery to betrayal; then at last, Orestes- 
like, to despair and the final blackness. He is everywhere ; 
he haunts the scene, never an evil angel, not even an evil 
genius, but a miserable human creature bound to destroy the 
Light he cannot comprehend. He is the discord in the har- 
mony of Redemption, the tiny switch which wrecks the work- 
ing of Eternal Love, the fissure through which the floods of 
Hate overflow. And withal, he is so humblingly indigenous, 
so inevitably a part of the tragic story ! 

It is at the Last Supper that the terror and the pity of 
Judas Iscariot are borne in upon our souls. The apostles 
have fallen into one of their frequent disputes over supremacy, 
and while they question who shall be greatest in the kingdom 
of their Master^ Jesus rises and lays aside his outer garment. 
Taking towel and basin, he kneels at the feet of Simon Peter; 
and that fathomless humility, which precept had not availed 
to teach, is driven home by one symbolic act. After Peter's 
vehement protest, there is no spoken word. In silence the 
Christus passes from apostle to apostle, prostrating his body 
for this most lowly service, while behind the scene women's 
voices are heard in solemn chant. There is scarcely a more 
beautiful moment in Anton Lang's entire conception. The wide, 
sorrowful sympathy of his eyes, the grave and unconscious 
grace of his movements, find their foil in the baffled surprise, 
the shame, the breathless expostulation of his peasant follow- 
ers. The scene is as real as a sacrament to these men of 
Oberammergau ; from the eyes of one white-haired disciple 
the tears are falling as the Son of Man kneels at his feet; 
and a thrill of responsive emotion shakes the vast audience. 

All the while Judas, grimly mute and unresponsive, seems 
to stand as representative of those countless souls for whom 
the whole stupendous sacrifice must be offered in vain. Into 
the Christus' face he looks uncomprehendingly ; from his re- 
luctant hands he receives Communion when the primal Mass 
is offered up; the aching pity of his eyes falls upon him in 
rebuke. Involuntarily, one turns with a shudder from the pro- 
longed sacrilege ! And then, the cryptic words of dismissal 
being spoken, this son of darkness passes out into the night ! 

" Kinder, meine kinder," Lang's voice proceeds with grave 
and encompassing tenderness, while the sublime Johannine 



48 THE PASSIONSSPIELE OF 1910 [Oct., 

discourses fall from his lips: "By this shall all men know that 
ye are My disciples, if ye love one another. . . . Arise, let 
us go hence ! " 

Perhaps the most dramatic of the old prophetic tableaux, 
which invariably precede these Gospel scenes, is that fore- 
shadowing the betrayal in Gethsemane. It represents the 
slaying of Amasa in a desolate waste of Gibeon; and the 
lament of the chorus is taken up in echo by the surrounding 
rocks, lone witnesses to Joab's crime. One wonders which of 
the many hands that have gone into the building of the Pas- 
sion Play monk, meistersinger, or village parochus may be 
responsible for this crude but finely poetic touch ? And, lis- 
tening to the solemn and impassioned strains of the music, 
one conjures up a vision of that one-time schoolmaster of 
Oberammergau whose genius was responsible for the score. 

But the day wears on. The stillness and the heat of early 
afternoon are upon the actors as they tread the Way of the 
Cross. The endless arguments and inquisitions of the high 
priests, the wavering of Pilate, the cool mockery of Herod, 
the shouts of the blind populace, are over at last. Sentence 
has been passed: the Man of Sorrows, thorn-crowned and 
marred by his scourging, has stood forth, a spectacle to men 
and to angels. And now we see him falling there beneath 
the weight of the cross upon his shoulders falling, and rising 
again, and staggering on without a murmur. It might almost 
seem that the summit of endurable agony had been attained 
by this terrible realism; did one not know that the extreme 
and ultimate of suffering is never reached until the victim 
smiles! Alas the chalice is to know even that fulfilling! 
For at this moment Mary comes once again upon the scene, 
pressing toward Jesus in spite of those who would spare her 
mother's eyes the final tragedy. Seeing her, he halts: and 
which of us, in meditating upon the Fourth Station of the 
Cross, had conceived the pure and perfect pathos of the smile 
which for that second illumines Anton Lang's white face ? 
Mother and son behold each other in an anguish of love too 
profound for word or sign. Then the crowd surges between 
them, and separately they travel on toward the Place of the 
Scull. 

The ominous, pitiless stroke of the hammer falls upon our 
senses as, a little while before, the counting of Judas' coins 



19 io.] THE PASSIONSSPIELE OF 1910 49 

had fallen in the Temple treasury. It is the hoof of victorious 
Hate galloping apace ; the blasphemous peal of Pandemonium 
suddenly audible to Christian ears ! Not one detail of the 
deicide drama is forgotten. He is hanging there between two 
thieves, while the soldiers cast lots for his raiment, and the 
Jewish priests mock the impotence of him who, having saved 
others, cannot save himself. 

Well, and all our lives we Catholics have been looking up 
at the crucifix ! We have thought upon that Head bowed be- 
neath its thorns; we have contemplated the Sacred Blood; 
we have kissed the wounded Feet. Why, then, does a sud- 
den tremor of pain shake us why is the heart faint all at 
once from the undreamed shock ? Because the human eyes of 
the crucified are gazing straight into our eyes ! Tearless, but 
dark with pain, they look down upon us, wearily, patiently, 
eloquently. They speak to us as once, by awful miracle, the 
crucifix spoke to Thomas of Aquino. For the reverent conse- 
cration of Anton Lang has won its own reward : into the man 
has passed something of the yearning, the pity, the infinite 
understanding of his God ! 

Consummatum est. The black -robed chorus has chanted its 
dirge; Joseph and Nicodemus are taking the still form down 
from his cross, even as the sun sinks down to twilight and to 
dusk. "Once again the beloved son rests in his mother's 
arms ! " murmurs the youthful St. John, as the first Pieta is 
revealed to us; and quietly the last piteous ministry is per- 
formed. They do not at any moment overact, these calm yet 
impassioned Bavarian folk least of all throughout the final 
scenes. Already they would seem to anticipate the peace so 
terribly purchased. And we ourselves no longer weep. The 
heart- subduing tragedy of Oberammergau has left us awed and 
speechless; clutching hard at the Faith once delivered to the 
saints and to the sinners of an Older World. 

The curtain falls: rises again for a vision of the ascendant 
Christ ; then, as if loath to shut him from our eyes, sinks 
slowly back into place. And so, with resurgent Hallelujahs, 
ends the Passionsspiele of 1910. 

Not to favored Italy, not to fair, long-faithful France, not 
to the proud and loyal Spaniard, was it given to hand down 
this heritage of medieval Christendom; but to the quiet moun- 
tain folk of Southern Germany "the pious Ammergau people," 
VOL xcn. 4 



50 THE PASSIONSSPIELE OF ipio [Oct. 



as good King Ludwig called them, " who have adhered to the 
customs of their fathers." Upon their little town has fallen, 
and is borne triumphantly, the mantle of York and Chester, 
of Towneley and Coventry, to mention but our English cycles 
of the great religious drama. And what a living, prevailing 
thing this Bavarian mystery is nowise an experiment in aesthe- 
tics or archaeology ; not even, upon its own ground, an exotic ; 
least of all a deliberate, mercantile revival ! All the world 
knows the history of the votive drama. Back in 1633, while 
the Thirty Years' War was raging, a deadly pestilence threat- 
ened to annihilate Oberammergau ; and the men and women 
swore then to perform the " Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ" 
once in every ten years if the good God stretched forth His 
hand to save. What if the Passion Play, which wrought once 
that miracle upon the body, works still upon the spirit of this 
people ? We may, as we choose, explain the curious, aposto- 
lic, yet wholly human charm of the peasant actors. But how 
other than miraculous shall we name that blessed and beauti- 
ful phenomenon which has preserved a whole community from 
the sophistication, the unrest, the unbelief of that modern 
world which every decade knocks tumultuously at its gates ? 




TAULER'S PLACE AMONG PREACHERS.* 

BY WALTER ELLIOTT, C.S.P. 

|A.ULER'S mortal remains, relics we would fondly 
call them, are still to be visited in Strassburg, 
his natal city. They rest where they were rev- 
erently placed by his brethren in what was 
then the Dominican Church, and now is a pub- 
lic library. On his ancient gravestone is seen sculptured the 
figure of a friar in his Order's habit, slender in frame and of 
refined, delicate features, different from the burly, spiritual 
athlete his powerful, vehement sermons generate in our imagi- 
nations. Above his head is carved the Lamb cf God, towards 
which this faithful herald of divine union is pointing with his 
long finger. On Tauler's breast is placed a crown. His 
brother Dominicans would thereby express his triumph in the 
holy warfare for Christ and His Church, which he so daunt- 
lessly waged in the stormy era in which Providence cast his lot. 
Our readers are aware that Tauler has been loudly claimed 
by Protestants as a forerunner of Luther. But so has many 
another powerful preacher and writer of the two centuries pre- 
ceding the Reformation. Whatever makes for Christian virtue 
in a Catholic teacher's writings is claimed as good Protestant- 
ism, while what makes for Catholic obedience is ignored, or it 
is explained away as a weak and momentary yielding to an 
evil environment. 

Thomas a Kempis, a teacher who, from striking identity of 
expression, seems to have drunk deep of Tauler's sermons 
which were preached only two generations before the appear- 
ance of the Imitation is acclaimed by many Protestants as a 
true reformer of Luther's stamp. Tauler was, indeed, a re- 
former, but he was one like St. Bernard, whom some Protest- 
ant writers have not blushed to place in Luther's and Cal- 
vin's unsavory company. In the same spirit Fenelon and 

* The Sermons and Conferences of John Tauler, of the Order of Preachers, s-urnamcd the 
Illuminated Doctor, being his Spiritual Doctrine. First complete English Translation, with 
Introduction and Index, by Rev. Walter Elliott, of the Paulist Fathers. Brookland Station, 
Washington, D.C. : The Apostolic Mission House. 812 pages, $3 net. 



|2 TAULER' s PLACE AMONG PREACHERS [Oct., 

even St. Francis de Sales are picked out and separated from 
the Church as being more Protestant than Catholic, because, 
forsooth, though they were stalwart missionaries of the truest 
Catholicity, they won all Europe's admiration for their gentle- 
virtues. Nay, is not Christ Himself set up as founder of the 
motly congeries of societies, which, with their ever varying 
succession of errors, are called Protestantism ? 

Tauler in the very midst of the direst confusion of relig- 
ious affairs, namely, at the time of the great interdict, demands 
obedience to ecclesiastical authority thus: "Men must conform 
themselves to the Holy Church humbly and patiently, with 
souls resigned, with most cheerful willingness, obeying with 
voluntary and docile subjection all the regulations and the doc- 
trines proposed to them by preachers from the pulpit.* 1 Ad- 
verting to the presence of evil men in places of Church au- 
thority, he quotes our Lord's directions to His disciples to 
obey the Scribes and Pharisees who sat in the chair of Moses, 
however unworthy they might personally have been. And he 
reaches the very limit of Christian conformity when he says 
that: "Men must not only hearken to the voice of their 
heavenly Father speaking within them, but also to that of 
their mother the Holy Church speaking to the outward ear, for 
these two voices are one; therefore he who hears not their 
voices will perish eternally." And he drives this home by 
saying: "The voice of our Father sounds to us by the voice 
of our mother the Church, in all her doctrines, precepts, and 
counsels." The document from which these extracts are taken 
was written in 1348, and was a sort of address or rather ad- 
monition, published by Tauler for common circulation during 
the painful troubles of the great interdict. According to even 
the best Protestant authorities it is unquestionably genuine. 
It serves also to disprove the claim of earlier Protestant 
critics, that Tauler openly disobeyed the interdict, though that 
accusation is amply refuted by other and more direct evi- 
dence. A multitude of quotations of the very same spirit as 
those given above might be made from the Sermons. 

The good in our own day of sermons modeled on Tauler's, 
and preached with his energetic sincerity, is shown by the 
character of the people he addressed ; for there is much re- 
semblance between the Rhineland Catholics of the fourteenth 
century and many a Catholic congregation of our own times. 



1910.] TAULER'S PLACE AMONG PREACHERS 53 

Our people are not, indeed, actually infected with heresy, as 
were many of Tauler's contemporaries, but they are often 
somewhat tainted by the errors prevalent now-a-days. The 
clergy too readily forget that the men and women, sitting 
peacefully in the pews before them for a half-hour's Sunday 
discourse, spend all their week days in the midst of a popula- 
tion wholly separated from Christ's true religion, who, though 
not always hostile to, are yet totally ignorant of, Catholicity. 
Meantime they incessantly talk error; and they loudly main- 
tain their right to question and reject any and all religious 
teaching, even Christ's own. And many of them have the 
easy glibness of scepticism, proposing indiscriminately every 
kind and quality of doctrinal difficulty, nor tarrying long 
enough to hear the solutions. Catholicity's official exponents 
must, therefore, supply our people with a good quality of teach- 
ing, delivered with force as well as kindness. A better model 
than the Illuminated Doctor for all this could hardly be desired. 
Truly does the attitude of the figure on the gravestone 
typify Tauler's drift and tendency : direct discipleship of Christ, 
the Lamb of God ; and his Dominican habit, as well as his 
ascetical features, proclaim the militant Catholic spirit that in- 
spired him. His sermons are simply saturated with dogmatic 
Catholicity. To one in the least degree acquainted with St. 
Thomas and the earlier schoolmen, Tauler is immediately re- 
vealed as the perfection of a preacher trained in Catholicity's 
best atmosphere. Therefore he gives a finished product of 
mental culture. It is, indeed, simply the Gospel of Christ as 
embodied in His Church's dogmas and precepts; but it is ad- 
vanced with those irresistible appeals to reason that distin- 
guish the disciples of Aquinas, the angelic reasoner of the 
schools. 

Like one of his successors in the long line of Dominican 
orators, Lacordaire, Tauler's power of exhibiting divinely cer- 
tain truth and divinely attractive virtue, is exerted with the 
ease of a perfectly trained and entirely sanctified intellect. In 
the case of the modern Frenchman, it is framed and adorned 
with the refinement of taste which must minister to the scep- 
tical Parisian audience of the nineteenth century; in the case 
of the medieval friar, it is the blunt, even brusque audacity of 
the master of a ruder people, dominating congregations of the 
arrogant German burghers of the fourteenth century. 



54 TAULER'S PLACE AMONG PREACHERS [Oct., 

No man can better impart the dogmas and maxims of 
Christ's gospel than one who has fathomed them by the scho- 
lastic method. Exception can be allowed for men of the 
supreme class, like St. Augustine among the Fathers, and 
Newman among moderns, a class made capable both by high- 
est natural endowment and the grace of a special vocation, of 
being a method and a training unto themselves, But even 
these are better imitated by a school- trained mind than by 
one vainly striving to emulate their inimitable personal endow- 
ments. Tauler, then, imparts truth with the precision of a 
schoolman and the force of an apostle. He ends discussion 
because he is a reasoner, trained to be at home with reason's 
noblest heroes, familiar with reason's restiveness under au- 
thority, beginning and carrying to a finish the process of im- 
parting a positively sane and sound religious belief. This is be- 
cause the schools have fully revealed to him the ancillary and yet 
necessary office of reason ministering to divine faith and love. 

The atmosphere of his time was just as palpitant with the 
doubts and scruples of independent thinkers as is that of our 
own day. And his success shall be ours, if by study of his 
sermons we assimilate his union of respect for reason and ad- 
oration of faith. To sway men's souls by downright personal 
force, projecting the divine message of penance for sin and 
love of Christ into hearts as unwilling as they are depraved 
to achieve this high victory is the aim of all real preaching. 
The study of Tauler imparts both the spirit and the method 
of this high vocation. 

Thus the depth of Tauler's learning and the clearness and 
conciseness of his style, are due to his training in the schools ; 
the resistless force of his discourses is due to his native fear- 
lessness and earnestness, driven on by the graces of his voca- 
tion ; the peculiar charm of holiness so plain in them, is due 
to their author's mysticism. What is known in literature as 
mysticism is nothing else than an assemblage of the glimpses 
and hints and fragments of the inner history oi saintly souls 
telling of their immediate contact with God. It relates to spir- 
itual conditions lying beyond natural mental activity. 

These, when carefully arranged, and when illustrated by com- 
ment and interpretation, form all that we know of the border- 
land between earth and heaven. Thus mystical theology is 
the Apocalypse of heaven's atrium. 



1910.] TAULER' s PLACE AMONG PREACHERS 55 

No wonder that the better class of minds are fascinated 
with these curious chronicles ; they tell of the satisfaction of 
the deepest want of created nature, immediate and blissful 
union with the creator; and the narrative is filled with events 
and with teachings, as startling and as poetical as they are 
instructive. Into this dreamland of God Tauler was personally 
ushered in his earlier public life, first by holy members of his 
order, and afterwards by the mysterious layman who disillu- 
sionized him about his style of preaching. He has been ac- 
cused of mystical excess in his treatment of the more recon- 
dite degrees of prayer unjustly and vainly accused. And 
furthermore, it is actually his mysticism which makes him the 
powerful persuader that he is. This is easy to demonstrate. 

He is always quoted as an authority in practical asceticism 
as well as in* mystical theology, even by such a quiet minded 
soul as St. Francis de Sales, and by as exacting a critic as 
Bossuet. The former thus speaks of him to St. Jane Frances 
de Chantal soon after assuming her spiritual direction: "For 
meditation books I recommend the spiritual exercises of Tauler 
and the Meditations of St. Bonaventure, truly excellent works, 
which it is impossible to use without being enlightened and 
affected, and which have been too much neglected in these 
latter days." 

It is precisely because he is a mystic that Tauler's doctrine 
is always so very spiritual, dealing with, the essential princi- 
ples of religion; and for the same reason it is very direct, in- 
ducing an immediate access to God and showing the way to 
obtain it. For both of these high qualities require a more 
than ordinarily familiar acquaintance with divine things, namely, 
an experimental knowledge, which alone can guarantee an ap- 
preciative description of them. How can this really be had but 
by supernatural insight ? Now the mystical state is variously 
defined as : " An experimental knowledge of God, obtained 
through the embrace of unitive love." Again : " A most di- 
vine knowledge of God, imparted to us through ignorance, and 
resulting from such a union that the soul, holding itself apart 
from all things, is united to the Eternal Splendor, and illumi- 
nated by the light of Wisdom." 

Not by men and their words, therefore, is the best knowl- 
edge of God's messages either learned or imparted, but rather 
by mysterious inner experiences and secret sensations of the 



56 TAULER' s PLACE AMONG PREACHERS [Oct., 

nearness of the Infinite. Tauler was thus taught, as, indeed, 
had been taught the Apostles themselves, who learned how to 
preach better from their ten days' seclusion in the upper cham- 
ber, ending with the fiery mysticism of the Holy Spirit, than 
in their three years' company with the Son of God in a life 
limited to union with Him through the external senses. So 
was Moses taught ; he was but an ordinary militant and public 
spirited Hebrew, till he saw God face to face. Then he was 
made at once both the meekest and most fearless of men, and 
chosen to be the Lord's lawgiver. 

Such a teacher is every saint whose vocation is to preach 
and to write. Though Tauler is not canonized, he surely ranks 
with Blessed Henry Suso and St. Vincent Ferrer, of his own 
venerable order, and St. Bernardine of Siena and St. John 
Capistran, of the Franciscans, all of whom were called by God 
to oppose identical evils and satisfy identical aspirations. 

This does not mean that Tauler simply amazed and mysti- 
fied his hearers. No ; he threw a brilliantly certain light upon 
the ordinary obligations of a Christian life, the keeping of 
God's commandments, and the reception of the sacraments of 
Holy Church. Especially did he continually point out the 
Christian's steps along the rough road of self-denial leading 
to Calvary. We believe that in all the great sermons in sacred 
literature, scarcely any will be found superior in power, more 
vivid in coloring, more unaffectedly pathetic, and withal more 
plainly practical, than those of Tauler on Christ's Passion. No 
one can read his First Sermon for Good Friday, without learn- 
ing a spiritual doctrine so high, so penetrating, and withal so 
entirely realistic, as to make him thank God for such a preacher, 
one so pure of heart in the highest mystical sense, one who 
has seen so deep into the heart of God. 

No theme better pleased this downright, simple-minded dis- 
ciple of the Crucified, than the world's great event of Calvary. 
If he often led his hearers, whose rough natures he loved so 
dearly, into the serene regions of contemplation, it was always 
that he might lead them back again to the pathetic scenes of 
Good Friday, by turns consoling and firing their hearts, sooth- 
ing and arousing their sensibilities, with his indescribably pow- 
erful appeals. Over and over again are we led by this master 
of silent prayer, from the high altitudes of contemplation into 
the uproar of the Lord's crucifixion, the tumults and clamors 



1 9 io.] TAULER'S PLACE AMONG PREACHERS 57 

and curses and prayers of Calvary. Nothing can exceed his 
vividness and pathos in his discourses on our Savior's sufferings 
and death. 

It is by contemplatives alone that Calvary can be most 
correctly interpreted. Men who have been thrust into the fires 
of inner penance, and humbled and elevated and refined by 
Truth unveiled, are the best exponents of the death of God's 
Son. By such teachers does God rule this world for its sav- 
ing. Who can tell the things of God equal to one who has an 
" experimental knowledge of God obtained through the em- 
brace of unitive love " ? It is the transit from the mystery 
of the Eternal Splendor of the deity enjoyed in supernatural 
prayer, to the infinite mystery of the deity's charity on Calvary. 

Much the same may be said of the sermons on the Eucha- 
rist. In all of his discourses we are nourished by the strong 
food of God in the banquet of the interior life, and his words 
are always a rich repast, making the soul's virile blood. But 
the outward banquet of God in His Son's holy Supper is con- 
tinually spread before us in the most attractive manner. In 
his many sermons on the Eucharist, and his countless references 
to it in other sermons, the frequent reception of holy Com- 
munion is joined with interior cleansing and refreshment as 
cause with effect. And one is astonished to find in Tauler's 
views about frequent Communion, a striking forecast of the 
beneficent legislation of the present Sovereign Pontiff on that 
subject. 

The standing objection to mystical teachers is that their 
influence is a dreamy substitute for sensible, solid, Christian 
conduct. But even a superficial acquaintance with Tauler cor- 
rects this delusion perfectly. If he never said a word about 
the loftier states of prayer, his purely practical discourses 
would make him a great doctor of the spiritual life which is 
led by all reliable Catholics. But no such discourses could 
ever be conceived or delivered with the resistless compulsion 
he was master of, except by one who was a mystic. 

Such a one, moreover, is the best corrector of unquiet de- 
votionalism, and of the delusions incident to misdirected pious 
observances. A man who has dealt directly with Christ in the 
higher kind of prayer is the right guide for those who con- 
fide overtrustingly in the wayside means of grace, and seem 
to rate the sacramentals higher than the sacraments, even pre- 



58 TAULER 1 s PLACE AMONG PREACHERS [Oct., 

ferring self-assumed pious obligations to God's command- 
ments.* Devotional expansiveness usually exists at the expense 
of volume in the soul's life. Few rivers are copious enough 
to have both a deep channel and a wide outspread of waters. 
Not great area of pious observance but depth of motive, and of 
feeling, real strength, love, well-matured meekness and obedi- 
ence, these are needed, if one is to be true to God under 
trials and safe under temptation. Christians must concentrate 
on a few great observances at the expense of many little 
ones. A royal supremacy must be ever yielded to the use of 
the Sacraments and the established worship of Holy Church, 
avoiding as a pest that "get-rich-quick" spirit which easily 
deludes the spiritual indolence of shallow or cowardly minds. 

Tauler's discourses everywhere enforce this duty of em- 
phasizing the essentials of religion. Practises of piety, outside 
of those that are common and approved, or such as are of obli- 
gation by one's state of life, are always discountenanced and 
sometimes roughly handled by him. Sobriety of taste in 
choosing voluntary devout practices is inculcated, and an iron 
adherence to one's rule of life and the guidance of superiors, is 
insisted on. Herein is Tauler most excellent spiritual read- 
ing for souls earnestly striving for perfection. Their bane is 
halting at the means when they should hurry onward to the 
end, which is entire conformity to Christ and God. With such 
persons devotions too often breed devotionalism. The holiest 
practices are performed with a view to an exact record, so as 
to mark a mechanical progress in perfection ; rather this than 
simply to deepen the love of God and. make more effectual 
the love of one's neighbor. The result is not only a monoton- 
ous routine of spiritual existence, but too often obstinate self- 
will and vicious pride of opinion. Many a time does Tauler 
lead us step by step along the downward way trod by such 
souls, the way to ruin. We can hardly conceive of better 
descriptions of exactly how it happens, that men and women 
spend years doing good things and yet finally become bad 

* But we sometimes meet with a type of universal devotionalism which is no hindrance to 
safe and sound piety. There are souls who are enrolled in all accessible societies, eagerly run 
about to all shrines, and seek for all possible miraculous favors (mostly for others' sake rather 
than their own), nor feel the least embarrassment in the company of the panicky mass of in- 
ferior spirits. Yet on close acquaintance they are found to be high-minded in motive and of a 
truly Christian liberty of spirit. These, we say, are met with, but yet rarely, marvels of the 
union of solidity of virtue with versatility of religious taste, capable both of enjoying heavenly 
delicacies and gorging on the fodder of plebeian natures. 



i9io.] TAULER' s PLACE AMONG PREACHERS 59 

Christians, or at least totally fail to become good ones. With 
painful but most instructive minuteness, and with merciless 
honesty, he traces the declining path of a devout soul, gradu- 
ally grown to be heady and disputatious, finally arrogant and 
intolerably censorious and quarrelsome; all from love of the 
devotional sweetness enjoyed in pious practises, undertaken 
without counsel and persevered in from motives of spiritual 
gluttony. 

Tauler shows us how to sift the chaff of externalism from 
the wheat of interior meaning in the routine exercises of a 
devout life. Nothing is to be found in any single one of these 
seven score of sermons, save the pure evangel of interior virtue. 
He incessantly deals with motives of action. Reasons for 
conduct are his theme everywhere. Back and forth between 
God and the Church's teaching and worship, is the unvarying 
movement of souls under his spell. That this whole big book 
is free from monotony, is due not to variety of topics though 
he loves to lead us from end to end of the Church's vast 
repertory of truth so much as to the fertility of his imagin- 
ation, and his dexterous and copious, his bold and novel, use 
of Scripture in treating of ordinary truths and commonplace 
duties. But the result is ever the same : interior virtue and 
external observance are blended into the unity of a Christian 
life as reasonable as it is supernatural. 

Seek far and wide as you please, you will hardly find 
among the most venerable of our teachers, a better expositor 
of the spirit of religion dominating our outward life. More 
powerful invectives against conditions in which the lack of in- 
terior virtue produces a barren outward observance, cannot be 
imagined. That life should be holy externally, belief must 
be as sincere of heart as profession is loyal to the Church's 
spirit. Yet, with all his energy, Tauler is as gentle with 
timid souls as a mother with her babes, even when he is 
crowding them forward into the narrow ways of the Gospel. 
In fact his most vehement effort is bent to the inculcation of 
the more kindly and yielding virtues, a policy quite befitting 
an age and race, almost wholly given up to the barbarities of 
war. But it is hardly necessary to say, that in teaching the 
softening v rtues of patience and meekness and obedience, it 
is without lesion to the stalwart manliness of an aggressive 
Christianity, exhibited both in resistence to public evil doing, 



60 TAULER' s PLACE AMONG PREACHERS [Oct., 

and in the practice of virtue in the face of all kinds of private 
difficulties. 

Here, then, is all Tauler in a nut- shell. Detachment from 
mundane things, and entire abandonment to the loving care of 
Providence; such is his beginning of an earnest career of per- 
fection. Upon this follows his wise counsel for that period of 
interior trial, in which God calls on the soul to love Him dis- 
interestedly, rising above joy or sorrow as motives of inner or 
outer allegiance, thoughts of hell and heaven being relegated 
to a lower order of incentives to virtue and aversion from vice. 
Next conies an intense inner striving after divine sanctification, 
in distinction to over-reliance upon outward devotional prac- 
tises. The powers of the soul, nay its very essence, are dis- 
covered as the field of God's best and therefore of His direct 
and immediate activity in the work of our sanctification. The 
practical means for responding to the divine purposes, are then 
plainly shown to be religious retirement and silence, meditation 
and devout reading, humility, self-denial in all its forms, the 
guidance of wise and peaceful spirits : all nourished by the 
frequent and wisely directed use of the sacraments. 

The reader can easily trace this brief syllabus of Tauler's 
doctrine of a devout life, in his famous Interview with the beg- 
gar. It is not to be relied on as a record of fact, but it is 
undoubtedly a true if an allegorical summary oi our great 
preacher's scheme of the highest perfection. 

The Interview of Master John Tauler with a Beggar. There 
was once a famous master of holy learning, who for eight years 
prayed God to send him a man able to teach him the way of 
truth. It happened one day that this longing was more than 
usually earnest within him. And presently he heard a voice 
from on high saying: "Go forth to the church door, and thou 
shalt find the man thou hast been looking for." Going to the 
church door, the master met a beggar there. He was in a miser- 
able plight, his feet covered with mud, and all his tattered clothes 
not worth three pennies. The master said: " Good-day, my 
friend." The beggar: "I never remember to have had a bad 
day my whole life long." The master : " May God grant thee 
prosperity." The beggar: "I have never known adversity." 
The master: "Well, then, may God make thee happy." The 
beggar: " I have never been unhappy." The master: "At any 
rate, may God save thee. And I beg thee to speak more 



i9io.] TAULER'S PLACE AMONG PREACHERS 61 

/ 

plainly to me, for I do not catch thy meaning." The beggar : 
"Thou didst bid me good-day, and I answered that I have 
never had a bad one. In fact when I am hungry, I praise 
God ; when I am cold, or it hails, or it snows, or rains, if the 
air is clear or foggy, I praise God. If I am favored by men 
or despised, I praise Him equally. And all this is why I have 
never known a bad day. Thou didst wish me prosperity, and 
I answered that I have never known adversity, for I have 
learned to live with God, and I am certain that all that He 
does can be naught but good. Therefore, all that happens to 
me that is pleasing, or the contrary sweet or bitter I receive 
from Him as being very good for me. Thus I have never 
been in adversity. Thou hast wished me happiness, and I an- 
swered that I have never been unhappy, for I have resolved 
to fix my affections only on the divine will. Hence it comes 
that I desire only what God desires." The master : " But what 
wouldst thou say if God would will to cast thee into hell?" 
The beggar : " God cast me into hell ? If He did it, I would 
embrace Him with my two arms. With the arm of humility 
I would embrace His sacred humanity, and with the arm of 
love, I would embrace His divinity. And would thus force 
Him to descend with me into hell. For hell with Him would 
be more happy than heaven without Him." The master con- 
cluded from this that resignation, united to profound humility, 
is the shortest road to God. Then he asked the beggar : 
"Whence comestthou?" The beggar: "From God." The 
master : " Where didst thou find God ? " The beggar : " Where 
I left all creatures." The master : " Where is God ? " The 
beggar: "In hearts that are pure and in men of good-will." 
The master: "Who art thou?" The beggar: " I am a king." 
The master : " Where is thy kingdom ? " The beggar : " In my 
soul; for I have learned to order and govern my interior fac- 
ulties and my exterior senses in such a way that I am master 
of all my affections and of all the powers of my soul. Now, 
that kingdom is certainly to be preferred to all the kingdoms 
of the world." The master : " By what means hast thou gained 
this degree of perfection?" The beggar: "By silence, medi- 
tation, and union with God. I have never been able to find 
rest in anything, be it what it might, that was less than God. 
I have found my God, and in Him I have found rest and peace 
eternal." 




THE STAR OF THE SEA. 

BY KATHARINE TYNAN. 

IANIE WALSH was a humble dressmaker. She 
lived in a crowded street of an outlying bit of 
London, a noisy, busy, friendly, quarreling 
street, known to the better-class inhabitants of 
the place as the Irish slum. One would have 
said a dressmaker could find little to do in such a place. 

However, not far from Warwick Street a Common widens, 
with a church-spire rising from the trees at its top. Round 
about a number of good, old-fashioned houses, with spacious 
gardens, are still occupied by old-fashioned people, wealthy, 
and of good position. From these houses Janie's revenue 
was mainly derived, although she occasionally made a dress 
for one of her countrywomen in Warwick Street. She had a 
French cleverness, at the ends of her toil-worn fingers. Some- 
how the fame of it spread. From being employed by the 
servants of the big houses, she came to be employed by the 
mistresses for all sorts of renovations. Her fingers were in- 
cessantly busy. In time she employed an assistant or two; 
and, later, she might have realized, if she would, her dream of 
a home in a greener, quieter place. 

By the time she was thirty, however, Warwick Street had 
become home-like to her. She hankered still, occasionally, 
especially in the summer heats and languors, after that dream 
of green fields, but she had no longer the intention of making 
a reality of it. After all, there was only herself. Did it mat* 
ter very much where one solitary woman lived or died? And 
Warwick Street had grown dear to her. She had found her 
vocation there in a sense. The neighbors had been kind to 
her mother while she lived indeed, the neighbors were always 
kind, if one needed them. It was a happy-go lucky, friendly, 
noisy neighborhood. The toppling houses ought to have been 
pulled down long ago. Janie's customers on the Common 
were distressed because Janie would go on inhabiting War- 
wick Street a squalid, over-crowded, riotous place in the es- 
timation of its betters. But just around the corner from War- 
wick Street was a tiny, shabby little Catholic Church, the Star 



i9io.] THE STAR OP THE SEA 63 

of the Sea, built by the sixpences and shillings of Irish emi- 
grants after the famine time. Warwick Street might occasion- 
ally get drunk and quarrel with its matrimonial partners. It 
might even fight to the drawing of blood. But there was a good 
deal of the supernatural as well as of the natural virtues flourish- 
ing in Warwick Street. Perhaps that and the little church and 
Father Mullany kept Janie where she was when she might 
have gone further out and found a cottage overlooking what 
was left of the market-gardens and orchards for which the 
district was once famous. 

She sometimes looked back with a sigh to the days when 
she had her mother and had planned an escape to brighter, 
purer air and less crowded places for both of them. Now at 
thirty- five she was content to stay where she was. It wasn't 
as though she had a child to make the change for, or a man, 
or a dependent woman. In Janie's code things had always 
been well enough for herself. Now she would not have known 
what to do with herself outside Warwick Street. 

To be sure her couple of rooms in Warwick Street were 
always kept bright and clean. There was an altar in the room 
where she fitted her customers, with a statue of our Blessed 
Lady on it and a couple of vases full of flowers. A smaller 
altar was on the staircase outside her door she had the upper 
floor of the toppling house, whence one could get a glimpse 
of the sky and the river and the trees of the river- bank with 
a lamp lighting upon it. The altars had given offence to some 
Evangelical ladies who were among Janie's best customers, but 
they had not withdrawn their custom, since she was very 
clever and very cheap. And the altars appealed to other cus- 
tomers, especially to Miss Vesey, who was an artist and said 
inexplicable things about the effect of Janie's altars and her 
face in the dark, toppling house one of a hundred like it, and 
all crowded from top to bottom with human beings of both 
sexes and all ages, alike in being poverty-stricken and cheer- 
ful and happy-go-lucky in this place that the Common ladies 
called the Irish slum. 

Miss Vesey had painted Janie sitting sewing by the win- 
dow, the high light on her neatly-braided hair, her face com- 
posed and sweet Janie could never recognize herself in the 
picture with the altar in the background. She called the 
picture "Prayer" when it appeared at a London picture-gal- 
lery, to which she took Janie one Saturday afternoon to see 



64 THE STAR OF THE SEA [Oct., 

it; an odd name Janie thought it, for she was certainly not 
praying; and she did not understand Miss Vesey when she 
laughed and said there were more ways of praying than one. 

Miss 'Vesey had a wonderful way of making people talk, 
Janie found. She discovered herself saying all manner of 
things to Miss Vesey which she had never put into words 
before, though she had thought the things out while she cut 
out or ran her seams together. She was able to work while 
Miss Vesey painted her, which was a good thing, for the pic- 
ture took a long while in the painting: and Miss Vesey never 
complained of having to come to a slum like Warwick Street, 
although her coachman did. On the contrary, she said some- 
thing one day about the atmosphere of Warwick Street being 
something far finer and loftier than anything on the Common, 
which surprised Janie, for of course the Common had beauti- 
ful houses and gardens, and Warwick Street was only a slum, 
although a harmless one enough. 

After that sitting Janie often went to have tea with Miss 
Vesey in her beautiful house or beautiful garden. Miss Vesey 
was as lonely as herself, or lonelier, having the great big 
house, which looked as though it ought to shelter a whole 
family of children, all to herself, with a whole troop of servants 
and horses and dogs and all manner of things. The house 
was full of beautiful furnishings, with an austere beauty that 
appealed to the artist's soul that was hidden away somewhere 
in Janie's stunted breast. She delighted in it ; and yet the 
beauty of the gardens in summer used to set her to thinking 
wistfully of how good it would be for the babies in Warwick 
Street for there were babies there to whom the journey to 
the Common was not possible when their enterprising elder 
brothers and sisters were at school : to say nothing of the fact 
that the children were discouraged on the Common as far as 
possible. They were apt to be chased away by guardians of 
one kind or another when they approached too near the 
houses, set amid the ancient trees, with their lovely gardens 
spreading about them. The lower part of the Common, from 
which they were not driven, became, as the summer passed, a 
sort of dust-bath, every vestige of grass trampled off it ; so 
that, when the elder brothers and sisters had a holiday, it 
seemed hardly worth while to tramp all that way with heavy 
babies only to be chased off the grass into the dust- bath. 

Miss Vesey got at this secret longing of Janie's and 



THE STAR OF THE SEA 65 

straightway gratified it. The children of Warwick Street, with 
Father Mullany and the school- mistress to keep them in order, 
had, during an unusually fine and warm summer, a succession 
of Saturday afternoons in the garden of the biggest house on 
the Common, which for that summer certainly transfigured the 
lives of the children ; for no sooner was one blessed Saturday 
over than another blessed Saturday was coming again. For a 
long time the Common had taken no more notice of Warwick 
Street than to pass by, with an averted eye, on the other side. 
But now that Margaret Vesey had set the fashion, others be- 
gan to do likewise. A neighborly feeling sprang up between 
the Common and Warwick Street, which, as Father Mullany 
said, was likely to be as beneficial to one as to the other; and 
that was a saying which was a dark one to Janie Walsh, until 
she pondered it out for herself while she sat sewing in her 
room, which the statue and the light and the handful of flow- 
ers in a cheap vase seemed to brighten amazingly. 

She came and went a good deal in those days between 
Warwick Street and the Common. Miss Vesey seemed always 
to have some pretext or other for bringing the little dress- 
maker to the house, where she lived in such a quietness that 
it was almost seclusion. It was as though she really, for some 
strange reason, wished for the company of the little dressmaker. 
She seemed to find so much sewing for her to do that little 
by little Janie found herself becoming detached from Warwick 
Street, or only going backwards and forwards to direct the 
work of her assistants. She gained in health from inhabiting 
the little slip of a room, close by Miss Vesey's own room, and 
looking into the beautiful gardens, rather than Warwick Street. 
But while she delighted in the pure air and the freshness and 
sweetness, and while her devotion for Miss Vesey grew, she 
was yet loth to part company with Warwick Street. There 
had been a time when she might have done it, but the time 
had passed. It was somewhat mysterious to Margaret Vesey's 
mind that a creature so much more spirit than flesh, could have 
been happy with the cheerful squalor of Warwick Street round 
about her ; but so it was. 

" You look so much better, my dear soul," Miss Vesey said 
to her one day. " Why not give up your rooms altogether, 
or leave them to that girl, Bridget, who seems nearly as clever 
as yourself, and stay here with me ? " 

VOL. XCII. 5 



66 THE STAR OF THE SEA [Oct., 

" They're all I have of people," Janie said humbly. " They're 
very good poor people, though a lady like you mightn't imagine 
it. Not a bit of harm in them, unless it might be a little drink 
and fighting. And the children are lovely." 

The children were lovely, not a doubt of it; they were 
even lovely when their faces weren't washed, which was a test 
in itself. 

Miss Vesey began to understand better when she was inter- 
cepted one day in the High Street by a towzled-looking matron 
who was standing by a basket of flowers. 

" Look here, my lady," she said, " you wouldn't be takin* 
away Jennie Walsh, the crather, from us ? You don't know 
what a comfort a little tidy old- maid body like her is in the 
likes of Warwick Street. She's terrible good to the childher. 
An' if it was only to have her bit of a room wid the altar in 
it to dhrop into an' be quiet whin the min are troublesome, 
or maybe you've been a bit troublesome yourself, 'tis a thing 
we couldn't do widout, your Ladyship." 

Miss Vesey mentioned it to Father Mullany, with whom she 
was on excellent terms, although, as the people put it, she went 
neither to Church nor Chapel. The priest looked at the deli- 
cate, ever so slightly faded, beauty of the woman, exquisitely 
clad, perfectly harmonious, with the tenderness which classed 
a woman with children in the mind of the priest. She did not 
belong to his flock, but she belonged he had no doubt to the 
soul of the Church ; and she belonged to the good women 
who, whether they know it or not, stand between the world 
and destruction, guarding the holiness of love, guiding the feet 
of children, cleaving to the ideal, loathing the material and 
the sensual. 

" That was Mary Anne Slattery," said the priest. " Mary 
Anne is quite right. We couldn't spare Janie from Warwick 
Street. You've no idea how much good she does. She has 
no idea herself." 

"She is an elect little soul," Miss Vesey sighed. 

" She is, indeed," assented the priest. 

" And you think I must leave her to Warwick Street ? " 

" It needs her more than you do, Miss Vesey." 

"I am not so sure," said Miss Vesey unexpectedly. 

" She will not leave Warwick Street unless it leaves her," 
said the priest. 

" You think there is a chance of that ? " 



i9io.] THE STAR OF THE SEA 67 

Father Mullany sighed. 

" It is a doom which has been hanging over us so long/' 
he said, "that we may well be forgiven for forgetting it. It 
may not come in our time. On the other hand, it might come 
any day of any month or year." 

" What would become of them ? " 

He shrugged his shoulders, with a reminiscence of his French 
seminary training. 

" Don't ask me ! That way madness lies. They would break 
up, be absorbed in worse places. I should lose them. Here 
they have held together since their fathers and mothers came 
from Ireland in the famine times. They have kept the virtues, 
despite the drink and other things. They have kept the reli- 
gion. They would go deeper." 

" And be lost ? " 

" God would keep count of them. But I hope Warwick 
Street will not be broken up in my time." 

After that conversation Miss Vesey gave up trying to per- 
suade Janie Walsh to leave her rooms in the slum and come 
to her. She went more to Warwick Street instead. One day, 
to her delighted surprise, Janie met Miss Vesey coming out of 
the Star of the Sea. They stopped to speak. Miss Vesey 
was on her way to Janie, who had become her almoner of late. 
There was a case she wanted her to inquire into, with the dis- 
cretion and delicacy which might be looked for from Janie. 

They turned about and went back together. In Janie's inner 
room where the altar was her assistants sat in the outer 
Miss Vesey dropped into a chair and sat with clasped hands 
looking at Janie's altar. 

" I like your Church, Janie," she said. 

Janie, with characteristic delicacy would have made no ref- 
erence to her meeting Miss Vesey in such a place. Now her 
little sickly face brightened wonderfully. A rush of color came 
to it. For the moment the little dressmaker was positively 
beautiful. 

" 'Tis a poor little place," she said, " but a deal of people 
do be sayin' their prayers in it. I don't know what Warwick 
Street would be without it. Tis so quiet, out of the noise of 
the street." 

" I like poverty of that kind," Miss Vesey said. " So clean 
and simple." In her own mind she made a reservation about 
certain gaily- colored pictures and statues which she did not 



68 THE STAR OF THE SEA [Oct., 

like; but she said to herself humbly that the children liked 
the gaiety, the children and their elders, the little ones of 
God. What did her preferences matter ? 

Janie looked up at her shyly. 

"A deal of people do be sayin' their prayers there," she 
repeated. 

Miss Vesey smiled. " I, too, said my prayer to the un- 
known God," she said, "and to the Mother. He is not so 
unknown if one approaches Him through the Mother." 

Janie ignored the first part of the sentence, at which she 
was vaguely shocked. The latter part she answered. 

"Aye, to be sure, Miss Margaret," she said. "Pray to her. 
She'll get you all you need. You never need be afraid to ask 
her." 

The most curious expression came into Miss Vesey's face, 
something shy and gentle; just a thought of laughter in it. 

"Wouldn't it be the worst of manners for a stranger to go 
asking things of her without having proved himself or herself ?" 

"She wouldn't mind that," said Janie confidently. "Just 
ask away, Miss Margaret. For the matter of that, you're not 
a stranger. She hears your name often in the prayers the 
people do be sayin'. There's some great old saints in Warwick 
Street, for all that they do be fightin' the boys I mean." 

Miss Vesey went on smiling gently. 

" I think I'd rather ask through you, Janie," she said. 
" Perhaps, by and by, I might get courage to ask for myself." 

"And what would you be askin' through me, Miss Margaret?" 

The lady's tired, beautiful eyes lit up. Many a time Janie 
had thought to herself that Miss Margaret had a look at times 
of Our Lady of Sorrows in the picture Father Mullany had 
brought from Rome and thought such a deal of. 

"It wouldn't be too much for her, Janie, I should think, 
if she were inclined to undertake it." Janie was a little afraid 
that Miss Vesey was not serious, after all, at least not quite 
serious. 

" She'd do it easy enough, Miss Margaret," she said per- 
suasively, " if you were to have the faith in her." 

" I'm not sure about the faith yet ; so you'd better ask 
for me." 

" And what will I say ? " Janie asked with that quaint 
folding of her hands together, which was so characteristic a 
gesture in her. 



19 io.] THE STAR OF THE SEA 69 

"Ask her to bring home the one I've lost some day, in 
her good time. Tell her I have patience to wait endlessly, if 
she sees that my lost one comes home at last. Ask her to 
look up through the glory, where I daren't look to pluck her 
Son's vesture by the hem." 

"You could say it a deal better yourself, Miss Margaret; 
but I'll say it, if you want me to. You can be givin' her the 
thanks yourself, by and by." 

"You think she'll hear me, Janie?" 

"If 'tis for your soul's good, Miss Margaret." 

A dreamy light came into Margaret Vesey's eyes. She 
clasped and unclasped her hands softly, while, her lips smiled. 

" Oh, indeed, Janie," she said, " if she was to be listening 
to me" unconsciously she copied Janie's manner of speech 
" I wouldn't know how to be thanking her all the days of my life." 

"'Twould be a trifle to her, Miss Margaret, if so be 'twas 
for the good of your soul." 

Janie set herself to pray ardently that Miss Margaret's 
lost one might return to her. There was nothing more said 
about it. Occasionally, when Janie ran into the church for a 
few minutes of rest and prayer, she would be aware of Miss 
Vesey sitting quietly in a dim corner. She was always sitting 
with her hands clasped in her lap, her face looking up towards 
the altar with its steadily-burning lamp, obviously not praying, 
for her lips never moved, and she never seemed to kneel. 
Others noticed her presence there besides Janie. Father Mul- 
lany had a new Sanctuary carpet given to him that autumn 
and a silver lamp, new possessions which delighted Warwick 
Street at least as much as they delighted him. "The donor 
prefers to remain unknown," he said, announcing the gift. Of 
course the people guessed that it was Miss Vesey; and many 
a " God bless her ! " followed her as she went to and fro. 

Janie was specially busy that autumn. There was an epi- 
demic of weddings in Warwick Street and there had to be 
modest finery for the brides; and a lady with a family of 
grown-up daughters had come to live on the Common and 
their ball-dresses required a deal of making and re-making 
before the winter. Janie saw less of Miss Vesey for a time; 
but there was no diminution of her prayers or her tenderness. 
Now when she did go to Miss Vesey's house Oakdene it was 
called with its large, beautiful rooms, amid its spreading 
gardens, she was conscious, as she had not been before, of an 



70 THE STAR OF THE SEA [Oct., 

aching loneliness in the rooms and the gardens. Where were 
they, the children who should run and leap in the gardens, 
who should sit about the board, whose faces should light the 
great rooms, whose voices should have called Margaret Vesey 
mother? The house was meant for happy family life not for 
one delicate woman, whose few requirements were nominally 
waited upon by a troop of servants, really the house's servants 
and not hers. She seemed all at once to have been admitted 
into a secret. The one whom Miss Vesey had lost was a 
lover, the one who should have been her husband. With the 
discovery Janie prayed more urgently than she had done 
before that, if it was for the good of Miss Margaret's soul that 
her lover should be restored to her, our Lady might see to it. 
She reminded her of a hundred benefactions. More and more 
Warwick Street had cause to bless Miss Vesey's name. Her 
purse was open whenever Father Mullany would dip into it 
for his church or his people. All manner of ready aid was 
given just at the moment when it was needed. Having this 
friend, winter in Warwick Street, with its recurring disem- 
ployment, lost half its power to frighten. 

Somewhere about mid-November two things happened simul- 
taneously. The doom long-dreaded fell upon Warwick Street. 
The whole settlement had notice to quit. Warwick Street was 
going to be leveled to the ground, to be replaced by a build- 
ing of flats. 

That was the first thing; and Warwick Street was as much 
disturbed and grief-stricken as though it were about to be 
evicted from Paradise. 

Janie saw the darkness on the men's faces and the tears in 
the women's eyes as she went down the street on her way to 
Miss Vesey, who had sent her a summons over-night. She 
heard their threats and their denunciations. Father Mullany 
was coming down the street silently on his way to a sick-call. 
The people fell back before him as before the face of a king. 
He looked neither to right nor left, but walked circumspectly, 
as one bearing a precious burden. Janie, standing back to let 
him pass, caught a glimpse of his face and saw that he had 
heard the news. Behind the composure it was heavy and 
anxious. 

What was to become of them ? she asked herself, as she 
left the street behind and walked on by the shops to the dis- 
tant trees which marked the foot of the Common. Sheep 



19 io.] THE STAR OF THE SEA 71 

without a shepherd, what was to become of them ? On the 
whole, they had been kept wonderfully well, almost as well as 
an Irish village, despite the poverty and the squalor, the occa- 
sional drunkenness and quarreling. Now, it was not likely 
they could be removed en bloc. They would break up, disin- 
tegrate, be absorbed into the greater misery without, in which 
God was forgotten. Her heart was heavy as she walked 
towards the group of trees, now showing gold and scarlet under 
a blue sky. It was a beautiful morning of frost. There was 
a white network on the dead leaves that had drifted down the 
street towards her. The frost would bring down the leaves. 
Meanwhile they were in a splendor of color. 

Next year the respectable flats would have arisen on the 
site of Warwick Street and the neighborhood would be cleansed 
of a stain or so the neighborhood would consider it. Janie 
wondered drearily what was to become of the little church. 
With Warwick Street razed to the ground the church would 
have lost its congregation. Would it be closed ? Sold for 
some other purpose than a church the little church conse- 
crated by so many Masses, so many Communions, so many 
prayers ? 

Her eyes were dim as she took the way up the Common 
towards Oakdene, where the other piece ot news awaited her. 
She was looking downward and did not notice Miss Vesey 
coming to meet her, a tall gentleman walking by her side. 
They were close upon her when Janie looked up, startled. 
What had eome to Miss Margaret ? The shadows and the 
sadnesses seemed to have rolled away from her face. She was 
young, radiant, smiling. 

Janie looked from her to the gentleman. He, too, was 
smiling and looked very happy. He seemed as though he 
had been recently ill, for he walked with a stick and his 
features were thin and sharpened. 

" Your prayers have been heard, Janie," Miss Vesey said f 
and smiled radiantly at the gentleman. " My friend has come 
back to me by such strange ways, Janie. It is the most 
wonderful story in the world." 

"It wouldn't be any trouble to the Virgin," said Janie, 
looking from one to the other. " 'Tis more glad I am than I 
can be sayin', Miss Margaret"; and then, most unexpectedly, 
a tear rolled down her cheek. 

" Don't mind me cryin', Miss Margaret," she said, trying to 



72 THE STAR OF THE SEA [Oct., 

wipe it away ; but while she succeeded there came another 
and another. 

Miss Vesey caught at her hand. 

" Go away and smoke, Lance/' she said, with the air of 
pretty imperiousness which was a new thing in her. "Only 
be sure and keep in the sun. And don't go out of call." 

He went, looking back at her, as though he found it hard 
to go, even for a little while. 

"What is it, Janie?" she asked kindly. 

" 'Tis that joy and sorrow comes together ; and, sure, 
while I'm rejoiced for you, Miss, my heart's broken for the 
poor people. They've got to go out of it. The place is comin* 
down about their ears. Sure, what's to become o' them at all, 
at all ? " 

" Ah, well " Miss Vesey spoke with an unexpected cal- 
lousness "it is time for Warwick Street to go. It was no 
place for people to be living in an old rat hole, saturated 
with disease." 

" 'Twas all the poor people had," Janie said, her tears sud- 
denly ceasing to flow. " What's to become o' them ? No one 
about here wants them. The Common has wanted to be rid 
o' them this many a day. I saw Father Mullany this morning 
and the grief was in his face. God knows what'll be happen- 
in* to them, the poor, unfortunate people." 

" I'm surprised at you, Janie," said Miss Vesey quietly. 
" Can't you trust God to take care of His own ? " 

She was smiling when Janie looked up at her, and Janie 
lost the sense that she was unsympathetic, for her eyes were wet. 

" Come with me, Janie," she said. " I have something to 
show you. Do you know that it was through my picture of 
you that Mr. Strong came back to me ? He is home from 
India for good. He has suffered so much, poor fellow, since 
we lost each other. I have a deal to make up to him for. 
Oh, Janie, I am the happiest woman in the world." 

She went upstairs before Janie, smiling back at her over 
her shoulder, a radiant creature. Her floating scarf blew back 
airily in the little dressmaker's face. There was a faint, subtle 
odor of violets. 

" The Mother did not turn away, Janie," she said, with the 
strangely radiant smile. " I remember in the French churches 
that they hang what they call reconnaissances at the shrines 
where they were cured. That means thanksgiving, my dear soul. 



1 9io.] THE STAR OF THE SEA 73 

I am going to show you my reconnaissance to the Star of the 
Sea. I wish I could move the little church bodily. But it 
will not be too far. It can stand where it is dear, beneficent 
Star of the Sea." 

It was all something of a puzzle to Janie. She did not 
quite understand what it was about, beyond that Miss Margaret 
was happy and grateful, and that was something saved, de- 
spite the thickness of the cloud that lay over Warwick Street. 

With a quick movement of her hand Miss Vesey drew up 
a blind. The view was down the Common and over a range 
of low houses at the foot to where building operations were in 
progress on what had been orchards last year. Houses were 
dotted here and there in various stages of being built. The 
one noticeable thing was that they were not huddled together 
in ghastly rows as most of the houses built on the old gardens 
and orchards had been. Each apparently was going to have 
its surrounding plot; and as far as possible the trees had been 
spared. 

" Do you see anything ? " 

" I see the houses in the old orchards, Miss Margaret." 

" Can't you guess ?' " 

Janie shook her head. 

" Why, it's the new Warwick Street, you uncomprehending 
person. It will be ready by the time the old Warwick Street 
needs to be vacated. Not a charity, Janie, but a business 
venture. The people will pay me rent instead of the slum 
landlords, those iniquitous persons who take rent for such rat- 
holes. The Orchard houses will be well-built; they will be 
well-ventilated ; well-drained. Oh, they're not " faddy," Janie 
I had a very practical architect. Don't you think the Orchards 
will give Warwick Street a chance to be clean and sober and 
self-respecting? And the babies. I see the babies under those 
trees. Oh, I don't expect them to become irreproachable all 
at once. But it will give them a chance. And they will be 
all together. Father Mullany need not lose them. I had 
planned it even before your prayers were answered, before I 
knew they were going to be answered in my way. Oh, you 
dear soul, what you have done for me ! " 

Margaret Vesey was married to her old lover in the Star 

of the Sea Church a few weeks later, all Warwick Street assist- 

ng. By that time some of the houses in the Orchards were 



74 THE STAR OF THE SEA [Oct. 

roofed; and Warwick Street was already stirred with the 
happy trouble of impending flight. Perhaps Janie Walsh's ex- 
ample had been moving in them all these years; for there 
was a great routing out and destruction of old, bad rubbish and 
bad ways, preparatory to moving into the new, clean houses. 
Warwick Street was going to have a chance to be forgotten in 
the Orchards. There was a deal of making of good resolu- 
tions going on in Warwick Street. The " Irish slum " was 
stirred to the depths with hope and joy. 

It was a very happy woman who kissed Janie Walsh in the 
church- porch before she stepped into the carriage with her 
bridegroom amid the shouts of the crowd a woman for whom 
life had been made over again. She and her husband were 
going for a honeymoon tour in Italy before coming back to 
see the fruition of a good dream in the Orchards. Standing 
in the church-porch, Father Mullany waved them a farewell. 
Outer London held no happier man than Father Mullany. 
There were to be greater doings, when the bride and bride- 
groom came back, for the church and for the people. There 
had been such a pledge-taking as never was among " the 
boys" in preparation for the wedding. 

As the carriage rolled away Margaret Strong sank back 
with a happy face. 

" Dear creatures ! " she said. " They think there will never 
be backsliding any more. But you need not laugh at me, 
Lance I am prepared for backsliding. I will not be hard 
with them. I shall leave them to the padre when they relapse 
into the ways of Warwick Street. But what a gain for them, 
Lance! Think of Warwick Street and then of the Orchards." 

Mr. Strong forbore to tease her with prophecy. 

" They won't be perfect," he said. " But you have kept 
them together with their shepherd. That is a great gain. 
And most of them will profit by the Orchards instead of 
Warwick Street the children certainly. I am so amazingly, 
incredibly happy myself that I am very glad, my dearest, to 
feel that you have made so many other people happy. Your 
little friend, the dressmaker, will be well out of it." 

" It is all her doing," his bride responded. " Without Janie 
Walsh I should have remained hopeless prayerless. We should 
never have met you and I we should never have been led 
home by the Star of the Sea." 




CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERICA. 

BY HENRY E. O'KEEFFE, C.S.P. 

[HERE are some things in Mr. J. G. Snead-Cox's 
Life of Cardinal Vaughan * which are of interest 
to Americans. Indeed, the English Cardinal 
had a more than superficial appreciation of our 
country. It was the present writer's happy 
privilege to have met and talked with him several years ago. 
Undoubtedy, kindness of heart provoked him to be more than 
gracious with a young priest from the United States, but it 
was very evident that he wanted to ask questions concerning 
the problems which confront the Church here. He was curi- 
ous to learn all about what is now known as " the non- 
Catholic movement." He thought the historical antecedents 
and traditional bigotry of religious life in England would make 
the movement more difficult there than here. Was he right ? 
Who can tell whether American indifferentism is more sus- 
ceptible to religious direction, than downright, sincere pre- 
judice ? 

He visited America in 1863 and again in 1870, He himself 
brought to Baltimore the first four missionaries for the Ameri- 
can negroes. These young priests were the first fruits of his 
foundation of St. Joseph's College, Mill Hill. They vowed 
themselves forever to the service of the negro race. We are 
told in the biography that they met with a very friendly re- 
ception in Maryland, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore 
at once placed at their disposal a house and some sixty acres 
of land. The departure from England of these first American 
missionaries to the negroes, was marked by a special cere, 
mony of farewell and by a sermon by Archbishop Manning. 

Mr. Wilfrid Ward says, that although the epithet "great," 
often used of Newman, of Manning, of Wiseman, was denied 
Cardinal Vaughan, it cannot be now, after we have read his 
biography. 

* The Life of Cardinal Vaughan. By J. G. Snead-Cox. Two vols. London, W. : Her- 
bert & Daniel ; St. Louis, Mo. : B. Herder. 



76 CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERICA [Oct., 

In like manner, we in America will be prompted to decry 
any charge of his narrowness of mind and spirit, when we 
recognize that he, alone and an Englishman, could look upon one 
of our most acute problems with such hopeful eyes: we mean, 
the Church and the negro problem. " For," says his biographer, 
" already he saw visions as to the future extension of his work. 
To anticipate that it would overrun the South and in time 
minister to the needs of the negroes in all the old Slave States, 
was to look forward only to what might be regarded as a 
natural development. Father Vaughan's hopes went further. 
Might not America prove to be the half-way house to Africa, 
and negroes from the plantations in the Carolinas or Alabama 
prove to be the most effective missionaries for the conversion 
of the Dark Continent itself ? " 

The first task, however, was to study the negro problem on 
the spot as it presented itself in America. For this purpose 
Herbert Vaughan made a tour through the Southern States of 
the Union, everywhere eagerly asking for information, cross- 
examining his witnesses, and carefully noting down his con- 
clusions. What he saw filled him with pity and compassion. 
For ignorance and spiritual desolation he was prepared, but it 
came as a shock to find how little was being done for the 
negro and how far he seemed left outside the area of philan- 
thropic and religious effort. He had heard all this, had been 
warned of it before he left England, and by none more em- 
phatically than by representatives of the Catholic Church in 
the United States. So conscious were the American bishops at 
that time of their inability to deal with the great problem at 
their doors, that at the Plenary Council ot Baltimore, in 1866, 
a special appeal was made to Europe to come to the rescue 
and to send out priests ready to devote themselves entirely to 
the colored population. And " in answer to that prayer Herbert 
Vaughan had come." 

It may be wise to say, before we proceed much further, 
that this unhappy condition of the negro, which existed in 
1872, has been somewhat bettered, but we cannot honestly 
believe that the problem has, by any means, been solved. 
Only recently has the movement been instituted in a systema- 
tized, practical manner, by an experienced priest, who directs 
the work, as it were, from a central bureau in New York, but 
with the official sanction of all the American bishops. For 



i9io.] CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERICA 77 

this we must be grateful, but it is to be remembered that the 
work has only now begun on an organized basis, and many of 
the circumstances entered in the diary of Cardinal Vaughan in 
1872 have their counterpart in this year of 1910. 

No harm can be done now, and no sensibilities 'violated, if 
we quote a few entries, taken from the commonplace book he 
kept at the time: 

A common complaint that white and black children are not 
allowed to make their First Communion on the same day. 

A colored soldier refused Communion by a priest at the 
Cathedral. Delassize's inclination to shoot the priest. 

In a church just built here, benches let to colored people 
which are quite low down. 

A lady colored built nearly half the church, another gave 
the altar ; both refused places except at the end of the 
church. 

A Fancy Fair colored people allowed to work for it but not 
admitted to it. 

I visited the hospital where there were a number of negroes. 
Talked to many in it and in the street. All said they had no 
religion. Never baptized. All said either they would like to 
be Catholics or something to show they were not opposed to 
it. Neither the priest with me nor the Sisters in the hospital 
do anything to instruct them. They just smile at them as 
though they had no souls. A horrible state of feeling ! How 
is it possible so to treat God's image ? 

St. I/ouis, January 25, 1872 The Archbishop thought all 
my plans would fail ; could suggest nothing for the negroes, 
and refused permission to collect, and declined to give a letter 
of approval. 

A few lines further down in the diary he adds: 

Father Callaghan, S.J., who has for seven years worked for 
the negroes, disagrees with the Archbishop on this question. 
Speaks of the virtue and simplicity of the negro. 

In Memphis he notes: 

Negroes regarded even by priests as so many dogs. 

One old man, who on being shown a crucifix and told it 
represented the death of Jesus Christ, looked at it steadily, 
and then said slowly : * ' How wicked of those Yankees to treat 
that poor Southern General like that.*' 



78 CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERICA [Oct., 

It is to be noticed that Father Vaughan, as he prolongs 
his stay, grows more and more satisfied of the practical wis- 
dom of separating the two races even in church. In Charleston 
he writes: 

Father Folchi, the priest of the colored people. There 
may be two thousand nominally Catholic negroes in Charles- 
ton ; about three hundred attend his little church. But he 
has admitted the whites, and this, the Bishop says, has ruined 
his chance of success with the blacks. He has a school in 
which there are about fifty children. Father Folchi very 
anxious ior us to come and help him so also the Bishop. 

Father Mandini, of St. Stephen's Church, has got up a little 
chapel for colored people, which they highly appreciate. He 
sa} T s they like to have a place of their own without its being 
determined that no white shall enter. This is the common 
opinion of intelligent people and I think true. 

Father Vaughan visited Mobile, Savannah, Vicksburgh, 
Natchez, Memphis, Charleston, St. Louis, and New Orleans. 
He then came North to New York, and went from there 
through the Eastern States, lecturing and preaching on the 
subject which had now taken captive his heart and soul. A 
curious picture indeed of some thirty years ago a young 
priest from England struggling to teach the Catholics of 
America their responsibilities toward a race which was, and is 
now, in absolute ignorance of even the elements of Christian- 
ity. His enthusiasm may have led him to overlook the real 
difficulties of the problem and to exaggerate the intelligence and 
natural virtues of the negro, but one cannot but love and ad. 
mire him for it. This aggressive zeal, coming, too, from a 
stranger, may explain why he received a somewhat mixed re- 
ception from the local clergy. We can imagine that he must 
have lost patience with those who worked unceasingly among 
the whites, but regarded the blacks as hopeless, or at least 
outside of their field of labor. It was characteristic of the 
man that he should seek an interview from the ex-President 
of the Confederate States. His opinions are given in the diary 
thus: 

Called on Jefferson Davis. He said the negro, like a vine, 
could not stand alone. No gratitude, but love of persons 
no patriotism, but love of place instead. He says that men 



i9io.] CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERICA 79 

are warring against God in freeing the negro ; that he is made 
to be dependent and servile ; that in Africa wherever a 
community does well an Arab is to be found at the head of it. 
I urged that this was a reason in favor of our mission, that no 
one but the Catholic Church could supply the guidance and 
support the negroes need. Mr. Davis quite agreed with this. 
4 'The field is not promising, " he said, "but you have the 
best chance. The Methodists and Baptists do much mischief 
among them ; their religion is purely emotional." 

Certainly, this opinion of Jefferson Davis, in reference to 
the emotional appeals of the Methodists to the negroes, is 
very interesting, but Father Vaughan's comment concerning it 
is more interesting and touched with practical suggestion. In 
one place in the diary he exclaims: "Why cannot we have 
catechists or brothers like the Methodist preachers?" Then 
in several places we find him suggesting the necessity of what 
we call " popular devotions/' which he regards as essential for 
success among the negroes. 

Finally we are constrained to say that this man, a stranger 
in our country, studied the nature of the Negro Problem by 
personal investigation. Although of a buoyant temper, he was 
not highly emotional, but a bluff, hard-headed, practical Eng- 
lishman, therefore his golden hopes are, at least, worthy of 
attention. They are summed up in the following eloquent 
passage, describing his prophetic vision of the American ne- 
groes proving to be the willing means of evangelizing Africa 
itself: 

We have come to gather an army on our way, to conquer it 
for the Cross. God has His designs upon that vast land. It 
may be a thousand years behind our civilization of to-day, 
but what were our forefathers a little more than a thousand 
years back compared to our present condition ? They were 
sunk in an apparently hopeless barbarism. But God sent 
missioners to them from a Christian nation, and they brought 
them into the light. Nation is dependent on nation, and we 
have to carry on the light. In less than a thousand years 
Africa may be as civilized as Europe or America. The mis- 
sion of the English-speaking races is to the unconverted, espe- 
cially to the uncivilized, nations of the world. God calls upon 
you for co-operation : His plans are prepared from afar. The 
branch torn away from the parent stem in Africa by our ances- 
tors was carried to America, carried away by divine permis- 



So CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERICA [Oct., 

sion, in order that it might be engrafted upon the Tree of the 
Cross. It will return, in part, to its own soil, not by violence 
or deportation, but willingly and borne upon the wings of 
Faith and Charity. 

It was now time to think of returning to England. In New 
York City he collected but four thousand dollars, yet he had 
many promises and doubtless some of them were duly fulfilled. 
All the money realized went to the founding of the Missionary 
College, Mill Hill, which was to educate missionaries to the 
negroes, not only in America, but in the Philippines, in Uganda, 
in Madras, in New Zealand, in Borneo, in Labuan, in the 
basin of the Congo, in Kashmir, and in Kafiristan. No records 
exist to tell the amount of money he gathered on his tour in 
the United States. At best it seems to have been a compar- 
atively paltry sum, when the proportions of the undertaking 
are considered. His biographer thinks it to be about ^11,000 
in cash. Money may have had a larger value in those days, 
and it may have gone further, as we would say, in his own 
country, but we cannot help believing that, in this day, we 
would be more generous. 

Yet, he must have been profoundly grateful, since, after all 
the years, he could take the trouble to speak to so insignifi- 
cant a one as myself of " the generosity of Americans." He 
had a very distinct recollection (as did his secretary, the late 
Bishop Johnson) of the charm and influence of Father Hecker. 
He remembered the gracious hospitality and good fellowship of 
the older Paulists with whom he lived when in New York. 
He never forgot the Californians, and those of them who saw 
his handsome face or spoke with him never forgot him. I 
have in mind a woman of California, who, though very old, as 
the world goes, seems never to have lost the light and love 
and memory of youth. It was she who told me of Father 
Vaughan, whom she met in San Francisco in 1864. She was 
quite sure that all the money he took from California was not 
ordinary coin, but in new and glittering gold. Like Lady 
Butler and Mrs. Wilfrid Meynell, she observed the more-than- 
natural beauty of his countenance. Such are not to be blamed, 
when so acute a judge as Aubrey de Vere could exclaim, on be- 
holding him : " Good Heavens ! if you are like that, what 
must your sister be ? " 



1910.] CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERICA 81 

In chapter six of Mr. Snead- Cox's work we are told that 
Father Vaughan sailed from Southampton for California on the 
1 7th of December, 1863. Passage was difficult across the 
American Continent, so he went by way of Panama. In 
Panama he had to wait a week for a steamer, which was to take 
him along the Pacific coast to San Francisco accordingly he 
"left for California January 14, on the steamer St. Louis" 
The voyage took several weeks. He immediately became the 
priest and friend of the steerage passengers, many of whom 
were Irish Catholics from the Eastern States, who were on 
their way to the goldfields, while others were avoiding the 
drafts then required for the Northern army in the Civil War. 
On the first Sunday morning he said Mass in the steerage, 
and in the afternoon he held service in the saloon under the 
protection of the Stars and Stripes. With the captain cf the 
vessel seated by his side, he " preached his first sermon under 
the shadow of the American Hag to an almost exclusively 
non-Catholic audience." 

In San Francisco, at the beginning of his begging tour, he 
met with some disappointment. Archbishop Allemany at first 
refused to allow him to collect, giving six reasons for this re- 
fusal, which had the full approval of the Council of the dio- 
cese. One concession, however, was made he was permitted 
to preach one sermon in aid of the Foreign Missions in the 
country parts of the diocese. He then " had recourse to 
prayer" so he writes. "The Presentation Nuns all March 
implored St. Joseph," he again writes in the diary. Finally, 
we learn that the Archbishop somewhat relaxed his prohibi- 
tion. Before it came, however, Father Vaughan wrote to Mrs. 
Ward a letter descriptive of the situation, which we will give 
in part: 

The Catholics are very numerous in California. They are 
the largest and most important community. In the public 
conveyances nuns go free of charge and priests sometimes at 
half-price. ... I thought, of course, the Archbishop of 
San Francisco would encourage my begging, bearing with 
me such a letter as I do from Rome, but, no he called a 
Council and it was decided that I should not be allowed to 
collect in San Francisco, nor indeed in the diocese at all from 
house to house. . . . 

Now I came to California simply to collect in San Francisco 
VOL. xcii, 6 



82 CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERICA [Oct., 



a town of 150,000 inhabitants, immensely rich and generous. 
Without difficulty I could collect .4,000 in San Francisco, 
if I were permitted to go round to s the Catholics, so the Jesuit 
Fathers tell me as well as others. . . . 

The convents excellent fervent communities at San 
Francisco and here at Marysville, are busy praying for the 
work. . . . 

I have come up here to Marysville, Bishop O'Connell's dio- 
cese. I have got about 100 only, but this was more than it 
was thought possible to collect here. 

But, on the whole, Father Vaughan's " stay in California 
was both successful and pleasant." There is in the diary a 
very ingenuous account of his prospecting for a gold mine with 
the hope of acquiring all the money he needed for his Mis- 
sionary College. Nothing ever came of it. It was now the 
month of May, and time for departure. Says the diary: 

I went into Mr. Donohoe's bank to sit down. I told him 
my case ; he had no sympathy for the work, and had given 
$250 to please his wife. Said he would lend me $400. * ' But 
I can't lend them to the Blessed Virgin," said I, smiling. 
I told him I had not come with the intention of begging from 
him he had : given generously already. Finally, I said : 
" What interest do you require? " " Never mind that," he 
answered. " When do you want the principal back?" 
" Never mind that, either," said he. 

Cardinal Vaughan's efficient biographer makes us believe 
that he was delighted with California and loved the people. 
He says: 

The only passage in all his writings, published or unpub- 
lished, in which, as far as I know, he ever speaks of natural 
scenery with anything like enthusiasm, occurs in the Journal 
kept at this time. It describes the Sacramento River as it 
rolls into the Bay of San Francisco, and declares that for 
sheer beauty there is nothing in Italy or anywhere in the Old 
World to touch it. All fc the rest of his days he was partial to 
everything American. And, to say the truth, there was 
something in his own nature which answered to the restless 
energy, the spirit of high adventure, and the willingness to 
risk everything for a good cause, which he noted then, and in 



i9io.] CARDINAL VAUGHAN IN AMERICA 83 

later visits, in the people of the United States. I find this 
passage in the diary at the time when the depredations of the 
Alabama were making bad blood between England and the 
United States : " The American is prodigal of money, health, 
home, lands, and all. So he will sacrifice all this for the 
success of an undertaking. If that be war with England, he 
will go to every imaginable length of exertion.*' 

With this, for want of space, we must conclude, and per- 
haps it were well to do so with a happy, though somewhat 
flattering, entry in the Cardinal's diary. We cannot refrain, 
likewise, from quoting from what his biographer calls " one of 
the last entries in his diary before sailing" for England; it 
runs as follows: 

Bishop Gibbons, who has just come from Baltimore, says 
our men are highly esteemed by the Vicar- General and the 
clergy. They are intent on their own business, and under- 
stand it and are very popular for their ' * simplicity and hard 
work." 

This final tribute to the American Cardinal and to the 
American Josephites, is but a reflection of how he felt toward 
us all when leaving our country. 




THE MONTREAL EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS. 

BY JOHN J. BURKE, C.S.P, 

IT is a most significant fact that in this age of doc- 
trinal disruption and sceptical denial devotion to 
the Holy Eucharist is becoming more widespread 
among Catholics. 

Outside the Church the honest thinker will 
see little else than the chaos of difference; the unlimited ques- 
tioning of the fundamentals of all truth and all morality ; a 
world that has almost frankly committed itself to the self-con- 
tradictory thesis that no such thing as positive, absolute, un- 
changing truth exists. And parallel with this he will see 
increased faith in, increased practical devotion to, that hardest 
saying of dogmatic Christianity, the Real Presence, in Body 
and Blood, in Soul and Divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ in 
the Sacrament of the altar. Is it with such " foolishness/' with 
such a "stumbling block," that the apologists for Catholicism 
will answer the deniers and the doubters of the non- Catholic 
and the non- Christian world ? Or may it not be truly said 
that the Christian revelation and the Christian life have a worth 
and beauty supremely and absolutely their own such a sur- 
passing beauty, indeed, that the very vision of it carries the 
guarantees of its own truthfulness and leads captive the human 
reason and the human will ? Those few who have been per- 
mitted to know in mystical union the beauties of Divine Truth, 
the surpassing goodness and power and love of the Incarnate 
Christ, have been lifted out of themselves and could but inade- 
quately express in words what they had experienced in those 
hours divinely favored. God's power is not limited ; nor His 
mercy restricted. To every one who believes in His revealed 
teachings, and who loves Him through the knowledge thus 
received, have come moments, perhaps very short, perhaps 
graciously longer, when the truth, the surpassing worth, and 
the consuming love of these things seized upon his soul and 
bore it high above the things of this world. According to his 
own limited vision, raised to a supernatural power by the grace 



i9io.] THE MONTREAL EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS 85 

of God, such a one realized not only that Catholic faith and 
Catholic life have a unique and transcendant value for himself, 
but he realized also that Catholic faith and love are the seeds 
from which spring a life divine, seeds that have within them- 
selves the potency of heavenly fruition, that can produce a 
power which transforms the passing things of the world, clothes 
man's temporal and spiritual hopes with the vesture of im- 
mortality, and, in a very true way, in the only true way, renews 
the face of the earth. 

The deposit of Christian revelation under the guidance of 
her, the Catholic Church, to whom alone it was entrusted, 
has, therefore, unfolded itself according to the will of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, Who first gave it to her. It is in the final sense 
absolutely independent of human philosophy and of human 
science. It was unheard-of by men before its first announce- 
ment by the Apostles and was branded at once by the world 
as foolishness. Yet its weakness has confounded the strong. 
This has been characteristic of it, that when antagonistic human 
powers, whether physical or intellectual, waxed so strong as 
seemingly to triumph, it has conquered and prevailed, in spite 
of all probabilities to the contrary. The explanation of this 
paradox is the truth to which history, universal and personal, 
bears witness that Christianity is not only most reasonable, 
but is the only reasonable philosophy as well as religion that 
the world knows. It not alone satisfies, it not alone fills the 
mind and the heart of man, but it fills them "to all the full- 
ness of God/' for it grants desires and the fulfillment of desires 
of which the soul never dreamt nor had the power to dream. 
Once really known it can never be dented. Once possessed it 
will never be forfeited save by sin and shame. The glory of 
its life is the glory of sonship with God, a glory begun, and 
in a real measure consummated, here upon earth by the Real 
Presence of Christ, the Incarnate God, in the Sacrament of the 
altar, and by the reception in Holy Communion of that same 
Lord Jesus in Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, into our 
own bodies and our own souls. We are taken up and we are 
made one with Him, and He is in us and we in Him. In union 
with Him do we find our heaven. With Him comes a strength 
that we have not and cannot have of ourselves. "With Me 
you can do all things, without Me you can do nothing." 

Christ in the Blessed Sacrament of the altar is not only 



86 THE MONTREAL EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS [Oct., 

the centre of worship ; He is also the source of life. The life 
of a Christian is sacramental and supernatural or it is no Chris- 
tian life at all. Every faithful believer shares in that life, and 
directs his energies by its powers. And when we can witness the 
gathering of thousands who have partaken of that life, witness 
'their works and their labors, presented in an orderly and an 
organized way, we behold a sight upon which our human eyes 
may well rest with amazement, and by which our human hearts 
may be stirred with an inspiration and an enthusiasm of which 
this world knows nothing. 

Such a sight was presented in Montreal during the past 
month, at least to all those who went there to see with the 
eyes of faith and to hear with ears that could recognize the 
music of heaven. Even from a merely human point of view 
the Twenty-first Eucharistic Congress, held at Montreal, Canada, 
from September 5 to n, 1910, was a wonderful manifestation 
of popular enthusiasm. From the day that his Eminence Vin- 
cent Cardinal Vannutelli sailed up the St. Lawrence, hailed by 
the shouts and cheers of the thousands who lined its banks, to 
the Sunday afternoon when sixty thousand men walked for 
miles through the city streets, preceding the Cardinal Legate 
who carried the Sacred Host, the city of Mary resounded with 
one chorus of praise and adoration to the Blessed Sacrament 
and to the work which the Sacramental Christ was achieving in 
the hearts of men. 

Apart from all the external display, the grandeur of ritual 
and of ceremony, the vast crowds of people, the crowded churches 
and halls, the houses illuminated and decorated, the triumphal 
arches, the large number of priests and dignitaries, yea, apart 
from the presence of the representative of the Vicar of Christ 
upon earth, apart from all these, it must be remembered that 
the inspiration of it all was belief in and love for the Blessed 
Sacrament. 

It is comparatively easy to arouse enthusiasm and to gather 
together multitudes for the celebration of a country's prosperity 
or a country's triumph, when the object appeals directly to 
the sense and the material advantages of human kind ; but 
to behold multitudes traveling long distances, with great in- 
convenience and at much expense, for a purely spiritual ideal, 
for an object that deals not so much with this life as with the 
life beyond, is surely sufficient to give the most confirmed 



19 io.J THE MONTREAL EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS 87 

pessimist a reason to be cheerful and to look with happier 
face upon the day in which we live. 

The Congress was distinctly Canadian, and to the Canadians, 
particularly to the citizens of Montreal, must go the credit of 
its success. But from outside of Montreal thousands of pil- 
grims journeyed to it. From across the waters, from England, 
from the nations of the continent, from far New Zealand, and 
particularly from our own United States, came many eager to 
bear a proud share in proclaiming their faith in, and their 
devotion to, the Eucharistic Christ. 

Foremost in the whole Congress as its supreme head was, 
of course, the Papal Legate, Cardinal Vannutelli. His presence 
brought the Holy Father himself among us and made complete 
the visible unity of our Catholic faith. The imposing figure 
of the Legate lent grace to every assemblage; and to his 
ability and his tact much credit is due. Many former Eu- 
charistic Congresses are indebted to his untiring devotion and 
his spirit of sacrifice. He has well merited the title with which 
he was hailed in Notre Dame Church, "The Cardinal of the 
Eucharistic Congresses." The words of such a worthy and 
experienced representative are surely reliable testimony ; and 
when we know that his Eminence declared this Montreal 
Congress to be the greatest Eucharistic Congress ever held, 
we may arrive at some idea of its magnitude and its enthu- 
siasms. As the thirty thousand little children, coming cham- 
pions of Catholic faith and life, dressed in spotless white, 
symbolic of the purity of their hearts and souls, filed past his 
Eminence, tears flooded his eyes and he could not speak. 
Again and again as the thousands upon thousands hailed him 
in hall and in open-air meeting astonishment and gratitude 
held him spellbound. America gave more than convincing 
proof of her devotion to the Holy See. 

To his Grace Archbishop Paul Bruchesi, of Montreal, must 
our brief but sincerest word of praise be written here. Through 
him Montreal secured the Congress; without his enthusiastic 
co-operation and untiring devotion it would not have been the 
success that it was. The Catholics of Montreal, the Catholics 
of Canada, yea, all of us who shared in the blessings of the 
Congress, are grateful to him. The Congress was further 
favored by the presence of our own American Cardinal, and 
of Cardinal Logue, Primate of Ireland, known and loved by 



88 THE MONTREAL EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS [Oct., 

us all. This is not the place to enumerate the distinguished 
Archbishops, Bishops, and dignitaries of the Church who at- 
tended and gave their aid to its success. 

We wish particularly to show forth here the manifestation 
given at this Congress of that Catholic life of which the Holy 
Eucharist is the source and the sustaining power. It was love 
for the Eucharist that gathered these unnumbered thousands 
together; that brought among us the representative of our 
Supreme Pontiff; showed forth the Church in her hierarchy 
and her priesthood, in her religious and her laity ; demon- 
strated, in a way which words are incapable of expressing, 
her world- wide universality and the variety of her subjects; 
made known her democracy ; and yet with all this, and because 
of all this, gave to the world a most convincing picture of her 
unity and her Harmony. 

Her unity and her harmony were placed on high before 
the eyes of men in visible form by the presence of the hier- 
archy, headed by the Papal Legate, by the priesthood, and 
by the people. The invisible reason and the foundation of 
both seemed to be made almost visible to the eyes of men by 
the over-reigning presence of the Eucharistic Christ which the 
heart of the participant could not but feel. The wonderful 
fruitfulness of that life, flowing from the heart of the Sacra- 
mental Christ into the hearts of the faithful and energizing 
their every power, forcing their activities into countless chan- 
nels of human endeavor and labor and sacrifice, was admirably 
set forth. 

As Christ upon the altar is visible to us only under the 
appearance of bread, as His humanity and divinity are invis- 
ible to us, so also the Christ-life that each of us strives to 
lead is invisible to our fellows. The holy chamber wherein 
we seek to dwell with Him is never open for the eyes of others. 
Of our aspirations, and of our graces, of our longings and of 
our hopes, of our motives, our desires, our real life, we never 
speak to our fellows. Of these things we " have not spoken 
save to one man and unto God." To our fellows they are 
unseen. We are known to others only by our external actions, 
only by the appearances of things. Only those who really 
know how to interpret the external can interpret and under- 
stand us. 

So with these vast multitudes of the faithful at such a 



igro.] THE MONTREAL EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS 89 

gathering as this Eucharistic Congress. We know they have 
been fed upon miraculous Bread. Through that Bread of Life 
they have their own life with God. Of the lowest and the 
simplest among them it may be said that heart and mind and 
will have been raised to a worth, a life divine, of which those 
learned only in the things of this world know nothing. That 
life is interpreted to us, its devotion and its zeal, by external 
works, by visible labors. If one were, without prejudice of any 
kind, in utter honesty, to look upon this Congress, on the num- 
ber, character, and life-work of the thousands who attended it, 
and on the labors which it officially promoted, organized, and 
presented, he would have to bear witness to a Power greater 
than anything in this world. If he viewed it simply as a 
lover of humanity, desirous of human peace and good-will, he 
could find nothing better calculated to promote these desires of 
his heart. Even from a merely human standpoint, good- will, af- 
fectionate greeting, happy salutation prevailed and showed the 
bond of affection that unites Catholics the world over. But to 
see the reign complete of such things, this onlooker should have 
witnessed the three hundred and fifty thousand at the foot 
of Mount Royal with bowed heads and in silence, all made one 
by Catholic faith, as the Sacred Host was raised aloft. Per- 
haps he would not think it an altogether foolish dream if he 
was told that there were some who hoped and prayed for the 
union of all nations and all hearts under the banner of that 
Salutaris Hostia. 

If he viewed this Congress as one anxious for the reunion 
of Christendom, surely here he would have seen unity made 
visible, and unity manifesting its essential truth. If he gazed 
as one anxious to promote the welfare of his fellows, could he 
ask for a greater ideal than that exalted here in the exalta- 
tion of the Christ of the Eucharist an ideal so great, so pure, 
so unearthly, that many have stamped it as impossible; an ideal 
that requires the strength not fof men but of God, or " with- 
out Me," said this same Christ, " you can do nothing." " I 
will live in you and you in Me." If he came as one eager 
to advance the social condition of the race; to lift the burden 
of poverty from the poor, the weight of injustice under which 
the working man and the working woman oftentimes labor, he 
would, indeed, if he looked intently enough, behold a sight that 
would cause his eyes to open wide and his lips to exclaim : 



90 THE MONTREAL EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS [Oct., 

" I never knew of these things ; least of all did I ever think or 
imagine they were discussed at a Eucharistic Congress." 

Such an observer would see here thousands of clerics who 
have sacrificed themselves for the welfare of humanity ; thou- 
sands of religious men who care for the young and study to 
make them worthy members of society ; thousands of religious 
women who know no other service than the service of their 
fellow- creatures; thousands of the faithful who yearly contrib- 
ute millions of dollars for charitable work among the needy 
and the poor. In truth, he would see here, begotten of and 
inspired by the love of Jesus Christ, the greatest power in all 
the world devoted to the welfare of humanity ; the only power, 
because it is the power of love and self-abandonment, that 
will effectively, in the last analysis, do the work which the 
world needs to have done. As the Cardinal Legate said in 
the great meeting at Notre Dame : " In the face of economi- 
cal problems which demand solution to-day at the hands of 
the governing bodies of this country, this Church offers you a 
security of principle and a guarantee of social peace for which 
we should not be slow in rendering thanks to Divine Provi- 
dence." Critics may take exception and justly at times, for 
we may learn from our critics to the administration, the prac- 
tical methods, the unscientific ways of much of this great 
power and this charitable work. These things, after all, are 
important, but let us not forget that they are secondary. 
They will come, perhaps at times too slowly, but they will 
come. No critic would venture to deny that the great essen- 
tials are here : willingness, enthusiasm, unlimited devotion, and 
deathless sacrifice. Not only are these things here, but we 
may answer our critic and say that here also are the very 
things he demands, the study of method, of helping and train- 
ing, so that the body may be strengthened and the character 
be developed. 

The Sacrament whereby we partake of the Body and Blood 
of Christ is the life of our souls, and consequently the source 
of all Christian life in the world, of our personal and our cor- 
porate life as Christians. It reaches from end to end and orders 
all things sweetly. Through it the Church will take all things, 
from the highest to the lowest, and regenerating them, return 
them to the Incarnate Christ Who owns them both by natural 
and by acquired right. " To restore all things in Christ," was 



i9io.] THE MONTREAL EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS 91 

the rallying cry sent forth by our Holy Father as he mounted 
the papal throne, and this Eucharistic Congress has cheered 
one with the renewed hope of its fulfillment. 

Through the Christ of the Eucharist must Christian energy 
reach out to the farthest limit and leave nothing unknown 
that will help to promote His glory and the welfare and salva- 
tion of men. Therefore does the zealous Christian study and 
examine, weigh and discuss, and therefore also do we meet 
in such congresses as this to make more valuable and effec- 
tive our corporate knowledge. 

The religious services of the Congress, which were its heart, 
for they sent the blood of life through all its members, were 
truly magnificent and impressive. From that solemn opening, 
when the Archbishop of Montreal welcomed at the door of St. 
James* Cathedral the Papal Legate, to the Midnight Mass at 
Notre Dame, attended by over fourteen thousand, and at which 
six thousand men received Holy Communion, to the Mass in the 
open air at Fletcher's Field, celebrated by his Grace Archbishop 
John M. Farley, of New York, at which three hundred and 
fifty thousand were present, and to that unprecedented proces- 
sion at the end, the Congress seemed to be one fervent, glorious 
act of homage to our Eucharistic King. Besides the services 
mentioned, there were many Solemn Pontifical Masses, at 
which sermons were delivered by distinguished prelates, mem- 
bers of the hierarchies of different nations, Masses were offered 
at all hours of the morning, Benediction of the Blessed Sacra- 
ment was given at convenient times, and church, convent, 
institution, and private home were illuminated and decorated 
by Eucharistic banner and Papal colors. 

It is, of course, impossible for us to give here any detailed 
account of the different services, receptions, meetings, of the 
speakers, their sermons, and their papers. These details were 
printed in the daily press, and the entire proceedings will be 
published in book form. 

To illustrate what we have said above, that the life im- 
parted to the soul by Christ in the Eucharist fills the world, 
covers everything human, and makes the soul anxious to employ 
all human learning, to solve every human problem, to make itself 
a lover of every human being, in other words, to empty itself 
into every human channel and inundate all the world with the 
knowledge and love of Christ, we will enumerate here some of 



92 THE MONTREAL EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS [Oct., 

the many subjects treated. These subjects were discussed in 
general or in sectional meetings. The sectional meetings were 
intended for those interested in the particular subject to be 
discussed. We may say here that we have never seen sec- 
tional meetings so well attended as they were at the Mon- 
treal Congress. Separate, general, and sectional meetings were 
held in French and in English. A general review of devotion to 
the Eucharist throughout the world, and particularly in Canada, 
was given by Father Galtier, of the Congregation of the Blessed 
Sacrament; "The Eucharist and the First Canadian Mission- 
aries," by Father Thomas Campbell, S J. ; " The Eucharist as 
the Centre of Dogma and the Life of the Church," by 1* Abb<S 
Curotte ; " Faith in the Eucharist and Modern Unbelief," by 
Right Rev. Bishop McDonald, of Victoria, B. C. ; " The Tribute 
of a Great Century to the Eucharist," by Dr. James J. Walsh, 
of New York. Two learned papers, " The Eucharist and the 
Primitive Canon of the Mass in the Light of Recent Discover- 
ies " and " African Records and Devotion to the Eucharist in 
the Early Ages," were presented respectively by Dom Jules 
Souben, a Benedictine of Solesmes, and Father Delattre, of 
the White Fathers. Neither of these, unfortunately, was able 
to be present in person. " Work Among the Poor in Rome," 
was discussed by Mgr. Laurenti, of that city. Educational 
papers, dealing with the instruction of adults and of the young, 
of parents and of children, of improvements in the catechism, 
etc., were read by Father Marchal, of the Redemptorists, 
1'Abbe Dupuis, 1'Abbe Halle, President of Levis College, 
1'Abbe Corbeil, of the Ottawa Normal School, 1'Abbe Belleney, 
of La Croix, Paris, Rev. E. P. Fitzgerald, of Holyoke, Mass., 
Rev. Richard Ormond Hughes, of New York, Right Rev. Mgr. 
F. H. Wall, of New York, and Mother Mary Loyola, of York, 
England. The conversion of non-Catholics was discussed by 
Mgr. Zorn de Buluch, Auxiliary Bishop of Strasburg, and the 
Very Rev. A. P. Doyle, C.S.P., of Washington. Papers on 
the Catholic press were presented by 1'Abbe E. Auclair and 
1'Abbe Belleney. The evil of intemperance and its cure were 
discussed by Canon Sylvain and Father Ladislas. The welfare 
of the working classes, societies for young men and women, 
and the general social betterment of the Catholic body, were 
discussed by Very Rev. John Cavanaugh, President of Notre 
Dame University; Rev. M. J. O'Brien, of Peterboro, Ont.; 



i9io.] THE MONTREAL EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS 93 

Right Rev. Mgr. Lynch, of Syracuse; and Rev. T. J. Shealey, 
S.J., of New York. 

We have given but a few of the subjects. The general 
meetings almost beggar description, because they were at- 
tended by such crowds, by such an unusual number of digni- 
taries, and addressed by so many distinguished orators. It 
was at these meetings that the great practical power of the 
Church and of her sacramental life was so strongly evidenced; 
where her power as the social force was most apparent; and 
where thousands heard, learnedly and courageously proclaimed, 
her saving doctrines. To give one example we will cite the 
great general meeting held in the church of Notre Dame. 
This church is, we believe, the largest church edifice in 
America. The gathering of which we spoke was undoubtedly 
the most notable public meeting of Catholics that ever took 
place on this continent. The Blessed Sacrament had been re- 
moved from the church and the sanctuary had been made into 
one vast stage. Hours before the appointed time crowds had 
gathered in the streets; when the meeting epened there were 
at least fifteen thousand gathered within those walls. Thous- 
ands who could not enter were still standing outside. On the 
stage were seated the Papal Legate, the members of the hier- 
archy and representatives of the federal, provincial, and mu- 
nicipal governments. The meeting was addressed by two car- 
dinals, his Eminence Cardinal Vannutelli and his Eminence 
Cardinal Logue ; and by two Premiers, Sir Wilfrid Laurier and 
Sir Lomer Gouin. The gathering typified the spirit, and 
showed the success of this Congress. It was, indeed, an in- 
spiring sight and a soul-stirring call to see and to hear that 
vast crowd of fifteen thousand cheer to the echo when an 
orator spoke of devotion to the Holy Eucharist and of faith- 
fulness in the service of Christ. 

Or again, we might speak of that gathering of young men 
at the Arena in Westmount, when the Cardinal Legate was 
cheered by thousands and actually overcome by the reception 
accorded to him. From the beginning to the end, in its re- 
ligious services, in its studies of present-day problems, in its 
display of Catholic activity and Catholic influence, in the 
multitudes that gathered to take part in it, the Twenty-first 
Eucharistic Congress was a magnificent demonstration of 
Catholic life, inspired, exalted, directed by devotion to the 



94 THE MONTREAL EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS [Oct., 

Blessed Sacrament of the altar. Its success is the glory of 
Montreal, the glory of Canada, the glory of our own United 
States; yea, the glory of Catholics throughout the world. 

Grand, inspiring, as were its services and its meetings, the 
crowning splendor, the perfect fulfillment of it all, came in 
that indescribable procession of the Blessed Sacrament. God 
granted us a perfect day. To the thousands already in the 
city, thousands more came by train, by boat, by vehicle of 
every kind, to pay homage to our Lord. From hundreds of 
miles around many, unable to come, rich and poor alike, sent 
their offerings of flowers, till there were more than enough to 
decorate a city. Those who had participated during the four 
days of the Congress felt that they had not even yet begun 
to praise their King as He should be praised. What we had 
done up to this hour was as naught. In the strength of our 
hearts and of our numbers we would lead Him forth, bear 
Him triumphantly as He should be borne our God, our King. 
The city and the whole world should bear witness to our joy. 
The same inspiration possessed every heart. They who were 
not permitted to walk secured seats on the stands, in the win- 
dows, or stood along the line of march. There was to be no 
vehicle. No one was to ride. In the presence of Him we are 
all equal; and, from the unknown altar- boy to the representa- 
tive of the Supreme Pontiff, all walked for those short four 
miles, bearing in enthusiastic love their Eucharistic King. 

Before Him are the great and the little of this world, num- 
bering thousands upon thousands. There are some of the 
Papal Zouaves, who years ago risked their lives in defense of 
the States of the Church. There is every kind of young 
men's society, Society of St. Jean Batiste, Workingmen's 
Clubs, the Catholic Club of New York City, Knights of Col- 
umbus, Holy Name Societies, American Indians, Chinese, 
Lithuanians, Poles, Syrians, Italians ; there are members of the 
religious orders, diocesan priests numbering thousands, Broth- 
ers of the Christian Schools; there are canons and mitred ab- 
bots, bishops and archbishops, and there is the Papal Legate, 
bearing aloft the sacred Host. He is surrounded by a military 
guard of honor. Following him come two other Cardinals, 
Gibbons and Logue, and then the Archbishop of Montreal, 
with Prothonotaries Apostolic, Papal Chamberlains, representa- 
tives of the federal, provincial, and municipal governments 



i9io.] THE HEAT OF DAY 95 

all forming a procession of sixty thousand men, and requiring 
five hours to pass. 

Through flower-carpeted streets, beneath beautiful arches, 
between living walks of devout, reverent worshipers, the Sacred 
Host is borne. Song upon song is raised in praise and honor 
to the Eucharistic Christ. Flowers are strewn before Him, 
clouds of incense bear the prayers of the multitude to His 
feet. A city's life has stopped. A city is silent, save for the 
praise which its hundreds of thousands send forth to God. 
Every nation is here, every tongue is here. All praise the 
Savior, Christ. His life animates this multitude. His power 
holds them silent. His love thrills their hearts. He passes 
as of old doing good; as of old, at the end He blesses the 
multitude. They answer as with one voice, acclaiming: 
"Jesus, the Host!" and the Eucharistic Congress is over. 
But we know that the life of the Eucharistic Christ is 
stronger than ever in the hearts of His faithful. 



THE HEAT OF DAY. 

BY CAROLINE D. SWAN. 

>Tis noon. Yon reapers, in discouraged mood, 
Are spent with labor, for the world is ripe 
To its ingathering. Fain is each to wipe 

His dripping brow, as though each drop were blood : 

"O daze of heat, poured in o'erpowering flood! 
No shade is ours,*' they mourn, "no shepherd's pipe 
Makes music i' the sun." Great Prototype 

Of lamb-like patience, bless our ill-wrought good ! 

Smile on its imperfections, till they shine 

Bright in Thy brightness. Help us bind the sheaves 

With cords of love's own silver ! Bread and wine 
Of sweetest Sacrament no longing leaves : 

O I/ight unshadowed, bid our sorrows cease; 

Celestial Presence, crown us with Thy peace. 



View Books. 

In the preface to his Life of Reg- 

THE LIFE OF REGINALD inald Pole (New York : Longmans, 

POLE. Green & Co. Price $5.25), Martin 

Haile states that the world might 

have had the work from the pen of Father Ethelred Taunton but 
for his untimely death at the beginning of his task. The author 
then acknowledges his indebtedness to Father Taunton's liter- 
ary executor for valuable notes and data collected with ex- 
haustive research ; and, gratefully dismissing this obligation, he 
assumes entire responsibility for the work in its present form- 

It would be misleading to say that the Life of Reginald 
Pole is a full and complete history of one of England's most 
notable sons, for so skillfully has the author estimated and 
placed the important characters kings, queens, prelates, knights, 
and pawns on the vast board, the sixteenth century up to the 
close of Cardinal Pole's life, that he has given to the reader 
a valuable summing up of the events and counter events of 
the entire period in Europe. 

Inestimable is the worth of a book such as the present Life* 
and particularly is it valuable to the lay reader under the skill- 
ful handling of the writer, who possesses a fine sense of pro- 
portion, a faithfulness in research, and a delicate discrimination 
when court intrigue, hatred, and dissimulation distort the fair 
outlines of Christ's divine edifice until her own children fail 
to recognize her and disown her because of the cringing sophis- 
tries of unjust stewards within her fold. 

The author's discernment of historic detail has enabled him 
to obtain a clear focus upon the noble Cardinal Archbishop's 
relation to the time in which he lived. Thanks to the reac- 
tionary quality of injustice and fanaticism, and to the preser- 
vation of the archives accessible to the student of history, the 
names of More, Fisher, Pole, and those who suffered persecu- 
tion in its many forms because of the unswerving quality of 
their faith, become fairer with the progress of time, and few 
books have shown to such advantage as Martin Haile's Life 
of Reginald Pole. 

As near and loyal kinsman to royalty ; faithful friend to 
friend; high-minded patron to the art and letters of his time; 
wise counselor to emperor, king, and pontiff, the name of 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 97 

Pole becomes suggestive when one contemplates the fixity, the 
steadfastness of this holy and learned man who witnessed the 
reign of three of England's monarchs and the pontificates of 
eight " bishops of Rome." With pleasing simplicity of style 
the author comprehensively presents to the lay reader the tan- 
gled doctrinal arguments of the time, and the mental journey 
to the Council of Trent, in company with the orthodox Car- 
dinal Pole, becomes one of the most pleasing features of the 
book. 

The account of Reginald's school days, beginning with the 
Carthusian monastery at Sheen, "a devout and holy place"; 
the later days at Oxford, where he numbered Sir Thomas 
More twenty-five years his senior among his friends; the 
prolonged student life at Padua, where under the generous 
patronage of his kinsman, Henry VIII., he was enabled to 
remain long enough to obtain princely advantages, and where 
he formed those friendships destined to last until the close of 
his life all these events are told with an easy grace of detail 
never wearying to the reader. " It has been observed of 
Pole," says the writer, " that he had many points of resem- 
blance with another great English cardinal of more recent 
times Cardinal Newman; especially that he could claim to 
having lost few friends during all the changes of his life and 
that the loss of an old friend had ever deeply grieved him. 
Another point of resemblance was the love of companionship, 
which made Newman unwilling to take the shortest stroll un- 
accompanied, and which in Pole created those friendships with 
Gasper Contarini and Alvise Priuli which deserve to rank 
among the famous friendships of history; and in a lesser de- 
gree with the representative men of his time for to mention 
his friends was to name the first, in moral and intellectual 
worth, in whatever place he might find himself." 

Possibly the most valuable material in the Life are the 
extracts from letters to Pole's various friends upon vital ques- 
tions of state and morals, and the full and comprehensive 
reference to his notable work, Pro Ecclesiastics Unitatis De- 
fensione, written at the command of Henry VIII. and destined 
to become the occasion of the historic breach between them. 
Carefully scanning extracts from this famous work of Pole's, 
one must smile in our own day at the illogical attitude of the 
Church of England bishop in one of the Southern States who 
VOL. xcn. 7 



98 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

answered the charge that Henry VIII. was founder of the 
English Church : " He was not Founder of the Church of 
England, but he did cure the English people of the Roman 
fever." 

Let those who would read the rather questionable nature 
of this " cure " turn to the Life of Reginald Pole, that they 
may know how great was the service of this illustrious and 
holy man to the beauteous Bride of Christ whom Henry VIII. 
would have robbed of her head, so great was his mania for 
decapitation ! 

With the contemplative knowledge 

HEAVENWARDS. of the mystic, and the spiritual 

illumination of one who lives in 

the Presence of the Most Holy, Mother Loyola, in her latest 
book, Heavenwards (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. Price 
$1.25), has delivered messages that strengthen, encourage, and 
animate all its readers to rise above the distracting temptations 
of sordid modern life. "Having in it all that is delicious and 
the sweetness of every taste," Heavenwards is adapted to the 
needs of varying conditions of life. 

Laying the book aside, the priest will feel better prepared 
for his sermon on the morrow; the "sister servant" of the 
community will welcome it as rich material for community 
reading; the valiant woman of domestic life will work more 
willingly with her hands from the inspiration of its practically 
adapted lessons ; and the woman of fashion God grant it may 
reach her ! will learn painfully how she must be in but not 
of the world, and how spiritual reading, though a necessity, 
will not be sufficient unless diligently applied when the soul 
faces the insinuating allurements of a life of ease. 

The dedication of Heavenwards fixes a standard for the book 
to which Mother Loyola has remained faithful in each succeed- 
ing chapter: 

" To Mother Church, whose office and aim is to keep our 
hearts above the dangers, trials, and allurements of this pass- 
ing world, and whose daily admonition from a thousand altars 
is ever ' Sursum Corda.'" 

The text for each chapter of Heavenwards is taken from 
some familiar passage of Sacred Scripture, and these Mother 
Loyola has illumined with a rare, delicate, and reverent insight 
holily qualified to lift up the heart of every reader. 



1 9 io.] NEW BOOKS 99 

Especially is this true of the meditations on God's beauti- 
ful promise: "Behold I will send My angel, who shall go be- 
fore thee, and keep thee in thy journey and bring thee into 
the place that I have prepared." 

Many of our readers are already 
ASTRONOMICAL ESSAYS, familiar with a series of popularly 

written articles on astronomy which 

appeared recently in the columns of the Boston Pilot and 
gave clear evidence of the exact scientific learning of their 
author, the Rev. George V. Leahy. These essays are now 
published in convenient book-form, Astronomical Essays (Bos- 
ton: The Washington Press. Price $i), and form a welcome 
addition to the library-table of the Catholic family and, in- 
deed, will convey a good deal of interesting information which 
non-Catholics are sometimes in urgent and striking need of 
receiving. The style of the author is very simple and clear; 
and he instructs his readers satisfactorily in a number of ques- 
tions which lie on the meeting ground of science and religion, 
and therefore need to be discussed in the spirit and with the 
equipment he so obviously possesses. 

This translation by Luigi Cappa- 

A MANUAL OF CHURCH delta, from the fifth German edi- 
HISTORY. t i on) o f Dr. F. X. Funk's Manual 

of Church History (Vol. I. St. 

Louis, Mo. : B. Herder. Price $2.75 net), is of exceptional 
value, particularly because it may easily be used as a text- 
book for the training of students, and because it will intro- 
duce them in a practical way to the sources and to the issues 
that are most important in the history of the Church. When 
the students of our seminaries are formed in the spirit and on 
the model of this thorough and practically successful teacher, 
a new era will begin in the history of American scholarship. 
In the hands of a painstaking professor, the Manual may be- 
come a splendid instrument for the drilling of a class. Slow 
progress, frequent review, and conscientious verification of all 
the available sources, would begin the development of a type 
of priestly scholar that our generation is yearning to find com- 
mon in this country. 

The author of the Manual m& the work itself in the orig- 



ioo NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

inal are too well known to require any comment of ours. The 
combination of science and sound doctrine, the fusion of ex- 
traordinary learning with unimpeachable faith, his love of 
original research, and his strict loyalty to evidence, make Dr. 
Funk the right man to produce the most satisfactory manual 
as yet offered to the public. And he has been fortunate in 
his translator. Under the obvious pseudonym affixed to the 
English edition, there is screened a literary workman of the 
first rank. His translating and editing leave nothing to be 
desired; and such additional notes and references as he has 
made give comfortable assistance to the reader. When pos- 
sible he has replaced references to foreign works by references 
to English translations, and his failure to do this with regard 
to Duchesne's Histoire Ancienne de I'Jiglise must, of course, 
be due to the fact that he had corrected his proof before the 
appearance of the English version of that book. 

The Poor Man of Assisi has been 
THE DIVINE MINSTRELS, so widely admired by artists and 

writers, hopelessly incapable of 

understanding his spirit, that readers regard with some sus- 
picion each new attempt at interpretation. In the present 
instance, The Divine Minstrels , by Auguste Bailly. Translated 
by Ernest Barnes (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Price 
$1.25 net), such suspicion will be justified, for this little romance, 
which weaves together some well-known incidents in the life 
of the saint on a beautiful background of Tuscan and Um- 
brian scenery, depicts a sentimental courtship, full of impos- 
sible details, and colored most vividly with high tints that 
would of themselves reveal the artist as a Frenchman. The 
descriptive parts are poetically and gracefully done; and the 
translation seems to be adequate. But the atmosphere is too 
little Catholic and too saturated with misuBderstandicg of the 
Franciscan ideal to make the book a source of enjoyment. 

This volume, The Promise of Ameri- 

THE PROMISE OF AMERI- can Life, by Herbert Croly (New 
CAN LIFE. York : MacMillan Company. Price 

$2), gives us a study of our na- 
tion at once historic, prospective, wide, profound, and stimu- 
lating. The author has sketched most lucidly the architectuie 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 101 

and analyzed the substance of American national life. He has 
shown us why it is what it is an organic democracy, but an 
organic democracy very much qualified in its constitution and 
growth by elements antithetic to its true nature. He traces 
the characteristic marks which Hamilton, Jefferson, and Lin- 
coln have left upon it, and also those which are due to what 
may be called pragmatic causes. But all this is only an incite- 
ment to his readers. He wants them to turn aside for awhile 
from the strenuous paths of unreflective business and resolutely 
think out for themselves what America now is and what, unless 
higher political thought and purer political passions enter into 
her life, she is likely to become. The first great founders of 
America were hard and high thinkers, they channeled out the 
forms through which her vigorous early life was to run its 
almost unconscious course, and so long as it retained its first 
simplicity all was well. But the very strength of this life, when 
once separated from its first givers, became in a sense blind and 
unreflecting in its sheer and headstrong individualism, and so 
it has continued to be, almost to the present. " For two gen- 
erations and more the American people were, from the econo- 
mic point of view most happily situated. They were able, in 
a sense, to slide down hill into the valley of fulfillment. 
Economic conditions were such that, given a fair start, they 
could scarcely avoid reaching the desirable goal. But such is 
no longer the case. Economic conditions have been profound- 
ly modified, and American political and social problems have 
been modified with them. . . . Ugly obstacles have jumped 
into view, and ugly obstacles are peculiarly dangerous to a 
person who is sliding down hill. The man who is clambering 
up hill is in a much better position to evade and overcome 
them. Americans will possess a safer as well as a worthier 
vision of their national promise as soon as they give it a house 
on a hill-top rather than in a valley." 

It would be well, therefore, for those whom an unfortunate 
mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism has lulled to 
sleep to wake up and take stock of things as they are. What, 
then, is the central plague spot to be attacked? "It is the 
economic individualism of our existing national system which 
inflicts the most serious damage on American individuality; 
and American individual achievement in politics and science 
and the arts will remain partially impoverished as long as our 



102 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

fellow-countrymen neglect or refuse systematically to regulate 
the distribution of wealth in the national interest." 

Mr. Croly develops two policies to meet the changed con- 
ditions of the national life. At home, he is all for qualitative 
individualism as opposed to that quantitative individualism 
which is now so rampant and excessive. He points to Abra- 
ham Lincoln who, so to speak, summed up and anticipated in 
himself the qualitative and democratic genius of his country. 
He was not only good-natured, strong, and innocent, as so 
many of his fellow-countrymen have been and are, but "he 
had made himself intellectually candid, concentrated, and dis- 
interested, and morally humane, magnanimous, and humble. 
All these qualities, which were the very flower of his personal 
life, were not possessed either by the average or the excep- 
tional American of his day : and not only were they not pos- 
sessed, but they were either wholly ignored or consciously 
undervalued. Yet these very qualities of high intelligence, 
humanity, magnanimity, and humility are precisely the qualities 
which Americans, in order to become better democrats, should 
add to their strength, their homogeneity, and their innocence." 

While this home policy which Mr. Croly advocates is so 
essentially qualitative, his foreign policy is quite other the 
Monroe doctrime, a big navy, a leading voice in the European 
concert, the whole thing quite frankly Bismarckian. 

This remarkable psychological 

BY INHERITANCE. study of the negro, and the mu- 
tual relations of white and black, 

entitled By Inheritance, comes from the pen of a New Eng- 
land woman, Octave Thanet (Indianapolis : Bobbs Merrill Com- 
pany). The book shows the touch of the artist as well as the 
mind of the student; inimitable humor and incident lighting 
up the dark shadows of "the tremendous, uncouth, fundamen- 
tal passions of men." Miss French shows us "naked human 
nature," the negro as he is " by inheritance " ; but a keen 
sense of values holds the balance between good and evil, com- 
edy and tragedy. 

The story carries southward Agatha Danforth, a New Eng- 
land philanthropist, pledged to the cause of the negro. Where 
before she had reckoned with the individual, she now learns 
to estimate the race, and grapples for the first time with the 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 103. 

real factors in the race problem. Her struggle between "life- 
long faiths and late perceptions " forms the background against 
which the actors play out the drama of life. This new insight 
into these "children too old to grow up," and the effect on 
them of the American panacea, education, as personified in 
Danton, a young mulatto, graduated from Harvard, make her 
ask sadly: "What is the right sort of education ? Is this higher 
education the best thing for them?' 1 Danton, a polished, 
finished product " up against " the impenetrable social barrier, 
is the embodiment of the tragedy of his race. Unsatisfied and 
unsatisfiable ambition turns to gall and bitterness an affectionate 
disposition and sunny nature, the best heritage of his people. 
The electric light of enlightenment, forestalling the sunshine 
of happiness, leaves him a prey to all sorts of morbid germs. 
In the impassable social barrier we find the crux of the whole 
problem. To defend it, the inherent law of race-preservation 
rises in a passionate flood of unreasoning madness, and sweeps 
before it all sense of law and order. 

Lily Pearl, the true heroine of the book, shows that filtra- 
tion may clarify the muddiest waters. Through unselfish sac- 
rifice and willing service her standard grows till, having " all 
the virtues but one," she learns to prize more than life itself 
that one which is the crown of womanhood. Lily Pearl is a 
woman's heroine. She could sway men's hearts and turn their 
heads and blind Antoine and send him back to France unsus- 
pecting, for only a woman could suspect and comprehend her 
stamp of heroism. 

No Catholic will fail to note the only Catholic touch in the 
book the natural confidence of the human mother in the 
Mother of God nor the references to divorce showing the dis- 
tinction without difference between the illegal sexual relations 
of the negro, and the "legalised adultery" of the whites. 

It may be objected that the author gives the terms of the 
problem but offers no solution, if we except some tentative 
suggestions scarcely calling for very serious consideration. 
The best light thrown on the subject by the wise old Genoa), 
and that philosopher of sanity, Lily Pearl, is, after all, the old 
key to many a social problem that even ambition must have 
limits, boundaries fixed by common sense and guarded by Chris- 
tian resignation. 



104 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

The Mirage of the Many, by W. 

THE MIRAGE OF THE T. Walsh (New York : Henry Holt 
MANY. & Co. Price $1.50), has ambitions 

to be a prophetic novel. It con- 
cerns the city of Chicago under the reign of Socialism, as estab- 
lished throughout the United States in the year 1952, and the 
author proposes in a forceful, but somewhat didactic, manner to 
show the deplorable effect of that reign on all classes of society. 
The starting-point of the novel seems unjustified. Conditions 
by the middle of this twentieth century are assumed to have 
jumped quite to perfection. The phrase, "economic evils," 
has been relegated to the dead-language shelf. 

But notwithstanding that this was the most wonderful 
civilization that had ever been upreared, in spite of the fact 
that the people had never before been so prosperous, the old 
slogan of half a century earlier was in constant repetition, 
14 The rich are growing richer and the poor poorer.'* Man's 
discontent was a paradox. He was discontented because he 
had so little reason to be. His wants were over- satisfied, 
over- satisfied, at least, in proportion to his merits. Not a 
single being suffered from lack of food, or clothing, or shelter 
the primary human wants no, nor from a thousand acces- 
sories to these wants. 

Man was spoiled by economic ease and yet, notwithstand- 
ing this, he craved for the still easier life. A great reaction 
was bound to come. Inconsistently man hit at the keystone 
of his prosperity his economic system, and Socialism, a 
theoretic principle for many a decade back, was demanded. 
Thought had revolutionized the world, in science at least. 
Thought could likewise revolutionize the social system. Such 
was the fundamental argument of the Socialistic leaders of 
the day. 

The shaky optimism of this starting-point how can the 
next forty years accomplish so much ? makes the introduction 
of Socialism inconsistent and impertinent; and on it the whole 
structure of the story is inclined to totter. The author would 
have strengthened his position by admitting, as does the most 
conservative thought of to-day, the many ragged gaps in our 
economic system; he could then have shown that for these 
gaps is needed a gradual bridge-building along constitutional 
lines, not the bomb-shell of Socialism. In proceeding, how- 



i9io. J NEW BOOKS 105 

ever, the story gains in strength. The account of the actual 
state of society under Socialistic government shows vividly the 
readjustments, often hard and cruel, demanded by the "great 
change." The author's insistence upon the inevitable sub- 
merging of individual talent and ambition, and his effective 
representation of the wreckage of all family life, suggest by 
sharp contradiction the older novel, Looking Backwards, by 
Edward Bellamy. A comparison of the two books would be 
worth while. The Mirage of the Many is certainly the more 
convincing. 

Some one has said that since the 

CHRISTIAN ORIGINS. Encyclical Pascendi " Catholic 

scholarship has drawn in its horns, 

and is now confining itself to the composing of harmless theo- 
logical text-books." This statement is a calumny, for never 
were writers so prolific in scholarly apologies of the Catholic 
position. Mgr. Batiffol is one of the best of present-day writers 
who meets the modern rationalist on his own ground. 

We are glad that his lectures at Versailles, January-May, 
1910, on the historicity of Christ and the Gospels, have been 
published in permanent form, Orpheus et VEvangile (Paris: 
Librarie Lecoffre, J. Gabalda et Cie,) They constitute a de- 
tailed scholarly answer to the latest attacks of modern unbelief 
on the much-debated questions of Christian origins. While the 
author has ever in view Reinach's superficial and inaccurate 
history of religions, his treatment is objective throughout, dis- 
cussing in turn the extra-gospel references to Christ, the origin 
of the canon, the witness of St. Paul and the Acts, and the 
authenticity of the life and teachings of Jesus. 

He seems to reject, with Schuerer and Lagrange (p. 18) 
the authenticity of the famous passage of Josephus (Ant. xviii. 
63, 64), but explains his silence (Orpheus, p. 333) on the 
hypothesis that Josephus wrote his work to suit the cultured 
Roman who despised Christianity (pp. 21-22); he points out 
(p. 31) that the blasphemies and inaccuracies of the Talmud 
writers, who " present insuperable difficulties to Reinach " 
(Orpheus, p. 334), are due to their hatred of Christianity 
(Meyer), and their utter lack of the historical sense (Lagrarge); 
he identifies the Chrestus of Suetonius (Vita Claudii, 25) 
with the Christ (p. 44), and brings out (p. 47) clearly the value 



io6 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

of Tacitus' reference to the passion of the Savior under Pon- 
tius Pilate (Annal. xv. 44). 

In his chapter on the Canon, Mgr. Batiffol shows how the 
Church separated the chaff from the wheat in the matter of 
the Apocrypha (pp. 58-64), the one supreme criterion being the 
criterion of apostolic authority ior all of the four gospels (p. 
78). He refutes theferror of Harnack and Juelicher, who trace 
to Marcion Jin 150 A. D. the first idea of a New Testament 
Canon (pp. 73-80, Orpheus 316). 

The lecture on St. Paul is an answer to a favorite theory 
of the Tubingen school rejected by Weiss in his Paulus und 
Jesus and repeated by Reinach (Orpheus, p. 339), viz., that St. 
Paul knew little or nothing of the historic Christ. Mgr. Batiffol 
refers (pp. 87-99) to many passages wherein the Apostle voices 
the Savior's teachings (I. Cor. iv. 20-21, vii. 10, xv. 50; II. 
Cor. i. 3., ix. 4; Rom. viii. 15-17, *iii. 8-10, xiv. 17; Gal. iv. 
1-7, v. i, v, 12, etc.), and lays special stress on the instruc- 
tion given him by Ananias (A. D. 34), Peter (A. D. 37), and 
Barnabas (A. D. 42-49) (pp. 100-102). 

Against Reinach (Orpheus, p. 344) our author proves that 
St. Luke, the physician (Col. iv. 14) and the companion of St. 
Paul (Phil. i. 24) is the author of the Acts of the Apostles, 
and against Weiss and Juelicher .that this history of the first 
twenty years of Christianity was written not in 100 or 105 
A. D., but in 62 A. D. The admissions of Harnack in his 
Lucas der Arts are used to good effect (pp. 118-136). 

The last chapter (pp. 237-279) deals with three hypotheses 
whereby the rationalistic critics of to-day question the authen- 
ticity of any gospel fact: i. That the incident recorded is 
suggested by some Old Testament prophecy (p. 251); 2. That 
the miracles mentioned are either cures that may be explained 
naturally, or mere symbolism misunderstood by the first illiterate 
followers of Jesus (p. 256); 3. That "the method of compara- 
tive religions " will explain many a so-called fact (p. 260)* 
The brief but clear-cut refutation of Reinach's fanciful "myth 
of the passion of Christ borrowed from the Sacaea of Babylon" 
is an evidence at once of the arbitrary character of the Rein- 
achian criticism, and a proof of the effectiveness of modern 
Catholic scholarship (pp, 265-272, Orpheus, 337-8). 

It would take a volume to enumerate the many errors of 
the much advertised Orpheus. Mgr. Batiffol who discusses only 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 107 

one brief chapter of thirty pages, points them out continually 
in footnote after footnote. Reinach speaks of a gospel of 
Cerinthus which never existed, and then calls St. John's Gospel 
a revision of it (p. 71); he quotes the Acta Pilati as a docu- 
ment forged by the Christians of the second century, whereas 
the Greek letter of Pilate to Claudius was not invented until 
the fourth or fifth century (p. 38); he states that all trace of 
the rivalry of St. Peter and St. Paul was deliberately eraced 
from the Acts, whereas this hypothesis has long been relegated 
to the ash- heap (p. 120); he confidently asserts that "all the 
quotations from Scripture in the Apostolic Fathers refer ex- 
clusively to the Old Testament " (p. 74), proof positive that he 
had never read them or even Leipoldt's latest book on the New 
Testament Canon; he speaks of the story of Paul and Thecla 
as "the type of pious fraud," but fails to tell his readers that 
the priest who acknowledged its authorship was degraded (p. 
59); he mistranslates St. Luke with a purpose (p. 156, Orpheus 
p. 323), fails to understand Loisy (p. 205, Orpheus, pp. 319- 
324), confounds the two congregations of the Index and the 
Inquisition (p. 244, Orpheus p. 352), utterly misrepresents the 
present position of the Church on the text of "the Three 
Witnesses " (p. 244), etc. 

In a word, Orpheus is a book whose Voltairean bias (he 
quotes Voltaire fifty- four times in 112 pages) may satisfy the 
superficial anti- clerical students of a French lyce'e, but will not 
pass muster as a serious study with scholars cf any school, 
either from the standpoint of method or of facts. 

A man so biased as to define religion as " a sum of scru- 
ples which impede the free exercise of our faculties," so be- 
hind the times as to make totems and taboos the corner stone 
of all his fanciful theorizing (Revue du Clerge Franfais, Vol. 
LVIII., pp. 715-729), so poor an historian as to write "a his- 
tory of religions in which the one thing lacking is religion " 
(Monod, Revue Historique, November, 1509), so bitter an anti- 
Catholic as to consider the Catholic Church a mere history 
of errors, superstition, intolerance, and crime such a man may 
write learnedly of Greek and Etruscan vases, or lecture inter- 
estingly on the antiquities of the Musee de Saint-Germain-en- 
Laye, but he ought not to venture on the difficult paths of the 
study of comparative religions : Ne sutor ultra crepidam. 



io8 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

A certain romantic interest sur- 

VENEZUELA AND rounds the Latin countries of 
COLOMBIA. South America. To their own na- 

tive attractiveness they seem to 

have added some of the poetic charm and chivalry of their 
early Spanish conquerors. 

Yet South America and her people have long been as a 
closed book to the majority of our countrymen. Differences 
of language, of racial antecedents and social customs, have been 
instrumental in keeping apart the people of the two continents. 
And it must be added that oftentimes our own arrogant com- 
placency, ignorance of true conditions, and a too great readi- 
ness to credit sensational newspaper reports, have created an 
unwarranted prejudice in our minds against the moral and in- 
tellectual standards of our South American brethren. It is so 
easy to indict a foreign nation as easy as it is imprudent. 

But we are happy to note the advent of a better under- 
standing between the peoples of the two continents. Perhaps 
the most effective public instrument has been, and still is, the 
Bureau of American Republics. Moreover, friendly diplomatic 
relations, international congresses, and the success of various 
common interests, have opened our eyes to the truth, and we 
are beginning to see and to know the vast fields for intellec- 
tual activity and material development which lie to the south 
of us. 

A new work has just appeared, Up the Orinoco and Down the 
Magdalena, by H. J. Mozans, A.M., Ph.D. (New York: D. Ap- 
pleton & Co. Price $3), which will have, we feel, a worthy share 
in promoting a better and a truer understanding. It is a book 
of travel, descriptive of the inhabitants, animal and vegetable 
life, and topography of two of the most northerly South Amer- 
ican countries Venezuela and Colombia with many of the 
adjacent islands. The volume takes us on a journey through 
some of the most renowned scenes of New World discoveries 
and explorations, and we see in perspective a land which in 
many respects glows with a charm primeval. The author's en- 
thusiasm for his labors aud his sympathy for his subject are 
contagious; we lay the book down in sheer wonder at the 
mighty land of marvelous beauty and unlimited resources which 
lies so near our doors. Those weird and popular stories about 
Latin American irreligion and moral degradation are conspicu- 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 109 

ously absent, and in this volume of a few hundred pages we 
are led by a kindly hand into a close and cordial intimacy 
with "those gentle, polite, sensitive, imaginative, delightful 
people." The work cannot fail to instruct and delight any one 
who honestly seeks to know these often misrepresented coun- 
tries. 

The volume contains a large number of illustrations and is 
well printed and bound. There is also a map showing the route 
followed by the author, a well-arranged index, and a complete 
bibliography. 

Sir Thomas E. Fuller, the author 

CECIL JOHN RHODES. of an interesting life of Cecil 

Rhodes, The Right Hon. John Cecil 

Rhodes (New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Price $1.60 net), 
writes: "I have not attempted to give any detailed account of 
Mr. Rhodes' life from childhood upwards. I have rather writ- 
ten a personal narrative of his life and work as they were 
associated with mine, in an intimacy of ma&y years ; while at 
the same time I have given as complete an account and esti- 
mate of his public career as the scheme of the book per- 
mitted. I have also specially endeavored to recall the best 
traditions of Mr. Rhodes' life, scarcely known to the general 
public, but cherished in the hearts of his friends." 

Cecil Rhodes' entrance into public life as a member of the 
Cape Parliament; his great schemes for South African expan- 
sion ; his social life at Groote Schuur ; his work as a states- 
man and as premier of the Cape Colony, his complicity as 
Prime Minister with the "Jameson Raid"; his ideals and 
characters these are prominent points in the narrative. Sir 
Thomas writes freely of this remarkable man's mistakes and 
failings. There is much of the human in his picture " of the 
man who cast a spell over South Africa and its people," and 
his work will be of interest not only to the student of South 
African history, but to the general reader. 

Houseboating on a Colonial Water- 
HOUSEBOATING. way, by Frank and Cortelle Hutch- 

ins (Boston: L. C. Page & Co.), 

is an account of a cruise up the historic James River, as under- 
taken and enjoyed by the authors in their boat, the Gadabout. 
The descriptions of famous localities in Virginia naturally in- 



i io NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

elude interesting glimpses of the life of those earliest days, 
pretty traditions and even bits of personal gossip about the 
colonists, and once again, of course, the first American romance, 
that of John Rolfe and Pocahontas. Especially enjoyable is the 
account of visits to old colonial seats, with all the charm of 
the old-time Southern courtesy and hospitality, manor-houses 
such as Brandon, Shirley, and Westover, home of the unhappy 
Colonial belle, Evelyn Byrd. The volume is illustrated with 
many photographs taken by the authors, and may serve as an 
exquisite gift-book. 

A volume called Trails Through 

TRAILS THROUGH WEST- Western Woods, by Helen Fitzger- 
ERN WOODS. aid Sanders (New York and Seat- 

tie: The Alice Harriman Com- 
pany), will prove a desirable addition to the literature of the 
Far West. Traditions and folk-lore of the Indiansjare success- 
fully mingled with descriptions of the wildly picturesque beauty 
of the region they still inhabit. The author attempts a sym- 
pathetic, if incomplete, interpretation of the primal, strangely 
compounded character of the Indian, "the mystery of our 
continent." The chapter dealing with "Some Indian|Missions 
of the Northwest " recounts the pathetic story of the labors 
of the heroic "black robes," whose zeal finally effected the 
conversion and civilization of so many tribes. The work of 
Father De Smet, founder of the missions of the Northwest, 
is described at special length, and also that of the gentle 
Father Ravalli, the Italian Jesuit, widely known and loved as 
the Apostle of the Selish. Of these pioneer priests the author 
writes with admiration, but obviously lacks a thoroughly clear 
understanding of their true aims and ideals. 

To any one wishing to follow the 
CHURCH AND STATE. troublous times which immediately 

preceded and followed the Separa- 
tion of the Church and State in France, no more instructive 
or reliable guide could be offered than the two volumes pub- 
lished by the eminent academician, Count Albert de Mun, 
Combats d'Hier et d'Aujourdhui (Paris: P. Lethielleux). The 
work is written, as it were, day by day under the immediate 
dictates of events. The first volume begins with the advent 
of the Combes' Ministry, June, 1902, and brings the reader 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS in 

to the eve of the separation of Church and State. The strug- 
gle which followed is well described, as are the events which 
rendered conciliatory measures impossible, and which led to 
the last great Papal decision which every Christian in France 
embraced unhesitatingly. In the second volume the separation 
is consummated and its dire consequences reveal themselves. 
Count de Mun says that the history of France from that unfor- 
tunate date should be called the history of the consequences 
of the separation of Church and State. The violent rupture 
with Rome marked the blasting of national traditions. We see 
the Church cast aside by the State, the episcopacy driven from 
its abodes, church goods subjected to ignoble inventories, the 
results of confiscation leading even unto the violation of such 
sacred contracts as provide for suffrages for the dead. The 
moral influences at work react so deeply upon the nation that 
patriotism is abased, the army disorganized, and the country 
in a state of social revolution. The deep-rooted patriotism of 
Count de Mun and his loyalty to the Church pervade his 
splendid work. 

Mr. H, M. Wiener's recent work, 

PENTATEUCHAL CRITICISM. Essays in Pentateuchal Criticism 

(Oberlin, Ohio : Bibliotheca Sacra 

Company), is an interesting volume, not precisely because he 
has evolved for us any new solution to the Pentateuchal prob- 
lem, but because he has boldly and earnestly defended what 
has come to be, for the non- Catholic, an obsolete view, i. e., 
"the general Mosaic character of the Pentateuch." 

These essays first appeared in the current numbers of the 
Bibliotheca Sacra, 1908-1909, and are now issued in book form. 

Mr. Wiener's avowed purpose here is to administer the coup 
de grace to the prevailing literary hypotheses of the Graf 
Wellhausen School. He is convinced that a mere common sense 
investigation of some of the conclusions of the higher critics 
respecting biblical difficulties will be sufficient to discredit their 
theory. 

Starting with what he considers to be the most important 
of these discrepancies, "the variant use of the terms Elhoim 
and Yahvueh" the author goes through the whole catalogue 
of Pentateuchal difficulties: "Egypt and Goshen"; "The Min- 
istry of the Sanctuary"; "The Position of the Ark"; "Con- 
cluding Chapters of Numbers"; "The Israelitic Census"; 



ii2 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

etc., contributing to all points not merely the negative work 
of criticising the critics, but the more difficult and positive 
effort of personal interpretation. 

Naturally, some subjects are treated with greater detail 
than others, but, whether he writes at length or briefly, the 
author brings to his thesis a certain confidence, and independ- 
ence of thought, which make his words always interesting if 
not always convincing. The last pages are devoted to an ar- 
rangement of the early chapters of Wellhausen's Prolegomena ; 
and the whole is supplemented by a very complete index of 
scriptural passages and subjects. 

The Essays are popular rather than technical in their form, 
and can be followed with interest even by those unacquainted 
with the technique of the problem. In addition the style is 
simple and clear, so that it is a book to be appreciated by a 
very large class of readers. 

But the work is not perfect. Mr. Wiener is intensely in 
earnest; and, as we have remarked, his indignation at the 
work of the higher critics is very deep. And while we sympa- 
thize and agree with much of his criticism of these men, we 
believe his work has been marred by an almost jejune exag- 
geration of the blunders and silliness of the critics; and by a 
failure to distinguish between critic and critic. 

The monotonous repetition of such expressions as "crass 
absurdities," " exhaustive ignorance," " these worthless con- 
clusions," "inveterate habit of self-contradiction," seem to be- 
tray the work of a "special pleader," rather than the dispas- 
sionate and cautious words of the scholar. Mr. Wiener is rep- 
resentative of a growing school "the anti-critical"; but he 
goes beyond all in his depreciation of the work of the critics. 
He would limit their achievement, in Pentateuchal study at 
least, to the detection of a few glosses; while their service is 
more than outweighed by the "crass absurdities they have put 
forward." 

We do not mean to imply, however, that Mr. Wiener has 
not written a strong book. The line of argument here laid 
down, and the plan of reasoning followed, will be amplified 
and continued, until we see the strange spectacle of critics re- 
turning to a position in many respects identical to that from 
which they started. 

One of the chief values of the book lies in this, that it 



19 io.] NEW BOOKS 1 13 

indicates the trend modern criticism is taking under the rela- 
tively recent influence of external research ; an influence surely 
conservative and in many respects Catholic in tone. 

Mr. G. E. Theodore Roberts has 

COMRADES OF THE TRAILS, achieved the impossible in Com- 
rades of the Trails (Boston : L. C. 

Page & Co.) He has actually written a story without a woman 
in it. The eternal feminine has for once been completely ig- 
nored. Comrades of the Trails contains three hundred solid 
pages without so much as a swish of skirts or an elusive echo 
of soprano laughter. Nor does the story suffer in the least by 
the omission. It tells of the partnership of an Indian and a 
young Englishman, trappers in the Canadian wilderness : of 
their adventures with trap and gun, and of their exciting en- 
counters with a ghost of peculiar habits and with a mysterious 
"Wild Man." It is the sort of book that one does not want 
to be interrupted in reading. 

Of Mr. George Wharton James* 

THE ARIZONA CANYON, several volumes concerning West- 
ern regions, the latest is The Grand 

Canyon of Arizona; How to See It (Boston: Little, Brown & 
Co.) The book describes the Grand Canyon, " the waterway 
of the gods/' traces its formation, and gives an extended ac- 
count of the surrounding country. It is a quite exhaustive 
treatment of the subject, and with its numerous illustrations 
and maps would seem excellent as a guide-book. The style, 
however, is not sufficiently attractive to make any strong appeal 
to stay-at-homes. 

Michael Servetus, branded both by Catholics and Protest- 
ants as a rank heretic, has found a champion in the author of 
the volume entitled: Michael Servetus: His Life and Teach- 
ings, by C. T. Odhner (Philadelphia: Lippincott & Co,) 
Servetus, who has had scarcely a single sympathetic and in- 
telligent reader," who has "apparently exercised no influence 
whatever upon the development of theological thought in the 
Christian Church," who has disappeared " almost without leav- 
ing a trace in the sands of time," is here heralded as a second 
John the Baptist. The work is without historical value, for 
the author fails to see any defects whatsoever in his subject. 
VOL. xcii. 8 



ii4 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

Fr. Pustet (New York) have published a new and complete 
edition of the Graduate Romanum, with the Vatican approba- 
tion. It is excellently presented. The same house has issued 
the History of Church Music, by Rev. Dr. Karl Weinmann, 
translated from the German. This work, as the author him- 
self states, does not claim to be a detailed history of Church 
Music, but rather "a compendious exposition," showing the 
broad lines of its development. However, though the little 
volume is modest in scope, it is far-reaching in its research 
and thoroughly well done. 

Benziger Brothers (New York) have issued a Handbook of 
Church Music, by F. Clement C. Egerton. It is a "practical 
guide for all those having the charge of schools and choirs, 
and others who desire to restore Plainsong to the proper place 
in the services of the Church. Beginners will find the work 
very useful, because it is extremely simple. Teachers also will 
find it valuable because of the different methods it suggests 
for acquiring the essentials of Gregorian music. 

During the past few years many books have been written 
on the Eucharist, such as the works of. Fere Eymard, the 
founder of the Fathers of the Blessed Sacrament, and the all- 
too-few treasures from the pen of Mother Mary Loyola. The 
present work, The Holy Eucharist The Bread of Angels, trans- 
lated by Rev. John F. Mullany, privately printed at Syracuse, 
N. Y., is another worthy addition to the devotional literature 
on the Eucharist, and is arranged with a special view for use 
at Mass and Holy Communion. It is a translation from the 
French of a series of meditations on the Eucharist, and is in- 
tended for " clergy and laity." The translation is simple and 
free from French idioms. 

The example set by the English Catholic Truth Society 
(London) in publishing interesting tales that inculcate moral 
lessons, such as religious loyalty, etc,, is well worthy of our 
imitation. One of its recent books of this kind is Under the 
Ban, by C. M. Home. It is a full-sized novel (well printed on 
good paper, though poorly bound) dealing with the troubles 
between John Lackland and the Papacy. Devotion to the Holy 
See is cleverly inculcated without letting the moral become 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 115 

too prominent. The story is well told and the interest of the 
reader is sustained to the end. There are incidents in Ameri- 
can history that might be utilized in the same way. 

The labors of the late Bishop Potter for the social improve- 
ment of the laboring classes, and for social reform in general, 
are interestingly set forth in a small volume, entitled Bishop 
Potter^The People's' Friend, by Harriette A. Keyser. It is pub- 
lished by Thomas Whittaker, New York. 

Service Abroad, by Right Rev. H. H. Montgomery (New 
York: Longmans, Green & Co.), consists substantially of the 
Pastoral Lectures delivered at Cambridge, 1910, and briefly 
summarizes pioneer missionary work. While intended primarily 
for Anglicans, Catholics can, nevertheless, profit by much of 
the practical advice therein given by experienced workers in 
India, China, Africa, and among English-speaking people. 

An excellent little work on the aims, materials, and meth- 
ods for the perfect training of the prospective man and woman 
will be found in the pamphlet, The Formation of Character, by 
Ernest J. Hull, S J. (St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder. Price 15 
cents). It is intended not only for parents and school-teachers, 
but also for all who are desirous of developing their own capa- 
bilities. The little volume can hardly be surpassed for use- 
fulness and ease of comprehension. The trifling price should 
insure its wide distribution. 

Histories of the United States are now so numerous that 
we can hardly expect to find anything new in the statement 
of facts or in the method of treatment. This latest volume, 
A History of the United States for Schools, by S. S. Forman 
(New York: The Century Company), however, is deserving of 
notice, in that its scope extends from the discovery of America 
by Columbus to the finding of the North Pole by Peary. While 
some important events of history have not here received the 
extensive treatment they deserve, the volume is, nevertheless, 
as a text-book, a good one. Free from all denominational 
and party bias, clear and simple in narration, and well supplied 
with numerous 'maps and illustrations, it should readily find 
a place in the school-room. 



ii6 NEW BOOKS [Oct., 

A much needed supplement to the little catechism will be 
found in this volume, Simple Catechism Lessons, by Dom Lam- 
bert Nolle, C.S.B. (St. Louis, Mo,: B. Herder). The lessons 
are put in the usual form of question and answer, but the latter 
consists of a series of short, easy sentences, each a paragraph 
by itself. The answers contain chiefly matters of essential belief 
and detailed practical conduct. Examples and pictures from 
biblical topics are suggested, to be supplied by instructors. 
The booklet on the whole is very valuable. 

In this little book of 70 pages we have The Liturgical 
Year Historically Explained and a Key to the Missal for the 
Use of the Laity, by Fr. Thaddeus, O.F.M. (London : Art & 
Book Company). It is very well done, and will be found 
most helpful to those who are either giving or receiving first 
instructions in liturgical matters. Starting, of course, with 
Advent, each of the holy seasons, and the important feasts 
which it includes, are explained with clear and competent 
brevity, both from the historical and from the devotional points 
of view. The last eight pages are devoted to an explanation 
of the dignity and order of the ecclesiastical feasts and brief 
descriptions of the great liturgical books the Pontifical, the 
Ritual, the Breviary, and the Missal. It is a book to have in 
order to help oneself, and in order to help others. 

In his Groundwork of Christian Perfection (New York : 
Benziger Brothers) the Rev. Patrick Ryan lays down princi- 
ples based on such excellent authorities in the spiritual life as 
Father Scaramelli and Father Rodriguez. The sole purpose 
of the author is to lead his readers to a better and a clearer 
understanding of what we must do and what we must be to 
attain the perfection which leads to eternal salvation. He 
writes particularly for those persons in the world who practice 
perfection without any formal aim at it, and his efforts to put 
things briefly and plainly have been most successful. The 
book is of a convenient size and we hope it will become well 
known. 

Like the mountain village itself, simplicity is the keynote 
of a recent publication, Oberammergau, which, in a tenderly 
intimate way, describes the place where the Passion Play is 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 117 

produced, the people of the village, their everyday life, and 
the particular characters chosen to take part in the sacred 
drama. The locality is well known to the author, Josephine 
Helena Short, and her work is made doubly interesting by 
the excellent photographs which illustrate the text. The vol- 
ume is published by Thomas Y. Crowell, New York. Price $i. 

The M. H. Wiltzius Company announces that it will pub- 
lish, on October i, a new novel by the well-known author, 
Father Copus, S.J., entitled Andros of Ephesus. 

The Gospel and Sociology, by Dr. Grasset, an eminent pro- 
fessor of medicine in the University of Montpelier (Paris: 
Bloud et Cie.), is a small pamphlet, but it has an importance 
out of proportion to its size. The author makes an earnest 
plea for united social action on the part of Catholics. There 
is a social question, he affirms, and he has no sympathy with 
those Catholics who are unanimous enough in lamenting per- 
secution and making wholesale charges against their enemies, 
yet are wholly indifferent or woefully disunited when it comes 
to social action. To lay the entire blame for the Revolution 
on others, and then to date every evil from it, as if it were a 
sort of Pandora's box, is useless and foolish. "If one wishes 
to speak of our part, as Catholics, in the responsibility (for 
social evils) . . . discord at once springs up; we are not 
willing to recognize our own follies, or we accuse each other, 
while no one has the courage to say mea culpa for his own 
failings." Dr. Grasset's thesis is, that because a purely scien- 
tific sociology, divorced from all religion, has no sanction for 
social obligations, therefore Catholics, possessing the true faith, 
are bound to exert themselves in diligently showing the sound 
basis for these obligations in the Gospel. 

The latest French publication of the Science and Religion 
Series from Bloud et Cie, of Paris, include : L'Histoire des Re- 
ligions et la Foi Chretienne, par J. Bricout; Qu'est-ce que le 
Quietisme? par J. Paquier; L'lde'e Individualiste et VIdee Chre- 
tienne, par Henri Lorin ; Le Pontifical, par Jules Baudot ; Vie 
de Sainte Radegonde, par Saint Fortunat ; La Vie de Saint Benoit 
d'Aniane, par Saint Ardon ; La Correspondance d*Ausone et 
de Paulin de Nole, par Ausone. 



jforeicjn periodicals* 

The Tablet (6 Aug.) : " The Accession Declaration Bill/' pro- 
viding for a change in the Coronation Oath, has passed 
both Houses of Parliament, received the Royal Assent, 

and become law. A Supplement gives a full account 

of the first National Catholic Congress held at Leeds. 
Varying and contradictory reports are still in circu- 
lation with regard to the relations between Spain and 
the Holy See. 

(13 Aug.): "Some Unpublished Fioretti of St. Francis," 
by M. Mansfield. In a letter quoted from The Man- 
chester Guardian, the Bishop of Salford explains "The 
Status of the Vatican." The Pope is an independent 
Sovereign, and therefore he is not, and never can be, a 
subject of the Italian State. 

(27 Aug.): "Where is the Milliard?" has to do with 
the liquidation of the property of the dissolved religious 

congregations in France, "The Sixth Chapter of St. 

John : A Difficulty and Its Solution," is discussed by 

the Rev. Gerald Stack. " Proverbs and Sayings of 

the Gael," by C. Dease. A Special supplement is 

devoted to general Congress topics, in which the ad- 
vantages and utility of the Catholic Federation of Eng- 
land is capably set forth by John Hobson Matthews. 
That penal reform is opening a wide field to Catho- 
lic zeal and enterprise is proved by the Rev. John 
Cooney in his paper " Catholics and Penal Reform." 
(3 Sept.): The letter of the Holy Father to the Cardi- 
nals, Archbishops, and Bishops of France on the organi- 
zation known as " Le Sillon " is treated at some length, 

as is the late Congress at Montreal. Space is given 

to the striking address to the King concerning the 
Royal Accession Declaration which was brought before 
the Australian House of Representatives, and the de- 
bate which ended in its being approved. 

The Month (Aug.) : The Rev. Jos. Keating, under the caption 
"Catholicism and Civil Disabilities," considers the quts- 



1 9 1 o. ] FOREIGN PERIODICALS \ i 9 



tion of the civil status of Catholics in Great Britain. 
The author attempts to show that the state has no 
right to penalize Catholics because they believe in one 
form of Christianity and reject the rest ; that the alleged 
incompatibility of the profession of Catholicity with 

civil allegiance has no foundation in fact. " Faith 

Healing and the Origins of Lourdes," by the Rev. Her- 
bert Thurston, is a criticism of the thesis of Sir Henry 
Morris that the miracles of our Lady have waxed and 
waned in direct proportion to the rise and fall in popu- 
larity of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, 
the teaching of this doctrine'forffling the basis of men- 
tal suggestion. 

(Sept.): Rev. Sydney Smith describes the Catholic Con- 
gress at Leeds. One great benefit is to make Catholics 

conscious of their strength. "Mistress and Maid/* by 

Agnes Gibbs, deals with the servant problem. The ob- 
jeet is to restore the old ideal, in which the mistress 
recognized her duties towards the health and moral 
education of the servant, and the latter looked upon 

her superior as the representative of God on earth. 

Rev. John Cooney writes on " Catholics and Penal Re- 
form." Catholics, he says, form one-fifth of the prison 
population of England, and their co-religionists should 
take a more active interest in reforming them. 

Expository Times (Sept.): Dr. Percy Gardner contends that the 
phrase "Kingdom of God" in the Gospels rtfers to a 
present as well as a future kingdom. In "The Visi- 
bility of Our Lord's Resurrection Body," Rev. J. M. 
Shaw maintains that Christ's risen Body was only visi- 
ble to those possessing a certain " spiritual receptive- 
ness." This restriction of recorded appearances, then, 
becomes an additional proof of their historical trust- 
worthiness. 

The Irish Ecclesiastical Record (Sept.) : " The Altar and Its 
Ornaments," by Patrick Morrisroe, details the rubrical 

requirements of an altar. Under the caption " Some 

Recent Discoveries in Hymnology," W. H. Grattan Flood 
gives many interesting facts concerning the authorship 
of well-known Latin hymns. The general tendency has 
been to assign their composition to an earlier date. 



120 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Oct., 

Le Correspondent (10 Aug.): Eugene Tavernier, writing of 
Proudhon, the French Socialist, considers him interesting 
because of his personality, rather than ior what he said 
or did. His style, while original and vigorous, "was 
stilted, rude, and tiring to even his better disposed 

hearers." Joseph Berge discusses the pros and cons 

for the tunneling of Mt. Blanc, which are being con- 
sidered by the present " Conference of, Rome." The 
writer thinks that the conference cannot but "advance 
the study of the improvement of direct railroad com- 
munication between France and Italy." " The Boy 
Scouts." Francois Lechannel writes of their history, 
duties, etc. The writer is very enthusiastic, and would 
have the organization world- wide. 

(25 Aug.): "Home Rule for Alsace-Lorraine," by Abbe 
Wetterle, deals with the nature and necessity of inde- 
pendence for these states, a question that has been 

agitated for nigh forty years. "The Approaching 

Millennium of Cluny," by L. de Contenson, presents an 
historical sketch of this celebrated abbey, its founda- 
tion and influence, and the customs of its order. 

Leon de Laperouse thinks "General Brincourt" "a shin- 
ing example of integrity, loyalty, and kindness, with an 
indomitable energy and a love for the sword." Chris- 
tian Patrimonio writes of affairs in the Balkans, dwelling 
on those events that have raised " A Principality to a 
Kingdom." 

tudes (5 Aug.) : " The Preacher in Preaching," is an essay 
by Raoul Plus analyzing the different elements con- 
stituting the psychical energy of the orator, the invis- 
ible force of one living soul acting on another.' 
" A Neapolitan Novelist," by Louis Chervoillot, reviews 
the life and works of Madame Mathilde Serao. She is 
said to belong to the French psychological school of 
fiction and to have exhibited remarkable powers of ob- 
servation. 

(20 Aug.): "The Millenary of Cluny," by Dom F. 
Cabrol. For centuries Cluny exercised the greatest in- 
fluence upon the religious, social, and political world. 
It is now but a small, unattractive, provincial town. 
" Apologetics of Savonarola," by Auguste Decisier. 



i9io.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 121 

Savonarola wished Christians to prove the truth of 
Christianity by their good lives; his contemporaries 
were satisfied with the legitimate extrinsic criterions of 
the truth of Christianity. His position was practically 
sanctioned by the Vatican Council, which also insists 
upon sanctity and good works as an eminent criterion 
for the divine mission of the Church. 

Revue du Clerge Francais (i Aug.): A. Degert gives a sketch 
of the relations of " Richelieu and the French Semi- 
naries." The famous Cardinal, he maintains, instead of 
being only a patron of St. Vincent de Paul, Cardinal 
Berulle, M. Olier, and others in this work, was in real- 
ity the one who first gave force in France to the pro- 
visions of the Council of Trent regarding the establish- 
ment of seminaries. L. Venard reviews among other 

works the following : The Historical Value of the Fourth 
Gospel, by M. Lepin ; Wellhausen and John, by C. R. 
Gregory ; Some Remarks on the " Orpheus " of M. Rein- 
ach, by R. P. Lagrange; Orpheus and the Gospel, by P. 
Batiffol; and three works on the Resurrection. Mile. 
Agnes Siegfried contributes an account of the motives 
of her conversion. 

(15 Aug.): Dom F. Cabrol, writing of "The Feast of 
the Assumption," gives a brief sketch of this feast in 

Christian worship, in history, and in the Liturgy. 

G. Geslin discusses the relation of the terms " Messias 
and Son of God." His conclusion on the point is that 
the latter gives the sense of sonship by generation, 
the former only the sense of " king " ; that the evangel- 
ical use is that of authentic Jewish tradition; and that 
their mutual substitution is not due to their identity in 
meaning but to their application to the same person. 

E. Bourgine treats the question " Do Catholic 

Rigorism and Protestant Laxism Influence the Family ?" 
The article deals chiefly with divorce and its effects on 

the family and the community. J. Riviere discusses 

the following theological works among others: 7 he 
Origins of the Dogma of the Trinity, by Jules Lebreton ; 
The Faith, by P. Charles ; The Nation of Catholicity, by 
A. de Paulpiquet, O.P. ; The Sacerdotal Vocation, by J. 
Lahitton. P. Godet contributes an article on "The 



FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Oct., 

Liturgic Origin of the ' Salve Regina.' " A. Boudin- 

hon writes of " The ' Fact of Loreto ' and the Author- 
ity of the Church." "The Moral Consequences of 

Protestants" is an extract from a book by Abbe E. 
Julien. 

(i Sept.): E. Vacandard reviews among others the fol- 
lowing work: Ancient History of the Church, Vol. III., 
by Abbe Duchesne, which he regards as the last word 
on many of the topics treated, as Donatism, Pelagianism, 

etc. The following are discussed by A. Bros and O. 

Habert : 7 he Successive Phases of the History of Religion , 
by J. Reville; The Assyro- Babylonian Religion, by P. 
Dhorme ; The Gospel in the Face of Pagan Syncretism, 
by B. Allo ; The Formation of Legends, by A. Van 

Gennep. "Social Sense and Catholic Sense/ 1 is an 

address of encouragement delivered by Mgr. Fuzet, 
Archbishop of Rouen, to an assembly of " the social 
week " at that city. 

Revue Thomiste (July-Aug.) : R. P. Montagne discusses the 
nature of the methodic doubt advocated by St. Thomas. 
It was the great Schoolman's doctrine that, any one 
starting out in quest of truth should be in a state of 
doubt, as an indispensable condition for the acquirement 
of truth. But all doubt, whether real or "fictitious," 
cannot include facts of experience or axioms of reason. 
- "The Origin of Political Power," by R. P. Hugon. 
According to St. Thomas the question of the origin of 
power resolves itself into two subdivisions: power con- 
sidered in the abstract, and pofrer considered concretely 
as it is lodged in an individual. The former is, indeed, 
of divine institution, but not necessarily the form in 

which it is exercised. R. P. Lage, with the doctrine 

of the Church and the teaching of theologians as his 
sources, concludes against P. Hugueny that the fact of 
revelation is capable of rigorous demonstration of ex- 
trinsics. 

Etudes Franciscaines : P. Exupere, in an article on "St. Mat- 
thew," Chapter I., first calls attention to the great igno- 
rance of pious people about the Gospels. Many, he says, 
know more about non-essential pious devotions than 
they do of the eight beatitudes, which contain the es- 



i9io.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 123 

sence of Catholic doctrine. " Higher Education in 

United States," by P. Hildebrand, gives, on the one 
hand, a short account of the foundation and history of 
the Catholic University of America. On the other hand, 
the history of Harvard is briefly given. 

Annales de Philosophic Chretienne (Aug.) " La Critique et 1'A- 
pologetique," by Laberthonniere, is a criticism of a 
book by P. Hugueny, O.P. P. Hugueny claims to judge 
the facts of revelation objectively, without reference to 
their interpretation by the subject. This he does not 

do, however. " Leibnitz et le Mecanisme," by Charles 

Dunan. The purpose of this article is to show the con- 
tradiction in which Liebnitz involves himself between 
the Determinism of Descartes and his own system of 
Monads. The author points out that Liebnitz's doctrine 
of Pre-established Harmony and Optimism cannot be 
verified, that it is not a suitable basis for philosophy. 

La Revue Apologetique (Aug.): "Anti-clericalism," by Ch. De 
Cerf., sketches the evolution of the anti- religious politi- 
cal parties in Belgium. The author maintains that neu- 
trality is here impossible. It is necessary to take one 
side and this side must be the same in politics as it is 
in religion. The anti-clerical programme of Liberals, 
Socialists, and Freemasons is then exposed from their 
own publications. 

Stimmen aus Maria-Laach (July) : "The Bankruptcy of Modern 
Epistemology," by K. Kempf, S.J., shows that the dis- 
agreement and uncertainty of modern philosophers re- 
garding the fundamental idea of " truth " prevents any 
solid conclusions in this particular branch of philosophy. 

J. Brown, SJ., sketches the efforts of the ritualist 

party in the Anglican Church to restore the ancient 

liturgical vestments. The Condition of Religion in 

Italy in the Middle of the Sixteenth Century, by Pietro 
Tacchi Venturi, S. J., is extensively reviewed. This work 
was awarded a prize of two thousand francs by the 
Imperial Italian Academy, and is said to be remarkable 
for its impartiality. 

Revue Pratique d* Apologetique (i Aug.): Cladius Piat, in his 
article " Intelligence of Children, 1 ' gives a somewhat ex- 
tensive summary of results obtained in experimental 



124 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Oct., 

psychology with regard to the mental faculty of chil- 
dren. "Biblical Commission: Historical Form of 

Beoks," by H. Lesetre. The hagiographers never meant 
to teach history but used the same to illustrate better that 

necessary for salvation. "The Historical Value of 

the First Three Gospels," by M. Lepin, is the first chap- 
ter of an extensive work. 

(15 Aug.): "The Adversaries of Lourdes." A certain 
Doctor of Medicine, of Metz, refuted, in a series of arti- 
cles, the arguments brought forth by M. Bertrin in favor 

of miraculous cures. In " Catholic Spain/' J. Guibert 

states the position of the Vatican that traditional rights 
must be upheld and that the Church in Spain has pre- 
served its secular heritage." The Church of To-day 
in France According to an American Calvinist," by M. 
Langlois. The Calvinist is Barrett Wendell, who was 
astonished at the amount of solid piety underlying the 
French love of pleasure. 

(i Sept.): Abbe Broussole, in his article, treats of the 
works of the celebrated Spanish philosopher, Balmes, es- 
pecially with regard to the apologetic value of his book 

The Art of Arriving at Truth. In the article "The 

Holy Humanity of Our Lord," L. Labauche first defines 
sanctity and distinguishes between positive and negative. 

He treats it from a theological point of view. H. 

Lesetre, reviewing the works of M. H. Welxhinger on 
the war of 1870, defends the Church against the charge 
of lacking patriotism in this crisis. 

Die Kultur (Aug.): In the article "A Life of Labor" Dr. J. 
Him sketches the political and literary abilities of Joseph 
A. Frei von Helfert, president of the Leo Gesellschaft. 

Joseph Weingartner, in his article " History and 

World-Philosophy," proves that the methodological strife 
against the^Christian explanations of the world is without 
justification, since both parties have equal rights of in- 
terpretation. Literary and historical students will find 

the " Genealogical Register of the Times of Charles 
Leonhard" (1792-95) an important source of biographical 
information. 

La Scuolo Cattolica (July-Aug.) : A double number, devoted 
entirely to St. Charles Borromeo. He is considered as 



i9io.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 125 

aa episcopal and social reformer, as a sacred orator, and 
as a master of dogmatic and ascetic theology. Fra Agos- 
tino refutes at length certain charges against this saint 
in connection with the plague of 1576-7. 

La Civilta Cattolica (6 Aug.) : " Religion, Church, and State, 
according to the Modernism of R. Murri." The latest 
views of this apostate priest, who persists in wearing 
the insignia of the Catholic priesthood, despite his open 
hostility to the Church, are characterized by the writer 
as a " series of speculative aberrations." " The Catho- 
lic Literary Movement in Germany " is an account of 
the work done for Catholic literature in Germany by 
R. von Kralik through the foundation, in 1906, of the 
" Gralbund," with its periodical Det Oral. " To him is 
due in great measure the defeat of Modernism in the 
field of literature." 

(20 Aug,): "The Introduction of the Gothic Style in 
Italy," accompanied by illustrations, by C. Bricarelli, S.J. 

A recent work, entitled the Modern Age, by S. 

Sighele, an Italian, which advocates the most radical 
views concerning morality, elicits an article on the de- 
cadence of morals. 

(3 Sept.) : " Medievalism " takes its title from Tyrrell's 
work of that name. The Catholic Church desires to up- 
hold the realism of the Middle Ages, " because it re- 
sponds to the necessary nature of the intellect"; the 
teachings of Tyrrell and others is the "most absolute 
nominalism." This number contains the " New Decree 
Concerning the Age of First Communion," with explana- 
tory remarks. L. Mecheneau, S.J., reviews the recent 

work of P. M. Hetzenauer, Commentarius in Librum Gene- 
sis, at length. The general impression made on the re- 
viewer is favorable to the work. Correspondence from 

the United States : Notes on Italian Immigration ; The 
Eucharistic Congress ; The Elections in Various Cities. 

Razon y Fe (Aug.) : R. Ruiz Amado contributes a paper on 
"Education in Patriotism." The first condition for in- 
stilling a love of country in children is that their teachers 
should possess it. Other suggestions are that the national 
history be taught with a " healthy optimism " ; the na- 
tional literature be read ; and anniversaries of great 



i26 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Oct. 

national events celebrated appropriately with songs, etc. 

In " An Observation on the Propositions of the Prime 

Minister and Catholic Dogma," P. Villada maintains that 
Sr. Canalejas is attacking the "Catholic dogma "of the 
existence of the Church as a complete and independent 
society. 

(Sept): P. Villada maintains, in "The Recall of the 
Spanish Ambassador to the Vatican," that the question 
of religious toleration is a moral one, from which the 
Church cannot rightfully be excluded. "The Solidar- 
ity of the Latin Race," by R. Ruiz Amado. The author 
thinks there is as great a race consciousness among the 
Latins as among the Germans or Anglo-Saxons. A com- 
mon racial stock and religion and affinities of language 

foster this. Under the caption "The Beginnings of 

Co-operation," N. Noguer describes the work of Owen 
and Rochdale. Though the former was bitterly opposed 
to religion, the author thinks that the later developments 
of co-operation are not antagonistic to the Church. 
Espana y America (Sept.): E. Nevent contributes the first of 
a series of articles on "The Characteristics of Funda- 
mental Theology." He divides the study into two parts, 
comprising the data of philosophy and the data of his- 
tory. "An Example of Charity," by P. B. Ibeas, is 

a study of the management of the orphan asylum of 
Valladolid. The conclusion is that it is governed as 
wisely and economically as possible. Tables of the food- 
stuffs supplied to the inmates, with their cost and nutri- 
tive value, form an important part of the article. 



IRecent Events, 

As the members of the Senate 

France. and of the Chamber of Deputies 

have been taking a holiday, very 

little of importance has occurred. The general strike of rail- 
way men which was threatened, and which would have para- 
lyzed the national industries, has so far been averted. There 
is, however, no certainty that all danger is past. The discon- 
tent of the workingmen in various trades and manufactures is 
one of the dark spots in the France of to-day, and gives some 
reason for the dread which is felt of a revolution this dis- 
content having penetrated into the ranks even of the servants 
of the State. Whether the Parliament in its approaching Ses- 
sion will succeed in passing measures sufficient to remove the 
causes of complaint depends upon the fidelity of its members 
in carrying out the promises which they have made by co- 
operating with the government. 

While little has been done, a good deal has been said; and 
what has been said indicates a somewhat selfish spirit. For 
example, the proposals of this country for the benefit of the 
Republic of Liberia have called forth no little criticism, and 
the determination has been expressed to insist upon the rights 
of France by virtue of Treaties made with Liberia. The Temps, 
in fact, has declared that France and England alone are en- 
titled to aid Liberia in the organization of her territory. 
"Intervention from any other quarter would prejudice our in- 
terests, which are paramount." The action of America must, 
therefore, be limited to the granting of a loan, and even in 
this a share must be given to England and to France. 

The same spirit is shown in the matter of the new Turk- 
ish Loan, raised in France, indeed, but not through the bank- 
ing institution of which the government of France has been 
accustomed to make use. On this account it is doubtful 
whether the financial facilities which it is in the power of the 
government to accord will be granted. This rather sordid 
proceeding seems to confirm the assertion often made that it 



128 RECENT EVENTS [Oct., 

is materialistic interests which are supreme at the present 
time. 

To a somewhat higher motive the opposition which has 
been offered to the Hungarian Loan must be attributed. 
Hungary is, of course, associated with Austria in the Triple 
Alliance, and has been, through the mouths of her statesmen, 
boasting of her hearty support of that alliance. It is, there- 
fore, part of a coalition directed against France and its allies, 
and to the political conscience of the French people an appeal 
is made not to contribute funds to strengthen potential ene- 
mies. It is intolerable, it is said, that French savings should 
be devoted to paying for the armaments of the Triple Alliance, 

It is worthy of note in this connection that whatever 
France may have lost in other respects she has become for 
most of the nations of Europe the indispensable means to 
which recourse must be had for the raising of national loans. 
For long years Russia has depended upon French savings, and 
within the last few months Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey 
have raised money in France. Hungary, as we have just said, 
is anxious to do the same, and even Germany has long been 
casting wistful eyes on the French Bourse. It is said, in fact, 
that, by a roundabout way, the funds for the Baghdad Rail- 
way, which is being made under German auspices, have been 
derived from France, or must be, if the work is to go on. 

The increase of the cost of living, which France is experi- 
encing along with other countries which have adopted pro- 
tection, is giving Free Traders an argument of which they are 
taking full advantage. Within the last decade the price of 
necessaries has increased by one-third, and for some articles 
has doubled. Commodities which in June, 1908, were sold at 
an average standard price of 100.8 cost 102 last year and 106 6 
to-day. The price of bread also has risen and certain demi- 
portions served in the restaurants have been abolished. This 
has led to an agitation calling upon the government to sus- 
pend the Customs in order that, for a time, grain may be ad- 
mitted free. The government has not been slow to take the 
matter in hand, and has instituted an inquiry, promising that 
if it should be proved that the increase of prices is due to the 
transgression of the law with reference to market transactions, 
or to the artificial forcing up of prices by speculators, pros- 
ecutions will be instituted. 



i9io.] RECENT EVENTS 129 

It is wonderful how little is heard of Switzerland. About 
once a year the election of a new President is announced. A 
few Alpine accidents occur and from time to time an avalanche. 
Recently there has been news of floods. Doubtless this is a 
sign that all is going well, but it does not make Switzerland 
a country that adds much to the interest of life, as understood 
nowadays. It is not, however, a country to be neglected, 
even as a political power, small and quiet though it is, and of 
their interest in it Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy have 
recently given proof. It is only of late, however, that the 
Third Republic has shown any sense of the possible importance 
of their smaller neighbor. At last it has awakened to a due 
recognition of this importance, and after a period of negotia- 
tion a formal rapprochement has taken place, the seal to which 
has been placed by the visit paid by President Fallieres a few 
weeks ago. Every effort was made to welcome the head of 
the French Republic, and festivities of all kinds were arranged. 
But on the eve of the departure of the President, a railway 
accident, of a very serious character, took place in France. As 
an evidence of sympathy with the sufferers, all the festivities 
were, at the President's request, countermanded. The visit it- 
self, however, was paid, and the substantial result, in the shape 
of a more cordial and intimate friendship between the two Re- 
publics, has, it is hoped, been secured. 

In another quarter France has experienced the mortification 
of seeing her influence supplanted by that of Germany, and 
yet in such a way as to afford no ground of complaint against 
that country. For some years the small army of the Brazilian 
State of Sao Paulo has been trained by French officers, but, 
before the term of their engagement had expired, it has been 
decided to appoint German officers instead of French. As the 
Chilian and Argentine armies are being trained by Germans, 
an indication is given of the extent and growth of the influence 
of Germany in South America, which is in no way pleasing to 
the Republic. The President of Brazil has been the object 
of several marked acts of courtesy on the part of the Kaiser, 
and has been so prompt in reciprocating them, that it seems 
clear that the influence of Germany is growing ever greater 
over the authorities of Brazil. A warning accordingly is given 
to those authorities that the French money market may not 
be opened to supply Brazil's needs when next it applies. 
VOL. xcii. 9 



i3o RECENT EVENTS [Oct., 

The rivalry in armaments necessitated by the attitude main- 
tained by Germany will, it is feared, shortly involve France in 
a further large expenditure of money. The Lebel rifle, which 
is now in use, while capable, it is said, of competing with all 
the rifles of foreign armies, is not so perfect as the war authori- 
ties desire, and a new weapon embodying every technical per- 
fection having been elaborated, its adoption is being urged as, 
if not necessary, at least desirable. The expense, however, 
makes even the War Minister hesitate; for it is said that it 
will cost no less than two hundred millions of dollars. Others 
put the amount at about half this sum. The authorities are in 
this difficulty : if they say that the rifle now in use is totally 
unfit, they may bring Germany down upon them ; if, on the 
other hand, they say that the rifle is as good as can be de- 
sired, there is no reason for incurring the immense expense 
involved in changing. The recent advance in aeronautics renders 
it necessary to take measures for aerial defence. A special 
corps has been formed for this purpose, which has at its ser- 
vice 32 aeroplanes and several airships. Such are the efforts 
being made in order to maintain the balance of power in 
countries which border one upon another. 

Germany, also, has been having 
Germany. its political holiday, the enjoyment 

of which has been somewhat in- 
terfered with by two events a widely extended shipping dis- 
pute and a speech of the Kaiser. The former has not, so far 
as we have heard, been settled, the effects of the latter have 
still to be made manifest. Before visiting Konigsberg, at which 
the speech was made, the Emperor went to Posen, where a 
new Royal Castle, the seventh, we believe, has been building 
for the past five years. It has cost no less a sum than a mil. 
lion and a quarter, and is not, so critics say, of remarkable 
beauty. The disappointment on this occasion was not on ac- 
count of anything said by the Kaiser, but rather on account of 
what he did not say. The Germans are busy in the attempt to 
Germanize the districts which formed part of the former Kingdom 
of Poland, but have met with very little success. An Expro- 
priation Law was made two years ago to further these efforts, 
but seems not to have been put into effect, and the coloniza- 
tion policy has fared no better than it did before the Law was 






i9io.] RECENT EVENTS 131 

made. Under these circumstances it was not unnatural to ex- 
pect that the Kaiser should make an announcement of the 
policy to be adopted in the immediate future. He confined 
himself, however, to generalities, the only reference which he 
made to the question of the relations between Germans and 
Poles being the expression of the hope that the town of Fosen 
" might be and remain a home and nursery of German culture 
and customs. 1 ' 

At Konigsberg, to which the Emperor subsequently proceeded, 
he was, no one will question it, outspoken enough. His son 
and heir, the Crown Prince, had made, two or three days be- 
fore, his first speech in public on the occasion of his being 
installed as Rector Magnificentissimus of the University. In 
this speech the Crown Prince declared it to be the duty of all 
the dwellers in the Empire to emphasize what is essentially 
German in them, in contrast to the efforts towards internation- 
alization which threatened to obliterate their healthy national 
peculiarities. 

The fact that Konigsberg was the place where the Great 
Elector's son, Frederick III. of Brandenburg, had had himself 
crowned King of Prussia, and that he did this by his own 
right, and that also later on it was the scene of his grand- 
father's placing upon his own head the crown of the Kings of 
Prussia by the grace of God alone, and not by Parliaments, 
meetings of the people, or popular decision, formed the Kaiser's 
ground for the assertion that he too was himself the chosen 
instrument of heaven, and that it was as such he performed 
his duties as Regent and as Ruler. "Considering myself as 
the instrument of the Lord," he went on to say, "without 
heeding the views and opinions of the day, I go my way, which 
is devoted solely and alone to the prosperity and peaceful de- 
velopment of our Fatherland." 

These utterances have called forth severe criticism from 
friends and foes alike. The friends of the monarchy fear that 
they will stir up an agitation dangerous to the throne and adding 
strength to the ever- increasing force of Socialism. The leading 
Catholic journal, the Germania t expresses the hope that the 
Emperor may not possess a false idea of his attributes as the 
instrument of heaven, and may not leave unheeded the opin- 
ions of others. It finds consolation in the fact that in the past 
his action has belied his words, and that he has always listened 



i3* RECENT EVENTS [Oct., 

to the opinion of the people when it has been decisively and 
clearly expressed. The Socialist organ demands an instant 
summoning of the Reichstag to take action upon a distinct and 
clear violation of the Constitution, a declaration of absolutism, 
a disregard of the people and of the people's representatives. 
So loud was the outcry, that it had to be explained semi- 
officially that the speech was not a governmental action; but 
a personal expression of faith on the part of the monarch; 
and of this personal faith the Kaiser, in a subsequent speech, 
said that all he meant to imply, when he called himself a 
chosen instrument of the Lord, was that he felt himself to be 
working under the highest protection and with the highest 
mandate of our Lord and God, "and that I assume to be the 
case with every honest Christian whoever he may be." More 
will be heard of this matter when the Reichstag meets, for 
there will then be an interpellation. 

Statistics of the movement of population in the Empire 
have recently been published, from which it appears that, 
while the decline in the death-rate has been checked, the de- 
cline in the birth-rate has continued. This decline has taken 
place in all States of the Empire and in all parts of the coun- 
try during the last ten years. The rate for the whole Empire 
is 4 per cent lower (33 per 1,000) in 1908 than in 1899, 37 
per 1,000. In Berlin the rate has now fallen to 23.9 per 
1,000 inhabitants. The rate is markedly low in the Protestant 
parts, in Saxony most of all, while the highest rate is in the 
Catholic parts, with the exception of Alsace-Lorraine. 

In pleasing contrast to the German 

Austria-Hungary. Emperor's self-assertion is the self- 

effacement of the Austro- Hun- 
garian Emperor-King; and as the former's speech has called 
forth the spirit of dissension and criticism, the quiet celebration 
of the eightieth birthday of Francis Joseph has been attended 
by a universal manifestation of esteem and even reverence, 
with not a discordant note. By the Emperor's command the 
only special celebration of the day consisted in the foundation 
of a large number of charitable institutions and the granting 
of a large number of amnesties. A family dinner at Ischl, 
and the performance of a play written by his youngest daughter, 
in which the actors and actress were his grandchildren, can 



i9io.] RECENT EVENTS 133 

scarcely be called a public celebration. While, in deference to 
the Emperor's wish, no public ceremonies took place, yet it 
was not in his power to prevent the manifestation in the public 
press of the respect in which he was held, a respect which he 
has earned by the services of a long life, not merely to the 
Empire as a whole, but to the individuals of which it is made 
up. For while he himself lives a life almost of austerity, sleep- 
ing upon a hard camp bed, rising early, his special care being 
that of needy children, he has ever an ear for a tale of misfortune 
or injustice, and long hours every day are passed in the 
drudgery of his official duties. To him is due the fact that 
war was averted last year, and in fact he has made his^ mod- 
erating influence felt far and wide. To quote the words of a 
wall informed writer: "For him life, from youth onwards, has 
been a ' mission/ a divinely appointed task, to be accomplished 
in sickness and in health, in good fortune or ill ; and just as 
he has never shrunk from duty, nor hardly even faltered|under 
heavy strokes of fate, so he regards with serene composure the 
lengthening of the shadows, trusting only that strength will be 
vouchsafed him until the end." 

To have held the supreme control from 1848 to 1910, and 
to have made his dominions infinitely happier than when his 
reign began, although territory has been lost and the external 
position of the Empire impaired, is no small achievement. 
Perhaps the most remarkable thing of all is that, instead of 
his love of power having grown greater with age, it was he 
who was the most anxious of all to share with his subjects 
that power, by promoting a few years ago the adoption of 
universal suffrage for the Reichsrath, and by insisting at the 
present time that the Hungarian politicians should fulfill their 
promises to make the same change in Hungary. 

In this connection it is worthy of note that the influence 
of kings seems to be growing while that of parliaments, al- 
though not in the same degree, is waning. Every one recog- 
nizes the work done by the late King of England in main- 
taining the peace and in being the means of altering the 
traditional attitude of his country towards France and Russia. 
King George of Greece is recognized as having been of greater 
service to that country than the Parliament which has led it 
to the brink of a military despotism. Accordingly, their 
number is being increased. A few years ago, when Norway 



134 RECENT EVENTS [Oct., 

separated from Sweden, it was expected, from the democratic 
spirit of its people, that the Republican form of government 
would have been chosen, but the monarchical was adopted. 
Two years ago the Prince ol Bulgaria became a king, and 
within the last two months Prince Nicholas of Montenegro 
has become King Nicholas. In 1905 he ceased to be, as Prince, 
an absolute ruler, for he conferred a Constitution and a Parlia- 
ment upon his people. The Parliament, in its turn, has made 
him king. Jurists must determine from what source he derives 
his rights. And while there have been movements to confer 
greater powers or at least practical influence upon individual 
rulers, there has been a widespread movement, on the other 
hand, to diminish their power, attended already with some 
success, as in Turkey and Persia, and eventually China, but 
with less in India and Egypt, perhaps we should add Germany. 
In Hungary a complete change has been wrought. In the 
Parliament in which for years nothing could be done, owing 
to systematic obstruction, since the last election in March 
everything has worked without a hitch, and the Premier, Count 
Khuen Hedervary, has been able to submit for Royal signature 
the Estimates, the Recruits Bill, the Foreign Loan Bill, the 
Census Bill, and sundry other measures. The Premier repre- 
sents the Dualist revival, which accepts the Compromise of 
1867 as the permanent adjustment of the relations between 
Austria and Hungary a cause which a short time ago seemed 
almost hopeless. The Independence Party ruined itself by its 
insincere treatment of the Franchise question. The majority 
which supports the Premier can hardly, however, be consid- 
ered as the unbiassed voice of the people, for the election 
was " made " by him with the help of the Liberal leader, 
Count Tisza. Nor was the election thus " made " without the 
use of violence, bribery, intimidation, and various subterfuges, 
as was frankly admitted by one of the leaders of Count 
Tisza's new Party. "Let us not forget," he said, "that we 
are Magyars and that electoral abuses are of old standing in 
our country. For centuries all Magyar parties have thus 
erred.' 1 Stone-throwing and bell-ringing, arson and violence, 
along with bribery, were practised by their forefathers in various 
degrees and by all parties. " We should have been ' green,' 
and have failed in our duty to the Fatherland, had we been 
more fastidious/ 1 was the almost cynical avowal of Count 



19 io.] RECENT EVENTS 135 

Tisza. Yet it is anticipated that from this bad tree good fruit 
may be gathered; and undoubtedly, during the past session, 
there was no obstruction, and confidence is expressed that the 
suffrage question will soon be settled without imperiling the 
Magyar State Idea, that whatever happens the Magyars must 
retain the supremacy they have so long enjoyed. It is thought 
that Hungary is entering upon a period of political calm. 

Sympathizers with the new regime 

Turkey. in Turkey cannot help feeling 

anxiety as to the future, not so 

much on account of internal developments, but on account of 
the somewhat aggressive and provocative character of its foreign 
policy, especially toward Greece. The purchase of war- ships 
from Germany which has been made, and the projected greater 
increase of the navy, the fact that arms are being imported in 
large quantities, the long-continued boycott of Greek merchan- 
dise, the aggressive attitude adopted towards such purely in- 
ternal affairs of Greece as the elections for the approaching 
National Assembly, the devotion to the service of the army 
of large sums of money in preference to everything else, render 
it almost evident that war with Greece is the thing which is 
nearest the heart of those who control the Ottoman Empire. It 
still remains under martial law, both in the letter and the spirit. 
Nor, if the Orthodox Patriarch may be believed, are things much 
better internally. The equality promised under a Constitu- 
tional regi.ne has proved, the Patriarch says, an empty phrase, 
while liberty is so interpreted as to be more intolerable than 
the oppression of absolutism. The State is ruled by an invisible 
power, the aim of which is the annihilation of all religions and 
of the national existence. Abuses of all kinds abound. Free 
citizens have been tortured and killed by the instruments of a 
free Constitutional State. Numerous acts of injustice to Chris- 
tians have been committed. These accusations may be some- 
what exaggerated, especially as the real ground of the Patriarch's 
discontent is the overriding of the immemorial privileges pos- 
sessed by the Orthodox Church. The mere fact that such an 
attack could be made with impunity seems to show that there 
is not a complete absence of freedom. There is no doubt, how- 
ever, that the present government is a military government, 
that its object is to bring all the races under the rule of one 



136 RECENT EVENTS [Oct 

law, to abolish privileges long existent. This cannot be done 
by the wisest without a great deal of friction, and as a matter 
of fact, by the admission of the Turkish government itself, its 
proceedings have in many cases been extremely harsh. 

While in Europe a^new kingdom 

The Annexation of Korea, has taken its place among the na- 
tions, in Asia an. Empire has ceased 

to exist, and even its name will disappear, for Korea is now 
merely the province of Cho-sen, one of the many provinces of 
the Japanese Empire. There are some who look upon this 
annexation as yet another proof of the grasping character of 
Japanese policy, but the general opinion seems to be that 
under the circumstances the annexation was inevitable. In 
fact the Emperor of Korea expressly admits this, and if he 
spoke his true mind that settles the question. If he did not, 
it is a proof of the Japanese contention that the Koreans are of 
too weak a character to exercise control and to prevent abuses. 
An Emperor with anything of the requisite strength'would not 
have suffered his power and the existence of his country to 
have been annihilated without at least a protest. He relin- 
quished his power by issuing an Edict, in which he said that 
it was impossible for him to effect reforms, and that it was on 
this account that he felt it wise to place the task in other 
hands. He showered decorations upon the Japanese who had 
superseded him, and accepted as his compensation the promise 
of due and appropriate treatment for himself and his family, 
made by the Emperor of Japan. All the Powers have acqui- 
esced in the annexation. Their only anxiety was that trade 
should not be hampered by an increase of customs. Japan 
having promptly promised that no change would bejmade for 
ten years, the new allotment of the world's surface has been 
accepted without formal protest. 



With Our Readers 



SEVERAL years ago Marc Sangnier founded in France a society 
called " Le Sillon " (The Furrow). He and his companions 
wished in this way to answer the call of Leo XIII. for Catholics to 
work for the uplifting of the laboring classes. The society rapidly 
increased in membership and seemed likely to achieve great good 
for the Catholic cause in France. But to many it soon seemed to 
show tendencies and to champion doctrines opposed to Catholic 
teaching. The organization was the object of much criticism and 
much debate throughout France. Members of the hierarchy ex- 
pressed different views, in approval and disapproval of the organiza- 
tion, till it was evident to those acquainted with the state of affairs 
that the supreme authority of the Holy See would have to pronounce 
upon the question. 



DURING the past month a most important letter was addressed by 
Pope Pius X. to the Cardinals, Archbishops, and Bishops of 
France. The Holy Father states plainly that the organization 
known as " Le Sillon " has departed from its original aims and from 
the Catholic teachings which originally inspired it. The encyclical 
does not call for the dissolution of the society. It points out what 
is good in the movement, and shows clearly, and condemns emphati- 
cally, what is dangerous and erroneous. The Holy Father writes 
most kindly to the members of the organization. He states that he 
has long hesitated to speak, but " things have come to such a pass 
that we should be betraying our duty if we kept silence any longer. 
We owe the truth to our dear children of the Sillon, who have been 
carried away by a generous ardor upon a course which is as false as 
it is dangerous/' In a lengthy exposition the letter considers the 
Sillon in its relations to ecclesiastical authority ; its political and 
social theories, the means and methods which it employs to further 
these ; shows wherein it has departed from Catholic doctrine, and 
lays down certain rules for its future observance. 



THE anti- Catholic press of France used the letter, of course, to 
show that the Catholic Church is opposed to the Republic. 



138 WITH OUR READERS [Oct., 

But in this they are absolutely dishonest, for Pius X. expressly 
states, quoting I^eo XIII., that " provided justice be safeguarded 
there is no prohibition against nations taking the form of govern- 
ment which best corresponds with their character or the institutions 
and customs which they have received from their forefathers." 



WITH regard to the measures which the Sillonmust observe, Pius 
X. begs them " for their own good, and for that of the Church 
and of France," " to range themselves by dioceses, to work under 
the direction of their respective bishops, for the Christian and Catho- 
lic regeneration of the people." And in the face of the social needs 
of the times he exhorts the bishops to look tenderly on all human 
needs ; to form the conscience of the people and of the public 
powers ; to take an active part in the right organization of society ; 
and to set apart learned priests who will apply themselves to the 
study of social science. 



IMMEDIATELY after the appearance of this letter on the Sillon, 
1 Marc Sangnier, its founder, published in his newspaper, The 
Democracy, an edifying letter of complete submission. He wrote also 
to his fellow-members, begging them <c to act as good Catholics with- 
out bitterness or ill-feeling." " I,et us abandon ourselves fully," he 
pleaded, " to the will of God and the authority of the Church, and 
let nothing destroy our confidence." 



IT is certainly a rule of courtesy not to speak of justice which all 
of us are called upon to respect, not to publish an author's writ- 
ings without his permission, or, if he be dead, without the permis- 
sion of his literary executor. For it is surely evident to all that 
no writer wishes anything from his pen to be published in perma- 
nent form unless he has the opportunity to revise and correct. His 
knowledge has increased ; his powers have developed and have 
been strengthened ; his views have changed ; and what he wrote ten 
years ago he might repudiate to-day as unworthy and unfit. One of 
the reasons why he leaves behind him a literary executor is that 
such executor may do the work of revising, correcting, and editing, 
which he himself would do were he alive. The whole world admits 
that this is the sacred, inviolable right of an author. And in 
particular those who love and admire him, who have learnt inspiring 
lessons from his lips, will personally resent the unauthorized publi- 
cation of his writings, which, worthy or unworthy, neither he nor 






1910.] WITH OUR READERS 139 

his literary executor had the opportunity to edit for publication. 
Their resentment is justified by every canon of literary ethics. By 
this we do not wish to infer that any of the prose from the master 
hand of the author whose work has occasioned these remarks is 
without merit ; we wish to reserve for him a right that is unques- 
tionably his own and all the more his own because he was a 
genius in expression both in prose and poetry. 



WE write these words apropos of a volume published by the Ball 
Publishing Company, of Boston, Mass., and entitled : A Rene- 
gade Poet and Other Essays, by Francis Thompson . 

The numerous articles published in THE CATHOUC WORI/D on 
Francis Thompson have made our readers acquainted with his work. 
They will regret the publication of this volume by unauthorized 
and incapable hands. No discrimination has been used in its edit- 
ing, and it shows a very inadequate appreciation of the worth and 
work of Francis Thompson. For example, we will quote this crude 
estimate of the great poet given in the introduction, which, by the 
way, and significantly, is the only copyrighted portion of the book. 

"Thompson prattles along in his prose like a happy child, 
exuberant and fanciful. Now and then he has long chats with him- 
self and finds that, on the whole, he is good company. If he chats 
much, he sings to himself more. The burden of his song is light, 
for, being only a child, he has no responsibilities, no doctrines, no 
heavy sense of an apostolic mission. He is the unconscious, airy 
singer, the skylark who soars to heaven in a lyric rapture of exu- 
berant irresponsibility." 

If there was ever a writer upon whom the sense of responsibility 
rested heavily, and through whom that sense found voice, it was 
Francis Thompson. And after Thompson's death, to quote -the 
words of Mr. Chesterton, there was " a continuous stir of comment 
upon his (Thompson's) attraction to, and gradual absorption in, 
Catholic theological ideas. It is, of course, true that Francis 
Thompson devoted himself more and more to poems not only purely 
Catholic but, one may say, purely ecclesiastical." And Mr. Ches- 
terton goes on to show how emphatically orthodox and dogmatic 
Francis Thompson was. "He could have written any number of 
good poems on the Cross. He could deduce perpetually rich and 
branching meanings out of two plain facts, like bread and wine." 



WHEN we had read the volume published by the Ball Publishing 
Company we at once wrote asking for an explanation to Thomp- 
son's literary executor, Mr. Wilfrid Meynell.^Mr. Meynell sent in 



WITH OUR READERS [Oct., 

answer a copy of a letter which he had written to the Ball Publishing 
Company, and which we print below. He further stated to us : " I 
begged him (Mr. O'Brien) to desist, because those signed articles 
do not represent Thompson adequately, the greater part of his work 
being anonymous. Moreover, they lack revisions, which are neces- 
sary to their preservation, and the volume of his prose I have in 
preparation for the press, following his own directions and selection, 
will include a number of unpublished essays, without which any 
Such collection would be further incomplete." The following is a 
copy of Mr. MeynelPs letter to the publishers of the volume concern- 
ing which we speak : 

IvONDON W., 12 July, 1910. 

DEAR SIR : May I express my regret that you have departed 
from the general rule of courtesy, and even fair play, in such mat- 
ters, by publishing an unauthorized volume of essays contributed 
by the late Francis Thompson to the pages of an English magazine. 

When I heard ol his design I begged Mr. O'Brien to hold his 
hand, for such of his prose as Francis Thompson desired should 
re-appear in book form is now in preparation for the press, and the 
forestalling of this volume by another which lacks the main body of 
Francis Thompson's fine work, and offers the remainder without the 
advantage of his revisions, is an injustice alike to author and to 
reader. 

I am, dear Sir, yours faithfully, 

WII/FRID MEYNEU,, 
Francis Thompson's Literary Executor. 



AN article of great human interest to all who think of the future 
of our country, and of our Church therein, appears in the 
October number of Everybody^. It deals not with the solution of 
the problems. It is no deep study, but it graphically puts before 
the reader the conditions that create the problem or rather problems 
heavy with meaning for both our Church and our country. 



THE writer has been speaking of the building up of the democracy. 
He continues : 

" ' But all this was done before,' the reader may object. ' The 
thirteen colonies long ago went through the whole mixing business. 
That's how we were made.' 

* ' So we were ; but the same mixing business is now to be repeat- 
ed on a scale tenfold more tremendous. And not only this : the races 



i9io.] WITH OUR READERS 141 

to be mixed are infinitely farther apart in climatic and racial differ- 
ences. And not only this : for as all things under heaven move 
faster now than at any other age since the flood, so this mixing is to 
be done not slowly as before, in quiet, scattered farming communi- 
ties, but in vast human hives called cities and factory towns, at a 
speed which even in our lifetime seems certain to produce changes 
dramatic and deep in the city life of the nation. 

"Now it is just beginning. The greatest of all immigration 
waves has come only in the past twenty years ; and its ten millions of 
immigrants the Italians, Bohemians, Jews, and Poles, the Swedes, 
Norwegians, and Greeks are only beginning to form first blood ties 
with the peoples who have come here before them. 

' ' How few of us are awake to these opening scenes of the drama. 
How many good preachers go on with their work of to-day without 
thinking what effect on church and creed this race drama is to have ; 
. . . of what may happen to laws and political systems and even 
to the economic frame of society through the welding of such widely 
different habits and customs, religions, convictions of every kind 
from the slow work of the Past ; such varied hopes, desires, ambi- 
tions for self, and social-political theories, dreams, and ideals for 
the quickening work of the Future." 



SIR ROBERTSON NICOU,, reviewing the Life of Cardinal 
Vaughan, by Snead-Cox, in his paper, The British Weekly, the 
Non- Conformist organ in England, speaks of it as " the best biogra- 
phy we have read for years from a literary point of view." And 
in the course of his review says : " We doubt if Roman Catholicism 
was ever stronger in such enlightened countries as Germany, Bel- 
gium, Holland, and America, than it is to-day. We have to recog- 
nize the facts, however unwelcome these facts may be." 



r PHOUGH it has appeared in print many, many times we think 
1 this letter worthy to be printed again here for the benefit of those 
of our readers who have not read it. The letter was written by the 
late Florence Nightingale to the Superior of the Irish Sisters who 
labored with her during the horrors of Scutari, where, in its British 
cemetery, lie 8,000 nameless victims of the Crimean war. 

" I do not presume to express praise or gratitude to you, Rev- 
erend Mother ; because it would look as though I thought that you 
had done this work not unto God but unto me. You were far above 



142 WITH OUR READERS [Oct., 

me in fitness for the general superintendency in worldly talent of 
administration, and tar more in the spiritual qualifications which 
God values in a superior. My being placed over you was my 
misfortune, not my fault. What you have done for the work no 
one can ever say. I do not presume to give you any tribute but 
my tears." 



WK reprint the following from The Catholic Fortnightly Review y of 
St. Louis : 

" The cities that have the largest percentage of Catholics in their 
population, according to the recent religious census are : Fall River, 
Mass. (86.5 per cent) ; San Francisco (81.1 per cent) ; New Orleans 
(79.7 per cent) ; New York (76.9 per cent) ; Providence, R. I. 
(76.5 per cent) ; St. lyouis (69 per cent) ; Boston (68.7 per cent) ; 
Chicago (68.2 per cent) ; Philadelphia (51.8 per cent). 

1 ' Commenting on these somewhat surprising figures, the St. 
Paul Wanderer (No. 2228) says : 

" * It is a good thing that we get this information from the cen- 
sus ; no one would have guessed from the municipal administration 
of these cities that they are so largely Catholic. On the contrary, 
there has been in evidence so much corruption in several of them 
that one would have been tempted to conclude that they had among 
their citizens only a very small proportion of Catholics and that 
these had crawled into a hole.' 

"Our excellent contemporary adds that so long as American 
Catholics have not learned to apply the principles of their religion 
to the public life of the cities in which they happen to live there is 
not the ghost of a hope that the Church will save the nation from 
the impending social dangers. 

" When shall we learn that we should take a lively part in poli- 
tics, municipal, state, and national not in order to enable a limited 
number of Catholic professional politicians to get their snouts into 
the public trough, but to enforce our Catholic world- view in public 
life ! The most promising field for such reform work, as the Wan- 
derer points out, are those cities and towns in which Catholics are in 
the majorit} T . The Socialists are now reforming Milwaukee. Why 
have not the Catholics long ago reformed Fall River, San Francisco, 
New Orleans, New York, Providence, St. Louis, Chicago, and 
Philadelphia ? 

" To discuss this and allied questions would be infinitely more 
profitable than to indulge in vain-glorious boasting of the " wonder- 
ful progress the Church has been making in America." The 



WITH OUR READERS 



143 



Church has not been making as much progress in these United 
States, relatively speaking, as it has in China. In fact, it has not 
even been holding its own. Such articles as the one entitled ' Are 
Our Skirts Clean ? ' in the August Extension show that some of our 
journals are awaking. I,et the entire Catholic press of the country 
wake up and do its duty. Then there will be some hope of im- 
provement." 



THK consecration of St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York City, will 
take place on October 5. We have already brought the cele- 
bration of this happy event to the attention of our readers. The 
celebration itself will occupy three days. Cardinals Vannutelli, 
IvOgue, and Gibbons will be present, and the sermon at the consecra- 
tion will be delivered by Archbishop Glennon, of St. I^ouis. 



WE are most pleased to call the attention of our readers, who, we 
know, will be at once interested, to the L,eague for the Salva- 
tion of Souls and the Conversion of America. The requirements for 
membership are few. There are no dues. It is a league of prayer, 
and will, with God's grace, bring down innumerable blessings on 
our country. Send your name to Corpus Christi Monastery, Hunts 
Point, New York, and full particulars will be sent to you. 



BOOKS RECEIVED. 



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What Pictures To See in Europe in One Summer. By Lorinda M. Bryant. 

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net. 

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The Mirage of the Many. By William T. Walsh. Price $1.50. Mad Shepherds ; and 
Other Human Studies. By L. P. Jacks. Price $1.20 net. 

FR. PUSTET, & Co., New York: 

One Christmas Eve at Roxbury Crossing ; and Other Christmas Tales. By Cathryn Wal- 
lace. Price 75 cents net. 

STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY, New York: 

The Lost Art of Conversation. Selected Essays. By Horatio S. Kraus. Price $1.50 net. 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 'New York: 

The Barrier (La Barriere). By Rend Bazin. Price $i net. 

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Life Lessons From Blessed Joan r ofArc. By Father Bernard Vaughan, S. J. 

MACMILLAN COMPANY, New York : 

The Imitation of Christ. By Thomas A Kempis. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, 
by Brother Leo, F.S.C. Price 25 cents net. 

EXPRESSION COMPANY, Boston : 

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and II. Price $3 net. Flamsted Quarries. By Mary E. Waller. Price $1.50. 

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REV. C. A. MARTIN, Cleveland : 

Catholic Religion. A Statement of Christian Teaching and History. By Rev. C. A. 
Martin. "Price $i. 

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Education in Sexual Physiology and Hygiene. A Physician's Message. By Philip Zenner. 
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Home Life in Ireland. By Robert Lynd. 

B. HERDER, St. Louis, Mo. : 

'.ctures on the History o 
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SANDS & Co., London : 



Lectures on the History of Religions. Vol. IV. _ Price 60 cents net. Footsteps in the 
Stoi 



Mysticism. Its True Nature and Value. By A. B. Sharpe, M.A. Price 5*. 




THE 

CATHOLIC WORLD. 

VOL. XCII. NOVEMBER, 1910. No. 548. 

THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC CHARITIES. 

AN INTERPRETA TION. 
BY WILLIAM J. KERBY, PH.D. 

|HE National Conference of Catholic Charities 
succeeded. From whatsoever standpoint it is 
viewed, the success which it met surpassed 
every expectation of its most confident friends. 
The Conference was an experiment. Men ex- 
perienced in the field of Catholic charity had sensed in the 
drift of things the need of some such gathering. In response 
to the suggestion that an effort in that direction be made, 
the Rector of the Catholic University invited about twenty- 
five laymen and priests, leaders in the field of Catholic charity 
in this country, to meet at the Catholic University in Febru- 
ary of this year. Two days' earnest discussion and survey of 
things led that committee to the unanimous conclusion that a 
National Conference of Catholic Charities was desirable and 
feasible. Provisional organization was effected, and the work 
of organizing the Conference was promptly begun. Approxi- 
mately four hundred delegates met at the Catholic University, 
September 25 to 28, in response to the invitation of the com- 
mittee. They brought with them faith in the plan and enthu- 
siasm for it. They came more eager to learn than to teach, 
and they made of the gathering an event which will stand in 
the record of similar movements in the American Catholic 
Church as one of the most inspiring and helpful. The dele- 
gates to the Conference felt this. The general and the sec- 
tional meetings during the four days of the sessions verified 
it. The inspiration which was universally shared and univer- 

Copyright. 1910. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE 

IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK. 
VOL. XCII. 10 



146 CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC CHARITIES [Nov., 

sally imparted, put the final stamp of creditable success on 
the Conference. 

The delegates who were present and active represented a 
sufficiently large number of cities to make the Conierence a 
good index of the tone of lay Catholic charities in general. 
The diversity of works which they represented was sufficiently 
great to render the gathering a fairly accurate indication of 
the power and the widely diversified range of our charity in- 
terests. The ripe experience of many ot the delegates coming 
to this new venture from other fields where they had long 
since won honor and achieved distinction lent a value to their 
favorable judgment of the Conference which it would be mock 
modesty to overlook in any description of it. In anticipation 
of the permanent report, which will be necessarily delayed, 
THE CATHOLIC WORLD has requested an interpretation of the 
Conference as a whole. 

The interpretation offered in these pages is not a record 
of activities. It does not, for instance, endeavor to point out 
details in the treatment of the questions nor the views that came 
to formal expression. It represents an endeavor to catch the 
collective tone of the gathering; to find out what the dele- 
gates discovered; what new purposes were engendered; what 
larger outlooks were suggested. It puts together assents as 
well as dissents and endeavors to find a common meaning in 
both. It reads in the applause of an audience as definite a 
manifestation of feeling as is to be found in the words of the 
speaker who provoked it, and in the criticisms heard about 
the grounds, a measurable revelation of the spirit and the 
policy to be found scattered among the delegates. 

A first lesson that the Conference seems to teach is that 
the lay Catholic charity forces in the United States are eager 
to come together and to co-operate. One discovered this in 
the greetings among delegates; in the enthusiasm and gladness 
with which well-known workers in given lines were met by 
others who were looking for them; in the joyful and almost 
nervous manner in which experiences of the most varied kinds 
were exchanged among delegates ; in the impulsive projects 
that sprung up on every side during the days of the Confer- 
ence; projects which, though in the nature of things destined 
to be short lived, did serve admirably to reveal the heart and 
spirit that were behind them. There was the tone of discovery 
everywhere about the University grounds. From West and 



i9io.J CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC CHARITIES 147 

South, from East and North, came men and women who had 
been working together in an unexpressed spiritual brotherhood 
and had not felt the consciousness of it. They had been obey- 
ing a common spiritual inspiration in working among the poor, 
and had drawn their inspiration from the poor and from God, 
but not from one another. This meeting in the Conference 
completed the trinity of inspiration and engendered the enthu- 
siasm which distinguished it. 

Permanent organization of the Conference was effected 
because every one demanded it. The instinct of those in 
charge, however, led them rightly to do as little as possible 
in the way of defining things, and as much as possible in 
pointing out a way. All of the charity organizations that 
were represented stood and stand strongly for their own au- 
tonomy. And rightly, too. It was felt that the place which 
a National Conference takes may not be one which will invade 
in any manner the autonomy or the field of existing organiza- 
tions. It should not be and it aims not to be a direct agency 
of charity. It aims to be and it ought to be an organization 
creating opportunity through which the national consciousness 
of our Catholic charities may come to expression. Our inter- 
ests in philosophy, in teaching, in principle, are common. The 
dangers that we face and the relations into which we must 
enter, are identical. The problems of administration that 
harass us are alike in kind, and unlike only in degree. We 
have, therefore, much in common on which may be based suc- 
cessfully a National Conference, But our problems of relief 
and of social service are distinct. Our fields are widely scat- 
tered; local conditions and resources vary and, therefore, we 
must have, to the greatest degree, local independence, self-suffi- 
cient organization in individual bodies, and, consequently, in- 
violable autonomy in individual Charity Associations. 

It is in this clearly restricted sense that the spirit of the 
National Conference of Charities expressed itself. We must 
come together. We must compare notes. We must share our 
wisdom, remaining still independent in our fields of work. In 
works of charity, as varied as those conducted under the au- 
spices of the Catholic Church, there is needed some attempt 
at whole views of things, some effort to stand back and place 
all things in their relations to catch their meaning. Catholic 
instinct is at work in our charities as well as principle and 
spirit. One city or one organization may not reveal them as 



148 CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC CHARITIES [Nov., 

clearly as twenty would, and thus we discovered, what indeed 
was obvious, that we did not half know one another. The 
Conference is warranted if it will lead to the upbuilding of a 
national view of our charities and of our policies in them. 

Another lesson that impressed itself is that among our lay 
charity forces there is a greater abundance of experience, of 
talent, of power and consecration than we usually imagine. 
We have men and women in great numbers who have served 
most intelligently in every field of charity for many years. 
They have views and they have an outlook. Hampered some- 
what by local conditions, by distance, and relative segregation, 
these have not come together into a national view. The Con- 
ference is a step toward such a view. It brought out in fact 
a manifestation of experience, ability, and force that sustained 
and enthused the delegates. 

Some mental process, whose origin is not clear but whose 
action is, has led many of us in the direction of a pessimistic 
view of our charities. It is a common experience to meet 
non-Catholics who enthuse over our works while we remain 
silent. In fact, we are so accustomed to big sacrifice, to un- 
calculating consecration and big achievement in charity, and all 
of it accomplished with such ease, that nothing short of the 
gigantic seems to awaken us. But there is really no call for 
the gigantic. No one could have witnessed the varied sessions 
of the Conference without being proud of the array of ability, 
experience, and forcefulness that adorned the rostrum and 
thronged the hall. No one at all observant could fail to read 
the unmistakable symptoms of resourcefulness and insight in 
the men and women who spoke with authority because they 
were captains among their kind. We discovered one another 
during those days. Not only that. It was noticed too that 
the views that are entertained among our active charity work- 
ers are thoroughly up-to-date. Now and then we complain, 
swayed by an impression whose origin we cannot trace but 
whose truth we have not questioned, that we Catholics are 
antiquated, that our institutions are anachronisms, and that the 
only wisdom in modern charity is to be found beyond our 
lines. But the gathering at the Conference of Charities dis- 
sipated that impression in more minds than one. We found 
our leaders as thoroughly convinced of the incomplete and 
unsatisfactory character of mere relief work as could be asked. 
We found them speaking for the integrity of the family and 



i9io.] CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC CHARITIES 149 

of the home in tones that could not be misunderstood. We 
heard the Superior of an Infant Asylum advocate the home 
for the orphan quite as vigorously as the most advanced of 
our often mistaken critics. We found the delegates as eager 
for social and preventive work as any reasonably careful 
student of human history and of institutions could ask. Even 
where fault was found the fault itself had within it the hope 
of progress. 

It was seen too that the delegates to the Conference were 
as definite and enthusiastic as to the social mission of the 
Church as either of the last two Popes. I mean it as no 
pleasantry when I say that the Conference was nearly as pro- 
gressive as Leo XIII. or Pius X. Both of these Popes have 
urged and insisted on the Social Mission of the Church and 
on the divine sanction for many of the social movements 
which look toward the uplifting of the weaker economic classes, 
It is well to place things where they belong, and so to under- 
stand that in the social turmoil of the modern world these 
Popes have been not indeed behind the age but in advance of 
it; and when we turn our eyes toward the future we see them 
magnificently placed for the social leadership of the next half 
century. No applause was more enthusiastic and no faces 
beamed with more instant inspiration than in the general ses- 
sion of the Conference in which the papers proclaimed unmis- 
takably the Social Mission of the Church and the wider duty 
of organized Catholic charity toward the suffering classes. 

Similarly, the social, political, and industrial causes of 
poverty were recognized and commented on, while the demand 
for social action in prevention was as clearly heard and as 
warmly endorsed as the keenest social student could ask. I 
would not have this estimate misunderstood. It is true that 
the reports made from cities throughout the United States 
during the first day of the Conference did not indicate that 
our organized charities are as active in promoting social move- 
ments as many of the secular charities are. But this, I think, 
has been incorrectly interpreted as a sign of indifference to 
the cause. What seems like Catholic inaction in social and 
preventive work is not altogether Catholic inaction. Inasmuch 
as it is it can be to a great extent explained. Inasmuch as 
it is not, one should discriminate in speaking of it. 

The conditions of our civilization, the drag on institutions 
and their peculiar mechanism get in our way. Nature has 



CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC CHARITIES [Nov., 

imperatively set many of the limitations against which we 
vainly struggle. Hence the social inaction so much spoken of 
is political inaction, social inaction, economic inaction, natural 
and inevitable inaction, and therefore, it is wrong to call it in 
particular Catholic inaction. 

But even as regards the Church there are conditions which 
one must note in expressing a judgment concerning her rela- 
tion to modern economic questions. American practice bids 
the Church to remain free of politics. Modern political con- 
ditions make all social reform and most social morality ques- 
tions nothing other than political questions. Modern circum- 
stances so diffuse Catholic men and women throughout the 
whole social body that the channels of solidarity are choked 
up and it is practically impossible to call out a unified ex- 
pression of Catholic feeling or instinct on any question other 
than one touching on spiritual or religious interests as these 
are traditionally understood. Now, if social reform is made 
political and our much-vaunted traditions forbid the Church 
to be a political agent, what is she to do? It is remarkable 
that for a certain twelve years, during which bishops and 
priests preached and wrote with customary regularity for social 
justice and reform, not one of them was known to have ap- 
peared before a certain congressional committee in advocacy 
of any reform with which that committee might be concerned. 
They were roundly praised by its chairman, a man not of our 
faith, for the wisdom and self-restraint that kept them within 
what he termed their legitimate field of action. Sometimes, 
when situations are analyzed, they are understood. 

When a drawbridge opens, automobiles, drays, carriages, 
and foot-passengers are stopped and a congested and confused 
mass of beings results. And so it is, as the Church, State, 
school, labor union, and legislature, stand puzzled before the 
situation in modern society, that keen minds fail to analyze 
and wise statesmen fail to master. We must lift some impu 
tation of inaction from the shoulders of the Church and dis 
tribute it more widely throughout society. This is possibly 
more a personal inference of the writer than a positive feature 
of the collective sense of the Charities Conference. It is 
probably the negative of the other features alluded to but it 
seems to belong to the situation as a whole. 

The thought may be carried farther. The impression of 
weakness and of lack of progress which many share concerning 



i9io.] CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC CHARITIES 151 

Catholic charity may be ascribed in some part to the fact that 
progressive Catholics who have wished to express their social 
conscience have been inclined to do so in and through civic 
or non-religious movements because they saw no other vehicle 
of self-expression at hand. Writing in the hurry which cir- 
cumstances cause at this moment, it may not be wise to hazard 
an explanation of the apparent inconsistency in the two state- 
ments that our charities are progressive and that they lack or- 
ganization. Both impressions were made. Why there is lack of 
organization is a question that would take one beyond the scope 
of the present paper, but the conviction was forced upon the 
average observer, I am sure, that our most active and progres- 
sive charity workers have been longing for a vehicle through 
which the whole policy of Catholic charity might be clarified. 

We found among our delegates members of Boards of Di- 
rectors in Schools of Philanthropy, members of State Boards 
of Charity, members* of the Associated Chanties, members of 
Committees engaged in many forms of relief or preventive 
work. We found many individuals deeply interested in many 
movements aiming toward reform by legislation. This was true 
of priests as well as of laymen. Now, there can be no doubt 
that to some extent these activities were undertaken by cur 
Catholics as civic duties, but it is equally certain that to a great 
extent these relations drained off much talent and experience 
for which the Catholic body should be credited and for which 
it has not been credited, simply because these workers have 
not been accustomed in and through the Church to give expres- 
sion to the beliefs that they entertained. There are conserv- 
ative and progressive tendencies in our charities. When the 
progressive felt that he had no organization at hand through 
which to express himself, it was natural that he would look 
beyond. Whether he is right or wrong, the effect is the same. 
An overpowering feeling will always express itself. If it does 
not express itself as it wishes it will at least express itself es 
it may. And the enthusiasm, the faith in humanity, the im- 
pulse to service, that have scattered these Catholics among 
many movements would have served as well to bring them 
together into one mighty organization, focusing their scattered 
energies into strength. The feeling was pronounced among 
the delegates that the Conference would render this great ser- 
vice to our charities as a whole. 

There was no disposition in the Conference to gloss over 



152 CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC CHARITIES [Nov., 

defects in our organization or in our methods, nor was there 
any inclination to exaggerate our wisdom or to claim immunity 
from the errors which it is the lot of man to make. The things 
that we discovered during the Conference were, as is so often 
the case, the obvious things which it is so difficult to see. The 
Conference did not indeed reveal the whole Social Conscience 
of the Church. It could not do that. Viewed, however, from 
the standpoint of mistaken impressions, from the standpoint 
of lack of information, lack of personal acquaintance, and the 
possession of so many fundamental convictions in common, the 
Conference did amount practically to a revelation. 

From the foregoing it will be inferred that a considerable 
portion of the self-condemnation, in which we sometimes indulge, 
is due to defects of organization and not to lack of spirit, re- 
sources, or intelligence. We believe too readily our insistent 
critics. They, not understanding us and our ways, have at 
times spoken loudly, and we have taken them too seriously. 
I value our critics highly. We need them. We are not per- 
fect. The men and women, for instance, who prepared papers 
for the Conference dealing with the institutions of lay charity, 
experienced the greatest difficulty in locating them throughout 
the United States, and were thereby discouraged from much 
research work. We have not as many institutions of all kinds 
that we need. What charity ever had ? Our spirit, resources, 
and willingness are evident ; the lack of organization under 
which we suffer is, after all, a technical and not a spiritual 
difficulty. We discovered that we have few directories or bu- 
reaus of information, no central commanding towers from which 
wisdom might stream out to the confines of the nation. The 
Conference discovered that such equipment might have the 
highest value in the development of our charities. That con- 
viction is one of the sources out of which the enthusiasm for 
a permanent Conference of Catholic Charities arose. 

It was discovered, from the general reports made from 
states, that on the whole the State Boards of Charity are dis- 
posed to be fair to Catholic interests. Instances of offensive 
activity were called to the attention of the Conference ; cases 
of unpardonable thoughtlessness were mentioned, but these 
were not taken as a sufficient basis for an adverse judgment of 
the general situation. In nearly every case that was mentioned, 
as far as memory serves at this moment, the offensive action 
could be ascribed, in part at least, to the neglect or indiffer- 



1910.] CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC CHARITIES 153 

ence of Catholics themselves. One delegate called attention, 
for instance, to systematic and undoubtedly bigoted interierence 
by state officials who resorted to quibbling and evasions in 
order to accomplish their purpose, but he showed further that 
he and his fellow- workers remained in the fight until they had 
conquered and had been welcomed in honor. The impression 
prevailed, after a whole day spent in the consideration of re- 
ports from states and cities, that there were practically no 
abuses or infringements of Catholic interests to which the Con- 
ference as such should direct its attention. The delegates 
seemed to favor on the whole the participation by Catholics 
in the work of the State Boards of Charity, of the Associated 
Charities in general up to the point where differences of phi- 
losophy or spiritual outlook on life were reached. The opinion 
was unanimous that at that point we Catholics must maintain 
the integrity of our teaching and we must fight to hold to the 
truth that charity is an organic part of our spiritual life and 
it ceases to be Catholic when it is separated in motive or in 
spirit from our religious thought and feeling. 

An observer gifted with historical imagination would scarcely 
have failed during the Conference to be struck by the dramatic 
situation which it suggested. The modern world is in the throes 
of disintegration. As remarked in an earlier number of THE 
CATHOLIC WORLD, everything must now be separated from 
everything else if the modern temper is to be obeyed. 

Many separations have taken place: science from faith; 
morals from dogma; education from religion; philanthropy 
from the soul ; and none appear to have been permanently 
advantaged by the process. But here were gathered hundreds 
of delegates who stood for the organic unity of life, for the 
solidarity of society, for the essential oneness of things, and 
the omnipresence of the soul in the affairs of man. There was 
no wavering in this historical Catholic attitude. There was no 
question as to the fact that the work in charity is and remains 
a spiritual phenomenon, a manifestation of understanding of 
the bonds that unite man to God and man to man. This sense 
of the organic relation of charity to religious consciousness 
amounted really to an instinct. There was inspiration in it, 
and there was the promise of power for days to come. The 
attitude that was thus expressed by Catholic instinct would 
have fitted into the fourteenth century, and it will fit into the 
twentieth before the sands are run. 



i54 CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC CHARITIES [Nov., 

It was found, and this again is a discovery of the obvious, 
that we lack a vigorous, technical literature in charity. We 
have sermons, theoretical treatises, and able discussion of many 
kinds, all of which point to a most progressive set of princi- 
ples, taught by churchmen. But literature the literature that 
comes up out of life and guides it ; the literature that throbs 
with the vitality of men and women who face situations and 
conquer them; that we lack. Our most active charity workers 
are men and women who are earning their living. Their charity 
is simply the consecration of leisure, and often of time to which 
prior claims of personal interests exist, to the service of fellow- 
men. Such men and women naturally lack the time and op- 
portunity for reflection that literature presupposes. They are 
busy and they have not the habit of literary expression. 
Further, the instinct for privacy is very strong in Catholic 
charity, notably so in our religious communities. And ever 
so many who might write with much point refuse to do so be- 
cause instincts lead them toward the solitude and not toward 
the public. It is an attitude of mind with which modern times 
have little patience. 

Furthermore, we have not yet begun forming our leaders 
in charity in and through schools. They are formed in life. 
Those who are producing the literature of charity have been 
taught its technique in schools. They have had every advan- 
tage that could be asked and the result is an impetus toward 
the production of a literature of charity which is a most hope- 
ful sign of the times. All great historical interests of human- 
ity have issued in schools. They have done this because they 
have found that the school was the safest means of self- per- 
petuation, the surest means of transmitting the achievements 
of one generation to the children of another. Religion created 
schools: music, medicine, law, oratory, states, art of all kinds, 
realized that only through schools, through systematic forma- 
tion, could they transmit the best within their ranks to future 
generations. And so the day has come when charity, as one 
mighty interest, creates its schools. The movement, on the 
whole, is undoubtedly wise. It will without question lead to 
the faults that all schools are apt to commit, but when our 
charity has its schools, in and through which its traditions may 
be sifted and its wisdom may be proved, we shall not lack 
the literature that we need. It is true that in our religious 
communities we have had technical training schools in charity, 



i9io.] CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC CHARITIES 155 

but these have not produced a technical literature for the men 
and women who consecrated themselves to these works and 
have been unwilling to become publicists in any sense of the 
term. 

During the days of the Conference we heard men and wo- 
men whose talk was literature. They had well-grounded per- 
sonal views and they expressed them with force and direct- 
ness. They understood the bearings of things. They inter- 
preted the larger relations of social problems. They saw the 
details that hamper institutional charity and they lacked neither 
vigor nor originality nor feeling. These have been forever the 
roots of literature. If the promise that was offered during the 
earnest days of the Conference be a substantial thing and not 
a shadow, there is reason to hope that this perfection of our 
work will be but little longer delayed. The directness with 
which many delegates favored the early establishment of a 
charities' publication devoted to the national interests of all 
our works, goes a long way in showing the stage of develop- 
ment in which we now find ourselves. 

There was manifested throughout the Conference a very 
strong demand for a federation of Women's Organizations, and 
for more thorough relation between the works of men and wo- 
men in Catholic charity. The delegates seemed to feel that 
the Conference answered that demand. The desire for the 
federation of Women's Organizations originated not, it would 
seem, in the prospect of a definite work to be accomplished, 
but from a most impressive eagerness of the organizations to 
know one another better, to compare notes and find a work to 
do. This readiness for co-operation among the women came 
to splendid expression in the section devoted to the Protection 
of Young Girls. In preparation for the Conference, committees 
had been named in a large number of American cities to study 
the local facts and problems and to be prepared to report sug- 
gestions for organized action in the interests of the innocent. 
The meeting at which these reports were made developed a 
degree of earnestness, a reach of observation, and an impulse 
to labor which were not equalled in any other section of the 
Conference during its whole term. The saddening reports that 
came with dreadful monotony from city after city, showing the 
horrible waste of innocent young lives thrown as victims to 
human passion, awakened in the minds of the women present, 
possibly for the first time, a national view of this one great 



156 CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC CHARITIES [Nov 

problem, and out of these revelations came the formation of 
federated committees which promise not to cease labor until 
systematic efforts may have been made to find a remedy. 

The St. Vincent de Paul Society played a peculiar role in 
this Conference of Catholic Charities. That society has been 
practically the only general organization of Catholic men in 
the United States devoted primarily to charity work. It 
has sustained the purest and finest traditions of Catholic 
life in a way creditable in the last degree to its members. The 
type of men that it sent to the Conference, their manner, ex- 
perience, spirit everything about them revealed a tone of 
superiority which could not be mistaken, although it deliberately 
attempted to hide itself. Now it is no little encouragement to 
the National Conference of Catholic Charities to feel that the 
men most active in its beginning, who lent most enthusiastic 
support to its first steps, and who stood high among its leaders, 
were members of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Those of 
us who have come later into the work and now feel the rich- 
ness of its inspiration, derive no little encouragement from the 
unique endorsement that the Conference has received from the 
followers of the beloved Ozanam. 

The programme was carried out as announced. As an- 
nounced, it did not represent all that had been held in mind 
in preliminary work. Some topics on which much importance 
was laid were omitted through force of circumstances. Some 
men and women, on whom much reliance was to have been 
placed, were unable to be present. Nevertheless the Confer- 
ence accomplished much and promised more. It brought to 
us a national view, a general outlook. It convinced us of 
power, of resources. It re-enforced our sense of social duty. 
It revealed immense work that is still to be done. It created 
an inspiration, and brought us together from widely scattered 
homes and fields of labor to share that inspiration and obey it. 
It reaffirmed the allegiance of the Kingdom of Catholic Charity 
to the Empire of Christ, and rewrote His blessed name over 
the worn doorways of the poor. It began by an act of woi- 
ship of God; it concluded by paying the homage of its mem- 
bers to the President of the United States. In doing both, 
it caught, happily though unconsciously, the spirit of the motto 
of the University, Deo et Patrice, within whose walls its good 
work began. 




A NIGHT ADVENTURE. 

BY MARY AUSTIN. 
I. 

[T was about six o'clock in the evening, July, 1881, 
that fatal year of the beginning of troubles for 
England with the Dutch Boers, when a Cape 
cart, drawn by six weary mules, was slowly mak- 
ing its way across the lonely Veldt that lies be- 
tween the Modder River and Boshof. 

Two fat, shining-faced black " Cape Boys," driving and 
flourishing the curling sjambok over the heads of the animal?, 
and two weary, dishevelled-looking women were the only oc- 
cupants of the not over- luxurious cart. Overhead, the lofty 
deep blue African sky was already changing into a darker 
shade of evening purple, the sun flooding the horizon with fiery 
crimson shafts of farewell glory. 

It is mid-winter ; the air is already sharp and frosty, and 
water, if left out-of-doors, will freeze hard by midnight. At 
last the solemn silence of the Veldt is broken by a tired 
voice : " Thank goodness, we are in sight of the shed where 
these wretched mules will be changed for fresh horses. There 
is still a chance for us to be at Boshof for a few hours' rest. 
We were due here at four, and now it is six o'clock." 

That tired voice was my own, and the answer came from 
my companion, one of the noblest, cleverest, and most charming 
women I have ever had the good fortune to meet. She was 
the Sister Superior, or Head Sister, of the well-known hospital 
at the Diamond Fields, and at that time I was her aide. We 
both were returning to our work, after a five weeks' well-earned 
rest in the happy, peaceful Home in Bloemfontein, in the days 
President Brande. 

" No use crying over spilt milk," was the answer of my 
companion ; " we shall change here and with fresh horses get 
to Boshof Hotel by eleven to-night." 

Sooner said than done; the miserable, three-cornered tin 



158 A NIGHT ADVENTURE [Nov., 

shed, roofless and bare, was there, we were there, but the long- 
wished-for horses were nowhere ! They had bolted, preferring 
a night of freedom on the Veldt to the task of lumbering 
along a bad road to Boshof. 

" The Missis can get down and sleep here, very good place," 
said one boy, grinning and showing all his white teeth. The 
weary mules were out-spanned, and in less than a trice they 
had vanished and went to pick up a prickly supper from the 
low, thorny mimosa bushes, practically the only vegetation on 
the barren Veldt. 

In the midst of our indignant remonstrances, the cart was 
partly despoiled of its rugs and boxes; all that we could say 
was lost on the philosophical Johannes, beyond the well-known 
word: "Allers will richt kom" (All will come right), while 
Sixpence nodded his fat head and said : " Ja, ja, Missis, very 
good shed.' 1 

Yes, Sixpence is a very common name for a colored man 
out in Africa; some rejoice in the name of "Soda- Water- Bot- 
tle" or " By-and-By," etc., and as a rule they are so proud 
of these nicknames, given by the white " Boss," that they 
actually forget their high-sounding, many-syllabled native 
names. 

Sixpence proceeded to drag out of the cart what at first 
sight looked like a bundle of dilapidated snakes but was, in 
reality, rolls of brown paper. In this he swathed himself round 
and round from top to toe, till he was more like an animated 
bale of goods dropped by Carter Paterson than anything else ; 
then he lit his pipe, and disappeared into a dark corner of the 
much despised shed. 

What a hole that shed was ! No covering of any sort kept 
out the starry sky; and yet there was an insufferable odor 
that made us long for a bottle of disinfectant; the flooring 
was simply damp earth, trampled into holes by the restless 
hoofs of cattle. We found a big wooden box, into which we 
pried unceremoniously, and from which we extracted a bundle 
of lovely pink wax candles, that would have been far more in 
place in some boudoir than in this dirty shed on the African 
Veldt. We calmly annexed one apiece, and with a box of 
matches felt more equal to a night surprise. But, on second 
thought, we agreed it would never do to risk rheumatic fever 
by trying to sleep in such a damp hole. So we left Johannes 



1 9 1 o. ] A NIGHT AD VENTURE 1 5 9 

and Sixpence to enjoy themselves in their own way in un- 
disturbed possession. 

"But what are we to do where can we go ? " I questioned, 
in mournful tones. 

" Do," was the answer, " do ? Why, anything rather than 
stop here in the dumps. Come, we will explore." 

So Sister argued that if we only walked on and on we 
must come to some farm. I did not think this hopeful, for it 
was some hours since we had passed any human habitation; 
besides, even if such rare good luck was ours, we were not sure 
of a welcome, for the days of open-handed hospitality were 
no more. Distrust and hatred of the English were spread far 
and wide, and scornful hints that the "English Dogs" could 
bark but could not bite, were lavishly circulated. 

The prestige of the " Old Flag " had waned under the bale- 
ful shadow of " Majuba Day." Only a few short weeks ago 
we had said farewell to the gallant, though unfortunate, Sir 
Gsorge Colley, little foreboding how soon he would sleep his 
last sleep under the stones of Majuba Hill. 

Whenever our Sister gave the word " forward, march," there 
could be no delay ; therefore march it was. We left the shed, 
and went out into the clear, frosty air. The glorious moon 
was already transforming the dusty, dreary Veldt, and all 
things base, into a silvery fairyland ; the white frost glit- 
tered like diamonds of purest water, and the large white and 
cream-colored flowers of the jtmson weed awoke from their 
long, ugly, crumpled- up day sleep, and looked fit to be the 
silver trumpets of the angels in heaven. Planets and stars, 
constellations and mystic lights, glowed and shone; their long 
rays of brilliant azure, ruby, emerald, and golden fire made 
far more lovely sanctuary lamps than ever burn in fairest shrine 
on earth. "The firmament showeth the glory of God" came 
the words from both our lips as we stood by the now forlorn 
cart, ate our supper, said our prayers, and then stepped boldly 
forth into the unknown. The peaceful harmony of that fair 
night was only broken by the 'constant snapping bark of the 
jackals all around us. At length, after a long tramp, my com- 
panion cried out in a joyful voice: "I see a light, I see a 
light." And, far away, I also could see a dull, red light, glim- 
mering not far from the ground. We looked at our watches; 
it was close upon eleven o'clock. 



160 A NIGHT ADVENTURE [Nov., 

We had walked nearly four hours ; the sharp exercise had 
caused our rather numbed blood to circulate, the frosty air 
was exhilarating, and the romance and a spice of danger sus- 
tained us, for we were both young in those days. But I must 
confess my heart sank very low when we came on a small, 
lonely-looking house ; there was a feeling of nameless horror 
about it, so ugly and squalid it stood, an unlovely sight in 
that brilliant moonlight. 

It was a sordid, red brick place, one story high, with a 
broken "stoep" in front of the faded, sun-blistered door, and 
a small window on each side. From one of these windows a 
gloomy light shone. 

Long and loud we thumped with our umbrellas on the 
door, not at all astonished to find no sign of bell or knocker, 
for such is the custom of the place. My heart quaked more 
and more, as we heard between the intervals of knocking, a 
most awful noise, a hideous din, proceeding from the rqcm 
wherein the light shone. I would have given worlds to have 
been back again in the despised shed, with Johannes and Six- 
pence, who would not have hurt a hair of our heads. 

" Oh, for goodness sake, come, come away ; let us go back, 
there must be murder going on, or at least a lunatic is kept 
here," I said to my companion. But the Head Sister was not 
in the habit of " going back, 1 ' she was of sterner stuff; so she 
only hammered louder, saying: "I want hot coffee." 

At last a lull in the uproar, a heavy step, and the rusty lock 
was heard creaking as it was slowly turned. The door opened, 
and there, in the flood of moonlight that poured in, stood the 
most hideous and forbidding Dutch Vrow it had ever been 
my fortune to see. In an attitude of almost frightened amaze 
she stared at us, spell- bound at the unwonted sight which 
our good Sister presented in her picturesque nursing costume, 
the long full lines of drapery falling in graceful folds round 
her. Our Sister stood in the moonlight, tall, handsome, ma- 
jestic, her beautiful face a little stern and pale. 

II. 

But the romance was dispelled when Sister explained in 
very good Dutch that we had lost our way, lost our horses, 
and lost ourselves, and then went on to ask for shelter and 
"hot Koffee trek" the common expression for a cup of hot 



A NIGHT ADVENTURE 



161 



coffee. But to-night there was no answering smile on the 
Vrow's sallow face; she only pushed us into the room from 
whence the light shone. 

And then the mystery was unraveled we had dropped into 
the midst of a " Dopper Prayer Meeting." The Dopper Boer 
is the most ignorant and bitter foe to all civilization, espe- 
cially to English civilization. There, in the middle of the 
night, far from all human help, we two lone Englishwomen 
stood. 

Picture to yourselves a small room, crowded with about a 
dozen men and half a dozen women. The men were Dopper 
dirty (it is part of their religion to eschew water in any form), 
sullen and ferocious- looking, their long, uncombed hair, 
smoothed down with cocoa-nut oil, nearly covering their eyes, 
while before them, on the table, sundry heavy whips and long 
sjamboks were lying. The women were a shade less repulsive- 
looking, and also a shade more friendly. They were thorough 
specimens of the up country Dutch Vrow, dressed in short, full 
skirts. Their heads wore for covering a dirty cotton " Copjee," 
or sun-bonnet. I could not describe the atmosphere of that 
room. The foul vapors, after the pure, frosty air cf the Veldt, 
made me say to myself, in the words of the old ballad : " I 
am sick at heart and fain would lie down ! " The clamor died 
away, and the loud, harsh voices were succeeded by an cmi- 
nous silence as we entered, though it was broken by a low 
murmur of: "Let the English dogs die"; as " Sister " boldly 
entered the room and I followed in her wake. 

At a less critical moment I could have laughed aloud, as I 
watched the stately, beautiful Englishwoman going solemnly 
round the room, shaking hands with every unfriendly Dopper, 
who seemed impelled, as by some higher power, to stretch forth 
a half-shrinking and wholly dirty hand to meet her firm grasp. 

I, too, went through the same ceremony, and then we sat 
down and surveyed the scowling occupants of the room. We 
found they had been holding a kind of " Prayer Meeting," 
somewhat after the " Smite the hip and thigh " fashion of 
Cromwell's Ironsides on the eve of battle. 

Just so had these Doppers, with howls and cracked psalm- 
singing, lashed their hatred of the "English dogs" to the 
highest pitch of fury. Without a sign of fear or of noticing 
the growing gloom of ill-will, my companion made a speech, 
VOL xcn. ii 



162 A NIGHT ADVENTURE [Nov., 

telling our troubles in fluent Dutch, using their very own ex- 
pressions, reminding them how many times their own people 
had been cared for and tended by us in Kimberley Hospital, 
and concluding her oration by a request for " Hot Koffee and 
shelter." 

There was sullen silence on the part of the men, but the 
" House Vrow " arose and left the room, and presently the 
grateful smell of fresh coffee rejoiced our nostrils. 

The Vrow returned with a black servant, bearing a tray 
with many bowls of exceedingly hot and be-sugared coffee. 
In the solemn silence the coffee was handed round to all, 
but just before it arrived, I noticed that a particularly ill- 
looking young Dopper muttered something to his neighbor, 
then looked hard at us and went out of the room. 

Even my companion was at length tired of this silent 
company, and aroused me by putting down her bowl with 
a bang, and asking if we could have a bed and rest ourselves 
for a few hours. I certainly thought the moonlight walk had 
affected her brain. But up rose the "Vrow," and throwing 
open the door of the opposite room, disclosed a small, stuffy 
apartment. The sole furniture was one enormous four- post 
wooden bedstead piled up high with pillows and blankets, and 
surrounded with gloomy curtains ; it was an imposing object, 
but it made one's flesh creep to think of sleeping therein. 

"Missis," said the "Vrow" in a deep voice, "the great 
father and the great mother sleep in there," with a sweep of 
her arm to the bed, "and we all sleep on the floor with the 
skins and blankets round us; if Missis pay good money, she 
may sleep on the floor next me ! " 

Perfectly true; men, women, all sleep together, rolled up 
like bundles on the dirty floors of these foul rooms. This 
killed even Sister's determination to remain ; so, with many 
thanks, we declined, and after shaking hands once more all 
round, we followed the good "Vrow" out of the room, shak- 
ing hands with her last of all at the door, where she stood 
looking at us with rather a curious, troubled expression in 
her eyes. 

So we were once again on the "Trek," somewhere between 
12 P. M. and i A. M,, seeking the formerly despised shelter of 
the now longed-for shed. 

" I think," said the Head Sister in a sad voice at least it 



i9io.] A NIGHT ADVENTURE 163 

was sad for her " I think we will try this track," pointing to 
a narrow track close to a dark patch I had not noticed before, 
" it may prove a short cut across the Veldt to the shed." 

I did not object to a "short cut," my one desire being to 
lie down somewhere as soon as possible; so we turned from 
the dazzling expanse of moonlit, frosty Veldt, and were about 
to explore when a shot rang out, followed by a cry. 

III. 

"Let us go and see who is hurt, help may be needed," 
said Sister. I was too much ashamed to say aloud what my 
cowardly heart prompted, that we had better keep on our way, 
that the Doppers would look after their own. We turned 
about to go to the house, when behold we could not find it. 
It was blotted out by a thick, soft, white fog, while there 
arose in front of us, barring our steps from any return, a won- 
drous sight. I can only compare it to a beautiful white, lu- 
minous cloud, or rather a column of white fire ; it was mar- 
velous. There was no sign of damp or passing vapor on 
earth, no flying cloud in the heavens to cast a shadow. Ex- 
cept just where we were, all was pure bright moonlight. 
Sharply, clearly defined in its outline, moved onward this tall 
white form. We followed spellbound, our beautiful mysterious 
guide at times brooding over us in its fleecy folds. Is it any 
wonder that we thought we could see the great white wings 
of St. Raphael, the friendly archangel, or at least our guardian 
angels carrying out the promise: "He shall give His angels 
charge over thee " ? 

Perhaps it was only the miasma rising from some stagnant 
water or a mirage so common out there. But, even looking 
at it in the practical, twentieth century fashion, may not the 
vapors and miasmas that hang over foul places be another 
form of angel warning ? 

Well, then, we followed our mysterious guide until we 
were well on the right track, and after quick, though silent, 
walking we came in sight of the shed, which looked like an 
overgrown ant-hill on that plain of dazzling whiteness. And, 
in an instant, our luminous guide left us, gone as if he had never 
been, save for the solemn, never-to-be-forgotten assurance that 
we had indeed seen a visible messenger from heaven. In a 



164 A NIGHT ADVENTURE [Nov., 

little while we crept under the low entrance, and in the dark- 
ness heard the loud, sonorous breathing from our faithful 
Johannes and Sixpence. 

Drawing forth our pink tapers, we struck a light and sur- 
veyed the scene. Dark and dismal did it appear after our 
beautiful moonlight walk; and yet we were glad to be back, 
and to descend from the pedestal of our strained nerves. 

Making the best of our circumstances, we wrapped our- 
selves up in our warm rugs and threw ourselves down on the 
damp earth. We left our pretty lights burning, and tried to 
get a little rest. I, at least, must have dozed off, for I started 
from an uneasy dream, dazzled by a bright light flaring at 
the entrance of our shed. 

It was nothing worse than a bright fire made by one of 
our boys from some dry brushwood and rags steepe<i in par- 
affin oil. Sixpence was bending over the blaze, warming the 
everlasting coffee for the " Missis," while Johannes was seen 
returning with the missing horses. It was daylight, and we 
scrambled stiffly into the cart, and were really bidding fare- 
well to our eventful experiences on the lonely Veldt. We were 
too cold and uncomfortable for conversation, but each gave a 
start and an exclamation when our vehicle drove past the very 
identical squalid house of last night's adventure. 

If it looked ugly and sinister in the fair moonlight, it 
looked doubly so in the cold, gray dawn of day. Not a sign 
of life, not a sound broke the silence. Then we noticed, close 
to the untidy stoep, so close that it seemed almost impossible 
to avoid stepping into it, a deep, dark, sullen-looking patch 
of half -frozen water, a pond as we say in England, but in 
Africa it goes by the curious name of Pan. 

How we escaped falling into it as we left that unfriendly 
house I know not. If we had made one false step, then, in- 
deed, "the English dogs" would have been silent forever; 
for I am sure no help would have been given by our grim 
hosts of the previous night. 

" Missis," said Johannes, pointing with his fingers spread 
out, "very bad house, very bad Pan, 'spoek' in the Pan." 
"Spoek" I must tell you, is Cape Dutch for ghost or spirit. 

To make a long story short, I must hurry over our arrival 
at Boshof. Great was the curiosity and excitement, and a 
group of friendly loungers, black and white, questioned us 



9io.] A NIGHT ADVENTURE 165 

eagerly as to our detention; and many were the offers of beds 
and comforts. But to all we turned a deaf ear, our one desire 
was to reach "Home, sweet home" without delay. We felt 
we were fit for nothing but our own home, this being Kim- 
berly Hospital. 

Seeing we were not to be moved from our purpose, a 
good friend generously offered to drive us in his comfortable 
spring-cart, and after rejoicing the hearts of good Sixpence 
and Johannes with a goodly roll of strong tobacco, we shock 
hands with them and saw them no more. 

How delicious that spring-cart was after the springless, 
narrow mail cart, and still more after our midnight experi- 
ences, words cannot tell. It was mid- day when we came in 
sight of the thin, blue haze of smoke which hangs everlast- 
ingly over the " Gamp/' or " Diamond Fields," or " De Beers," 
all three names designating much the same thing. 

Great was our joy to find ourselves once more in the 
familiar surroundings. The "Staff" wondered what had be- 
come of the "Head," the nurses and convalescents forebcding 
all manner of dire mishaps. We arrived just in the nick of 
time, to be greeted not only by " ourselves " as some one 
rather vaguely had named "the family," but by our good and 
kind Chief Surgeon. I will not write his name, for it is one 
too well-known, but it will ever remain to us and to all un- 
der his care in the early days, a name of gratitude and re- 
spect. He welcomed us with his genial smile, and prescribed 
"a square meal, or hot soup, hot baths, and bed, without 
being bothered for twenty-four hours." You may be sure we 
did not object. 

IV. 

In our busy, hard-working life, time flew on wings, inter- 
ests were many, and oftentimes pathetic scenes brought tears 
to our eyes; but, fortunately, we had a dash of the humorous 
now and then, and so our spirits did not fall too much below 
par for long. 

We had almost, if not altogether, forgotten our " Adven- 
ture," when one hot, December day a heavy wagon lumbered 
up to the " stoep," its veranda covered with brilliantly colored 
" Morning Glory," or convolvulus, whichever name you like 
best, and numerous lounging-chairs and small tables covered 



1 66 A NIGHT ADVENTURE [Nov., 

with periodicals made it a favorite resort of convalescents and 
nurses. 

With some curiosity we watched four or five typical Boers 
extricate themselves from numerous bales and boxes, and they 
helped a companion out of the cumbrous vehicle. He was 
evidently the invalid, and was heavily muffled about the head 
and face, and in spite of the blazing sun a warm rug was over 
his shoulders. 

Our Head Sister was called, and one of the men handed 
an order to her, all in due form : " Admit Piet Ruyman." It 
was signed by our good doctor. 

'It was truly an amusing scene to us, though far otherwise 
to Piet and his friends, when he was " admitted/' and sundry 
fearful-looking parcels and bundles were brought in and 
"dumped 1 ' down. Then, with a silent handshake and many 
terrified glances at the bevy of nurses, Piet's friends departed, 
and Piet was left alone in that unknown and, to him, mysterious 
world. 

His troubles, and ours also, began when, after being ushered 
into his nice little room and told to undress and get into his 
comfortable bed, he flatly refused to divest himself of any of 
his dirty-looking garments. Much to his nurse's discomfort 
and horror, Piet clung to what had not been changed for many 
a long day. At last Sister suggested a compromise, and prom- 
ised if he would consent to array himself in the spotless and 
comfortable regulation clothing he should be allowed to wear 
his awful red woolen comforter, which enveloped his neck in 
many folds. So a truce was made, and after a while Piet dis- 
carded the dirty comforter of his own free-will. 

A very curious accident had brought Piet to the hospital. 
He was out shooting big game with his companions, when a 
lion suddenly sprang upon him and began mauling his arm and 
face. A very lucky shot from one of Piet's friends saved his 
life, and no serious injury was done. The wound healed rap- 
idly. Veldt life is a very healthy one, and after some months 
Piet was himself again, except for one side of his face. The 
lion's paw had inflicted a severe flesh wound, and it was 
thought that one eye was destroyed; a huge lump of flesh 
had grown over the socket. Piet, however, always declared 
that he felt the eye move under this encumbrance. 

The fame of our clever surgeon had reached even to Beer 



i9io.] A NIGHT ADVENTURE 167 

ears, and some Doppers themselves had been in his hands. 
After a time Piet determined to try what the English could 
do for him, the desire for saving his eye overcoming his prej- 
udices. 

When our doctor examined him, he said he believed Fiet 
to be in the right, that the eye was there, and that it would 
be quite possible to remove the mass of flesh which closed it. 
The operation was performed most successfully, and the eye 
found to be quite uninjured, though of course it required care. 

We all agreed that Piet did not make such a very bad 
patient after all, though it was a long time before he could 
overcome his terror at the sight of the hot water and soap, and 
he would cry like a baby when he had to submit to necessary 
ablutions. 

However, time changes all things, and after awhile he quite 
enjoyed his more cleanly condition, consented to have his hair 
cut and combed, and, still greater wonder, discarded the hitherto 
beloved comforter; and with the dirty, red thing, Piet, the un- 
couth Dopper, disappeared, and became quite a good, com- 
fortable, friendly being. There still remained, however, a sort 
of shyness and awkwardness, if not fear, when our Head Sister 
came near him; that he admired her and felt the charm of 
her manner was evident, but still he was uneasy in her presence. 

At last she set herself to win his confidence, and when she 
laid herself out for this, no one, not even a Dopper, could re- 
sist her. 

One afternoon, shortly before his time for departure, they 
were sitting together on our stoep. Sister presented Piet with 
a brand new red comforter, which she herself had made for 
him, and said: "Piet I have seen you before somewhere ?" 

"Yes, Missis"; in a sheepish tone. 

" Now, Piet, don't say ' Missis ' but ' Sister/ and tell me 
where and when I saw you, and why you are afraid of me." 

After a pause out came the story. 

"Sister, do you remember the night you came to the house 
on the Veldt?" said Piet. Yes, Sister remembered very well; 
and then he went on to tell how he was the very identical 
young Boer who had been so unfriendly and had scowled at 
us, and that he went out of the room, determined the " En- 
glish dogs" should not get off scot free. Taking his gun, he 
hid himself near the dark pool. He was not clear himself 



1 68 A NIGHT ADVENTURE [Nov. 

whether he really meant to kill us, or only to frighten us, but 
at all events he meant mischief. Then he heard us saying 
good night and saw the good Vrow watching our departure. 

A shadow fell across the track by the dangerous water, and 
he hastily raised his gun and fired ; there was a cry, and to 
his horror the cry was not as he expected from one of the 
hated English, but the voice of the "House Vrow," his very 
own mother. Piet rushed out of his hiding-place, to see her 
being carried into the house by two of the men. Most fortu- 
nately she was not seriously hurt; the bullet had grazed her 
shoulder and she was soon well again; but Piet was too 
ashamed of what he had done to remain in the place where 
he had nearly killed his own mother. He took to a roving 
life, and in one of his expeditions met with the accident which 
had so nearly cost him his life. 

It turned out that the good woman was uneasy about us, 
and she went down the stoep to warn us of the deep, dark 
water, and Piet could not see her, because she was well in the 
dark shadow, and also, I suppose, he was nervous and excited. 
Piet told Sister that a deep, dark shadow rested all over 
the Veldt that night, so dark that he could see nothing of us; 
so that the marvelous cloud, which was to us protection and 
light, was to our enemy confusion and darkness. 

He ended his confession to Sister with a burst of tears 
and the words: "My heart is sore, Missis, when I see how 
good you are and think I tried to kill you." 

Our good Sister consoled him, and putting his red com- 
forter round his neck, took his brown hand in her shapely 
one. And this time it was not given unwillingly, for she and 
Piet entered into a friendly compact, and Piet was no more 
a foe to the English, but a good and loyal friend, and re- 
mained so for many long years. He would return to Sister 
laden with valuable presents of beautiful ostrich feathers, rare 
skins of animals, etc. 

And with Piet's conversion our "Adventure" ends to be 
remembered as a thing of the past, always with gratitude, for, 
truly, that eventful night proved the truth of the blessed 
promise : " He shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep 
thee in all thy ways." 



THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS.* 




BY C. C. MARTINDALE, S.J, 

|HAT particularly unpleasant young roan who fig- 
ures largely in Mr. Mallock's Veil of the Temple 
had marked, on the wall of a long, glazed gal- 
lery, spaces which represented centuries. The 
galleries stretched out for about a hundred 
yards, for Mr. Mallock thinks easily in millenniums, and down 
the wall were arranged relics or models or drawings which 
represented the religion of each period. A crucifix showed 
that Christianity stood at the very end of a long, long list; 
and the twenty centuries of its history seemed mean enough, 
compared to the vistaed ages in which men and women had 
lived and fought and suffered and died, all without knowledge 
of the Truth. In fact, urged the unpleasant young man and 
his rather vulgar sophism seems to have impressed the intel- 
lectual ladies of his party it is preposterous to suppose that 
these last twenty centuries have the supreme privilege denied 
to all that vanished history of real lives. 

Vulgar the sophism may have been ; it was, none the less, 
as far as it went, a vivid little bit of Comparative Religion. 
Christianity was a phenomenon among phenomena; it existed, 
as they did, in time and space ; it could be compared and 
contrasted, judged by the same criteria as its compeers; at 
once, as a mere thing of yesterday, it must be ready to take 
a modest place behind the great religions of immemorial an- 
tiquity which excavation and research are daily bringing into 
light: at once, too, certain similarities between it and its pre- 
decessors will suggest that much that it claims as original, as 
unique, is really borrowed, copied, or inherited; has been 
who knows? surpassed by the spiritual efforts of the un- 
known prophets and apostles of wholly alien faiths. 

And what, then, has become of a " Revealed Religion"? 
of the "Supernatural Claims" of Christianity? 

In England Rationalism is fighting a stubborn, and, in 
many places, a winning fight, against the all-too-feeble forces 
of Protestant Christianity. One of its many organs is the 

* Lectures on the History of Religions. In Four Volumes. St. Louis : B. Herder ; Lon- 
don : The Catholic Truth Society. 



1 70 THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS [Nov., 

Rationalist Press Association. From the sixteenth annual re- 
port I take the facts that follow. In 1908-9 its income was 
1, 198-0-1, its members 1,609 not large sums, you say, in 
men or money ; but the men are keen and the money well 
laid out. Thus in 1908-9 it published three very large works; 
its Annual; and a set of Lectures to Sixth Form Boys ; it put 
forth three reissues, many of them extremely cheap (Mr. Viv- 
ian's The Churches and Modern Thought gives 432 pages for 
is.); 3 cheap reprints of large works, and a number of pam- 
phlets. Nearly all these involve, and some turn wholly upon, 
Comparative Religion. Public lectures are financed by a Plat- 
form Propaganda fund, which helps other societies to the 
same end. During the lecture season, on most week nights 
and twice on Sundays, crowded London audiences, attend these 
public debates. Social meetings with music, recitals, etc,; re- 
ceptions make the work of the Association known and facilitate 
the communication of the associates among themselves. Hon- 
orary local secretaries are being appointed there are eight 
London centres, twenty-one provincial, nineteen abroad; and 
abroad the work spreads even more rapidly than at home; e. g., 
Hungary, Greece, China, Japan, the Colonies Australia, New 
Zealand, and India especially and all these are staffed by one 
or more R. P. A. officials. A traveling organizer is to be ap- 
pointed, there is .an R. P. A. reading room and lending library, 
and the R, P. A. only one, please remember, among several 
similar societies is careful to present its books and periodicals 
to all the free libraries and reading rooms. 

This literature is of all sorts and includes heavy volumes 
like the Pagan Christs, of Mr. Robertson, M.P., no less than 
the penny pamphlet. Every class cf reader is expressly 
catered for: schoolboys, as we saw; teachers; women. Will 
Women Help? is the name of Mr. Gould's book, which ex- 
plicitly recognizes the faith of women as one of the great hin- 
drances to Rationalism. 

My point is, that in every category of these publications, 
the majority, almost, find in Comparative Religion one of their 
aptest weapons. I could give a long list, and I should like 
to, for it scares one, and a healthy scare from time to time is 
the best of stimulants. But I wish to hurry on to my main point. 

First, let it never be thought that all this is written for 
the man in the study; that it is the property of the pedant; 
that it does not reach the man in the street. 



i9io.] THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS 171 

The man in the street is a deal more alert than we imag- 
ine a t least, than we in America and England are inclined 
to imagine. Not only are these R. P. A. books used as text- 
books on which popular lectures are built and that is bad 
enough, but the ordinary man wants to buy them for himself. 
Else why is there so steady a supply of extremely cheap re- 
prints of really stiff scientific, yet rationalistic wciks? I doubt 
whether there is a man in England who knows better how to 
write for the ordinary man than does Mr. Blatchford. Yet his 
God and My Neighbor is so full of Comparative Religion that 
we are right in taking it to be a useful weapon indeed, else 
he of all men would not use it. Let me quote from a priest 
of long experience among the working classes of our northern 
manufacturing towns. 

I will give you my experience of B , he writes to me, 

a town reeking with Socialism, and a place I came to know 
very intimately. As,, soon as a Catholic became inoculated 
with Socialism, he began to dabble with such books as God 
and My Neighbor ', which led him to the R. P. A. reprints. 
I know of no single instance in that town of a Catholic who 
became a Socialist, who did not speedily become Atheist. 
God and My Neighbor has done untold harm in the under- 
mining of the faith of the ignorant workman. The R. P. A. 
reprints completed the disaster. 

The largest bookseller in B , who had his stall in the 

market-place, told me these R. P. A. reprints sold like hot 
cakes. The numerous Socialistic- Atheistic lectures in the 
market-place did much to advertise this form of literature. 

Yet, " I am rather keen on Mr. Blatchford," said the Rev. 
R. J. Campbell, which surprises us the less when we see that 
the Encyclopedia Biblica is being published by the R. P. A. in 
6d. parts. Still we wonder what the reverend canons and 
others who are its editors thought, when the R. P. A. applied 
to them for permission ? 

We have no space to dwell on the curious tendency which 
leads men to imitate what they want to destroy, and we shall 
not quote the hymns and catechisms, of which examples lie 
before us, which inculcate atheism and prove Christianity to 
be but a rechauffe of the old rituals and beliefs of Mithraism 
and Osirianism, and far less fine than Buddhism. Nor on 
publications of a different character, like the nauseating and 
flippant Bible Romances, by Mr. Foote, published at 6d. for 



172 THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS [Nov., 

the Secular Society. This disgusts rather than persuades; and 
as yet I have seen nothing in England quite like the illus- 
trated Bible Amusante* But something is lost, and irretriev- 
ably, once these coarse fingers tear from our purest mysteries 
the veils of reverence in which we wrap them. And from 
many isolated pamphlets I have possessed, there seems to be 
a regular conspiracy to propagate the Taimudic myth that 
Christ was the son of the Centurion Pandera. 

These things, I repeat, hawked about as they are by boy 
scouts on bicycles, preached in lectures to which children, on 
boxes at street corners, are paid to point the way, commented 
on (I quote here from a letter to me from a well-known and 

keen-sighted social worker) "by weekly papers like , by 

street corner and public park lecturers, , by force of con- 
stant repetition, combined with the deadening spiritual effect 
of slum life plus the public house, are gradually, indeed swiftly f 
destroying Christianity among our town populations." 

So far Catholics have done very little to meet this evil. 
That is due to a number of reasons. First, the questions of 
Comparative Religion were being asked almost entirely outside 
the fold. The cry of the Comparative Religionist in the 
United States and England did but add one to the babel of 
voices which always reached the Church from over her high 
walls. There is no doubt at all that the specific problems 
had been worked out in no sort of adequate way in the text- 
books and reference books which alone were in the hands of 
her theological and other students. No one ever dreamed of 
going to the Fathers to ask them in what precise relation 
the Christian Eucharist stood to the Mithraic, or Christian 
Baptism to the Isiac; and, on the whole, historical theology 
was but little in vogue, and masterpieces like Jules Lebreton's 
recent Origines du Dogme de la Trinite would certainly not 
have been rated at their proper value, and, by some, might 
even have been looked upon with dislike. Again Catholics 
were not a reading body, and for this the causes lie very far 
back indeed. But are they now? Well, we wish to become 

* Which I once found on sale, at a kiosk in Bordeaux, to children, for id. 

NOTE : Alas : since writing the above, a large pile of pamphlets, etc., has reached me, 
all printed in one single north of England town, which contain terrible examples of Bible 
Stories Comically Illustrated, of caricatures of the Gospels, whose virulence is only equalled 
by their vulgarity. One can but hope that these publications mark the lowest stage of the 
progressive prostitution of science ; for the pseudo-erudition that pervades many of them 
can scarcely go further in the direction of popular degradation. Are these pamphlets the last 
fleet in a chain of cause and effect, and themselves unproductive ? 



i9io.] THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS 173 

so, bat we still suffer very terribly from lack of literature. As 
for English Catholic literature upon the History of Religions, 
apart from sporadic magazine articles and the like, it has been 
practically non-existent. But slowly the lack is being supplied. 
And in consequence we need spend time no longer in examining 
the shortcomings of the past. The articles of the Catholic En- 
cyclopedia are an honor to America, not only because of their 
own excellence, but because they come first into the English- 
speaking field as scientific, yet fairly popular treatment of 
stuff with which the non-Catholic Comparative Religionist has so 
far had it all his own way. Mr. Hastings' new Encyclopedia of 
Religion and Ethics has many Catholic names among its authors. 

Still, it is only lately that the Catholic Truth Society of 
England that gallant little underpaid, understaffed body has 
chivalrously undertaken to publish, besides the social litera- 
ture for which it is making itself a name, some popular yet 
genuinely scientific literature upon the burning subject of 
Comparative Religion. The well-known house of B. Herder, of St. 
Louis, Mo., publishes these volumes for the United States, and it 
is because we are so sure of American sympathy in this effort, 
that I am daring to write this rather unblushing recommenda- 
tion of the C. T. S. series of lectures on the History of Religions. 

First, let me exactly define the scope of this work. It 
does not aim at offering a Philosophical Theory of Religion. It 
does not attempt to decide what the essential value of religion 
is, nor what is the peculiar value of Christianity. It does not 
even attempt historically to trace the pedigree of Christian 
rites and dogmas. In every scientific investigation there are 
three stages. Facts are collected; then they are grouped ac- 
cording to the principles of likeness or unlikeness which 
emerge; finally, laws of development, levels of value, are de- 
duced, and the whole is worked together into a scientific 
system. This can be done with comparative anatomy ; com- 
parative sociology ; comparative economics, and so on. In the 
C. T. S. lectures the writers aim directly and immediately at 
achieving the first of these three things. They wish to put 
before readers a trustworthy birds' eye view of various religions, 
ancient and modern, especially, of course, of Christianity and 
its offshoots. This has not prevented them from making com- 
parisons here and there, and a full index will, it is hoped, af- 
ford those who are anxious to follow up comparisons for 
themselves, the means of doing so. 



174 THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS [Nov., 

Moreover, the editor confesses that its inception was not 
unattended by difficulties, and, in consequence, the contents of 
individual numbers, and indeed the construction of the series, 
were arranged on less definite lines than might have been de- 
sired. Again, the authors, who are Catholics, and write for 
Catholics, have not, of course, indulged in those hypothetical 
interpretations, or even reconstructions, or "supplementing" 
of history, which are perfectly open to men of no dogmatic 
faith. Anyhow such interpretation or appraisement or theoriz- 
ing is the work only of those who are engaged upon the third 
stage above mentioned, that, namely, of the religious philoso- 
pher. In the collecting and marshaling of facts a Catholic 
writer is, of course, as free as any one else ; and hence the 
picture of a Pagan or Catholic or Schismatical scheme of re- 
ligion can be as well and truthfully presented by a Catholic 
scholar as by the least dogmatically minded of his non-Catho- 
lic confreres. A Catholic may, however, believe that from the 
facts themselves certain definite conclusions emerge without 
any solicitation, and in a few cases the writers of these lectures 
have pointed out one or two such conclusions. It was their 
aim, however, to be throughout objective, expository, histori- 
cal; not interpretative, philosophical, apologetical ; and, above 
all, not controversial. 

Another diversity of treatment will, however, be visible in 
the greater or less technicality of treatment. Some writers 
have aimed chiefly at being popular, others at being complete 
and accurate, even at the expense of condensation and com- 
plexity of detail. There are those who, wishful to be " under- 
standed of the people," to catch the ear of the street, eschew 
all long words, all qualifying clauses, all half-tones. To others 
it is agony to treat of religious things in epigram; to run to- 
gether, into two violently opposed groups, facts or doctrines 
which contain all sorts of delicately differentiated grades ; to 
deduce immediately, as conclusion from given premises, what 
can only remotely be attained to by long argument, and then 
not stated in any general form. They feel that they are being 
vulgar if they act thus, and that if they do it naturally, they 
are lowering themselves and science and religion, and if un- 
naturally, that they look fools, like any heckled duke trying 
to talk slang at an election. Well, here again diversity of 
taste must be forgiven in the authors; it is hoped that all sorts 
of readers will find something in some of the lectures which 



i9io.] THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS 175 

will appeal to them; and that, with a little good will, nearly 
every one will be able to find interest in nearly all of them. 

It remains to explain the actual arrangement of the lec- 
tures, and here again it will be remembered that just as a one 
cent pamphlet of thirty-two pages cannot possibly deal exhaus- 
tively with its subject, so a series of such lectures cannot pos- 
sibly cover the whole ground of religious phenomena. But it 
was felt that no lacunae, no diversity of treatment, could pos- 
sibly justify the postponement of an enterprise of such im- 
mediate utility. 

The first volume, after a general review of the whole question 
of the Study of Religions, by the distinguished editor of the 
Etudes, contains accounts of some of the greater of the ancient 
religions other than those more immediately attendant on the 
birth of Christianity. Father L. Wieger, a missionary of nearly 
a quarter of a century's experience in China, writes of the re- 
ligion of that country and of the desolating philosophies of 
Confucius and Lao-Tzu, which we yet hear so often and so 
rashly compared with Gospel doctrine. Professor J. O'Neill, 
Professor of Celtic at the new Dublin University, has found 
time amid the stress of work incident to the inception of 
that splendid institution, to write on the religion of our Celtic 
forefathers. Buddhism itself, a religion (if so a system can 
be called which denies both God and soul alike) revived in 
our own days in disreputable forms, is dealt with by that 
scholar of European reputation, Professor de la Vallee Pous- 
sin, of Ghent. Hinduism is by the Rev. E. Hull, for many 
years editor of the Bombay Examiner, and a man of prolonged 
experience of the people whose religion he describes. The re- 
ligions of Babylon, Assyria, Syria, and Egypt are of unique 
importance, for from Mesopotamia Israel came, in Egypt it so- 
journed and became a nation, and in Syria it dwelt. Who 
does not see what problems these facts at once create ? What 
in Israel's religion is inherited ? What borrowed ? What re- 
vealed? What of its cosmogony, its laws, its ritual, its ark? 
What of the name of Yahweh ? What significance for Israel 
have the name of Hammurabi, the Myth of Marduk and Tiamat, 
u the tablets of the Babylonian deluge, the popular cults of 
Canaan ? Father Condamin is a well-known Assyriologist 
whose guidance in these matters is wholly to be trusted. 

Volume II. deals with worships more immediately neighbor to 
nascent Christianity, or with their remoter origins. The Bishop 



1 76 THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS [Nov., 

of Salford, an authority of the first rank in Oriental studies, 
has, with the greatest generosity, contributed the paper on that 
old Persian religion of which Zoroastrianism was the startling 
reformation. With the Avesta, which enshrines all we know 
of this, Professor Carnoy, of Louvain, has dealt ; immense 
problems here again arise. Is Persia responsible ior the lafer 
development of Israel ? Did Israel influence Persia ? Whence 
came the Angelology and Eschatology prevalent in Palestine 
at the dawn of the Christian era ? Into the Roman Empire 
Christianity was born and accordingly the religion of Rome 
had to be fully dealt with but into an Empire profoundly 
Hellenized, especially in the East, and in Greek-speaking, 
Greek-philosophizing, Greek-praying circles the Church devel- 
oped. Hence Greece, religious and philosophical, had carefully 
to be described ; here again, the new University of Dublin has 
given us its aid in the person of Father Henry Browne. Finally, 
an amazing inroad of Oriental cults was modifying even Italy 
when Christianity reached Rome, and these were, naturally, 
chez eux in the East, whence the new religion traveled ; of 
these Mithraism was by far the most startling, or is, at least, 
being now the most noisily celebrated, and hardly a Christian 
rite or dogma or sacrament exists, but adventurous scholars 
will seek its origin in the worship of the unconquered. And 
the society in which Christianity had to struggle to survive, 
was one constructed on the complex religious and political 
notion of Emperor worship; already Caesar and Christ face 
each other; already persecution is inevitable, and the course 
of future centuries is indicated. Lectures, then, on Mithra and 
on King-worship conclude this volume. 

The Christian history itself is outlined in the third ; or 
rather, phases and crises of its course are indicated. The He- 
brew Bible tells of its background and of its earliest environ- 
ment : the Greek Testament, of its "' dynamic," its idees direc- 
trices, whose formidable impulse all future development was to 
obey : the Early Church, of the childhood of that Society whose 
infancy has just been related. St. Augustine shifted the the- 
ological and spiritual centre of gravity from East to West, 
and bridged the chasm between the old shattered Empire and 
new Europe. Gregory VII. placed the Church forever in its 
category of spiritual Empire; Aquinas endowed it with an 
official philosophy, and reknit it to the Aristotelian past, as 
Augustine to the Platonic. Trent marks a watershed ; the Mod- 



i9io.] THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS : ', 177 

ern Papacy reveals the same principles at work, the identical 
life-springs still abundant, the personality unchanged, which 
were detected twenty centuries ago. It is a pleasure that Prior 
McNabb, of St. Thomas' own order, should have written for 
us Aquinas; and that the distinguished Vice-Rector of the 
English College, Rome, Mgr. Cronin, D.D., should have written 
Trent. 

Finally, Dr. Adrian Fortescue, an Oriental scholar of travel 
and experience, as well as of erudition, of vivid wit no less 
than of technical and scientific power, has told of those East- 
ern sects which broke away from the main current of Christian- 
ity ; Father E. Power, long of Beirut, writes of the great Semitic 
post-Christian religion, Islam. The Rev. A. H. Lang, once 
one of the six preachers in Canterbury Cathedral, explains 
the official structure of Anglicanism ; Father Burbridge, once 
a student for the Wesleyan ministry, tells of Wesley's sect. 
Father Power, the well-known Edinburgh preacher and contro- 
versialist, gives us the history of Presbyterianism ; Father Bourg 
writes of Luther and of Calvin; a distinguished Rabbi has read 
and approved the lecture on modern Judaism ; the lecture on 
Unitarianism the ultimate destiny of disintegrating Protestant- 
ism is by one who for many years was a Unitarian minister. 

It will be seen how carefully we have tried to ensure es- 
pecial reliability in those tracts which might most easily be 
suspected of controversial bias. 

We hope that many different classes of readers will be inter- 
ested in these lectures. Not only the professed student, but 
those who would fain have the directions for wider, deeper 
reading pointed out, who wish for text- books for lectures; 
even the school-boy who may have been (as in cases we have 
known) fascinated by the mystery of Egypt, or the oddity of 
China, and who almost certainly will have examinations where 
knowledge of Greek or Roman or Jewish history is necessary. 
All these, and more, we hope, will find that a little help, at 
le~st, has been offered to them here. 

It has been decided to issue a fifth and perhaps a sixth 
volume of lectures, one frankly of the nature of an appendix, 
another telling of those after-forms of faith which, once the 
prevalent religion yields its place, immediately spring up to 
satisfy the soul of man, made for God, and restless till it rests 
in Him, or at least, in what it takes for Him. 
VOL. xcn. 12 



THE CALL OF THE SEA. 

BY JULIAN E. JOHNSTONE. 

I,OUD and clear comes the distant 

Call of the sea, insistent, 
The primitive, wild, and clamorous call 

Of the thunder-rolling sea. 

Up from the shelvy beaches, 

Over the rocky reaches, 
Grand and full as the organ-roar 

Of the tempest, the call for me. 

And I see the white ships homing : 

The surf and the breakers foaming 
In vision. I watch the mountainous wall 

Of the waters rush and roar. 

I smell the tang of the ocean, 

And my heart is all commotion, 
As, strong as a resonant song of war, 

The billows pour on the shore. 

Silver clear is the ringing 

Song the sirens are singing, 
As, high on the back of the white-maned steeds, 

The mermaids gallop along : 

To me indesinent calling 

Over the rising and falling 
Of the thunderous, wondrous wilderness, 

To sing them a sounding song. 






19 io.] THE CALL OF THE SEA 179 

Flapping of flags and cracking 

Of tarry canvas, and tacking 
Of vessels that drive in the boom and spume 

Of the racing, rushing sea : 

Rattle of tackle falling, 

Curlews crying and calling : 
O Heavens. 1 I long for the vigorous song 

Of the spin-drift flying free ! 



That grand old harper, Thunder, 
Who fills the world with wonder, 

Can sing no epic of roaring storm 

So strong as the song of the sea : 
For the Ocean's mighty motion 
Is an anthem full of devotion, 

Intoned to the Great Jehovah, 
God, enthroned in immensity ! 




THE WORK OF IRISH SISTERS. 

Being the third and last of the series of sketches entitled " In Carra and Tirawley, 

County Mayo." 

BY WILFRID ST. OSWALD. 

N the Moyside, partly in Gallen and partly in Ti- 
rawley, for the river divides these ancient baro- 
nies, lies Foxford, the railway gate of Tirawley, 
though in fact the station is a mile distant from 
the town which has grown to its present size and 
status since the closing decade of the last century, when dis- 
tress was acute throughout the district. Its destitution ap- 
pealed so strongly to Mr. Balfour, when he visited it during 
his tour in the West of Ireland in 1890, that he at once started 
relief works which happily averted the threatened famine, and 
prepared the way for the scheme initiated by the Irish Sisters 
of Charity in April, 1891, when they opened a convent at 
Foxford, and took over the management of what had hitherto 
been the practically empty National Schools, personally gath- 
ering into them and feeding and clothing the children from 
the villages and lonely cottages on the stony wastes around, 
and rousing the parents from the apathy induced by hopeless- 
ness and semi-starvation. 

All went well for the children during their school- days; 
but the solution of the problem of their present involved the 
graver and more difficult problem of their future; for naturally 
their improved education had bred in them a " divine discon- 
tent" with their surroundings; and "the West was a-calling" 
the great West which for more than a century had attracted 
too many of the eager, the purposeful, and the strong from 
the old country, weakening its people in exact proportion as 
it strengthened the populations of the United States and of 
the British Empire overseas the great West which unfortu- 
nately had beckoned also to the nerveless, the resourceless, 
and the physically frail, to number them, alas ! among the 
wrecks of its civilization, or to send them back to the old 



THE WORK OF IRISH SISTERS 181 

country disappointed and destitute. The wish and aim of the 
Foxford nuns, as true patriots, was to make it possible for 
more of these Mayo young people to remain in their own 
Connaught, even though the stony ground could feed no more 
mouths, and the foolish sub-division of holdings only tended 
to increase distress. But in such circumstances how could they 
remain ? Providence solved the problem by putting it into 
the minds of the Sisters of Charity to stop the waste of the 
splendid powers of the Moy River as it rushed seaward over 
its rocky bed, and to use it in revitalizing a dead Irish indus- 
try, and thereby to provide employment and food for the people. 
And Providence sent friends and sympathizers, Protestant as 
well as Catholic, individuals and the Congested Districts Board, 
to give necessary financial aid in initiating the scheme. De- 
spite difficulties and disasters, despite the objections of friend 
and foe, which had to be lived through in starting and steer- 
ing a new undertaking, the desirable venture of strong, hopeful 
hearts became a living, robust fact in the Providence Woolen 
Factory, which at first had to be bravely run at a loss, but 
is now gaily paying its way, providing splendid employment, 
and turning out fabrics which have received honors at many 
exhibitions blankets and flannels, tweeds and friezes, serges 
and cloths all of absolutely honest texture and at an equally 
honest price. Do we wonder, then, when we are told that the 
factory is Foxford, and that Foxford is the factory ? Its tall 
chimney is a pillar of hope to the barren countryside, and the 
music of its machinery mingles with the voices of the Moy, 
waking the land from its lethargy, giving work to willing hands, 
and making Foxford the busiest hive of industry in Connaught. 
Among the most interesting incidents of our stay in County 
Mayo, were visits to this Foxford factory, which, if not yet 
as large as the elephantine mills at Bradford, is stocked with 
no mere makeshifts in the matter of plant, but with first-class 
machinery, spindles and looms, worked by a capable staff of 
alert young men and women of irreproachable morals and 
manners, under the supervision of religious women vowed to 
poverty and unworldliness, yet showing as much energy and 
business capacity as people stimulated merely by motives of 
gain. Not only this. These nuns train their "mill hands" in 
the same qualities, and give them a due share of responsibil- 
ity in the management of the various departments. Fair wages 



1 82 THE WORK OF IRISH SISTERS [Nov., 

are paid; hours of work are regular; and so great is the de- 
mand for the goods manufactured, that never yet has there 
been need to work "short time"; neither is there any shirk- 
ing of the normal conditions of factory life; while it would 
be difficult to find anywhere a better or more carefully carried 
out system of book-keeping. Government inspection of the 
factory there is, of course, never failing to bring Government 
commendation. But, be it noted, no financial profit accrues to 
the sisterhood. What profits there are, are either absorbed by 
improvement and extension of the plant, or devoted to the 
needs of those who help the nuns to create them; to increas- 
ing classes in the Technical School whose foundation was all 
outlay on the part of the Convent. And now, besides classes 
in the usual elementary subjects, the school includes courses 
in cookery, laundry, poultry-rearing, and handicrafts, a much 
needed course of training for domestic servants, and a singularly 
successful dairy class, which has taken high honors for butter 
exhibits at the Royal Dublin Society's Show. 

So far, in speaking from personal observation and knowl- 
edge of the Foxford factory and schools, we may have de- 
scribed only what is now fairly well-known, even though the 
venture is hardly beyond its vigorous youth. What is not 
realized save by those benefited by it, and by those of us 
who have visited some of the more than four hundred lowly 
cottages within its boundaries, is the work done in the greater 
factory extending for miles and miles into the bogs and recesses 
of the mountains a work in the hovels and cottages of the 
peasantry, manufacturing energy, order, and cleanliness out of 
apathy, disorder, and dirt. To this work a speaker at the 
Connaught Exhibition bore eloquent testimony from his per- 
sonal experience of a four days' house to house visitation of 
a large district in this greater factory ; and we may well en- 
dorse his statement that, " all the Acts of Parliament ever 
passed have not effected in the rural districts as much in the 
cause of sanitation and health as has been done in a few 
months by the example and gentle influence of the Sisters of 
Charity." 

These Irish Sisters, who are re-vitalizing the ancient woolen 
industry of the West, and leading the people anew in the 
paths of life and hope, have a distinctly national spiritual an- 
cestry. Their foundress, Mother Aikenhead, was a Dublin 



i9io.] THE WORK OF IRISH SISTERS 183 

lady who, early in the last century, at the request of Dr. 
Murray, Archbishop of Dublin, received her training in religious 
life at the York Convent of the Institute of Mary, a Society 
founded by Mary Ward during the days of religious persecu- 
tion in England. From York Mother Aikenhead, and the 
companions who had with her been prepared there for their 
future work, returned to Ireland, and in conjunction with 
Archbishop Murray founded a religious Congregation or In- 
stitute devoted to works of charity, and known as the " Irish 
Sisters of Charity," to distinguish it from the Congregation 
founded by St. Vincent of Paul. United under a general 
Superior, the numerous houses of this Irish Congregation are 
to be found in many parts of the world, and very various are 
the fields of labor in which the Sisters work their good 
works for God and the people; but among their multitudinous 
methods of ministering to the poor and needy, Mother Aiken- 
head surely never foresaw that her nuns would become mill- 
managers, and excel as such.* 

That there was an ancient or rather a medieval woolen 
industry in Ireland, there is abundant and independent docu- 
mentary evidence to prove. It was not factory work, of 
course, as we now understand the term, but the product of 
spinning-wheel and handloom, as was the contemporaneous 
output of woolen materials in Somerset and Yorkshire, and as 
is the work of "cottage industries " everywhere to-day. Three 
excellences were to be borne in mind by medieval workers of 
all countries, " elegance, comfort, and lastingness." Irish cloth 
was well known in England after Henry II. 's invasion, and 
was sold in English markets at least from A. D. 1200 to 1600. 
To Chester and Hereford and Gloucester, to Bristol and 
Southampton, and to Coventry and Canterbury, were carried 
Irish friezes and serges, cloth white and red, purple and green. 
The fifteenth century Book of Lismore records Ireland's manu- 
facture of linen and serge; and Irish madder and other dyes 
were renowned. If Spanish wool was imported for the best 

* Success has crowned the enterprise of the Irish Sisters of Charity, of the Sisters of 
Mercy, and of other Orders, in nearly all the industries started by them throughout the 
country, notably at Skibbereen, Stradbally, Gort (County Galway), Blackrock, Queenstown, 
Kilkenny, Carrickmacross, Newry, etc. ; and in the revival of the once famous lace schools of 
Kenmare, Killarney, and Youghal. Good luck to the Sisters of Mercy, who were bravely 
battling with small beginnings when we saw them last year on Achill Island, where they hope 
to establish a woolen factory. 



1 84 THE WORK OF IRISH SISTERS [Nov., 

fabrics, Catalonian manufacturers sought the secret of the Irish 
coloring as well as of their textile work. Fine Irish serge was 
used in Naples, and was known in Bologna and Genoa and 
Florence * Irish frieze found a good market in France, passed 
up the Rhine, and was so popular at Bruges and Antwerp f 
that when the importation of foreign cloth was forbidden in 
the Netherlands, in 1497, so great a clamor arose from the 
people that the Archduke gave orders that cloths from Ireland 
as well as from England and Scotland should be freely sold 
as before by strangers frequenting the country and carrying on 
the trade. We can hardly believe, however, that this freedom 
of sale implied freedom from tariff even to these "most fav- 
ored nations/ 1 in all of which, we may note parenthetically, 
woolen manufactured materials were the staple article of trade 
during the Plantagenet period. 

Some at least of the Irish woolen industry, with which we 
are immediately concerned, was carried on in Connaught, 
whose " ports and islands were full of ships that sailed the 
Atlantic from the Orkneys to Italy and Spain 1 '; and not a 
few of these ships, we know, went from Killala Bay. It calls 
for no stretch of imagination, therefore, to believe that their 
freight consisted, in many cases, of the Irish woolen fabrics 
that found favor in France and with the artistic people of 
Italy. It is no argument to say that the political and social 
unrest of Ireland precluded the possibility of such work as we 
have indicated. Possibility or no possibility, contemporary 
documents prove that it was done and well done. The greater 
trade and commerce of England were not killed either by the 
French Wars or the Wars of the Roses, but actually pro- 
gressed in spite of them; and some of the most brilliant peri- 
ods of Italian art and commerce synchronized with times of 
the direst internecine warfare. 

Quite true is it that " Foxford is the Factory, and the 
Factory is Foxford." Quite true on six days of the week; 
but on Sunday Foxtord is the knoll-set Catholic Church, which 
from far and near gathers to itself a congregation of which its 

* Naples. G. Yver. Le Commerce et les Marchands. Bologna. Frati. Vita, Privata di 
Bologna, 32. Florence. Ditta Mundi. Fazio degli Uberti. Cap. XXVI. Old Florentine 
Account Book in Dizion. Delia Crusca. See Napier. II., 593. 

t France. Tour de M.de la Benlhaye le Gouz. Ed. Crofton Croker, 1837. Rhine. 
Hazeakten aus England. Kunze, 144. Bruges. Gilliodts van Scoeren, Cart Bruges. Antwerp^ 
Guicciardini, Description of the Netherlands. Quoted by Macpherson. II., 131. 



1 9 io.] THE WORK OF IRISH SISTERS 185 

clergy and sisterhood may well be proud. A modern Gothic 
church it is, spacious and in measure beautiful, testifying that 
in their recently acquired comparative prosperity its people 
are animated by the grand tradition of the Ages of Faith, 
that looked first of all to the beauty of God's House and the 
place where His glory dwelleth before pouring out riches upon 
the habitations of His creatures. 

Driving from Pontoon behind a thoroughbred mare, for 
whose little runaway escapades justification was sought on the 
plea that, being a good religious animal, she was afraid of be- 
ing late for Mass, and naturally shied at black sheep when 
such happened to be by the roadside in her moments of fear, 
Sunday after Sunday, shine or shower, on highways and by- 
ways, on mountain and bog, and in the streets of Foxford it- 
self, we saw the faithful converging to the day's common goal. 
The crowded foregathering of the men outside the church, be- 
fore the bell sounds for Mass, is a well-known feature of the 
Irish country Sunday; and the picture within the sacred edi- 
fice, even to the large tub of holy water at the door, is one 
familiar in Ireland's country churches. Not unkempt and un- 
washed, as we sometimes see their compatriots on Sunday 
mornings in the slums of great cities in America and England, 
are the Irish of Carra and Tirawley in their own land. Neat- 
ly clad in stout serge or tweed are the men; the older women 
are picturesque in dark colored skirts and fringed shawls light 
and dark, crowned by bright head-kerchiefs catching the sun- 
rays and making a harmony of colored halos above the heads 
of the wearers, some of whose faces are framed in frilled white 
linen caps of spotless cleanliness. The younger people are 
garbed in more modern fashion, and in demeanor are strictly 
"correct," restrained, and reverent ; but the older people men 
and women seem to be happily oblivious of neighbors and 
onlookers, so wrapt are they in prayer, sometimes a quite 
audible outpouring of heart to our Divine Lord. Little they 
knew that the " Sassenach stranger " close at hand heard them 
with gratitude craving for a blessing on him and his ! English 
prayers before Mass, as in the old days. How good to hear 
them once again ! And then the Mass the touchstone of 
orthodoxy the great Act of Faith linking all nationalities in 
a common heavenly brotherhood " ,the Mass that matters!" 
Nearly midday is it when the Communion is reached, yet not 



186 THE WORK OF IRISH SISTERS [Nov. 

a few of the faithful, who could not get to Foxford for the 
earlier Mass, approach the altar to receive their Lord ; and 
very evident is it that in all reverence they are keenly sensible 
of the reality of His coming. From the sermons we learn 
facts worth knowing about the congregation : that nearly all 
its men belong to the Confraternity of the Sacred Heart, and 
are pledged by their membership to total abstinence from 
alcohol; that a similar pledge is exacted from members of the 
women's Confraternity of our Lady ; that all fathers and 
mothers are urged "never to let the children taste the wet of 
the whisky"; and that, consequently, Foxford is in the very 
forefront of the temperance movement in Ireland. 

Even in Foxford, however, there are failures to spoil a 
bright record, but their rarity is proved by the indignant aston- 
ishment of the Bishop when, on going through the parish with 
its rector during the last episcopal visitation, he saw in one of 
the roadways " the sad and singular sight of a drunken man." 

After Mass, Benediction; and then a brief tarrying in the 
churchyard that climbs the hillock from the roadway, to meet 
and sweep round the church ; no wailing is there, but silent 
prayers by the graves of dear ones already called [to the 
Great Home; then happy sounds of mirthful laughter as, with 
interchange of news and greetings, the congregation disperses 
to go its several ways until it reassembles the next Sunday 
morning. And meanwhile, linking Sunday to Sunday, the 
missionary work of the Sisters of Charity goes on, elevating 
the hearts and minds of the people, giving them work and 
food, and brightening their lives for all time by the charm of 
a factory. 




THE CATHOLIC LAYMAN AND SOCIAL REFORM.* 

BY JOSEPH McSORLEY, C.S.P. 

!OU will bear with me if I begin by reminding 
you that it is a significant nay, I will say, a 
historic moment, when the first National Confer- 
ence of Catholic Charities officially broaches the 
question of the Catholic layman's relation to 
Social Reform. As the years pass future Congresses will, of 
course, go into the matter more thoroughly, more satisfactorily ; 
yet the discussion inaugurated at this Conference must, as the 
first, remain unique. 

Why do I venture to attach this supreme importance to 
the present question ? 

First; because I believe that the working people of this 
country will not submit much longer to the rules that now 
control the distribution of wealth. 

Secondly ; because I believe that to guide the discontented 
army along legitimate ways, to prevent violent revolution by 
wise and just reform, no type of man is so well- equipped as 
the American Catholic layman. 

It will occur to you at once, no doubt, as it occurred in- 
stantly to me, that there would be a particular fitness in hav- 
ing one of our laymen begin the discussion of the topic be- 
fore us. Yet, after all, I find it not inappropriate that a priest 
address you at the outset. For we the clergy, I mean feel 
an imperative need of urging upon your attention the obliga- 
tions of the Catholic people with regard to social reform. 
Frankly, we think you are not doing your whole duty in the 
matter. "Very good," replies the Catholic layman, "but if I 
have not done my whole duty in the matter, that is largely 
the fault of the priests." Gentlemen, we plead guilty. It is 
true. As you have not done your whole duty, neither have 
we. I have consulted the two distinguished priests who have 
been foremost in arranging the present Conference. They agree 
that we have been at fault no less than you ; and all three of 
us confess it here publicly Mgr. White, I presume, speaking 

* An address delivered at the First National Conference of Catholic Charities, held in the 
city of Washington, D.C., September 25-28, 1910. 



1 88 THE CATHOLIC LAYMAN [Nov., 

in behalf of the prelates; Dr. Kerby for the professors; and I, 
lor the purpose of this confession, representing the parochial 
priesthood. But what we are further agreed upon is that this 
reproach is to be wiped out. Prelates and professors and plain 
priests, we are getting ready to do our part in the apostolical 
field of social reform. It is as a pledge of our sincerity that 
we now address you and urge you to consider the gravity of 
your responsibilities in the matter. 

Those responsibilities are, indeed, grave; for our age wit- 
nesses no phenomenon more momentous than the urgent, 
spreading, irresistible pressure of public opinion against the 
slow yielding walls of unjust economic institutions. And no 
comment upon this struggle can be more electrically sugges- 
tive than the challenge implied by our meeting here this even- 
ing: Catholic laymen, what are you going to do about it? 
You, who bear Christ's name so proudly you, the disciples of 
the saints and the heirs of the knights crusaders; you, whose 
destiny it is to build up the next generation of God's people 
out of your own flesh and blood and mind and soul; you, 
Catholic laymen and Catholic laywomen of the twentieth cen- 
tury and of America you are bearing a tremendous responsi- 
bility and facing a thrilling issue, not unworthy of comparison 
with the conflicts that, at different epochs of Christian history, 
tested the strength of martyrs in the Roman tribunals, amid 
wild northern forests and the mountain caves of Ireland, or on 
the coasts of the Orient. You, Catholic laymen, have been set 
by God's providence in the midst of a movement which seems 
to deserve the name of a social crusade and what are you 
going to do about it ? 

The first contribution that we have a right to expect from 
the Catholic layman is a contribution of interest that he be 
not entirely aloof from, indifferent to, the social miseries that 
prevail among certain classes of his fellow-beings. You are 
hardly men of fine feeling or of natural nobility, if you care 
nothing about what is going on in the workshops and the 
factories, the tenements and the tunnels, the mines and stock- 
yards and steel-mills. You are scarcely Christians, if it means 
nothing to you that women and children are condemned often 
to lives of suffering, sometimes to lives of sin and shame, by 
reason of certain conditions in our industrial life that are 
easily alterable. I shall not try your patience or harrow your 



19 io.] AND SOCIAL REFORM 189 

imagination by attempting to paint in high colors the agonies 
to which many thousands of our fellow-beings are subjected 
by what is called the present social system. But it is worth 
our while to recall that there is such suffering and that it is 
largely traceable to economic conventions for which you and 
I if we are passive members of the comfortable classes must 
be held, in part, responsible. 

I assume that all of you are fairly familiar with the main 
facts in the pitiful story of injustice that stains the record of 
our civilization. If any one is not, then his ignorance is his 
shame. These facts appear again and again in newspaper and 
magazine; they inspire novelist and playwright and poet. Stu- 
dents analyze them; statisticians tabulate them; legislators 
puzzle over them. What is worse, God's poor die; little chil- 
dren are dwarfed ; men are maimed ; women are dishonored 
because of them. What is better, heroic men and women sur- 
render wealth and consecrate life in the endeavor to mitigate 
the horror of them. And if the American Catholic layman is 
not even interested ; if he thinks he is free to be unconcerned 
about problems of unemployment, overwork, underpayment, 
unsanitary housing, occupational diseases, employers' liability, 
pensions, prices of fuel and food and clothing if the Catholic 
layman thinks all this is none of his affair why, then, God 
pity us ! 

Let us put aside for the moment every debatable point; 
There is one thing universally admitted that our economic 
machine is working badly and is crushing human souls in the 
process. Whether or not the machine can ever be made to 
function perfectly is, indeed, at best, an open question. But 
that it can be made to function better, thousands do maintain* 
Impelled by the hope of preventing the suffering of multitudes, 
many men and women are devoting the best part of their en- 
ergies to the reforming as they call it of the present social 
order. Money, sweat, comfort, health are spent generously; 
life itself is given up not infrequently in this heroic attempt. 
These persons are not satisfied to relieve misery ; they would 
as far as it is possible, prevent it. Charity does not content 
them ; they clamor for justice. 

So, from the Catholic layman, we bespeak zealous interest 
in the preventive measures adverted to under the name of social 
reform, But you must have a zeal " according to knowledge "; 



THE CATHOLIC LAYMAN [Nov., 

and, therefore, we urge you to make yourselves familiar with 
what bears upon these projects most intimately. 

For lack of knowledge, the social reformer has fallen into 
pitfalls so often and so disastrously that the very cause itself 
has incurred obloquy. Now one must not give ready credence 
to every indictment of the existing order; nor attach oneself 
instantly to every proposed remedy; nor promote fanatically 
any panacea. Therefore, one must begin by getting the facts 
correctly; one must proceed scientifically; one must always 
conclude with a fast hold upon principle. This may mean 
that he will move more slowly than others ; but in the end he 
will win more support, achieve greater influence, and effect more 
profitable and lasting results than the hasty and headstrong re- 
cruit who would be a brigadier before he has learned the first 
lessons of the drill-book. 

Briefly, then, you must study. First, you should know 
something of the history of attempts that have been made in 
the past and of failures that have been recorded. History will 
manifest, too, the heredity of .certain leaders and certain sys- 
tems of social reform ; and perhaps may identify them with 
proclivities which at present they loudly repudiate. 

You should be well informed again, as to the progress of 
current events what evils are now entrenched, and who en- 
trenches them ; what remedial legislation is proposed and who 
proposes it; what good bills are killed, what good laws are 
shelved and who is responsible for the killing or the shelving 
of them. 

Science implies a conformity of the mind with the actual 
facts. In the interest of science, therefore, one must have a 
care not to be swayed by the gusts of passion, or the tides of 
greed ; one must not be blinded by partisanship, or deafened 
by appeals to race loyalty, or handcuffed by religious bigotry. 
Let a man dig into the facts and lay down sound conclusions ; 
then let him build upon these his fearless social platform. 
Thus habit will not paralyze him, nor catchwords frighten him ; 
neither will tradition gag him, nor promises soothe him to sleep. 
Catholic layman i find out what projects are being agitated in 
the world of social reform; study their significance; learn how 
to demonstrate the worth of whatever is good and stick to 
your opinion. 

Let us affirm plainly now, that among the obligations of 
the Catholic layman we include an elementary knowledge of 



i9io.] AND SOCIAL REFORM 191 

the principles of economics ; of the natural laws that govern 
production and consumption, of wages and capital and monopo 
lies, of trade-unionism and taxation. This is not hard to ob- 
tain. With it your usefulness to the cause of social reform is 
many times multiplied ; without it your enthusiasm may trans- 
form you into an unmitigated nuisance. For an illustration of 
the good that can be accomplished by patient, united action 
based upon scientific principles, I refer you to Father Plater's 
account of the successful progress in social reform made by 
the Catholics of Germany.* For an instance of the way and 
the spirit in which another nation may follow the lead of the 
Germans, I recall to your minds the recent establishment of 
the Catholic Social Guild of England. For a book which will 
introduce you fairly to the elements of economic science, I 
suggest Political Economy, by C. S. Devas. Finally, for a brief 
general guide to some literature which will easily and effec- 
tually increase your knowledge, I may mention Leslie Toke's 
Methods of Social Study, published in a pamphlet on Social 
Work for Catholic Layfolk by the English Catholic Truth 
Society. 

So far as to economics. But, moreover, you must be so 
well grounded in the principles of your religion that you can 
demonstrate to anybody the essential incompatibility of Catho- 
licity and bad citizenship. Never paste a party programme 
over the pages of your catechism; never sanction a campaign 
document that is inconsistent with the Christian gospel. No 
matter what any one may say, the seventh and eighth com- 
mandments are as* permanently valid as the sixth; the Beati- 
tudes still hold good ; and Fortitude is no less a gift of the 
Holy Ghost when it is nerving a man's conscience on the 
Tuesday after the first Monday of November. To defraud the 
laborer remains, even in this our day, a sin that cries to heaven 
for vengeance; and though we have changed many things, it 
is still true that on the hinges of justice God swings the doors 
of the moral world. 

Property is sacred ; the well-instructed Catholic will never 
doubt that. And authority is of divine origin; that is as clear 
as the noonday. It is sure, likewise, that the poor we shall 
have always with us, and that the one real Utopia borders the 
farther side of] the river of death. But it is equally true that 

* Catholic Social Work in Germany. By Charles D. Plater, S.J. St. Louis, Mo.: B. 
Herder. 



192 THE CATHOLIC LAYMAN [Nov., 

Catholic principles censure as criminal the rich man's scandal- 
ous waste of goods for the need of which his brother lies starv- 
ing; that the Church condemns as immoral the man who grows 
rich on usury, however thickly disguised ; and that God visits 
eternal punishment upon a board of directors as surely as 
upon a secret society of assassins, though the first may have 
let the victim's heart's blood out with a majority stockholders' 
vote instead of with a stiletto. 

We have pleaded for interest and for knowledge. If, then, 
one is interested in the various problems of social reform and 
thoroughly familiar with the facts and principles that most 
nearly touch the centres of our economic disturbance, is it 
enough ? We should scarcely be Americans did we not, at 
once, project the undertaking of some practical measures of 
readjustment. You shall not satisfy your conscience in this 
matter by anything short of active service in the cause of re- 
form. It is true that in going on to consider what sort of 
service each can give, we touch upon complicated and delicate 
problems. But there is one general rule we can apply to all: 
Do something. 

If you do nothing whatever it cannot all be the fault of 
the clergy. We are willing to shoulder a good deal of re- 
sponsibility,*but it is not wholly our fault if, for instance, you 
have never read Pope Leo's Encyclical on the Labor Question ; 
if you do not let the librarians of your city know that Dr. 
Ryan has written the best book in English on the working- 
man's right to a living wage; if you do not come in crowds 
to High Mass on Labor Sunday when Monsignor White 
preaches one of his stirring and noble discourses on the rights 
and duties of labor ; if you have never spoken a word of 
sympathy for, or lifted your pen to aid, the work of educa- 
tion which Dr. Kerby has been doing so quietly and effec- 
tually for many years in this university. 

Examples to reproach our inactivity might be drawn from 
Holland and Belgium and Switzerland and France and Ger- 
many ; from our neighbors over in the British Isles even from 
our fellow-countrymen of another creed. What to do ? Well, 
there are valuable monographs that need to be translated, 
pamphlets that should be imported, good book-lists already 
prepared that would be of immense use if properly distributed 
in this country. England is now covered with a system of 



19 io.] AND SOCIAL REFORM 193 

Catholic clubs for social study; and with this year there be- 
gins the issue of a Catholic Social Year Book. Five years ago 
the English published a Handbook of Catholic Charitable and 
Social Works. When is ours coming out? Continually the 
Catholic Truth Society is printing valuable brochures which 
few of us over here can even name. And attention, ladies ! 
the Catholic Women's League has founded three scholarships 
at the London School of Economics. 

Here in America, too, there are groups and organizations 
that have undertaken most important social investigations ; that 
have elaborated social programmes ; that have made their weight 
tell in social issues with business men, with readers of the 
press, with legislatures, and with political candidates. Which 
of these things is it impossible or inexpedient for us to do ? 

Confess I It is not impossibility or inexpediency, that has 
retarded us so much as the lack of interest and of knowledge. 
Something in the way of an examination of conscience, there- 
fore, might be good for us on an occasion like the present. 

Maybe you buy an occasional novel or short- story magazine; 
then why unwilling to buy a Catholic Truth Society booklet 
or to subscribe for a periodical which will keep you in touch 
with the world of social reform ? Maybe you have time to 
attend a demonstration of the fall styles in aeroplanes; then 
why not time for an occasional lecture on strikes and causes 
of unemployment ? If you take the trouble to remember the 
batting average of some baseball favorite, why should it seem 
an impossible nuisance to keep track of and to patronize the 
White List of the Consumers' League ? Possibly you are ac- 
tive about having the tariff reduced on some article you would 
like to import. Yet you do nothing to promote legislation 
which will permit your brethren to exist humanly and will 
protect women and children in their health and lives and 
sacred honor ? 

Then, again, specifically with regard to mothers and fa- 
thers. There are various ways in which the parents' activity 
can take a practical form. One is that of encouraging the 
young people to interest themselves in such questions as these 
in hand. Sometimes there is a book to be bought, a prize to 
be given, a course of study to be elected; sometimes the sub- 
ject of a debate, of an essay, or of a lecture is to be chosen. 
We need not neglect the training of our children in the lesser 
VOL. xcii. 13 



194 THE CATHOLIC LAYMAN [Nov., 

matters that we call accomplishments ; but God forbid that we 
should be totally indifferent to their formation in the power to 
think straight and speak intelligently and act honestly with re- 
gard to matters that are getting to be the most vital subjects 
in the world. Do we know, this moment, whether or not our 
larger bays and girls are receiving any social formation in 
their classes at school ? Remember ! they will receive it, if 
their parents demand it. 

In another field the activity of the layman can manifest 
itself nobly, and that is the field of practical charitable work. 
Few of our men are not within easy reach of a St. Vincent 
de Paul Conference ; and hence within reach of one of the 
best of all opportunities of displaying an active zeal for the 
welfare of God's unfortunates and of acquiring valuable social 
experience. But how many of our men, especially our young 
men, are blind to this opportunity ? Is it a good excuse for 
them to say that they would be more interested in another 
kind of social activity preventive or constructive rather than 
remedial? That would be a fair answer, if they were doing 
that other kind of work; but if, while waiting for it to come 
along, they are doing nothing whatever, then it looks very 
much as if they are shirking. 

Another point that cannot be too strongly emphasized is 
the splendid opportunity presented to our Catholic men at the 
polls. What percentage of us realize our responsibility in 
this regard ? or, realizing, attempt to discharge the obligation ? 
It is no exaggeration to say that if the Catholic voters of this 
country to a man voted intelligently and consistently for 
healthy social legislation, we should have a guarantee against 
injustice and disaster such as never has been and perhaps in 
no other way can be provided. 

Of course one cannot broach the subject of action without 
adverting at once to the increased value of united, and there- 
fore of organized, action. In the future that may come; per- 
haps I had better say it is bound to come. But this is too 
early an hour to enter upon that matter, and for the present 
we are contenting ourselves with an appeal to the individual. 

My friends, you were reminded at the beginning of this 
paper that you represent the class of men on whom it would 
seem the welfare of our future must depend. You perceive 



i9io.] AND SOCIAL REFOR'M 195 

the proof of this affirmation when you reflect that in a very 
real sense you are to be numbered among the Fathers of the 
Church, since the Church of the next generation will literally 
be composed of your sons and daughters. Prelates and profes- 
sors and missionaries of the present day, all alike, will pass 
away their bequest of influence to the next generation being 
limited to that moral impulse they will have given by written 
or spoken word, by prayer or by example. But the prelates 
and the professors and the missionaries of the Church fifty 
years hence will be bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh 
the heirs of your moral and religious, as of your material 
and mental wealth or poverty. They will bear your name 
they will largely reproduce your lives and they are the beings 
who must determine, in so far as human act can determine, 
the course of history in society and in the Church for cen- 
turies to come. 

Tell me, Fathers of the Catholic Church, what influence 
will you exert over the men and women of this coming gener- 
ation what example are you going to leave them in the 
matter of social reform ? 

One might imagine the benign figure of that Mother Church 
which has been parent and nurse and teacher to so many 
ages of Catholic people, smiling down upon the little group 
of her children gathered together at this Conference, and ad- 
dressing them in trustful tones: "Children of mine, during 
these twenty centuries, I have been with you through many a 
struggle. Often I have called to you in dire necessity ; and 
you have never failed me yet. Was it the cause of faith or 
of purity, of peace, of education, or of charity never once 
did I find you sluggish or unheroic, but always unselfish, 
vigilant, brave. Now there is another enterprise in hand. 
Again I call upon you and again upon you I must depend. 
This great blundering world of ours, this heedless, far-straying 
generation, in many ways so good and in many ways so bad, 
having been deaf to my voice, has wandered into mortal peril. 
Let us go and save it. It is captive and oppressed; let us 
win for it liberty and justice. Catholic laymen, children of my 
bearing and my upbringing, your brethren, the sons of God, die 
for want of your time, your thought, your labor, your gold, 
your heart's blood give to them generously. For, remember, 
only so can you be named the children of my inspiration." 




THE VANDALISM OF THE REFORMERS, 

A RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW. 
BY CARYL COLEMAN. 

ALMOST all the intellectual movements of the past, 
of whatever nature they may have been, had 
their prophets or forerunners, hence it is not 
strange to find that the Gothic Revival- was no 
exception to the rule. And that years before 
Pugin wrote his Principles of Christian Architecture: the Gos- 
pel of the Revival, a plea was written in favor of returning to 
pointed architecture in ecclesiastical edifices. 

At the end of the eighteenth century the Church of St. 
Margaret, Westminster, was embellished with a stained- glass 
window that gave great offense to the ultra-Protestants of 
London, as it depicted the Crucifixion, together with repre- 
sentations of saints and angels. The feeling aroused against 
-this popish decoration was so strong that it called forth a 
quarto volume of almost two hundred pages in apology for 
the window, and in defense of similar decorations, at the same 
time advocating medieval architecture for church buildings. 

The name of the author of the work ( The Ornaments of 
Church Considered, Oxford, MDCCCXCL) is not given. The 
way in which he handles his subject makes very plain that he 
was a man of learning and wide reading, nevertheless, he 
writes with great timidity, evidently from the fear that he 
might be taken for a Romanist, which would have defeated 
his object. In speaking against the bad taste that then pre- 
vailed in church building and decoration, he says : " Our 
Gothic ancestors had juster and manlier notions than the 
mimics of Greek and Roman magnificence. The modern taste, 
not content with introducing Roman temples into our churches, 
and representing the virtues under allegorical images, has ran- 
sacked all the fabulous accounts of heathen theology to strike 
out new embellishments for our Christian monuments. Now I 
ask what subjects are properest for religious structures ? Such 
as are taken from the Iliad or /Eneid ? Surely not, for they 
would lead the mind unnecessarily away from its devotion. 



i9io.] THE VANDALISM OP THE REFORMERS 197 

Let them be taken from the volume that contains those sacred 
truths which cannot be too deeply fixed in our minds." 

Almost a century later these words, so strong for the time 
in which they were written, were echoed and re-echoed by 
Pugin, but with increased force, in his brilliant, though bellig- 
erent, Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture, where 
he says: "In the name of common sense, whilst we profess 
the creed of Christians, whilst we glory in being Englishmen, 
let us have an architecture, the arrangement and details of 
which will alike remind us of our faith and our country an 
architecture whose beauties we may claim as our own, whose 
symbols have originated in our religion and our customs. 
Such an architecture is to be found in the works of our great 
ancestors." In another work, speaking of Pagan emblems and 
attributes erected in Christian churches, he says: "What have 
we, as Christians, to do with all those things illustrative only 
of former error ? Is our wisdom set forth by the owl of Min- 
erva, or our strength by the club of Hercules ? What have 
we (who have been redeemed by the sacrifice of our Lord 
Himself) to do with the carcasses of bulls and goats ? And 
how can we (who surround the biers of departed brethren with 
blazing tapers, denoting our hope and faith in the glorious 
light of the Resurrection) carve the inverted torch of Pagan 
despair on the very tomb to which we conduct their remains 
with such sparkling light? Let us away with such gross in- 
consistencies, and restore the Christian ideas of our Catholic 
ancestors, for they alone are proper for our imitation." 

If the author of The Ornaments of Church Considered had 
lived to witness the Gothic Revival, he would have indeed re- 
joiced and joined most heartily with the enthusiasts of the 
movement, of which he was the precursor, such as John Earl 
of Shrewsbury, Dr. Rock, and Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle, " to 
whom the Canons of Gothic architecture were points of faith"; 
men who seemed to believe that the return of England to 
Catholic unity depended on crockets, finials, and gargoyles, the 
cut of a chasuble and the Gregorian chant ; men who were 
"grateful that the orientation of the heavens, and the glowing 
azure of its vault was beyond the reach of the perversity of 
human ingenuity " and the paganism of the Renaissance. The 
motive that so strongly moved these earnest men in favor of 
pointed architecture was threefold, vtx. 9 their ardent faith ; their 
insular pride; and their sincere belief that English Gothic was 



198 THE VANDALISM OF THE REFORMERS [Nov., 

the only channel through which an adequate architectonic ex- 
pression could be given to Christianity. Their reason for this 
belief was expressed by one of their number in the following 
words : " The great argument in favor of Gothic architecture 
(as it is generally called) has always appeared to me to be 
that which is derived from the circumstance of its Christian 
origin, meaning, and destination. No man of taste, however 
great his predilection for the Gothic or pointed style on Chris- 
tian grounds, will for a moment deny the beauty of Grecian 
or Roman architecture, but however much he may admire the 
beauty of those styles, he cannot deny their Pagan origin and 
meaning, or the fact that for many hundred years before the 
Christian era their sole and universal destination was Pagan. 
Hence the preference for the Christian pointed style over the 
Pagan or classical is much less a question of taste than one 
of principle. As a question of taste it may be defended, and in 
my opinion powerfully ; as a question of principle it becomes 
invincible, and I have no doubt of its ultimate and universal 
triumph, than I have of that of Christianity itself. Christian- 
ity cannot obtain a perfect triumph until every result of its 
teachings, every development of its principles, has obtained an 
universal recognition from the whole human race." 

What would these men and other disciples of Pugin, if 
they were living, say to those students that now hold that 
English Gothic was the invention of continental rather than 
English mind? For they emphasize the fact that ecclesias- 
tical art of all kinds, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, 
in all the countries of Europe, was largely in the hands of 
Clunisian architects and artists, or under their influence, while 
the church buildings were often constructed by lay-workmen 
trained in the workshops and studios of Cluny. And that in 
the following centuries the great cathedrals and abbeys were, 
as a rule, built by guilds of masons the inheritors of the 
skill of Clunisian artisans and their teachers, the monks and, 
moreover, that these guilds were cosmopolitan. Some students 
go further and question the right of Englishmen to any part 
in the invention, not only of Gothic, but of any other form 
of good architecture ; their reasons for this opinion being based 
on their interpretation of the historical and constructional de- 
velopment of Gothic architecture, and on the fact that after 
the Reformation had isolated England from intercommunication 
with Catholic nations, the world of art, its architecture and 



i9io.] THE VANDALISM OF THE REFORMERS 199 

kindred arts, fell into a most lamentable state of decay. As 
Pugin himself says, it was "a gradual decay of four centuries, 
the styles, for styles there were, became so execrably bad that 
the cup of degradation was filled to the brim." 

The author of The Ornaments of Church Considered, realizing 
this degradation, looked forward, although it must be admitted 
in only a half-hearted way, toward a revival of the ecclesi- 
astical architecture of the Ages of Faith, but, as he says, 
" freed from all superstitious decorations " ; at the same time 
he seemed doubtful of the artistic genius of the English 
people, that is as far as painting and sculpture are concerned, 
for he says : " It is the peculiar fate of this island (England) 
to have produced a Shakespeare, a Milton, and a Newton, 
without being able to boast of a painter or statuary, whose 
works can be compared, even by the most partial, with those 
of other nations." The architectural revival he hoped for has 
come to pass, but some critics are inclined to believe the re- 
vival is even now on the wane, at least as far as the English 
Roman Catholic body is concerned, and that it received its 
" death-blow " in the erection of the so-called Byzantine 
Cathedral of Westminster. A most un-English affair, about 
which the late Pope Leo XIII. " expressed his wonder that 
Mr. Bentley (the architect) had been sent to Bulgaria or Dal- 
matia to choose his models instead of the vales of Yorkshire, 
so rich in sacred architectural memories." 

The book under review was, in truth, a voice of one crying 
in the wilderness, and a storehouse of arguments and facts 
favoring the embellishment of churches with paintings, sculp- 
tures, and colored glass windows. The author even dares to 
attack the Book of Homilus on this subject. Yet, with all the 
boldness and learning he brings to bear, there is a tone of fear 
running through the work, as if too much had been said, so 
every now and then he turns aside and abuses Catholics, in 
order, as it were, to show his own orthodoxy. It may be he 
lived too near the time when the precious ornaments, lands, 
and buildings of the church excited the cupidity of sacrilegious 
plunderers to write freely. He had always before his mind the 
greed of the courtiers of the sixteenth century, and the fanat- 
ical hatred of the puritanic iconoclasts of the seventeenth, 
both alike the enemies of art: the first stole the lands, the 
gold and silver vessels, pulled down the churches in order to 
build themselves houses with the materials, or to sell them to 



200 THE VANDALISM OF THE REFORMERS [Nov., 

the highest bidder; while the latter, with no love for the 
beautiful in their hearts no soul for God's light that passed 

"Through the dim Gothic glass of pictured saints, 
Casements, through which the sunset streams like sunrise 
On long, pearl-colored beards, and crimson crosses, 
And gilded crosiers and cross'd arms and cowls, 
And helms, and twisted armor, and long swords; 
All the fantastic furniture of windows 
Dim with brave knights and holy hermits " 

broke in pieces, or removed from the churches, or used as 
targets, almost all the works of art that had escaped the 
plunderers of the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and 
Elizabeth. 

The author gives many examples of the destruction of 
things ecclesiological, during the days of Oliver Cromwell, 
through the ignorant zeal of the Puritan party, who seem to 
have been animated with a positive hatred of beauty. It is 
appalling to contemplate the desolation they wrought, the 
number of stained-glass windows they smashed, the pictures 
they defaced, and the organs they demolished. 

At Winchester, in the year 1643, a band of these " sancti- 
monius Pharisees," under the command of Sir William Waller, 
tore down the most beautiful wood-carvings in all England: 
stories from the Old and New Testament; rifled the monu- 
mental tomb of William of Wainfleet, the founder of Magda- 
len College, scattering his bones hither and thither. This same 
band, under the authority of Parliament, proceeding from Win- 
chester, visited parish church after parish church, and every- 
where their march was marked by the destruction of works of 
art, the pious offerings of English medieval faith and culture, 
and thus in the short space of three months they brought to 
naught the work of years. Sir William Waller's destroyers 
were by no means the only ones; there were others of like ilk, 
in various parts of England, committing like acts of vandalism 
a fact made plain from the pages of the Journal of William 
Dowsing, one of the parliamentary visitors. Under the date 
of January 6, 1644, at Clare, in Suffolk, he tells us, he de- 
troyed two hundred pictures, among them " three of God the 
Father, and three of Christ and the Holy Lamb, and three of 
the Holy Ghost like a dove with wings/ 1 At this time he also 



i9io.] THE VANDALISM OF THE REFORMERS 201 

removed from the top of the roof of the church statues of the 
twelve Apostles, which were carved in wood, together with those 
of twenty cherubims. Our author, in writing of these Parliamen- 
tarians, says : " They always pleaded their conscience for what 
they did. Conscience was the cover to all enormities what 
made them turn churches into stables, pull down altars, destroy 
paintings and glass windows, especially those where Christ was 
represented in His suffering for the sins of mankind ? Why 
still the large capacious thing, their conscience, which was always 
of much larger compass than their understanding. 

It must not be forgotten, however, that the smashing, mu- 
tilating, selling, and burning of objects of Christian art, togeth- 
er with the destruction of all kinds of instrumenta ecclesiastica 
by these vandals, was as child's play, compared with the devas- 
tations and desecration of sacred things under the authority of 
Elizabeth : " the only supreme governor in spiritual or eccle- 
siastical things or causes. 11 In the diocese of Lincoln alone, 
during the first eight years of this Queen's reign, by the official 
sanction of the intruded bishop, no less than a hundred and 
fifty Rood-lofts and their accompanying "images," the crucifix, 
the statues of St. John and the Blessed Mother, were destroyed. 

The reports of the churchwardens, of the time of Elizabeth, 
to their respective bishops, in answer to the inquiry made in 
virtue of the " Visitation Articles," are sad reading, for these 
inquiries, which were also " Injunctions," were warrants for the 
iconoclastic fanaticism of perverts and the covetous greed of 
the irreligious. Their tenor was much the same in all the di- 
oceses as that issued in 1561 by Parkhurst, Bishop of Norwich: 
" Whether all aulters, images, holi-water stones, pictures, past- 
ings, as of Th* assumption of the Blessed Virgin, of the de- 
scending of Christ into the Virgin in the form of a little boy 
at Th' annunciation of the Aungell, and all other superstitious 
and dangerous monuments, especiallie paintings and images in 
walls, boke, cope, banner, or els where, of the Blessed Trinitie, 
or of the Father (of Whom there can be no image made), be 
defaced and removed out of the church and other places, and 
are destroyed, and the places where such impietie was, so made 
up as if there had been no suche thing there." 

The one object, above all others, that Elizabeth and her 
bishops wished utterly to destroy was the altar. Archbishop 
Grindal, in his inquiry of 1571, asks : " Whether in your churches 
and chappels all aulters be utterly taken down and cleane re- 



202 THE VANDALISM OF THE REFORMERS [Nov., 

moved, even unto the foundation, and the place where they 
stood paved, and the wall whereunto they joined whited over 
and made uniform with the rest, so as no breach or rupture 
appear ? " 

In the churchwards* reports from every part of England en- 
tries of the following purport may be read by hundreds : 

Parish of Lang to ft 21 of May 1565. 

Ttm, iii altar stones broken and defaced thone solde unto 
Thomas Woodcroft who turned it to a cestron bottom thother 
occupied about the mending of the church wall and the thirde 
sett in a fire herthe. 

Parish of Horblinge 18 of Mar. 1565. 

Itm. iii altar stones ar broken and troughes and bridges 
ar made of theim. 

Itm. the roode lofte taken down and sold to Robert 
Cawthorne and Johnne Craile who haith made a weavers lome 
thereof and made windoes and suche like things. 

Parish of Bradley 25 of April 1566. 

Itm. one Rood with Marie and John brent this yeare 
Itm. a mass book with all the rest belonging to the popish 
service brent 

Itm. one altar stone broken and laid in the high waies. 

Parish of Denton. 6 of April 1563. 

Itm. the images of the roode Marie and Johnne and all 
other images of papistrie were burnte. 

Itm. iii banner clothes crosse clothe and one rood clothe & 
one herse sold to Simond hall lie haith made hangings of 
them. 

Itm. one vestment of worsted sold to Willm grene he haith 
cutt yt in peces and made him a doublett thereof. 

Itm. iii alter stones broken in peces. 

Parish of Drought. 

Imprimis one Rood with Marie and John weare brent Ao iii 
Regno. Elizabeth. 

Itm. an altar stone one sup. altarie and linnen clothe for 
thalter defaced ano. pmo. Elizabeth. 

Itm. the tabernacles whearin the xii Apostles stoode with 
other popish papisticall and supsticous Idolls weare brent 
Ano. sexto Elizabeth. 

The above items are taken from a voluminous list in the 
Episcopal Registry at Lincoln: the original inventories and 



i9io.] THE VANDALISM OF THE REFORMERS 203 

accounts of the pillage and devastation committed under and 
by the authority of the then Bishop of Lincoln acting for the 
Queen, one Nicholas Bullingham, a man much employed by 
the government in establishing the State Church, in drawing 
up the Thirty-nine Articles, and acting as the gaoler of the 
Bishop of Bath and other Catholic divines. He died in debt, 
leaving a widow, his second wife, and seven children without 
provision for their support, although his epitaph says he was 
" A painful preacher of the truth" 

These acts of vandalism of his Lordship of Lincoln and his 
fellow Elizabethan bishops, " the appointed officers of a Royal 
Lady who, at her coronation, had openly professed the Catho- 
lic religion," and who had then solemnly pledged herself in 
the face of the nation to maintain "the Ancient Faith," were 
"carried out in cold blood, with preparation, resolution, and 
success," in the face of a believing people to their dismay and 
amazement, but " who were awe-struck by the punishment with 
which those were threatened who actively interfered in behalf 
of the ancient rites." 

The confiscations, thefts, and devastations, great as they 
were, which took place through the direct orders or by the 
connivance of Elizabeth and her bishops, were but the echo 
of the greater ones perpetrated by Henry VIII. and his courtly 
sycophants. For example, take one instance, viz., the spolia- 
tion of the shrine of St. Thomas, from which the King re- 
ceived 4,994 ounces of gold, 4,425 ounces of gilt plate, 840 
ounces of parcel gilt, and 5,286 ounces of plain silver, and no 
end of precious stones, one of which he had mounted for a 
thumb ring. 

The avarice and hypocrisy of Tudor destroyers, led in 
Elizabeth's reign by William Barlow, the fountain head of 
" Anglican Orders," of the works of art which once adorned 
the churches of England, together with the fanatical ravages of 
the Puritan religionist, would be difficult to comprehend in this 
age, when all approve of making the House of God a thing of 
beauty, were it not for the fact that the whole world had be- 
fore its eyes, only a few years ago, the result of the vandalism 
of the Paris Commune. It may be said in very truth that 
greed, and above all that fanaticism of whatever kind relig- 
ious or irreligious, political or social is always the enemy of 
every form of art, more particularly Christian Art. 

To return to our author. The Ornaments of the Church 



204 THE VANDALISM OF THE REFORMERS [Nov. 

Considered is brought to an end by a description of the win- 
dow of St. Margaret, Westminster, which called forth the 
book. The author believed this window to have been made 
by order of the magistrates of Dort, in Holland, for a present 
to be given to Henry VII., but, this King dying before its 
completion, by some strange chance it fell into the hands of 
the Abbey of Waltham (Austin Canons), Essex, where it re- 
mained until the dissolution of that house in 1540, when it 
was removed to New Hall, Essex, and became in turn the 
property of various persons. At one time it was owned by 
Anne Boleyn's father; later by General Monk, who, to preserve 
it from his puritanical friends, buried it in the ground, where 
it remained until the Restoration; and still later it passed 
into the possession of a Mr. Conyers, who sold it in 1758 to 
St. Margaret's Church for 400 guineas. 

The foregoing history of the origin of this window has 
been questioned; one authority is inclined to believe it was of 
English manufacture; another that it was ordered in Holland 
by Ferdinand and Isabella as a gift to Henry VII., in honor 
of the marriage of their daughter Catherine to Prince Arthur, 
but before the window reached England Arthur was dead, so 
it was not erected. Whatever the origin of the window may 
have been, there is no doubt about the Queen portrayed in 
one of the side lights being Catherine of Aragon, as she is 
accompanied by her patron, St. Catherine, and the heralded 
symbol of the Kingdom of Granada. 

The subject of the window is the Crucifixion, which is re- 
presented in the usual manner of the sixteenth century, and 
although it is not a work of the highest artistic merit, never- 
theless it is a most interesting example of the later school of 
glass painting. 

Scholars mourn the destruction of the great library of 
Alexandria by the Mohammedans. May not the lovers of the 
beautiful as justly mourn the loss of the art treasures of 
medieval England ? Art treasures that were destroyed by the 
avaricious courtiers of Henry VIII., the ecclesiastical syco- 
phants of Elizabeth, the religious fanatics of Cromwell, and 
the time-serving politicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries, who assumed by turn the outward semblance of the 
Catholic and Protestant religions, as best harmonized with the 
desire of lucre and other worldly gains. 




1 WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD."* 

BY W. E. CAMPBELL. 

[HERE is so much of Mr. Chesterton, and every 
bit of him is so full of boisterous and propor- 
tionate health, that when he puts himself (as it 
were) into a book of three hundred pages his 
critics cannot help feeling a little small which 
indeed they are, when compared with him. Unfortunately, 
this feeling of comparative smallness on the part of Mr. Chester- 
ton's critics has determined only too many of them to take 
him at a disadvantage and, if I may so say, to hit him below 
the belt. One can imagine one of these critics saying to him- 
self: "There stands Mr. Chesterton! All I can see of him I 
can understand, but what I understand doesn't fit into my 
little scheme of things. It is, therefore, my solemn duty to 
say so." Then follows a criticism in the best below- the belt 
manner. But, as I said before, this is very unfair to poor 
big Mr. Chesterton. It is not fair for the critics to take snap- 
shots of Mr. Chesterton's boots and trousers, all painfully 
transfixed with their own little critical pins, and then give 
these snapshots to the world as representations of the man 
himself. 

Having said this, I must now proceed to commit the faults 
which I have so strongly deprecated in others, but having 
confessed that I am going to commit them, I shall at least 
try to avoid doing so. 

Mr. Chesterton's book, which has now reached its eighth 
edition, is a book about the Home, and What's Wrong with 
the World is, first, that there are a great many people dying 
for homes of their own, but can't get them ; secondly, that 
there are other people who have homes of their own, but are 
most anxious to get out of them; finally, that the very people 
who don't want real homes of their own, won't let anybody 
else have a real home if they can prevent it. 

* What's Wrong With the World. By G. K. Chesterton. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 



206 "WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD" [Nov., 

In order to emphasize the tremendous importance of the 
Home, our author proceeds to discuss it in relation to the 
other great institutions and realities of life which stand above 
it or about it or beneath it in one or many senses. 

1. There is Heaven which should be above the Home; and, 
please God, very often within it. 

2. There is Earth which should be beneath the Home, and 
a small portion of which should belong to it. 

3. There is the Home itself and them that dwell therein 
father, mother, and child or children. 

4. There is the State which was made for the convenience 
of the Home, and not vice versa. 

Such, in very rough outline, is the scope of the book; a 
few more lines may now be sketched in. 

The specialist has discovered many things for us, and for 
these he is deserving of thanks; but they are special things. 
We must not mistake them for something greater than those 
old universal things which every child and childlike mind 
must discover and cling to for itself. If we do make this 
mistake we shall lose our senses of proportion and with 
them all that is more excellent in life. Mr. Chesterton has 
been trying for some time, and with great success, to bring 
us all back to a true sense of proportion, to a true sense of 
the things that really matter. 

There is human nature, for instance, homo, man in the 
most generic sense of the term, man as distinguished from the 
brute. There was once no confusion on this point. Every 
one was taught that man was created by God, and also that 
the brutes were created by God, but that man was created in 
the image of God, and that the brutes were not. Then came 
the theory of evolution and the after-theories of that theory. 
What has been the effect of all this on the plain man ? Its 
effect has been to obliterate in his mind the clear and dignified 
distinction which he once was accustomed to make between 
himself and the brutes. He is much less inclined than formerly 
to think of himself as a little lower than the angels; he is 
much more inclined to think of himself as little better than 
the brutes and not half as clever. The " missing link" is re- 
sponsibile for a tale of disastrous consequences consequences 
which are morally, intellectually, physically, and economically 



1 9io.] " WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD" 207 

disastrous. " All abuses may be excused, since evolution may 
turn them into uses. It will be easy for the scientific pluto- 
crat to maintain that humanity will adapt itself to conditions 
which we now consider evil. . . . The new tyrants will 
invoke the future. Evolution has produced the snail and the 
owl; evolution can produce a workman who wants no more 
space than a snail, and no more light than an owl. The em- 
ployer need not mind sending a Kaffir to work underground; 
he will soon become an underground animal like a mole. He 
need not mind sending a diver to hold his breath in the deep 
seas ; he will soon be a deep-sea animal. Men need not 
trouble to alter conditions; conditions will soon alter men. 
The head can be beaten small enough to fit the hat. Do not 
knock the fetters off the slave ; knock the slave until he for- 
gets the fetters." It is quite important, then, that big em- 
ployers, as well as small, should keep clearly in their heads, 
and deeply in their hearts, the grand old Christian distinction 
between man, who was made in the image of God, and the 
brutes, who were not. 

But we need not despair. The specialists who have preached 
evolution so incessantly and disproportionately since 1859 are 
coming to 'the end of their tether: they cannot "humbug all 
the people all the time." Ordinary people will not stand more 
than a nasty dose of evolutionary doctrines, the consequences 
are too painful; they cannot be made to believe much longer 
that they are living in a sort of convict century between a 
past, which is full of nothing but the bones of animals, and a 
future, which is full of nothing but indefinite and impersonal 
despair. If we are to have a living and glorious future we 
must learn encouragement and humility from a living and 
glorious past. "The future is a blank wall upon which every 
man can write his own name as large as he likes : the past I 
find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, 
Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo. I can make the future 
as narrow as myself; the past (unless indeed one happens to 
be a necrological specialist) must be as broad and turbulent 
as humanity." The past is full of huge ideals, unfulfilled in- 
deed, and sometimes, alas, abandoned in despair, but great for 
all that, and everlasting because sanctioned by God Who made 
man in His own image. " The first freedom that I claim is 



208 "WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD" [Nov., 

the freedom to restore. ... I merely claim my choice 
all the tools in the universe ; and I shall not admit that any 
of them are blunted merely because they have been used." 

The old ideals are assailed chiefly by people who have 
never tried them or by people who, having tried them, have 
failed to persevere through their trials. The Home is one of 
these ideals. The Home "is older than the law, and stands 
outside the State. This is not to be understood as meaning 
that the State has no authority over families; that State 
authority is invoked and ought to be invoked in many abnor- 
mal cases. But in most normal cases of family joys and sorrows 
the State has no mode of entry. It is not so much that the 
law should not interfere, as that the law cannot. Just as there 
are fields too far off for law, so there are fields too near ; as 
a man may see the North Pole before he sees his own back- 
bone. Small and near matters escape control at least as much 
as vast and remote ones; and the real pains and pleasures of 
the family form a strong instance of this. If a baby cries for 
the moon, the policeman cannot procure the moon but neither 
can he stop the baby. Creatures so close to each other as a 
husband and wife, or a mother and children, have powers of 
making each other happy or miserable with which no public 
coercion can deal. If a marriage could be dissolved every 
morning it would not give back his night's rest to a man kept 
awake by a curtain lecture; and what is the good of giving a 
man a lot of power when he only wants a little peace ? The 
child must depend on the most perfect mother; the mother may 
be devoted to the most unworthy children; in such relations 
legal revenges are vain. Even in the abnormal cases where the 
law may operate, this difficulty is constantly found ; as many 
a bewildered magistrate knows. He has to save children from 
starvation by taking away their bread-winner. And he has 
often to break a wife's heart, because her husband has already 
broken her head. The State has no tool delicate enough to 
deracinate the rooted habits and tangled affections of the family : 
the two sexes, whether happy or unhappy, are glued together 
too tightly for us to get the blade of a legal penknife between 
them. The man and woman are one flesh yes, even when 
they are one spirit" (p. 51). 

The Home pulls a man together when and where the State, 



i9io.] "WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD" 209 

were it unwise enough to interfere, could only succeed in pull- 
ing him to pieces. Man has many a breaking- point in which, 
lor a season, he is insufficient for the occasion. He must be 
helped to survive these breaking-points and helped from the 
outside. Given this help, he will not only recover his interior 
ability to master his distressing difficulty, but he will also grow 
by perseverance to a mature and habitual ease with regard to 
it. 

All institutions, laws, vows, promises, and contracts which 
exist, exist for this main purpose alone that they enable man 
to survive his breaking points. The three great institutions of 
highest value in this respect are the Church, the Home, and 
the State: the most valuable, because the most spiritual, is 
the Church: the next is the Home: and the last, because it is 
the least spiritual of the three, is the State. 

Why then (the question at once occurs) should the Church 
and the Home, the two institutions which are most valuable to 
man in the crises of his humanity, be compelled by the world- 
ly wise to take with shame the lowest places in their social 
schemes? This question can only be met by another. Who 
are the worldly wise who father such schemes upon us ? Mr. 
Chesterton discloses the answer to this question, and also, I 
think, the answer to the first one as well. He says : " The 
luxurious man dictates the tone of nearly all 'advanced* and 
'progressive* thought" (p. 57). 

Luxury and leisure breed false ideas, and these ideas are 
the " advanced " ideas of to-day. They are spread, it is true, 
by hard-working gentlemen of the press who seldom know 
whence they come and don't always care to inquire. Take, for 
instance, the " advanced " ideas which are involved in the 
popular fallacy of free love. Who started them ? Surely a 
man of " ample means " with a long holiday in which to get 
tired of one woman and a motor car in which to wander look- 
ing for others. Take again the "advanced" idea that women 
should be economically independent of man. " It probably 
arose through the sombre contemplation of some rich banking 
family, in which the banker at least went to the city and pre- 
tended to do something, while the banker's wife went to the 
Park and did not pretend to do anything at all." Or, once 
more, take the very " advanced " idea that home life is tame 
VOL. xcn. 14 



2io " WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD" [Nov., 

and dull. "This is, indeed, a rich man's opinion. The rich 
man knows that his own house moves on the vast and soulless 
wheels of wealth : is run by regiments of servants, by swift and 
silent ritual. On the other hand, every sort of vagabondage 
or romance is open to him in the streets." And so he gets 
the idea that Home is a dull place and, whether he knows it 
or not, he can't help spreading this idea of his through the 
mouths and pens of a thousand parasites. 

In his parable of Hudge and Gudge, Mr. Chesterton throws 
still further light upon the hidden sources of "advanced" and 
" progressive " thought. Gudge is a plutocrat, and affects a 
fine old crusted Toryism: Hudge is an idealist, who affects a 
passion for humanity. " Gudge, the plutocrat, wants an anarchic 
industrialism; Hudge, the idealist, provides him with the lyric 
praises of anarchy. Gudge wants women workers because they 
are cheaper; Hudge calls the woman's work 'freedom to live 
her own life.' Gudge wants steady and obedient workmen; 
Hudge preaches teetotalism to workmen, not to Gudge. 
Gudge wants a tame and timid population who will never take 
arms against tyranny; Hudge proves from Tolstoy that nobody 
must take arms against anything. Gudge is naturally a well- 
washed gentleman: Hudge earnestly preaches the perfection of 
Gudge's washing to people who can't practise it. Above all, 
Gudge rules by a coarse and cruel system of sacking and 
sweating and bi-sexual toil which is totally inconsistent with 
the free family and which is bound to destroy it; therefore 
Hudge, stretching out his arms to the universe with a prophet- 
ic smile, tells us that the family is something we shall glo- 
riously outgrow" (p. 276). Hudge and Gudge, then, like Jack 
Sprat and his wife, affect profound differences in economic 
taste, but, in spite of these differences, most successfully com- 
bine to " lick the platter clean ! " In the case of Hudge and 
Gudge, however, the platter (and what's on it) is not their 
own it belongs to some poor family living at a sanitary dis- 
tance from both of them. 

The attack upon the Home is conducted in many and 
various ways. Some attack its protecting atmosphere that 
atmosphere of religion without which it can neither subsist 
nor cohere. Some attack its material foundations, saying that 
all private property in land should be abolished. Others again 



i9io.] " WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD" 211 

attack it in its relations to external institutions and contend, 
for instance, that the Home is made for the State and not 
vice versa hence in all things the State should command and 
interfere, and that the Home should obey the State and court 
its interference. Or, finally, there are those who attack the 
Home in its internal order of life and procedure and claim to 
reverse this order and procedure for the sole benefit of some 
one of its members. " A scheme which proposes to leave 
mother and child economically dependent upon the father/ 1 
writes Mr. Wells, "forbids the practical freedom of women." 
" The practical freedom of women." What does it mean 
after all ? It means that women should be at liberty to do 
anything they please short of living their own proper life in 
its own proper place, which is the Home. Mr. Chesterton is 
at his very best on this point. But I have already written 
more than I should, and quoted more than is usual, but as- 
suredly with the most pure intention of inducing readers, 
whom I have troubled, to go direct to that place where read- 
ing will not be troublesome namely, to Whafs Wrong With 
the World. 



HERBERT CARDINAL VAUGHAN. 

BY W. H. KENT, O.S.C. 




, says the Gaelic proverb, is the food of 
the historian. And the same may be said of 
the biographer, who does for one individual 
what the historian does for an age or for a 
nation. But the task of finding this food and 
duly digesting it is beset with so much difficulty that critics, 
however much they may differ on other matters, are gener- 
ally agreed in complaining of the exceeding rarity of a good 
history or a good biography. Some fail for want of knowing 
the real facts, and thus we are hampered by a host of histor- 
ies and biographies full of false and misleading statements. 
And others, with a painstaking accuracy in regard to dates 
and details, may yet fail to see things in their true propor- 
tions; and the result may be that '/lie that is half a truth," 
which, as the poet says, "is ever the blackest of lies/' since 
in this case it is harder to remove the false impression. 
Even when we set aside those who are ignorant or in- 
competent and those whose malice or party spirit will not 
allow them to tell a true tale, it is still hard to find a fit 
biographer. Nor need we wonder at this; for in truth the 
office seems to require a combination of incompatible condi- 
tions. He must be near to his subject, for how else can he 
have a real knowledge of the facts ? And he must be far off 
if he is to see it as a whole in all its aspects and judge it 
with impartial justice. There is a knowledge that seems only 
possible to a contemporary, and a judgment that must needs 
be left to the impartiality of posterity. Looked at in one 

* The Life oj Cardinal Vaughan. Ey J. G. Snead-Cox. 2 Vols. Price $7 net. St. 
Louis : B. Herder ; London : Herbert & Daniel ; Burns & Gates. 1910. 

NOTE : We think it worth while to recall here the interesting fact, that the article on the 
late Cardinal Vaughan on the occasion of his appointment to the see of Westminster, which 
appeared in THE CATHOLIC WORLD for June, 1892, was written by the late Henry Charles 
Kent, a brother of the writer of the present article. Henry Charles Kent died in 1898, at the 
age of 34. [EDITOR C. W.] 






i9io.] HERBERT CARDINAL VAUGHAN 213 

way, a near kinsman, or an intimate friend, or a comrade in 
arms should be the best of biographers, for beyond the bare 
knowledge of facts accessible to the world at large, he has 
shared his hero's confidence and can enter into his feelings 
and understand his real motives. But, on the other hand, 
from the nature of the case, such a biographer is in a peculiar 
danger of being swayed by the pardonable partiality that 
comes from these close relations. And it is seldom that the 
impartial outsider is able to acquire or assimilate the knowl- 
edge of the near friend, or that the friend or follower can 
attain to the detachment and aloofness of the stranger. Hap- 
pily, however, some writers do in fact succeed in surmounting 
these difficulties and give us books that are really good 
biographies. And such certainly seem to be the case with 
the lately published Life of Cardinal Vaughan by his kins- 
man and confidant, Mr. J. G. Snead-Cox, the Editor of the 
Tablet. For if the critics agree in complaining of the rarity 
of good biographies, they would seem to be equally at one 
in recognizing this book as one of those rare achievements. 
In fact, a comparison of several reviews in very various journals, 
Catholic, Anglican, Non-conformist, or neutral organs of liter- 
ary criticism, may well support this familiar Latin phrase, 
emnes omnia bona dicere. Nor can this agreement be ascribed 
to any prepossessions in favor of the author or his hero, as 
is sometimes the case where a book owes its success not to 
its own merits but to the magic of a popular name. For 
though Mr. Snead-Cox is by no means a novice in literature, 
his best work has all been done anonymously, and his fame 
as an author only begins with the book before us. And if 
the name of Cardinal Vaughan at any rate was generally 
known, it can hardly be said that it excited any widespread 
enthusiasm such as would account for the popularity of his 
biography. Indeed, we imagine that very many readers, even 
among Catholics, will first learn to know him and appreciate 
his merits from studying the picture presented in these pages. 
Nor, on the other hand, can it be said that the success of the 
book owes anything to this general reader's ignorance, which 
might have made him too ready to accept pleasing fiction or 
specious special pleading in place of authentic biography. 
For those of us who had other sources of information about 
Cardinal Vaughan and his work, and were thus in a position 



214 HERBERT CARDINAL VAUGHAN [Nov., 

to test the author's accuracy, will assuredly accept this as a 
faithful picture of the man and a true record of his life and 
labors. 

It may be well to add that even those readers who must 
needs depend entirely on the author's word, and have no ex- 
ternal means for testing the accuracy of his statements, may 
yet have some good ground for confidence that the truth is 
being told them. For while the author's relationship to Car- 
dinal Vaughan, his long association with him in literary work, 
and his obvious possession of a mass of private journals and 
correspondence shows that he can speak of what he really 
knows; on the other hand, his frank acknowledgment of his 
hero's limitations or failings, and his singularly fair treatment 
of those who came into conflict with the Cardinal, are enough 
to show that this is no idealized biography written by a mere 
disciple or admirer. 

Here, as in the case of most books of biography, the readers 
may be in this way roughly divided into two broad classes, 
the outside public to whom the book makes the hero known, 
and the friends who knew him already, but are none the less 
glad to have the familiar features recalled to them by a faithful 
portrait. But it may be observed that this line of division 
cannot be drawn very sharply. For it is obvious that there 
are many different kinds or degrees of knowledge. And while 
on the one hand most of those who take up the book at all 
must have had some previous knowledge, however slight, on 
the other hand it may well be believed that there are few who 
will not learn something further from the study of this biogra- 
phy. Indeed we may say that, save for a comparatively small 
circle of near kinsmen or intimate friends, most ef us even 
those who had seemed to know him fairly well will find here 
much that is little less than a revelation, and much that may 
help to correct previous false impressions. Certainly, many of 
those who had at best but an imperfect and superficial ac- 
quaintance with his policy and opinions, and who did not come 
under the spell o! his personal influence, must feel that now, 
for the first time, they have come to know the real Cardinal 
Vaughan. And though it is likely enough that their own ob- 
jections to some parts of the Cardinal's policy may still retain 
all their force, their whole estimate of the man and his work 
will surely undergo a great change, and as they now know 






i9io.] HERBERT CARDINAL VAUGHAN 215 

him as he really was, they will esteem him far more highly. 
This, we take it, is the true triumph of the biographer. 

Some of us must have experienced a change of this kind 
on first reading that masterpiece of biographical art, Trevelyan's 
Life of Lord Macaulay. Perhaps we were long familiar with 
the historian in his writings and his public capacity, and there 
was doubtless much in his historical judgments or his political 
principles that we regarded with imperfect sympathy, if not 
with abhorrence. But on reading Trevelyan, though we might 
retain to the full our Jacobite views of history or our objec- 
tions to some of the essayist's critical verdicts, we felt that 
we had now come to know the man himself and had learnt to 
regard him with a new sympathy and admiration. In this re- 
spect Mr. Snead-Cox's Life of Cardinal Vaughan may well be 
likened to the Life of Macaulay. Those who are familiar with 
Sir George Trevelyan's fascinating portraiture of his uncle will 
be able to appreciate the compliment implied in this compari- 
son, and though it may be feared that the literary and political 
matter which fills the pages of the earlier biography has interest 
for a somewhat wider circle than that which can be reached by 
the most attractive treatment of religious subjects, it may be 
hoped that the life of Vaughan will take a permanent place 
with the life of Macaulay among the masterpieces of Eng- 
lish biographical literature. For both these eminent men, 
so different from each other both in their personal character 
and in their work and station, were singularly fortunate in 
their biographers, who, it may be added, were both of them 
kinsmen in full sympathy with their subject. And here we 
fancy that though in some respects the purely literary and 
historical value of Trevelyan's work may give it the first place, 
there is at least one important point on which the palm must 
surely be given to the Catholic biographer. As we have al- 
ready remarked a near kinsman or intimate friend is peculiarly 
open to the danger of undue partiality. He may be tempted 
to give his hero an impossible perfection; and, on the other 
hand, he may do less than justice to those who were arrayed 
against him. Now it must be admitted that, possibly from the 
difference of age and the nearer relationship, Trevelyan is hardly 
able to recognize the limitations or imperfections of Macaulay 
as readily and as frankly as Mr. Snead-Cox is able to do in 
the case of Cardinal Vaughan. And certainly no one can say 



2i6 HERBERT CARDINAL VAUGHAN [Nov., 

that Liberal Catholics or others who crossed the path of the 
Cardinal fare as badly in this biography as the unfortunate 
Croker does in Trevelyan's pages. This is a distinct advantage, 
for the Life of Cardinal Vaughan necessarily deals with the 
story of many strenuous struggles, such as the controversy on 
Vaughan's work as an Oblate in St. Edmund's College, and 
majora movemus the fight for Papal Infallibility in the Tablet 
and elsewhere, the prolonged conflict with the Regulars in 
Salford and in Rome, the battle with Barnado for poor Catho- 
lic children, and the controversy on Anglican Orders and the 
Reunion movement. And, though on most of these matters 
it may be surmised that the author himself is in sympathy with 
the views of Cardinal Vaughan, no candid advocate of the other 
side could find just ground for taking offense at the picture 
presented in these pages. 

This pacific and conciliatory attitude may be ascribed, we 
suppose, to kindly feeling, or to tact or to prudence. But for 
our part we prefer to dwell on the point that this attitude 
is in accordance with the true nature of biography, and may be 
sufficiently explained by the discriminating instinct of the biog- 
rapher. For it is here that biography, like history, suffers 
most harm from the disastrous intrusion of alien elements and of 
motives not its own. Too many writers forget that while the 
same facts may be considered alike by the theologian, the his- 
torian, and the biographer, they are considered in each case in 
a different aspect, so that each several fact may give rise to 
three distinct questions. It is thus with the great controversy 
on Papal Infallibility and the Vatican Council, which, natural- 
ly enough, fills a conspicuous place in these pages. To the 
theologian, the main point must needs be the doctrine itself, 
and he is chiefly occupied in illustrating the evidence in its 
favor and disposing, as best he may, of difficulties and objec- 
tions. The historian, again, has in some sort an independent 
interest in all the facts and all the persons concerned. For 
him it is necessary to know not only the theological argu- 
ments and evidence, but likewise the state of feeling, whether 
right or wrong, in the various nations or parties. But from 
this point of view of the biographer dealing, let us say, with 
Herbert Vaughan's campaign in the Tablet in defense of In- 
fallibility, his method of maintaining the doctrine, his estimate 
of the opposing parties, and his peculiar policy of suppressing 



1 9 io.] HERBERT CARDINAL VAUGHAN 217 

the letters of obnoxious correspondents; the main question 
really lies in the personal equation. It is throughout subjec- 
tive rather than objective. In other words, the chief question 
for the biographer is not so much the doctrine in itself, or the 
facts, or the real state of the opposing parties, but simply the 
question: How did these things appear to Herbert Vaughan? 
For it is by this alone that we can rightly understand his 
character and judge of his conduct in this critical period. It 
matters not that the theologian might be able now to set the 
doctrine in clearer light, or that historical research might en- 
able us to see the actions and motives of Liberals and Inop- 
portunists in a somewhat different aspect. For, however valu- 
able, historically or theologically, these things would really be 
irrelevant to the purpose of the biographer. Mr. Snead-Cox 
seems to see this clearly, if we may judge by the line he takes 
in dealing with Herbert Vaughan's manner of conducting his 
campaign in the Tablet. 

This instance may, indeed, be taken as typical. For, in our 
view of this matter, the same principle will suffice to explain 
the author's treatment of other controversies, such as those on 
the question of Bishops and Regulars, or on Anglican Orders. 
Here we imagine that this record will be more satisfactory to 
readers in sympathy with Cardinal Vaughan than to a champion 
of the Regulars or to one who looked at the other problem 
from the Anglican standpoint. And such a one might possibly 
be tempted to say that Mr. Snead-Cox was making out a case, 
and that the Religious or the Anglican advocate, like the Lion 
in the Persian fable, might have produced a different result if 
they had been permitted to paint the picture. But further re- 
flection should suffice to show that here again the biographer 
is justified, inasmuch as he is concerned not so much with the 
rights and wrongs of the controversy in itself, but with Her- 
bert Vaughan's part therein and the motives that determined 
his course of action. It is Herbert Vaughan's view, and not 
the author's or the reader's, that has to be taken into consider- 
ation. Looking at the matter in this light, even those religious 
or Anglican Catos, who would fain have seen the other cause 
triumphant, may still find here a satisfactory explanation and 
vindication of Cardinal Vaughan's action. And though their 
own views may remain unchanged still they will rise from the 
study of this biography with a new respect for his character. 



2i8 HERBERT CARDINAL VAUGHAN [Nov., 

It is possible, no doubt, for the candid non-Catholic reader 
to give due attention to all the evidence adduced by the biog- 
rapher, and still think Cardinal Vaughan wrong in his theolog- 
ical doctrine, as, on the other hand, it is possible for many 
Catholics to think him mistaken on some points of policy ; or 
even when we are all agreed on the end in view some may 
suspect that he was not always happy in his choice of means, 
or that some of his words or actions were hasty or indiscreet. 
But we venture to say that it is scarcely possible for any candid 
and intelligent reader to doubt of his absolute sincerity or his 
single-minded and self-sacrificing service to his Divine Master. 

Nor is this only our own estimate of the effect of this candid 
and illuminating biography. For in the comments of a host 
of critics we find abundant evidence that this is in fact the 
impression produced in many and very various quarters. Not 
to speak of the increased admiration expressed by Catholic 
writers, it is pleasant to note that even in organs of pro- 
nounced Protestantism where such a militant ultramontane 
might have expected scanty sympathy, devout Evangelicals or 
Nonconformists are happy to recognize a true servant of 
Christ under the unfamiliar trappings of a Roman Cardinal. 
As might have been anticipated some exception has been taken 
to some of the Cardinal's devotions or penitential practices, 
though the blame is thrown not on the man but on the sys- 
tem. One critic, for example, lamented the " materialism " 
manifested by Cardinal Vaughan when with pious simplicity 
he placed the Brief which appointed him to the See of Salford 
first on the altar and then in the hands of the statues of our 
Lady and St. Joseph, in order as he said that he might thus 
receive his office from -their hands. But the objection only 
betrays a strange misconception of Catholic doctrine and the 
principle of religious symbolism. Did the writer imagine that 
Cardinal Vaughan really thought that the material contact of 
the Brief with the hands of the statues could have any bene- 
ficial effect on his episcopal labors ? And would it not be 
well, before talking of Roman " materialism " to ask what was 
the real meaning of his action ? 

We cannot expect Protestants, while they remain what 
they are, to accept the Catholic doctrine of the intercession 
and invocation of the saints. But in judging the conduct of 
Catholics, whether peasants or Cardinals, it is only fair to 






i9io.] HERBERT CARDINAL VAUGHAN 219 

adopt this doctrine as a hypothesis. And on this theory it 
seemed perfectly natural that a devout Catholic, on taking up 
a new work, should wish to place it, and himself, under the 
protection of his Heavenly Patrons. The main thing, of course, 
is to do this by the inward devotion of the heart. But, unless 
all vocal 'prayer is to be condemned, it is surely permissible 
to give oral expression to this spiritual dedication. And if 
this may be done audibly, why not also visibly by means of 
some symbolical action. Certainly our other feelings, as love 
and loyalty and patriotism, or national mourning or rejoicing, 
are freely expressed in a visible manner, and why should the 
natural symbolism, so freely allowed in these matters, be denied 
to religion. 

Much the same may be said of the penitential armlet, a 
representation of which is given in the biography, and has 
apparently shocked the susceptibilities of some good people. 
For it may be remarked that sport and fashion have their asceti- 
cism no less than religion. The athlete in training must needs 
mortify some natural appetites, and many have undergone 
painful operations for the removal of some deformity merely 
disfiguring their appearance. May not some bodily penance 
be endured for the sake of a spiritual good? Castigo corpus 
meum t says the Apostle most revered by Protestants. And 
with the Bible before us, it is scarcely possible to reject the 
principles of bodily penance and mortification. And once the 
principle is admitted, the question of means, whether by fast- 
ing from food or enduring other bodily discomfort, is a mere 
matter of detail. There is no need to linger on the point, or 
points, of this little instrument of penance. But it is remarked 
that it has at any rate one special merit, that of secrecy. For 
one whose life was lived in public, any self-denial in the mat- 
ter of food can scarcely escape observation ; whereas this pain, 
endured under the cover of rich raiments, may well seem a 
literal fulfillment of the injunction to fast in secret. 

Some question may be raised and we believe it has been 
raised in certain quarters as to the wisdom of making such 
matters public now. And some who would in no wise advo- 
cate a general policy of suppression, or anything in the nature 
of idealized biography, would yet prefer that such things as 
their private devotions and practices of penance should be ex- 
cluded by a sort of biographical disciplines arcani. 



220 HERBERT CARDINAL VAUGHAN [Nov., 

And it may be urged in support of this view that Cardi- 
nal Vaughan himself would have been horrified at the sugges- 
tion of these posthumous revelations of his private devotions 
and penitential practices. Well, if he had wished to have 
these hidden deeds brought before the world they would have 
had a very different character. And we should be disposed to 
say that it is only on the hypothesis of his disapproval that 
the posthumous publication can be edifying. But we need not 
stay to discuss the general principle of disclosing such private 
matters in works of religious biography. But it may be re- 
marked that on the other view this branch of our literature 
would have to undergo a far more drastic revision than any 
that has been suggested by the most ruthless historical critics. 
And assuming, as all our hagiographers have done hitherto, 
that such revelations of hidden holiness are allowable, it may 
be added that there are some reasons that seem to make this 
course particularly appropriate in a biography of Cardinal 
Vaughan. For on the one hand it may be said that this side 
of his life was so much out of sight, that even among his 
friends and fellow-Catholics his true character was likely to be 
misunderstood. And as in some other respects he presented 
a marked contrast to a man like Cardinal Manning, a super- 
ficial observer might be led to imagine that the austere asceti- 
cism of the one was wholly wanting in the other. If only for 
this reason it is well that the world should know that beneath 
the outward display of pomp and ceremony and the hard 
practicality of Herbert Vaughan there was a deep spiritual life 
of lowly self-sacrifice and mortification, fitly symbolized by the 
sharp instrument of penance hidden under the rich robes of 
the Cardinal. On the other hand, it is too commonly sup- 
posed that bodily penances of this kind are only characteristic 
of morbid natures, and that such devotional devices as placing 
a letter in the hands of a statue can only commend themselves 
to weak-minded sentimentalists. And it may, therefore, be 
well for us to see that such things were done by one of such 
a strong and vigorous character, and so full of practical com- 
mon sense, as Herbert Vaughan. 

This reminds us that the book before us, while primarily 
of personal and biographical interest, is withal something 
more; and besides giving us a true and faithful portrait of a 
man, may throw some light on the history of the world in 



1 9 io.] HERBERT CARDINAL VAUGHAN 221 

which he moved and help the causes which he had so much 
at heart. Mr. Snead-Cox does not profess to tell the history 
of the time. His book is purely and essentially biographical, 
yet there is enough notice of the circumstance amid which 
his hero lived and labored to furnish the necessary historical 
background for the central portrait. And, as might be ex- 
pected in the case of one who took such an active part in the 
strenuous religious struggles and ecclesiastical politics of his 
age, the biographical element does much to illustrate and ex- 
plain this history. 

It is easy to imagine how this book might have been 
fashioned if the task had been entrusted to a writer with a 
more pronounced purpose of doctrinal defense on spiritual 
edification. A theological controversialist, sharing Vaughan's 
views on the chief questions at issue, might have lingered 
longer on the pages devoted to the battles that raged around 
the Vatican Council, and insisted on the lesspns to be learnt 
from the rebellious aberrations of critical scholars and histo- 
rians. And then, more occupied with Anglican controversy, 
might have dilated at length on Anglican Orders and the 
movement for Reunion. And thus the book might have be- 
come less a biography than a belated manifesto against liberal 
Catholicism, or a fresh contribution to controversial theology. 
Others, again, anxious for the edification of their readers, 
whether within or without the Catholic fold, would have given 
us more of an idealized biography, casting a veil of decorous 
reticence over such painful episodes as the battle of Bishops 
and Regulars, or what may be called the unseemly squabble 
between two Catholic prelates as to the funeral expenses of a 
brother bishop. 

Such changes or omissions might be defended, we suppose, 
as a necessary subordination of biography or history to some 
higher interest. And it may be urged with great plausibility 
that the triumph of true religion, and the avoidance of scandal 
whereby souls may perish, are matters of far greater moment 
than the perfection of biographical portraiture or the require- 
ments of historical criticism ; and that it would be better that 
the fullness and artistic proportions of the biography should 
be sacrificed, so that all scandal may be avoided and Catholic 
orthodoxy may be more firmly established. But, on the other 
hand, it may be urged with yet greater force that a biography 



222 HERBERT CARDINAL VAUGHAN [Nov. 

mainly devoted to its proper purpose of personal portraiture 
may in the end be of more help to the Catholic theologian 
and historian than one that is a polemical pamphlet; and that, 
in the truest sense of the word, a frank and faithful history 
or biography is far more edifying than a bowlderized version. 
For, after all, what can be more scandalous than the implied 
confession that the real facts of Church history are not fit for 
publication ? Rightly understood, it is the real history, whether 
of men or nations, that enlightens and edifies; and there are 
lessons to be learnt from the darker as well as from the 
brighter pages. As Pope Leo XIII. reminded us, we have an 
example of this in Holy Scripture itself, which records the 
falls and failings of God's chosen servants. And for this reason 
the Church historian or religious biographer who frankly and 
fearlessly sets forth the truth to the best of his ability may 
b 2 satisfied that he is thereby rendering a service to the cause 
of religion. A true and faithful biography of a Bishop who 
has lived and labored for the Church of God is something 
more than a mere literary memorial. It is in some sort a 
continuation of his life and activity. For if the work is done 
well, the man himself still lives and speaks in its pages, so 
that all who read may profit by his example and share the 
advantage of his inspiring influence, like the friends among 
whom he moved in his mortal pilgrimage. If a good biogra- 
phy is in any case a rarity, a good life of a great Bishop is, 
naturally, yet more rare. And we may well be grateful to 
Mr. Snead-Cox for giving us such a book in his Life of 
Herbert Cardinal Vaughan. 



FRANCIS THOMPSON ; HIS LIFE AND WORK.* 




NOTE. The thirteenth of November, 1910, marks the third anni- 
versary of the death of Francis Thompson. [EDITOR C. W.] 

BY A. B. PURDIE. 
I. HIS LIFE. 

CHILL, damp night in London's streets, an hour 
from midnight; thin mists are curling round the 
street and shop lamps, and underneath passers- 
by, wrapped close and warm, hurry home to genial 
firesides. On the curbstone stands the ubiqui- 
tous hawker, lethargied by the biting air and too dulled to 
drive his meagre trade. The night advances; the crowd melts; 
the garish shop-lights are extinguished ; and London commits 
itself to the darkness, the passer-by to his home, the hawker 
to the shadowy arches by the Thames Embankment, or the 
refuse- heaps of Covent Garden. 

Some thirty years ago, if we had been among those passers- 
by in the shadow of Charing Cross, we would perhaps have 
been struck [by a hawker thereabouts, an unprofessional one 
indeed, and one whom the world, with a sympathy extending 
only to words, would describe as having seen better days. 
Thin and nerve-broken, physically shattered, he' t is clad in a 
shabby, frayed ulster and disastrous hat, and seeks to earn a 
few pence from the 'sale of matches. How many, I wonder, 
who saw and perhaps pitied that wretched piecing of humanity, 
realized that it was a tabernacle containing the fair soul of a 
sweet and true singer ? How many, I wonder, who passing 
in the later watches of the night, and recognizing that same 
figure reposing on the rubbish heap of vegetables, realized 
that to the sleeper it was a Jacob's stone whereto descended 
the angels of song ? And how many, pitying that frail form* 
cold and shivering on the Thames Embankment, with the gray, 

* Poems. By Francis Thompson. Sister Songs. By Francis Thompson. New Poems. 
By Francis Thompson. New York: John Lane Company: London: Burns & Gates- 
Shelley. By Francis Thompson. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons ; London : Burns & 
Gates. 



224 FRANCIS THOMPSONS His LIFE AND WORK . [Nov., 

sullen river beneath and cold sky above, imagined that therein 
was grandest inspiration ? 

The gods are hard to their children ; Francis Thompson 
was to drink deeply of the bitterness of life, that thus the 
sweetness might be more sweet. 

A short sketch of the life of this great Catholic poet will, 
perhaps, help to our appreciation of his poetry, which was the 
sincere effluence of his life a life concerning which, he wrote : 

Whereof thou hast not the surmise, and slight 
Is all that any mortal knows thereof. 

He was born at Preston, in 1859, and at the age of eleven 
went to Ushaw College, with the intention of devoting himself 
to the service of God a fond hope that was never to be real- 
ized. Some of his old school-fellows have recalled the dusty 
past, when " Tommy/' a frail-looking lad, with high cheek- 
bones and retrousse nose, would sidle quaintly along the a ir tu- 
la cium wall "the cynosure of neighboring eyes"; they have 
told of his strange, meditative ways, which won for him the 
sobriquet "mooney," and his great aptitude for fireside talk- 
ing. He was extremely fond of the fire and was alternately 
nick-named "brown-silks" from the heat-affected color of his 
garments. Thus early, too, did he develop his love of poetry : 

From almost earliest youth 
I raised the lids o' the truth, 
And forced her bend on me her shrinking sight ' ' 

(Sister Songs, p. 26). 

"Tommy "was generally to be seen poring over some tome 
of verse, either diligently transcribing or in absorbed reading, 
running his nervous fingers through his hair. His shyness and 
aloofness, which he was never rid of through life, were not 
results of melancholy; he was bright-humored and witty, and 
even organized a band of pirates in the Bounds ! As he rose 
higher in the school, his love of literature increased, and the 
end of each year would see him at the top of his class in 
classics and literature, and at the bottom in mathematics. A 
few of his poetical efforts in these days have survived. His 
"juvenalia" of a more serious nature, particularly a little 
descriptive essay on " The Storming of the Bridge of Lodi," 
did not pass unnoticed by his superiors. 



i9io.] FRANCIS THOMPSONS His LIFE AND WORK 225 

la sports, as is common to his class, he made no mark, but 
cricket had a strange fascination for him, and after death, 
among his papers were found the averages of the leading 
cricketers of the past thirty years. Attached to them was the 
following stanza, trifling, perhaps, yet weird, and showing how 
naturally Thompson read the spiritual into the practical and 
material 

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk, 

Though my own red roses * there may blow ; 
It is little I repair to the matches oi the Southron folk, 

Though the red roses crest the caps, I know. 
For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast, 
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost, 
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host 

As the run-stealers flicker to and fro, 

To and fro. 
O my Hornby t and my Barlow t long ago ! 

School-life, which meant for Thompson days of quiet dream- 
ing, and a paradise wherein he held converse with the soul of 
poesy, came to a close in 1877, when he was in the class of 
syntax: an unsympathetic stepmother, with very worldly 
ideals, was perhaps primarily responsible for the shattering of 
an incipient vocation, and Francis Thompson proceeded from 
Ushaw to Owen's College, Manchester, to study medicine with 
the ultimate purpose of succeeding to his father's practice. 

This was the last thing in the world to which the poor boy 
was naturally inclined ; the soul and not the body was to be 
his province, the immaterial and not the gross material. In 
his initial clinic he fainted at the first sight of warm, flowing 
blood; and thereafter studiously avoided lecturer and lecture- 
room, and wandered over the libraries and reading-rooms of 
Manchester to satisfy his all-absorbing passion. As a con- 
sequence, he failed in his examinations, and at length, unable 
to abide the righteous indignation and anger of his father, fled 
from home and eventually came, resourceless, to London. Lack- 
ing initiative and physical strength, he felt the pinch of life at 
once; he gained what scant pittance he could by selling 
matches, calling cabs, holding horses, or doing any odd jobs 

* An allusion to the poet's Lancashire parentage. 

t A famous Lancashire cricket player. 
VOL. XCIl. IS 



226 FRANCIS THOMPSON ; His LIFE AND WORK [Nov., 

that came his way. Still, his earnings were not sufficient for 
the necessary sustenance of life ; numberless nights his bed was 
a seat in the Park, on the Embankment, in Covent Garden, or 
in the kindly shade of some railway arch. In one of his 
poems he makes reference to this misery : % 

Forlorn and faint and stark 
I had endured through watches of the dark 

The abashless inquisition of each star ; 
Yea, was the outcast mark 

Of all those heavenly passers* scrutiny ; 
Stood bound and helplessly 
For time to shoot his barbed minutes at me ; 
Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour 
In night's slow- wheeled car 

(Sister Songs). 

It was too much for his tender frame ; hunger and cold told 
on his weak constitution ; he was wretchedly ill at times, deso- 
late and abandoned. He, whose experiences in so many respects 
are similar to those of De Quincey, at last had recourse, like 
the writer of the " Confessions of an English Opium-Eater," to 
laudanum, and gained relief, even if temporary and fraught 
with dire effects, from the burden of intolerable woe. In the 
after years he sung of the earth which 

Against its own dull will 

Ministers poppies to our troublous thought * 

(" Anthem of Earth") ; 

and his was the cry of De Quincey's " O just, subtle, and 
mighty opium! that to the hearts of rich and poor alike, for 
the wounds that will never heal, and for ' the pangs that tempt 
the spirit to rebel ' bringest an assuaging balm ; eloquent op- 
ium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes 
of wrath . . . for one night gives back the hopes of 
youth. . . ." 

We will not here enter upon the full details of the story 
of his redemption; he was rescued from the misery of the 
streets, and never again suffered homelessness. Passed forever 
were the days when Ferdinand de Rothschild might pay him 
in silver for a halfpenny newspaper; passed forever that sad 

*Cf. Virgil's " Soporiferum papav er " (Aen. ir.). 



i9io.] FRANCIS THOMPSON ; His LIFE AND WORK 227 

yet happy night, when half- dead he received the charity of a 
poor girl of the streets a child of sin. And as De Quincey 
has immortalized Anne, so was the deed of this Magdalen to 
be told to the world " for a memorial of her " : 

. . , and, bled of strength, 

I waited the inevitable last. 

Then there came past 

A child ; like thee, a spring flower; but a flower 
Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring, 
And through the city streets blown withering. 
She passed O brave, sad, lovingest tender, thing ! 
And of her own scant pittance did she give, 

That I might eat and live : 
Then fled, a swift and trackless iugitive 

(Sister Songs) . 

And so the little tragedy of his life was finished; he met, 
in his dreary perambulations about London, an old college 
friend not in very bright circumstances, but not so low as to 
refuse shelter to the " Tommy " Thompson of his old school- 
days. In this more settled state our poet took pen and paper, 
and a few weeks later the editor of Merrie England, a Catho- 
lic magazine of the eighties, was poring over the most un- 
presentable of manuscripts, but one which was worth decipher- 
ing. Thompson's future was determined ; he was invited to the 
editor's office, and thence to his home to be received into the 
family. Here were spent perhaps the happiest days of his 
life, when he felt not want, and breathed in a thoroughly 
literary atmosphere. His benefactors and their children have 
received a legacy of song that will immortalize them. They 
were, indeed, the inspiration of many of the poems in his first 
volume, published in 1893, and of Sister Songs, which appeared 
in 1895 and was dedicated to Monica and Madeline Meynell. 
He dedicated his first work to Wilfrid and Alice Meynell in 
the following lines: 

If the rose in meek duty 

May dedicate humbly 
To her grower the beauty 

Wherewith she is comely, 
If the mine to the miner 

The jewels that pined in it, 



228 FRANCIS THOMPSON / -His LIFE AND WORK [Nov., 

Earth to diviner 

The springs he divined in it, 
To the grapes the wine-pitcher 

Their juice that was crushed in it, 
Viol to its witcher 

The music lay hushed in it, 

Theit lives if all livers 

To the Life of all living, 
To you, O dear givers ! 
I give your own giving 

(Dedication to Poems); 
and to one of the children he wrote : 

Over thy form, dear child, alas ! my art 
Cannot prevail ; but mine immortalizing 
Touch I lay upon thy heart. 
Thy soul's fair shape 
In my unfading mantle's green I drape, 
And thy white mind shall rest, by my devising, 
A Gideon-fleece amid life's dusty drouth 

(Proem to Sister Songs). 

The evil effects of the laudanum .habit made themselves 
felt on Thompson, and, " unwinding the accursed chain/' to use 
a phrase of De Quincey's, he retired to repose and quiet in the 
Premonstratensian Monastery at Storrington. In that pretty 
Sussex village 

Where the thistle lifts a purple crown 

Six foot out of the turf, 
And the harebell shakes on the windy hill 

(" Daisy "), 

he found plenty to appeal to his rich, poetical faculty. Here 
he watched Nature, " dabbled his fingers in the day-fall," rev- 
eled in the sunset, and saw in the stars " glimmering tapers 
round the day's dead sanctities.' 1 This was the scene of his 
happiest musings and the inspiration of some of his most 
beautiful imagery. 

It was here that he penned his " Ode to the Setting Sun," 
which drew a delighted editor by express train from London, 
on an errand of congratulation. 

The red sun, 

A bubble of fire, drops slowly toward the hill, 
While one bird prattles that the day is done. 



i9io.] FRANCIS THOMPSON / His LIFE AND WORK 229 

He is sad at its setting at the death of the day. Death and 
birth are the fairest things in life, and the fairer of these is Death. 
Is not the glory of everything in its fall ? 

It is the falling star that trails the light, 

It is the breaking wave that hath the might, 

The passing shower that rainbows maniple. 
Is it not so, O thou down-stricken Day, 

That draw'st thy splendors round thee in thy fall? 

And as the golden orb dips slowly in the west, he apos- 
trophizes it, lauds its greatness and beneficence " Thou, geni- 
tor, that all things nourishest " from the earth that "was 
suckled at thy shining breast" to the "splendid rose" 

With dusky cheeks burnt red 
She sways her heavy head, 
Drunk with the must of her own odorousness. 

O why must all beauty pass ? Why must Orpheus ever pur- 
sue a doomed Eurydice? is his heartfelt cry. 

Even as he trembles to the impassioned kiss 

Of reincarnate Beauty, his control 

Clasps the cold body, and foregoes the soul ! 

Whatso looks lovelily 
Is but the rainbow on life's weeping rain. 

And the sun is set: "no rift disturbs the dewy shade and 
chill " ; and as the poet meditates, he sees a symbol in the 

sun 

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. 

I4ke 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 hath He unto Death His beauty given : 



230 FRANCIS THOMPSON ; His LIFE AND WORK [Nov., 

And so of all which form inheriteth 

The fall doth pass the rise in worth ; 

For birth hath in itself the germ of death, 

But death hath in itself the germ of birth. 

And in an after strain, as he stands in the shadow of the 
Cross before the monastery gates, he sings: 

Even so, O Cross ! thine is the victory. 

Thy roots are fast within our fairest fields ; 
Brightness may emanate in Heaven from thee, 

Here thy dread symbol only shadow yields. 

Therefore, O tender I^ady, Queen Mary, 
Thou gentleness that dost enmoss and drape 

The Cross's rigorous austerity, 

Wipe thou the blood from wounds that needs must gape. 

" I/o, though suns rise and set, but crosses stay, 
I leave thee ever," saith she, " light of cheer. " 

'Tis so : yon sky still thinks upon the Day, 
And showers aerial blossoms on his bier. 

At Storrington, too, our poet composed that pretty lyrical 
piece to " Daisy/' whom he met on the South Downs. 

The hills look over on the South, 

And southward dreams the sea ; 
And, with the sea-breeze hand in hand, 

Came innocence and she. 

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 ! 

After recuperating his lost strength, he returned to lodg- 
ings in London, but never a day passed but he visited the 
Meynells, and spent some few hours in the family circle, de- 
lightful in his simplicity, even more garrulous than when he 
held forth before his school-fellows at Ushaw, moving the 
children to laughter by his odd little ways, and especially 
when manipulating his after-dinner cup of coffee, he stirred 
with such vigor, as to deposit the best part of the contents in 
the saucer or elsewhere; he added to their mirth by entering 
into complicated explanations to the effect that that little foi- 



19 io.] FRANCIS THOMPSON ; His LIFE AND WORK 231 

ble was hereditary. And the laughter of the children he not 
only pardoned but loved for many years, so the mother tells 
us. 

The year 1891 was marked by the death of Cardinal Man- 
ning, and Thompson's editor asked him for a poem on the 
subject. This elicited from the poet a threnody " To the 
Dead Cardinal " which is characterized more by the personal 
note of dread anticipation, and despair as to his own fate 
hereafter. It was written in one of those intervals of depres- 
sion and spiritual desolation into which he occasionally lapsed : 

The grave is in my blood ; 

I shake 
To winds that take 

Its grasses by the top ; 
The rains thereon that drop 

Perturb 
With drip acerb 

My subtly answering soul ; 
The feet across its knoll 

Do jar 
Me from afar. 

I have no thought that I, 
When at the last I die, 

Shall reach 
To gain your speech. 

But you, should that be so, 
May very well, I know, 

May well 
To me in hell 



With recognizing eyes 
I,ook irom your Paradise 

"God bless 
Thy hopelessness! " 

In the following year Thompson was introduced to Coventry 
Patmore, another Catholic of high and beautiful thinking, who 
paid his tribute to his younger brother in a fine appreciation 
in the Fortnightly Review. He spoke of the "qualities which 
ought to place him in the permanent ranks of fame with 
Cowley and with Crashaw," and wrote : " Mr. Thompson 



232 FRANCIS THOMPSON , His LIFE AND WORK [Nov., 

places himself, by these poems, in the front rank of the pioneers 
of the movement, which, if it be not checked, as in the his- 
tory of the world it has once or twice been checked before, 
by premature formulation and by popular and profane per- 
version, must end in creating * a new heaven and a new 
earth.'" Their admiration was mutual. Thompson has in 
turn paid his tribute to Patmore in his poem on the portrait 
by Sargent: 

If any be 
; That shall with rites of reverent piety 

Approach this strong 

Sad soul of Sovereign Song, 

Nor fail and falter with the intimidate throng ; 

If such there be, 

These, these are only they 

Have trod the self- same way ; 

The never-twice-revolving portals heard 

Behind them clang infernal, and that word 

Abhorred sighed of kind mortality, 

As he 

Ah ! even as he ! 

These two poets met in 1894 at Pantasaph, where Thomp- 
son, under the kind care of the Capuchin Friars, was resting 
again for reasons of health. Among Patmore's correspondence 
is a letter dated 1894 to his wife, referring to this visit: 
"Francis Thompson and all the Fathers spent two hours last 
night in my room, and we had excellent talk. Father Anselm, 
the superior, and a profound contemplative, said he had never 
read anything so fine as the ' Precursor.' . . . The Fathers 
help me to get through my cigarettes, of which I should like 
to have another consignment as soon as possible. I spend 
part of my day with Francis Thompson, who is a delightful 
companion, full of the best talk. The monks feed me up as 
if I were a pig being fattened for the fair and give me as 
much of their company as I like to have " (Champney's 
Coventry Patmore. II., p. 133). 

It was at Pantasaph, in the midst of a country of glorious 
sunsets, that Thompson composed his last pieces, which were 
published as New Poems in 1897. These mark the close 
of his poetical career, which extended over five years. Coven- 
try Patmore had died in 1896, and after that Thompson gave 






i9io.] FRANCIS THOMPSON / His LIFE AND WORK 233 

but two odes to an appreciative world, the one written on 
Queen Victoria's Jubilee, for the Daily Chronicle, the other 
an ode on the English Martyrs, which appeared in the pages 
of the Dublin Review. 

His efforts were now directed to the writing of prose, and 
he joined the staff of the Academy, and also contributed to the 
Athenceum. He wrote articles and reviewed books on any 
conceivable subject poetry, biography, history, theology, and 
even strategy. His thought and expression was still as bril- 
liant as in early days, and his language rich and sonorous. 
" A Thompson article in the Academy" says Lewis Hind, who 
was editor at that time, " gave distinction to the issue. What 
splendid prose it was ! Reading the proofs, we would declaim 
passages aloud for the mere joy of giving utterance to his 
periods. He wrote a series of articles on Poets and Prose- 
Writers, which must some day be recovered from the files; 
he wrote on anything." Mr. Wilfrid Whitten ("John o' Lon- 
don"), too, who worked with him on the Academy, has given 
us a description of Thompson at this time: "A stranger 
figure than Thomson's was not to be seen in London. Gentle 
in looks, half- wild in externals, his face worn by pain and the 
fierce reactions of laudanum, his hair and straggling beard 
neglected, he had yet a distinction and an aloofness of bear- 
ing that marked him in the crowd; and when he opened his 
lips, he spoke as a gentleman and a scholar. A cleaner mind, 
a more naively courteous manner were not to be found. . . . 
No money (and in his later years Thompson suffered more from 
the possession of money than from the lack of it) could keep 
him in a decent suit of clothes for long. Yet he was never 
"seedy." From a newness too dazzling to last, and seldom 
achieved at that, he passed at once into a picturesque nonde- 
script garb that was all his own, and made him resemble some 
weird pedlar or packman in an etching by Ostade." 

The only prose-works of his that have been published, are 
Health and Holiness, A Study of the Relations Between Brother 
Ass the Body and his Rider the Soul, an Essay on Shelley, 
of which we shall have more to say later, and a biography, 
St. Ignatius Loyola. These last two are posthumous publica- 
tions, and were found among much literary material which 
Thompson has left, and which is by degrees being presented 
to expectant readers in various periodicals. 



234 FRANCIS THOMPSON / HIS LIFE AND WORK [Nov., 

Thompson's health, we have observed, was never good, and 
at last his frail system fell a prey to consumption. He was 
wasting visibly, and not even Storrington of sweet memories 
could restore his waning powers. There he stayed in the 
earlier part of 1907 with Mr. Wilfrid Scawen Blount, but on 
November 2 was taken to London, where he entered the 
Hospital of SS. John and Elizabeth, in St. John's Wood, as a 
private patient. 

Ten days later, in the slow dawn of a November morning, 

When dusk shrunk cold, and light trod shy, 
And dawn's grey eyes were troubled grey. 
And souls went palely up the sky, 

his soul too was summoned hence by its Maker. 

He was buried in St. Mary's Cemetery, at Kensal Green, 
next to the grave of Mrs. Craigie, and in his coffin among other 
tokens was placed a handful of roses from George Meredith, 
with the testimony : " A true poet, one of a small band." 

So closed a short but remarkable life; he had given his 
message to the world and eased his aching breast of melodies ; 
nor fretted he to give back to the red earth his little "puff of 

dust." 

Tellus, behold me come, 

Thy son stern-nursed ; who mortal-motherlike, 
To turn thy weanlings' mouth averse, embitter'st 
Thine over-childed breast. Now mortal-sonlike, 
I thou hast 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 

(' 'Anthem of Earth "). 

II. HIS WORK. 

It is our next duty to speak a little of Thompson's work, 
not with the pretensions of a critic, but with the appreciation 
of a humble admirer. And here I beg the indulgence of my 
readers if I appear to do him an injustice by many omissions. 
In the space at our disposal, our treatment must necessarily 



i9io.] FRANCIS THOMPSON ; His LIFE AND WORK 235 

be restricted; but if I can give some small idea of the place 
which Thompson holds in poetry, of his genius and of his 
power, my purpose will be realized. 

I hope to achieve this by immediately turning to his great 
essay on " Shelley," which appeared posthumously in the pages 
of the Dublin Review, and to which an interesting history is 
attached. Now his fellow-poets and reviewers hailed Thomp- 
son in almost a frenzy of delight, as a second Crashaw 
" Crashaw born again, but born greater," said one ; and others 
classed him as a member of the Metaphysical School, in which 
Crashaw and Donne were leading lights, and whose habit it 
was to seek " to express something after, something behind, 
the simple obvious first sense and suggestion of a subject" 
(Saintsbury, p. 411). They tried to give expression to the 
expressionless and inexplicable, if one may speak so boldly ; 
to describe and draw out those deep currents that flow in the 
waters of the soul ; poetry is the true pantheism seeing where 
God has traced His finger in all things: 

** 

All things by immortal power, 

Near or far, 

Hiddenly 

To each other linked are, 

That thou canst not stir a flower 

Without troubling of a star 

(" Mistress of Vision ") ; 

perceiving how great is allied to small, and how small is great : 

Nature is whole in her least things exprest, 

Nor know we with what scope God builds the worm 

(" Correlated Greatness n ) 

In true knowledge of Nature, too, is a needed a supplement 
turn sensuum defectui, which the Metaphysical School supplied 
by a daring richness of imagery, conjuring up from behind 
every image and every ostensible thought, vistas and back- 
grounds of others dimly vanishing, with glimmers in them here 
and there into the final enigmas of life and soul. Thompson, 
then, was classed among the Metaphysicals, and as one of the 
best of them ; and he himself in the essay published after his 
death, in which he forwards a vigorous apologia for Shelley, 
ranks that poet as a Metaphysical indeed, but as what the 
Metaphysical School should have been. He calls Crashaw a 



236 FRANCIS THOMPSON /. His LIFE AND WORK [Nov., 

Shelley manque, and Shelley the range found for which the 
Metaphysical School was trying. So then we can institute our 
comparison. On the one hand we have his contemporaries ap- 
plauding Thompson as a Crashaw, but greater; on the other 
hand Thompson writing passionately of Shelley and extolling 
him as the ideal which Crasbaw should have been but was 
not. It would not be an unjust conclusion perhaps that 
Thompson then is a Shelley, and though not committing our- 
selves to such a statement, we may with profit listen to what 
Thompson has to say of Shelley and see if he is mirroring 
himself, giving us as it were a piece of self -criticism. 

He opens his remarks .with an ardent appeal for Catholic 
appreciation and recognition of poetry. " Once poetry was as 
she should be," he says, "the lesser sister and helpmate of 
the Church ; the minister to the mind, as the Church to the 
soul. But poetry sinned, poetry fell ; and in place of lovingly 
reclaiming her, Catholicism cast her from the door to follow 
the feet of her pagan seducer. The separation has been ill 
for poetry; it has not been well for religion." In impas- 
sioned sentences he calls for the home- return of his prodi- 
gal, for the reunion of sanctity and song, the intertwining of the 
palm and the laurel. " This beautiful, wild, feline poetry, wild 
because left to range the wilds, restore to the hearth of your 
charity, shelter under the rafter of your faith; discipline her 
to the sweet restraints of your household, feed her with the 
^meat from your table, soften her with the amity of your chil- 
dren ; tame her, fondle her, cherish her ; you will no longer then 
need to flee her. Suffer her to wanton, suffer her to play, so 
she play round the foot of the Cross." And that is the key- 
note of the whole of Thompson's poetry : 

Ah ! let the sweet birds of the I,or<! 
With earth's waters make accord ; 
Teach how the crucifix may be 
Carven from the laurel tree, 
Fruit of the Hesperides 
Burnish take on Eden's trees, 
The Muses' sacred grove be wet 
With the red dew ol Olivet, 
And Sappho lay her burning brows 
In white Cecilia's lap of snows 

(" To a Poet Breaking Silence ") 



i9io.] FRANCIS THOMPSON; His LIFE AND WORK 237 

To him the earth is the Church; the ritual of Nature and 
of the Catholic Church are one and the same ; the former in 
the pageantry of the seasons, the latter in her grand solemn 
offices, pays homage to the great God. 

All Nature sacerdotal seems. . . . 

The calm hour strikes on yon golden gong, 

In tones of floating and mellow light, 
A spreading summons to even-song. 
See how there 
The cowled night 

Kneels on the Eastern sanctuary-stair. 
What is this feel of incense everywhere ? 

Clings it round folds of the blanch-amiced clouds, 
Upwafted by the solemn thurifer, 

The mighty spirit unknown, 

That swingeth the slow earth before the embannered Throne ? 

("A Corymbus for Autumn ") . 

To Thompson everything on this earth and in this world 
is sacrament and symbol of the great truths of faith : the stars 
are: 

Heaven's death-lights which kindle yellow spark by spark 
Beneath the dreadful catafalque of the dark. 

Nature is a 

Never-done ungaped-at Pentecostal miracle, 
Our Lady is 

Sweet stem to that rose Christ, who from the earth 
Suck'st our poor prayers, conveying them to Him 

(Sister Songs) , 

and the Sun is symbol of the Blessed Sacrament which "Day, 
a dedicated priest, lifteth slowly, lifteth sweetly," from out the 
Eastern tabernacle, sprinkling benediction through the dawn 
and blessing the earth, and in the purple evening setting it 
" in august exposition meetly within the flaming monstrance 
of the West "* (" Orient Ode "). 

Thompson, then, is the pioneer of the new movement, or 
rather the old movement revived, which he so strongly advo- 
cates in his essay. Let us proceed, and see what he has to 
say concerning Shelley, and mediately concerning himself. 

* Cf. Psalm 18. " In sole posuit tabernaculum suum." 



238 FRANCIS THOMPSON,- His LIFE AND WORK [Nov., 

In the first place he declares we have " no lineal descend- 
ant in the poetical order" of Shelley and this is owing to 
the general defect of modern poetry the predominance of art 
over inspiration, of form over soul. Our poetry is not suffi- 
ciently free and spontaneous ; its movement is hampered by 
useless ornament, which makes it artificial. 

" There is a certain band of words," he writes, " the Prae- 
torian cohorts of poetry, whose prescriptive aid is invoked by 
every aspirant to the poetical purple, and without whose pre- 
scriptive aid none dares aspire to the poetical purple: against 
these it is time some banner should be raised.' 1 Thompson 
himself does so with a vengeance in his own poetry. He has 
been called a word-coiner, obscure, involved, ungrammatical, 
hyperbolical, and long-winded, so that one critic suggested 
that Mr. Thompson would call a spade "a broad obtuse 
Chalybian delving blade." 

Yet if he is obscure and involved, as indeed at times he is, 
it is due to the fact, which he recognizes himself, that his power 
of vision is greatly in excess of his power of expression ; that 
our "untempered speech," descended "grimy and rough : cast 
still from Babel's bricklayers," is impotent to catch his finest 
thought. He is possessed 

With sight to pass the frontier of all spheres 
And voice which does my sight such wrong. 

O dismay ! 

I, a wingless mortal, sporting 
With the tresses of the sun ? 
I, that dare my hand to lay 
On the thunder in its snorting ? 
Ere begun, 
Falls my singed song down the sky, even the old Icarian way " 

(" The Mistress of Vision "). 

But better perhaps that his music should be wild and true, 
than too scrupulously exact, labored, and perhaps false. Shelley 
is his ideal poet for this very spontaneity, and Shelley was 
spontaneous because he was ever a child. " Know you what 
it is to be a child ? It is to be something very different from 
the man of to-day. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from 
the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in 
loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the 









19 io.] FRANCIS THOMPSON; His LIFE AND WORK 239 

elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pump- 
kins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, 
and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy-god- 
mother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell, and to 
count yourself the king of infinite space; it is 

To see a world in a grain of sand, 

And a heaven in a wild flower, 
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand 

And eternity in an hour ; 

it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, 
nor petition that it be commuted into death." 

And such an enchanted child was Shelley to the end of 
his days, keeping his dream unbroken. For poor Thompson, 
as we have seen, the dream was all top rudely shattered and 
spoilt; and he was doubtless conscious of his own past, when 
he contrasted Shelley with Clarence Mangan " outcast from 
home, health, and hope, with a charred past and a bleared 
future, an anchorite without detachment and self-cloistered 
without self-sufficingness, deposed from a world which he had 
not abdicated, pierced with thorns which formed no crown, a 
poet hopeless of the bays, and a martyr hopeless of the palm, 
an exile banned and proscribed even frem the innocent arms of 
childhood." 

Life was very real for Francis Thompson, and he knew in 
all its bitterness what it is to be a man,, and what it is to lose 
one's childhood the childlikeness of a Shelley; and so he 
loved children, his days were brightened by their company, 
. and his poetry is a sweet tribute of love and regard. He sings 
of " the heart of childhood so divine for me," bids his young 
god-child, when they both be dead " Look for me in the 
nurseries of heaven," and dedicates his whole volume of Sister 
Songs to the praises of the young children who were his as- 
sociates in the after-days of his deliverance. 

Again, it is not difficult to read Thompson into his own 
description of Shelley in the following passage, which is per- 
haps one of the most beautiful in the essay: "He is still at 
play, save that his play is such as manhood stops to watch, 
nd his playthings are those which the gods give their chil- 
dren. The universe is his box of toys. He dabbles his fin- 
gers in the day-fall. He is gold-dusty with tumbling amidst 



240 FRANCIS THOMPSON,- His LIFE AND WORK [Nov., 

the stars. He makes bright mischief with the moon. The 
meteors nuzzle their noses in his hand. He teases into growl- 
ing the kenneled thunder, and laughs at the shaking of its 
fiery chain. He dances in and out of the gates of heaven; 
its floor is littered with his broken fancies. He runs wild over 
the fields of ether. He chases the rolling world. He gets 
between the feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the 
lap of patient Nature and twines her loosened tresses after a 
hundred wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his 
song." 

Thompson did the same, but with this difference, that he 
was a Christian, and whereas Shelley's play led him to an un- 
satisfying pantheism, Thompson's drew him to the feet of 
Divine Love. 

/ . . . 

Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies. 

/ knew all the swift importings 

On the wilful face of skies ; 

I knew how the clouds arise 

Spumed of the wild sea-snortings ; 
All that's born or dies 

Rose and drooped with made them shapers 
Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine 

With them joyed and was bereaven. 

I was heavy with the even, 

When she lit her glimmering tapers 

Round the day's dead sanctities. 

I laughed in the morning's eyes. 
I triumphed and I saddened with all weather, 

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 ; 

(" The Hound of Heaven "). 

But his ultimate satisfaction and joy was not in Nature, as 
was the case with Shelley, but through Nature he came to 
God. 

Ay, if men say that on all high heaven's face 

The saintly signs I trace 

Which round my stoled altars hold their solemn place, 

Amen, amen ! For oh, how could it be 



i9io.] FRANCIS THOMPSON ; His LIFE AND WORK 241 

When I with winged feet had run 

Through all the windy earth about, 

Quested its secret of the sun, 

And heard what thing the stars together shout 

I should not heed thereout 

Consenting counsel won : 

" By this, O Singer, know we if thou see. 

When men shall say to thee : I/o ! Christ is here, 

When men shall say to thee : I/o ! Christ is there, 

Believe them : yea, and this then art thou seer, 

When all thy crying clear 

Is but : 1^0 here ! lo there ! ah me, lo everywhere ! " 

(" Orient Ode "). 

Speaking of the poetry of Shelley, Thompson once more lets 
escape a secret of his own verse : " It would have been," he 
says, "as conscious an effort for him to speak without figure, 
as it is for most men to speak with figure. Suspended in the 
dripping well of his imagination, the commonest object becomes 
encrusted with imagery." That Shelleian gift Thompson in- 
herited in its fullness; his poetry is piled to overtoppling with 
the grandest and richest imagery now immense as in "The 
Hound of Heaven " now profuse and beautiful as in the love 
odes in Sister Songs, and always moving to bewildering wonder. 
I will give but one short example which is descriptive of the 
cold spring of 1891, and in which the earth is likened to a ship : 

This labouring, vast, Tellurian galleon, 

Riding at anchor off the orient sun, 

Had broken its cable, and stood out to space 

Down some frore Arctic of the aerial ways : 

And now, back warping from the inclement main, 

Its vaporous shroudage drenched with icy rain, 

It swung into its azure roads again 

(" To my Godchild"). 

And if we would seek for an explanation of this power, which 
makes his verse a Prosperous island: 

Full of strange noises, 

Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. 
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments 
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices 
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep, 
VOL. xcii. 16 



242 FRANCIS THOMPSON / His LIFE AND WORK [Nov., 

Will make me sleep again ; and then in dreaming, 

The clouds methought would open, and show riches 

Ready to drop upon me ; that when I wak'd, 

I cried to dream again (" The Tempest ") ; 

if we would seek the explanation of the magical power, we 
have but to remember that it was the power of Shelley. 
" He had an instinctive perception (immense in range and fer- 
tility, astonishing for its delicate intuition) of the undeifying 
analogies, the secret, subterranean passages between matter and 
soul ; the chromatic scales, whereat we dimly guess, by which 
the Almighty modulates through all the keys of creation." 
" To Shelley's (and to Thompson's) ethereal vision the most 
rarified mental or spiritual music traced its beautiful correspond- 
ing forms on the sand of outward things. . . . His thoughts 
became a mounted infantry passing with baffling swiftness from 
horse to foot, or foot to horse." (See examples of this in 
Sister Songs). The best example of this, Thompson thinks, is 
to be found in "Prometheus Unbound." "This amazing lyric 
world . . . where the very grass is all a- rustle with lovely 
spirit things, and a weeping mist of music fills the air ; . . . 
poetry is spilt like wine, music runs to drunken waste." 

After all, Thompson might have been but describing his 
own " Ode to the Setting Sun," which has been pronounced 
one of the lyrical masterpieces of the century. Therein, too, 
poetry is spilt like wine with daring exquisiteness, and music 
runs to drunken waste. He thus addresses the westering sun: 

And now, O shaken from thine antique throne, 

And sunken from thy ccerule empery, 
Now that the red glare of thy fall is blown 

In smoke and flame about the windy sky, 
Where are the wailing voices that should meet 

From hill, stream, grove, and all of mortal shape 
Who tread thy gifts, in vineyards as stray feet 
Pulp the globed weight of juiced Iberia's grape? 
Where is the threne o' the sea ? 
And why not dirges thee 

The wind, that sings to himself as he makes stride 
lyonely and terrible on the And6an height ? 

Where is the Naiad 'mid her sworded sedge ? 
The Nymph wan- glimmering by her wan fount's verge ? 



i9io.] FRANCIS THOMPSON ; His LIFE AND WORK 243 

The Dryad at timid gaze by the wood-side ? 

The Oread jutting light 
On one up-strained sole from the rock-ledge ? 

The Nereid tip-toe on the scud o' the surge, 
With whistling tresses dank athwart her face, 
And all her figure poised in lithe Circean grace ? 
Why withers their lament ? 
Their tresses tear-besprent, 
Have they sighed hence with trailing garment-hem ? 

sweet, O sad, O fair, 

1 catch your flying hair, 

Draw your eyes down to me, and dream on them ! 

In contrast to the deep, rich, organ tones of both poets is 
the fairy music of their lighter lyrical pieces, and if the 
" Lover of Shelley leans most lovingly " on " The Skylark," 
" The Cloud/ 1 or " The Sensitive Plant." it might also be true 
to say that Thompson will be remembered by many for his 
" Corymbus for Autumn," "Daisy," " Ultima," and that charm- 
ing little poem, entitled " The Poppy," the first three stanzas 
of which are very prettily conceived: 

Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare, 
And left the flushed print in a poppy there : 
Like a yawn of fire from the grass'it came, 
And the fanning wind puffed it to flapping flame. 

With burnt mouth red like a lion's it drank 
The blood of the sun as he slaughtered sank, 
And dipped its cup in the purpurate shine 
When the eastern conduits ran with wine ; 

Till it grew lethargied with fierce bliss, 
And hot as a swinked gipsy is, 
And drowsed in sleepy savageries, 
With mouth wide a-pout for a sultry kiss. 

Like Shelley, he " could at need sacrifice smoothness to 
fitness," " he would forego the more obvious music of melody, 
if he would better secure the higher music of harmony." The 
first verse of "The Hound of Heaven," which is the story of 
a soul trying to escape the love of God, aptly illustrates this : 



244 FRANCIS THOMPSON; His LIFE AND WORK [Nov., 

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 oi 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 betray est Me." 

To conclude our little whisper of praise, we would draw 
attention to the closing paragraph in this essay on " Shelley," 
in which Thompson seems to recall his own early sorrow. 
Why is it, he asks " that the poets who have written for us 
the poetry richest in skiey grain, most free from admixture 
with the duller things of earth the Shelleys, the Coleridges, 
the Keats are the very poets whose lives are amongst the 
saddest records in literature? Is it that ... the harvest 
waves richest over the battlefields of the soul ? " It is indeed 
so, and he has confessed as much in "The Hound of Heaven": 

Whether man's heart or life it be which yields 
Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields 
Be dunged with rotten death ? 

and the Persian Poet has told us: 

I sometimes think that never blows so red 

The rose, as where some buried Caesar bled (xviii.). 

Is it " that the heart, like the earth, smells sweetest after 
rain; that the spell on which depend such necromantic castles 
is some spirit of pain charm- poisoned at their base? Such a 
poet, it may be, mists with sighs the window of his life until 
the tears run down it; then some air of searching poetry, like 
an air of 'searching frost, turns it to a crystal wonder." This, 
too, is so, and Mrs. Browning has told us of those who " sigh 
the glass dim with their own breath's sigh." "The god of 



i9io.] FRANCIS THOMPSON / His LIFE AND WORK 245 

golden song is the god too of the golden sun; so peradven- 
ture songlight is like sunlight and darkens the countenance 
of the soul. Perhaps the rays are to the stars what thorns 
are to the flowers ; and so the poet, after wandering over 
heaven, returns with bleeding feet." 

Therefore must my song-bower lone be 

That^my tone be 
Fresh with dewy pain alway. 

And so we leave Thompson, sorrowful in ' the gladness 
which his poetry inspires, for there is a strain of sadness in 
all that is beautiful. His was a noble heart and a noble soul ; 
and he lived up to the gospel he preached, leaving to poster- 
ity in his life and work an example and a message. It has 
been said that youth is a blunder, manhood a struggle, and 
old age a regret ; Thompson's youth was a happy blunder ; 
his manhood a crowned struggle nor lived he for the possible 
regrets of old age, but anticipated them by realizing that God 
must clear the wood ere He can limn with it. ("The Hound 
of Heaven 11 ). 

His voice will ever be heeded ; his song will echo down 
the ages, even if it be the song of a dreaming, "sun-hazed 
sleeper/' Is it not good to dream sometimes? 

I hang 'mid men my needless head, 

And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread ; 

The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper 

Time shall reap ; but after the reaper 

The world shall glean of me, me the sleeper ! 

(" The Poppy "). 



Hew Books* 

Comparison between the Dublin 

THE POETRY OF IRELAND. Book of Irish Verse, recently pub- 
lished (Dublin : Hodges, Figgis & 

Co., Ltd. New York: Oxford University Press, 1909: Price $2.50), 
and the already famous Oxford Book of English Verse, is inevita- 
ble, and would even seem invited. Yet manifestly any such com- 
parison is unfair and misleading. For obvious reasons, alike lin- 
guistic and political, existing Irish verse cannot possibly stand in 
the same class with the regnant heritage of English poetic lit- 
erature. Irish poetry, in the English language, did not have a 
beginning until the middle of the eighteenth century ! That 
it should have grown, in one hundred and fifty years, into a 
recognized literary influence, into a fine art of distinctly national 
inspiration, is glory enough for the country which gave it birth. 
Two strains, from the very first, are notable in Irish poetry. 
There is the laughing, tuneful, tender, nai've strain, voiced by 
Sheridan, by Moore, by " Father Prout," and many a joyous 
ballad. And then there is the tragic strain, mystic at once and 
magic, which has clung about lone hilltops in centuries of 
otherworld brooding; the strain which wails through all the 
elegiacs, which James Clarence Mangan caught in poignant 
echo, and which has largely dominated the Celtic revival of 
the last two decades. And all this, of course, is just the light 
and the shadow, the contrast, the versatility of the Celtic 
temperament. 

Perhaps nowhere else is the Irish attitude more conspicuous 
than throughout its national poetry. It is not like any other 
national poetry in the world ; and yet many other nations have 
as loyally loved their patria. But Ireland is not praised as 
fatherland not even as motherland; she is the love land of 
her children, the Queen, the Virgin Lady, the Little Dark 
Rose, the "emerald set in the ring of the sea." With a passion 
intense, chivalric, and mystic, too, her sons tender their fealty. 
Irish of the Irish, and no isolated note, is the vibrating beauty 
of Mangan's "Dark Rosaleen": 

" Over dews, over sands. 

Will I fly for your weal 

Your holy, delicate white hands 

Shall girdle me with steel. 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 247 

At home in your emerald bowers, 

From morning's dawn till e'en, 
You'll pray for me, my flower of flowers, 

My dark Rosaleen! 

My fond Rosaleen ! 

You'll think of me through daylight's hours, 
My virgin flower, my flower of flowers, 

My dark Rosaleen ? " 

O ye that pass by, behold and see if there be any love 
like to this love which the all-suffering Isle of Destiny has 
drawn from the hearts of her wandering children ! Even the 
devotional poetry and the love poetry of the land are colored 
by this national hue ; for have not faith and love wept together, 
rejoiced together, through all the long struggle of Ireland ? 

Just here it may be remarked that no serious exception 
can be taken to any of the poems included in the Dublin Book 
but there are several open questions in its omissions. Ver- 
sions of the old epic and heroic poetry of Gaeldom are given 
us in selections from Samuel Ferguson and Aubrey de Vere ; 
yet many of the latter's most beautiful verses are excluded. 
The same may be repeated of Lionel Johnson's lyrics. It is 
a delicate and difficult question : but is an Irish poet Irish 
only when writing upon Celtic themes ? May not the national 
note be accentuated at the expense of the universal ? 

With this single criticism, all praise should go to the 
Dublin editor. To every reader he must bring recognition of 
that Irish Renaissance which is still in process of becoming. 
This was one of the artistic phenomena of the century just 
passed. Out of it, and together with it, grew the Irish Liter- 
ary Society, the Irish National Theatre, the Gaelic agitation of 
Dr. Hyde and Stephen Gwynn, and a whole school of poets. 
At the very forefront of these one inclines to place William 
Butler Yeats, whose dreamy yet passionate genius has woven 
us a poetic fabric of memorable beauty. Much of this is cast 
in dramatic form, and consequently is excluded from the pres- 
ent anthology ; but one hopes that a later edition may present 
some more generous selection from his delicate and distin- 
guished lyrics particularly " When You are Old and Gray and 
Full of Sleep," a poem dear to all readers of Mr. Yeats. George 
W. Russell ("A. E."), on the other hand, is admirably repre- 



248 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

sented. " A. E." is a transcendentalist with much of the noble 
sweep and the philosophic vagueness of our own Emerson. 
He sings of the " dark divinity of Earth," of sunsets " thrice 
a thousand years ago" in glittering Babylon; but, withal, his 
" Reconciliation " is a poem of real dignity, and in the " Her- 
mit" croons a magic never known to the New Englander. 
Several tender and bewitching lyrics from Katharine Tynan 
Hinkson are included ; a love poem of rare charm by Thomas 
Boyd; some elemental stanzas by Padraic Colum, a young poet 
with the seeing eye; and selections, of course, from Lady 
Gilbert, Seumas MacManus, and George Sigerson. Through 
all of these poets breathes the mystery and the magic and the 
poignancy of Celtic inspiration; the strange pathos of earth, 
the heart's unrest, the love and pursuit of unattainable ideals. 
Scarcely ever have they found more beautiful expression than 
in the verses of Nora Hopper (Chesson) in the yearning lone- 
liness of her "Dark Man," in the exquisite fairy lore of her 
"Dirge for Aoine." 

So, in a place apart, stands the poetry of Ireland; and it is 
well that the busy world's ships should pause and listen to 
its song. Yet, when all is said, the crowning poetic gift of 
the Celt is forever incalculable. Into all English-speaking 
literature it has carried the beacon light " that never was on 
land or sea"; the great "Arthurian motif is one of its most 
memorable gifts! Arthur O'Shaughnessy, who lived and died 
before the present literary revival, caught this half -unconscious 
cry of his race: 

" We are the music makers, 

And we are the dreamers of dreams, 
Wandering by lone sea-breakers, 

And sitting by desolate streams; 
World-losers and world-forsakers, 

On whom the pale moon gleams: 
Yet we are the movers and shakers 

Of the world forever, it seems." 

Under the fervently deductive scru- 

THE DURABLE SATIS- tiny of the Catholic philosophy of 
FACTIONS OF LIFE. twenty centuries, the words dura- 
bility, satisfaction, and life, as ap- 
plied to man's existence, lose much of their claim to perma- 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 249 

nency, content, and spiritual vitality in Charles W. Eliot's very 
modern book, The Durable Satisfactions of Life (New York : 
Thomas Y. Crowell. Price $i). The five essays, comprising 
the volume, seek to answer the question with which the author 
begins his work: "For educated men, what are the sources 
of the solid and durable satisfactions of life ? " 

With all good will to give to the book its due, one might 
argue that the writer is lucid throughout, but if lucidity, as 
applied to this work, means the illuminating development of 
an argument on life and its durable satisfactions, one looks in 
vain for the stability of Dr. Eliot's premise and the durabil- 
ity of his conclusions as applied to life in its relation to 
Eternal Truth. 

There is a note, clearly sustained throughout, that is dis- 
cordant and incompatible with satisfaction in its durable form, 
and Dr. Eliot's ideals seem bounded by the modern moral 
code of conscious human respect. There are numerous sen- 
tences in the work which, if removed from their setting, might 
sound wise or well to the collector of epigrams, but should the 
critic seek thus to strain the quality of justice, he would seem 
unfair to both reader and author, since it is the latter's object 
to prophesy to the world the religion of the future, and as he 
considers this religion a " consummation devoutly (?) to be 
wished," he takes occasion to demonstrate its dangerously 
ephemeral and modernistic principles before the American 
students to whom it has been his responsible privilege to 
lecture at various times. 

The terrified negro urchin who exclaimed to the dressed- 
up skeleton : " I knows you, if you is got yer clothes on ! " 
possessed a discrimination worthy of emulation. Could the 
student of to-day detect the wily skeleton clad in the filmy 
garments of compromising sophistry, he might arm himself 
against each new appearance and be able to say in alarm to 
the sickly semblance : " Lo, here it comes again ! " 

It is an attitude most astounding and often unconsciously 
assumed by the blind followers of negation, optimistically to 
presuppose durable satisfaction for the individual while deny- 
ing the religious tenets that have vitalized the history of 
Christendom. Little do men of the new schools realize that 
they are ingrates in their failure to admit their large indebted- 
ness to the past. But for that religion, which according to them 



250 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

is not good enough for the future, Dr. Eliot and his kind 
would not be enjoying the privileges and advantages of the 
present. 

In her nature of possessing all things, the Church, that 
vast repository of durability and good, still insists on authority 
and, as if in fractious answer to this insistence, Dr. Eliot says: 
"The religion of the future will not be based on authority 
either spiritual or temporal. The decline of the reliance upon 
absolute authority is one of the most significant phenomena of 
the modern world. ... As a rule, the Christian churches, 
Roman, Greek, and Protestant, have heretofore relied mainly 
upon the principle of authority, the Reformation having sub- 
stituted for an authoritative church an authoritative book; but 
it is evident that the authority both of the authoritative 
churches and of the Bible as a verbally inspired guide is already 
greatly impaired, and that the tendency toward liberty is pro- 
gressive and among educated men irresistible. 1 ' 

As if in answer to the promise of a religion so full of 
menace, a writer in the Outlook says : 

America to-day stands in peculiar need of that contribution 
which the Roman Catholic Church is peculiarly fitted to fur- 
nish. For the chief peril to America is from disorganizing 
forces and a lawless spirit; not from excessive organization. 
One of the chief lessons Americans need to learn is reverence 
for constituted authority and willing obedience to law. This 
lesson the Roman Catholic Church is peculiarly fitted to teach. 
And within the reach of its influence are those who most need 
to be taught. That Church is a vast spiritual police force, a 
protection of society from the reckless apostles of self-will. 
But it is far more. Wherever it goes it teaches submission to 
control, and that is the first step toward that habit of self- 
control in the individual, which is an indispensable condition 
of self-government in the community. . . . The Outlook 
congratulates America upon the evidences of spiritual pros- 
perity in the Roman Catholic Church in this country, and it 
gratefully appreciates the services which that Church is ren- 
dering to the community by inculcating the spirit of rever- 
ence fot law and lawful authority which is the foundation of 
civil and religious liberty. 

Surely Dr. Eliot must see that there are "educated men" 
many leagues removed from his mental attitude, and across the 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 251 

water there is one in London to-day who says, in his work 
on Bernard Shaw: "All works must become thus old and in- 
sipid which have consented to smell of time rather than of 
eternity. Only those who have stooped to be in advance of 
their time will ever find themselves behind it." 

There is a street corner in Rome 

SPIRIT OF ST. FRANCIS, about which, three hundred and 

By Camus. fifty years ago, courtiers and 

clergymen and other gentlemen 

used to loiter to exchange greetings. Among them was often 
seen the attractive figure of a certain self-exiled Florentine, 
whose quaint and witty sayings drew men to his devoted friend- 
ship ; but he spoke most commonly of such topics as the beauty 
of virtue, heaven, and Jesus Christ. One of the corner houses 
is still standing, and a bronze plate has been let into the wall, 
bearing this inscription : " Here Philip Neri chatted about God. 11 

We now have a good English version of another saint's 
Francis de Sales' chats about God and divine things, The 
Spirit of St. Francis de Sales, by his friend, Jean Pierre 
Camus, Bishop of Belley. (Translated by J. S. With a Pre- 
face by his Grace the Archbishop of Westminster. London : 
Burns & Oates; New York: Benziger Brothers. Price $1.80 
net). 

These are the spontaneous utterances of a saint remarkable 
for ready and perfect expression of thought. He was a born 
persuader of men, and his sanctification by the Holy Ghost 
elevated this native gift into a regenerative force seldom 
equalled. No one could be long in his company without being 
sanctified. It is fortunate for the generations which have fol- 
lowed him that Jean Pierre Camus, an intimate friend as well 
as a devoted disciple, happened also to be a facile and graphic 
writer. He constantly sought opportunities to put on paper 
the conversational wisdom of the saint. These precious sweep- 
ings of the goldsmith's shop he called the Spirit of St, Francis 
de Sales, and he has given us a peculiarly charming and won- 
derfully edifying volume of colloquial spirituality. 

Our readers doubtless know that, in the earlier part of the 
fifth century, the sayings of the Fathers of the Desert were 
arranged and published by John Cassian. 

His work was done after he had lived several years among 



252 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

them, passing up and down through their lauras and monas- 
teries. His book was for ages, perhaps even till St. Bernard's 
era, the foremost standard authority of Christian asceticism. 
To this day, under the name of Cassian's Conferences, it is an 
indispensable volume in every religious person's library. We 
do not rank Camus equal in any wise with Cassian. But St. 
Francis de Sales is in many respects the equal of the great 
hermits and cenobites of Egypt and Palestine; and even with 
Camus' defective record, his sayings are wonderful incentives 
to a life of entire perfection. Add to this substantial merit 
the fact that St. Francis lived in the open, was a vigilant, 
fearless chief pastor of souls, his whole life long the director 
of saintly men and women, some of whom holy Church has 
placed on her altars. His vocation was the most public and 
active known to religion. These qualifications of his career 
give his teaching, especially his more artless and conversa- 
tional teaching, a value peculiarly practical. As one reads 
these little paragraphs of instinctive wisdom, grouped under 
headings which catalogue pretty much all the virtues and 
vices of every state of life, many a time he hears a self-whis- 
per: I wish I had this saying by heart. 

We did have an American translation of the Esprit, but it 
was so much abbreviated as to be almost fragmentary, and 
was hurt by the translator's defective knowledge of the Eng- 
lish idioms, as well as by the intrusion of his personal eccen- 
tricities into his rendering of the original. Though it is now 
quite forgotten, it served a good purpose in its day. This 
translation is in every way excellent, having been made under 
the supervision of English Visitandines, and with the patron- 
age of the Archbishop of Westminster. We ought to add 
that, although the book is good for all classes, it is of par- 
ticular use for the clergy. 

The claim put forth by the Cleve- 

CATHOLIC RELIGION. land Apostolate Publishing Corn- 
By Father Martin. pany f or Father Martin's book, 

Catholic Religion (Price $i), is a 

large one. "Did you ever wish," they ask, "for a book you 
could give to a man and say : * This will tell you all about 
the Catholic Church'? Here it is." 

The volume is certainly remarkable for the amount of mat- 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 253 

ter compressed within its red covers without presenting an 
alarming bulk. Naturally, the great originality of such a work 
can only lie in its plan of presentation. This is admirable. 
The author has fully recognized that though the eye and the 
attention of the incipient convert are caught, now by one 
thing, now by another in the teaching or practice of the 
Church, he yet needs to know at once that the overwhelming 
difference between the true Mother of Souls and her myriad 
imitators lies in the absolute coherence and solidarity of her 
doctrine. Full comprehension of this truth can only be the 
outcome of years of study in history, philosophy, and theology. 
But a clear outline of the fact can and should be given to the 
"plain man." He has it here in Catholic Religion a book 
which clearly grew out of the actual notes and instructions of 
the practical working missionary. 

Father Martin begins at the beginning. The first part of 
this book, "Foundations of Religion," touches "upon the re- 
ligious ideals and needs of humanity often vestiges of great 
truths that suggest a lost inheritance of knowledge perceived 
by poets and philosophers and expressed by them darkly, with- 
out the sureness and fullness of revealed truth." 

The second part deals with "The Christian Church. 11 Its 
most striking chapter is the sixth, "The Church and the 
Bible." Few expository writers have understood so well as 
Father Martin the mountains of difficulty piled up before the 
non-Catholic inquirer through his habitual misuse of such sim- 
ple words as "faith," "tradition," "grace," "salvation," etc., 
and few have answered them so admirably in a treatise in- 
tended for popular use. 

Father Martin, throughout his book, summons to his sup- 
port all manner of unorthodox writers, ranging Jrom Carlyle 
and Emerson, Huxley and Spencer, to Dr. Osier and Mark 
Twain. 

With regard to the third part, " The Christian Life," we 
imagine the illustrations will be sometimes as effective as the 
letter press. Those representing the administration of the 
Sacraments, St. Ignatius Loyola in Mass vestments, Benedic- 
tion of the Blessed Sacrament, and monks and sisters at their 
ordinary occupations, will be of special interest and very real 
use to the neophyte, for whose sake we are also glad to see 
the exact construction of a confessional carefully diagrammed. 



254 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

We hope that in a second edition the publishers will not allow 
the illustrations to be backed by type. 

The fourth part, "The Church in History," is a marvel of 
true historical sense governed by the instinct for compression. 
The most noticeable chapters are those on "The Culture of 
the Middle Ages/' under Ruskin's sub- division of the Book 
of Words, the Book of Deeds, and the Book of Arts, and on 
the Reformation. We recommend the book in a particular 
way to all Catholic students forced to study history in public 
high schools. We heartily congratulate Father Martin on his 
work. He has given us a valuable book of Catholic defense 
and exposition. 

There is already a paper covered edition at thirty five 
cents, and we understand that it is hoped eventually to pro- 
duce a ten cent copy. May it come soon ! 

This is the fourth edition of a 

CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS, popular student's manual of apol- 
ogetics. (Apologetique Chretienne, 

par Anatole Moulard et Francis Vincent. Paris: Bloud et Cie.) 
It is written by two young professors of Combree, in the diocese 
of Angers, France. It follows the usual lines of a theological 
text-book arrangement of the treatises on God, Man, Religion, 
the Church, and the Papacy. A few chapters are [added on 
the Charge of Intolerance, the Relations of Church and State, 
the Church and Rationalism. 

As might be expected, there is nothing strikingly original 
in the method of treatment, and nothing peculiarly attractive 
from the viewpoint of style in these brief dogmatic sketches. 
Still the statement of Catholic doctrine is most accurate and 
orthodox, and the authors are usually most careful in excluding 
all personal viewpoints on debated questions. 

It is a manual well-calculated to instruct the average 
French schoolboy in some important Catholic doctrines, al- 
though the reason of some omissions is rather hard to under- 
stand. Perhaps the writers have a second volume in mind, 
which will complete the lacuna of the first. We must concede 
that it is rather an impossible task to meet all the objections 
of modern Rationalism and Protestantism within the narrow 
compass of a five-hundred-page text-book. We are certain 
frequently to meet with refutations that remind us of the ab- 






i9io.] NEW BOOKS 255 

surdum est of the old philosophy manuals, wherewith the callow 
philosopher quickly dismissed the arguments of a Spencer or a 
Kant. 

The bibliography, arranged according to chapters, is fairly 
complete and modern, but the book needs a careful index of 
subjects and authors. 

We were not aware that the Church to-day still claimed 
the right of deposing princes (p. 462), but thought that in the 
Middle Ages this power was conceded the Popes by the com- 
mon consent and public law of Christendom. On an open 
question like the extent and scope of the coercive power of 
the Church, we would ask our authors to consult again a book 
they often quote, Vacandard's Inquisition, and then explain 
more fully the text of the Quarta Cura (p. 395). 

After an accurate statement of the Catholic doctrine on the 
relations of Church and State, our authors make the astound- 
ing assertion: "The separation of Church and State does not 
exist de facto in the United States" (p. 461). We suppose 
that a French Catholic of to-day is so used to the absolute 
tyranny of an anti-clerical government under a psuedo- separ- 
ation regime, that he must needs fail to grasp the status of 
the Church in our own free land. 

After reading Flamsted Quarries, 

FLAMSTED QUARRIES, by Mary E. Waller (Boston : Lit- 
By Waller. t i e> Brown & Co. Price $1.50), 

it seems as if the one true note in 

the entire book is sounded by the prophetic dedication To 
Those Who Toil which, supported by a menacing hand in 
bas-relief on the outer cover, gives fair warning to unwary 
triflers who are not prepared to plod through its five- hundred 
odd pages. The story is placed in Flamsted, a small Maine 
village abounding in conservatism and local color. We see the 
hamlet changed into an industrial centre through the selling 
of land to a New York syndicate for stone quarries; foreign 
workmen invade it, riding rough shod over local prejudice, 
united in nothing save the fellowship of labor, the mutual 
desire to wrest a livelihood from the gray granite of Maine. 

The first importation from the world without Flamsted is 
Father Honore, a voluntary exile from his native France. In 
the portrayal of this character Miss Waller nearly achieves a 



256 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

living, consistent study; but the clergy in fiction are doomed 
to speak in threadbare platitudes and to do deeds of inhuman 
heroism ; so in the end, after a struggle covering a few chap- 
ters, he succumbs to type. The plot circles about a youth, of 
worldly ambitions tending towards Wall Street, who loves an 
orphan girl, but because of his aspiration to marry an heiress 
is prevented from speaking " that word of four letters which a 
woman writes large with legitimate, lovjng pride in the face 
of the world," for which she waits, we are told, "in joyful 
anticipation to make her future fair and blest." At length, 
after much ingenious self- revelation, the girl discovers "that 
this which she was experiencing with Champney Googe the 
man she loved with all her heart was not love." 

So at the close of a hectic interview she bids him leave 
her, and he complies. After his dismissal the youth abandons 
himself to high finance, not big game shooting in the Rockies, 
the one point of difference between him and his prototype. 
This departure from precedent proves unfortunate, for he be- 
comes a fugitive from justice through appropriating the funds 
of Flamsted quarries. He expiates his lapse by seven years 
in a State prison, whence he emerges determined to gain peace 
of mind in honest labor, despising the methods of money-making 
which do not include the sweat of the brow. As his teim in- 
cluded stone- breaking he is in [excellent condition to return 
to the quarries he once managed. There he finds the orphan 
girl, and to nobody's surprise, he articulates the four-lettered 
word which had proved his Waterloo before. 

The plot is over-weighted by discursive descriptions and 
by minor characters who indulge in homely philosophy both 
in and out of season, regardless of the inaction thus produced. 
Mr. C. G. Nelson, the illustrator, evidently paid but little at- 
tention to the author's text. 

The Man and the Dragon, by 
THE MAN AND THE DRAGON. Alexander Otis (Boston : Little, 

Brown & Co. Price $1.50), is 

a notable novel, distinctly American and quite up-to-date. 
It tells of John Price, self-made, manly, and energetic, whose 
position as editor of a city newspaper enables him to combat 
a powerful political boss on the one hand, and the magnates 
of a street railway monopoly on the other. The story of his 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 257 

desperate struggle for clean politics, and of his final success 
through defeat, is well told. The said political boss, "Thomas 
Evans, hatter and furrier, devoted husband, fond father, un- 
scrupulous politician, found places and homes for the widow's 
orphaned children, who visited the sick in his district, who 
forced through costly public improvements that starving work- 
men might have bread, who found sinecures for young men 
that they might earn their way through college, who crushed 
political opposition with an iron hand, and nominated to office 
the representatives of the people, from coroner and inspector 
of elections to mayor and congressman." 

It would surely be interesting to know whether Mr. 
Thomas Evans, with his genial philanthropy and his con- 
scienceless political rule, has any original in real life or in 
Rochester. Mr. Otis, himself a lawyer and politician in that 
city, knows the importance and the many aspects of the civic 
problems in his story, and handles them ably. The book 
makes enjoyable reading. 

The Dweller on the Borderland, 

THE DWELLER ON THE by the Marquise Clara Lanza 
BORDERLAND. (Philadelphia: John Joseph Me- 

Vey. Price $1.50), is a psycho- 
logical novel, concerning the conversion to Catholicity of the 
hero, Lionel Farnsworth. The story begins with Lionel him- 
self, his wife Maggie, and the baby, whose name does not 
matter, all located in a Morningside flat. They had recently 
come to New York, where Lionel secured a position as tutor 
to a boy preparing for college. Next, carefully concealing the 
fact that he was married, he proceeded to fall in love with 
Hilda Burton, the aunt of his pupil. Through her influence 
he became interested in the doctrines and practices of the 
Church. Matters came to a climax in their mutual acknowl- 
edgement of love and in his confession of his marriage. Then 
in rapid order followed Maggie's death, his own conversion to 
Catholicity, and, last and most startling, the announcement, 
heartbreaking to Hilda, of his intention to enter the Jesuit 
order. 

Candidly, we do not personally enjoy the story. It has 
become common in certain literary fields to take the sinful in 
human nature and cover it with the decent-sounding cloak of 
VOL. xcii. 17 



258 NEW BOOKS [Nov., 

psychological study. We have been haunted by the idea that 
in the present instance the author added to the psychological 
cloak a few Catholic trimmings, and really made the garment 
more unseemly and grotesque than ever. Throughout the 
book is an evident over-straining after the manner of Bourget 
and Henry James. About one-third of the volume is occupied 
with the description, in polysyllables, of the contortions and 
frequent somersaults of Lionel's inner consciousness, and might 
profitably have been left out. The intelligent reader will take 
care to skip it. Some one has said that " fire is the most 
searching of all analysis, and fire reduces its object to ashes"; 
overanalysis has certainly burnt out the character of Lionel, 
making him appear weak and selfish. His conversion, altogether 
an affair of the emotions, recalls, by contrast, that exquisite 
story of the intellectual and spiritual conversion of Ormsby in 
Ganon Sheehan's My New Curate. 

In Mr. Oppenheim's latest novel, 
THE LOST AMBASSADOR. The Lost Ambassador (Boston : 

Little, Brown & Co. Price $1.50), 

a fair heroine, with more beauty than brains, finds herself, like 
a lone Babe in the Woods (of London this time), deserted by 
a villainous uncle. The hero, a sort of " Johnny-on-the-spot," 
hastens to her rescue. He discovers and baffles the uncle, gets 
himself tangled in mysterious plots and counterplots, that in- 
clude the false sale of two newly-completed battleships belong- 
ing to the Brazilian government. The story is after the ap- 
proved "six-best-sellers" model. Mr. Oppenheim is called 
"the Prince of Story-tellers"; then, whoever he may be, long 
live the king! 

" We don't need new toys," said 

CHRISTMAS TALES. an astute department store sales- 
man to a lady who complained of 

the "same old line" of dolls, trumpets, and tin kitchens every 
year. " Old toys are good enough, as long as there are new 
children every year." 

The same thing holds good in Christmas juveniles. The 
old snow-effect, the old, old bells, the Oldest Story told anew, 
will never be trite to such fresh- hearted readers as those for 
whom Miss Cathryn Wallace writes her Christmas stories, 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 259 

One Christmas Eve at Roxbury Crossing ; and Other Christmas 
Tales (New York: Fr. Pustet & Co. Price 75 cents). A 
really novel Christmas story might be an artistic success, but 
would surely be a publishing failure. The child public would 
none of it. Little Roxburgians will be especially delighted 
by the realism of the title story, wherein Father Frawley, 
C.SS.R., puts his head out of the window of the Redemptor- 
ist House to hear the mounted police clatter by ; and the In- 
dian who brings home the lost child on Christmas Eve of 
"Long Ago" is an old friend who will be dear to a new 
generation. 

We must, however, protest, in the name of the many chil- 
dren whose success in life depends on their ability to write 
the English language correctly, against the startling typo- 
graphical novelties displayed in the punctuation of this little 
book. 



is the book concerning which the only questions are 
J plainness of print, portability in size, durability of binding, 
and fair seeming adornment of cover and page. Such a book 
is the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis. Edited with 
Introduction and Notes by Brother Leo, of the Christian 
Brothers, Professor of English Literature in St. Mary's Col- 
lege, Oakland, California (New York: The Macmillan Com* 
pany. Price 25 cents). 

Here it is in perfectly plain print, of pocket size, strongly 
put together, and retailed at a quarter of a dollar. Brother 
Leo's notes are few and pertinent, as become both the book 
and the editor, and his Introduction gives an excellent sum- 
mary of the claim of A Kempis to the honor of authorship. 

The Imitation is the one book that is worthy, if such a 
high .dignity can be earned at all, to be a companion volume 
to the New Testament. No book is so true an interpretation 
of the Gospel of Christ, or rather so stimulating a distillation 
of its spirit. Yet, curiously enough, literal quotations from 
the inspired book are not very frequent: A Kempis voices 
rather than quotes the teaching of Christ. 

As to the text, Brother Leo's version doubtless is a good 
and true one. Veteran Imitationists, however, cannot be 
weaned from their ancient Challoner, acknowledging, as they 
may, that new minds enjoy new flavors of translation, espe- 



26o NEW BOOKS [Nov. 

cially by so religious an interpreter and one that knows all 
about the book and its author. 

We wish this edition of the Imitation many reprints; and 
take the liberty of suggesting the convenience of having Book 
and Chapter printed as page headings. 

Keith of the Border, by Randall Parrish (Chicago: A. C. 
McClurg & Co. Price $1.35. net), is a story of the Western 
frontier forty years ago. It is melodrama of the heiress* find- 
ing, villain-thwarting type, with plenty of shooting in every 
chapter. The Western atmosphere is well presented. 

This volume, L* Opposition Religieuse au Concordat ', by C. 
Latreille (Paris: Hachette et Cie.), treats of the opposition 
which the Concordat engendered among many of the French 
bishops. It is by the author of Joseph de Maistre et la Papaute, 
which has been crowned by the French Academy. The present 
volume deals with a question of French Church history on 
which there is but little known, and unveils the threatened 
danger of a schism which would have wounded most severely 
the Church in France. 

Students of church history and of the Fathers should wel- 
come the handy, authoritative, and reasonably-priced edition 
of texts and documents being published under the direction 
of MM. Hemmer and Paul le Jay. The latest addition, Les 
Peres Apostoliques, III,: Ignace d' Antioche et Polycarpe de Smyrne t 
Epitres ; Martyre de Polycarpe. Text Grec, Traduction Fran- 
9aise (Paris: Alphonse Picard et Fils), to the series contains 
all the extant letters of St. Ignatius, the epistle of St. Poly- 
carp to the Philippians, and the Martyrdom of St. Polycarp. 
The former are especially valuable as insisting strongly upon 
the hierarchical constitution of the Church. 

M. Auguste Lelong, of the University of Paris, has written 
an introduction to each author. After a short biography, he 
considers the text and authenticity, a still unsettled question 
in the case of St. Ignatius. Then follows the Greek text with 
French translation on opposite pages. The volume is concluded 
with a thorough index of topics and scriptural quotations. 



jporeion periodicals* 

The Tablet (10 Sept.): A complete translation of the Papal Let- 
ter censuring " Le Sillon." The celebration in honor 

of the third centenary of the canonization of St. Charles 
Borromeo began in Milan on September i. 
(17 Sept.): Over ^40,000,000 per year are expended in 
relieving Great Britain's poor. " In London there are 
at any moment from 120,000 to 130,000 paupers, and 
the number of those who live by charity is quite as large." 

" The Holy Father has issued, under date September 

I, a Motu Proprio which may be described as a corollary 
to the Pontifical documents already in existence regard- 
ing Modernism." On the occasion of his recent visit 

to Canada the Archbishop of Westminster crossed the 

Continent, preaching and visiting schools and hospitals 

on the way. 

(24 Sept.) : " The Eucharistic Congress at Montreal." 

A summary of the proceedings of that great event. 

A dispute has arisen in the cotton trade which may 

terminate in a strike or a lock-out directly affecting 

150,000 employees. "The Millenary of Cluny " was 

celebrated recently in the Church of Notre Dame de 
Cluny under the presidency of the Cardinal Archbishop 
of Rheims. 

(i Oct.): More about the Eucharistic Congress at Mon- 
treal. The great Eucharistic Meetings, the Procession, 

and the triumphal closing scenes. " The Archbishop 

of Westminster and the Language Question in Canada." 
The frank words of his Grace, appealing for English- 
speaking priests for Western Canada, before the Eucha- 
ristic Congress have evoked some criticism to which he 
replies in an interview printed in one of the Canadian 

newspapers. The Hebrew Mayor of Rome signalized 

"the fortieth anniversary of the Breach" by a speech 
at Porta Pia, which at once heaps "abuse and outrage 
on the doctrines of the Catholic Faith, on the Vicar of 
Christ on earth, and on the Church itself." In a letter 
to his Vicar- General, the Sovereign Pontiff made a solemn 
protest against the attack of Mayor Nathan. 



262 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Nov., 

Expository Times (Oct.): The Rev, R. H. Strachan, M.A., 
writes on "The Newly Discovered Odes of Solomon, 

and Their Relation to the Fourth Gospel." In "A 

Note on Ezechiel xxxii., 17-32," the Rev. F. H. Woods, 
B.D., says that this passage of Ezechiel is a corruption, 
and so by the help of the " LXX." he endeavors to 
restore it as far as possible to the original text. 

The Crucible (28 Sept.): The Editor gives some notes and 
comments upon the recent " International Conference of 
Catholic Women's Leagues/' which took place at Brus- 
sels, August 26 and 27. Her words are highly commen- 
datory of its success and of the energy displayed by the 

general feminist movement. "Blind Alley Education" 

criticises the schooling that leads to nothing. "A smaller 
proportion of practically qualified students leave our 
[Catholic] schools than . . . other schools in the 
country." The preparatory system of education is the 
particular subject of the discussion <-" The Higher 
Education of Women in Pre-Reformation Days." Article 
by Rev. T. Kejidal, O.S.B. The writer tells us that 
" in this essay an attempt is made to give some no- 
tion of the educational ideals of women in pre-Refor- 
mation times, to show that these were as high as those 
which studious men set before themselves, and that 
women in many cases attained an influence, an impor- 
tance, which their successors have seldom reached and 
never surpassed." In the open question of "The Sur- 
veillance of Letters " another view of the discussion is 
published, in which the writer maintains that the reading 
of parents' and children's letters has many advantages. 

The International Journal of Ethics (Oct.) : B. Bosanquet, in 
" The Prediction of Human Conduct : A Study in Berg- 
son," maintains that we can predict for others in as far 
as we are the same with them. " And, contrary to 
Bergson's agnosticism, we can be and are the same 
with others in a considerable degree."" In Thinking 
About Oneself," by Helen Wodehouse, deals with three 
classes of people: the egoist, the self-satisfied person, 

and the moral man who is self-conscious. " Two 

Modern Social Philosophies," by Ernest L. Talbert, treats 
of the origins and developments of Socialism and An- 



i9io.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 263 

archism. The author claims that the importance of So- 
cialism is not limited to Europe. "It is an undercurrent 
flowing against our traditional American spirit, and is 
not to be measured by the number of voters." 

Le Correspondent (25 Sept.) Michel Salomon writes apprecia- 
tively of William James. His claim to live, thinks the 

author, is his concrete analysis of consciousness. 

"Athalie," by Mason-Forrestier, shows the local traces 
of Ferte-Milon in Racine's great work. Racine is de- 
fended from the charge of Jewish descent. Guy de 

Cassagnac and Gustave Hue present ten unpublished 
letters of " The Last Years of Dumouriez." They ex- 
cite a little pity for the man who died " hated in his 
own country, tolerated in a strange land." 
(i Oct.): Under the heading " Human Adaptation to the 
Geographic Conditions," Jean Bruhnes treats the mineral 
resources, vegetable production, climatic conditions, and 
commercial locations of the different European countries. 

"St. Francis of Sales and His Family," by Henry 

Bordeaux, is a review of the book of the same title by 

Mgr. L. E. Piccard. "Some Notes and Souvenirs on 

Albert Vandal," by C. N. Desjoyeaux, is a brief our- 
line and review of the works of Vandal as an historian, 
his work as a lecturer on historical subjects, and powers 
as a conversationalist. 

Etudes (5 Sept.) : " The Age of Admission to First Holy Com- 
munion." The age of discretion, for Communion as well 
as for confession, is about seven years. A full knowl- 
edge of Christian doctrine is not necessary for Com- 
munion. Those in charge of children are obliged to see 

that the children go to confession and Communion. 

"James Balmes," by Luclen Rouse, insists especially 

upon his characteristic of "good sense." 

(20 Sept.): "A Visit to the Exposition of Brussels," 

by M. Parra. " Italian Reviews," by Louis Chervoillot. 

The following subjects are considered. " The War on 
Catechism"; "Cavour and the Jews"; "Italian Emi- 
gration"; "St. Charles Borromeo and the Plague of 
Milan." 

Annales de Philosophic Chretienne (Sept.) : Charles Dunan, on 
" Kant and the Reform of Cartesianism," says that, far 



264 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Nov., 

from having buried the philosophy of Descartes, Kant 
was himself a pure Cartesian; and that both these 
" sister doctrines " now present but an historic interest, 
since the concept of mechanism upon which they de- 
pended has already had its day. 

Revue du Clerge Franfais (15 Sept.): Writing of "The Gospel 
of St. Luke," E. Mangenot opposes M. Loisy's criti- 
cisms on the findings of other scholars as learned and as 
independent as himself, especially Harnack. He tries to 
show that M. Loisy, instead of presenting results unan- 
imously admitted by contemporary critics, has joined 
himself to one of the most radical of schools and has dis- 
dained the solid arguments a Harnack has renewed with 
great vigor in the traditional sense. Leon Desers 
begins a new department entitled : " Pastoral Chronicle," 
with the intent to pass in review methods, books, dis- 
cussions of congresses, etc., for the benefit of those in- 
terested, to renew their ardor and to revive in them the 
flame of the apostolate. The school is discussed in this 

number. Apropos of a " Manual of Byzantine Art," F. 

Martin sketches briefly the history, origin, and influence 

of the Church of St. Sophia, Constantinople. Eugene 

Evrard considers the theatrical sketches of Abbe Louis 
Bethleem, the success of " Chanticleer," by M. Rostand, 
and the value of the " Barricade," a drama of Paul 
Bourget. 

(i Oct.): J. Bricout contributes the Introduction to a 
general history of religion entitled "Is there a History 
of Religion ? " The work is to consist of a series of 
articles by a number of learned Catholic writers on the 
religions of the various nations and peoples. Each 
successive number of the Revue is to contain one of the 
articles. In the Introduction M. Bricout considers at 
some length the history, the object, the method, and some 
of the systems of the history of religions and its rela- 
tion to Catholics. Ch. Calippe writes upon " The 

Question of Domestics." Such topics as the wages and 
conditions of work of domestics, social duties towards 
servants, unions of domestics, laws and proposed laws 
in their favor, and works to be created and developed, 
are discussed. With regard to wages and conditions of 



i9io.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 265 

female domestics his words indicate that much is needed 
for the amelioration of the lot of this particular class. 

G. Planque, writing on " The Religious Movement 

in English-Speaking Countries," gives an account of the 
Apostolic Mission House of Father W. Vaughan and of 
the Congress of Leeds, the first national Catholic Con- 
gress held in England ; he considers also the royal 

Declaration. "The Age for First Communion" is a 

letter from Mgr. Chapon, Bishop of Nice, to Cardinal 
Coullie, Archbishop of Lyons, pleading for a continu- 
ance of the present custom of not allowing children 
their First Communion until they have been thoroughly 
instructed in the catechism. 

Etudes Franciscaines : " Decree on the Age of Admission to 
First Communion." Sacred Congregation, Rome, August 
8, 1910. Children should not be deprived of the bless- 
ings and graces of Holy Communion after the age of 
discretion, on the grounds of ignorance of the catechism 
or of the importance of the Sacrament. A full and 
complete knowledge of Christian Doctrine is not neces- 
sary for First Communion. 

La Revue Apologetique (Sept.) : M. Stellio, under the title 
" Catholicism and Literature," favorably criticises Carton 
de Wiart's latest novel Les Vertus Bourgeoises, dealing 
with the French and Brabantine Revolutions. 

Revue Pratique d* Apologetique (15 Sept.): H. Lesetre writes on 

"The Supernatural in the Bible." "The Lay Moral- 

ity Concerning the Problem of Death," by J. Reviere, 
is an exposition of said problem according to the lead- 
ing lay moral writers. The opposition to the decree 

urging pastors and parents to see that 'children seven 
years of age receive Holy Communion. Both guardians 
and spiritual directors object that children of this age 
are not sufficiently advanced in matters of religion, 
(i Oct.) : The important question of the education of the 
young is made the subject of Pierre Petit Julleville's 
article. The author concludes by saying that priests play 
an important part in this matter. "The Public Exer- 
cise of Catholic Worship According to the French Civil 
Legislation," by F. Cimetier, is the beginning of a 
series of articles pertaining to the rights of the " Parish 



266 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Nov., 

clergy in their churches from the viewpoint of civil law." 
In the article "The International Apologetical Con- 
gress at Vich," J. Lebreton gives an account of the pro- 
ceedings. " The Progress of Catholicism in the United 

States." The Protestants admire the progress of the 
Catholics. Statistics show an important increase. 

Chronique Sociale de France (Aug.-Sept.) : Under the caption 
" Social Catholicism and the Gospel," Jean Terrel con- 
siders the question whether a Catholic can be "social" 
without his faith and his social ideas interfering one 
with the other. He concludes that to be truly Christian 
one must also be "social." 

Stimmen aus Maria- Laach: "The ' Fallacy of Consciousness/" 
by Max Przibilla, S.J., is an extensive consideration 
of how self-interest warps conscience and judgment. 
" Know thyself " is the first task of one seeking virtue 

or truth. Alfonso Bath, S.J., sympathetically considers 

the Edinburgh Congress under the title, " Protestant 
Missionary Activity at the Present Day." Catholics, 
he suggests, can learn from Protestants methods of financ- 
ing missions, and should strive more earnestly to recruit 
missionaries among the Teutonic races, since they dom- 
inate politically so much of the non-Christian world. 

K. Kemp, S.J., thinks that "The Goal of Modern 

Philosophy" is thorough scepticism. 

La Civilta Cattolica (17 Sept.): This number contains the 
Letter of the Pope to the Hierarchy of France con- 
cerning the organization "Le Sillon." "'Le Sillon': 

Its Censure and Reform." The writer endeavors to 
show that the censure of the Sillon is entirely justified, 
and that its reform is necessary. In its official docu- 
ments it advocates a " humanitarianism without consist- 
ency and without authority, which is opposed to every 

intention of its founders and inspirers." "England's 

Rule in India in 1910." An examination into the pres- 
ent political state in India should be conducted with 
great caution and hesitation ; even the most clear-sighted 
and practical statesmen in the United Kingdom are not 
of the same mind in judging of the tendencies and dis- 
positions on the Indian Continent, nor are they agreed 
as to the programme of action for the future. Gui- 



i9io.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 267 

daismo e Cristianesmo (Judaism and Christianity], an apolo- 
getic work by E. Pincherle, a converted Jew, receives a 
lengthy review. 

(i Oct.) i "Religious Instruction and Modern Natural- 
ism." Naturalism, with its manifold evil effects, must 
be combatted by the clergy through the teaching of the 
catechism; this has become one of the gravest of their 

obligations at the present day. The Jesuits, a work 

by H. Boehmer, Professor at Bonn, which has recently 
been translated into French, "is not a true history of 
the Company of Jesus." This work is made the subject 
of a lengthy article. "New Measures Against Mod- 
ernism." The Motu Proprio, Sacrarum Antistitum " is 
notable for its opportuneness and efficacy; it places the 
Modernists, who are ever expressing their sincerity and 
frankness, under the necessity of retracting their errois 
and submitting, or else of throwing off the mask and re- 
vealing themselves." "Roman Affairs": The Congre- 
gation of the Holy Office has placed several works on 
the Index : Revista Storico- Critica Delle Scienze Teolo- 
giche, a monthly periodical published at Rome, and the 
latest works of A. Manaresi, E. Buonainti, and F. Mari, 
all published in Rome. 

La Ciencia Tomista (Sept-Oct): " Balmes and St. Thomas," 
by Father Norberto del Prado, shows the high admira- 
tion Balmes had for " the great, the sublime, the in- 
comparable St. Thomas Aquinas." 

Espana y America (15 Sept.): First installment of the "Ency- 
clical of His Holiness Pope Pius X. Concerning ' Le 
Sillon.'" While sympathizing with the intentions ex- 
pressed by the founders, he thinks the society has 
drifted away from these original objects. To continue 
as a Catholic organization " Le Sillon " must submit to 

the direction of the diocesan bishops. P. J. Perez 

presents extensive statistics showing the productiveness 
and prosperity of agriculture in Argentina. 



IRecent Events. 



The rulers of France have been 
France. engaged in the somewhat com- 

monplace occupation of protecting 

the savings of the people from undue risk, and of securing 
orders from the Turks for articles of French manufacture. 
They have been more successful in their efforts in the former 
case than in the latter. Hungary tried to negotiate a loan for 
about a hundred million of dollars; but the patriotic feelings 
of the French refused to allow their money to go towards the 
expense of finding arms which it was probable would be 
used against themselves. The Turks have been making re- 
peated efforts to supply themselves with funds from the same 
source, but both the insufficiency of the security and the proba- 
bility which has recently arisen, that the money would be 
used to strengthen the Triple Alliance, have made the govern- 
ment hesitate before giving the necessary approval to the pro- 
ject. The fact that it was not unlikely that the money ob- 
tained from France would be spent in Germany made the 
French still more unwilling to accede to the wishes of the 
Turks. France wanted Turkish custom, but Germany had out- 
bid her. It is a humiliating spectacle to see Christian nations 
competing for the favors of the Turk, who is proving himself 
almost as intolerable under the new as he was under the old 
regime. 

The willingness of the government to undertake what would 
be looked upon elsewhere as purely a business matter is shown 
by the opening of a new department of the Ministry of Pub- 
lic Works, to be known as the " National Touring Bureau." 
The object is to centralize all information which may interest 
travelers in France and to increase the facilities for travel in 
the country. The establishment of this Bureau under the 
auspices of the government is an indication of the extent of 
the increasing dependence of the Old World upon the New. 

Savoy has been celebrating the Jubilee of its annexation 
to France. The President took part in the festivities and was 
welcomed by the people with every mark of enthusiasm. The 
fact that there was no reference to Napoleon III. in the 
speeches that were made excited the ire of M. Ollivier, who 
was the Prime Minister of France when the war was declared 



i9io.] RECENT EVENTS 269 

in 1870. The France of to-day, he says, "shows cowardice 
on every hand; cowardice above and cowardice below; cow- 
ardice in deed and word and thought; and, above all, cow- 
ardice in history, falsification of facts, and the abolition of 
national traditions." Which of the two is the worse, coward- 
ice or foolhardiness, it is hard to say, but even if it were true 
that France has been careful not to provoke war, and has 
done too much for the sake of avoiding it, M. Ollivier is the 
last person in the world to call attention to such an error. 

Repeated accidents upon a railway which is under the 
management of the State have raised the question whether the 
State is well fitted for the carrying on of this branch of busi- 
ness. The fact, however, that the railway in question has only 
recently passed under State control, and that its defects were 
largely due to the former owners, make it impossible to give 
a decisive answer. 

The strike of railway men which has recently taken place 
has been expected for a long time. There is in France an 
organization, called the Confederation of Labor, which has for 
its object the destruction of the existing order, both political 
and economical, by what it calls direct action. It is animated 
with the most bitter hatred towards capitalists, and has no 
scruples about taking any means, lawful or unlawful, for effect- 
ing its purpose. A General Strike is what it most desires, but 
so far it has not been able to bring this about. It has made 
several attempts and has failed. The strike which has just 
taken place is but the last of a series, and it has met with 
the same fate as those that went before. The credit of the 
victory is attributed to M. Briand who has been both energetic 
and conciliatory. The railway men had to choose between 
their duty to the country as soldiers in ;the reserve, and the 
pecuniary advantages offered by the promoters of the strike. 
When M. Briand declared it to be an insurrection, patriotism 
in the majority of cases prevailed over self-interest and 
the Confederation's call was not obeyed. Immense damage, 
however, was done and many trades and industries disorgan- 
ized, even though the strike failed to reach the dimensions 
which its promoters had planned. 

The French Church has been celebrating the thousandth year 
of the foundation of the Benedictine monastery of Cluny, an event 
which took place on the I ith of September, 910. European schol- 
ars and representatives of French learned Societies have taken 



2;o RECENT EVENTS [Nov., 

part in the celebration, Representatives of the French Academy, of 
the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, of the Academy 
of Moral and Political Science, of the Academy of Fine Arts, 
as well as representatives of the government, joined with bishops, 
priests, and monks in praising the work of an establishment 
which all agreed in recognizing as having occupied for centuries 
a unique place in the history of Christianity and civilization. 
The writer of one of the papers developed the idea that the 
Benedictine Order of Cluny was an essentially French institu- 
tion. "While Catholicism," he said, "was the least national 
of religions, beneath the unity of its organization and the uni- 
versality of its doctrine, the Church has not effaced the special 
hereditary characteristics of the peoples of which it is com- 
posed. The Divine Sower may have scattered the same seed 
on the fields of humanity. The diversity of the soil and of 
the air gives a different tinge to the crops that are produced. 
There is a French Catholicism that of St. Bernard, of Gerson, 
of Vincent de Paul, of Bossuet, of Lacordaire a happy alli- 
ance of idealism and good sense, of sentiment and reason, a 
common need of discipline and liberty, the same aversion from 
the individualism which isolates human beings and from autoc- 
racy which absorbs them, a love of clearness in beliefs as well 
as in duties." 

In common with France, Spain, 
Germany. Austria, and England, Germany 

has been disturbed by labor dis- 
putes. It would seem that the workingmen are trying to prove 
that they can act as unreasonably, or at least can make them- 
selves as disagreeable to the rest of the community, when they 
have the power, as in former times other classes have been in 
the habit of doing. A shipping dispute has been going on in 
Germany for a long time involving large numbers of men be- 
longing to the shipbuilding and allied trades. In this case the 
employers were the active aggressors, having locked out the 
men. The end has not yet come. An insignificant dispute in 
Berlin involved one of the districts of that city in serious 
turmoil. Conflicts between the people and the police took 
place for four or five successive days and nights. There were in- 
dications that the populace had been regularly organized, and the 
Social Democrats were accused of being the organizers. This, 
however, they disclaim. Four British and American journal- 



i9io.] RECENT EVENTS 271 

ists, who ventured upon the scene of operations, were attacked 
wantonly, it is said, by the police. The President of the Police 
praised the journalists for their courage, but refused all re- 
dress. 

The Social Democrats have been holding their annual con- 
gress at Magdeburg, and as they have this year a member- 
ship of 720,038 compared with one of 633,309 last year and of 
384,327 in 1906, each of whom s a voter for the Reichstag, 
such an assembly cannot be neglected. It has no less than 
76 daily newspapers, one of which has a circulation of 139,000. 
The Party has its own divisions and sub-divisions. The main 
line of cleavage is between those who are willing to obtain by 
parliamentary action, and by co-operation with other parties, 
such ameliorations of the lot of the workingman as opportunity 
affords, and those who will accept all or nothing. The Social- 
ist members of the Baden Diet had voted for the Budget, and 
thereby had compromised the purity of Socialist principles, 
The consideration of their case took up much of the time of 
the Congress, and the debate ended in a vote of censure be- 
ing passed upon those who should depart from the pure 
principles of non-co-operation. A resolution was passed which 
declared that any member who in future should vote for the 
estimates should ipso facto be excluded from the party. The 
offending members withdrew from the meeting at which this 
resolution was passed ; but there is good reason to expect that 
no permanent division will take place and that the party will 
present a united front to all opponents at the approaching 
General Election next spring. 

The Pan-German League has also been holding its annual 
meeting, but for some reason or other little public attention 
has been given to its proceedings. Entire disapproval of the 
proceedings of Baron von Schoen, until recently Foreign Sec- 
retary, was expressed, and the English proposals for a limita- 
tion of armaments were characterized as attempts to meddle in 
the affairs of a foreign power. England ought to realize that 
she was making herself ridiculous. In addition to these, and 
similar exchanges of incivilities, each of the two countries is 
striving to learn the strength one of the other. A German 
lieutenant has been arrested in England, and two Englishmen 
have been arrested in Germany for a too close inspection of 
their respective fortifications. 



272 RECENT EVENTS [Nov., 

The visit paid by the German 

Austria-Hungary. Emperor to the Emperor of Aus- 

tria, in order to offer his personal 

Jubilee congratulations, brought out very clearly the closeness 
of the relations between the two Empires, and the fact that 
the alliance is not merely between the governments and sover- 
eigns, but that the hearts of the peoples so far as they are 
German are in full sympathy with the alliance. Domestic 
intimacy is the expression used to characterize the relations 
at present existing. This is largely due to the support which 
was so unhesitatingly given by the Kaiser to Austria-Hungary 
in the annexation crisis. The two countries are now looked 
upon as belonging one to the other. When the German Em- 
peror comes to Vienna he comes as a friend so close that no 
special emphasis need be laid on his presence. A visit paid 
to the Rathhaus, or City Hall, of Vienna, in order to receive 
an address of the citizens, was an innovation, for Imperial 
visits have hitherto been confined to higher circles. He was 
received by these citizens with enthusiastic applause repeated 
over and over again. In the speech which he made, his Im- 
perial Majesty recognized that this reception was a token of 
the inmost sympathy existing between the people of Vienna 
and himself, and that it was chiefly due to his action in " tak- 
ing his stand in shining armor at a grave moment by the side 
of your most gracious Sovereign." This declaration confirms 
the fact, so often and so long denied, that Russia was threat- 
ened by Germany with armed intervention, in the event of an 
attack upon Austria in the recent annexation crisis. It throws 
a light, too, upon the existing relations between Russia and 
the other two Empires, especially as the speech was made on 
the eve of the rapprochement of Turkey to the Triple Alliance. 
Ever since this same annexation-crisis the relations between 
the Dual Monarchy and Great Britain have been, if not cool, 
certainly not very warm. The fact, however, that the new 
King of England sent, to announce his accession, a special and 
exclusive representative, and one so distinguished as the Earl 
of Rosebery, was taken as a great compliment, as in fact it 
was meant to be. It was looked upon as an expression of the 
desire to change the attitude of Great Britain towards Austria, 
and even by some it was said to be an expression of regret 
that such an attitude had ever been taken. That the relations 
between the two Powers have again become hearty and friendly, 



i9io.] RECENT EVENTS 273 

and that the last traces of misunderstanding have been removed, 
was the express declaration of Lord Rosebery. With France, 
on the other hand, a change for the worse has taken place. 
The refusal of France to find the money which was needed by 
Hungary and even the hesitation over the Turkish Loan have 
provoked considerable resentment both in Austria and in Hun- 
gary, and leading newspapers have indulged in language not 
lacking in strength. 

Things have been quiet in Russia, 
Russia. although the quiet, in all likelihood, 

is that which precedes a storm. 

The only action taken so far by Finland is to refuse even to 
discuss the new law by which her rights have been restricted. 
The most noteworthy event, and it is indeed noteworthy, is 
that M. Isvolsky is no longer the Foreign Minister, having 
been appointed Ambassador in Paris. Count Aehrenthal will 
doubtless triumph, and possibly better relations may be estab- 
lished with Austria. The new Foreign Secretary is, however, 
said to be in sympathy with the policy of his predecessor, 
especially in regard to the entente with Great Britain. 

The recent revolution in Portugal, 
Portugal. which has brought to an end one 

of the most ancient of European 

monarchies, although surprising in the way in which it was 
effected, was no surprise in itself. In fact in well-informed 
circles it has been long anticipated. For many years Portugal 
has been going from bad to worse. The existing evils were 
due more to its Parliament than to the Throne. The rival 
politicians were united in only one thing, and that was how 
they might, in the most effectual way, fleece the people ; and, 
as being the most effectual way, they agreed among themselves 
to take turns, establishing the system called Rotatavism. The 
late King tried to put an end to these iniquitous proceedings, 
and for that purpose made Senhor Franco a quasi- dictator. 
After the assassination of the King an attempt was made to 
establish an honest system of government and to redeem the 
past. But the old system soon came again into operation, 
and with still more manifest signs of corruption. This led to 
a widespread feeling of discontent, or perhaps we should say 
of despair ; the situation was aggravated by the conduct of the 
VOL. xcn, 18 



274 RECENT EVENTS [Nov., 

King, whose private life, if it can be called private, was of 
such a character that even Catholics, who are naturally sup- 
porters of the established government, were becoming alienated 
by the conduct of the reigning monarch. Republican journals 
gave repeated expression of the desire to appeal to the nation 
by means of a Referendum in order to ascertain the wishes of 
the people as to a constitutional settlement. Strange to say 
it was among naval and military officers that the existing 
evils were very keenly felt. This was so well known that on 
the occasion of the recent elections every warship was sent 
away from Lisbon, in fear, it is said, of a revolt. The long- 
expected Revolution began with a declaration from some of 
the troops of the garrison, who gave their support to the 
Republicans and took up arms for the establishment of a Re- 
public. It ended by a further defection of loyalist troops 
after two days' fighting in Lisbon. The Navy co-operated by 
bombarding the Royal palaces. The President of the Republic 
of Brazil was an on-looker. Only nine days before every 
Regiment had defiled before the King on the historic site at 
Bussaco and the peasantry, gathered in thousands, had cheered 
vociferously. Now the King himself has abandoned his own 
cause, and a Republic has been proclaimed in the midst of 
universal acclamations. A Provisional Government has been 
formed. The reason for this so sudden and apparently so 
complete a success is that the Republican party has never 
been even accused of the venality which has been the charac- 
teristic of all the other Parties. 

The ambition of the new regime 
Turkey. in Turkey forms for Europe a 

greater source of anxiety than the 

revolution in Portugal for that is a comparatively isolated 
and local event, although there are, of course, possibilities of 
its developing into something more important, should it have an 
effect upon Spain. The real power in Turkey is in the hands of 
the Committee of Union and Progress, however constitutional it 
may be in theory. The Sultan is hardly named, and seems to have 
no influence upon the course of events. The Committee of 
Union and Progress, like every other body of men, has represen- 
tatives of a more moderate and conservative tendency, and those 
of a more aggressive and extreme one. The former wish Turkey 
to devote her energies to internal improvements, roads and 



i9io.] RECENT EVENTS 275 

schools and the development of commerce; the latter are in 
favor of adopting a vigorous foreign policy towards Greece, 
and perhaps Bulgaria, and as a means thereto wish to spend 
all the money available, and more than is available, on the 
army and navy and to raise a large sum by means of loans. 
It is into the hands of the aggressive party that the power 
seems now to have passed. In politics there is said to be no 
gratitude, and the conduct of the Young Turks seems to be 
another exemplification of the truth of this saying. If there 
were any opponents of the Young Turks in the action which 
they took to overthrow Abdul Hamid and his loathsome rule, 
Austria- Hungary and Germany were those opponents, whereas 
France and Great Britain did all that was legitimately in their 
power to support the action of the destroyers of the tyrant's 
despotism. But notwithstanding the services rendered by the 
latter and the opposition encountered from the former, it 
seems certain that Turkey is entering into a combination with 
the Triple Alliance and throwing the support of all the 
strength she has in opposition to her former friends during 
the recent crisis Russia, France, and Great Britain. 

A few months ago there was a prospect of a Federal Alli- 
ance with Turkey of the Balkan States, Rumania, Bulgaria, 
Servia, Montenegro, and possibly Greece, supported by Rus- 
sia, for the purpose of a peaceable maintenance of the existing 
state of things, and to allow Turkey time and opportunity for 
the internal development of her resources. Now these projects 
have been set aside, everything is being sacrificed for the 
strengthening of the military and naval forces; Greece is being 
treated in a high-handed manner, deliberately calculated to 
provoke war; a military convention has been signed with Ru- 
mania, by which the latter country is pledged to place her 
forces on the Bulgarian frontier in the event of the outbreak 
of a conflict between Bulgaria and Turkey. 

Official denial has been made of the existence of this con- 
vention, but political morality is at so low an ebb that no re- 
liance is placed upon such denials, especially when, as in this 
case, there are decisive evidences to the contrary. The depend- 
ence of Rumania upon Germany is so great that action of this 
kind would not have been taken except with the consent of 
that country. It is in .this way that it is thought that Turkey 
is now to be looked upon as grouped with the Powers which 
constitute the Triple Alliance. 



276 RECENT EVENTS [Nov., 

But, in order that Turkey may carry out her plans, a large 
sum of money is necessary. In order to get this, recourse has 
been made to France. Now the government of France acts as 
the guardian of the savings of its people, and when it will not 
give its endorsement, no loan can be quoted on the Bourse; 
and the people, those of them at all events who are prudent, 
will not subscribe. The French government, seeing that the 
money which it was sought to raise in France would, or at 
least might, go to enrich and give strength to its adversaries, 
and taking into consideration also that Turkey already owes 
to France by far a larger amount than to any other power, 
has refused, unless certain conditions are fulfilled, to give the 
necessary approbation, and has persisted in this refusal, not- 
withstanding all the efforts of the Grand Vizier and the Finance 
Minister of Turkey, who paid visits to Paris for the purpose of 
securing the concession. The latest news is that German and 
Austrian financiers are holding out hopes to the Turks that 
they will do what France has been unwilling to do. It is 
worthy of mention, as showing the relations of the Powers, 
that efforts made in England to secure the loan were unsuc- 
cessful on account of the loyal support which was felt even by 
financiers to be due to France as a party to the entente 
cordiale. 

The position at present, therefore, seems to be that Ger- 
many with her allies has regained in Turkey the position of 
predominance which she held under Abdul Hamid, that the 
chief supporter of his tyrannical rule now dictates, or at least 
largely influences, the present constitutional rulers. Whether 
that influence will be used to encourage the warlike party in 
Turkey to take that action against Greece which they have so 
long desired, the future will not be long in disclosing. The 
extreme rigor of the proceedings which have been taken in 
order to disarm the Macedonians of all races is another proof 
of the violent spirit by which the Young Turks are animated. 

Disarmament of the various nationalities is, indeed, a thing 
to be desired both in itself and as an evidence of the end of 
the chaotic anarchy which has existed for so long a time in 
the Balkan provinces, and as a means for preventing its recur- 
rence. But the way in which the work has been carried into 
execution by the Turkish authorities has already provoked one 
insurrection, that of the Albanians, and is leading to such a feel- 
ing of resentment and indignation that there is a probability 



19 io.] RECENT EVENTS 277 

of a general uprising in which Greeks, Bulgarians, and Alban- 
ians of both creeds would take part. 

The Greeks in Macedoina especially have been subjected to 
the most cruel treatment, with a view, it is thought, to excite 
public opinion in Greece and thus bring on the desired conflict. 
Their notables, priests, and ecclesiastical dignitaries have been 
arrested. Peasants have been put to torture, houses burned 
down, churches closed. In fact the violence used by the 
military authorities recalls the worst days of the uncontrolled 
despotism of Abdul Hamid. For all that, no one desires a 
return of his loathsome rule, and according to the best author- 
ities there is no danger of such a return. But the Young 
Turks have much to learn before they can receive the appro- 
bation of those who have hitherto sympathized with them. 
We hope some way will be found of teaching them a lesson. 

It will be remembered that the 
Greece. Greek Assembly was dissolved in 

order that a National Assembly 

for the revision of the Constitution in its non-fundamental 
principles should be elected. The Military League, under the 
usurped control of which for a considerable period efforts had 
been made to effect reforms, at the same time by its own action 
ceased to exist. The elections have been held and have re- 
sulted in the formation of a Revisionist Assembly, although 
there are among its members some who wish to transform it 
into a Constituent Assembly and to proceed to a complete 
transformation of the Constitution. This, however, would be a 
breach of faith and would be resisted by a majority of the 
members, although there may be legitimate room for contro- 
versy about what are and what are not the non-fundamental 
principles of the Constitution. The question may arise in this 
way as to whether or not a Second Chamber -should be es- 
tablished. 

The result of the General Election is to leave in a state of 
considerable uncertainty the question whether a real reform 
will be effected. The object which it was hoped to obtain 
was to eliminate the self-seeking politicians to whom the 
lamentable state of the country, its weakness and corruption, 
was due. But their supporters have come back to the As- 
sembly 190 in number out of a total of 358, while those who 



278 RECENT EVENTS [Nov. 

represent the new party, with a mandate to put an end to the 
methods of the old political parties, number only 80. There 
are three other groups, supporters of M. Mavromichalis, 35 or 
40 in number, 10 Socialists, and 45 Deputies from Thessaly, 
whose primary object is the expropriation of the Thessalian 
landlords. There was a scene at the opening session of the 
Assembly which makes it hard to look with any degree of 
reverence upon the new constitution-menders. Deputies be- 
longing to the new Party, which is to renovate Greece, would 
not allow the leader of one of the old parties to take the 
oath ; they carried off the New Testament which he was about 
to use; a series of free fights followed, and in the end soldiers 
with fixed bayonets had to make their appearance. The ques- 
tion was raised whether any oath could be taken, it being 
contended that the Constitution had been violated by the 
illegal manner in which the last Assembly had acted. But 
necessity knows no law, and, whether legal or illegal, the 
members of the Assembly decided that the oath should be 
taken, and declared themselves not a Constituent but a Revision- 
ist Assembly. 

In the midst of all these discordant elements there is 
reason to hope that some unifying and harmonizing principle 
will be found. The King is precluded from taking an active 
part by the constitutional position of non-interference to which 
he has rigidly and faithfully adhered, and by so doing has 
rendered his throne secure. There are those who think that a 
savior of the country has been found in M. Venezelo, who 
has been for some time at the head of the Executive Govern- 
ment of Crete. He is the author and creator of the present 
Assembly, of which he has been elected a member. Great 
confidence is felt in him by members of all parties, and it is 
expected that he will before long be placed at the head of 
the government. As the King said in his address at the open- 
ing of the session, the task will be a very laborious one, and 
will need all the wisdom at the command of the members in 
order to find a remedy for internal evils, and to defend the 
country from external foes. Greek orators in the Assembly 
are in the habit of quoting Aristotle and Plato; but it would 
seem better to apply their own common sense to the solution 
of the present day problems, and not to look for guidance to 
heathens who knew nothing about the existing state of things. 



With Our Readers 



''THE consecration of St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York City, on 
A Wednesday, October 5, was an event of historic importance and 
of particular interest to all the Catholics of the United States. The 
celebration, it may be said, began on Sunday, October 2, with Ponti- 
fical High Mass in St. Patrick's Cathedral, and the reading of 
Archbishop Farley's letter to his priests and people "on the happy 
consummation of more than half a century of toil and anxious care." 
His Eminence Cardinal Vannutelli was enthusiastically escorted 
into the city on Tuesday. His Grace the Archbishop of New York, 
accompanied by many priests and laymen, went out to welcome the 
Cardinal, and he was greeted on his arrival in the city by a chorus 
of over 3,000 children from the parochial schools. 

* * * 

THE following day witnessed the most impressive ceremony that 
American Catholics have ever seen. At half-past five in the morn- 
ing his Grace, the Archbishop of New York, began the solemn ser- 
vice of Consecration. Pontifical High Mass was sung at n o'clock 
by his Eminence Cardinal Gibbons. The ceremony was remark- 
able for the presence of three princes of the Church, Cardinal Van- 
nutelli, Papal legate to the Montreal Eucharistic Congress, Cardi- 
nal Logue, Primate of Ireland, and, as we have already stated, 
Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore. The Catholics of the 
city, and the non- Catholics also in great numbers, took part enthu- 
siastically in the celebration. Forty bishops and more than one 
thousand priests were present in the Cathedral. We quote the fol- 
lowing from one of the New Yort evening papers : 

* * While the processions were in motion all traffic on Fifth and 
Madison Avenues was halted one block either side of the Church. 
It took five hundred policemen to keep back the crowds in the 
neighborhood of the Cathedral." 

The presence of the great crowd showed with what joy the peo- 
ple of New York welcomed the consecration, the presence of prelates 
and priests from all parts of our country proved that the joy was one 
common to all American Catholics and the event a significant one in 
the life and growth of Catholicism throughout the land. The spirit 
of all was voiced by Archbishop Glennon, the preacher of the day, 
when he said : " We to-day join in dedicating and consecrating to 
Almighty God this church of churches, this cathedral of cathedrals 
in the great metropolis of a great nation." 



280 WITH OUR READERS [Nov., 

Solemn Pontifical Vespers were sung by his Excellency the 
Apostolic Delegate. Thursday was given over to the children, who 
assisted at Solemn Pontifical Mass. On Friday the religious orders 
of the diocese gathered in the Cathedral ; and the celebration closed 
with a reception to his Eminence Cardinal Vannutelli by the Catho- 
Jic laymen of New York at the Catholic Club. 



THE consecration marked the glorious fulfillment ot half a cen- 
tury of effort and sacrifice. Begun at a time when its founders 
could plead in excuse for such a tremendous and seemingly fool- 
hardy undertaking, only the abiding faith that was in them ; con- 
tinued through trial and sacrifice, in the face of opposition from 
within and without, mocked at by hostile ones, scorned by the in- 
different, St. Patrick's Cathedral stands to-day consecrated to God's 
service forever as a monument of wonderful faith, of enduring hope, 
and of undying zeal. It will be to us a reproach and an inspiration. 
A reproach if we ever falter in following the footsteps of our present 
leader and his predecessors in the hierarchy ; an inspiration so that 
even in our sorest trials we ought never to despair. As it has 
proved the past glorious, so will it prove the future of our Church 
in this country still more glorious. Hope is a virtue that has its 
own reward, and St. Patrick's Cathedral stands to-day as the best 
proof of what Christian hope can attain and of what Catholic loyalty 
and devotion can accomplish. Its stones are eloquent of a great 
lesson for us individually and for us as a great body of American 

Catholics. 

* * # 

THE inestimable services of Archbishop Hughes, of Cardinal 
McCloskey the centenary of whose birth was synchronous with 
this celebration of Archbishop Cowigan, who built the great towers 
and began the I^ady Chapel, are written indelibly in the history of 
the diocese and in the hearts of our Catholic people. To the pres- 
ent head of the diocese, our beloved Archbishop Farley, whose labor 
was to make secure for all time what his predecessors had begun and 
completed, the day of consecration must have been one of unalloyed 
and well-merited happiness. He saw his life-hope crowned with suc- 
cess. He had hoped, with the faith and the trust and the courage 
of his forefathers, and he had attained. With his own hands he 
consecrated for all time the Cathedral which he had been most in- 
strumental in making God's own and by that consecration he gave 
to the Church and to his country an edifice that is a worthy testi- 
mony to the one saving faith of time and eternity. As participators 
and sharers in his joy, he saw himself surrounded by the eminent 
princes of the Church, by prelates, by priests, by people ; and to 



i9io.] WITH OUR READERS 281 

him it must have been a glorious, inspiring evidence of the vitality 
and strength of Catholicism in this land where he has labored so 
long and so faithfully. 

In his modesty he sent forth a letter congratulating his priests 
and people, and giving to them the credit. We feel that it is he 
who is to be congratulated, that to him must go the honor of in- 
itiation, of inspiration, and of success. His unselfish labors in the 
government of the greatest diocese of our country, labors manifold, 
constant, and many of them unknown to the average man, have en- 
deared him to the hearts of his people, of his fellow-citizens, Catho- 
lics and non-Catholics alike. The labors of others have been in him 
continued and through him have been crowned with success in the 
consecration of St. Patrick's Cathedral. 



THE death of the illustrious priest, the Rev. I^ouis A. I^ambert, 
pastor of the Church of the Ascension, Scottsville, N, Y., and 
world -renowned editor of the New York Freeman's Journal, was duly 
announced in both the secular daily and the Catholic weekly press in 
their issues of the last week of September ; and the secular press 
seemed to vie with the Catholic in its earnest and eloquent eulogy of 
the departed champion of Christian truth. Both were unstinted in 
their well-merited tributes to the memory of the most brilliant Catho- 
lic controversialist of modern times. In Rochester, where the fam- 
ous priest was as well-known to non-Catholics as to Catholics, where 
the intellectual power of the vanquisher of Ingersoll was held at its 
proper estimate, and where the winning personality of the man had 
endeared him to men of every class in life, the tributes in the daily 
press whether in the form of contributions from ardent admirers, of 
reportorial notice from men specially assigned to the work, or of 
editorial comment seemed to take on an accent of affectionate ad- 
miration of the man. They all sounded the same keynote of love, 
and were couched in terms of respectful tenderness to a degree al- 
together unusual in the obituary notice. 

* * * 

ABOUT two years ago it became evident that Father Lambert's 
constant application to his editorial work, as well as his assid- 
uous attention to his parish duties, had undermined the powerful 
constitution of the physical and intellectual giant. He was then 
seized with an attack of pleurisy, from which he really never fully re- 
covered. In July of the present year it became evident even to him- 
self that change and rest were imperative. About two months ago 
he wrote to the writer of this sketch : " I am not at all well, have 
just seen the bishop and he has given me a vacation. I have just 



282 WITH OUR READERS [Nov., 

finished my paper for the Montreal Congress ; I do not know how 
they will like it." He added : " I have great difficulty in writing ; 
but by getting the pencil in a certain position I can manage to push 
it along . ' ' The note was written in pencil something quite unusual 
for him and was barely legible, showing the feeble condition of 
the writer. His intention was to spend his vacation on the Jersey 
coast, but, his strength soon failing, he was removed to Idylease, 
Newfoundland, New Jersey, where his death occurred on Sunday, 
September 25. His remains were taken to Scottsville, where his 
funeral took place on September 29. Pontifical High Mass was sung 
by his Bishop, the Right Rev. Thomas F. Hickey, of Rochester, 
who, also, in an eloquent sermon, paid a high tribute to Father 
Lambert's worth. His remains were laid to rest in the beautiful 
cemetery overlooking his church and home, and the loving hands 
of his parishioners transformed the grave that was to receive them 
into a veritable bower of repose. The bugler of Myron Adams 
Grand Army Post, of Rochester, of which Father Lambert was an 
enthusiastic member, sounded the farewell note of comrades at the 
grave where the remains of one of the most distinguished writers of 
modern times will sleep until awakened by the note oi the arch- 
angel's trumpet. 



T7ATHBR LAMBERT was born at Allenport, Pa., February n, 
-T 1835. His grandfather was among * ' The Pikemen of '98 " in 
the battle of Vinegar Hill. His father came to America in 1811, in 
company with his brother Father Lambert's uncle who was the 
second bishop of St. John's, Newfoundland. His mother was of Quak- 
er extraction, her ancestors having come to America from England 
with William Penn. Father Lambert studied at St. Vincent's Col- 
lege, Pa., and at the theological seminary of St. Louis, at Caronde- 
let, Missouri. In 1859 he was ordained priest for the diocese of 
Alton. When the Civil War broke out he offered his services in 
the army and was duly appointed as chaplain of the" eighteenth regi- 
ment of Illinois Infantry Volunteers, ranking as Captain of Cavalry. 
He was with his regiment through their campaigns in Missouri, 
Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, " a sharer in their perils and 
hardships." After a two years' service in the army, he resumed 
his parochial work in the diocese of Alton for a brief period, but in 
1868 came to New York City, where he became teacher of philoso- 
phy and theology in the Paulist novitiate at Fifty-ninth Street. His 
next work was at Waterloo, N. Y., where he became pastor and 
built the foundations and a goodly portion of the walls of the present 
handsome church edifice. From Waterloo he went to Scottsville, 
where he remained to the end. 



i9io.] WITH OUR READERS 283 

T^ATHER LAMBERT was in turn editor of three Catholic papers, 
A on each of which he left the indelible impress of his genius. It 
was Emerson who said : "If you can write a better essay, preach a 
better sermon, or make a better horseshoe than other men (we quote 
from memory), though you live in the wilderness, the world will 
make a beaten path to your door." Father Lambert was a literal 
exemplification of this truth. From his obscure, humble presbytery 
in Scottsville there went out a light that flashed around the world. 
The name of the victor who, in a single conflict, so triumphantly 
routed the entire forces of atheism and infidelity in the person of 
their leader, the blasphemous Ingersoll, is a household word in every 
Christian home and one of the brightest jewels in modern Catholic 
literature. Father Lambert was the author of several works, but 
his enduring fame will rest on his Notes on Ingersoll. 



IP VERY one, except, perhaps, the irresponsible and radical Social- 
ly ist, will admit that the family is the basis of our social and 
national existence. It is one of the cardinal principles of our 
orderly and progressive life. Yet it is threatened with widespread 
denial and destruction, and in the face of such a bewildering, far- 
reaching disaster, many, very many of our countrymen, thinkers, 
legislators, leaders of different religious bodies, representatives of 
supposed public opinion, champions of the national welfare, are either 
holding their hands in helpless despair or else offering a cowardly 
compromise with human passion and with sin. 

With serene composure writers of the day are propagating the 
most immoral theories ; defending libertinism ; destroying the fam- 
ily; sacrificing children body and soul to the caprice of passion, 
depriving them of that which alone can give them worth of character 
and growth of soul ; and with equal composure, or with equal ig- 
norance, are undermining the whole structure of individual worth 
and of national life. 

* * * 

WE might fill the pages of THE CATHOLIC WORI.D with exam- 
ples. We will quote but one as illustrating very clearly what 
we have said. It is taken from a most respectable- looking and 
thoughtful book just published called The American Hope. 

" If, after the spiritual relation between husband and wife has 
ceased, another woman's beauty of mind and of spirit seem to the 
husband pre-eminently to demand perpetuation, it is the worst pos- 
sible condition to have him still bound to serve the first in a relation 
which must be abhorrent to both, whereas he might be free to serve 
the second in a relation which is godlike. It is clearly true, also, 



284 WITH OUR READERS [Nov., 

that when the relation has ceased, the woman should be free, with 
our characteristic American liberty, to perpetuate as far as she may 
the body, the mind, and the spirit of another man, if any seem to 
her pre-eminently to demand her aid for perpetuation." 

It is a pitiful commentary on our age and on the results of our 
education when we say that the writer of these words is evidently 
sincere, for the book is dedicated to the author's children. Every 
one who knows life, knows the necessary translation that must be 
given to " beauty of mind and spirit " ; knows that if there is one 
thing pre-eminently lacking in the champions of divorce it is the 
spiritual sense; knows that the talk about " a relation which is 
god-like," under such circumstances, is arrant nonsense; and yet 
a nonsense that is the fertile mother of personal licentiousness and 

social chaos. 

* * * 

WE have spoken of what may seem to be academic and theoretical. 
We will now review an example which will show practically 
into what chaos we are being led and into what confusion the family 
as an institution is being driven. 

A wife, lately, and in the usual manner, obtained a divorce in 
Reno, Nevada, from her husband. At the time the wife went to 
Reno both were legally residents of the State of New York. After 
obtaining the Nevada divorce the wife sued in the New York courts 
for the custody of her children. But the New York judge declared 
that the Reno divorce was invalid in New York, and held further 
that the Nevada court did not have jurisdiction in the case. As a 
consequence, the couple are married in New York, but divorced in 
Nevada. Within our own country, therefore, this man and woman 
are husband and wife, and they are not husband and wife ; the wife 
is at liberty to marry again ; and again if she marries she is guilty 
of bigamy ; the children belong to her in Nevada ; in New York she 
has no claim upon them, since they belong to the father. Under 
such circumstances and at the root of it all is not difference in 
State law, but the radical evil of divorce what becomes of our 
homes? What fate awaits the hopeless, dependent child, for whose 
welfare God has established the family ? 



HIS Eminence Cardinal Vannutelli, just before he left the United 
States, paid this tribute to America : 

"I venture to say that no stranger has ever left your hospitable shores 
with more vivid and lasting impressions of the present greatness and promis- 
ing future of this magnificent country. The opportunity afforded me of 
visiting you came through my official mission to Canada, where I recently 
represented Pope Pius X. at the Eucharistic Congress in Montreal. His 



1910.] WITH OUR READERS 285 

Holiness, ever longing to know more about the United States, and the condi- 
tion of the Catholic Church here, was desirous that I should also pay a visit 
to the States. 

" I must admit that having heard so much of your country, its vast area, 
its millions of inhabitants, its prosperity, its resources, its opportunities for 
the immigrant and the progress of the Church, I rejoiced to know that I was 
soon to witness with my own eyes this wonderful land. I am now departing, 
willing to testify that the reality surpasses my most sanguine anticipation. 

" I have found here a republic that is one in reality, not merely in name 
like most of the republics of Europe. It has been most refreshing and inspir- 
ing to come in touch with the spirit of Christian justice and charity that in- 
fluenced the founders of your institutions, at present dominates their develop- 
ment, and predestines, I am confident, their glorious future. 

" Within a few weeks I have traveled through the large cities of the 
West and East, and everywhere I witnessed the greatest possible reverence 
for religion and respect for authority both now sadly lacking in some of the 
old countries of Europe. The permanency of your republic is assured if 
recognition of God and obedience to authority continue to exercise their 
benign influence on American life. 

" Naturally I was especially concerned with the progress of the Catholic 
Church in the United States. The evidences I have seen of the marvelous 
growth of the Church in this country have impressed me most profoundly. 
Here, unhampered by hostile legislation and free to work out her mission, 
the Church, an infant in years, shows all the vitality and strength of a giant. 
I am convinced that the Church is contributing in a large measure to the 
upbuilding of the nation; and if she continues to enjoy the liberty she now 
possesses she will do still greater things in the future for the welfare of the 
country. Her influence makes for upright citizenship and the stability of 
government. 

"I know that your extraordinary material wealth and prosperity have a 
tendency to deaden the finer feelings of the soul and the higher instincts of 
the mind, because commercialism is by its very nature apt to be baneful in 
its influence on culture. Yet I could not avoid observing the deep interest 
in religion, art, and learning as evidenced in your monumental buildings, 
your museums, your libraries, your beautiful churches, both Protestant and 
Catholic. 

"I shall certainly tell the Holy Father of the warm welcome I received 
on all sides, from non-Catholic as well as Catholic; and I shall bear in grate- 
ful memory during the remainder of my life the days, all too short, that I 
spent among you." 



IN the address for the Catholic laity ot New York, at the reception 
to his Eminence Cardinal Vannutelli, the Honorable Morgan J. 
O'Brien said: 

" For the first time in the history of the Catholic Club, and for the first 
time in America, the opportunity is given to a Catholic association to wel- 
come three illustrious princes of the Church. 



286 WITH OUR READERS [Nov., 

" The progress and development of this Archdiocese has been as marvel- 
ous and as unprecedented as the progress and development of our country, 
and New York stands forth to-day the largest Catholic city in the world. 
This wonderful achievement, though marked by the finger of man, was the 
work of God. Those who would question the vital force, the living principle 
and the supernatural spirit of the Catholic faith, can find in the great moral 
and material development in this diocese alone a complete answer. 

" And what Catholicity has done here has been equally evident through- 
out our entire country and throughout its entire history. As part of our 
Catholic heritage we recall that it was a Catholic monk who inspired Col- 
umbus with hope; that it was Columbus and a Catholic crew that first 
crossed the trackless main; that it was a Catholic queen who rendered the 
expedition possible; and that it was a Catholic who gave his name to the 
entire continent. And more, the early history of our country is the history 
of its Catholicity, and the Catholic names written in the four quarters of our 
continent by the early discoverers are carved in enduring brass upon the 
massive doors of the capitol at Washington. 

* * * 

"This country has steadily advanced in population and wealth; our 
nation has won a place among the great powers of the world ; many of our 
people have amassed wealth running into the millions, and our corporations 
are striding continents ; but under the shadow of this national and individ- 
ual prosperity, we find the presence and growth of tendencies which are a 
menace to our national security. Whilst, therefore, glorying in our achieve- 
ment and proud of our wonderful development, we could not, if we would, fail 
to observe dark and ominous clouds which hover over our national firma- 
ment, and which are the inevitable forerunners of a violent storm. Such a 
storm may effect good or bad, according to the manner in which it is met 
and directed. If the now smoldering embers are to be fanned into a living 
flame, ruin will follow ; if, on the other hand, advantage is taken of present 
conditions to direct into safe and patriotic channels the torrent, then instead 
of evil good will flow. 

'* This is an era of transition, when the nation, stirred to its depths, is 
wrestling with great problems, religious, social, industrial, and political. 
The spirit of unrest demanding drastic changes which pervades our country 
is observable throughout the world. The safety of a republic is necessarily 
dependent on the virtue of its citizens, and virtue is dependent upon religion ; 
and it is proper to note the fact that our government was established and our 
prosperity built up by men of severe and rugged virtue, who were imbued 
with religious principles, and who in their day solved the great problems 
that were presented to the fathers in a way consistent with truth and justice. 

" Hence the duty and obligation which rest upon an association likeours, 
and upon all those who love their country, to see to it that from present con- 
ditions good shall flow. To accomplish this nothing is more needful than the 
prevalence of right principles and of right ideals and moral standards, and 
herein lies our mission as a Club. The effect of our rapid national develop- 
ment, the maddening, dazzling struggle for wealth, has tended to increase 
materialism and socialism, and against such implacable foes of the present 



i9io.] WITH OUR READERS 287 

civilization all who believe in the vital force of religion, whether of our faith 
or not, can stand and successfully defend against all attacks upon our na- 

tional security. 

* * * 

" Stimulated by the glorious record made by our fathers in the Faith, this 
Catholic Club was founded, and it is our purpose that it shall go forward im- 
bued with the same lofty motives, the same high ideals, with the same spirit 
of self-sacrifice and ambition for noble achievement, remembering always that 
buildings and commerce, and things which serve only to mark material 
growth, are perishable and will pass away, and that the only permanent 
things of value are those associated with and produced by moral forces. It 
is because our faith teaches these things that we love it. 

"It is the success in promoting and sustaining these which has crowned 
the labors of the Church in the past in this country, and it is the signifi- 
cance of our meeting this evening, and fortunate indeed will it be for us and 
for our country if, when the history of the next century is-written, our de- 
scendants can meet and rejoice over a like history, as full of noble deeds and 
glorious achievement, and so fruitful in the creation and establishment of 
those things which tend to secure the happiness of the individual, the better- 
ment of the race, and the advancement of a true Christian civilization. 



THE name of Hilaire Belloc, the brilliant historian and essayist, 
is a sure guarantee of capable work. 

The right view of the great historical movements that have 
marked Christianity since its beginnings is a most valuable asset in 
these days of questioning and of debate, and, in great measure, of 
shallow opinion. It is most valuable and important for every Catho- 
lic not only that his own personal life as a member of the great his- 
toric Church of Christ be stimulated, but also that he may be able to 
defend and expose the practice and the teachings of that Church to 
non- Catholics. 

THE CATHOUC WORI/D will publish next month, and during 
the coming year, a series of papers of pre-eminent importance by Mr. 
Belloc, to which we wish to call the attention of the clergy and the 
laity of America. In the December CATHOUC WORI,D will appear 
an explanation by Mr. Belloc of the series and his first paper. The 
articles will be of permanent and fundamental importance, particu- 
larly in this, that they will deal with and expose those great princi- 
ples in the light of which history must be read and in which light 
alone it may be read correctly. 

The papers will be of the deepest interest to every one. They 
will illuminate for us, in an inspiring way, the history of our Church, 
and we feel that they will receive a hearty welcome. 

We respectfully request our readers to spread the news of this 
announcement among all their friends and acquaintances, that others 
also may enjoy this coming " feast of reason. " 



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THE 

CATHOLIC WORLD. 

VOL. XCII. DECEMBER, 1910. No. 549. 

WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 

BY HILAIRE BELLOC; 
I. 

[HE history of European civilization is the history 
of a certain institution informed at its origins 
by the influence of a religion which it ultimately 
accepted and finally was merged in. This insti- 
tution having accepted that Religion, having made 
of that Religion its official expression, and having breathed 
that Religion in until it became, so to speak, the spirit of the 
whole, was slowly modified and remodified by certain political 
accidents; but the institution suffered no breach of continuity: 
it never died, and the same is true of the Religion which was 
its soul. This institution was known among men as "the Em- 
pire 19 ; the Religion which informed it was and is called " The 
Catholic Church." 

It is immaterial to the historical value of this historical 
truth whether it be presented to a man who utterly rejects 
Catholic dogma or to a man who believes everything the Church 
may teach. A man utterly remote in distance, in time, or in 
mentality from the phenomenon we are about to examine would 
perceive the reality of that phenomenon just as clearly as a 
man who was steeped in its spirit from within and who formed 
an intimate part of it. The Oriental pagan, the contemporary 
atheist, the hypothetical student of some remote future, read- 
ing history in some place from which the Catholic faith may 
have utterly departed, and to which the habits and traditions 
of our civilization may be wholly alien, would, in proportion 

Copyright. 1910. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE 

IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK. 
VOL XCII. 19 



290 WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE? [Dec., 

to his science, grasp this truth as clearly as it is grasped to- 
day by the Catholic student of European race. The only peo- 
ple who do not grasp it, or do not admit it, are those writers 
of history whose special, local, and temporary business it is to 
oppose the Catholic Church, or who have a traditional bias 
against it. These men are numerous, they have formed in the 
Protestant universities a whole school of hypothetical and 
unreal history in which, though the original researchers are 
few, their copyists are innumerable: and that School of History 
is still dogmatically taught in the anti-Catholic centres of Europe 
and of the world. 

No* our quarrel with this School should be not that it is 
anti Catholic that concerns another sphere of thought but 
that it is unhistorical. 

To neglect the truth that the Empire with its institutions 
and its spirit was the origin of European civilization; to for- 
get or to diminish the truth that the Empire accepted in its 
maturity a certain religion; to conceal the fact that this reli- 
gion was not vague but determinate, and was not promulgated 
by individual holders of opinions but incorporated in a fixed 
institution ; to fail to identify that institution with the existing 
institution still called the Catholic Church ; to exaggerate the 
little influence which came from outside the Empire and slightly 
tended to modify its spirit; to pretend that the Empire or its 
religion have at any time ceased to be that is, to pretend that 
there has ever been a solution of continuity between the past 
and the present of Europe all these things and all the attitude 
implied by them, spring from conscious or unconscious histori- 
cal falsehood. 

There is nothing upon which we can cast our eyes, and in 
which we differ from the rest of mankind, which is not origi- 
nally peculiar to the Roman Empire or dernonstrably derived 
from something peculiar to it. 

In material objects, our wheeled traffic, our building material, 
our cooking, our staple food and drink; in forms, the arch, the 
column, the bridge, the tower, the well, the canal, the alphabet, 
the very words of most of our languages, the syntax of still 
more, the logical sequence of thought in all, spring from that 
source. The saw, the hammer, the plane, the chisel, the file, 
the spade, the plough, the rake, the sickle, the ladder; all 
these we have from that same source. And of our institutions 



1 9io.] WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE f 291 

it is the same story. The divisions and the subdivisions of 
Europe, the parish, the province, the fixed national traditions 
with their boundaries, the emplacement of the great European 
cities, the routes of communication between them, the univer- 
sities, the parliaments, the courts of law, and their jurispru- 
dence, all these are of the Empire : or are demonstrably de- 
rived from the institutions of the Empire in so overwhelmingly 
great a proportion that the remaining elements which may be 
extraneous to the Empire are insignificant. 

It may here be objected that to connect so closely the 
worldly foundations of our civilization and the Catholic or uni- 
versal religion of it, is to limit the latter and to make of it a 
temporal phenomenon. 

The accusation would be historically valueless in any case, 
for in history we are not concerned with the claims of the 
supernatural, but with a sequence of proved events in the natu- 
ral order. But if we leave the province of history and consider 
that of theology, the argument is equally baseless. Every 
manifestation of divine influence among men must have its human 
circumstances of place and time. The Church might have sprung 
under divine providence in any spot: it did, as a fact, spring 
tip in Judea. It might have risen at any time: it did, as a 
fact, rise at the inception of that Imperial system which we 
are about to examine. It might have carried for its clothes 
and have had for its sacred language the accoutrements and 
the speech of any one of the other great civilizations, living 
or dead, of Assyria, of Egypt, of Persia, of China, of India. 
As a matter of historical fact, the Church was so circumstanced 
in its origin and development that its external accoutrement 
and its language were those of the Mediterranean. 

Now those who would falsify history from a conscious or 
unconscious bias against the Catholic Church, will do so in 
many ways, some of which will always prove contradictory of 
some others. For truth is one, error disparate and many; 
and the attack upon the Catholic Church may be compared to 
a violent, continual, but inchoate attack upon some fortress, 
which will proceed now from this direction, now from that, 
along any one of the infinite number of directions from which 
a single point may be approached. To-day there is an attack 
from the North, to-morrow an attack from the South. Their 
directions are flatly contradictory, but the contradiction is ex- 



292 WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE f [Dec., 

plained by the fact that each is directed against a central and 
fixed opponent. 

Thus, some will exaggerate the power of the Roman Em- 
pire as a pagan institution; they will pretend that the Catho- 
lic Church was something alien to it; that it was great and 
admirable before Catholicism, weak and despicable upon its 
acceptation of the creed. They will represent the faith as 
creeping like an Oriental disease into the body of a firm 
society which it did not so much transform as liquefy and 
dissolve. Others will take the contrary tack and make out the 
Roman Empire to have fallen before the advent of numerous 
and vigorous barbarians possessing all manner of splendid 
pagan qualities sometimes of modern Protestant qualities 
(purely hypothetical), which are contrasted against the dis- 
eased Catholic body of the Empire which they were attacking. 
Others adopt a simpler manner; they treat the Empire and 
its institutions as dead after a certain date, and discuss the 
rise of a new society without consideration of its Catholic and 
Imperial origins. Nothing is commoner, for instance, in Eng- 
lish schools than for boys to be taught that the disastrous 
pirate invasions of the fifth century were the " coming of the 
English/' and the complicated history of Britain is simplified 
into the story of how certain pagans (with a suspiciously ac- 
ceptable character*) occupied and developed a land which 
Roman civilization had proved inadequate to hold. 

It is, again, a conscious or unconscious error (conscious 
or unconscious according to the learning of him who propa- 
gates it) which treats of the religious life of Europe as though, 
it were something apart from the general development of our 
civilization. There are innumerable text-books, for instance, 
in which a man may read the whole history of a European 
country, from say the fifth to the nineteenth century, and 
never hear that any one went to Mass. Warped by such his- 
torical errors a man is at a loss to understand the ordinary 
motives of men. Not only do the great crises in the history 
of the Church escape him, but the great crises in civil history 
as well. 

* " Progressive and thoroughly patriotic," is the Protestant Bishop of Oxford's choice of 
adjectives (Stubbs : Constitutional History. Vol. I., p. 39). Their kings are " dignified and 
important," but enjoy no more than " a single honor" (Idem., p. 28). "Regarding the 
family ties " (Idem., Charters, p. 7). " Honoring their women " (Idem.) " The whole busi- 
ness of the Nation is transacted by the Councils of the Nation" (Idem., p. 4), etc., etc. A 
fantastic picture. 



i9io.] WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE f 293 

To set right, then, our general view of history it is neces- 
sary to be ready with a sound answer to the prime question 
of all, which is this: "What was the Empire?" 

If you dropped a man into the United States to-day and 
let him have a full knowledge of all that had happened since 
the Civil War, of the Civil War itself a partial, confused, and 
very summary account, and of all that went before it you 
were to leave him either wholly ignorant or ludicrously mis- 
informed and slightly informed at that, what could he make 
of the problems in American society, and how would he be 
equipped to understand the nation of which he was to be a 
citizen? To give such a man the elements of civic training 
you would have to let him know what the Colonies were, 
what the War of Independence, and what the main institutions 
preceding that event and created by it. He would have further 
to know the outlines of the struggle between North and South, 
and the principles underlying that struggle. Lastly, and most 
important of all, he would have to see all this in a correct 
perspective. 

So it is with us in the larger question of that general 
civilization which is common to both the Americas and to 
Europe, and which in its vigor has extended garrisons as it 
were into Asia and Africa. We cannot understand it to-day 
unless we understand what it developed frcm. What was the 
origin from which we sprang? What was the Empire? 

The Roman Empire was a united civilization, the prime 
characteristic of which was the acceptation, absolute and un- 
conditional, of one common mode of Hie by all those who 
dwelt within its boundaries. It is an idea very difficult for 
the modern man to seize, accustomed as he is to a number 
of sovereign countries more or less sharply differentiated, and 
each colored, as it were, by a different religion, a different 
language, and so forth. Thus the modern man sees France, 
French speaking, with an architecture, manners, laws of its 
own, etc.; North Germany under the Prussian hegemony, 
German speaking, with yet another set of institutions, and so 
forth. When he thinks, therefore, of any great conflict of 
opinion, such as the quarrel between oligarchy and democracy 
to-day, he thinks in terms of different countries. Ireland, for 
instance, is democratic, England is anti-democratic, and so 
forth. Again, the modern man thinks of a community, how- 



294 WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE? [Dec., 

ever united, as something bounded by, and in contrast with, 
other communities. When he writes or thinks of France he 
does not think of France only, but of the points in which 
France contrasts with England, North Germany, South Ger- 
many, Italy, etc. The men living in the Roman Empire re- 
garded civic life in a totally different way. All conceivable 
antagonisms (and they were violent) were antagonisms within 
one State. No differentiation of State against State was con- 
ceivable or was attempted. The world outside the Roman 
Ecnpire was, in the eyes of the Imperial citizen, a sort of 
waste; it was not thickly populated, it had no appreciable 
arts or sciences, it was barbaric. That outside waste of sparse 
and imperfect peoples was something of a menace upon the 
frontiers, or, to speak more accurately, something of an irri- 
tation ; but that menace or irritation was never conceived of as 
we conceive of the menace of a foreign power; it was merely 
the trouble of preventing imperfect, predatory, and small bar- 
baric communities from doing harm to a vast, thickly popu- 
lated, and highly organized state. 

The members of these communities (principally the Ger- 
manic peoples, but also on the other frontier the Nomads of 
the desert and a handful of saints beyond the Scottish lines) 
wanted to deal with the Empire, to enjoy its luxury, now and 
then to raid little portions of its frontier wealth ; they could 
never have dreamt of the "conquest"; and on the other hand 
the Roman administrator was concerned with getting them to 
settle in an orderly manner on the frontier fields, coaxing 
them to serve as mercenaries in the Roman armies, or, when 
there was any local conflict, defeating them in battle, taking 
them prisoners and making them slaves. I have said that the 
mere number of these exterior men was insignificant, and, I 
repeat, in the eyes of the citizens of the Empire their lack of 
culture made them more insignificant still. At only one place 
did the Roman Empire have a frontier against another civili- 
zation, properly so called. It was a very short frontier, not 
one twentieth of the total boundaries of the Empire, it was 
the Eastern frontier, guarded by spaces largely desert, and 
though a true civilization lay beyond, that civilization was 
never of great extent nor really powerful. This frontier was 
variously drawn at various times, but corresponding roughly to 
the plains of Mesopotamia, The Mediterranean peoples of the 



i9io.] WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE f 295 

Levant, from Antioch to Judea, were always within that fron- 
tier, the mountain peoples of Persia were always beyond it. 
Nowhere else was there any real rivalry or contact with the 
foreigner, and even this rivalry and contact counted for little 
in the general life of Rome. 

The point cannot be too much insisted upon, nor too often 
repeated, so strange is it to our modern modes of thought, and 
so essentially characteristic of the first centuries of the Chris- 
tian era and the formative period during which Christian -civ- 
ilization took its shape. Men lived as citizens of one State 
which they thought necessary and which they even regarded 
as eternal. There would be much grumbling against the taxes 
and here and there revolts against them, but never a sugges- 
tion that the taxes should be levied by any other than imper- 
ial authority, or imposed in any other than the imperial man- 
ner. There was plenty of conflict between armies and indi- 
viduals as to who should have the advantage of ruling, but 
never any doubt as to the type of thing which was to be 
ruled over, nor as to the type of function which the " Em- 
peror " filled, nor as to the type of universally despotic action 
which he exercised. There were any number of little local 
liberties and customs which were the pride of the separate 
places to which they attached, but there was no conception of 
such local differences being antagonistic to the one life of the 
one State. That State was for men the World. 

The complete unity of this social system was the more 
striking from the fact that it underlay not only such innum- 
erable local customs and liberties, but an almost equal number 
of philosophic opinions, of religious practices, and of dialects. 
There was not even one current language for the educated 
thought of the Empire, there were two, Greek and Latin ; and 
in every department of human life there co-existed this very 
large liberty of individual and local expression, coupled with 
a complete, and as it were necessary unity, binding the whole 
vast body together. Emperor might succeed Emperor, in a 
series of civil wars, several Emperors might be reigning to- 
gether, the office of Ecnperor might even be officially and con- 
sciously in commission among four or more men. But the 
power of the Emperor was always one power, his office one 
office, and the system of the Empire one system. 

It is not to the purpose of these few pages to attempt a 



296 WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE? [Dec., 

full answer to the question of how such a civic state of mind 
came to be, but the reader must have some sketch of its de- 
velopment if he is to grasp its nature. 

The old Mediterranean world out of which the Empire 
grew had consisted (before that empire arose) in two types of 
society : there stood in it as rare exceptions States , or nations 
in our modern sense, governed by a central Government, which 
controlled a large area, and peopled by the inhabitants of 
many towns and villages. Of this sort was ancient Egypt. 
But there were also, surrounding that inland sea, in such great 
numbers as to form the predominant type of society, a series 
of Cities, some of them commercial ports, most of them con- 
trolling a small area from which they drew their agricultural 
subsistence, but all of them remarkable for this, that their 
citizens drew their civic life, felt patriotism for, were the sol- 
diers of, and paid their taxes to, not a nation in our sense 
but a municipality. These cities and the small surrounding 
territories which they controlled, which, I repeat, were often 
no more than local agricultural areas necessary for the subsist- 
ence of the town, were essentially the Sovereign Powers of the 
time. Community of language, culture, and religion might, 
indeed, bind them in associations more or less strict. One 
could talk of the Phenician cities, of the Greek cities, and so 
forth, but the individual City was always the unit. City made 
war on City. The City decided its own customs, and was the 
nucleus of religion. The God was the God of the city. A 
rim of such points encircled the eastern and central Mediter- 
ranean wherever it was habitable by man. Even the little 
oasis of the Cyrensean land with sand on every side, but 
habitable, developed its city formations. Even on the western 
coasts of the inland ocean, which received its culture by sea 
from the East, such City States, though more rare, dotted the 
littoral. 

Three hundred years before our Lord was born this moral 
equilibrium was disturbed by the huge and successful adven- 
ture of the Macedonian Alexander. The Greek City States 
had just been swept under the hegemony of Macedon when in 
the shape of small but invincible armies the common Greek 
culture under Alexander overwhelmed the East. Egypt, the 
Asian littoral and much more, was turned into one Hellenized 
civilization. The separate cities, of course, survived, and after 



i9io.] WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 297 

Alexander's death unity of control was lost in various and 
fluctuating dynasties derived from the arrangements and quar- 
rels of his generals. But the old moral equilibrium was gone 
and the conception of a general civilization had appeared. 

Meanwhile in Italy one city, by a series of accidents very 
difficult to follow (since we have only later accounts and they 
are drawn from the city's point of view only), became the 
chief of the City States in the Peninsula. Some few it had 
conquered in war and had subjected to taxation and to the 
acceptation of its own laws ; many it protected by a sort of 
superior alliance; with some few its position was ill- defined 
and perhaps in origin had been a position of allied equality. 
But at any rate, a little after the Alexandrian Greecifying of 
the East this city had in a slower and less universal way be- 
gun to break down the moral equilibrium of the City States 
in Italy and had produced between the Apennines and the 
sea (and in some places beyond the Apennines) a society in 
which the City State, though of course surviving, was no longer 
isolated or sovereign, but formed part of a larger and already 
definite scheme. The city which had arrived at such a posi- 
tion, and which was now the manifest capital of that scheme, 
was ROME. 

Contemporary with the last successes of this development 
in Italy went a rival development very different in its nature, 
but bound to come into conflict with the Roman because it also 
was extending. This was the commercial development of Car- 
thage. Carthage, a Phenician colony, had its city life like all 
the rest. It had shown neither the aptitude nor the desire 
that Rome had shown for conquest, for alliances, and in gen- 
eral for a spread of its spirit and for the domination of its 
laws and modes of thought. The business of Carthage was to 
enrich itself, not indirectly as do soldiers (who achieve 
riches as but one consequence of the pursuit of arms), but di- 
rectly and by commerce. The Carthaginian occupied mining 
centres in Spain, and harbors wherever he could find them, 
especially* in the Western Mediterranean. He employed mer- 
cenary troops. He made no attempt to radiate outward slowly 
step by step, as does the military type, but true to the type 
of every commercial empire, from his own time to that of 
Britain, the Carthaginian built up a scattered hotchpotch of 
dominion, bound together by what is to-day called the " Com- 



298 WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE? [Dec., 

mand of the Sea." That command was absolute. Rome chal- 
lenged Carthage, and after a prodigious struggle, which lasted 
to within two hundred years of the birth of our Lord, de- 
stroyed the Carthaginian power. Fifty years later the town 
itself was destroyed by the Romans, and its territory turned 
into a Roman province. So perished for many hundred years 
the dangerous illusion that the merchant can triumph over the 
soldier: but never had that illusion seemed nearer to the truth 
than at certain moments in the duel between Carthage and 
Rome. 

The main consequence of this success was that, by the 
nature of the struggle, the Western Mediterranean, with all its 
City States, with its half-civilized Iberian peoples, lying on 
the plateau of Spain behind the cities of the littoral, the cor- 
responding belt of Southern France, and the cultivated land 
of Northern Africa, fell into the Roman system, and became 
but in a more united way, what Italy had already long be- 
fore become. The Roman power, or, if the term be preferred, 
the Roman confederation, with its ideas of law and govern- 
ment, was supreme in the Western Mediterranean and was 
compelled by its geographical position to extend itself inland 
further and further into Spain, and (what was of prodigious 
consequence to the world) into GAUL. 

But before speaking of the Roman incorporation of Gaul 
we must notice that in the hundred years after the final fall 
of Carthage, the Eastern Mediterranean had also begun to come 
into line. This western power, the Roman, thus finally estab- 
lished, occupied Corinth in the same decade as that which saw 
the final destruction of Carthage, and what had once been 
Greece became a Roman province. All the Alexandrian or 
Grecian East followed. The Macedonian power in its various 
provinces came to depend upon the Roman system in a series 
of protectorates, annexations, and occupations, which two gen- 
erations or so before the birth of Christianity had made Rome, 
though her system was not yet complete, the centre oi the 
whole Mediterranean world ; the men whose sons lived to be 
contemporary with the Nativity saw that the unity of that world 
was already achieved. The World was one, and was built up 
of the islands, the peninsular, and the littoral of the Inland 
Sea. 

So it might have remained, and so one would think it nat- 



1910.] WHAT WAS THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 299 

urally would have remained, but for that capital experiment 
which has determined all future history, Julius Caesar's con- 
quest of Gaul. 

It was this experiment and its success which opened the 
ancient and immemorial culture of the Mediterranean to the 
world. It was a revolution which for rapidity and complete- 
ness has no parallel. Something less than a hundred petty 
States, partially civilized but in no degree comparable to the 
high life of the Mediterranean, were occupied, taught, and as 
it were "converted" into citizens of this now united civiliza- 
tion, roughly speaking within the lifetime of a man. The 
quadrilateral, which lies between the Pyrenees and the Rhine, 
between the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Channel, 
accepted Rome and the civilization Rome had to bring in a 
manner so final and so immediate that no historian has ever 
quite been able to explain the phenomenon. It accepted the 
Roman language, the Roman food, the Roman dress, and it 
formed the first extension of European culture. We shall later 
find it providing the permanent and enduring example of that 
culture which survived when the Roman system fell into decay. 
Gaul led to Britain, the Iberian Peninsula, after the hardest 
struggle which any territory had presented, was also incorpor- 
ated, and by the close of the first century after the Incarna- 
tion, when the Catholic Church was already obscurely founded 
in many a city, and the turn of the world's history had come, 
the Roman Empire was finally established in its entirety. By 
that time from the Syrian Desert to the ocean, and from the 
Sahara to the Irish Sea and to the Scotch hills, to the Rhine 
and the Danube, in one great ring fence, there lay a secure 
and unquestioned method of living incorporated as one great 
State 

This State was to be the soil in which the seed of the 
Church was to be sown, as the Religion of this State the Catho- 
lic Church was to develop, and this State is still present, un- 
derlying our apparently complex political arrangements, as the 
main rocks of a country underlie the drift of the surface. Its 
institutions of property, of marriage, its conceptions of law, 
its literary foundation, are still the stuff of Europe, the re- 
ligion which it came to make as universal as itself is still, and 
perhaps more notably than ever, apparent to all. 




THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE. 

BY A NUN. 

E lived in an old castle on the west coast of 
Ireland. Honor and I were twin sisters. Our 
mother had died in giving us birth. Our father 
was an intelligent Irish country gentleman. He 
was neither learned nor clever, but he was of a 
chivalrous and refined nature; he delighted in horsemanship, 
but only cared for spirited animals, looking upon fine mettled 
horses as creatures to be treated daintily ; and they seemed 
to respond to his appreciation of their good breeding and 
submitted courteously to his rein. As I look back now, I 
think I loved my father more than I have ever loved any one. 
We were his only children. My mother was, I believe, intel- 
lectually greatly his superior. During their short married life 
he had allowed her freely to take her own way, for he had 
that poetry of nature with which the average Celt is endowed. 
As regards my sister and myself, our mother's place was 
taken by a lady whose services my father was fortunate in 
securing, for she was well-fitted for our training by her birth, 
cultivation, and moral qualities. We loved her dearly and 
called her Auntie Meg. Our seagirt home faced the Atlantic. 
I loved the wild days, when the mighty billows rose moun- 
tains high and broke in hissing foam on the craggy rocks 
around; on they came with fierce, impetuous rush, and then 
would recoil with proud, unflinching dignity, leaving the great 
rocks bare and glistening, as if smiling at each oft- repeated 
embrace. One felt there was no fear on either side, they 
understood one another, the bold rocks and the foaming sea; 
as they met and parted, each seemed mockingly to defy the 
other, and yet they could not live apart. One ever in motion, 
the other ever motionless so do extremes need each other. 

This constant intercourse with the great ocean enlarged 
my character, as intercourse with the great, be it of humanity 
or of nature, is always bound to do. My whole girl life ex- 
panded under its influence, and I trace to the rearing of 



i9io.] THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE 301 

Mother Nature much of the joy and pain of my after life. 
As I lingered by the sea and watched the waves draw back 
with a sucking motion, I too sucked in strength and inde- 
pendence of thought, though I knew it not at the time. 

I was my father's favorite, and as I was fond of riding and 
Honor did not care for it, he used to take me, when quite a 
little girl, for long rides. Whilst I trotted beside him on my 
gray pony he taught me to love every hill and dale of my 
native land. He was proud of me and I knew it and took 
advantage of it to get my own way. 

Religion formed a lever in our earliest training, and the 
little church at the borders of our grounds was a friendly 
house to us; thither we went to confide our childish sorrows 
and joys to " Good Jesus ; " and sometimes, on hot days, I 
am afraid we played there, because it was cool. 

Auntie Meg had her own views about education, and they 
were not always in accordance with modern methods. She 
taught us that we are each one of us put into this world not 
to achieve success in the visible race of life, that she held to 
be a mean ambition, but to contribute our share in leavening 
the lump in which we find ourselves; and the education that 
aims at developing the faculties for this end was, to her mind, 
the highest. 

Perceiving in me a great love of nature she gave me 
lessons in painting; when free to do so I wandered out with 
my easel, and being all alone would spend many an hour 
trying to reproduce the harmony of color and the blending of 
strength and softness that my eye took in ; but I never rose 
froqi cny easel feeling that I had reproduced to my satisfac- 
tion, for all that there was a great deal of pleasure in the 
attempt. The silence of nature seemed to soothe and speak 
to me, and yet this nature that I loved so well, did it satisfy 
me? I remember when I was fifteen or sixteen saying to 
Honor that I did not believe there was such a thing as real 
happiness, that no one in the world could be quite happy. 
Honor's answer, whatever it was, did not satisfy me. I en- 
joyed a beautiful scene intensely, and yet, was it enjoyment? 
for it always made me dumb and pensive and inclined to cry; 
and at times any remark, even though it might not be out of 
sympathy with the scene around, jarred on me. Nature was 
silent, and I felt more in unison with her by being silent too. 



302 THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE [Dec., 

" There is more power and beauty in the well-kept secret of 
one's self and one's thoughts than in the display of a whole 
heaven that may be within one. 11 This I thought was nature's 
motto, and in the day of her transformation we shall know 
her secret. 

In my early life I had- no sorrow, and I often felt in buoy- 
ait spirits as I rode on horseback or sailed over the waves in 
our yacht on a breezy day; but I do not remember to have 
had a satisfied feeling of happiness for any length of time. I 
had a love of poetry. I began with Adelaide Procter and 
Longfellow and then transferred my admiration to Tennyson, 
whose poetry I came to appreciate when I was seventeen. 
After some years Wordsworth became and remained my favor- 
ite. I also delighted in Mathew Arnold. Auntie Meg said it 
was not natural for one so young to love Wordsworth, she 
attributed it to my tendency to philosophize, which I cer- 
tainly did. The love of poetry fostered a certain want, I 
knew not for what, which was becoming part of my life. 

When we were about twenty Honor and I went to London 
to make our debut. We stayed with a cousin of my mother's, 
who chaperoned us. Her husband was a barrister and member 
for one of the English boroughs, so she always spent the Par- 
liamentary season in London. Honor thoroughly enjoyed the 
season, but not so I, though I tried to throw myself into it. 
I had looked forward to my debut tentatively, as a fresh ex- 
perience that might appease this growing want within me, that 
might satisfy aspirations that were daily becoming more ob- 
trusive, and which at times I longed to smother, so officiously 
did they claim my attention in spite of myself, alluring me 
against my will at the most unlooked-for times and places; 
sometimes in a ballroom, when I would fill my programme 
and dance every dance to fly from the intense loneliness they 
created. While I was thus struggling with myself one night, 
as I lay awake, St. Augustine's words came to my mind : " My 
heart is restless, O my God ! until it rest in Thee " ; and yet 
how it was to rest in Him, or what future life He meant for 
me, or how I was to pass through the dark tunnel in which I 
now felt myself to be, I could not see. I was still in this 
frame of mind when one Sunday morning we went to Mass at 
the Pro-Cathedral, Kensington. After the Gospel Cardinal Man- 
ning came into the pulpit. I had never seen him before and 






19 io.] THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE 303 

I was not very enthusiastic about such of his writings as I 
had read, but I remember now as vividly as if it were but last 
Sunday, not indeed his words, but all that I felt as I sat there, 
half way down the nave on the outside seat of one of the 
benches. He took for his text : " And because of his impor- 
tunity he prevailed " ; and in quiet and clear tones he urged 
on his hearers the necessity of importunity in prayer. I fan- 
cied that he was looking at me individually, and so he riveted 
my attention. His sermon was void of action, save such as 
was conveyed by the simple jesture of his closed hand with 
one uplifted finger raised, now in warning or reproach, and 
again in encouragement or guidance. In that sermon he gave 
me light to investigate my difficulties, and told me that I was 
to importune God till He changed my uncertain will into a 
definite purpose. He spoke with a conviction that passed into 
my soul, so that I felt there was no shadow of doubt but that 
the Holy Spirit would tell me strongly and clearly how this 
struggling aspiration of mine was to be satisfied. During the 
Mass that followed his sermon I laid my case as clearly as one 
so vaguely understanding it could do before myself, and the 
very effort of looking calmly into my own heart gave a lucid- 
ity to my inarticulate wishes that startled me : it was the first 
raising of the veil that hid my vocation from me. I went out 
into the street with a sense of having experienced something 
that had changed my life, feeling that I never again could be 
quite the same as I had been on entering that church an hour 
before. I was like one who had been aimlessly wandering in 
a forest seeking an exit, and who suddenly comes upon a fel- 
low-traveller, who takes him by the hand and shows him the 
way. 

A few days after this Honor became engaged to a young 
artist, and within the week we returned home. The only one 
to whom I spoke of my vocation at this time was our good old 
Soggarth Aroon, Father M . He was very kind and sym- 
pathetic and soon procured information about such communities 
as he thought would suit me. Amongst the books sent by the 
nuns descriptive of their orders, there was one that so attracted 
me that I lingered over its pages with something of the pleas- 
ure one experiences in wandering through an old-fashioned 
garden where the rosemary and rue grow together, and where 
the air is laden with the sweet scent of the violet which one 



304 THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE [Dec., 

discovers growing under shelter of the sharp- thorned briar. 
Ah, I thought, if they would but take me in this order I might 
even find happiness at last. It was contemplative, or rather 
on the border land of contemplation and activity, for the all- 
embracing benignity of its founder bequeathed to his daughters 
above all else that spirit of charity which so continually im- 
pelled him during his own life to yield something of the joys 
of contemplation for labor in God's vineyard. To carry out 
this spirit, though he called his children " daughters of prayer," 
he debarred them only such active work as of its nature might 
lead to any false development of the laws and character of his 
Institute. The mortification necessary for self- conquest, which 
every founder looks upon as the salt of religious life, he pre- 
scribed to be interior rather than exterior, the subjugation of 
the spirit rather than of the flesh. When I returned the books 

to Father M and told him the order of my predilection, 

he said I had chosen a very hard life for my temperament. 
However, the prospect of its being difficult did not repel me, 
rather the contrary, as I explained to him; and he, knowing 
me, understood my frame of mind. But there was another 
difficulty for which I was not prepared. Anticipating my choice, 
the <?ood old priest had been making inquiries, and now told 
me that there was no house of this order in Ireland. The 
prospect of having to leave my country had never presented 
itself to me, it was just the one sacrifice that I had not made. 
I had pictured myself to myself as being within easy reach of 
home and knowing all about home interests, so I left the little 
presbytery with an irresolute heart and a promise of prayer 
from the old man. After a few days of struggle and prayer 
for light I made up my mind to this last sacrifice. 

After Honor's wedding Father and I went to Kilkee for a 
little change. Each morning while there I got up with the 
determination to tell him about myself, and each night I went 
to rest without having had the courage to speak. When the 
last day came I felt I could no longer delay, as on the mor- 
row we were going home to be in time to receive Honor and 
her husband on their return from their honeymoon. So that 
evening I asked my father to come out with me to see the 
sunset from the amphitheatre. As we walked along I proposed 
to him a plan about Honor's husband which had been in my 
mind for some time, viz., that he should give up the idea of 



i9io.] THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE 305 

taking a house in London, as he and Honor had planned, and 
live instead at home with Father, look after the property for 
him, and take a son's place. When I ceased speaking my 
father turning to me said : " Daughter dear " he always called 
me so when he was very affectionate " I will wait to see your 
choice first." 

"Father," I replied, "I shall never marry. I want to lead 
another kind of life." 

He made no answer. As I spoke we had reached the pre- 
cipitate edge of the amphitheatre and straight before us lay 
no habitation, nor tree, nor land, nor shore, only the vast 
ocean. Beyond we knew was the Western hemisphere. At 
the horizon the sun, a great ball of fire, was sinking slowly 
into the waters, leaving a trail of glory behind. The whole 
sky was resplendent with color red and purple and gold 
and the waters to our very feet were lit up as by a tremulous 
wave of light. The wave crests glistened like chains of myriad 
jewels, until we, too, were lapped in the warm glow of the set- 
ting sun. It was such a scene that, had not thought been up- 
permost with us at that moment, we might have felt with 
Wordsworth "thought was not in enjoyment it expired." But 
though the scene helped me by bringing the other world al- 
most within touch, there was no joy in either of our hearts as 
we stood there in silence. The sky was gray again, and the 
warmth succeeded by the chill feeling that comes after sunset 
when we turned back to our little hotel. We were now alone 
on the amphitheatre and I took Father's arm coaxingly, as I 
tried to cheer him by the prospect of my own happy future 
and his frequent visits to me, and every other little device 
that came into my mind to help him ; but he spoke not one 
word until we neared the hotel, and then he only asked me 
not to speak to him on the matter again until we returned 
home. 

Soon after our return I told Auntie Meg and Honor. 
Neither of them was surprised at the news and both did me 
good service with my father. Auntie Meg spoke to him wisely 
and feelingly, and Honor, who herself felt the separation so 
much, was most generous. Her husband was delighted to fall 
into our plans for him, to which my father soon consented. 

The way was now clear for me. I asked Auntie Meg to 
come with me to the convent. It was in England. I will not 
TOL. xcn. 20 



306 THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE [Dec., 

dwell on our last parting days at home ; even to memory, after 
the lapse of years, they are not pleasant to recall. 

I entered my new home late one evening in August. As 
the great enclosure doors opened to me two nuns stood at the 
threshold, the Reverend Mother and the Mistress of Novices; 
they embraced me and took me into a little room where tea 
was prepared. My eyes were still heavy with weeping and 
the kind nuns noticed it and said I must get to bed soon. 
After tea the Mistress of Novices took me first to the chapel, 
where I suppose I said some prayer, but I was too dazed to 
remember; then we went on to the Assembly room, it being 
the hour for the sister's recreation. I stopped at the door 
and asked not to stay long there; she looked pityingly at me 
with eyes full of sympathy, and said it would only be for a 
few minutes. Faithful to her word, in a short time I found 
myself for the first time in a nun's cell. A bright looking 
novice brought me there and said she would call me in the 
morning in time for Mass. She kissed me affectionately, tell- 
ing me, as she did so, that I would soon be as happy as she. 
Closing my cell door she left me alone. I looked round and 
saw a deep window sill on which was laid a white cloth with 
a little basin, jug, and towels, at the side a bath, a floor of 
spotless white boards, a little cupboard, and one small stool 
upon which I quickly sat; a few devout pictures and a cruci- 
fix hung on the wall, and in large black letters was printed 
the text : " For I am the Lord thy God, Who take thee by 
the hand, and say to thee: Fear not, I have helped thee" 
(Isaias xii. 13). A little iron bed with a white woolen cover- 
let completed the furniture. This, then, was my future home. 
Could anything be colder or drearier than this tiny room, with 
its bare white- washed walls and not even a chair to rest on? 
I looked out of the window and there lay the nun's cemetery 
and their garden, and beyond a pretty, undulating country, 
well-wooded and prosperous looking, as English landscapes 
usually are. I said a few prayers mechanically, undressed, and 
got into bed, still feeling dazed and weary. I could not gather 
my thoughts, but only felt that I had taken some kind of 
irrevocable step, and that I must abide by the consequences. 
Yet, for all that, I was perfectly conscious that I was free to 
leave in the morning if I so willed. 

Utter weariness made me soon fall asleep. I slept all 



i9io.] THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE 307 

might and until the young novice called me in the morning. 
I woke refreshed and feeling, strange to say, somewhat joyous, 
notwithstanding the past weeks of suffering and the present 
austere surroundings. 

In half an hour the novice returned to take me to Mass 
and we went into the nuns 1 choir. As we entered the nuns 
were chanting Prime and this was followed by Mass. I was 
shown into a stall, where I heard Mass. I was now sufficient- 
ly myself to be able to make an offering of myself to God, to 
do with me what He willed, only to let me be wholly His. 

After Mass Sister Mary A , the novice who looked after 

me, took me to the novitiate, where she gave me my break- 
fast. A little later in the morning the Mistress of Novices took 
me out into the garden: she showed me the grounds and we 
sat down on a bench and talked. There was a restful sympa- 
thy in her face and manner that made it easy for me to talk 
to her, though I am by nature reserved ; she drew me out 
first about home, telling me how much she herself had felt 
leaving her family ; in this way we soon got on familiar terms, 
and I was able, not indeed in this first talk, but soon after- 
wards, to unfold to her my desires and aspirations, and she 
explained to me many of my own thoughts. She called the 
desire for labor and sacrifice " Love's offspring," and told me 
that as years go by, if we are earnest in religious life, we find 
ourselves ever impelled to do and suffer more for God's love, 
and so the life becomes harder and sweeter, but with an in- 
creasing sense of peace and happiness, which proves that we 
are not only by grace but even "by nature formed for sanc- 
tity." 

This first day we talked nearly an hour, and when Auntie 
Meg came in the afternoon to bid me good-bye, she told me 
that had she had any doubts of my being in the right place, 
her talk with me that afternoon would have dispelled them. 
As I was not yet received as a postulant, I did not go to the 
refectory until afterwards, when those sisters who served and 
read were taking their meals. 

After dinner we went to recreation. I, being treated as a 
visitor, sat by the Reverend Mother. To my surprise she was 
quite conversant with the leading subjects of the day. Though 
very ignorant myself on many of them, I had yet deplored 
the idea of shutting them out from my mind, being under the 



308 THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE [Dec., 

impression that this was a necessary contingent of the religious 
life; and now I found that I should have to keep my wits 
about me, or I would be classed amongst those ef whom the 
founder speaks as having "the vice of stupidity." 

The sisters sat on stools round the room doing needle* 
work or some branch of painting; those at a distance would 
come up from their places and sit on the floor to talk to the 
Mother, whose stool was placed at the top of the circle; if 
they were ignorant of such topics of interest as they ought 
to have known, they got well teased; some indeed, especially 
of the younger ones, seemed to enjoy such a display of ignor- 
ance as would draw from the dear Mother her half-laughing 
and half-reproving protests and exclamations of horror at their 
hopeless condition ! 

After a few days I was received as a postulant. Being 
young and healthy I began at once to join in all the exercises 
of the novitiate. We rose, like the other nuns, at 5 o'clock in 
summer and 5:30 in winter. Our day was divided between 
mental and vocal prayer, including the chanting of the Office 
in choir, spiritual reading, instructions from our Novice Mis- 
tress, which she gave in public every day, recreation, manual 
labor, and study, but this latter was usually confined to such 
subjects as bore on our future life and duties. Our founder 
evidently considering in his distribution of time for the novices 
that 

" He in whose bosom thought on thought shoots out 
Still of his aim is wide, in that the one 
Sicklies and wastes to naught the other's strength." 

Our entire day, in its leading and in its minor occupations, 
tended to concentrate our thoughts on the step which we were 
preparing to take. 

The rule is be in bed at 10 P. M., unless with special per- 
miss to stay up longer. On Thursday nights many remain up 
to keep "The Holy Hour." 

In the refectory we have two meals of good, plain, well- 
cooked food ; besides this a cup of tea and bread and butter 
in the morning and the afternoon; of these lighter refections 
we partook standing, as they only occupied a few minutes; 
but the nuns were at liberty to sit while taking them. How- 



THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE 309 

ever, as the Rule prescribes, the sisters do not go to the re- 
fectory only to eat, but also to hear pious reading; and on 
the vigils of great feasts of the Church those who are so 
drawn may undertake some penance, such as asking the sisters 
to pray for them that they may overcome some fault, which 
they mention aloud, or they may say some prayers, kneeling 
in the middle of the refectory with their arms extended in the 
form of a cross, as Moses of old. These, the chapter of faults, 
which also is voluntary, and such like devout practices, being 
contrary to natural vanity and love of bodily ease, are offered 
up by the sisters, as is their whole life, to draw down God's 
blessing on the world and to stay His arm of justice; and 
these it is that the world sometimes so unfairly misrepresents. 

Such simple practices keep up strict observance, and it is 
a point of honor amongst us not to allude to such voluntary 
disclosures; yet, though unremarked on, they give that sim- 
plicity to our intercourse with one another which is one of 
the charms of religious life. 

The founder cuts off all reflections in these matters, by 
telling his children to remember that the same virtue which 
urges one sister through humility to manifest her fault impels 
another to silence. Indeed the pious and penitential practices 
of religious life chiefly aim at emancipating the spirit, and 
there is far more true liberty in the cloister than in society ; 
no doubt both have their enforced restrictions, but in religious 
life their end and object is to set the spirit free, whereas the 
restrictions of society do but enslave the spirit. 

As we have reading at dinner and supper we get through 
many delightful books, for we have a good library, which is 
constantly being replenished by the kind gifts of our friends. 
We read the lives of the saints, biographies, church history, 
etc., some of the most instructive and delightful of late years 
have been Ward's life of his father and Pastor's Lives of the 
Popes. 

Our days in the novitiate were very full and our minds 
and hearts active in the pursuit of our new calling. Each day 
our Mistress explained to us the rules and constitutions, and 
she frequently saw us in private, so that the public instruc- 
tions were supplemented by the private ones, at which we 
liked to talk over our own particular needs and the application 
of her instructions to them. 



310 THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE [Dec., 

She taught us that not only all the virtues which a good 
Christian practices in the world, but all the gifts that adorn a 
Christian woman in society, should be accentuated by religious 
life, and, as our founder put it, his daughters should bear 
themselves as princesses; with this view faults against polite- 
ness and convenance were considered out of keeping with our 
spirit and it was a matter about which our Novice Mistress 
was strict, for she used to tell us that with too much famil- 
iarity mutual respect would soon die out and without it our 
founder would not recognize us as his daughters. 

She instilled into us that a nun must begin by self-con- 
quest, that as daughters of our Mother Mary, the great exem- 
plar of the world, we inherit the privilege of taking our part 
in the great work of salvation ; but that it is only by first cul- 
tivating personal sanctity that we shall ever spread abroad the 
good odor of Christ; that our life is chiefly one of prayer 
and interior penance, which latter is a life- long task, and so 
it needs a long breath and a stout heart to mount the hill of 
perfection. " Look rather," our Mistress would say to us, " up 
the hill, for too mtrch self-introspection narrows and impover- 
ishes our ideal, we are but poor things; look off self unto 
God, from the littleness and meanness of the creature to the 
greatness and nobility of the Creator." We learnt from her 
that, though after our novitiate days we might be called upon 
to give ourselves to exterior works, our first aim is to be a 
beacon light to the world, a city set upon a hill apart from 
the noise and tumult of the world, a tangible object lesson, 
proving by its existence that this world is not man's end and 
aim, but rather a training field for the life to come, that the 
influence of such example was far-reaching and, in the long run, 
far more effective in its results on the world of thought, which 
always eventually governs the world of action, than the good 
practical results which cheer on her way the sister employed 
in active work. Both means are necessary helps in God's 
Church, and both may sanctify us; but in the exterior work, 
if we have not trained ourselves to the interior spirit, whatever 
talent we may have apart from it is half, if not wholly, lost 
if it be not impelled by the spiritual life within. 

When I heard these instructions I would burn with longing 
for the day of my profession. But my clothing had not yet 
come, and my Mistress was in no such hurry as I, rather the 



i9io.] THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE 311 

contrary; she told me that, though she was very hopeful of 
my vocation, experience had taught her that four or five and 
twenty is a better age for girls to enter religious life. 

As the months succeeded one another I found myself ever 
gaining new knowledge of myself. Up to this I had, all un- 
conscious to myself, been cultivating weeds in the garden of my 
soul, mistaking them for flowers, and now it was no longer to 
be a case of letting the cockle and the wheat grow apace until 
the harvest day. The growth of the cockle from henceforth 
had to be checked, even though at times its removal chafed 
my poor blurred artistic sense, which liked to add piquancy 
to my conversation even at the expense of another's weak 
point. If charm of conversation was to be, it must now be 
achieved with a sensitive and discriminating charity towards 
others. The wheat alone had to be fostered, and this was not 
easy nor always pleasant to nature. I found there was more 
selfishness in my character than I had dreamed of and it had 
to be replaced by selflessness. 

It will be seen by all this that we were ever drinking from 
a spiritual fountain, so that even the least thirsty soul could 
not fail but be refreshed and encouraged to go bravely on her 
way. 

The novitiate consisted of Sister A , aged twenty- three, 

Sister B , aged twenty- five, Sister R , aged thirty- six, 

and Sister J , aged sixty. The three former were novices ; 

Sister J was a postulant. She left before my clothing 

arrived, but not before she had given us younger ones many 
a good-natured laugh at her expense. She had a turn for 
poetry and wrote comic verses for our entertainment. We oc- 
casionally had a holiday in the novitiate, when we invited 
Reverend Mother to tea and entertained her with hot cakes 
and bon bons ; we used to visit the kitchen beforehand to 
entice the sister cook to give us a good tea. For these oc- 
casions dear old Sister J always ordered a smart widow's 

cap to honor Reverend Mother. Once the shop failed her and 
the cap did not arrive in time. How we laughed at her distress 
and her indignation with the shop-keeper, and her apologies 
to Reverend Mother, who told her that she ought to mourn 
the cap in verse and sing its dirge; that evening at recreation 
Sister A sang us the dirge of the cap, Sister J taking 



312 THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE [Dec., 

seconds, and very amusing and clever it was. She was always 
very motherly to us all. 

I remember one day coming from the refectory where they 
had been reading the life of St. Stanislaus, upon remarking 
that these saints who were always so good depressed me, Sister 
J turned to me and said: " My dear, they had just as many 
faults as you and I, only they kept quiet about them." Sister 
B , too, would love to relate for Reverend Mother's benefit 
one of her stories. Now we all know how a story flags fire on 
being told a second time to the same company, and how dif- 
ferent is the artificial laugh which greets its repetition from 
the hearty ring of enjoyment that welcomes its first appear- 
ance ; but it was not so with Sister B 's stories, rather did 

their repetition add to our enjoyment, for her stories all had 
a stratum of facts, upon which she built with ever-increasing 
prodigality, and when we would call upon the Novice Mistress 
to chide her for her flagrant coloring, the good Mistress would 
only laugh and say that people who were not accurate add 
very much to the entertainment of a community. 

So our days went by full and happy until spring came 
round, when I received the habit of the order and changed 
my name to Sister Mary M . 

They all came from home for the ceremony, including 

Father M , and when it was over we all walked through the 

convent grounds. I took my father off by myself, leaving our 
sisters to entertain the others. We sat down together under 
one of our big trees in the field, and seeing my happiness I 
think gave him joy ; he told me I looked provokingly happy. 

Between the clothing and profession at least a year is spent 
in more immediate preparation for taking the vows; during 
which time the Novice Mistress gives a full and clear exposi- 
tion of our future life, its difficulties, its obligations, and its 
whole end and aim, so that none is professed without being 
fully aware of what she is undertaking. Shortly before my 
profession we had an instruction on charity, in which our Mis- 
tress explained to us the difference between the command- 
ments and the counsels ; it helped me greatly, and I have kept 
the following notes of it. 

We are bound under pain of sin to keep all the command- 
ments, because they are God's laws; if we transgress any one 



i9io.] THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE 313 

of them we become guilty of sin and are deserving of punish- 
ment; if we keep them we merit eternal life. The counsels, 
on the other hand, carry in themselves no such obligations, 
nor is the thought of merit uppermost, that is swept aside by 
the force of love. God invites whom He chooses to this en- 
closed garden in which His counsels hold sway ; within its 
boundary love, that is charity, reigns supreme, it is the key- 
note and motive power that alone impel the chosen company 
therein, that draw it with a magnetic power, that point to its 
true destiny, that emancipate it from earthly ambitions and 
earthly ties. This same charity it is that directs some to re- 
ject and some to adhere to these very counsels, for even they, 
in their highest manifestation, are but her handmaids. So she 
bids one cast aside this world's wealth to live in poverty for 
Christ's sake, whilst she directs another to gather together 
temporal goods, and with laudable carefulness make provision 
for himself and his family. 

She bids one live a life of continence, and another marry; 
to some she counsels intercourse with the world, to others 
solitude. She is subject to no law, for she herself is the law- 
giver, her kingdom is boundless, her gifts munificent, her laws 
supreme. Be so bold as to question her prudence in any of 
these things and she makes answer : " The Lord hath need of 
it." All is made for charity and charity is God; so if we 
adhere to charity we must live lives of love " like a vivid flame 
ever mounting upwards, 1 ' ever ready to follow her lead and to 
let ourselves be sacrificed and consumed for the common good. 
If we feel not invited to this hard, high life, then let us not 
undertake that to which we are not called, and which there- 
fore we should not have the power to accomplish. Let us 
keep the commandments and we will save our souls. God has 
even promised to those who keep them " a great reward.' 1 

This instruction afforded me meditation for many days. 
At its conclusion Sister R asked our Mistress (it was cus- 
tomary with us thus to have any difficulty explained) were we 
free not to follow the call to religious life, even though we 
believed it to be our vocation ; and she replied that St. 
Thomas says: The rejection or following of such an invitation 
must be governed by the laws of charity, which weigh all cir- 
cumstances and each individual case, and that these laws could 



THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE [Dec. 

not be disobeyed without sin, and it might even be grievous 
sin. 

About this time, too, we had another very helpful instruction 
on the maxim " know thyself/' in which she said that we are told 
that the philosopher here speaks not only of the knowledge of 
our own miseries and meannesses, but also of the knowledge of 
the dignity of our own souls and of their capacity for being 
united to God; and this she drew out in a lucid manner. 

After these instructions I would sometimes ask leave to go 
out into the grounds, feeling that I needed the open expanse 
to enjoy what I had heard and drink in its full meaning. I 
cannot explain how it was or what I felt. I only know there 
seemed to me not to be room enough under any roof but the 
blue sky for the enlargement of my heart, and so I would go 
up to a little hill in the grounds and dream. 

The chapter of votes having been in my favor, I went into 
retreat for my profession at the end of June. 

(TO BE CONCLUDED.) 




A DIALOGUE. 

BY VINCENT McNABB, O.P. 

DRAMATIS PERSONAL: 
i st. Writer. 2d. Reader. 

'EADER: You have been silent of late. What 
have you been doing ? 

Writer: Much, every way. I have been 
silent. 

Reader: You mean you have done little ex- 
cept keep silence? 

Writer: I mean that, because I have been silent, I have 
done much. In my vocabulary "to be silent" is neither a 
neutral nor a passive verb. It is, at times, one of the most 
active verbs in the language of thought. 

Reader: Are you a quietist ? 

Writer: Only in so far as I would have Nazareth a per- 
manent institution in the world of thought. 

Reader: Already my head is beginning to reel. 

Writer: The force generated in my spell of silence is be- 
ginning to work. You are set towards understanding. Think, 
if even the echo of silence so stirs your mind, how much 
would you be buffetted by its substantial whirlwinds. 

Reader : You deny that silence is nothing or the doing of 
nothing ? 

Writer: Some talk is nothing; and worse than nothing. 
Silence like talk may be the echo of emptiness. Yet silence 
may be the ore of thought, as speech may be its finished 
jewelry. 

Reader: Are you, then, a mystic? 

Writer: Only in so far as the spirit of Nazareth must go 
with us on our way toward Golgotha. 

Reader: I avoid the transcend en tals. Let us come down 
from the mountain to the valley, from the clear sky to the 
mists. The infinite clearness of the mountain sky but draws 
me to look down. From its heights I see no vision fairer 



316 A DIALOGUE [Dec., 

than the earth. But the half lights of the mist- wreathed val- 
ley are akin to vision. They draw my eyes upwards. I look, 
until my eyes weary, looking upwards at gates that, alas, 
never open. 

Writer: Are you, then, a mystic? 

Reader: Your question is a jest. 

Writer: The soul that detects the unopened gates of 
thought in the waves and ripples of an English mist is neither 
a jest nor the fit subject of a jest. 

Reader: I cannot argue. I came here to ask. Let us 
leave the transcendentals and come to geography. 

Writer: Must we, then, give up thought for gossip? 

Reader: I will not be stayed by reproaches. Where have 
you been living since last I spoke with you ? 

Writer: My soul, everywhere; my body, first in Babylon, 
and then in one of its handmaiden towns. 

Reader : Babylon ! You lucky dog. I would almost wil- 
lingly lose one of my eyes, to look upon it. It is a wonder- 
ful sight. 

Writer : It is likelier you would lose one of your ears with 
its din. By night and day its traffic never rests. The din 
drowns the preacher in the pulpit, the penitent in the con- 
fessional, the priest at the altar. Its dust discolors the vest- 
ments of the sacrifice and clogs the lamp of the sanctuary. 

Reader: I can bear with its din, in love of its life. 

Writer: I thought you would say that. I have said it my- 
self; yes, and believed it as firmly as you now believe it. 
But this mood has passed away, I trust into something higher. 

Reader: Then you were not in silence of late. 

Writer: I kept silence in the throng of a great noise. The 
din of Babylon did no more than knock loudly at the door. 
Once upon a time to me, as to yon, it was the loud, welcome 
reveille of life; of late it has been but an impertinent rattle 
of death. 

Reader: You have been a dweller in the tombs. 

Writer: Then have I been a philosopher. Plato assures us 
that all philosophy is the philosophy of death. 

Reader: Now you begin to talk my language. Philosophy 
is to me the fruit of life. Pray, go on. 

Writer: The philosopher is one who measures light by 
darkness, the hills by their shadow, knowledge by ignorance, 



i9io.] A DIALOGUE 317 

life by death. To him the world is, as it were, a tomb, and, 
therefore, a school. He does not teach it : it teaches him. 

Reader: You have been to school, then, in mid-life? 

Writer: Quite true. I have been taking out a post-gradu- 
ate course in the University of life. 

Reader: Must I say you have entered your second child- 
hood ? 

Writer: I would I had. I have often thought that even 
the kingdom of thought suffers violence. No man by taking 
thought can add an inch to his stature; but every man must 
subtract many inches from his stature if he would take thought. 
No man can enter into the kingdom of thought as a king but 
as a child. To shrink back into the humble consciousness of 
our essential childhood is the violence needed to open the 
gates of Truth. 

Reader: You have, then, been learning as a little child. 

Writer : Would to God I had ! I have, in sooth, been striv- 
ing to learn how to learn. Too often have I sought to over- 
throw Nature in pitched battle. The victory has ever been on 
the side of Nature; and I have been left wounded on the field. 
Too late, perhaps, have I learnt that to learn Nature's secrets 
we must cease our strife and our commanding. We must even 
cease our wooing. Truth will not be our captive or our servant 
or our wife, until we have sought her as a child. I am learn- 
ing now, I trust not too late, that to know her secrets I must 
rest like a child in her lap. I must be dandled on her knees. 
I must draw down her willing lips to my ears ; and take knowl- 
edge as a sweet caress, a Donum Dei Altissimi the most High 
God's most lowly Gift. 

Reader: You have almost persuaded me that your silence 
was a throng of work. 

Writer: So great a throng, indeed, that nothing comes at 
once out of it. I am as a door leading from a hall. Some- 
times no one passes out because there are none, or too many, 
within. 

Reader: The time will come when the thoughts wrought 
within your soul in the fires of silence may be uttered. 

Writer : God, Who alone gave them in the darkness, alone 
knows if they will ever see the light. Till then, farewell. 




ANGLO-IRISH CHRISTMAS CAROLS. 

BY W. H. GRATTAN FLOOD, Mus.D. 

jT is strange that the subject of Anglo- Irish 
Christmas carols has not hitherto found an ade- 
quate exponent, although English carols and 
English Christmas songs have been treated of 
by many able writers during the past century. 
On this account, and pending a more thorough investigation, 
it may be deemed apropos at this festive season to give some 
account of Anglo-Irish Christmas carols, that is sacred songs 
and carols in the English language, during a period of four 
centuries in Ireland: from 1270 to 1670. 

The derivation of the word carol has furnished a theme 
for many discussions, but it is now generally agreed by the 
leading etymologists that a carol was originally a dance, in 
which singing formed a chief factor. Carols were popularized 
in the eleventh century, and the vogue arose from the fact of 
dancing and singing caroles on the eve of saints' festivals, 
with special compositions for the great festival Noel or the 
Natale Domini. A singular story has come down from an in- 
cident that occurred in the eleventh century on Christmas 
Eve in the churchyard of Kolbigk, as told in the Journal des 
Savants (1900). The legend goes that while a number of 
peasants were caroling or dancing on the eve of Christmas, 
towards midnight, they sang : " Quid stamus ? cur non imus ? " 
And, as a result, they could not stop either their singing or 
dancing. It is sufficient to note that the carol is clearly given 
in the legend as dancing to the accompaniment of singing. 

Carols were introduced into England in the twelfth cen- 
tury, and they spread rapidly ; so much so, that in the suc- 
ceeding century the composition of carols was extensively culti- 
vated. An Irishman, Siadhail, or Sedulius, wrote a beautiful 
Abecedarian hymn in honor of the Nativity, A Solis Ortus Car- 
dine, in the fifth century. This hymn shows Irish character- 
. istics of vowel-rhyming and alliterative structure. And it is 
well to observe that it was the fact of the transfer of these 



19 io.] ANGLO-IRISH CHRISTMAS CAROLS 319 

Christmas hymns from the Church to the domestic circle that 
gave rise to the composition of Noels, or Christmas carols. 
Similarly it was the Tropes of the ninth century that gave 
rise to the drama, as is now admitted. 

Starting from the twelfth century, the English adopted the 
French carols, and this vogue was strengthened by their intro- 
duction into the Mystery or Morality plays of the thirteenth and 
fourteenth centuries. Naturally the English in Ireland kept 
up the practice, and as early as 1266 we find a reference to 
carols in an Anglo-Norman poem written by Brother Michael 
FitzBernard, a Friar Minor of Kildare, in his description of 
the building of the walls of New Ross, County Wexford. His 
reference to the carole seems to point to the dance with song 
accompaniment. We have an illustration of La Carole d* Amours 
in an early fourteenth century MS. of the Romans de la Rose. 
In this illustration or painting, the music is evidently supplied 
by a bagpiper, and the hands of the dancers seem to touch, 
though the fingers are not interlaced or twined. In 1305 this 
same Anglo-Irish Franciscan friar, Brother Michael, of Kildare, 
wrote a charming English hymn : " Sweet Jesus, hend and f re." 

Here it may be convenient to dissipate an erroneous idea 
that was set on foot by Dr. P. W. Joyce in his admirable 
Social History of Ireland t published in 1903. Dr. Joyce created 
a sensation in Irish-Inland circles by his statement that the an- 
cient Irish never danced to music, nor did they dance at all. 

Of course he based his statement on the absence of any 
allusions to dancing in the Irish manuscripts, and he quotes 
O'Curry and Stokes for confirmation thereof. But the learned 
doctor who I am glad to say is still hale in his eighty-fourth 
year quite overlooks the fact that dancing was "part and 
parcel" of the social life in ancient, as it is in modern, Ireland. 
The terpsichorean art was so common, and so much in evi- 
dence, that there was no need to accentuate its existence among 
such a gay-hearted nation. In proof of this I can confidently 
quote a verse from an English poem dating from about the 
year 132010 be found in the Rawlinson MSS. This early 
fourteenth century poem has reference to Irish dancing: 

" Ich am of Irlaunde, 
Am of the holy land 
Of Irlaunde; 



320 ANGLO-IRISH CHRISTMAS CAROL? [Dec., 

Good Sir, pray I se, 

For of Seynte Charite 

Come and daunce wyth me in Irlaunde." 

There is ample evidence that dancing was divorced from 
Christmas and Easter carols at the close of the thirteenth cen- 
tury or in the first decade of the following century. Among 
the statutes of Ralph Baldock, Bishop of London (1304-1313), 
I find that dances, wrestlings, and other sports were forbidden 
in the churches or churchyards of his diocese. 

In Ireland Richard Ledude, Bishop of Ossory from 1317 
to 1360, cultivated Christmas carols. Naturally, these carols 
were sacred, but they were adapted mostly to secular tunes, 
so as to make them popular, and, particularly, to replace the 
lewd and ribald songs that the English settlers had imported. 
In all, Bishop Ledude who is best known for his connection 
with the heresy and witchcraft trials between the years 1324 
and 1331 wrote about sixty songs, including four Christmas 
carols, and wrote them expressly for the Vicars Choral of 
Kilkenny Cathedral, with a recommendation for their adoption 
by the priests and clerics of the diocese of Ossory, " that their 
throats and mouths, sanctified to God, might not be polluted 
with theatrical, indecent, and secular songs." These composi- 
tions will be found in the Red Book of Ossory, a venerable 
pre- Reformation manuscript volume, now one of the treasures 
of the Protestant Bishop of Ossory. 

All through the fifteenth and the greater part of the six- 
teenth centuries the custom of Christmas carols continued in 
Ireland as well as in England, but I cannot trace any speci- 
mens of either native Irish or of Anglo-Irish carols of that 
period. Such tunes as were associated with these carols are 
all of a " modal " character, proving that they originated with 
the Church, or at least were based on the Church modes. 

Naturally the Puritan influence, which obtained during the 
last quarter of the sixteenth century and the first quarter of 
the seventeenth century, had a considerable effect on Christ- 
mas carols. However, with the advent of Charles I. the puri- 
tanical gloom practically disappeared, though it revived for a 
decade during the Cromwellian regime. At length the Restora- 
tion brought a reaction, but, unfortunately, coupled with this 
reaction against Puritanism, there arose a school of licentious 



i9io.] ANGLO-IRISH CHRISTMAS CAROLS 321 

song writers, whose effusions overstepped all the bounds of 
decency. During the years 1661 to 1671 the introduction of 
these erotic songs and ballads into Ireland tended to corrupt 
the minds of the then persecuted Catholics, and, as a result, 
the bishops and priests denounced such effusions. At this 
epoch one zealous bishop, Dr. Luke Wadding, who was nomi- 
nated to the see of Ferns as coadjutor, with right of succes- 
sion, in 1671, bethought of a scheme to counteract the insidi- 
ous tendencies of the prevalent immoral songs. Accordingly 
between the years 1672 and 1678 he wrote numerous "pious 
and godly songs," set to popular tunes, including a cycle of 
Christmas carols for the twelve days of the great festival. 

Bishop Wadding succeeded to plenary jurisdiction on the 
death of Bishop French, on August 23, 1678, but he had been 
Ordinary of the diocese since 1671, owing to the exile of Dr. 
French, who was Assistant Bishop of Ghent. In 1680 he col- 
lected his spiritual songs into one volume and published them, 
but owing to the pretended " Popish Plot," which resulted in 
the martyrdom of the Venerable Oliver Plunket, the book was 
almost immediately withdrawn from circulation, and no copy 
is now known. However, in 1686, after the accession of King 
James II., Bishop Wadding who was a cousin of his more, 
famous namesake, Father Luke Wadding, O.F.M. reissued 
bis book. 

As Bishop Wadding's little volume is extremely rare in 
fact, there is no copy in the British Museum I subjoin the 
title of the 1686 re-issue: 

A Pious Garland 

Compos'd by the Reverend Father 
Luke Wadding, Bishop of Ferns, 
which he compos'd for the Solace 
of his Friends and Neighbours in their Afflictions. 

To which is added 
a choice collection of Divine Poems. 
The sweet and the sour 
The nettle and the flower, 
The thorn and the rose 
This Garland compose. 

[Dublin : Printed for Alderman James Malone, 
Bookseller in Skinner's Row.] 

VOL. XCII. 21 



322 ANGLO-IRISH CHRISTMAS CAROLS [Dec., 

Before quoting two specimens of Bishop Wadding's Christ- 
mas carols it may be of interest to add that this poetic pre- 
late died a confessor in December, 1691, and was buried in 
the Franciscan Friary Churchyard, Wexford. From the year 
1686 the cycle of carols has been sung uninterruptedly in the 
parish church of Kilmore, Co. Wexford, during a period of 
two hundred and twenty-four years. Bishop Wadding's suc- 
cessor, Dr. Michael Rossiter, fostered a love for these quaint 
carols; and Bishop Verdon, who ruled from 1709 to 1728, 
published a second edition of the Garland, at Drogheda, in 
1718, of which a third edition was issued in London, in 1728. 
It is amazing how accurately the Kilmore traditional singing 
of these carols has survived the hurly burly of over two cen- 
turies, for on comparing a transcript made on the spot in 1896 
from a Kilmore native with the printed copy of 1686, I could 
only discover some slight variations. 

Here are some typical verses from Bishop Wadding's carol 
on the Nativity. Following the custom of the time, many of 
the carols run to fifteen and sixteen verses, but two will be 
sufficient for illustration : 

CHRISTMAS DAY CAROL. 

Christmas Day is come, let's all prepare for mirth, 
Which fills the heavens and earth at this amazing Birth, 
Through both the joyous angels in strife and hurry fly, 
With glory and hosannas: Holy! Holy! they cry. 
In Heaven the Church triumphant adores with all her choirs, 
The Militant on earth with humble faith admires. 

If we would all rejoice, let's cancel the old score, 

And purposing amendment, resolve to sin no more, 

The Mirth can ne'er content us without a conscience clear, 

You shall not find true pleasure in all the usual cheer 

In dancing, sporting, revelling, with Masquerade and Drum, 

Then let our Christmas merry be as Christians doth become. 

No doubt many a reader will style this carol as " very poor 
stuff , indeed," but the good bishop's homely thoughts and style 
make a strong appeal to primitive and devoted Catholics, re- 
gardless of language and verse methods. Though not a poet, 
Bishop Wadding's verses sang well enough, as wedded to old 



i9io.] ANGLO-IRISH CHRISTMAS CAROLS 323 

Irish tunes, and, as has frequently happened, the beauty of the 
air helped to preserve the words and to make up for the rude 
metre, written at a very crucial period " in the midst of 
alarms." 

Appended are two verses of the carol for New Year's Day, 
directed to be sung to the tune of Neen Major Neal t of which 
the more correct Irish title is Inghean Major O'Neill: 

A CAROL FOR NEW YEAR'S DAY. 

The first day of the year 

Jesus to us doth give 
His pure and precious blood 

That we in Him might live. 
A most rare New Year's gift, 

A greater none can have 
A gift more rich and precious 

None can desire or crave. 

This gift brings us great joy 

And makes us all admire, 
It proves His love for us 

To be all flames of fire. 
And for our sake this day 

Jesus is His sweet name 
A name which cost Him dear, 

His blood spilt for the same. 

This second specimen of Bishop Wadding's Christmas carols 
is no better than the first, but it is historically interesting. By 
way of exhibiting the good bishop in a more favorable light, 
I subjoin the opening verse of another song, which was directed 
to be sung to the tune of Since Ccelia's my foe t a song written 
by an Irishman, Thomas Duffet, in 1675 : 

THE BANISH'D MAN'S ADIEU TO HIS COUNTRY. 

Dear Country, Adieu, 
Tho' faithful and true, 

To-morrow 

With sorrow 
I must part with you ; 



324 ANGLO-IRISH CHRISTMAS CAROLS [Dec. 

Without more delay 
This is my last day, 

Remember 

November 
Doth force me away. 

In concluding this article it may not be amiss to mention 
that the still popular Christmas hymn, Adeste Fideles, is pro- 
bably of Anglo-Irish origin I mean as regards the music. 
Most authorities are agreed that this popular hymn dates from 
the first decade of the [eighteenth century, and is of French 
provenance, but the air seems to be Anglo-Irish, Its source 
has been traced to a tune introduced into a French comic 
opera, Acajou, produced at Paris on March 18, 1744, and the 
tune is distinctly named as Air Anglais. The earliest appear- 
ance of the hymn and tune is in a MS. in Clongorous Wood 
College, Co. Kildare, dated 1749, and this MS. is closely fol- 
lowed by another, in Stonyhurst College, Lancashire (England), 
in 1751. Both hymn and tune were printed for the first time 
in an English collection, compiled by an Irishman, John P. 
Coghlan, in London, in 1782. The earliest English translation 
of the Adeste Fideles appeared in 1760. 



THE COLISEUM, 

BY JULIAN E. JOHNSTONE. 

MOONUGHT and splendor on thy massy walls, 

Thy mighty arches, and thy broken tiers; 
O Thou, whose vastness on my spirit falls 

White with the winter of two thousand years! 
O mighty monument of glory gone i 

Of greatness, underneath whose awful wings 
The nations of the earth all met as one 

When Roma's ruler was the King of Kings ! 

Now broken, crumbled, falling to decay, 

A planet shattered by a comet's shock, 
An empire overthrown, the pillars gray 

Making a chaos of colossal rock, 
Thou standest in the moonlight, sorrowing there 

For Rome departed and the Caesars gone ! 
Caesar, whose genius, like the lightning's glare, 

Led the batallions of the thunder on I 

What eloquence sublime is in thy look I 

What awful majesty is in thy port, 
Lofty as his whose dreadful thunders shook 

The world, when high Olympus was his court! 
Last of thy mighty race, thou standest there 

A crownless King, his army overthrown, 
The eagles gathering in the battle- air ; 

His sword all shattered and his empire gone ! 



Yet grander in thy desolation, thou, 

Than all the greatness of imperial Rome ! 
Yea ; save St. Peter's, that upon his brow 

Wears for colossal crown the gilded dome ! 
Earth has no fellow to thy majesty ; 

Fame has no thunder-lit Valhalla vast 
That hath thy grandeur and thy dignity, 

O mighty relic of the mighty Past ! 



326 THE COLISEUM [Dec., 

Glory has stamped thee lor its very own, 

Time that hath buried empires hallows thee ! 
Sublimity hath worn thee for a crown 

Gemmed with the golden deeds of history! 
Cyclopean strength, Olympic loftiness, 

All that we know of grandeur and ol might, 
Magnificence and power, and massiveness 

Meet like the gods upon thy ruined height ! 

Hark! is it thunder, or the lion's roar? 

Again thou standest in thy power and pride 
While proud patricians and plebeians pour, 

Crushing and crowding, through thy portals wide. 
High o'er the gate all glittering in gold 

Enthroned sits Caesar, master of the world, 
While flashing through the dust around thee rolled 

Rush the swift cars as by the tempest whirled. 

Again, 'tis night! A thousand lamps are lit, 

Torches, that shine like jewels on thy brow! 
Five times a thousand tigers in the pit 

IJons and leopards fight, and Roma now 
Standing upon the marble benches roars, 

And all the leaping torches dance delight, 
While hell its fury on the battle pours, 

And thunders clap their hands with all their might ! 

Once more like the colossal banquet bowl 

Of Jupiter Olympic thou dost shine ! 
Tiberius bids the fulvid river roll 

And flood thee with a tide of battle-wine ! 
Then the fierce Kraken of the Amber Isle, 

The savage dragon torn from Drachenfel, 
The shark, and devil-fish, and crocodile, 

Battle and bellow like the lake of hell. 

At last like Aetna 's yawning crater red 

Thou belchest fire upon the Christians there, 
Falling in fiery halos round their head, 

While howling Rome with thunder fills the air ! 
Yet burning in the tyrant's Brazen Bull, 

Blazing like living torches round the^ ring, 
They chant above the tempest, loud and full, 

Eternal praise to the Eternal King. 



i9io.] THE COLISEUM 327 

O God ! what crimes are written on those stones ! 

What tales those libraries of brick contain! 
The very caves are haunted with the groans 

Of all the myriads tortured there, and slain. 
No wonder, Coliseum, yonder Moon, 

Robed like a priest in surplice all of white, 
Purges away thy sins, and gives thee boon 

Of grace, absolving thee with golden light ! 

But, lo ! I see where countless Christians fell 

Thicker than Gauls beneath the Roman sword y 
The sacred symbols ot Emmanuel, 

The stations of the Cross of Christ, the Lord ! 
'Tis well ! Where Julian ruled, now Jesus reigns, 

Far other banners than the Roman float, 
As pale processionists march o'er the plains, 

And music golden as an angel's note. 

Music soars upward like a fount of fire, 

Purging the place of all impurity : 
And like a vine of ivy high and higher 

The silver leaves of moonlight mantle thee ! 
Farewell, thou great Colossus of the Past ! 

Emblem of worldly pomp and glory gone ! 
Nothing but God the Lord endures at last, 

And Holy Revelation rolling on! 



FATHER LAMBERT. 




BY R. S. F. L. 

SKETCH of the life of the Rev. Louis A. Lam- 
bert has been already printed in THE CATHOLIC 
WORLD and need not be repeated here. In this 
article let us try to glance at his labors their 
nature, their scope, their value, and the lesson 
which they teach. 

True greatness which is but another name for genius is 
both multiform and manifold. It has various methods of doing 
its work and various ways of manifesting itself. To the Catho- 
lic priest, however, whose kingdom is not of this world, the 
fields ordinarily open to genius are deliberately closed by his 
own hand; the limits of greatness if he possess it are volun- 
tarily restricted; and if he attains renown among his contem- 
poraries, it is because he possesses genius of a superlatively 
high order, or because his opportunities have been unusually 
favorable. For the most part the field of a priest's labors is 
the more humble one of saving souls and breaking the bread 
of life to sinners. This is, of course, by far the noblest and 
most sacred of all; but it does not bring worldly fame or re- 
nown. The consecration of a priest's life to these duties is the 
highest form in which either greatness or littleness can surrender 
itself. It is working for souls for whom Christ died ; and next 
after this comes the defense of God's sacred truth. The one 
is the consecration of talent for individual souls ; the other is 
the consecration of it for God's Church the collective body. 
It was given to Father Lambert to labor in both these fields; 
and, in the latter especially, with a success that was unexam- 
pled in our day. From his obscure country parish in West- 
ern New York his voice was heard around the globe. 

Although, doubtless, the exact contrary was intended, never 
did magazine render better service to the cause of religion 
than did the North American Review when it refused to publish 
Judge Black's reply to Colonel Ingersoll. Without this refusal 
the world might never have known the Notes on Ingersoll. 
Fortunately Father Lambert himself has recorded for us the 
genesis of the Notes. 



i9io.] FATHER LAMBERT 329 

In the year 1881 there was a triple understanding which 
proved to be a misunderstanding between the editor of the 
North American Review, Robert G. Ingersoll, and Jeremiah S. 
Black, of the City of Washington, that there was to be a joint 
debate by the two latter in the columns of the Review on the 
subject of religion. In accordance with this agreement Inger- 
soll's attack on religion duly appeared, and with it Judge Black's 
reply, in the same number of the Review. In a later number 
appeared Ingersoll's " reply to Judge Black's defense," without 
rejoinder, however, by Black ; and the latter thus explains its 
absence : 

" From the beginning," Judge Black wrote in explanation, 
" it was distinctly understood that my defense was to be pub- 
lished with the accusation. . . . At the time of publication 
I agreed that if Mr. Ingersoll had any fault to find, it might 
seem cowardly to refuse him another chance on the same terms. 
. . . Three months afterwards," Judge Black continues, " fifty 
pages of the foulest and falsest libel that was ever written 
against God or man was sent to me." 

Judge Black then relates how, incapacitated by an injury, 
he could not write a reply for the forthcoming issue; but that 
he stood ready to answer, when, to his surprise, he was in- 
formed by the editor, " that no contradiction, correction, or 
criticism of mine, or anybody else, would be allowed to accom- 
pany this effusion of filth"; how the postponement of publi- 
cation was peremptorily refused ; how " other offers were re- 
jected " by the editor, because " Mr. Ingersoll would not con- 
sent"; and how Judge Black, seeing that Ingersoll " controlled 
the Review to suit himself," withdrew from the controversy. 

All this was not without its effect on Father Lambert. AH 
the chivalry in his ardent, generous nature was aroused by the 
indignity thus offered to the cause of religion. He saw that 
the difficulty must be met, and he resolved to meet it in his 
own way. He tells us : 

" The proper way to meet Ingersoll is not to defend Chris- 
tianity against ... his attaeks, but to make his article the 
subject to be considered. . . . The proofs of Christianity 
are on record . . . and Mr. Ingersoll's ancestors in athe- 
ism and unbelief . . . have never answered them. . . . 
It is not Christianity that is on trial, but Mr. Ingersoll's arti- 
cle." Such was the genesis of the famous work. 

Even so, Father Lambert had not thought of independent 



330 FATHER LAMBERT [Dec., 

publication of his reply. The Notes were sent from week to 
week to the Catholic Union and Times of Buffalo, without thought 
of further publication, and it was only when an obscure coun- 
try priest, who had followed them with keenest interest, sug- 
gested to the late Father Cronin, editor ol the Catholic Union 
and Times, the advisability of rescuing them from oblivion by 
separate publication that the great world at large was intro- 
duced to the treasure-house of logic, wisdom, and wit. 

We can hardly overestimate the value of the service which 
Father Lambert in his famous work and also in his less fa- 
mous works has rendered to the cause of religion. Not since 
the days of Voltaire had religion been so openly, so auda- 
ciously, and so virulently assailed. Night after night the plat- 
form rang with the shameless and vicious assaults. 

The situation was perilous in the extreme. A glib-tongued 
orator, with honeyed phrase and pleasing address and the 
fatal gift of wit, had flung aside all restraint and undertaken 
the task of trampling under foot the beliefs that men hold 
most sacred. The man was possessed of considerable elo- 
quence, had acquired much renown ; and at the bar and on the 
platform was known as " the silver-tongued orator." The 
prestige of a great political party, too, was behind him, and, 
by reason of his oratorical and forensic gifts, he had been 
chosen as the mouthpiece of that party, to place in nomina- 
tion at a national convention an illustrious American states- 
man for the chief magistracy of the American people. In the 
very zenith of his fame this man turned the full force of his 
eloquence, with all its dazzling rhetoric and all its glittering 
sophisms, against God and His Christ. The news of the ora- 
tor's work spread like wildfire. Night after night there issued 
from the platform a deluge of polished blasphemy, which 
swept like a tide of burning lava over men's souls. The press, 
more eager for sensation than anxious about religion, sent on 
its wings the blasphemous messages as "news," of course 
broadcast throughout the land; so that the audiences of a few 
hundred were swelled to hundreds of thousands. 

From the platform the attack was carried to the magazine. 
The most influential among them one which had been re- 
garded as conservative and dignified opened its pages to the 
scurrilous assaults on Christianity. This gave a quasi- dignity 
to the buffoonery of the scoffer and lent, for the nonce, a 
prestige to the platform utterances which the hired hall and 



i9io.] FATHER LAMBERT 331 

the applauding mob could never impart. This magazine 
seemed to have surrendered its pages unconditionally to the 
cause of irreligion, and to have given to the scoffer an exclu- 
sive monopoly. Against the scoffer the obscure priest, Father 
Lambert, came like a new David; and, with wit for his sling, 
and truth and logic for his pellets, he laid the boaster and 
blasphemer prostrate on the earth. Never was victory so com- 
plete. The unassuming little volume appeared. The public 
read, admired, applauded, and laughed until it wept. Each 
new edition of the work was exhausted as soon as it left the 
press. Soon it began to be published wholesale as the Bible 
or the dictionary. The Protestant world vied with the Catho- 
lic in its wholesale distribution, and soon took in hand the 
work of printing new editions to supply the demand. The 
audiences of Ingersoll had been splitting their sides over the 
ridicule heaped on God, Moses, Christianity ; Ingersoll himself 
was now the laughingstock of the world. 

The keenest weapon which Father Lambert used in the en- 
counter was the sharp and piercing sword of his extraordinary 
wit. Ingersoll had employed the same weapon in his warfare 
on religion, to the great delight of his audience. Father Lam- 
bert instantly snatches the rapier from Ingersoll's grasp, and 
with it gives him the fatal wound. The tide of battle was 
instantly turned, and the audiences deserted the blasphemer 
and flocked to the standard of the Christian champion. 
" I would not give a cent," said Father Lambert, before 
he undertook the work of refutation, " to hear Ingersoll on 
The Mistakes of Moses ; but I would give five hundred dol- 
lars to hear Moses on the mistakes of Ingersoll." What 
Moses might have thought on the subject one might easily 
suppose; but the world was soon in convulsions of laughter 
over what Father Lambert had to say on the mistakes of In- 
gersoll. 

There was not a single note in the gamut of wit and 
humor of which Father Lambert was not master. From play- 
ful mirth to Junius-like invective he ran through the entire 
scale with the ease of a master. He seldom, indeed, resorted 
to the savage irony of Swift, though he did employ it when 
occasion demanded. He seldom used the gentle humor of 
Addison. He had nothing of Rabelais and his scurrility; 
nothing of Fielding and his scoffings at virtue; little even of 
the quiet humor of Sydney Smith* Any or all of them might 



332 FATHER LAMBERT [Dec., 

be indeed at his command ; but they were not all alike to his 
taste; and, while he swept his hand over the entire keyboard 
and drew out whatever stop pleased him for the nonce, the 
stop and the key were always those best adapted to the situ- 
ation. It was, indeed, strange music ^consecrated to a sacred 
purpose; but it was the only one that fitted the occasion. The 
babbling Thersites who could, when occasion served, be the 
pompous orator, the finished rhetorician, the polished, graceful, 
and eloquent speaker, the forensic, obituary, and after dinner 
Nestor, soon found himself outmatched by the humble country 
priest. 

The keenness of Father Lambert's wit was equalled only by 
the acumen of his logic. Both went hand in hand and effected 
a combination that was invincible. Never was the dialogue 
form of controversial argument made so effective as in Father 
Lambert's hands. For the most part the form of question and 
answer, or objection and answer, is an unintended hint to 
the reader to close the book. With Father Lambert it be- 
comes the most delightful and entertaining form of literature. 
We see the combatants in the intellectual duel as if they 
were actually before us. His dialogue is a picture more vivid 
than the cinematograph. We see the flash of the eye, the 
lightning play upon the countenance, the cheek glowing with 
the fire of energy, the whole form throbbing with earnestness; 
we hear the ring of their voices; and we hold our breath lest 
we might lose the next word or fail to catch the next point 
in the discussion. Sometimes he condenses a whole argument 
in a phrase. A single answer is often a whole treatise. 

Throughout it all Father Lambert never loses temper, never 
descends to personality, except in so far as it is revealed by In- 
gersoll's own expressions, so that while it is one of the most 
personal attacks ever made on one man by another, it is, para- 
doxical though it sounds, devoid of every trace of personality. 
It is Ingersoll as revealed by himself as betrayed by his own 
words that is on trial throughout; and in this way he is 
tried mercilessly, indeed, but justly. Indeed so justly that, 
with all his blistering sores and festering wounds aching at 
every point, Ingersoll could never plead that he had received 
unjust treatment. 

The earnestness of Father Lambert's manner and language, 
when occasion demands denunciation, is fierce and sweeping. 
He is aroused at the thought that a mere sophist and trickster 



i9io.] FATHER LAMBERT 333 

should have the hardihood and effrontery to make a mockery 
of sacred things which he does not understand, and hold them 
up as the butt of ridicule for audiences who could not perceive 
the flaws in his logic or the halt in his reasoning. In point 
of fact, there is nothing easier than to be witty at the expense 
of things sacred. There seems to be something in our fallen 
nature that is closely akin to the ghoul and the demon ; for 
never is man so unreasoning and senseless as in his warfare on 
sacred things. The sans- culottism in our humanity comes at 
once to the front. In proportion to our former veneration we 
become fierce and frothing iconoclasts. Father Lambert was 
well aware of all this. He knew that Ingersoll was trading 
on the ignorance of his hearers, and that the very sacredness 
of his subjects was the surest earnest of their applause. When 
swayed by these considerations Father Lambert always rose to 
the requirements of the case and showed Ingersoll in his true 
and proper colors. But never once does he outstep the sayings 
of Ingersoll himself and the legitimate deductions from them. 
At the close of his Notes on Ingersoll we have a splendid 
specimen of this power. 

But it would be a mistake to suppose that Father Lambert's 
only weapon was his wit, or that his triumph was due to a 
mere superiority in repartee. His finely cultivated intellect was 
full-orbed. Its logical instincts were well-nigh unerring. Sel- 
dom, indeed, do we meet with an intellect so perfectly attuned to 
the keynote of truth, that it is never out of accord with it. 
Such intellects are rare indeed, for their adjustment would 
mean perfection ; but Father Lambert's came as near to this 
attunement as is given to most men in this world of intel- 
lectual discord. The almost infallible perception of his logical 
powers was the proof of this. Seldom did they fail or betray 
him. His mind was always in such close harmony with phil- 
osophical truth that there was little danger that it should ever 
be misled by the false glare and glitter of our modern, so- 
called intellectual, progress. One of the most interesting prob- 
lems of our time is : Why we have so much scientific progress 
and so little intellectual progress ? Why does not the latter 
keep pace with the former? The answer is not far to seek. 
The masses of crude knowledge are accumulating around us so 
rapidly as to paralyze the intellect. The rapidity of our motion 
leaves no time for thought. Intellectual perception is deadened 
by the variety and quantity. Men become dazed and lose sight 



334 FATHER LAMBERT [Dec., 

of guiding principles. They lose all sense of proportion and re- 
lation. They lose sight of the eternal principles which are fixed 
and irrevocable. Hence the wildest vagaries in every depart- 
ment of knowledge and life extravagant socialism in eco- 
nomics, anarchism in politics, pragmatism in philosophy, and 
modernism in religion. Fickle minds slip their anchorages. 
Feeble ones surrender to stronger ones without a struggle. The 
pressure of knowledge proves too strong for them; they succumb 
to its brute mass. In the profusion of fact the faculty of as- 
similation is lost. We not only miss the meaning of the fact, 
but we are also fast losing the faculty of interpreting it. All 
knowledge is knowledge in relation; and the great evil in our 
day is that proper appreciation of this relation is rapidly be- 
ing lost. 

With Father Lambert the note of truth seldom if ever fails, 
and the note of sincerity and strength is never absent. He 
perceives at once the false note in the plea of his adversary. 
With an opponent he is never off his guard and never de- 
ceived. His method is unique. He occupies a niche in reli- 
gious controversy and philosophy peculiarly his own. The 
only weapons that he uses are truth, logic, and wit; but in 
his hands their power is irresistible. He met a grave religious 
crisis. And he met it as no one but Father Lambert could 
meet it. He was not discursive. His method chained him 
closely to the subject of his analysis; and, when he had ex- 
hausted it, he seemed powerless to move until he first laid 
hold of a new subject of attack. On any disputed point he 
seemed to divine instinctively the side on which truth lay. 
We are aware of only one or two instances in which this 
instinct for truth seems to have failed him. One is the 
slightly false note which is discernible in the first half of his 
very last work his paper written for the Eucharistic Con- 
gress at Montreal; and which was no doubt due to the fact 
that it was written when the hand of death was already upon 
him. The other is the incorporation by him, in his Tactics of 
Infidels (we think), of Brownson's ontological argument for the 
existence of God; and is not so easily accounted for. That 
he had a profound admiration for Brownscn is certain ; but it 
is difficult to understand how he could permit this admiration 
to deceive his fine instinct for truth, or to chloroform his 
wonderful powers of logical analysis. That it imposed upon 
him is certain; for, in the first place, Father Lambert prized 






i9io.] FATHER LAMBERT 335 

truth too dearly to adopt and print an argument whose sound- 
ness he suspected; and, in the next place, he repeated it in 
an editorial in the Freeman's Journal not many years since, 
apparently with faith in its efficacy. That he lost faith in it 
later seems to be also certain ; for the writer of this article 
wrote him a private note of protest on the occasion of its re- 
appearance in the Freeman's Journal, saying that he regarded 
the " proof " as the one weak spot in his (Father Lambert's 
own) writings, and offering to send him an analysis of the 
" proof " in case he still believed it sound. He did not ask 
for the analysis; what he did was to announce, editorially, in 
the next issue of the Freeman's Journal that the contemplated 
reproduction of Rosmini's philosophy (we think) would be post- 
poned, as it might involve him in a controversy for which he 
was not exactly prepared. (The appearance of Brownson's 
proof in the Freeman's Journal was in connection with the an- 
nouncement of Rosmini's philosophy.) Evidently the adoption 
of the " proof " by Father Lambert was merely another instance 
of the great " Homer nodding," and the incident is mentioned 
here solely for the benefit of any one who might be inclined 
to regard Father Lambert's adoption of it as a guarantee of 
the soundness of Brownson's famous argument. These instances, 
however, are but the exceptions that prove the rule that his 
intellect was a true test-tube of truth. 

It would be wrong to suppose that Father Lambert's claim 
to greatness rests solely on his reply to Ingersoll. Indeed, so 
far would such a notion be from the truth, that we might blot 
out the Notes on Ingersoll, and there would still be left a very 
substantial foundation on which to base a claim for greatness. 
He was by no means a " Single-Speech Hamilton." Passing 
over his Thesaurus Biblicus, which he translated, adapted, and 
enlarged from the original of Philip Paul Merz; which was the 
first Catholic Biblical Concordance printed in English ; and 
which has been an invaluable aid to priests throughout the 
English-speaking world ; he has given us other useful transla- 
tions, such as The Christian\Father, The Christian Mother, etc. ; 
and he has also edited many other valuable works. The Notes 
on Ingersoll t too, were followed by others in the same vein, 
and on kindred topics : such as, The Tactics of Infidels, Inger- 
soll's Christmas Sermon, etc. There is also his analysis of the 
Christian Science cult, which is the ablest criticism of that 
rather intangible entity which has yet appeared. 



336 FATHER LAMBERT [Dec., 

For our part, however, we cannot but think that by far 
the best work done by Father Lambert was in the editorial 
field. He was in succession the editor of three very able 
papers, of two of which he was the founder. At the time of his 
death, and for sixteen years previous, he was the Editor-in- 
Chief of the New York Freeman's Journal, one of the oldest 
and always one of the ablest Catholic papers in the United 
States. Father Lambert's work on this paper is too recent 
and too well-known to need notice here. 

The two papers which he founded and established bore 
each the name, The Catholic Times the first The Catholic 
Times, of Waterloo, New York; the other The Catholic Times, 
of Philadelphia, Pa. It is noteworthy that, although merged in 
other papers, the name has never been lost in either, and that 
the spirit of Father Lambert still lives in each of the mergers. 
They are still among the ablest Catholic papers in the United 
States. The Waterloo paper was united with The Catholic 
Union, of Buffalo, and became The Catholic Union and Times, 
with the late Father Cronin as its renowned editor; while the 
Philadelphia paper was united with The Catholic Standard, of 
that city, with Messrs. Hardy and Mahoney as proprietors 
and editors, and became The Catholic Standard and Times. 

For ourselves, we cannot but think that Father Lambert's 
best work was done on The Catholic Times, of Waterloo. 
This was the first offspring of his marvelous brain, and of it 
he himself ever cherished the most tender memories. At its 
beginning it was an unpretending little folio cf four pages, 
printed throughout in uniform type. Defamation of the 
Church was common in those days. The rabid Protestant 
minister was then as plentiful as blackberries. Father Lam- 
bert's delight was to go gunning for such sport, take a false 
statement on the wing, and with a single shot bring the 
preacher and his soaring eloquence ignominiously to earth. 
We cannot but think that here was the real Father Lambert. 
The little paper was written by him almost from beginning 
to end. A department was devoted to an explanation of Cath- 
olic doctrine, and this was as inspiring and as interesting as 
the editorial page. In clearness, directness, and simplicity it 
came nearer to Cardinal Gibbons' Faith of our Fathers than any 
work that we know, although couched in the form of question 
and answer. His readers multiplied rapidly. Letters of com- 
pliment and congratulation from all parts of the world began 



i9io.] FATHER LAMBERT 337 

to pour in on the editor, who at once found himself famous. 
His readers soon discovered, to their delight, that doctrinal 
exposition was seasoned with wit and wisdom. The inquirer 
after Catholic truth found compressed within the columns of 
the unpretentious sheet a far sounder, clearer, more readable 
exposition of a point of doctrine than [in the pages of the 
pretentious magazine or the volume of religious controversy 
or apologetics. The lover of his country found that patriotism 
was intermingled in due proportion, and learned at the same 
time from its pages how to be a good citizen and a good 
Christian; while, on the various questions that arose for de- 
bate in the great world without, sage comment and sound 
advice might be found from time to time, which the great 
political parties might benefit by following. And throughout 
it all the genius of the editor ever shone resplendent. 

Father Lambert's English style was as if made for the oc- 
casion. It was the fitting hilt for the keen Damascus blade of 
his logic and the still keener one of his wit. His strong-fibred 
Anglo-Saxon is for the most part without ornament of any 
kind. His command of language never fails him. The language 
seems to grow out of the thought, as if by necessity. Like 
the linotype or the monotype which manufactures the type as 
it prints the line or the letter, so the intensity of his thought 
seems to manufacture the word or the expression needed for 
the required effect. We are never at a loss to understand his 
meaning. Even in the full torrent of his vehemence, his lan- 
guage is as pellucid as a polished mirror. 

As was his style so was the man. In spite of his unassum- 
ing simplicity, no one could be in Father Lambert's presence 
for half an hour without being forced to conclude that he was 
in the company of a remarkable man. He was a striking per- 
sonality in every way. His tall, commanding figure, broad but 
slightly drooping shoulders (especially in his later years), his 
massive head and long silver hair; the "cliff-like brow"; the 
"eminent nose" like that of Carlyle's Abbot Samson, the keen 
but kindly eye whose kindling into humor was the twinkling of 
the blue sun, Vega all went to make up a presence that, wholly, 
without what is commonly known as magnetic power, impressed 
all with whom he came in contact. In the days of his early 
priesthood he was thin and gaunt, and many liked to trace a re- 
semblance between himself and Abraham Lincoln ; and in point 
VOL. xcn. 22 



338 FATHER LAMBERT [Dec., 

of fact the resemblance might be extended to the mental endow- 
ments also. Of Lincoln he was one of the most ardent admirers. 
His war experience had saturated him with the personality of 
the great martyr. His fund of anecdote on this topic alone 
was exhaustless. When he talked of his war experience it was 
like a breath from the battlefield. But his strain of thought 
was seldom sad. Indeed, quite the contrary, his mood of 
mind was ever mirthful, and " in the little Olympus of his own 
favorites" the geniality and humanity of the man kept ever 
bursting into sparkling wit, or quiet humor, or ceaseless anec- 
dote inimitably told. 

And now, briefly, for the lesson. The second generation 
of intellectual giants in the Catholic Church in the United 
States has passed away. The last of the Romans sleeps his 
last sleep among his own loved and loving people on the gen- 
tle slope in the Scottsville churchyard. The Heckers, the 
Brownsons, the Corcorans, the Lamberts have gone the way 
of their intellectual ancestors the Englands, the Kenricks, the 
Spaldings. Nothing is more striking in a comparison of these 
two generations than the difference in the dangers with which 
each in its turn was confronted. The first generation needed 
profound theologians; the second called for profound philoso- 
phers. The evolution of error during the past half century has 
been astounding in its rapidity. Little over half a century 
separates the Notes on Ingersoll from Milner's End of Contro- 
versy ; but, in subject-matter, the End of Controversy is more 
closely related to Beliarmine's Disputations or the Theologica 
Dogmata of Petavius than to the Notes on Ingersoll. 

The days of religious discussions, like that of Pope and 
Maguire, or that of Hughes and Breckenridge, have gone and 
gone forever. On the great battleground of truth there is a 
new alignment of forces. The devout Catholic and the pious 
Protestant are now fighting shoulder to shoulder in defense of 
a common cause revealed religion. Up from the desert of 
doubt and the barren wastes of agnosticism come marching, 
with heavy tread that shakes the earth, the forces of the neo- 
pagan. They come in the name of science, in the name of 
philosophy, in the name of progress and enlightenment. They 
claim to possess all the intellectual weapons of our time; but 
their aim is to lay waste our Christian civilization and erase it 
with fire and sword. The voice is the voice of progress, but 



i9io.] FATHER LAMBERT 339 

the hands are the hands of Attila and Genseric. The danger 
has forced Protestant and Catholic to lay aside their conten- 
tions and face the common foe. It is precisely the same enemy 
that Father Lambert in his Notes on Ingersoll and Tactics of 
Infidels so successfully routed. They have returned to fight 
under the same banner, but with slightly changed weapons; 
but the new swords are not one whit stauncher than those which 
the logic of Father Lambert shattered in a thousand fragments. 
The greatest difficulty now is that there is danger of some of 
our Protestant allies becoming panic-stricken. Occasionally, 
too, an intellectual weakling in the Catholic ranks finds that his 
heart fails him, and he succumbs without a struggle. There is 
just one way to success in the conflict, and that is the method 
employed by Father Lambert. We must abandon the defense 
as he did Christianity will take care of itself and concentrate 
all our efforts in such an attack on the enemy that they will 
soon be on the defensive themselves. We must carry the war 
into Africa. The moment Father Lambert turned the search- 
light of his logic on Ingersoll his victory was assured. In 
girding our loins for the battle and arming for the fray, we 
may not have Father Lambert's 

" Heart-affluence in discursive talk 

From household fountains never dry ; 
The critic clearness of an eye, 
That saw through the all the muses' walk; 

"Seraphic intellect and force 

To seize and throw the doubts of man ; 
Impassioned logic, which outran 
The hearer in its fiery course " ; 

but he has shown us the proper weapons for the warfare; he 
has pointed out the road ; he has blazed a path ; he has left 
us a model. But, above all, he has left us the undying ex- 
ample of a brave and loyal Catholic heart, a Christian patience 
that never faltered, a perseverance that never flagged, a cour- 
age that never wavered, a zeal that never drooped or lan- 
guished, a faith and hope that sealed his every work and 
riveted him to that work to the end. 




THE WAYSIDE STATIONS. 

BY JEANIE DRAKE. 

N the breakfast room of the Tower of Babel there 
was the usual hum of talk. This was not, of 
course, the real name of the house, but had been 
given it by the American girl, on account of its 
picturesque medley of tongues and nationalities. 
She was talking now to Franziska, the landlord's rosy daughter, 
moving about among the coffee-trays. " It is your policemen 
I am interested in, Fraiilein their absence, rather. Are there 
none at all in Seeberg ?" 

"We had one once," said Franziska, with modest pride; 
" but he resigned after a year. His conscience forced him to. 
He had not enough to do he made not one arrest." 

" How is that for Arcadia ! " laughed the German Baron, 
who was also at the table. "But, possibly, there is much in- 
dulgence as to conduct in such a place. There would surely 
have been arrests if it had been in Germany." 

" But, certainly," said the. American girl with impatience, 
"for that is the Land of Verboten, and one must have a per- 
mit to breathe." 

Her aunt glanced at her restrainingly, and she continued 
more pacifically: "But I have wondered to see how simple 
and how honest the plain people here are. The baker comes 
every morning to early Mass, and he leaves his tray outside 
the door, with no protection but a sheet of paper. The smell 
of the hot rolls and cakes is appetizing, even to me. But the 
little girls and boys pass in and out unwatched, and he loses 
nothing. That could not happen in all places." 

"But the things are his only," said Franziska uncompre- 
hending. 

" Helena," her aunt said to her later, "why should we 
linger over Christmas on these heights? When we were 
across the lake, down there in the midst of vivid summer 
liie, I could understand." 

"Yes; that was fascinating, too. The visitors of all kinds, 
fashionable and unfashionable, crowding the quais under the 



i9io.] THE WAYSIDE STATIONS 341 

chestnuts. The immense hotels, with their glow and sparkle 
of flowers and Paris fashions and music and electric lights. 
And the steamboats splashing and churning their way through 
the green and blue and violet waters of the lake. And the 
old town, with its gray, medieval walls and towers, and at night 
all springing into fiery outline, and diadems of stars on the 
heights above the rushing river. But I love this, too : this 
tiny village which mountain and lake so cunningly hide 
with such views of the high Alps. And isn't this quaint, old- 
time chalet delightfully absurd ? To go to bed by candle-light 
in this year of progress ! You know I am great friends with 
all the village folk. The people in the house are amusing, too. 11 

" If you regard them as amusing only/ 1 said Mrs. Ross slowly. 

Instead of the blush she, perhaps, expected, Helena looked 
grave and a little pale. " It is quite true, Aunt/' she an- 
swered, "that Baron von Sternach is staying here on my 
account, and that I do not wish him to stay; and, yet, do 
not quite wish him to go." 

" He is very fine-looking and soldierly," said Mrs. Ross 
hesitantly, " and of old family, I am told, and large estates. 
But, in married life, difference of nationality, sometimes, and 
of faith of faith above all " 

"Dearest," said the girl, "there is nothing for or against 
international marriages which I have not told myself. It might 
be easier to decide if he went away for a while; but he will 
not, he says, lose one moment of his leave." 

"Do you remember," asked her aunt, laughing nervously, 
"your uncle's charge when he saw us off? 'Do not, Helena,' 
he said, 'bring me back any sort of princeling, for he would 
not have my blessing.'" 

"Oh, dear Aunt, why do we spoil the beautiful morning 
in this way ? I do not want to marry anybody. What I 
really want is to go skating with Mr. Chow-Chow." 

"Mr. Chow-Chow?" 

" The Siamese student. His real name is Chonimari Su- 
kariti; but that, you know, is quite impossible in daily inter- 
course. So I address him as 'Monsieur'; and speak of him 
to you as Mr. Chow-Chow." 

Mrs. Ross looked lovingly at the charming face which 
smiled at her from its frame of golden-brown hair under the 
skating-cap. 



342 THE WAYSIDE STATIONS [Dec., 

The Siamese student on the veranda threw away his ciga- 
rette at sight of her, and took her skates; for, being the son 
of a Government official, he was being educated in England. 
He was a mere boy in appearance and she told him maternally : 
" You smoke far too much." 

"It ees true," he agreed delightedly. "I know the good 
all the time. But I do the bad." 

" Like the rest of us," she answered, but abstractedly, for 
they were quickly come to the little frozen lake, set, like a 
jewel, between fir-covered heights. And she saw that she was 
not, for the morning, to be free from Von Sternach's presence 
as he, with others of the guests of the Pension Mathias, was 
already skimming the ice-field. 

" The Baron goes first-rate well," observed Mr. Chow-Chow 
dispassionately, kneeling to secure Helena's skates. 

She felt an unreasonable impulse to dissent, hearing a 
chorus from the fluttering company of girls and their mothers, 
meant, it almost seemed, to reach the skater's ears. 

" Perfect ! Fine ! He does the figure eight admirably. 
And now the pirouette ! And the double spiral and the grape- 
vine I Those officers such skaters as they are ! Beautiful ! 
Wonderful ! " 

The Baron held his uncovered head well up to the crisp, 
frosty air. His arms were folded upon his broad chest. His 
military cape blew back from his tall, erect figure, as he swept 
hither and thither with serious self-sufficiency, his gaze light- 
ening only when it perceived Helena. 

" These silly girls ! " she thought, " they give a man excuse 
for posing. He imagines himself, perhaps, like the young 
Goethe skating in Kaulbach's picture which I detest." 

" I will not go on the ice this morning," she suddenly in- 
formed the mildly-surprised Siamese. He detached her skates 
reluctantly, and looked a moment after her receding form. 

With Helena went, for a while, the troubled indecision so 
constant in these days. It had been pleasant in the greater 
town across the long lake, whose steeples and towers were yet 
visible on a clear day, to have a ballroom partner, handsome 
and expert; an escort at afternoon tea or concert in hotel or 
Kursaal, where men were few among the silk and lace and 
chatter of the maidens, Pleasanter yet was it to have an at- 
tendant on lake or river handling oar or sail with equal skill; 



i9io.] THE WAYSIDE STATIONS 343 

above all, to receive the flattery of romantic devotion from 
one of his undoubted rank and wealth. But this she knew for 
gratified vanity in herself. The puzzle came when, following 
her, against some protest, to the secluded little village on the 
higher plateau, he pressed his suit with directness and senti- 
ment. Would one thrill at the ever beautiful: "Du bist wie 
eine Blurae," without some feeling for the speaker ? Could the 
title of Baroness and two or three castles, with some distinc- 
tion at court, alone actuate, when the castle's owner was fine- 
looking and ardent ? She missed something in him. Was it 
the deference paid to women at home? He would have her 
talk nothing but music, poetry, sports He smiled tolerantly 
if she were ever more earnest. She fancied he frowned intol- 
erantly at faintest allusion to things spiritual. Once, when 
asked if he could conceive of laws without a law-maker, he 
had shrugged and murmured something about "childishness." 

All at once, so young she was and bright the day, she dis- 
missed her perplexities, and climbing the snowy steeps she 
turned to look down upon the little village of Seeberg. " The 
dear little church," she murmured, glancing below to where a 
forest chapel reared its belfry against the snow. From that 
direction now hurried Franziska, vivid colors of carrots and red 
cabbage, broccoli, beets, and apples shining through the meshes 
of her netted marketing- bag. 

" Why didn't you let one of the waitresses go to market 
this morning?" asked Helena. "You, who so love skating!" 

"They love it, too," said Franziska simply. "Besides, I 
wanted to attend Mass. I offered it for the basket- maker's 
Adelheid. She is not happy lately." 

" No ? I am sorry. Shall I go and see her on the way 
back ? " 

" If you will be so good. It will surely cheer her." 

Helena struck across a footway cleared in the snow meadows, 
then up some stone steps to where, on a higher road, stood 
the basket-maker's work-shop and home. Passing the open 
door, where baskets of all conceivable shapes showed, large 
and small, square and round, and especially the useful flat kind 
to be strapped with leather thongs to the back of the climber, 
she reached a little chalet. It showed its toyhouse outlines 
and its gay coloring against the wintry atmosphere, with 
empty window boxes now, which in summer were aglow with 



344 THE WAYSIDE STATIONS [Dec,, 

vivid blossoms. In the neat kitchen, which was also dining- 
room and parlor, Adelheid gave superfluous touches of her 
broom to an already speckless floor. Helena had long ago re- 
marked in church this tall and stately Swiss maiden, with her 
clear, direct gaze, her poise of carriage and manner, her crown 
of fair hair. Her own gift of sympathy had quickly made 
them acquainted. This was one of the subjects which caused 
the Baron to raise his eyebrows. 

" One helps the poor and one's tenants, certainly. But to 
talk freely with them of their affairs, it is quite unnecessary 
condescension." 

She was not thinking of him just now, however, but won- 
dering how she could reach the cause of Adelheid's depression; 
and, indeed, it was not long before the girl gave to her tact- 
ful interest full confidence. 

"I have grown up with both, do you see, Mademoiselle, 
have studied and played with both; but always have Anton 
and I understood that we were sweethearts to be married 
some day. And many times has Jost troubled and made love 
and interfered. He has a wicked temper Jost and rough 
ways. And lately, I am ever afraid of their quarreling. For 
both are wood-carvers, do you see; and Anton took the prize 
last year at the Exposition in Berne; and then he won in the 
ski contest at Davos, which Jost had expected. And both 
came home from the fair with me, and they disputed, and Jost 
threw his stein at Anton in this very room and before my 
father, who said : ' Do you mean to make my daughter the 
canton's talk with such doings? You both know well that 
Gottlieb Fiihrer keeps his promises. If ever I hear a whisper 
of a quarrel between you again, neither of you shall ever have 
her.' And my father is a strict man of his word." 

"We must keep things smooth, then," said Miss Keith, who 
had been a frequent visitor to both carvers' ateliers. " And 
and, Adelheid, could you not hurry the wedding a little ? " 

" My linen chest is not quite filled," said Adelheid. " Fran- 
ziska, for all her duties in that great chalet, has had hers 
ready long ago." 

" I did not know Franziska was betrothed." 

" She is not exactly. But before you came the Swiss 
gentleman in the house Herr Miihlin paid her many compli- 
ments. Now he says he cannot tell which would be better for 



i9io.] THE WAYSIDE STATIONS 345 

the son of a Regterungsrath a wunderschon American Fraii- 
lein, or a good, plain Swiss Hausfrau." 

" Upon my word ! " said Helena laughing. " Well, Adelheid, 
do not fret and things will come straight. Adieu.' 1 She went 
her way, laughing again. So the Baron, waiting in front of 
the Pension Mathias, had a smile not meant for him, and for- 
got to reproach her with her long absence. 

That afternoon it was Christmas week he drove Helena in 
his light sleigh, over the frozen roads to the higher plateau. 
There was nothing masterful about his manner now. On the 
contrary, the premature attitude of ownership, the pronounced 
air of masculine superiority from nature and training, were 
almost hidden under the careful protection which tucked soft 
fur robes about her, and paid her many compliments. He 
helped her out, not without pressure of the little, fur-mittened 
hand, and she must take part in the sport of coasting under 
its foreign name of la luge and show her familiarity with 
the bob-sleigh of her native land. 

"We will try the skis now," he said abruptly, when they 
hauled the bob up after a few flying, animated descents. 
Helena arched her brows a little, but made no objection, for 
skating and coasting had been childhood's amusements, and 
the skis still held the charm of novelty. They had the lower 
plateau practically to themselves only a few beginners there, 
warily making essay on the long, pointed skis, which so mar- 
velously conquer winter's obstacles to swift locomotion in the 
frozen lands. 

"This you do well, too," said the Baron with indulgence, 
" the wild, white German winter should hold no terror for you." 
She had, indeed, but few accidents, and, presently sped along, 
rosy, breathless, tingling with excitement. 

"Now to the snow-plain," he said, and driving her to a 
smooth, wide field of snow, detached his trained horse, and 
gave the reins into her hands, that the animal might draw her 
along upon her skis. To her delighted amaze she was moving 
like the wind across the snow- fields, in rapid, smooth, exhila- 
rating flight. 

When, reluctantly, the after-glow rosing the white moun- 
tain tops warned them of the short afternoon's end, and they 
drove back, she sighed softly, with retrospective pleasure. 
" Why not ? Why not ? " she thought, wrapped in his luxurious 



346 THE WAYSIDE STATIONS [Dec., 

bear- skins and listening to his words of wooing. " Why must one 
reflect and analyze and hesitate forever ? What if he did seem 
to regard religion as a thing outworn and outgrown, and the 
Church as an obsolete institution ? What if his attitude towards 
woman must inevitably be affected by lack of spirituality ? 
What if she should be condemned to lifelong silence on things 
of grave and eternal import?" His low- toned talk and the 
horse's bells soothed and rested her, and she felt herself drift- 
ing and found it pleasant to drift. 

The next glowing December afternoon found Helena again 
on the ski slopes, where her growing skill gave increased de- 
light. Another essay at skikjoring had, however, given her, 
after its glowing exultation, a little lassitude. " We will let 
the horse rest for a while," said Von Sternach, " and we will 
climb to a height I know on the mountain's farther side, 
where hardly any one goes, and, when you are entirely ready, 
we may ski down where we like." This led them quite away 
from all and alone, with the great snow peaks the only wit- 
nesses of Helena's continuous improvement. 

"Himmel!" said the Baron suddenly, "those fellows have 
gone to steeper slopes than any one. They train, perhaps, 
for the races." 

She followed the direction of his gaze and up high on the 
mountain-side she saw two men, whom, in the crystal- clear 
air, she recognized as the rivals for Adelheid's favor Jost and 
Anton both famous for their skiing. They had approached 
each other from different points, but now, being on the same 
slope, seemed to be speaking with one another. It was too 
far for voices to carry, but, from their gestures, they were 
fiercely excited. Presently one of them, with action of protest 
and dismissal, leaped high in air to a point far below, landing 
firm and fair. Instantly the other sprang from the sprung- 
hugel in pursuit, continuing the quarrel. 

"That is an awkward platform for an unfriendly argu- 
ment," observed the Baron, " narrow and steep and close 
to a precipice just behind." 

He had hardly spoken when the two men neared each 
other and were indistinguishable in a flurry of snow and 
skis, from which one had disappeared when it cleared ; the 
other, wavering and balancing in the skis for a moment or 
two, also went from their sight around a curve. 



i9io.] THE WAYSIDE STATIONS 347 

" It was an accident/' said Helena breathlessly. 

"It was deliberate," said the Baron firmly. "I will at 
once lay information. Do you know the men ? " 

" At this distance ? But, see, how late we are, and so far 
from the Pension Mathias." 

The moon, indeed, lighted their homeward way during 
which they spoke little, the Baron's instinct of stern disci- 
pline occupying his thoughts. 

"We do not actually know anything," said Helena after a 
pause. 

" I more than suspect everything," he answered briefly. 
"The lower classes are sufficiently lawless without our en- 
couragement." 

She felt suddenly chilled and repelled ; and was, with a 
girl's quick changes of mood, glad, after dinner, to escape his 
society on being told there was some one asking for her 

It was Adelheid waiting outside, in the snow, the Pension's 
lights showing her handsome, anxious face. " Pardon, Made- 
moiselle, for disturbing you. And you will be cold out in 
this frost." 

" No ; I have my warm wraps." 

They walked together up the narrow path which led to 
the little forest chapel of St. Waldemar. The wind was rising 
and fluttering the snow down from red roofs and the white, 
heavily burdened fir-tree tops. Icicles glistened from well- 
covers and gutter-spouts. 

"See, dear Mademoiselle," said Adelheid, "I know I 
should not trouble you, but perhaps you can advise me. 
You may have heard that Jost has been picked up on a foot- 
hill of the Senken Pass. He would never have been found, 
but that his skis caught and held him from the deeper preci- 
pice. He is still unconscious, and his leg broken. I, with 
others, might have thought it an accident, but to- night Anton 
came to me looking quite wild, and said" the Swiss girl 
caught her breath "that that, he was really a murderer, for 
that he was in dreadful anger when, on the mountain-side, he 
had thrown Jost backward and over. He had not meant kill- 
ing, perhaps, but was in wild rage, when Jost insulted me 
and threw himself upon him. I have sent him away forever; 
for it could not be right for us to marry after that ! And 
there is my father, who says many times : ' Gottlieb Fuhrer 



348 THE WAYSIDE STATIONS [Dec., 

never breaks his word. 1 And he must know when Jost can 
speak. But, if he did not even, it could not be right after 
such deed ! " and she broke into low sobbing. 

"See, now, Adelheid no, don't cry"; said the American, 
thinking rapidly. "Where is Jost?" 

" At the Sisters' Hospital." 

" And where can I speak to Anton ? " 

" He wanted to give himself up, but has promised me to 
say nothing until certain news comes from Jost. He may be 
now in his atelier." 

"I will try. We can go there now; and you may wait 
for me in the wood." 

A few minutes' walk brought them in front of the young 
wood-carver's workroom and he admitted the American at 
once. His rugged though frank and manly face showed signs 
of such recent deep emotion as prevented surprise at her ap- 
pearance at this hour. Nor did he suspect Adelheid's nearness. 

"I have heard everything," said Helena quickly, "and 
you may trust me. But you must not think of giving your- 
self up, nor say one word until we know something certain 
from the hospital. Jost may not remember; or or he may 
forgive." 

"That is not likely," he answered simply, "but I will say 
nothing now, if it is your wish and hers. That I am to lose 
her after all my life's hope is but a just penance for such 
sin." 

Helena hesitated, but only said : " Hope for the best, 
Anton. Good-night ! and may God assist you." 

"Good-night, Mademoiselle, and I thank you." 

Adelheid went back with her to the Pension, where the 
Baron paced the veranda, and looked displeasedly upon the 
girls' parting, " I have told you they would presume upon 
your kindness," he said abruptly. "Here has that girl's ob- 
trusion wasted a whole evening ! " 

"Not to me," laughed Helena, and slipped away. 
The next day being Christmas Eve, there was much to do, 
for Franziska would have a tree with some trifle for each one 
upon it, and Helena assisted in its decoration. 

" It must be this afternoon," said Franziska, " for all will 
want to go on the ice to-night by the full moon. It will be 
a pretty sight with all of you in fancy dress and Papa will 



i9io.J THE WAYSIDE STATIONS 349 

have music for them to skate by and the yodlers will call 
down from the upper gorge for the echo. What shall you 
wear, Mademoiselle ? " 

" I think I shall not be there ; for I am going to Mid- 
night Mass, and I have promised Adelheid to be with her first 
to dress the altar. Another pipe for your father, Franziska ? 
He has a great many." 

" Every year I ask him what he would like. Every year 
he says a pipe. Now, does that not look beautiful ? " 

This important task over, Helena walked briskly and alone 
to the hospital on the monastery heights. The sisters, to 
whom she had been most generous, admitted her willingly to 
the ward where Jost was, at present, the only patient. 

" He is quite conscious to-day," said Sister Melchior. "His 
injuries are less than at first supposed. His broken leg is the 
worst; but he knows, or tells, but little of how the accident 
happened." 

The young lady had bought several pieces of Jost's carving 
during her stay in Seeberg, so her interest in the surly work- 
man was explicable. 

"I was sorry to hear of your fall, Jost," she said sweetly, 
when Sister Melchior was called away. " They happen most 
often to the best skieurs, I hear, for they are the most bold 
and brave. Perhaps you were racing with some one." 

He looked sullen enough, turning his bandaged face to the 
wall for some instants, then he said roughly: 

" I do not need to] race as all know me for the better 
runner. But I was pursuing some one, yes, I do not care who 
knows it, for I meant him to hear what I had in my mind. And 
the ski broke, or I stepped too far back, that I cannot re- 
member." 

" It would be a pity if Gottlieb Fiihrer should hear that 
you were with Anton, for Gottlieb is a man of his word." 

"You know about that, then? Well, I do not mean old 
Gottlieb to hear, for I am not such a fool as to give him ex- 
cuse to put me out of his house. I have mentioned no one's 
name, not even to you, Mademoiselle; and it is easy for a 
ski to upset one." 

"There is a German officer at our house," said Helena, 
rising and speaking carelessly. " It is thought he saw you on 
the mountain with some one. If he should be asking ques- 
tions" 



350 THE WAYSIDE STATIONS [Dec., 

"It is none of his business/ 1 said Jost, "and he will get 
nothing from me." 

"You are very wise,", Helena commended, and presently 
went away. 

Among her other gifts on the afternoon's tree, was an 
oval package: "To be opened privately." In her room she 
found it to be a fine miniature of the Baron, in uniform and 
orders, framed in silver and with a card: "To keep this 
as is hoped is to mean that you accept, for always, your 
devoted OTTO VON STERNACH. 

She did not show it to Mrs. Ross, but closed the case, and 
put it away thoughtfully. After dinner the guests dispersed to 
their rooms to attire themselves in this or that pretty or fan- 
tastic costume, with the delight which maturity, no less than 
childhood, takes in " making believe." 

The Baron secured a minute with Helena to urge low- 
toned insistence that she should skate with him. " My last 
evening, as you know my leave ends to-morrow and there 
is something I must know." He looked flushed and very 
handsome in his eagerness. 

" Come to church with me, instead," she smiled. 

" I could not be weak enough so to spend such a night/ 1 
he said, irritated. " But will be here to meet you later." 

The house, in a little time, was quite empty and deserted. 
Mrs. Ross having joined, for a while, the spectators at the 
skating field ; and even Franziska and the waitresses taking part 
in the brilliant scene. Helena felt, suddenly, very lonely. 
Her youth and temperament had invited participance, but 
meaning to receive Communion, she could not feel the ex- 
citement of such a scene the appeals of her suitor, the pos- 
sibility of being too late a fitting preparation. Wrapped in 
furs, she presently went out and was met by Adelheid, show- 
ing in the moonlight the flat-sided basket strapped on her 
shoulders and filled with house-flowers and vines for the altar. 
The church was already lighted, and the two girls went in and 
busied themselves with their work, exchanging but necessary 
words of consultation. A woman came and laid a little child 
on one of the benches, covering him up. 

" Keep an eye on him for me, Adelheid," she said, " while 
I run down and see the skaters before Mass." 

Adelheid nodded and smiled, though abstractedly, her sad 
preoccupation being, indeed, evident to Helena, in contrast to 



i9io.] THE WAYSIDE STATIONS 351 

the general Christmas gayety. They were through at last, and 
it was still some time before the bell would ring. 

" Let us go up higher on the hillside," said Helena. " It 
is a wonderful night. We can go by the Capuzinerweg, be- 
hind the monastery, and so not meet the people coming to 
church." 

" I must take the child, then," said Adelheid, and lifted him 
to her strong young shoulder. 

The way they chose was quite steep and narrow, an old 
road and less frequented than the wider street below, and 
here, along the monastery wall, there were Stations of the 
Cross at intervals. Each in its shrine, protected from the 
weather. They went in silence, looking out over the beautiful, 
solemn expanse of white mountains, crowned here and there 
with sparkling diadem of electric lights at the shining great 
lake, with its circling villages and distant town. From the 
skating field below was wafted to their ears, now and then, an 
orchestral strain of music, and even a faint echoed murmur of 
laughing voices. 

"You would have been the prettiest and sweetest there, 
Mademoiselle," said Adelheid. " There was time before Mass." 

" I was not in humor for masquerading," said her com- 
panion abstractedly. Both girls spoke very low, as though 
they feared to profane the lovely night. As they turned a 
curve in the lonely road a crackling of the snow sounded and 
a dark figure appeared at a little distance. They stood a mo- 
ment close under shadow of the low-hanging, heavily snow- 
laden fir-branches. 

" There is nothing to fear in our roads usually," whispered 
Adelheid, " but but in holiday time the wine shop, per- 
haps" 

She stopped, for a murmur reached her now, and it was 
that of supplication, humble, penitent, and earnest. A man's 
form, broad and sturdy, went reverently from shrine to shrine, 
kneeling in the snow at each,^as many processions of pilgrims 
had done in the times past. Here, alone in the night, under 
the shining, wonderful heavens, he made his Stations of the 
Cross, seeking remorsefully pardon for homicidal fury. In the 
deep shadow the girls followed softly, and Helena sought a 
glimpse of Adelheid's face, fearing to find it express as fixed 
purpose as when she had banished this life-long lover. 

" He makes his penance, she murmured. " Jost is better 



352 \THE WAYSIDE STATIONS [Dec. 

your father need not know if the dear Lord forgives, then, 
Adelheid, you " 

But Adelheid spoke not a word, her eyes upon the rever- 
ent figure which went in front, kneeling and rising and kneel- 
ing again. The road made here a long loop, and turning upcn 
itself came out, with the last Station, behind the church. The 
young man here paused again, finishing fervently his peniten- 
tial devotion. As he rose, crossing himself, from his knees, 
Adelheid stepped slowly forward and stood in the silver moon- 
light before him. Her long, dark mantle fell about her in 
straight folds, from its hood her fine, calm face looked at him, 
the little flaxen-haired child slumbered on her shoulder. 

" Du heilige Jungfrau!" muttered the startled young man. 

"No, no"; she smiled upon him. "Thou art not yet 
worthy of miracles, my poor Anton. But thou mayest still 
deserve, if our Lord wills " she gave him her hand, and so 
they passed in together, forgetting Helena. 

But it seemed to the young American girl that it was to 
her a miracle had come. Quite suddenly the perplexities and 
irresolutions of these last few months cleared themselves away 
under the Christmas moon. These two humble lovers now, she 
was shown, so united even after trouble, mutually helpful, one 
in faith, going together, hand in hand, to prayer. The mirage 
of rank, wealth, worldly brilliancy, cleared itself away farther 
than the gay skaters below were removed from these simple, 
childlike worshippers at the Lord's cradle on the heights. She 
saw now, with vision made distinct, where peace and rest and 
harmony must come, with unity, in life's journeying together. 
So, with mind all tranquil and resolved, went in to sing : 
' Adeste fideles Icsti triumphantes" 

"What is it, my dear?" asked her aunt, impressed by her 
serene buoyancy, when they returned from Mass to find the 
merry-makers not yet come in. 

"Just a package I am sending back to the Baron a pres- 
ent quite too costly for me to accept. As he goes in the 
early morning, my card wishes him 'bon voyage.'" 

" We will spend next Christmas at home with your uncle, 
and and other friends, God willing," said Mrs. Ross, with ap- 
parent irrelevance. 

" It is now one o'clock," said Franziska, " and I wish you 
a happy Christmas, Fraulein Helena." 




THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL IN DENMARK AND ICELAND. 

BY J. FABER SCHOLFIELD. 

jN no part of Europe is the story of the religious 
revolution of the sixteenth century more dismal 
than in the Scandinavian kingdoms. Nowhere 
else, except perhaps in the eastern districts of 
Prussia, does the light of faith seem to have been 
so utterly extinguished. Nowhere else does the extraordinary 
maxim of "Reformation" times: " Cujus regio, ejus religio" 
find so complete an illustration. It is only in our own days 
that the Second Spring has begun to dawn on those noble 
lands of the North, that can boast of so grand a history and 
so heroic a people. To the English-speaking nations there 
should be a deep and special interest in all that concerns the 
well-being of the northern kingdoms; we are united to them 
by blood- relationship, by a thousand points of contact in our 
national histories, by common characteristics and common sym- 
pathies.* 

In this short paper I propose only to deal with that restora- 
tion as it has so far manifested itself in Denmark, and, at 
greater length, of the more recent but not less hopeful growth 
of the Church and the faith in Iceland, Denmark's far-away 
dependency in the northern sea. 

King Christian III. of Denmark, who reigned from 1536 to 
1559, has left a name which may almost stand beside that of 
Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, of infamous memory, for the ruth- 
less industry with which, having himself apostatized from the 
faith, he seduced his people from their allegiance. There was 
a peculiar venom in the way in which the change of religion 
was carried out in Scandinavia. Much of the old form was 
retained, eviscerated of its reality and its meaning. A Lutheran 
church retains a good deal of Catholic furniture, and to out- 
siders would convey something of a general Catholic aspect. 
Altars, crucifixes (of immense size in some places), lights, pic- 

*A Danish princess has twice shared the English throne; the " Sea-kings' daughter 
from over the sea," Alexandra, the Queen-Mother, has a place of warm affection in English 
hearts ; and her daughter, as Queen Consort of Norway, has forged yet another link in the 
chain that binds the English people to Scandinavia. 
VOL. XCII. 23 



354 THR CATHOLIC REVIVAL [Dec., 

tares, here and there even an empty tabernacle (as at Ntirn- 
berg), rood-screens (as frequently in Eastern-Prussia), the chasu- 
ble (in Norway), and various ceremonies, all serve to give this 
species of Protestantism a completely different outward character 
from the chilling bareness of every Anglican church until the 
"Oxford Movement," and of every Presbyterian and English 
Nonconformist place of worship to this day. The Protestant 
Sunday morning service in Norway is popularly known as " High 
Mass," though the communion may not be, and indeed rarely is, 
celebrated. Some years ago I reviewed for an ecclesiastical 
newspaper, a small manual, translated from the Norse, with this 
very title of " High Mass " ; at many points in the service the 
traces of the old faith might be recognized, but they were mere 
external traces in the most extraordinary and incongruous jumble 
a jumble even worse, liturgically speaking, than the confused 
fragments of the Catholic rite that make up the communion 
service of the Anglican Prayer Book. In Sweden there is even 
a hierarchy, consisting of a Primate- Archbishop with a number 
of suffragans ; but, so far as I know, there is no serious claim on 
the part of these bishops to a Catholic character for their orders. 
Some Anglican churchmen would rejoice if such could be 
proved, and Bishop Gray, of Capetown, when he pronounced 
excommunication on Dr. Colenso, Anglican bishop in Natal, sent 
word of the sentence to the Archbishop of Upsala, as well as 
to various metropolitan dignitaries, Catholic and otherwise, 
including the Holy Father himself ! But, apart from all other 
considerations, the form of consecration as used in Sweden ap- 
pears hopelessly inadequate for any validity in the Catholic 
sense, the episcopate being conferred, apparently, as a gift from 
the king as the source of all authority. 

In 1860 there were only two Catholic congregations in 
Denmark, one at Copenhagen, the other at Fredericia, with 
two churches and two chapels ; only two schools, one hospital, 
one religious community the Sisters of St. Joseph. Now 
the capital alone reckons three parish churches, four churches 
belonging to religious, and thirteen other churches and chap- 
els twenty homes for the Most Holy Sacrament in what was 
so recently almost a desert. There are five elementary schools 
in Copenhagen, four secondary schools, and St. Andrew's Col- 
lege, with both classical and commercial courses, and possessing 
State recognition. In the provinces the advance has, natur- 
ally, not been so rapid; but they have between twenty and 



i9io.] DENMARK AND ICELAND 355 

thirty churches and chapels, and at least fourteen Catholic 
schools. For one hospital forty years ago there are now 
eleven, besides three sanatoria at Aalborg, Dalum, and Esb- 
jerg. Fifteen religious communities, eight for men, seven for 
women, are established in the country. The Catholic popula- 
tion is about 8,000; in summer there is a great immigration 
of Polish farm-hands, reaching to 12,000 or more at times, 
whose spiritual needs have to be provided for. 

It is, no doubt, still the day of small things. But the in- 
crease has been extraordinary, and we are justified in looking 
for great results in another generation. The time will come, 
as it has come in England and Scotland, when a restored 
hierarchy will take the place of the present Vicar-Apostolic. 
There is little or none of the absurd anti- Catholic spirit so 
prevalent in other places. The educational policy of the 
government is "a fair field and no favor"; and Catholic 
schools, properly qualified, receive precisely the same recogni- 
tion and aid as any others. It may be that the very con- 
servatism of the Lutheran bodies, in externals especially, will 
insensibly make the Church's work more easy. They are, 
indeed, cut off from the unity and sacramental Hie of the 
Church; but a religion that teaches "consubstantiation" (how- 
ever unphilosophical) is at any rate not likely to lead its 
members to blasphemous hatred of our Lord's Sacramental 
Presence. The lately abolished Royal declaration oath, of 
which there has been so much discussion this year, and which 
is now happily taken off the statute book of the United King- 
dom, could scarcely have been framed by a legislature officially 
Lutheran in character. 

Such is the devotion and liberality of the Catholics of 
Denmark that many of the buildings belonging to the Church 
have a stateliness worthy of their high purpose, and are on a 
scale proportioned to the great work that has to be done. 
The novitiate of the Sisters of St. Joseph, in Copenhagen, is 
a splendid building ; while among the more conspicuous edi- 
fices in the provinces may be mentioned the church of the 
Jesuit Fathers at Aarhus, the mission buildings of St. Anna, 
Sundby, and the large and splendidly equipped hospitals at 
Esbjerg and Roskilde. All are more or less characteristically 
Danish in style, and carry on the best architectural traditions 
of the country. 

The restoration of the faith in Iceland is still more re- 



356 THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL [Dec., 

cent, and in some ways even more remarkable, than in Den- 
mark. Iceland had a glorious Catholic past, marked by devo- 
tion to the faith and the Apostolic See. To King Christian 
III. of Denmark it, too, owes its national apostasy. In order 
to allay the indignation of the people at the robbery of what 
they held most dear, the public worship was continued for a 
long time almost unchanged in externals. The plain-song was 
still chanted to the old Latin words, and until the earlier part 
of the eighteenth century the service of the Mass was almost 
unchanged in both text, and, with regard to the choral parts, 
in note. The only change was that the so-called consecration 
followed, instead of preceded, the Paternoster. Until recent 
times the Lutheran bishop wore on festal occasions the cope 
which Pope Paul III. had sent to Jon Arason, the last Catho- 
lic Bishop of Holar, who died a martyr for the faith, and 
worthily closed the long line of Icelandic Catholic bishops. 
To-day the cope, with many other memorials of Catholic days, 
statues, crucifixes, and sacred vessels, lies in the museum at 
Reykjavik. 

The Abbe Boudoin of Rheims visited the island in 1850! 
and found traces of Catholic tradition and practice still exist- 
ing. In many families hymns in praise of the Holy Mother 
of God, of which the words and tune were handed down from 
generation to generation, were sung. This last relic of better 
times seems now to have disappeared. But so great was the 
devotion to Mary in old times that Iceland was well styled 
her country. "The veneration to our dear Lady," writes Dr. 
Jon Thorkelson, the famous Icelandic author, " far exceeded 
that to the other saints; there were not less than 150 churches 
in Iceland dedicated to Mary." Dr. Thorkelson has made a 
careful collection of the pre-reformation hymns to our Lady; 
they would form a large volume, and we may hope their pub- 
lication may be found possible. In 1905 this eminent writer's 
son embraced the Catholic faith. 

Not so many years ago there was said to be but one Catho- 
lic resident in Iceland an aged woman, for whose spiritual 
ministrations a priest from Copenhagen sailed every year to 
Reykjavik. The old lady was repeatedly pressed to settle in 
Denmark, but refused to entertain the idea of exile in her last 
years. Most of the Danish steamers to Iceland touch at Leitb, 
and I have been told by one of the Edinburgh clergy that the 
priest who was accustomed to go on this mission of charity was 



DENMARK AND ICELAND 357 

well known to some of his brethren in the Scottish capital. 
A few years ago, however, the Church again won a footing in 
Ultima Thule, and the Marist Fathers are now in charge of a 
most hopeful and flourishing mission. The ignorance and pre- 
judice of the people as a whole are appalling, but are gradual- 
ly giving way before the logic of facts. If the matter were 
not so serious, one would be inclined to laugh heartily at the 
marvelous imaginations the good people have about Rome, the 
" Romish " Church, and her priests. The picture before their 
eyes of the ancient Church is not merely faded or obscure, 
but is the most absurd of caricatures. A woman who has re- 
cently come to the Church had no peace until, with the help 
of a fellow- Protestant learned in the Latin tongue, she had ex- 
amined the whole missal, because she had always heard that 
the priest at Holy Mass invoked a curse on the people assist- 
ing at the sacrifice, by some magical formula of adjuration 1 
Now she can bear witness as to her slight mistake ! 

This deep-rooted prejudice against the Church shows itself 
also in the commotion and indignation that arise over every 
conversion. " The unhappy one " is treated and described as 
an apostate even by his own parents and relations. It needs 
a brave man to take the step; but the converts are great- 
hearted souls, and, besides, as the tiny handful of Icelandic 
Catholics increases, the unfriendly feeling will disappear.;: 

The little chapel at Reykjavik is filled Sunday after Sunday, 
and often cannot accommodate all who come. The Icelander is 
naturally inquisitive, and wishes to see what is going on and to 
hear what is to be heard ; and in this way many come under the 
influence of the Light of Life. The Catholic Church reckons 
among her friends and admirers some of the most prominent and 
important men of the country. The celebrated Matthias Jochum- 
sson, a national poet and Lutheran pastor, thus expresses himself 
in the Nordei, the leading Icelandic newspaper : " All that is al- 
leged against the blessed Mother, the sublime Church, is false- 
hood, lies, and slander. All that the Catholic Church, that as- 
sembly of saints, preaches and teaches, has no other end but the 
sanctification of souls. 1 ' Wonderful testimony from the lips 
of a Protestant clergyman ! The superior of the Catholic mis- 
sion, Father Menlenberg, had asked the poet to translate 
some of the hymns of the Church into Icelandic. In his reply, 
under date of 19 October, 1906, Pastor Jochumsson writes: 



358 THE REVIVAL IN DENMARK AND ICELAND [Dec. 

" What you say is perfectly correct. Our national literature is 
rich in poems in the honor of Mary, and it is therefore very easy 
or an Icelandic poet to compose or translate songs in honor of 
our dear Lady; and I could never understand why our 'holy* 
father Luther so vehemently proscribed her veneration." 

A great support to the preaching of the faith exists in the 
hospital and school, both under the management of the Jose- 
phite Sisters from Chamberg. The first, a large and somewhat 
handsome building, proves that the Church is not forgetful of 
her Divine Master's commandment of charity, the second, that 
she is no enemy to culture and progress. The sisters have 
won universal affection and respect. The fame of the hospital 
has spread far through the country, and often sick people from 
great distances are brought there. The governor of Reykjavik 
has given the highest praise to both hospital and school in the 
public press. The school, which began in the poorest sur- 
roundings, at first only excited derision, and prophecies to the 
effect that it would soon come to an end. Very few families 
would entrust their children's education to its care. Now, ia 
spite of the fact that the Reykjavik schools are thoroughly up 
to date, and conform to all modern requirements, the success 
of the Catholic school has been phenomenal. The governor 
and a number of the leading families send their children to it 
even some Protestant clergymen follow their example. Every 
place in the small building, which accommodates fifty-six chil- 
dren, is filled. 

The state of the mission is, then, in every way most en- 
couraging. What is urgently needed is means to build, that 
a stately church and large, well-appointed school may shortly 
take the place of the present inadequate buildings. The prayers 
and warm interest of Catholics throughout the world will surely 
reach to this far outpost of the Church's warfare ; all who know 
something of the history and character of the island and its 
people will enter into the thoughts of Father Menlenberg, the 
devoted superior of the mission, when he declares it to be his 
opinion that, of all the nations which the " Reformation" tore 
from the loving heart of the Church, none deserve so much 
sympathy as the Icelanders. They were, indeed, sinned against 
rather than sinning ; and now the first signs, at least, are visi- 
ble of their return to their fathers' Faith. 




NOEL. 

BY CHRISTIAN REID. 

'TLBERT RIDGEWAY sighed deeply as he stepped 
from his cab and mounted the steps of the hand- 
some house before which he had paused on the 
city's most fashionable avenue. It was a sigh 
of sincere sadness, for he had just landed in 
America, and the last news he had heard before leaving Europe 
was of the sudden death of his brother. And now he was 
about to enter that brother's desolate home and meet his widow 
a meeting from which he shrank with all a man's dread of 
a woman's unrestrained emotion 

But the young creature, looking piteously thin and pale in 
her deep mourning, who presently came to him in the familiar 
library into which he was shown, was clearly making a strong 
effort at self-control Perhaps the eyes that had wept so many 
tears had for the present at least exhausted their fountain, for 
there was no outburst of weeping when they met; only the 
low, bitter cry: 

" Oh, Gilbert, did you ever dream that when you came 
back Hugh would be gone ? " 

" How could I have dreamed of it ? " Gilbert answered, as 
he held her hands in his warm, brotherly clasp. " It seems 
incredible that Hugh, so strong, so well when I went away, 
should be gone, and I be here! If only I had been taken in- 
stead of him ! There would at least have been no heart to 
break for my going out of the world." 

"I've thought of that," his sister-in-law said, with the 
sad candor of sorrow. " Of course no one could have wished 
you to die; but if it had to be you or Hugh " 

" There's no doubt which it should have been," Ridgeway 
agreed, sincerely enough. " But the Power that orders these 
things is incomprehensible," he added hopelessly. 

" I have no desire to try to comprehend it," Mrs. Ridgeway 
cried, as she sank into a chair. "I can see no reason why 
Hugh should have been snatched out of life. He was so good 
and so happy, and doing the best he could in every way* It 



NOEL 



[Dec., 



isn't only that I needed him so much that I haven't anything 
left to live for since he is gone but the world needed him, 
needed men like him; yet he is taken and others are left whose 
death would have been a blessing to their families and to so- 
ciety. It all seems an awful, purposeless muddle ! " she ended 
in a tone of mingled despair and resentment. 

It was a tone with which Ridgeway was not unacquainted. 
He had not lived his thirty-odd years in the world without 
having come into contact before this with that form of human 
sorrow which follows the death of one deeply beloved, and he 
had seldom failed to find, when grief was acute, the note of 
resentment strongly accentuated. "Why should this have hap- 
pened to me ? " is the instinctive cry of the naturally rebellious 
heart; and he had never seen his way to ask in turn: "Why 
should sorrow not come to you, as well as to another, since 
sooner or later it comes to all ? " 

He was as much at a loss as ever now to find something 
to take the place of this obvious but inadvisable question; and 
before he was able to do so Mrs. Ridgeway went on : 

" It is hard enough to bear at any time the terrible 
desolation and loneliness but at this time, when the whole 
world is rejoicing, it seems almost unbearable. I cannot en- 
dure to drive through the streets, or glance out of the windows. 
All the signs of Christmas festivity nearly set me wild. Fami- 
lies will be united, everybody will be happy, and 7 " 

Sobs finished the sentence; and as Ridgeway regarded the 
slight, black-clad form, so shaken by grief, a poignant realiza- 
tion of the sharp contrast between this sorrow and the rejoicing 
of the outer world of which she spoke, came to him also. He 
had himself felt that the Christmas decorations everywhere 
apparent, the brilliant shop-windows, the hurrying holiday 
crowds which filled .the streets, struck a note that jarred on 
his depression of spirit. For to him, as to many another, the 
great Christian feast had come to mean merely a time for family 
reunion, for gift-giving, for social entertainment, and on the 
part of a few, perhaps, for some dim remembrance of a Birth 
in the remote past from which this joy originally sprang. Yet 
it now occurred to him that in a world where death walked 
triumphant there must necessarily be many to whom the per- 
vading atmosphere of festivity was as painful as to the young 
widow who complained of it; and, so thinking, he said: 

" I understand how the associations of the season add a 



i9io.] NOEL 361 

fresh pang to your grief; but mightn't it help you to remem- 
ber that under all the rejoicing there are others suffering as 
you are, to whom Christmas must be as hard to bear as you 
find it ? " 

She shook her head. " I don't feel that it helps me at all/' 
she answered. " Why should it ? The suffering of other peo- 
ple doesn't make me less sad and desolate." 

Something about sharing in " the common lot " the sorrow 
which is the universal heritage of mankind rose to Ridgeway's 
lips; but he did not utter it, being wise enough to perceive 
that such suggestions could only irritate. For why, indeed, 
should there be any consolation in the fact that suffering is 
the law of life, unless we recognize a divine purpose behind 
this law? 

When he left the house, an hour later, his mood was many 
degrees more depressed than it had been when he entered. 
And this was not only due to the realization of his brother's 
death, which [the familiar setting of his home had brought, 
nor to the sad details of his illness that Mrs. Ridgeway had 
poured forth, nor yet to the influence of her despairing grief; 
but rather to a crushing sense of the helplessness of man in 
the stern grasp of fate, of the apparent futility of life, and the 
deep mystery of death. These are considerations which can be 
put aside as long as things go well with us many people are 
even able to put them aside when things go ill but to the 
reflective mind a sharp touch of personal loss and sorrow brings 
them insistently forward. They pressed heavily, with the weight 
of unanswered problems, upon Ridgeway now; and more than 
ever he felt impatient of the Christmas crowds in the streets, 
the lavish display, the suggestion of extravagance and unthink- 
ing pleasure on all sides. "It is like a pagan saturnalia !" he 
said to himself angrily. " What are they rejoicing about ? 
Has any form of human suffering been lessened by the event 
they are supposed to be celebrating ? And does one in a 
thousand even give a thought to that event?" 

It was as this question rose in his mind that he paused 
abruptly, for out of the deep porch of a church, past which 
he was walking, a figure with a strange air of familiarity sud- 
denly stepped, and the next moment he came face to face 
with a girl whose delicately featured, dark-eyed countenance 
had a foreign aspect, as well as the slender grace of her sim- 
ply but perfectly attired figure. 



362 NOEL [Dec., 

" Mademoiselle Noel ! " he cried, as they halted simulta- 
neously. "What an unexpected good fortune is this!" 

" It is very unexpected to me, M. Ridgeway," the girl an- 
swered in a musical voice, which spoke English with a French 
accent. " I did not know that you were even in this country. 

" I have only just landed," he answered. " And one of 
the things I proposed to myself was to look you up as soon as 
possible. I not only promised your friends in Paris to do so, 
but it is the greatest pleasure I have anticipated." 

" Really?" The smile which lighted her face was alto- 
gether charmiiag* "That is very kind of you, for naturally 
you must have so many pleasures in returning to your home, 
that to count a visit to a poor exile among them is a proof 
of what a good heart you possess." 

" I can't allow you to give me credit for anything of the 
kind," Ridgeway declared. " I haven't a good heart at all in 
the sense you mean; and instead of pleasures awaiting me at 
home, I have come back to face many disagreeable duties, and 
one sharp pain." 

: " I am so sorry." The simple words were full of an ex- 
quisite sympathy. "There are so many kinds of pain in the 
world, are there not ? But you have always appeared to be 
one who had escaped them." 

" I have escaped them, because I have led a very selfish 
life," he confessed. " Long ago I formed the deliberate in- 
tention of narrowing the channels by which pain attacks us. 
But I find that it is impossible to narrow them so closely 
that grief cannot enter." 

She nodded assent. "It is impossible," she said, "unless 
you do yourself the great injury of closing up your heart al- 
together." 

" Why do you speak of it as an injury ? " he asked. " I 
have been inclined to consider it a very desirable thing, if one 
could only compass it." 

" I speak of it as an injury, because it would frustrate the 
intention of the good God in giving us hearts," she answered. 
"And whatever frustrates His intentions must, in the end, 
work injury to us." 

" The good God I " Ridgeway repeated the tender French 
phrase meditatively. They had stepped back from the crowded 
pavement under the shadow of the porch from which she had 
issued, and so could speak quietly. " Now I might ask what 



i9io.] NOEL 363 

you can possibly know of Him or His intentions?" he went 
on, " but, granting all that you believe, I wonder how many 
people in your position would call Him the good God ! " 

Her eyes opened wide with startled wonder. "What do 
you mean ? " she queried. 

" Why, look at you ! " Ridgeway returned energetically. 
"See how you have been stripped of everything that makes 
existence worth having. When I remember your life as I 
knew it first when I think of your father with his brilliant 
genius, the delightful circle of friends about you in the most 
delightful of cities and then consider your life as it is now : 
when I see you, in the flower of your youth, condemned to 
narrow toil in a strange land (you are teaching in a school, I 
have been told), with father, friends, and fortune gone, I 
marvel yes, Mademoiselle Noel, I marvel that you can still 
talk of ' the good God 1 ' " 

The eyes which had not ceased to regard him with won- 
der, now filled softly with tears. 

"My poor friend," the low voice said, "how little you 
know, and how bitter grief must be to you, knowing so little ! 
It is at such times that the good God reveals Himself to us, 
that He teaches us the deep things of life which we can never 
learn in happiness. You are right in thinking how happy I 
was in the bright days that are gone so happy that I could 
think of little except their brightness but, although you may 
find it difficult to believe, I am happy still ; for, although I 
have lost so much, I have gained a great deal." 

"I cannot imagine what it can be," Ridgeway said; "but 
I wish you could impart your talisman, not so much to me as 
to another poor soul whom I have just left. She is the widow 
of my brother who died very suddenly a few weeks ago. It 
is his death that has brought me home." 

" Ah ! " The girl laid her hand for an instant on his with 
a quick, light touch, then turned toward the church door, 
crossed herself and murmured a few words in French. Ridge- 
way knew enough of Catholics to understand; and when she 
looked back at him he said gratefully: "Thank you." 

"This," he added after a moment, "is the pain of which 
I spoke as awaiting me at home. But I don't want to talk of 
what it is to me I want to tell you, if I may, about my poor 
sister-in-law." Then he described Mrs. Ridgeway's passionate 
grief, her bitter rebellion, and her uncomforted soul. 



364 NOEL [Dec., 

" Has she no religion ? " Noel asked. 

He shrugged his shoulders. " As much, I fancy, as most 
people of her class and kind," he answered. " It is a conven- 
tional, fair-weather religion, which has never taken any deep 
grasp of the soul, or given anything which can be laid hold 
of in the crises of life. She certainly derives no consolation 
from it now ; and this season adds a keener pang to her 
sorrow." 

"This season?" 

" Yes ; Christmas, you know. She can hardly endure the 
pervading suggestion of all that Christmas means with us 
family reunion, social festivity, happiness, feasting, mirth " 

The wonder in the French girl's eyes deepened to amaze- 
ment. 

" Is that what Christmas means to you ? " she asked. 
"But those are not the things one learns in the Stable of 
Bethlehem." 

"There's little thought of the Stable of Bethlehem in the 
minds of these people," he said, glancing out over the hurry- 
ing, parcel-laden crowds thronging the avenue in the long 
sunlight of Christmas Eve. "They are preparing to celebrate 
a day which to them simply stands as an occasion of good 
cheer, of human fellowship, love of children, and amusement* 
I am glad if it has other associations for you I've been think- 
ing ever since we met how much its coming must sadden you, 
in your loneliness and exile." 

"Ah, but, no"; she cried quickly. " I forget that I am an 
exile and that I am lonely, when I go in spirit to Bethlehem. 
I have been looking forward to Christmas so eagerly it is my 
own fete, you know I am a Christmas child feeling sure that 
when I kneel at the crib I shall find renewed courage and 
strength to go on with my journey and my work." 

"Do you mind" Ridgeway's tone was curious and almost 
awed " telling me what the things are that you learn there 
which have such an effect?" 

"But surely you know!" she said, marveling a little. 
"Well, one finds no warrant for ease or pleasure, or what the 
world calls happiness there you know that. No poverty could 
be more extreme, no hardships greater than those of the stable, 
save only the poverty and the hardship of the cross. And if 
one meditates a little upon it, upon the divine lesson of the 
meaning of pain, one comes away ashamed to complain of any- 



1910.] NOEL 365 

thing, feeling certain that there can be nothing better than to 
suffer, or our Lord would have shown it to us." 

Ridgeway drew a deep breath. " I wonder," he said, " if 
you would do a most kind and charitable thing, if you would 
let me take you to see the poor woman of whom I have spoken 
to you?" 

" Your brother's widow ? It would give me great pleasure 
to go if I could help her in the least but how can I ? " 

"I believe that you can help her just now more than any 
one else possibly could. You can at least interpret Christmas 
for her in a way it has never been interpreted before. Holly- 
wreaths, carols, gifts, feasting, and pleasure that is all it has 
meant for her, poor soul ! Now these things are associated 
with her lost happiness in a way that renders them unbear- 
able; but all this deep, mystical lesson of the stable and the 
crib will be new to her." 

" But how can I talk of it how seem to preach ? " 

"That will arrange itself only come!" 
The pleading earnestness of his tone made some women who 
at this moment emerged from the church, glance at the two a 
little curiously, and then look at each other significantly as 
they left the porch. But neither Noel nor Ridgeway noticed 
their glances. 

" Of course I will come," the girl replied. " Even a mere 
chance of helping one suffering so much is worth taking." 

It is safe to say that no one but Ridgeway could have in- 
duced his sister-in-law to receive the visitor whom he brought 
to her house a little later. At first, indeed, she declared that it 
was impossible for her to do so, but he would accept no refusal. 

"Think, Grace!" he urged. "Mademoiselle de S&incourt 
is a stranger in a strange land ; she has lost her father and 
her fortune, she has no home but the school in which she is 
employed, and this is Christmas, you know ! " 

" I want to forget that it is Christmas ! " Grace Ridgeway 
cried. "Why do you remind me of it?" 

" Well " he paused for a moment, doubtful how best to 
appeal to her " because it seems to me that you might like 
to do a little kindness to one who is even more lonely, more 
bereft, than you are. Just see her that is all I ask." 

Mrs. Ridgeway sighed. "Since you ask it, I'll see her," 
she said reluctantly. " But don't expect me to make any effort 
to help her. I am in too sore need of help myself." 



366 NOEL [Dec., 

"I know that," Gilbert answered; and then, fearful of say- 
ing something ill-advised, hastened to bring Noel to her. 

His anxiety passed away, however, as soon as he perceived 
the effect of the French girl's gracious presence. The mourn- 
ing which she wore, the gentle kindness of her beautiful dark 
eyes, the charm of her manner, so full of subtle sympathy, all 
appealed irresistibly to the sad-hearted woman whose whole 
being was sensitively ready to respond to the influence which 
emanated from the other. For the first time her thoughts were 
diverted from the consideration of her own grief by realizing 
the sorrow of another, and by wonder at the absence of any 
outward sign of dejection or despondency in one who had lost 
so much. Ridgeway, sitting by, saw the stirring of interest in 
her eyes, while the conversation flowed on ordinary topics, and 
he was not surprised when, as Noel, with an apologetic glance 
at him, presently made a movement to leave, that Mrs. Ridge- 
way impulsively put out a hand to detain her. 

" Pray don't go ! " she said quickly. " I feel as if it were 
selfish to keep you ; but there's an atmosphere about you that 
seems to have a comforting power and I need comfort so 
dreadfully ! I was so wretched and lonely before you came, 
that I was tempted to drug myself into unconsciousness, at 
least until Christmas was past. Does that shock you ? " Noel 
had started a little " but surely you must wish that you 
could forget the season and all its associations." 

"So far from that," the girl answered, "those associations 
are full of consolation and joy to me. With us in France the 
celebration of Christmas is altogether religious, you know; and 
therefore the note of rejoicing is so full of spiritual meaning, 
that it can never jar on any sorrow, but must console even the 
greatest." 

Mrs. Ridgeway shook her head. " I can't imagine that," 
she said. "There will be services at my church to-morrow, 
but I feel as if it would kill me to go and hear all the joyful 
singing, and see all the festive decorations and the happy 
people, and think how out of tune with it all I am." 

" Ye s" ; Noel said slowly. " I can fancy that a service of 
that kind might be hard to bear. You want something to remind 
you of the deeper side of Christmas, of the unearthly nature of its 
joy, and of the suffering of which Bethlehem was the key-note." 

"Perhaps so," the other assented despairingly, "but where 
am I to find all that?" 



19 io.] NOEL 367 

Noel did not answer immediately; she glanced at Ridge- 
way, and read in his eyes an appeal so urgent that, after an- 
other instant's hesitation, she said gently : 

" Have you ever been to that service from which Christmas 
takes its name the Mass of Christ ? I am quite sure that it 
would not jar upon your grief, even if it did not console you. 
There is wonderful power of consolation in it especially in 
the beautiful Midnight Mass, at the time of the Nativity. The 
heavens seem opening again, and one hears the songs of angels. 
Do you know our French chant of ' Noel* ? ' Chretiens! c'est 
Vheute solemnelle ' " she broke off suddenly. " I am forget- 
ting," she said. " This is not France ; and I am told that 
there is no Midnight Mass celebrated here. It seems very 
strange and sad the most beautiful, hallowed, and deeply 
moving Mass of all the year ! But if we cannot be at Bethle- 
hem with the angels, we can go with the shepherds very 
early, before the dawn, while the stars still seem to shine in the 
sky, and the Gloria in Excelsis to ring out of heaven. Dear 
lady" she laid Tier hand softly on the arm near her "why 
not try what you can find of comfort in the House of Bread, 
at the Mass of Christ ? " 

She had entirely forgotten herself forgotten self-conscious* 
ness and fear of " seeming to preach " in her eager desire to 
help the poor soul whose sorrow was so deep, whose need of 
help so great ; and Ridgeway, feeling himself thrilled as he had 
never been thrilled before in his life, by the exquisite tones of 
her voice, did not wonder that Grace answered with a quiver 
in her voice: 

" I'll go gladly if you will take me." 

" Oh, with so much pleasure ! " Noel cried. " Shall we meet 
at the door of the church ? The Mass is very early at five 
o'clock, I believe." 

"No, no"; as if afraid that she might slip away, Mrs. 
Ridgeway caught hold of her dress. "You must not go you 
must stay, you and Gilbert, and spend this Christmas Eve with 
me. It is sad company I am offering you ; but, then, you 
have neither of you anything more cheerful to do, and it will 
be a work of charity. I've heard of * entertaining angels una- 
wares ' ; but I've sense enough not to let one go when I recog- 
nize her," she ended, with something between a laugh and a 
sob. 

It was a Christmas Eve. which none of the three, who thus 



368 NOEL [Dec., 

unexpectedly spent it together, were ever likely to forget. 
After a quiet dinner they gathered about the library fire and 
talked, not of the Christmas which was being celebrated with 
much noise all around them, but of the many beautiful 
customs with which the feast is observed in the Catholic 
lands of the Old World. Ridgeway, who had been a wan- 
derer for years, knew much of these customs, and told of 
Christmases he had spent in many remote places in Umbrian 
sanctuaries, in cities of Spain, in villages of the Tyrol, and in 
the v far shrines of the East but no description was so vivid 
or so touching as that which Noel gave of the Christmas cele- 
brations she had known in those country districts of France, 
where the old traditions of a tender faith are kept alive. As 
she recalled the memories of her childhood which had been 
passed chiefly in an ancient chateau of Languedoc her listeners 
seemed to see the family groups, with their lanterns, coming 
from all directions over the fields and roads, white with snow 
or hoar frost, under the brilliant, starry skies, toward the spot 
where the lights of the village church shone out for the Mid- 
night Mass the Mass begun a little before twelve o'clock, so 
that as the chimes in the bell-tower rang for the hour of 
midnight, the priest standing at the altar would sing the first 
words of the Gloria, 

Mrs. Ridgeway looked with a wistful wonder at the girl 
who described these scenes, not forgetting the happy greetings 
after the Mass, the return home, the revcillon, the gathering 
of old and young about the great fire of the Yule log 

" I should think it would break your heart to recall it all ! " 
she said at last. 

But Noel shook her head. "Oh, no"; she said. "Those 
are not the memories that break one's heart. It may be that 
' a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things ' 
when those things relate to earth alone ; but if there is a note 
of eternity in them ", 

" Ah ! " It was fa sharp cry. " But how do we know 
how can we tell anything about eternity ? " 

Again Noel laid a gentle hand on her arm. " I will answer 
that question if you still wish it answered after we have 
come from the Mass of Christ," she said; while in her own 
mind she added : " I believe that He Himself will speak to you 
there." 

A little later, when they had separated, and she had been 



1910.] NOEL 369 

shown to a chamber to lie down until the early hour when it 
would be necessary to rise again, she asked herself why she 
felt so certain of this ? For she knew well that sorrow is too 
common in human life to seem to call for a divine intervention 
of solace, and it was only by a Hash of illumination that she 
perceived that the ground of her hope was because this heart 
was not only empty but open. And then she also realized that 
herein lies the great, the essential difference in hearts. On 
many, grief acts as an embittering influence, closing them hard 
and fast against the dew-drenched Figure that stands outside 
and knocks, but will never force His way within. The door 
must be opened before He will enter; and it seemed to the 
girl, who from her own sorrow had learned so many things, 
that here was a heart which in its emptiness and sadness was 
ready to welcome Him; and, this being so, she understood 
why she had no doubt of His making Himself known to it. 
,. " What a beautiful Christmas it will be, if it brings her such 
a Gift ! " the girl murmured as she knelt down to thank Gcd 
for the comfort He had given herself on this Christmas, which 
she had fancied would be so lonely, in the wonderful privilege 
of leading a sorrowful soul to the side of the manger of Beth- 
lehem. 

She thought only of one soul, but there was another which 
was meanwhile thinking much of her. Ridgeway had declined 
his sister-in-law's offer of a bed, saying that he preferred to 
remain in the library, and that he could easily sleep in one 
of the deep chairs by the fire, if he felt inclined to do so. 

" Hasn't Mademoiselle Ncc'l been telling us that Christmas 
Eve is a vigil ? " he asked. " And vigils in their original mean- 
ing were not times for sleep, but rather for wakefulness, recol- 
lection, and er other things." 

" Prayer," Nce'l said, with a soft smile. 

" Yes, prayer," he repeated, glancing at her. "The modern 
man doesn't know as much about that as the old knights did; 
but it may be possible that a vigil could teach, him something. 
At all events, I shall remain here, and be ready to call you 
both at four o'clock, shall we say ? " 

So he was left alone in the quiet, luxurious room, where 
in the flickering glow of the firelight he immediately turned 
out all the other lights he kept a vigil destined to be mem- 
orable in his life. For what is so memorable as the hour when 

VOL XCII. 24 



370 NOEL [Dec., 

the soul [for the first time realizes its true destiny and the 
relative values of the things which surround it? Ridgeway, 
who up to the present had hardly given a thought to these 
subjects, whose one object in life had been to enjoy it in as 
epicurean a fashion as possible, suddenly found himself in the 
stern grasp of a pain which he could not evade, and forced 
by the shock of his brother's unexpected death to consider 
existence, its possessions, pleasures, and rewards, as he had never 
considered it before. Here, in Hugh's own room, with the chair 
before him in which Hugh's shadowy presence seemed to sit, 
he had an absolutely sickening sense of the awful transitoriness 
of earthly things, the utter impossibility of holding happiness 
in a secure grasp for an hour, and of the deep and terrible 
mystery of man's destiny. 

But even as his soul seemed, in meditating upon all this, to 
sink into a gulf of despair, some words that he had lately 
heard came to him like an angel's whisper. What was it Noel 
jsaid of memories that did not break the heart because they 
had "the note of eternity in them"? Clearly the only way 
to endure life, and the sense of human powerlessness under 
its trials, was by that note of eternity ; but, like his poor 
sister-in law, he felt inclined to cry: " How can we know 
how find it ? " He had a vision of himself, as one of a myriad, 
wandering in a thick mist toward an inevitable precipice, 
with no ray of light to guide or guard. Yet what a secure 
and steadfast light this girl, whom he had so strangely was 
it not providentially ? encountered that afternoon, seemed to 
possess 1 He might have thought little of it if he had not 
known how severely her faith had been tested; but knowing 
this remembering her life as it had been, and considering it 
as it was he recognized the presence of something for which 
he could find no better word than supernatural, in her assured 
grasp of the deep meaning of the fleeting happiness and the 
abiding pain of life. His thoughts dwelt upon the manner in 
which she had responded to his appeal, and the transformation 
which the influence of her lovely personality had wrought in 
the house of mourning. He found himself praying if to lift 
up mind and heart to God be prayer that this influence 
might remain to bless those to whom it had come in their 
need, as a gift born of the hallowed time. While he thought 
this the deep bell of a clock on the mantel struck the mid- 



i9io.] NOEL 371 

night hour, and he remembered all that Noel had said of the 
Midnight Mass of happier lands. " We cannot heie go to 
Bethlehem with the angels," she had mourned but was there 
not a way to go, in heart at least, and was not the greeting 
of that angelic host for "men of good will"? Well, surely 

"They who cared for 'good will' that first Christmas 
Will care for it still." 

When the great church doors swung open, revealing to 
those who came from the quiet night outside, and the still 
radiance of its remotely shining stars, the vision of an interior 
ablaze with lights, softly warmed, and filled with a silent 
throng of kneeling worshippers, the effect of contrast was so 
strong that Noel heard Mrs. Ridgeway give a slight gasp. 
Ordinarily it might have seemed to her merely a striking 
picture the beautiful soaring arches, the pillars and walls 
wreathed with ivy, a Roman fragrance of box on the air, and 
at the end of the vista formed by the spacious nave the white 
splendor of the altar, with its tall candles gleaming like stars 
but now the scene appealed to something deeper than the 
mere pleasure ofj the eye. The soul, tuned to the perception 
of spiritual vibrations, felt a meaning of which the outward 
beauty was but a sign and symbol. It seemed to her that 
the great church was like a court, set and waiting, in breath- 
less expectancy, for the coming of a Presence which would 
fill it, and furnish a reason for its solemn pomp. 

Noel spoke softly to an usher, and he, with a comprehen- 
sive glance at her companions, led them to one side, up a 
long aisle, and then into a seat very near the sanctuary, and 
was this the favor she had asked ? immediately before the 
chapel which had been converted into the stable of Bethlehem. 

There had been times when Ridgeway, in his wanderings 
into Catholic churches at Christmas, had smiled in a superior 
and patronizing fashion at what he had then regarded as the 
childishness of these representations of the most poetic, as well 
as the most wonderful, scene this earth of ours has ever wit- 
nessed. But he had no inclination to smile now. For him, 
too, the meaning under the symbol became plain, and the 
Child, holding out open arms from the straw of the manger, 
seemed saying: "Unless ye become as little children " 

Yes ; there could be no doubt that this was the condition 



372 NOEL [Dec., 

for admittance into that region of faith, where mysteries cease 
to be difficult, and become the sustaining strength, the illu- 
minating light of the soul. It was that light which he saw 
reflected in the rapt faces of the people of all ages and con- 
ditions, who were kneeling before this representation of the 
Nativity; while in spirit they were worshipping with the angels 
and the shepherds in Bethlehem of Judea two thousand years 
ago. He glanced at his sister-in-law, and read aright the 
wonder and wistfulness in her eyes, as she leaned forward, 
gazing intently at the scene the rude stable, with its utter 
lack of the most ordinary comforts of life, where God chose 
to show in His own Divine Person the high estate of poverty, 
the royal road of suffering. It was as Noel had said there 
c was no hint of softness, prosperity, or pleasure here; the low- 
liest might come to find one more lowly, the most bereft of 
happiness could not murmur in face of all that was signified 
and foreshadowed in this hardship. The man bent his head 
in sudden, comprehending reverence " Only a God could have 
thought of such a thing, of appealing so irresistibly to His 
creatures, of so completely depriving any of the right to com- 
plain of anything ! " he said to himself. 

Meanwhile the deep thunder of the organ was filling the 
air, a gleaming train had swept into the sanctuary, and the 
Mass of Christ had begun. The singing was low and soft 
until it burst into the exultant Gloria but then the joy had 
an unearthly note in which the sorest and saddest heart might 
have joined. As the majestic Rite proceeded, Mrs. Ridgeway 
sat quite still, drawn out of herself by the strange beauty, the 
strange impression of something marvelous and mystical which 
was implied by every movement and gesture of the golden- 
vested figures at the altar. She felt that Noel had been right 
in promising her a worship different from any she had ever 
known before, although she only dimly apprehended the sig- 
nificance of what was going on. But it was as if for a time 
she left the familiar associations which had stabbed and pained 
her, and found herself in a world where all things were 
changed, where she dimly perceived that even sorrow and suf- 
fering might have nay, must have, since God Himself chose 
them a divine purpose and meaning in human life. Again 
she looked at the stable and the manger, and then, as the 
triumphant strains of the Adeste fideles swept over the church, 



I9IO.J NOEL 373 

stirring every heart, she sank upon her knees. For how was 
it possible to resist the compelling invitation of the Venite 
Adoremus? how fail to join in the great wave of adoration 
which was borne to the feet of the Child, as the silver voices 
rang out in the stupendous words: 

Deum de Deo, 
Lumen de lumine, 
Gestant puellae viscera : 
Deum verum, 
Genitum non factum : 
Venite adoremus ! 

Of what followed after this thrilling strain, she had natur- 
ally only a vague comprehension. But she remained on her 
knees, like every one else around her, during the solemn part 
of the Mass, and when presently on the hushed stillness the 
mellow stroke of the sanctuary bell bade the people again 
adore; their Lord, she remembered that Bethlehem was the 
House of Bread, and that He who was born there said of 
Himself: " / am the bread of life ; he that cometh to Me shall 
not hunger ; and he that believeth in Me, shall never thirst" 
And even as she remembered this, a soft murmur began, the 
movement of a great multitude of people coming to His table. 

A lovely flush of dawn was on the eastern sky when they 
Anally came out of the church and paused a moment on the 
porch, where Ridgeway had met Noel the evening before. 
Toward her he turned now, with a feeling which he made no 
attempt to disguise shining in his eyes. 

" Noel, child of Christmas," he said, " how can we ever 
thank you enough for what you have given and been to us 
on this day of days ? " 

" We- can never thank her," Grace Ridgeway's eager voice 
interposed, "but we can beg her to promise that she will 
never take the precious gift of herself away from us again." 

Noel smiled as she held out a hand to each. 

"Dear friends," she said in her sweet, foreign tones, 
"think what you have given me the exile who would have 
been so lonely without you, and who has found such happi- 
ness in helping you and be quite sure that what one has 
given on Christmas one will never take away." 



CHAUNTING MYSTERIES. 



BY R. M. BURTON. 



TIDES. Bethlehem's holy morning, 

When the angels sung; 

In the desert forty days, 

Agony begun ; 

Finished on Calvary; 

Earth in darkness hung; 

Till in resurrection light, 

Heaven with praises rung. 
PASTORALE. Honored above all others of this earth, 

O happy lot of shepherds first to see 

The Incarnate Word: what holy mystery! 

Well might the stars rejoice in sacred mirth. 

The Son of the Highest descends to lowliest dearth. 

Those infant hands shall long-bound captives free; 

Rest little lambs, He will thy shepherd be: 

Angelic choirs, intone His royal birth ! 

Fair beamed that light on darkened souls below, 

Dayspring of morn, thy rising did portend 

The victory o'er night, surcease of sorrow's flow. 

And still the angels' song is with us to the end. 

words of peace to lead us as we go 
Through the dark valley. Alleluia ! Amen ! 

NOCHE BUENA, See His Mother o'er Him hover 
Tucking in the humble cover 

Of his lowly bed. 

Prostrate all the shepherds bending, 
Heaven's angelic hosts descending: 

Lo, the halo 'round His head ! 
A SONG OF MARY. O my little Jesus, O my little Son, 

Thou, like the flowers, hast toiled not or spun ; 

1 see you play in the morning sun: 
I, the Mother that bare Thee. 
'Twas I who gave you motherhood 
When I bowed me 'neath the rood ; 
Where the shining Archangel stood: 
Saying : His will be done. 

I who partook of the holy mystery, 
I the seven-fold veil did see 
Riven. No pangs or subtlety 
Can rob me of my Son. 



CH A UN TING MYSTERIES 



375 



THE THREE 

WISE MEN. 



THE FLIGHT 
INTO EGYPT. 



Heaven's door opened for a little hou* 

What time the lily burst into flower; 

My little Son, my priceless dower, 

Descending to the Mother that bare Thee. 

What though the lengthening shadowy 

Rays from the star converged on the tree, 

Lifted up for the world to see : 

Thou art my little Child for this hour. 

O my little Jesus, O my little Son, 

My little flower yet hath toiled not or spun; 

As I see you play in shining sun : 

I, the Mother that bare Thee. 

They were led out of the abysmal deep 

Of the far-away gentile lands asleep ; 

Where gross darkness the peoples keep. 

By what unseen angel's winnowing wing 

Were they led while signaling 

Beckoned the star, as seraphs sing. 

Through many a pleasant fertile land, 

Across the desert's golden sand, 

Following still the star's command. 

'Till at last o'er Bethlehem Town 

The star stood still, its ray poured down 

Above the stable like a crown. 

Hark ! they hear that wonder-song, 

Peace on earth, through the night long, 

Swelling loud and clear and strong. 

They found the Blessed Virgin His Mother 

With Holy Joseph, and our little Brother, 

The infant Jesus, Him and no other. 

They knelt before Him and adoring 

Offered unto Him the gifts they bring; 

Costly and noble, worthy for a king. 

The most precious things that were 

From the far countries beyond Ophir: 

Gold and frankincense and myrrh. 

Greatly rejoice, O Bethlehem Town 1 

Beneath thy star, as its rays pour down 

Around His manger for a crown. 

' Twas at the close of the long toilsome day, 

Weary with journeying, they rested by the way, 

Upon the Virgin's breast the infant Jesus lay, 

Ah, white fluttering dove. 
While myriad seraphs ranged in order deep 
Their faithful vigil silently did keep : 
But to mortal eyes He only seemed to sleep 

Safe in His Mother's love. 




McCLURE'S, ARCHER, AND FERRER. 

BY ANDREW J. SHIPMAN. 

[cCLURE'S Magazine for November has an article 
entitled "The Life and Death of Ferrer," written 
by the English correspondent, William Archer, 
who, it is said, went to Spain last spring for the 
particular purpose of ascertaining the facts con- 
cerning Ferrer. To judge from the first installment of his 
work Mr. Archer might perhaps have saved himself the trou- 
ble: for, no matter what he gathered, he has written down only 
what was contained in McCabe's Martyrdom of Ferrer, the an- 
onymous Un Martyr des Pretres, and other books of like im- 
port. There seems to have been no investigation on his part 
of any of the Spanish officials, any of the Spanish merchants, 
bankers, men of substance, and persons interested in preserv- 
ing the good name and character of Barcelona. All the in- 
vestigation and all the results shown in the installment of the 
November number seem to have been wholly directed towards 
Ferrer's late comrades and sympathizers alone; and even the 
majority of such results, as stated, are copied out of the above- 
named books'. Spanish official records, statistics, memoranda, 
and the like were not diffi:ult to get at in Barcelona, yet they 
never seem to have been consulted, or even as much as men- 
tioned. To judge from Mr. Archer's report it would seem that 
there was only a slight " unpleasantness " ; and yet Ferrer 
alone was executed for its occurrence. Certainly that is the 
impression he has studiously endeavored to create. 

Yet, even with that, he has to admit that Ferrer, after all, 
was not the b^au -ideal of a teacher of children, a molder of 
infancy, either in morals or rectitude, as understood among us. 
For instance, he admits that Ferrer had relations with at least 
two women other than the particular one who was the direct 
cause of the outburst of jealousy against him by his wife when 
she shot at him; he admits that Ferrer's personal character as 
to sex relations was such as we could not tolerate in a teacher 
or p/ofessor in any school; he admits that Ferrer was an an- 



19 io.] MCCLURE'S, ARCHER, AND FERRER 377 

archist, or, as he calls it in politer terms, an " acratist," which 
he tells us means merely that Ferrer was "anti-religious, anti- 
monarchical, anti-patriotic, anti-militarist, and and capitalist." 
If there be any other " antis " such as those relating to family 
and marriage, quite apart from religion he must have inadver- 
tently forgotten them. But Mr. Archer frankly says that Ferrer 
would not be permitted to carry on his schools in the United 
States or England, for, " there are very few countries in which 
teaching so openly hostile to the existing form of government 
and to the whole social order would be endured." 

Then he goes on to make a distinction, saying that Ferrer 
himself was not an "anarchist of action 91 ; that personally he 
did not favor the bomb, the torch, and the rifle ; that he did 
not directly advocate arson and murder, although he and his 
subordinate teachers taught anarchy, revolution, and rebellion 
openly in his schools and text-books and carefully prepared the 
immature minds of children and half-taught men and women 
to do the deeds which he personally feared to advocate with his 
own utterances. Certainly, no one reading the admissions which 
Mr Archer was compelled to make about Ferrer can help conced- 
ing that Ferrer was nearly all that his opponents have painted 
him. The summary of what Mr. Archer has given is the picture 
of a man who has carefully set the springs of human action so 
that they will do most diabolic work, and thereupon stands aside 
to witness the result, and when it has been accomplished saying 
smugly and cowardly : " I never raised my hand to that work, 
for it cannot be shown that I took part, for I was most care- 
ful to keep away." This is the utmost to which Mr. Archer 
can carry his investigation, confined as it seems to have been 
to Ferrer's friends and present-day advocates. 

Certainly one may well doubt the truthfulness and correct- 
ness of assertions in Mr. Archer's article, undertaking now to 
overturn the results of a trial of one year ago, when the very 
facts in front of him, mathematical, obvious facts, are wholly 
misstated. It does not argue well for the thoroughness of his 
research, or the honesty with which he states facts. For in- 
stance, he says : " More than fifty per cent of the Spanish 
population is illiterate; and most of those who can read and 
write have been miserably taught by underpaid masters in un- 
sanitary and ill-provided schools." He knows, or should know, 
that that statement is not true. In reality it is copied from 



378 MCCLURE'S, ARCHER, AND FERRER [Dec., 

pages 44 and 53 of McCabe's Martyrdom of Ferrer, published 
last January, and pages 8 and 24 of Un Martyr des Pretres ; 
so that Mr. Archer need not have gone to Spain for that* 
The census of Spain in 1900 showed that the general illiteracy 
then was not over 30 per cent; and Spain has made large 
strides since 1900 in all branches of education. That percent- 
age of illiteracy includes the peasantry of Galicia and the 
Basque mountaineers of the Pyrenees, neither of whom are 
anarchists or in rebellion, although they are woefully lacking 
in book knowledge. 

Barcelona was the focus and hotbed of the uprising; and, 
as a matter of fact, the illiteracy of Barcelona in 1908-1909 
was between six and eight per cent, as Mr. Archer could 
easily have ascertained by consulting La Estadistica Escolar de 
Espana, published at the beginning of this year. And any one 
who has ever been in Barcelona knows the prevalent habit of 
cabmen, porters, etc., of reading their books of rules to a 
traveler upon the slightest controversy as to fees, prices, and 
the like. Certainly the obvious was overlooked in regard to 
the statement about illiteracy, for Barcelona is one of the 
cities abundantly provided with schools, and about the first 
thing the mob did was to destroy a great many of them. 
About the only schools in that city which are small and miserable 
in comparison with most of the others are the Ferrer schools ; 
only eight or ten of them were of good size and comfortable, 
usually they were in the cramped quarters of a private house. 
It was not the lack of schools and education in Barcelona 
that caused Ferrer to start his propaganda; it was the lack 
of the particular kind of schools which Ferrer favored, and 
which would teach the elements of anarchy and revolution. 
It is evident that Mr. Archer made no attempt to visit and 
compare the real schools of Barcelona with those which Ferrer 
established. 

Then, too, he insists continually in his article that " it was 
as 'author and chief of the rebellion* ' autor y jefe de la 
rebelion* that he (Ferrer) was found guilty and shot," and 
again and again emphasizes it and builds several sentences on 
it, to the effect that Ferrer was tried as the sole " instigator 
and director of the rising." Either he did not know, or did 
not care to say, that this Spanish phrase was nothing more 
than the technical legal expression in Spanish of our word 



i9io.] MCCLURE'S, ARCHER, AND FERRER 379 

" principal " in criminal law, as distinguished from " accessory " 
or. "accomplice." Our law here in America has often con- 
demned criminals as " principals " who have had substantially 
no physical participation in the crime. 

Further on, Mr. Archer says regarding the religious orders : 
41 Exempt from taxation, some of the religious houses compete 
in the production of certain commodities ; and this unfair com- 
petition is keenly resented by the people." Then he goes into 
almost the old A. P. A. hysterics about conventual life, citing 
for it an absolutely discredited anonymous work. Then he 
draws the conclusion, "for reasons above indicated, the reli- 
gious houses were chronically and intensely unpopular." This 
is to give a basis for events. Notwithstanding all this, he tells 
us, "it (the mob) did not single out for destruction those in- 
stitutions which competed unfairly in confectionery, laundry 
work, or other industries." Not a building of that kind was 
touched. What the rioters burned and destroyed were chiefly 
the schools, day-nurseries, kindergartens, and charitable insti- 
tutions of defenseless women. Not a complaint had ever been 
raised about them ; but to a cowardly, raging mob of anarchists 
they were easy game. 

In speaking of this anarchistic mob, he says: "They were 
bent on destruction, not on theft. . . . No bank was at- 
tacked; no store, other than gun-stores "; and he is extremely 
anxious to show that there was "no sack," even proclaiming 
in head-lines that there was " no massacre and no sack." Yet 
the slightest inquiry, to cite merely one case, would have 
shown Mr. Archer that at the working women's schools, in 
San Andres, the mob looted everything they could carry, and 
some even came with wheelbarrows and small carts to carry 
off beds, pillows, sheets, chairs, sewing-machines, typewriters, 
dishes, and the like; while they piled up the heavy furniture, 
tables, pianos, harmoniums, and desks, for a bonfire ! Also 
that every chalice, paten, jewel, and ornament were stolen from 
the churches and convent chapels before they were set on 
fire. He knows very well, or could easily find out, that the 
reason why no bank or public building was attacked was be- 
cause they were well protected; and that very fact left no 
police to protect churches, schools, and convents. It was not due 
to any thoughtfulness on the part of the revolutionists; it was 
only because they did not dare to take the risk of being shot 



3So MCCLURE'S, ARCHER, AND FERRER [Dec., 

In speaking of the three days' unbridled rioting, Mr. Archer 
is at exceeding great pains to minimize it. Yet he might easily 
have interviewed a hundred persons who could have given him 
the details. Had he done so, or had he even gone around 
and looked at the blackened ruins throughout the newer part 
of Barcelona, he need not have condensed his story of ruin, 
terror, and destruction into twenty-two short lines, thus indi- 
cating that it was a matter of hardly any consequence at all. 
He might even have discovered that the " Padres Esculapios " 
are chiefly lay brothers of the Pious Schools (Escolapios). It 
does not appear in his story of investigation that he ever con- 
sulted with any one who was on the side of law and order, 
or who suffered from the awful series of events. But he seems 
to have taken particular pains to get in touch with all the 
Ferrerites of high and low degree. This is hardly the work 
of an unbiassed investigator. 

Yet, notwithstanding that Barcelona had about 600,000 
population, Mr. Archer sums up the case of the destruction 
of the schools, colleges, and convents of the religious orders 
with the words: "They (the religious orders) are, in truth, 
almost entirely outside the law; and the populace in 'moments 
of revolt is apt to pronounce and execute sentence of outlawry 
upon them.' 1 But he knows, or ought to know, that eight or 
ten thousand rioters and revolutionists in a city of that size 
are most emphatically not " the populace." They are, however, 
the pliable tools which master-minds in the background can 
most easily use, minds which, when use has been made with 
disastrous result, are the quickest to deny any participation in 
anarchy or riot. 

In endeavoring to smooth over and minimize that diabolic 
outrage, the disinterment of the buried nuns, he says: "But 
it is no less certain that the motive of this profanation was a 
desire to ascertain whether there was any sign of the nuns 
having been tortured or even buried alive. It was found, as a 
matter of fact, that many of the bodies had their hands and 
feet bound together; and although this is susceptible of a quite 
innocent explanation, it was not unnaturally taken at first as 
confirming the most sinister rumors. To the Anglo-Saxon mind 
it would seem that when a community walls itself in from the 
world, and admits no intervention of the law, no public inspec- 
tion of its practices, whether in life or death, it should not 



i9io.] MCCLURE'S, ARCHER, AND FERRER 381 

complain if suspicions arise as to the nature of these practices. 
The alleged design of the rioters was to take the bodies to 
the ayuntamiento or town-hall, that their condition might be 
publicly verified.'* This is a fine specimen of an unbiassed 
statement ! But he did not take the trouble to find out that 
there are only nine cloistered convents of women in Barcelona, 
and that the other religious orders are uncloistered and are 
not " walled in from the world," but are Little Sisters of the 
Poor, Sisters of Charity, Third Order of St. Francis, Sisters 
of Mary Immaculate, Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, 
and the like, who go in and out of their houses as their duties 
require, and who are seen regularly by their friends, scholars, 
patients, and others, exactly as the same religious orders are 
seen here in New York. And it was from these that the bodies 
were taken. If Mr. Archer had made any inquiry he would 
have found that the town-hall of Barcelona is called the " casa 
consistorial" and that it is in the centre of the old city, not 
far from the Cathedral, and that the rioters carried the bodies 
of the nuns in the opposite direction, away from the town- 
hall. His explanation does not explain; neither does it ex- 
plain why these dead bodies were treated with the most revolt- 
ing grossness. 

But it would take too long to go over his article in ex- 
tenso. In every portion of it are found evidences of insinua- 
tion against the clergy, nuns, and members of religious orders 
in general, while the riotous mob and its anarchist leaders are 
uniformly credited with good intentions. Certainly this is not 
the mere detailing of facts ; it is the addition of coloring matter. 
It is not the calm statement of an unbiassed investigator; it 
more nearly inclines towards the statement of a prejudiced 
journalist, who desires to exploit only one side of the case. 
Take as an example the sentence : " The fact that the Cortes 
was not sitting left the Maura cabinet the unchecked despots 
of Spain ; and the fact that Senor Maura declined to summon 
the Cortes showed that this despotism was essential to the 
carrying through of his policy," which sounds so unbiassed. 
An ordinary biassed correspondent of the usual stamp who was 
sent out to get the whole story, would have consulted Sefior 
Maura himself, and let him give his own explanation. 



flew Boohs, 



TWENTIETH CENTURY SOCIALISM. WHAT IT IS NOT. WHAT 
IT IS. HOW IT MAY COME. By Edmond Kelley. New 
York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.75 net. 

Whatever else may be said about Iwenticth Century Soc~ 
ialism, it certainly is a fascinating book ; and whatever limita- 
tions may attach to the author's powers, he indeed writes 
luminously. In a volume dealing with so many technical points, 
it is unusual for the reader to find not a single page confused 
or lacking in interest; but Mr. Kelley carries us along from 
chapter to chapter, and our attention never flags. Even finance, 
and freight-charges, and markets become interesting under the 
deft touches of his pen. 

As for defects well, it is the old, old issue over again. 
Prevalent misunderstandings of Socialism are pointed out and 
hitherto uninformed readers are made aware that the economic 
programme, here advocated under the name of Socialism, is 
not necessarily allied with anarchism, communism, robbery, and 
other forms of immorality. Then the evils of the existing 
order are enumerated, analyzed, and remorselessly condemned. 
Finally, two hundred pages are devoted to the exposition of 
a socialistic programme adapted to remedy all existing defects 
and evils, ethical, political, or economic. 

As is nearly always the case, the programme embraces 
various elements propositions that are indisputable, proposi- 
tions that are debatable, and propositions that are mere fantas- 
tic dreams. It is safe enough, for instance, to affirm that 
organized production is better than unregulated competition; 
it is rash to predict that under municipal Socialism practically 
all temptation for " graft " would be removed (p. 324) ; and 
it is surely extravagant to foretell that Socialism will elimi- 
nate misery and injustice, and thereby make man's preparation 
for a future life easier (p. 400). 

In a word, then, this posthumous volume of Mr. Kelley's is 
a readable in some respects, an illuminating and profitable 
book. It is interesting, too, as an illustration of the way 
in which a certain type of mind will ever repudiate actual in- 
stitutions because of their plain limitations, and aspire gen- 
erously after ideals not marred as yet by visible stains be- 
cause never yet materially embodied. 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 383 

THE CHARITY OF CHRIST. By Rev. Henry C. Schuyler. Phil- 
adelphia: Peter Reilly. 50 cents. 

Father Schuyler has produced a good book as the second 
of his series on the virtues of Christ. What is particularly 
striking about the work is the calm, sensible tone observed 
throughout. We are often accustomed to meet in writings ap- 
pertaining to charity an amount of sentiment that becomes 
nauseous, and a rigidness of doctrine that tends to turn one 
away from striving to attain to this virtue in its perfection. 
Others have made it appear to be a tremendously difficult 
thing to be charitable. Father Schuyler shows from the life 
of Christ that the acquirement of the virtue is not at all so 
hard for ordinary man. 

He divides his book into six parts, consisting of a general 
introduction, and chapters on the intimate connection of charity 
with bodily needs, ignorance, the necessity and duty of cor- 
rection, sorrow, and injury. On each of these points he shows 
how we can take example from the three years' public life of 
Christ. How our Lord showed patience and charity in in- 
structing the ignorant; fearless when the necessity arose to 
correct faults; full of sympathetic charity for those in sorrow, 
from whatever cause that arose; and perfect in His charity 
towards those who injured Him. 

We should like to see this book in the hands of every 
priest and religious, and in every Catholic household. It is 
a book to be read often, and the oftener the better. For every 
one who reads it carefully will make some further effort to 
overcome that awful modern curse of uncharitableness which 
is the cause of so much dissension and anguish of heart. 

The book may be read with ease; there are no technicali- 
ties, and the style is good. By producing a well- printed and 
attractive volume the publisher has added to the merits of the 
work. The only fault we should feel inclined to find is in the 
ragged edges of the leaves. It has been the fad for some 
years to leave edges untrimmed, but as the custom is a mere 
trap for dust and dirt it should be frowned upon. Also, the 
illustrations to the volume should have the artists' names 
affixed. It is nothing but right that an artist like any other 
person should get the credit of his work by having his name 
made known when his work is copied. This is a form of 
charity that publishers could cultivate with some profit. 



384 NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

THE SPANIARD AT HOME. By Mary F. Nixon-Roulet. Chi- 
cago: A. C. McClurg. $1,75 net. 

The surest way of establishing permanently peaceful rela- 
tions between two fairly good men who have heard and have 
half-believed harsh things about each other is to bring them 
together, to make them acquainted, to explain their different 
feelings and convictions, to point out clearly and convincingly 
the half- hidden traits that have made others love them. Pre- 
judices will then shrivel up and fall away. A mutual under- 
standing will spring into life and grow healthily. Good will, 
perhaps even friendship, will bind them together. It is so 
likewise with nations. For that reason it is a joy to know 
that such a book as Mrs. Nixon-Roulet's latest work, The 
Spaniard at Home, has been given to the world. In English- 
speaking countries, at least, the Spaniard has been, till re- 
cently, a despised, berated type of humanity, haughty, fanatical, 
gloomy, and above all cruel. Such he still is, no doubt, to 
narrow minds, confined within the cramped limits of their own 
perfections. Generous- souled men knew, however, that there 
were great and good qualities in the race that had given birth 
to a Teresa, an Ignatius, a John of the Cross, to say nothing 
of Isabella and the dauntless explorers who raised the Spanish 
flag in both West and East, or of the heroes that had worsted 
Napoleon's greatest marshals in the hour of his greatest glory. 
Those who had studied the Spaniard at home, with the thor- 
oughness of a scholar and the balance of a judge, found much 
to respect and to love in the Spanish character. The writer 
of this book is such a one. She has spent many years in 
Spain; she knows the people well; she writes about them in 
a convincing way. The book is copiously and well illustrated. 
It should have a wide circulation and will do a proportionate 
good, for books of this character tend to create good-will and 
to maintain peace among the nations. 

MODERN BIOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION. By 
Erich Wasmann, SJ. St. Louis: B. Herder. $4.50 net. 

Father Wasmann's book attracted so much attention in 
the German original that English- speaking readers will wel- 
come this translatioa just published from the third German 
edition. We may say at once that the translation is well 



NEW BOOKS 385 

done, and that even those who know German well will be 
glad to have such an abstruse scientific work in an English 
dress. Futher Wasmann, S.J., is at once a scholastic philoso- 
pher and an evolutionist. He is one of the greatest of living 
entomologists, recognized all over the world for his thoroughly 
scientific studies of ants, their guests, and parasites, and his 
studies have shown him evolution at work. He does not be- 
lieve in the doctrine of permanence of species, because he has 
seen contradictions of it under his own observation. He is 
not an evolutionist in the monophyletic sense of accepting the 
teaching that all living things have come from some one origi- 
nal living being, but he is a polyphyletic evolutionist, believ- 
ing that there are a number of original beginnings of life, 
from which, however, there has been an evolution into the 
immense diversity of living forms which exist around us at the 
present time. 

His reason for taking up this advanced evolutionary opin- 
ion he lays down very definitely : 

If we wish successfully to combat the modern theory of de- 
scent, in so far as it has proved serviceable to atheism, we 
must carefully distinguish truth and falsehood in it. We 
shall then have no difficulty in depriving our antagonists of 
their weapons, and even in smiting them with the same sword 
with which they fancied we were already conquered. If we 
let ourselves be misled by the skillful tactics of our monistic 
opponents, and take up an attitude hostile to evolution in 
every form, we shall be playing into their hands and giving 
them an easy victory. We shall, in fact, be assuming the 
same mistaken position as the champions of the Ptolemaic 
system once assumed against the advocates of the Copernican 
theory. They were obliged to be always on the defensive, 
and to limit themselves to weakening this or that actual 
piece of evidence adduced by their opponents, as not holding 
good. In an intellectual conflict such a position must, in 
course of time, be abandoned. 

While admitting polyphyletic evolution, Father Wasmann 
is in no sense a Darwinian. He distinguishes very clearly the 
four senses in which Darwinism is used. The first is the 
Theory of Natural Selection, which Father Wasmann shows 
has come in recent years to occupy much less attention than 
before. In so far as it represents a gradual progress by innu- 
YOL. xcii. 25 



386 NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

merable and almost imperceptible variations, it contradicts the 
known facts of paleontology. As to the second sense of Dar- 
winism, as proclaimed by Haeckel, who under this term pre- 
sented a realistic monism, which would be better designated a 
materialistic atheism, as a philosophic theory of the universe, 
Father Wasmann points out that this is simply a mischievous 
statement unwarrantably made in the name of science. In the 
third sense Darwinism means man's origin from the animals. 
For this the supposed evidence has disappeared. In a fourth 
sense Darwinism means the whole theory of evolution. But this 
ought to be given up, for it would lead only to confusion. The 
blunder was pardonable forty years ago, when Darwin's theory 
of evolution was the only one known, but it is pardonable no 
longer. Incidentally Father Wasmann shows, by a wealth of 
quotation from authoritative scientists, how much of prestige 
Darwinism in any and every sense has lost during the past 
two decades. 

Probably the most striking passages in the book are to be 
found in the concluding chapter, in which Father Wasmann 
describes two great storms that centred about the rock of 
Christian cosmogony the first, three hundred years ago, arose 
from the dispute over the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems; 
the second, fifty years ago, from the question of evolution. It 
is quite easy to see now that the conflict between the two 
systems of the permanence of species and of evolution will 
have no more effect upon the Christian cogmogony than did 
the Ptolemaic and Copernican tempests. The dwellers on the 
rock need feel no fear. 

On the white crests of the waves, that still angrily threaten 
even the summit of the rock, are thousands of tiny bubbles 
that seem to fancy themselves about to destroy both rock and 
Church. They represent modern unbelief and they imagine 
that the theory of evolution furnishes them with the best pos- 
sible weapon against Christianity. But the new wave of the 
evolution theory will ere long lower its proud crest and sink 
peacefully to rest at the foot of the ancient rock. The tide of 
human knowledge is in no sens a natural enemy of the Chris- 
tian cosmogony. On the contrary, it is naturally the friend 
ot Christianity, for human knowledge proceeds from the same 
divine wisdom that created also the rock and the mighty 
Church upon it. 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 387 

THREE WISE MEN. A CHRISTMAS MYSTERY. By W. L. 
Locke. New York: John Lane Company. 75 cents net. 

Most modern Christmas stories are not Christmas stories at 
all. The real truth and spirit of that day are seldom expressed. 
So our hearts rejoiced when we found The Story of Three 
Wise Men to be a real Christmas story. Mr. Locke has seen 
how the birth of the Babe on Christmas Day transfigured this 
world of ours and all that is in it, and through His own com- 
ing in human flesh shed the glory of divine love upon every 
mother and child. The story is admirably well told. It is a 
much greater Christmas story than Dicken's Christmas Carol. 
Its humor is charming; its tragedy has a sublime lesson; its 
pathos is convincingly human. The Three Wise Men are very 
modern. One is a noted physicist, another a famed linguist, and 
another an experienced administrator all men of the world 
and all believing in nothing save what their hands may touch 
and their eyes see. How they meet and travel together ; how 
they come to see better and truer things than they ever saw 
before, and how at length they go forth on Christmas Day, 
carrying " an inalienable joy and possession into the great 
world," will be found between the covers of this small book. 
It is small but it is delightful. 

MYSTICISM : ITS TRUE NATURE AND VALUE. With a trans- 
lation of the " Mystical Theology " of Dionysius and of 
the Letters to Caius and Dorotheus. By A. B. Sharpe, 
M.A. St. Louis: B. Herder; London: Sands & Co. 
$i net. 

Mysticism has its guide books, as well for the curious- 
minded as for the devoutly interested, and the best, if not the 
only one of these in our language, has now been published. 
The author's purpose is not a stated treatise, like that of Father 
Augustine Baker or St. John of the Cross. He would give us 
a manual and a summary of the steps from ordinary prayerful 
conditions to the infused and, as it were, miraculous ones 
known as contemplation, the prayer of quiet, divine locutions, 
visions, ecstacies, and the like. 

Though the work does not pretend comparison with such 
highly philosophical books as that of Gorres, it is of much use 
to all who would read intelligently the works of the mystical 
saints, or be competent guides for persons thoroughly devoted 



388 NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

to prayer. The author shows himself entirely familiar with 
all the standard authorities on his theme, and has even trans- 
lated a portion of the works of one of the earliest, Dionysius. 
The bibliography affixed to his volume is of special worth to 
librarians and spiritual directors. He is entitled to the thanks 
of all loving searchers after the divine footsteps in the hidden 
vales of solitary lore. 

The book is not large and the price is reasonable. 

A BOOK OF THE CHRIST CHILD. By Eleanor H. Broadus. 
New York and London: D. Appleton. $1.75 net. 

The materials out of which this book is fashioned have 
been drawn from many sources* There are legends that come 
from the earliest days of Christianity, scenes from the Miracle 
Plays, tales of the Middle Ages, verses from the pens of Mil- 
ton, Luther, Herrick and Christina Rossetti; and together with 
these are excellent reproductions in color of famous religious 
masterpieces by the world's greatest painters. Through them 
all there breathes the spirit of devotion to the Christ Child, 
and it will be very strange indeed if even one unspoiled boy 
or girl lays down this book without feeling an increase of both 
faith and love. The cover of the book is enriched with a 
colored copy of Raphael's Madonna of the Chair. 

JEANNE D'ARC, THE MAID OF FRANCE. By Mary Rogers 
Bangs. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Com- 
pany. $1.25 net. 

There are few stories of womanly goodness, heroism, and 
greatness as worthy of being made known through all the world 
as the thrilling, instructive, and strengthening story of the 
happy, holy Maid of Orleans. Because of this conviction we 
welcome this new life of the Blessed Joan; It is not a lawyer's 
argument in defense of the Maid; it it not a bitter arraignment 
of her craven friends, nor of her enemies, whether stupid or 
savage ; it is not a [subtle inquiry into the nature of her 
"Voices," nor a detailed study of difficult and debated events 
in her career, but a simple yet graphic narrative of her short, 
eventful life. The style gives the intrinsic interest of the story 
full, free play on the imagination and emotions of the reader. 
The author evidently sympathizes with and loves her heroine, but 
her admiration and affection are neither blind nor extravagant. 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 389 

LITTLE BOOKS ON ART. i. CHRISTIAN SYMBOLISM. 2. OUR 
LADY IN ART. By Mrs. Henry Jenner. Chicago: A. C. 
McClurg & Co. $i net per volume. 

To the lovers of our Blessed Lady and of the works of the 
great artists we heartily recommend a small volume, well-printed 
and well-bound, entitled : Our Lady in Art. The volume is 
profusely illustrated with excellent reproductions. Mrs. Henry 
Jenner is thoroughly conversant with her subject, both from 
the religious and artistic points of view. 

Her taste is thoroughly good ; her canons of interpretation 
exact and true. She has brought to her "work a soul filled 
with love and reverence for the subject she treats, and, there- 
fore has produced a volume exceptionally attractive. It is a 
most instructive and useful work for readers of all ages, and 
we think it particularly well adapted for giving growing chil- 
dren a knowledge of our Lady's life and work, of the great 
paintings that have her as their subject, and of the unique 
position she has ever held in the Christian world. 

And a companion volume to this, entitled Christian Sym- 
bolism, merits the same high praise. Mrs. Jenner has here 
many more subjects to treat and many more questions to ex- 
plain, but she has succeeded admirably in her task of supply- 
ing " in a short and quite popular form, a guide to the general 
principles on which is based the symbolism of the Christian re- 
ligion." Her book has seemed to us to show most convincing- 
ly that it is absolutely necessary to grasp the truth of the real 
unity of the Church in order to understand the meaning and 
purpose of Christian art. Aside from the value of its artistic 
history and criticism the book is particularly useful and in- 
structive for Catholics. Indeed, we wish that many Catholics 
were more thoroughly acquainted with the great and the small 
things of which it so ably treats. 

THE SCIENCE OF POETRY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LAN- 
GUAGE. New York and London : Funk & Wagnalls Com- 
pany. $2.50. 

Mr. Hudson Maxim is an experimental scientist of wide 
ambition, deep confidence, and, it would seem, of versatile 
taste. Not content with having produced an admirable smoke- 
less powder (and other explosives appreciated by Government 
circles), he has recently essayed to systematize the whole 



390 NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

subject of rhetoric, oratory, and poetic criticism. And, by his 
own admission, he has brought to this delicate and intricate 
subject precisely the same methods he would have applied to 
" biology, ethics, or torpedo warfare." In other words, the 
book is an attempt to lay the Muse upon the dissecting table. 

Mr. Maxim does not believe that poetry and verse are 
identical; but neither, of course, does any discriminating critic: 
and he does not rank Whitman among the great masters for 
which, at least, we thank him. Suggestive,|too, are his remarks 
upon tone-color; and his definition of poetry as " the expression 
of insensuous thought in sensuous terms by artistic trope " is 
valid enough as far as it goes. What Mr. Maxim fails utterly 
to apprehend is, not only the higher artistry, but the spiritual, 
the sublimated, the intuitional quality, which is the essence of 
great poetry : " the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," 
in Wordsworth's famous phrase " the human aspiration for 
supernal beauty," in the words of Edgar Poe. 

In one of the appending illustrations we behold Mr. Hud- 
Bon Maxim himself, wrestling in mid-air with a somewhat pro- 
testing Pegasus. In its sequel, man and beast are down to 
earth once more; the wings droop upon the ground, the whole 
attitude suggests a quiet Sunday morning ramble. At first 
sight, this all seems rather absurd; at second, it takes on a 
humorous and ironic significance. For Mr. Maxim's artist is 
right. Pegasus is broken, all through the volume ! 

LIFE IN THE ROMAN WORLD OF NERO AND ST. PAUL. By 
F. G. Tucker. New York : The Macmillan Company. 
$2.50 net. 

Those whose knowledge of Roman life is no wider than 
the statements of their history text-book, or the pictures drawn 
in novels like Quo Vadis, will be astonished by Professor 
Tucker's Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul, but 
they will rise from their reading better- informed men, with 
many a harsh judgment about ancient Rome greatly softened 
or totally set aside. After describing the condition of the 
empire the means and security of travel within it, the sys- 
tems of government, administration, and taxation the writer 
takes us into the Imperial city and makes us well acquainted 
with its material side. Then we have the daily life of the 
people set before us, with descriptive accounts of their occu- 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 391 

pations, amusements, and customs. No class of society is 
overlooked no phase of life ignored. The status of women, 
the education of children, the organization, equipment, and 
training of the army, the religion, philosophy, and art of the 
time are all carefully treated in separate chapters. There are 
many excellent illustrations which help the text to make the 
Roman of those far-off days stand before us in a well-defined 
way, showing us clearly that he had much of both good and 
bad. 

THE PITTSBURG SURVEY : WOMEN AND THE TRADES. By 
Elizabeth Beardsley Butler. WORK-ACCIDENTS AND THE 
LAW. By Crystal Eastman. New York : Charities Publi- 
cation Committee. $1.50 per volume. 

Three years ago last September a group of experts gath- 
ered from different quarters of the United States for the 
purpose of making a diagnosis of the industrial and social 
conditions of Pittsburg. Along the lines then projected, some 
twenty trained investigators, men and women, were set to 
work at making highly detailed reports of the situation pre- 
vailing among the wage- earners of the famous steel-district; 
and their findings are being published under the title of The 
Pittsburg Survey. In the outcome of these investigations, 
we have, beyond doubt, the most comprehensive and signifi- 
cant social study ever inaugurated by private enterprise in 
this country. The work was planned by the editors of Char- 
ities and The Commons (now 7 he Survey) and financed chiefly by 
subsidies from the Russell Sage Foundation for the Improve- 
ment of Living Conditions. 

Mr. Paul U. Kellogg, who directed the work, is editing 
the reports of the investigators. Six volumes of goodly size 
will present the general findings of the staff with regard to 
health, wages, organization, and dependency in the district and 
give the results of four special inquiries carried on throughout a 
year. Of these special inquiries two lie before us as we write. 

In the space at our disposal we can do little more than 
recommend them to the attention of our readers and this we 
do most heartily. The amount of painstaking labor that has 
gone into the making of these books can be properly appre- 
ciated only by those who have had personal experience of the 
difficulties that confront such investigators. But the scientific 



392 NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

method of collecting, and the scrupulously careful manner of 
presenting, a vast amount of valuable data, will be readily 
apparent to any reader. The practical bearing, the moral of 
the story, can be obscure to no one. It is economic and in- 
dustrial facts coldly set down in type, or tabulated figures and 
percentages, that chiefly fill these pages. Yet they are heavy 
with tragic significance, that concerns not Pittsburg alone but, 
more or less directly, all big American cities; and we confess 
to having been unable to ponder them unaffected. 

Miss Butler's book introduces us into the world of woman's 
work, but excludes some of the groups enumerated in the 
United States Census, and classifies those observed under Food 
Production, Stogy Industry, Needle Trades, Cleaning Industries, 
and Metals, Lamps, and Glass. Approximately twenty thou- 
sand women were studied. The mildest possible comment on 
the facts published is that many of these women work at lower 
than a living wage, during hours and under conditions that 
sap the health of body and of soul. This situation the public 
conscience must consider and the law must take in hand. 

Our readers, of course, are aware with what authority Miss 
Eastman can speak and of the large share of credit due her 
for New York's enlightened law on Employer's Liability and 
Compulsory Compensation. No one can deny the well-supported 
premises nor escape the conclusion of her wonderfully well-done 
volume. She has studied minutely the cases of 526 men killed 
by work-accidents in Allegheny County during twelve months; 
and of 509 men injured in such accidents and taken to hospitals 
in the same territory during three months. She tells us in detail 
so far as it can be measured in words and figures what was 
the cost of these accidents and who bore the loss. No reason- 
able being can contradict her when she avers that " a grave in- 
justice exists in the distribution of the industrial accident loss 
in Allegheny County." 

THE EMPTY HOUSE. By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Boston: 
Houghton Mifflin Company. $1.20 net. 

These are stories about real and normal folk. The problems 
they handle are quite common finding place in even village 
life but they are of the sort that have an undying interest 
for sound-hearted men and women. The stories are serious, 
thoughtful, and wholesome, but they make easy and delightful 




i9io.] NEW BOOKS 393 

reading. Even a stern man will smile genially as he reads how a 
mischievous French spaniel broke the forbidding crust which 
time and disappointment had formed over a New England 
spinster, allowing her native tenderness to well forth abun- 
dantly and enabling a once careless lover to win her affection. 

THE FRIENDLY LITTLE HOUSE ; AND OTHER STORIES. New 
York: Benziger Brothers. $1.25. 

The Friendly Little House ; and Other Stories is a recently 
published volume containing a collection of short stories by 
eleven of the best-known Catholic authors. The list includes 
Marion Ames Taggart, whose story gives the book its name, 
Mary T. Waggaman, George M. A. Cain, Nora Tynan G'- 
Mabony, Mary E. Mannix, Jerome Harte, Norman Whiteside, 
Anna Blanche McGill, Richard Aumerle, Anna T. Sadlier, and 
Magdalen Rock. The book is, therefore, sure to be enjoyed 
by the numerous admirers of these authors. 

THE LEAD OF HONOR. By Norval Richardson. Boston: L. 
C. Page & Co. $1.50. 

The Lead of Honor is a careful piece of work. It really 
deserves that much misapplied name of novel. The characters 
are thoughtfully drawn, the plot develops well, and the style 
is of exceptional purity. Natchez, Mississippi, in the year 
1830, gives the background, and the central figure is Sargent 
Everett, an ambitious young lawyer. His struggles and bril- 
liant progress, his constancy in love, and his high-minded re- 
nunciation, form the theme of the story, and are believed to 
be drawn from the life of the statesman and orator, Hon. 
Sargent Prentiss, the supposed original of the fictional por- 
trait. The novel has distinct merit. If Mr. Richardson is a 
beginner, he has begun well. 

TALES OF IRISH LIFE AND CHARACTER. By Mrs. S. C. Hall 
Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co. $1.75. 

In Tales of Irish Life and Character the reader's attention 
is drawn at once to the illustrations "sixteen tipped illustra- 
tions in color by Erskine Nicol, R.S.A." Regarded as studies in 
coloring and technique these justify Mr. Erskine Nicol's initials. 
Regarded as reproductions, they are superb specimens of color- 



394 NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

printing. But as artistic efforts, all but two or three are dis- 
appointingly Cruikshankian. The only " decent bodies " whom 
Mr. Nicol has seen in Ireland appear to be the " Gipsies on 
the Road " or the groups in " An Irish Merrymaking." More- 
over, considered as illustrations to Mrs. Hall's rather mild Tales, 
they are sadly like the engravings in the old Book of Beauty 
or Ladies' Wreath, where one hunted vainly as a child to find 
"the story about the picture," or to investigate the antece- 
dents of the Orphan Maid or the Fading Flower. They have 
no slightest connection, except in two instances, with the sub- 
ject-matter of the volume ! 

The sketches themselves are often very good, showing trained 
and careful observation and an Irish ear for music in word 
a,nd phrase, if not a genuinely Irish heart. The author may 
have been Irish born, but she lived out of Ireland too long to 
understand possibly to be understood by her own people. 
We sympathize with poor Moyna Brady, who cries out to her: 
"Well, Ma'am dear, I never thought yer going into foreign 
parts would make a heathen of ye intirely. To be sure, it 
turns the mind a little to leave one's own people ; but to shift 
that way against what the world knows to be true true as 
gospel! It's myself that couldn't even it to you at all, at all 
so I couldn't if I hadn't heard it with my own ears ! " 

The chapter on Beggars, ending with the pitiful story of 
Milly Kane, dying of cold and starvation in the midst of plen- 
tiful alms, bestowed by her on her husband, hiding from the 
gallows, is excellent, though our Irish expatriate seems of too 
Protestant a turn of mind to realize the basis of primitive and 
unperverted Christianity on which is built up, not in Ireland 
alone, but in every Catholic country, a systematic structure of 
personal almsgiving. 

The chapter on " Naturals " is also striking. " The Irish 
natural," says Mrs. Hall, " is not altogether an idiot. Gener- 
ally, there is so much mother wit mixed up with the character 
as to make it a matter of uncertainty which predominates, 
knave or fool." The account of the "born natural " who could 
not learn to read or to write, but who had " picked up " the 
art of stone masonry so as to be famed all over the country- 
side, suggests Dr. Shields' Dullard, and makes one ask whether, 
as better trained elementary teachers are multiplied and " special 
classes" formed in Irish National and parochial schools, the 



1910.] NEW BOOKS 395 

" natural " may not turn out to be no racial product at all, 
but merely a modification of the slightly deficient or wholly 
eccentric child for whom pedagogists are at last beginning to 
work in earnest. 

For the contempt expressed for honest pride of birth, in 
"Illustrations of Irish Pride " we have but answering contempt. 
We find nothing "amusing" in the simple remark of the 
glover (p. 192) : " It isn't the sewing with which I stitches 
together the skins of the poor dumb beasts that I prides myself 
upon. No, no; I've something, God be praised, better nor 
that to look up to, poor as I am : the blood oi the O'Neills 
goes fair and softly through every vein in my body." 

And we have much to forgive the author for when she links 
together on the same page, as worthy ancestors, the names of 
McMurrogh and O'Toole! the one a base traitor, the other a 
saint. 

MAD SHEPHERDS ; AND OTHER HUMAN STUDIES. By L. P. 
Jacks. New York: Henry Holt & Co. $1.20 net. 

It has been said that, owing to the influence and associa- 
tion of early years spent as a chemist's apprentice, Ibsen made 
his dramas studies in mental pathology, rather than represen- 
tations of normal human minds. It has even been asserted, 
as a corollary to this proposition, that those dramas should 
appear only in medical journals, and be read only by the pro- 
fessional. This latter is rather a sweeping statement. This 
same pathology of the mind, a subject always interesting to 
seekers after the Unusual, provides the material of a new 
volume by an English writer, L. P. Jacks, the editor of The 
Hibbert Journal. 

Mr. Jacks, however, has made one mistake, he has called 
his book Mad Shepherds ; and Other Human Studies. Really 
his people can no more be considered human than Hedda 
Gabler. The "mad shepherd," to whom the greater part of 
the book is devoted, is called " Snarley Bob." With his won- 
derful success as a cunning breeder of sheep, his contempt for 
the human race, his ungovernable spasms of rage, his love for 
the stars and " the spirits," and for the invisible companion in 
whose guidance he believes, and to whom he refers mysterious- 
ly as " the Shepherd " or " the Master," Snarley Bob's nature 
comprises strange antagonisms. The question of his sanity is 



396 NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

frankly left to the reader's judgment. More rational, if less 
striking, is the portrait of old Shoemaker Hankin, octogenar- 
ian and atheist, who reads Tom Paine and John Stuart Mill, 
a^id who patches and mends old shoes to give to poor children 
or to men out of work. As Snarley Bob says: "Shoemaker 
Hankin spends his breath in proving that God doesn't exist, 
and his life in proving that He does.." Mad Shepherds is un- 
doubtedly to be commended for fine workmanship, but as a 
study of human life it has really no value. 

A MINISTER'S MARRIAGE. By Austin Rock. New York: 
Benziger Brothers. 75 cents. 

Austin Rock's talent lies in character-study. The plot of 
A Minister's Marriage is ol the slightest. Indeed, we doubt 
if its author will ever learn to construct a striking and well- 
proportioned plot. Perhaps it is just as well. For the in- 
terest of life centres, to the modern mind, in the study of 
characters, rather than in the study of events, and A Minis- 
ter's Marriage gives us two or three characters as true to 
English Nonconformity as if they were the work of photo- 
graph and phonograph. 

The story contains much delicate satire, but no caricature. 
Austin Rock knows his " Nonconformistdom " as Robert Cham- 
bers knows his New York or Robert Hichens his Sahara. 

GOUNOD. Par Camille Bellaigue. Paris: Felix Alcain. 

Anything from the pen of M. Camille Bellaigue, the distin- 
guished musical critic, is worth reading. In the present instance 
he is particularly happy in his work on account of his intimate 
associations with its subject, Charles Gounod. The two were 
bound together by the closest ties of friendship, which began 
in a singular manner on the First Communion day of our au- 
thor, when Gounod, then at the height of his fame, fell on his 
knees before the boy and asked his blessing: " c'est toi, qui 
portes Dieu dans toi cceur, c'est toi qui me beniras" he exclaimed. 
la our opinion no other writer could do this work near so well 
as M. Bellaigue, who gives us a deep insight into the Maes- 
tro** inner, or religious, life. One beneficial result is that many 
unpleasant and nervous feelings which may arise on reading 
other attempts at describing the life of Gounod are now re- 
moved. The picture that M. Bellaigue gives us produces favora- 






i9io.] NEW BOOKS 397 

ble impressions, and corrects at the same time the errors of 
previous writers on the same subject. 

It was the old story : the same old French story. Gounod 
had neglected his religious duties up to early manhood, propa- 
bly from the day of his First Communion. The awakening 
came in the Gesu, in Rome, 1840. M. Bellaigue shows that, 
instead of being led on by the exhortations of his mother to 
turn over a new leaf (as former writers liked to suggest), the 
crisis was caused by the influence of two priests, Abbe Gay 
and Lacordaire; that in reality it was the son who was ex- 
horting the mother to become a Christian, and to observe once 
more the practices of Catholicism, which for many years she 
had given up. Another important point in Gounod's later life 
is also cleared up the cause of the shadow that fell on him 
during his sojourn in England. The light thrown on this mat- 
ter is very welcome, since is was badly needed, and will pre- 
vent rash judgments being made in the future. 

These are valuable points for students of the history of 
music, but in some other respects the volume has its defects. 
The biographical method is lost sight of from the second chap- 
ter onwards, and we lay down the book with just as much 
knowledge of the events of Gounod's life (with the exception 
of the one point mentioned already) as when we took it up. 
Had M. Bellaigue modified the title of his work by calling it 
an analytical study we should have no room to find fault with 
his methods; but as the volume stands, and more especially 
since it belongs to a series of presumable biographies, a few 
pages should have been devoted to details of the Maestro* s 
life. In no part of the book will this want of information be 
felt so much as in the chapter on "Faust." There is not a 
single word on the difficulties experienced in having the work 
first performed, or on how it was received coldly by the Pari- 
sians, or on how its success was gained in Germany, and how 
it was brought back to Paris to take on a new lease of life, or 
on how Mapleson tricked the English public into patronizing 
it. One who may be seeking information about this opera will 
naturally turn to the present volume, but he will be grievously 
disappointed, for there is nothing in it but an analysis in lan- 
guage that is eloquent and slightly rhetorical. On the other 
hand, the chapter on "Romeo et Juliette" is excellent, and 
that on " Mireille " is equally good. 



398 NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

We note that Madame De Bovet's work on Gounod is omitted 
from the bibliography; and that no mention is made of Gou- 
nod's literary work, of his Commentary on " Don Giovanni " ; 
neither is there an Index. When will the French learn that 
the latter appendage is an essential to any modern biographical 
or historical work that asks for serious attention ? 

MAKERS OF SORROW AND MAKERS OF JOY. By Dora Mele- 
gari. Translated by Marian Lindsay. New York: Funk 
& Wagnalls. 

The authoress, despite her Italian name, is well-known 
among contemporary French writers by Ames Dormantes and 
other works. This latest book sustains her high reputation 
and, while we could wish it less didactic in tone, it is well worth 
reading and cannot fail to do good. It brings home to us 
our individual responsibility and the part each human being 
plays in the lives of others. 

As the title implies, the writer divides the world into two 
classes those who add to its sorrows and those who shed 
happines around them surely a wiser distinction than that of 
the sceptic Renan, who could see no better way to classify 
God's creatures than by their intellectual differences, and was 
blind to the fact that there is no one so simple, no one so 
unlettered that they may not make the world " the better for 
their being, the happier for their speech." 

It must not be supposed that this book is on the order of 
sermons; on the contrary, considering the nature of the sub- 
jects treated, the spiritual element is markedly absent. It is a 
masterly and complete analysis of an important phase of human 
thought and life, from the social and moral standpoint, and 
strong and helpful in its reflections and deductions. 

The clear flowing English is what Miss Lindsay's other 
translations would lead us to expect, and leaves nothing to be 
desired. 

OUR LADY'S LUTENIST ; AND OTHER STORIES OF BRIGHT 
AGES. By Rev. David Bearne, SJ. New York, Cincin- 
nati, Chicago: Benziger Brothers. 65 cents. 
Children whose appetite for tales is fed on Father David 
Beanie's stories of the "Bright Ages" will not easily believe 
the fables they may hear in later years about the " Dark Ages." 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 399 

This new volume, out in good time for Christmas, is, as usual, 
largely concerned with boys Gabriel, the magic " lutenist " 
himself, the noble boy, Meinrad of Einsiedeln, delightful little 
St. Paschal Baylon, who taught himself to read on the lonely 
moors by a method all his own, and Simon, the "Little 
Kentish lad who had the pluck to mortify himself, to efface 
himself, and to lead a life that the best and bravest boys of 
to-day would find well-nigh intolerable, 1 ' and by so doing won 
for us our dear brown scapulars and it will be a strange girl 
who does not enjoy it as well. 

THE BOY'S CUCHULAIN. Heroic Legends of Ireland. By 
Eleanor Hull. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. 
$1.50 net. 

This book deserves a welcome, since it attempts to stamp 
upon the heroic imaginations of English-reading youth the 
romantic figures of Irish folk-lore. As is proper, the work 
has been done by a writer thoroughly versed in the history 
and literature of the people whose stories she adapts. Miss 
Hull's more serious work on the Cuchulain Saga gives her the 
right, as it lends her the skill, to present this selection of 
heroic legends in popular form. Many a boy who reads these 
stories of Meane and Culain and Deirdre and Conor and the 
Sons of Usua will forever better appreciate the spirit of his 
race and will be the prouder of the brave old Irish blood that 
courses in his veins. The illustrations in color by Stephen 
Reid are sixteen in number and are beautiful. 

MARJORIE IN COMMAND. By Carolyn Wells. New York : 

Dodd, Mead & Co. $1.25. 

The Maynard children have appeared in print before, and 
in Marjorie in Command we have the delightful record of how 
they behaved, what they did, and what they tried to do, 
during the absence of their parents, who go:j South on a vaca- 
tion trip for a period of six weeks. A certain Miss Larkin 
comes to take care of the very human little family. She 
knows little of children, and her unnatural attempts to be 
motherly and kind are very humorous, indeed. She proves to 
be an uncertain quantity ruling one day with a rod of iron 
and the next becoming very lax and not ruling at all. But 
the children have a merry time notwithstanding, and life holds 



400 NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

a variety of interests for them. Her mother transfers the re- 
sponsibilities of hostess to Marjorie's shoulders, and the little 
mistress plays her part well. The story throughout is bright 
and entertaining. 

PEGGY ALONE. By Mary Agnes Byrne. Akron, Ohio : Saal- 
field Published Company. $1.25. 

Peggy is introduced as a wealthy little girl, yearning for 
the companionship of a playmate. The intense loneliness of 
her existence is relieved by the good fortune that brings about 
her union with the Happy-Go-Lucky's a circle of girls banded 
together in the cause of good, innocent fun. Peggy proves to 
be a valuable and well-beloved member of the Club. The 
chronicle is well-written and the volume most attractively 
presented. 

NED RIEDER. By Rev. John A. Wehs. New York : Benziger 
Brothers. 85 cents. 

This is a story of parochial school life. Ned figures promi- 
nently throughout, as does " Father Hale/' the priest in charge, 
who takes an active interest in the studies and sport of those 
committed to his care. The boys are good, strong, healthy 
characters, fond of work as well as play, and the "new 
priest influences them always for higher and better things." It 
is a book particularly suited for parochial school awards. 

L'HEURE DU MATIN. Par 1'Abbe Dunac. Quatrieme e'dition 
par 1'Abbe Gros. Paris: Pierre Tequi. 6 frs. per volume. 

These two volumes of meditations for priests are of con- 
siderable value to those for whom they are intended. The 
plan followed is to divide the work into six books. Each 
book contains a number of chapters, and the chapters in turn 
are broken up into a series of meditations. In this way there 
is a definite scheme of meditation which gives to the volume 
an admirable sense of unity. No fixed method is adopted for 
the meditations; some contain three points, some only two; 
but this is all the more welcome, as the dry, frigid style so 
common in books on the subject is entirely absent. Scripture 
abounds, and human wisdom and piety are evident on every 
other page. The following, which is taken from the second 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 401 

meditation on the dangers of a priest's life arising from having 
either too much or too little to do, will strike home to the 
heart of many a lonely priest: " Pauvre pretre, prisonnier dans 
ton presbytere, ou te promenant seul dans les allees silencieuses 
de ton jardin, ne te decourage pas. Dieu est avec toi dans ta 
solitude, Sursum corda ! (Vol. I., p. 165). 

We regret that we cannot congratulate the publisher on 
his share of the work. Rarely have we met with a book so 
trying to the eyes. The type used, the large amount of 
italics, the multitude of points (for which we can see no mean- 
ing), and the unnecessary accents, make the pages appear to 
dance whilst they are being read. The work of Pere Dunac 
is worthy of better treatment. 

THE HOLY LAND. By Robert Hichens. New York: The 
Century Company. $6. 

We have already called the attention of our readers to the 
papers on the Holy Land contributed by Robert Hichens to 
the Century. It is a pleasure for us to be able to announce 
that the papers have been published in book form, and the 
volume is one whose beauty it would be difficult to exagger- 
ate. It will be sufficient for us to state that the matchless il- 
lustrations are done by Jules Guerin, that there are numerous 
excellent photographs, and that the letter press equals the 
best work of the De Vinne Press. The text is worthy of such 
a lavish setting. Mr. Hichens in a direct, personal way con- 
ducts us from |Baalbec to Damascus, to Nazareth, to Jerusa- 
lem; from Jersualem to Bethlehem; and back again to the Holy 
City. The land and its people of to-day and of long ago are 
brought vividly before us by the power of his pen ; he makes 
us forget our surroundings and, like the Breton boy of whom 
he speaks, we, too, felt after reading the book that, in a meas- 
ure, we had visited the Holy Land and stood on the sacred 
spot where Christ died upon the Cross. The book may be 
recommended as a most worthy Christmas gift. 

THE CHRIST CHILD IN LEGEND AND ART contains 

-*- many excellent reproductions from the the more famous 

Christian artists. As a story of our Lord's childhood it leaves 

much to be desired, for one might read it through and never 

VOL. xcii. 26 



402 NEW BOOKS [Dec., 

learn who Christ really is. It recalls many of the old legends 
that centre about Christmas and throughout is Episcopalian in 
tone. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. $i net. 



CHRISTMAS ANGEL, by Abbie Farwell Brown, tells 
of a lonely spinster for whom Christmas has no mean- 
ing, and who does not hesitate to say so. A little toy angel 
finally brings about her reconciliation with the rejoicing world. 
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 60 cents. 

ENGLISH ACCENTUATION, by the Rev. F. T. Barre*, is a 
class book of less than one hundred pages, designed to be 
complete for all purposes of spelling and reading. The author 
gives five rules for proper pronunciation and copious illustra- 
tions to show their simplicity and comprehension. New York: 
P. J. Kenedy. 60 cents. 

A SMALL, attractive volume entitled Pere Jean, by Aileen 
-** Kingston, contains several short stories, together with an 
appreciative memoir of the young author, now deceased. The 
stories reveal, for the most part, primitive conditions of life in 
a French-Canadian village. The local color is true in tone and 
the characters are well drawn. New York : Benziger Brothers. 

A STIR is the name given by the well-known publisher, Joha 
-t Adams Thayer, to his recent] autobiography. The book 
is "the real business story of a real business man," and will 
surely be of interest to up-to-date Americans. It tells the 
" ins and outs " of the magazine business and reveals methods 
and personalities of present-day editors and publishers. The 
chapters which deal with Everybody's Magazine throw a new 
light, not limelight this time, upon the character of Thomas 
W. Lawson, of Boston. Boston : Small, Maynard & Co. 

a certain Daisy Dewey the privilege has been given, by 
an imaginative author, of transmitting what is supposed to 
be a mighty message from the spirit world. The message is 
embodied in a small book of high-sounding title, Problems of 
Your Generation, issued by the Arden Press, of New York. 
The book is spiritual in spots, but unbounded in its arrogance 
for it comes from those who, to use their own words, "assert 



i9io.] NEW BOOKS 403 

without fear of failure their ability to give out what may be 
desired." 

ANEW series of the lives of some of the principal canon- 
ized saints of the Orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic 
is shortly to be issued by Longmans, Green & Co. The series 
has been undertaken solely with a view to spread the knowl- 
edge of, and devotion to, the glorious Friar saints. 

THE Ordo for 1911, published by Fr. Pustet, New York, comes 
to us in its usually well-bound and well-arranged style. 
This edition includes the Roman Calender and sells at 50 cents 
per copy. 

THIS latest work of M. 1'Abbe Broussolle, Art, Religion 
and the Renaissance (Paris : P. Tequi), includes the lec- 
tures which the learned author gave last year at the Catholic 
Institute of Paris. It is a most worthy contribution to Chris- 
tian apologetics, and will give its readers a frank, clear-cut, 
accurate picture of the Italian Renaissance. The work is il- 
lustrated with one hundred and thirty-nine engravings, pen 
designs, or direct reproductions of excellent photographs. 

THIS volume Oriental Religions. First Series. The Vedic 
Religion, by Alfred Roussel is made up of various con- 
ferences given by the author at the Catholic Institute of 
Paris. The author makes a thorough study of the Vedic divin- 
ities, gods and demons, and presents a capable exposition of 
this ancient worship. Paris: P. Tequi. 



T^HE latest life to be added to the series of Les Saints, under 
* the editorship of Henri Joli, is that of St. Leon le Grand, by 
Adolphe Regnier. This edition needs no introduction, and 
Adolphe Regnier has already contributed a life of St. Martin. 
St. Leo's pontificate was one of the most romantic and impor- 
tant in the history of the Popes. It was during his reign that 
the papacy saved Western civilization from utter extinction at 
the hands of Alaric and Genseric, and it was he who successfully 
upheld the infallible authority of the successor of St. [Peter 
against the growing ambition of Constantinople. Paris : J. Ga- 
balda et Cie. 



jforeion periobtcals, 

The Tablet (22 Oct.): "Home Rule All Round," the plan for 
extending the principle of local self-government to Ire- 
land, Wales, Scotland, and England, on federal lines. 
The position of Mr. Redmond and Mr. T. P. O'Connor. 

"St. Ambrose and St. Augustine the Authors of 

the 'Te Deum.' " The evidence in favor of their joint 
authorship of the hymn, by Rev. T. D. Nolan, O.S.A. 
The Lisbon correspondent of The Westminster Ga- 
zette has thrown some interesting light upon the methods 
of the Portuguese officials in dealing with the Religious 
Orders and the censorship of news. " If you are will- 
ing to wire that the Jesuits are running like rats through 
all the old sewers and drains in the town with bombs 
and infernal machines, for the purpose of blowing us all 
up, then your telegrams will pass." 
(29 Oct.): "The Doctrine of Transubstantiation at 
Brighton." The writer deals with the position of those 
Anglicans who maintain that the Anglican Church has 
never condemned or rejected Transubstantiation, and, 
consequently, that if any one wishes to hold that doc* 
trine, he is, or ought to be, free to do so within the 

reformed Church of England. " The Charing Cross 

Bank has failed with liabilities of over two million 
pounds." Thousands of poor people are [involved in 

absolute ruin. The Apostolic Nuncio in Lisbon has 

been called to Rome, presumably to acquaint his superiors 
with the conditions that confront the Church in Portugal. 
(5 Nov.): "The Age of First Communion," an histori- 
cal survey of the practice of many centuries. "A 

Regrettable Letter." The London Times has published 
a letter from Miss Maud Petre, in which she states her 
complaint and grievance against the action of the 
Catholic ecclesiastical authorities in her diocese. "Miss 
Petre has been asked by her Bishop to subscribe to the 
recent judgments of the Holy See pronounced against 

Modernism." The Cardinal Legate has returned to 

Rome full of enthusiasm about all he saw in the New 
World. 

The Month (Oct.): " Professor Haeckel and His Philosophy,'* 



19 io.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 405 

by the Editor, is a refutation of the position that the 
last word of science on matters human and divine is to 

be found in Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe" In an 

article entitled "Loyalty to the Church," the Rev. 
Joseph Keating proves the teaching authority of the 
Church and pleads for obedience to this God- derived 

authority. Under the caption " St. Charles Borromeo 

and the Recent Encyclical," Father Thurston considers 
the late Papal document which produced a sensation in 
Germany. He declares the German opposition to be 

part of a political scheme. Rev. Charles Plater, in 

the first of a series of articles on " Social Study in 
Seminaries," shows the approval, exhortation, almost 
command of such study by the Pope, and what some 
continental bishops have done in this field. 
(Nov.): "The Revolution in Portugal," by Rev. Sydney 
F. Smith, considers the important features in the late 
revolution. The Rev. Herbert Thurston has an arti- 
cle entitled "The Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy to 
Date." He enumerates the leading advocates of the 
Baconian authorship, and shows that, with few excep- 
tions, they have no rank as students of Elizabethan 
literature. He claims to prove beyond doubt that 
Shakespeare is the author of the works ascribed to him. 

The Church Quarterly Review (Oct.) : " Dr. Sanday's ' Chris- 
tologies, Ancient and Modern,'" by the Rev. Darwell 

Stone. "The Church and the World." According 

to Mr. Hobhouse's view the Church history is the history 
of a mistake, and there is need of reform. In com- 
menting on this, Rev. E. W. Watson says that we can- 
not assent to this proposition, and the policy of reform 
advocated by Mr. Hobhouse points straight to schism. 

"The Assyrian Church," by W. A. Wigrane, a 

summary of the results of recent discoveries that throw 
new light upon the history and theological status of the 

Church of Assyria. Rev. H. L. Goudge, writing on 

" A Jewish View of the Synoptic Gospels," reviews cer- 
tain works by Jews urging their people to accept Christ 
as an ethical teacher. 

Mibbert Journal (Oct.) : M. Paul Sabatier discusses (in French) 
"The Religious Situation of the Roman Catholic Church 



4o6 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Dec., 

in France at the Present Hour." P. E. Malheson, 

writing of " Ideals in Education," considers knowledge, 
efficiency, and character, and how they may be brought 

to bear on the education of to-day. "A Vision of 

Unity," by the author of Pro Christo et Ecclesia, is an 
account of the Edinburgh World's Missionary Conference. 
James H. Hyslop writes of " Philosophical Theories and 

Psychical Research." In "Prisons and Prisoners" 

Thomas Holmes writes of conditions in prisons of the 
present day, and suggests remedies for existing evils. 

G. C. Field presents "The Fallacy of the Social 

Psychologist." This seems to be that facts already evi- 
dent to the man in the street are dressed up in pseudo- 
scientific garb and the result labelled "science." 

Frances H, Low, an anti-suffragette, contributes a " Re- 
joinder to Principal Childs on Woman Suffrage." Dis- 
cussing " Religion and Progress," H. B. Alexander con- 
cludes that the race which persists must believe in God 

and immortality. James Drummondjcriticises Dr. B. W, 

Bacon's book, The Fourth Gospel in Research and Debate. 

Th* Irish Theological Quarterly (Oct.): "Was John the Scot a 

Heretic ? " is the title of an article by Dr. William Turner, 

in which he defends Scotus Erigena from the charge 

of formal heresy. The Rev. W. T. Sheppard, O.S.B., 

discusses the teaching of the early Fathers on divorce. 
He shows that there is a large and important body of 
witnesses who teach the Catholic doctrine of divorce 
as we know it to-day, and that these are the true 
representatives of the current doctrine of their time. 
" A Plea for the Prophets," by F. C. Plater, S.J., is a 
new setting for the old argument from prophecies in 
support of Christ's divine mission. The prophets must 
be viewed in their historical prospective, and the pro- 
phecies represented as stages of an evolution working 
out a design which only becomes apparent at the end ; 
the full design is in the mind of no one prophet. Each 
prophecy, though serving an immediate purpose and 
conveying a useful message to its generation, does not 
exhaust its utility at the time of its appearance.- The 
argument will be attractive to scientists, accustomed, as 
they are, to see all things in the light of evolution.- 



i9io.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 407 

Father Toohey, S.J., shows that there is no opposition 
between the criterion of certitude taught in the Gram- 
mar of Assent, and that of the Scholastics. Apropos 
of the objections raised by the Presbyterians of Ulster 
over the establishment of a lectureship in scholastic 
philosophy at Queen's College, Belfast, Dr. Coffey points 
out the difference between scholastic philosophy and 
Catholic dogma. 

Dublin Review (Oct.): Maurice Baring, under the title "The 
Causes of the Failure of the Russian Revolution/' traces 
the genesis and course of this movement. He attributes 
its failure to selfish ideals on the part of the popular 
leaders and disagreement of the revolutionary forces. 
" What is Toleration ? " asks G. K. Chesterton, and 
proceeds characteristically to prove that we have less 
now than in the days of religious persecution. Rev. 
C. C. Martindale, S.J., in reviewing some recent works 
on comparative religion, outlines the present status of 
this science and its future prospects. F. C. Burnand, 
, for twenty-five years editor of Punch, writes on " ' Punch* 
and Pontiffs." While describing the treatment of the 
Popes by the professional cartoonists, he incidentally 
gives an interesting side-light on the change of religious 

sentiment in England during the last fifty years. 

"Spain and the Church," by Manuel J. Bidwell, out- 
lines the difference of half a century between the 

Spanish government and the Vatican. An anonymous 

writer, after admitting frankly the dangerous strength 
and logic of Socialism, proposes co-operative industry 
as the only effective answer. 

L Correspondent (10 Oct) : Under the title "The Eucharistic 
Congress at Montreal," Bishop Touchet presents the 
journal kept by him during the Congress. It dates from 
his departure from Orleans, and describes the farewell 
reception to the Papal Legate at Liverpool, incidents of 
the voyage, the reception of welcome at Montreal, and 

the ceremonies during the Congress. Louis Cadot 

discusses the necessity of electoral reform in France 
to-day under the heading "The Electoral Reform." 

"A Convert," by George Goyau, deals with the 

conversion to Catholicity of Professor Albert de Ruville, 



408 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Dec., 

of the University of Halle, and the writings published 
after his conversion, which have created quite a stir in 

Germany the past year. " The Maritime Ideas of 

Colbert," by G. Lacour Gayet, relates the achievements 
brought about by Colbert and his son, Siegnelay, in be- 
half of the French navy while they were Secretaries of 

the Navy during the reign of Louis XIV. "The 

Protection of Public Wealth Against Financial Swind- 
ling," by R. de Boyer Montegut, describes the aim and 
purpose of the Congress of International Societies at 

Brussels, September 20-22. "In the Desert" is am 

unpublished romance of Mark Helys, translated from 
the Italian by Grazzia Deledda. 

(25 Oct.) : An unsigned article, under the heading "The 
Political Situation in the United States," gives a brief 
history of the Democratic and Republican parties and 
the importance of each at the present time in the national 

government. " A French Painter at Rome," by Pierre 

de Nolhac, is a biographical sketch of Hubert Robert 
during his student- days in Rome about the latter part 
of the eighteenth century. " The Revolution in Por- 
tugal," by Victor de St. Blanchard, discusses the situa- 
tion in Portugal to-day and the causes which led up to 

it. "The Reconstruction of the Naval Standing of 

France," by Biard d'Aunet, discusses the possibility and 
the impossibility of the question. " Some Prose- 
Writers of Belgium," by Henri Davignon, gives a short 
history of the Belgian writers, describing the charac- 
teristic style of each. 

Revue du Clerge Franfais (i Nov.): J. Capart gives an account 

of the "Egyptian Religion." Apropos of the old 

charge that the saints among Catholics are the suc- 
cessors of the gods, E. Vacandard treats of the "Origins 
of the Veneration of the Saints," indicating, with the 
aid of texts, the beginnings of the veneration of mar- 

tyrs and tracing through the ages its development. 

T. Wintrebert discusses "The Actual State of Trans- 

f ormism." " The Socialist Army," is an account of 

the numerical strength of Socialism in various countries. 

Etudes (5 Oct.): "A Social Work at Rouen," by Benoit 
Emonet, describes the work of a meeting intended to 



FOREIGN PERIODICALS 409 

educate "the public conscience as a necessary prepara- 
tion for laws and institutions which will better social 
life." "The Thirty-Third General Assembly at Bor- 
deaux of the Alliance of Christian Educational Centers/' 
by Henri Gaye, touches principally upon Abbe Guibert's 
discussion of the decline of Latin, and upon the means 
suggested for forming the child's conscience. 
(20 Oct.): "Contemporary Philosophers," by Lucien 
Roure, considers William James, dwelling especially upon 
his "Theory of Emotion" and "Pragmatism"; Maine 
de Birau and his idea of the triple life of interior man, 
namely, animal, human, and spiritual; Gabriel Forde's 
insistence upon the individual in social life; Cesare Lorn- 
broso's contention that crime is the manifestation of 
degenerate organism. " Across Islam," by Henri Lam- 
mens, sketches the life of Mohammed ; Islamitic Art 
and Civilization ; Islam and European colonization. 

La Revue du Monde (15 Oct.): When should children first re- 
ceive the Holy Eucharist ? The decrees in reference to 
this question, recently formulated at Rome by the Sacred 
Congregation of the Sacraments, are set forth by Car- 
dinal Ferrara, Secretary of the Congregation. In 

" Contemporary Notes " the author, speaking of the con- 
dition of affairs in France, points out chiefly the import- 
ance of education, not only for the development of the 
country but also for the maintenance and growth of a 
religious spirit. 

Stimmen aus Maria-Laach (Oct.): In "The Latest Investi- 
gations Concerning the ' Holy House ' of Loreto," St. 
Beissel, S.J., points out that many good Catholics have 
not been satisfied with the proofs of its translation. 
He concludes with the warning that it should always 

be remembered that this is not a question of faith. 

V. Cathrein, S.J., writes sympathetically of " ' Action 
Populaire ' of Rheims." Abandoning the usual hope of 
French Catholics that a change of government will ac- 
complish all, this organization has made a direct appeal 
to the people. And it has made the ground of its ap- 
peal economic rather than religious, recognizing that 
"the way to a man's heart is through his mouth." 

Revue Thomiste (Sept.-Oct.) : R. P. Petrot defends the Thorn- 



410 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Dec., 

istic theory of sufficient grace against the superficial at- 
tacks of Pascal in his first Provincial Letters. Thcmism 
teaches that the will is free to resist grace effectively ; 
the power of resistance spoken of by Pascal is something 

theoretical and absurd. "The Causes of Assent in 

Belief and Opinion," is a study of the nature of faith, 
both human and supernatural, by T. Richard. The func- 
tion of the will is not confined to belief; the will it is 
that commands and directs us in forming our most irr- 

tellectual convictions. R. P. Lagae gives the second 

installation of his article " The Rational Certitude of the 
Fact of Revelation." 

Revue Pratique d } Apologetique (15 Oct.): J. Guibert, gives a 

general view of the encyclicals of Pius X. In the 

article, "The Riches of the Church in Spain," we find 
the Church was well fixed financially until 1836, when 
the State took charge of her wealth and confiscated 
much of her property. 

Rev** du Clergt Franfais (15 Oct.): Apropos of Pope Pius 
X.'s letter on the " Sillon," F. Dubois discusses "True 
and False Democracy." He gives an analysis of various 
systems of democracy to show that the teaching of the 
Catholic Church is in perfect accord with true democracy. 

E. Lenoble writes of " Souls in Prison," the title of 

a book by M. Louis Arnould on the education of blind 

deaf-mutes. M. Kleber discusses the question of a 

" Catholic Teaching of Letters and Sciences." 

Annales de Philosophic Chretienne (Oct.): L. Pastourel begins 
an article on "The Ecstasy of Pascal." Between the 
opinion that the event can be explained in its entirety, 
en the one hand, and the opposite view, that in Pascal's 
rapture all is mystery, the author hopes to strike a mean 
that will be nearer the truth. 

La Revue Apologetique (Oct.): Jules Lintelo, S.J., interprets 
" The Decree on the Age of First Communion " to mean 
such an age as to know clearly what they are about and 
the preparation that should be made. "The Conver- 
sion of Constantine," is a defense of the first Christian 
emperor by Abbe Joseph Dewitt. The author attempts 
to prove the good and exemplary life of Constantine. 

Die Kultur (29 Oct.): E. Schwiedland discusses various forms 



1 9 io.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 411 

of "Economic Associations," such as co-operative stores, 
trusts, producers' unions, etc., and their place in social 
reform. Under the caption "Scientific Study of Re- 
ligion," Dr. Eugen Schwiedland defends the right of 
comparative religion to be called a " science. "-^^In 
" Curiosities of Psychiatry," Dr. Alexander Pilaz de- 
scribes some ancient methods of curing the insane by 
sorcery. 

B&lische Zeitschrift (29 Oct.): "The Protevaugelium," by Dr. 
W. Engelkemper. The representation in Gen. iii. is 
neither mythical nor allegorical, but tells its story in 

symbols. Dr. Dausch writes about a new attempt 

made by Belser to prove that Christ's public ministry 
lasted only one year, which attempt ke holds to be a 
failure. 

La Scuola Cattolica (Oct.) : " James Balmes in the First Centenary 
of His Birth." G. Tredici treats of him chiefly as a 
philosopher and an apologist. The spirit of this great 
philosopher and apologist should guide the Catholic 
Spaniards in saving tkeir religion from the new and 
menacing assaults which are now menacing it in their 
country. C. Parroco proposes means to avoid " Agra- 
rian Strikes." L. Toudelli devotes an article to the 

Orpheus of Reinach. 

La Civilita Cattolica (15 Oct.): " Literary Modernism" is not a 
new kind or a new form of Modernism, distinct from the 
forms of Modernism condemned in the Encyclical Pascen- 
di; but is the use of various kinds of literature to spread 

abroad Modernist doctrines. " The Authors and the 

Time of the Composition of the Psalms." L. Mechmeau, 
S.J., outlines the work accomplished by the Biblical Com- 
mission, and then explains why the Commission does 
not oblige us to attribute to David all the Psalms. 
" Italian Emigration and Canada/' reviews Canada, Pres- 
ent and Future, in its Return to Italian Emigration, a 
work by P. Pisani, professor in the Seminary of Vercelli. 
Emigration to Canada is represented as an admirably 
efficacious means of agricultural colonization, which offers 
to the Italian peasants the best economic advantages in 
the cultivation of the soil. "The Nature of the Sac- 
raments According to the Theosophists." "The Christian 



412 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Dec. 

sacraments are not rites instituted by Christ, but are 
special formulas or magic rites not unlike the supersti- 
tious ceremonies of the Indians, Buddhists, and Spiritual- 
ists." 

Rason y Fe (Nov.) : V. Minteguiaga writes on " The Deprecia- 
tion of Authority: Its Causes." These are: the seculari- 
zation of authority, denying its foundation in God ; and 
the extension of the civil authority (as in education) 
until it conflicts with individual liberty. " Has Rome 
Admitted Religious Liberty in Rome ? " asks P. Tillada; 
and answers no, in the sense of approving such action. 
J. MaGarcfa Ocana describes various suggestions re- 
garding "The Budget of the Clergy." N. Noguer 

writes on'"Le Sillon ' and the Democratic Movement." 
The organization is accused of a too conciliatory atti- 
tude towards anti-clericals and masons. " Christian 

Education in the Family " warns parents against the 
agitation now going on in Spain to secularize the 
schools. Children belong to parents not to the State, it 
is claimed. The influences back of the school question 
are blamed for the Barcelona riots. 

Espana y America (i Oct.): P. A. Sanz, reviewing Jiinemann's 
General History of Literature, recommends it as a text- 
book and guide. Objection |is found with the author's 
assumption of Hebrew works prior to the Bible. De- 
tailed description of "The Decoration of the Church of 
St. 'Paul in Manila," by P. M. Cil. 

(15 Oct.): "Rationalism Against Christianity," by P. M. 
Blanco, of New York, is a review of Philip Vivian's 
The Churches and Modern Freethought. The strength f 
the Knights of Columbus in the United States is in- 
stanced as indicating the vitality of the Church. P. 

A. Monjas, lander the title "The Educational Congress 
and Neutral Schools," points to France as an example 
oi Godless education. Spanish officials, having sworn te 
support the Catholic religion, have no right, he con- 
tends, to drive the teaching of that religion out oi the 
schools. Decree of Pope Pius X. on "First Com- 
munion," declaring that children are bound to make 
their Easter duty as soon as they reach the age of rea- 
son, that is about seven years. 



IRecent Bvents, 

Events which have taken place in 

France. France are calculated to cause 

anxiety in the minds of friends 

of the existing form of government. M. Briand had declared 
that his end and aim was to promote the well-being of all 
Frenchmen, to whatsoever party they belonged. This dec- 
laration did not meet with the approbation of many members 
of the ^largest party in the Chamber the Socialist-Radicals. 
To them every one who was not an aggressive supporter of 
the Republic, or who, professing to be a Republican, showed 
any Catholic sympathy or adopted any practice, was an enemy 
of France and to be treated as such. In former days an official 
who went to Mass was to be denounced to his superiors. 
This party held a meeting at Rouen, at which it elected M. 
Combes as President of the Executive Committee, and passed 
a resolution, although there was a respectable minority, in 
condemnation of M. Briand's policy of apaisement. 

The railway strike, however, threw those proceedings into 
the background and introduced new issues. The firmness of 
M. Briand and his Cabinet caused the failure of the strike. 
Acting under the authority of existing laws, he summoned to 
the colors the Reserves, and as these included the strikers on 
the railway, the decree if so facto put them under martial law 
and rendered them liable to its pains and penalties. Moreover, 
it excited feelings of patriotism and loyalty towards the colors, 
and within a few days after the decree had been issued the 
strike was at an end. 

But not its consequences, for these seem destined to exert 
a profound influence upon the course of events. Several days' 
debate took place in Parliament, in which a fierce attack was 
made upon M. Briand and the government by the Socialists of 
the Extreme Left, of whom M. Jaures made himself] the spokes- 
man. The articulate attack was not so remarkable as the in- 
articulate. Such violent scenes have never in recent years 
been witnessed in the French Chamber. M. Briand had to 
make his speech in the midst of the banging of desks, of ex- 
clamations of all kinds; and when it was over he had to be 
escorted to his room by a phalanx of friends in order that he 



414 RECENT EVENTS [Dec., 

might not be subjected to physical violence. The strange part 
of it was that the Socialists, who made this savage attack on 
M. Briand, were taking the part of those who are called Syndi- 
calists, and are really anarchists, and utterly opposed in prin- 
ciples to the Socialists. The latter wish the State to own and 
control everything and all the means of production, to place 
every one in his daily life under State control. The former, 
to whose action the strike was due, wish to abolish all govern- 
ment, and leave everything to the individual. M. Briaad's 
government incurred the condemnation of both, because he 
had defended so successfully the existing order; and this was 
the only bond between his opponents. 

Several of the Ministers, including M. Briand, were handi- 
capped by the fact that, not many years ago, they had ex- 
pressed approval of the general strike advocated, as a means 
of obtaining its ends, by the General Confederation of Labor. 
M, Briand, however, is not unwilling to grow wiser as he 
grows older, and to admit that he has made mistakes in the 
past. Moreover, he was able to show that the strike just over 
had peculiar features of its own, and that those who promoted 
it had entered into a conspiracy against the well-being of all 
the citizens and their interests, and that the means which they 
adopted of maliciously injuring property constituted an intol- 
erable outrage on the rights of others. In his own words: 
" The government had been confronted with an enterprise 
designed to ruin the country, an anarchist movement with civil 
war as its object, and for its methods violence and organized 
destruction (Sabotage)" 

The zealous regard for legality shown by the law-breaking 
defenders of the strike was made manifest when M. Briand 
publicly, and some think injudiciously, declared that although 
he had acted in strict accordance with law in the measures 
which he had taken, yet he would have been willing to resort 
to illegality if it had been necessary so to do. This declaration 
the Socialists received with shouts of: "Dictator, Dictator, 
Resign, Resign ! " and almost carried the tribune by assault 
In the end the government's victory was complete. An un- 
qualified expression of confidence in it was carried by a ma- 
jority of 388 votes to 94. Royalists and Imperialists voted in 
support of the motion. Their support, however, would not 
have been accepted as a condition of retaining office. Had 



i9io.] RECENT EVENTS 415 

there not been a clear majority of Republicans, M. Briand 
declared that he would resign. This, however, was amply 
secured, for he had a majority of 104 even within the old 
Combist bloc. 

The government had been united in the measures which 
they had taken for suppressing the strike ; but when the ques- 
tion arose, what was to be done to prevent similar efforts ia 
the future, divisions arose. M. Viviani resigned, and doubts 
arose in the minds of several members. Desirous of complete 
unity of action in the future, M. Briand placed in the hands 
of the President the resignation of himself and his colleagues. 
He was, however, at once entrusted with the task of forming 
a new government, a thing which he did in the course of 
twenty-four hours. The new Cabinet embraces within its 
ranks four or five of M. Briand's old colleagues, including M. 
Pichon, the Foreign Minister. The new members are little 
known men, thereby making it, in the judgment of many, a 
one man government. Its programme embraces proposals re- 
lating to electoral, administrative, and fiscal reform, which have 
already received the approval of the great majority of Depu- 
ties during the recent electoral campaign. The new proposals, 
in consequence of the strike, for the prohibition of like at- 
tempts in the public services and in great enterprises like rail- 
ways, may meet with more opposition. The prospects for the 
future are not of the brightest. M. Briand has enemies oa 
the Right and on the Left. The Socialists, and no small num- 
ber of the Radical Party, cannot be relied upon for support: 
the latter on account of Briand's policy of apaisement\ the Right 
and the Moderate Republicans on account of his devotion to 
the Republic and of his leaning to the Radical Left. Such 
being the state of things within and without the Chamber, 
violence and virulence, in an unprecedented degree, character- 
izing the recent movements, while divisions, which go down 
to the very depths, exist not merely between the supporters 
of the Republic and its opponents, but even within the ranks 
of the Republicans themselves, it is impossible not to feel ap- 
prehension as to the immediate future. 

The relations of France towards other Powers have not 
changed to any great extent, although the refusal to allow the 
Hungarian Loan to be quoted on the Bourse, thereby render- 
ing it impossible that it should be raised in France, has caused 



4i6 RECENT EVENTS [Dec., 

a certain degree of coolness in Austria-Hungary. The condi- 
tions insisted upon by the French government, before the 
same privilege should be granted to Turkey, were after long 
negotiations rejected by the Turkish Cabinet, and with a like 
result. Turkey is now seeking the help of her former adver- 
saries, Germany and Austria, and is getting a series of 
monthly advances at a higher rate of interest than would 
have been paid to the French financiers, with the promise 
or expectation of a loan next spring. With Great Britain 
the entente cordiale still subsists with undiminished ardor, nor 
has the controversy about the native of India, who escaped 
while in French waters and was handed back to the British 
authorities, caused any serious difference between the two 
countries, inasmuch as it has been referred to arbitration at 
The Hague. Towards Spain a feeling of distrust was begin- 
ning to be felt, on account of reports that the Spanish gov- 
ernment was seeking to secure an indemnity which would 
conflict with French interests. The assurances given by the 
Spanish government have, however, removed all anxiety. 

Nothing of great moment has taken 
Germany. place in Germany. The shipping 

dispute, which threatened so seri- 
ous a dislocation of industry, has been settled. The riots in 
Berlin had no political importance and were suppressed without 
much trouble. The Berlin University has been celebrating its 
one hundredth anniversary, having been founded, as the Em- 
peror in his speech at the celebration said, when the tide of 
Prussian fortune was at its lowest, in order to make good, by 
intellectual forces, what the State had lost in material strength. 
In this she had succeeded, having been filled with the spirit 
of truth and thoroughness, with the seriousness and the love 
in every task which is the glory of the German people. 
Through the pursuit of pure knowledge, which comes from 
within and which transforms character and makes characters, 
his Majesty expressed the hope that the University would con- 
tinue its work, and would constitute herself as the guardian 
of a treasure which belongs to all mankind : " Communis ho- 
minum thesaurus situs est in magnis veritatibus." 

The admonition given to women by the Emperor in his 
speech at Konigsberg, that they should devote themselves to 



i9io.] RECENT EVENTS 417 

the quiet work of the home rather than to the attainment of 
"supposed rights," has not been listened to by the gentle sex 
with the docility which was to have been expected. The League 
of the Association of German Women passed a strongly- 
worded resolution in which pain and regret were expressed at 
the German Emperor's want of understanding. "While appre- 
ciating the importance of women's domestic duties, they could 
not rest content with a state of things which drove 9,500,000 
women into a struggle for living outside the home, and so 
they felt bound to exert themselves in order to find a remedy. 

To a remarkable appeal made to him the Emperor has so 
far made no answer. The new constitutional regime in Persia 
has not been able to restore order. In all parts of the country 
chaos reigns and, as a consequence, commerce is almost impos- 
sible. The British government felt itself justified in giving 
notice to the Persian government that, if steps were not taken 
within three months to bring about tranquillity, it would itself 
organize, under the command of Indian officers, a Persian force 
sufficient to guard the trade routes. A number of Persians 
and Turks (among whom must be included some Germans) 
misrepresented this as involving a deliberate purpose to par- 
tition Persia Great Britain to take the South, Russia the 
North. The feeling was so strong that at a meeting of Turk- 
ish and Persian Moslems, held at Constantinople, an appeal 
was made to the Emperor for his protection and aid. He was 
reminded that at the tomb of Saladin he had uttered words 
which had gladdened the hearts of 350 million Moslems the 
generous promise to safeguard their rights. His support of 
Turkey in Macedonia, his intervention in Morocco, justified 
the hope that now he would protect Islam from the nefarious 
attempts of the British government. By this time these peti- 
tioners have found out that they were laboring under a delu- 
sion that no partition is contemplated and, therefore, that 
a reply from the Ecnperor is not called for. 

With the Turkish Empire both Germany and Austria have 
entered into closer relations, for the loan that failed in France 
is being raised in the two Empires. Doubtless this will in- 
volve a closer political union. The visit of the Tsar to 
Potsdam has led to speculation as to whether any charge 
will take place in the attitude of the two countries one to 
another. Great care has been taken to keep secret what 
VOL. xcii. 27 



4i 8 RECENT EVENTS [Dec., 

passed between the Kaiser and the Tsar ; but as the respective 
Foreign Ministers were present it cannot be looked upon as 
merely a family visit. It is well known that Count Aehren- 
thal wishes to renew the Alliance of the Three Emperors, and 
that he is strongly opposed to the entente that now exists 
between Great Britain and Russia. 

The revolution in Portugal led to 

Spain. the expectation that a like event 

would take place in Spain. The 

very day, that of Ferrer's execution, was, it was said, fixed. 
But so far nothing has happened to justify these apprehen- 
sions. The number of Republicans in Spain is, indeed, con- 
siderable, and they form one of the recognized parties. But 
they are not relatively so numerous as they are in Portugal, 
and their aim is not altogether in accord with that of the 
Portuguese Republicans. Many of the Spanish advocates of a 
Republic wish to establish a similar form of government for 
the whole of the Peninsula, to embrace both Spain and Por- 
tugal, and thereby to establish a great Iberian Republic. But 
this is not in accordance with the patriotic idea of the Portu- 
guese, who love their own country although it is small. 

Another difference is that the Royal Family of Spain seems 
to be very popular, and this popularity is due chiefly to the 
Queen. The visit recently paid to Valentia, a republican 
stronghold, made manifest the hold of their Majesties upon 
the affections of the people. Nothing could exceed the enthu- 
siasm of the welcome which they received, not only in the city 
itself, but on the route to and fro. The visit is said to have 
proved a great personal triumph for the Queen, who charmed 
every one by her pleasing appearance and gracious manner. 
The return journey from Valentia to Madrid was the occasion 
of the most extraordinary scenes of popular enthusiasm. The 
King had given orders that the train should make a short stop 
at all the stations, and every one of these was packed to over- 
flowing. We are not told that the King, in imitation of illus- 
trious examples, took the opportunity to make a speech, but 
the people struggled, thrust, and even fought, to shake hands 
with his Majesty and the Queen. Such great enthusiasm has 
seldom been witnessed in Spain. 

How far this may be taken as an assurance that no change 









i9io.] RECENT EVENTS 419 

is likely, it is impossible for any one to say. To what extent 
the personal popularity of the King is a controlling force is 
doubtful. Leading Republicans declare that so long as a 
moderate government is in power, the present state of things 
will be accepted; but if a Conservative government were to 
be formed the overthrow of the monarchy would be attempted. 
The army is said to be loyal ; and in General Weyler it has 
a commander who will not be slow to put into execution the 
methods characteristic of Spanish rule. Subversive manifestoes 
are, however, being circulated in the barracks. Catholic demon- 
strations have been held in various parts of Spain, but these 
are directed against the anti-religious measures proposed by 
the government rather than in support of the dynasty. A 
Bill has passed the Senate which limits the number of religious 
associations to be allowed in Spain for the next two years, 
when another Bill, which will have been more thoughtfully pre- 
pared, is to be introduced. 

One of the most remarkable things 
Portugal. about the recent revolution in 

Portugal is the fact that the mon- 
archy had so little hold upon the people that, after a few 
hours' fighting, the opposition to the establishment of a Repub- 
lic ceased, and from one end of the kingdom to the other the 
new form of government was almost at once accepted. The 
king's own ministers made not the slightest effort to save him. 
A few officials have refused to serve under the new government. 
The Marquis de Soveral, the Minister for so many years to 
Great Britain, has sent in his resignation ; and at the bull fight 
which was held in order to celebrate the victory for the 
Republic, notwithstanding its ardor tor reforms, has not in- 
cluded the abolition of this barbarous pastime among them 
the seats usually occupied by the aristocracy were vacant. The 
Church lost no time in giving in her adhesion to the Republic. 
On the 1 7th of the month the Cardinal Archbishop of Lisbon 
sent a letter to the Minister of the Interior, formally declaring 
his acceptance of the new form of government, and by the 
2 ist all the Bishops had given in their adhesion. The Provi- 
sional Government, therefore, has no excuse for its harsh and 
unjust treatment of the Church. 

The new authorities seem to be altogether too precipitate 



420 RECENT EVENTS [Dec., 

in the wholesale way in which they are carrying out what they 
are pleased to call reforms. Their proper function is to pre- 
pare the way for the nation's voice being heard by means 
of a Constituent Assembly. But they have announced that 
this Assembly will not be called before next summer; and in 
the meantime they have, of their own authority, decreed a 
series of reforms, some of them deserving that name, but 
others by no means worthy of it. The abolition of the arbi- 
trary Press Law of Senhor Franco, and of the law of summary 
arrest, the practical enforcement of the law for repatriation of 
the natives of Angola, are, indeed, steps in the right direction, 
the abolition of the House of Peers, of the Council of State, 
and of titles of nobility, as well as the banishment of all mem- 
bers of the Braganza Family (although the last savors of harsh- 
ness), are matters about which outsiders have no right to ex- 
press an opinion. It is worthy of note that, although heredi- 
tary titles have been abolished, the Orders of Knighthood 
conferred for personal excellence have been retained. Nothing 
but regret can be felt, however, that the secularization of all 
State schools, and the prohibition f all religious education, 
are included among the measures already decreed. 

The Censorship, too, is carried out so strictly that nothing 
in the way of news, or of the expression of opinion, is allowed 
to be sent abroad, except such as may be deemed edifying. 
Hence, no one can be sure that he knows the exact state of 
things. This seems to be the delusion into which all authori- 
tarian forms of government fall, and the present Portuguese 
government must be looked upon as such. They think they 
have the power to suppress the truth, or that their cause is 
served by the attempt to do so. The new Press Law, indeed, 
permits free discussion and criticism of all legislative measures 
existing or in prospect, of political matters, of government 
policy, and of the action of public officials. The censorship 
hitherto existing with autocratic and anonymous power called 
the Black Cabinet is abolished. But these reforms do not in- 
clude the abolition of the censorship over foreign telegrams. 

Other measures are proposed which in no way deserve the 
name of reforms: Church and State are to be separated; all 
churches and ecclesiastical buildings are to become the prop- 
erty of the State, not absolutely, indeed, for they are to be 
used for the services of the Church under the supervision of 



i9io.] RECENT EVENTS 421 

the Minister of Pablic Works. The private property of the 
clergy is to remain inviolate, and all ecclesiastical incumbents 
are to enjoy for life their present emoluments. The State 
guarantees to equalize any deficits for which the application 
of the new law is directly answerable. The proposed law for 
allowing divorce shows, however, more clearly than anything 
else how far the new government is prepared to go. In addi- 
tion to several other causes, divorce is to be allowed by mutual 
consent, provided, after two years of married life, the parties 
have for one year manifested to state officials their intention 
of seeking a release from their bonds. Neither Europe nor 
our own country allows such a liberty. 

Instead of letting bygones be bygones Senhor Franco, the 
ex- Dictator, who had returned to Portugal, and was indeed 
holding a political office, has been arrested, and is held for 
trial on the charge of having exercised an unlawful dictatorship, 
of enforcing seventy-two dictatorial decrees without the sanction 
of Parliament, of endeavoring by decree to liquidate the in- 
debtedness of the Royal Family to the State, to the amount 
of some five hundred thousand dollars, and of fraudulently in- 
creasing the Civil List of the crown by the sum of one hundred 
and sixty thousand dollars. This prosecution seems to be in 
the highest degree unwise, and the government disclaims re- 
sponsibility for it. The trial, however, may throw light upon 
the causes which have led to the expulsion of the royal family. 
This family seems to have lost its hold upon the respect of 
the people, less from any particular evil doing of its own 
(although it seems to have been somewhat over-desirous of 
money), but from the want of ability to cope with the evils 
brought upon the country by politicians whose only aim was 
their own personal gain. The situation has been much the same 
as in Greece, a country which has been brought to the verge 
of ruin by a similar class of self-seekers. But Greece has had 
the advantage of possessing in its ruler a man of principle who 
has loyally respected the constitution to which he owed his 
crown, whereas the late King Carlos of Portugal tried by arbi- 
trary measures to find the remedy an attempt which resulted 
first in his own assassination and afterwards in the recent revo- 
lution. It remains very doubtful whether this revolution will 
effect a cure. What Portugal wants is good government, hon- 
est administration, justice, liberty, and progress, and in particu- 



422 RECENT EVENTS [Dec. 

lar a reform of taxation ; and these must in large measure come 
from the natural virtues oi the people, and are not the gift of 
either monarchism or republicanism. Republicanism opens 
mere avenues for the bringing into the public service of the 
necessary elements of good government. But the spirit of the 
existent authorities seems to be as autocratic and self-centred 
as that of any despot. 

A beginning, however, has been made in the very impor- 
tant matter of finance, the mismanagement of which was at the 
root of the discontent. The five hundred thousand dollars a 
year spent upon the royal family is to be applied to the aboli- 
tion of the town dues on meat and vegetables, thereby dimin- 
ishing the cost of living for the people. The taxation on landed 
property and buildings is to be raised from some twenty- five 
millions to sixty. The payment of arrears of taxes is to be 
enforced; superfluous officials dismissed. The advances made 
to the Royal Family and government officials, amounting to 
nearly five millions, are to be collected. The revenues of the 
Royal properties are, after payment of debts, to be handed over 
to the deposed monarch, who is, in other ways, assured of an 
income of a hundred thousand a year. By these and other 
measures it is hoped to pay all expenses without the issue of 
a loan. In fact, every effort will be made to pay off the 
national debt, the burden of which has been so great a source 
of evil. The small effect produced by the revolution upon 
Portuguese stocks is an evidence that the financial world .has 
not felt any great degree of apprehension or anxiety on ac- 
count of the change of government. 



With Our Readers 



OELDOM does the press of this country attain so high a level, both 
O editorially and otherwise, as on Tuesday, November 15, in 
appreciation of John La Farge, who, in his seventy-sixth year, had 
died on the preceeding day. The public at large should surely 
have realized, what many long have known, that his was the re- 
markable career of a remarkable man, remarkable both as artist and 
as writer on the philosophy and histoiy of art, while as regards his 
work in glass John La Farge held the unique and historic place of 
inventor and founder of a school. In the words of the judge of the 
window which he exhibited at the French Exhibition of 1889, and 
for which he was given the Legion of Honor: 

He is the great innovator, the inventor of opaline glass. He has created, 
in all its details, an art unknown before, an entirely new industry. 

And the Boston Transcript says : 

It was in his glass work that he most freely and completely expressed 
himself. This work is sui generis. In it he attained the perfect union of the 
decorative and the religious intention. Solemnity and exaltation are embo- 
died in resplendent terms of color. ^Esthetic detachment and illustrative 
interest not in conflict, but co-operating, here are bound up in an organic 
unity. La Farge has achieved what amounts almost to a miracle in carrying 
forward and giving new lustre to the sublime color of the old French glass- 
makers. Words are inadequate to describe the magnificence of his windows. 
Before such masterpieces one remains silent. 

One need only see for himself in order to believe the truth of 
these most laudatory words. In the Paulist Church, just behind 
the altar, are three windows of German and English fabric. 

All the other windows, and two in the chancel, are the work of 
John La Farge. What a contrast ! What a difference in the two 
kinds of work. What dull, soulless color in the one, what a revela- 
tion of luminous color-blending in the other ! 

* * # 

AS regards his painting of religious subjects, notable examples of 
which may be seen in the churches of St. Thomas, the Ascen- 
sion, and the Incarnation, and in Trinity Church, Boston, the same 
writer of the Boston Transcript says : 

Different as La Farge's art is in all its exterior aspects from that of Rem- 
brandt, it has certain affinities to it in spirit, which are worth consideration. 
Both enter into the old Bible stories, not like men using them as materials, 
but like simple little children, to whom they are as dear and familiar and 
authentic as household events of yesterday. La Farge's imagination has un- 
doubtedly less of homely depth, the astounding reality, the poignant inten- 



424 WITH OUR READERS [Dec., 

sity of feeling, and the understanding of humanity, which combine to make 
Rembrandt the supreme artist of all time ; but he shares with the great 
Dutchman his absolute seriousness and unquestioning faith, his mystic vein 
of thought, and his impersonal detachment. His angels, saints, and prophets 
are not wholly of this world; they belong to a higher order of creation; he 
delights in clothing them with moral beauty, with the suggestions of more than 
moral power, with nobility and dignity and tenderness, that do not altogether 
belong to poor humanity, but yet convey some glorious hints as to what it 
may aspire to in its golden moments of high endeavor. With all its limita- 
tions, the religious art of La Farge is truly inspired, full of reverence, and 
as far removed from materialism as is that of Fra Angelico. 
* # * 

JOHN LA FARGE was born in New York in 1835. His father, 
Jean Frederic La Farge, a native of Charente, France, who 
lived during the terrible days of the French Revolution, was in the 
navy and army by turns, fought under Napoleon on his native soil, 
as well as in San Domingo, and died at his summer residence, Glen 
Cove, L- I., in 1858. Having disposed of an estate in Louisiana, 
he came to New York, where he acquired a large property, partly 
in Jefferson and partly in Lewis counties, not far from Lake Ontario. 
There he founded La Fargeville, and built the mansion which later 
was used by Archbishop Hughes as an ecclesiastical seminary. 
During Lieutenant La Farge's ownership the homestead was main- 
tained in princely style, and generous hospitality dispensed, es- 
pecially to many ot his expatriated countrymen. Among these was 
M. Victor Bancel, a graduate of La Fleche, who had iounded in 
New York a semi-military school. M.Buisse de St. Victor, a 
wealthy planter of San Domingo, had also come here, married M. 
Bancel's sister, and the daughter of this lady became the wife of 
John La Farge's father. M. Buisse de St. Victor was a miniature 
painter of distinction, some of whose excellent work may still be 
seen in New York drawing rooms ; and it was he who gave to John 
La Farge, his grandson, the first lessons in drawing. " He taught 
me," said Mr. La Farge, " when I was only six years old, how to 
tack my drawing paper on the board, and made me practice ruling 
until I became very expert." An early beginning which served 
him in good stead to the end. His education was divided between 
Columbia, Mt. St. Mary's, Kmmitsburg, Md., and St. John's Col- 
lege, at Fordham. 

* # * 

IT was an Irish Jesuit who first aroused his interest in China and 
Japan, an interest which in time so effectively expressed itself in 
his decorative work. I well remember only three winters ago, in 
calling upon Mr. La Farge, to find him absorbed in reading a big 
dusty old book written in a curious Latin, which he told me was 
the diary of a Chinese priest and missionary, a convert of the seven- 



9io.] WITH OUR READERS 425 

teenth century. The Jesuit Fathers were evidently quick to dis- 
cern the unusual possibilities of this boy. He was not obliged to 
study or compete in the exercises unless he chose. Consequently 
he did study, and, when he chose to compete, was easily first. With 
the apparent caprice of genius he went from one college to another 
and back again for slight reasons. From St. Mary's to Fordham, 
and again from Fordham back to Emmitsburg, where he completed 
his studies and graduated in 1853. It was also an Irish priest at 
St. Mary's who saw the lad's artistic quality of soul, and therefore 
put Ruskin in his hands to read at an age which was receptive and 
formative. He afterwards went to the studio of Couture, in Paris, 
only to find from Couture himself that he (John L,a Farge) was to 
be his own best master. Like many a man of the artistic tempera- 
ment, he fought against his destiny, and for a time tried the law; 
but Blackstone and Kent were like the Latin and Greek classics 
of college days ; he read them when and how he pleased fortunate- 
ly, for he was impelled against himself to be true to himself. Hence 
the development of a great artist and a great personality. Essential- 
ly a Catholic type, of universal expansiveness of perception, thought, 
and sympathy, he painted everything and anything, investing it 
with beauty, by reason of depth and breadth of vision, of his 
profound simplicity and sincerity. Like Francis Thompson, his 
work is the varied expression of poet, mystic, and metaphysician, of 
a man of the hour, a man of all ages, of a child whose soul is as 
old as the world. 

The New York Evening Post says : 

As a prophet his quality was peculiar. Our pathfinders of the spirit 
have almost invariably been of a single type the Puritan Emerson, Lowell, 
Norton in all of these there has been a marked strain of other-worldliness. 
None of this in John La Farge. He accepted the world blandly and with 
shrewd sagacity, somewhat in the spirit of those Jesuit Fathers from whom 
he received his first instruction. He represented to us the mellowness of the 
Catholic civilization of Europe. 

* * * 

JOHN LA FARGE was, as every Catholic should be, beautifully 
J innocent of Puritanism. 

Paul Bourget in Outre-Mer writes : 

Nowhere have I felt more keenly the influence of travel upon American 
intellectuality than in New York, and in the studio of that remarkable 
painter, John La Farge. The man himself, who is no longer young, whose 
subtle face with a skin whitened, and as if dried by inner ardor, with eyes 
mobile and yet held within lids both drawn and stretched, gives the impres- 
sion of a nervous activity unappeased by any effort, unsatisfied through 
any experience, and seeking, and seeking again. He has invented new pro- 
cesses for stained glass. He has practised both decoration and illustration, 



426 WITH OUR READERS [Dec., 

painting in oil and encaustic, has executed large altar pieces, such as his 
grand and refined Ascension, as well as delicate palettes. 

The following is from the private letter of a distinguished writer 
to the hostess of an informal dinner party, at which La Farge had 
been the other distinguished guest : 

The more I think of Mr. La Farge, the more wonderful he grows, and 
the more I appreciate the pleasure and the honor of dining with him. I 
never met any one who said wicked things so gently, and I never met any 
one at all who alternated so easily between sardonic humor and the expres- 
sion of charming emotions. It is a great deal to have had one such experi- 
ence, one such conversation, amid the recurrent stupidities of life. 

It is needless to say that here the terms ' ' wicked ' ' and * * sardonic ' > 
are used in the harmless sense. His was an extraordinary person- 
ality, and therefore not without its paradoxes. In an estimation of 
his character, charity, as always and everywhere, should here be ex- 
ercised, the charity which Mr. Chesterton defines as " a reverent 
agnosticism towards the profound mystery and complexity of the 
human soul/* 

John La Farge married Miss Margaret Perry, of Newport, a 
granddaughter of Commodore Perry, and a great-granddaughter of 
Benjamin Franklin. Of the seven surviving children, the youngest, 
and his namesake, is a priest of the Society of Jesus. He was the 
celebrant of the Solemn High Mass of Requiem sung for the repose 
of his father's soul at the Church of St. Francis Xavier, New York, 
Thursday, November 17. 



THE dedication of Father Corby's statue at Gettysburg, on Octo- 
ber 29, was an event significant from many angles of view. In 
the first place, it is the only monument to a Catholic priest on any 
modern battlefield. And then, not the least of its merits lies in 
the obvious vindication of Catholic loyalty in these United States 
a loyalty magnificently conspicuous in the Irish Brigade at Gettys- 
burg, as it has been upon every hard-fought field from Revolutionary 
days even to our own. The life of the Very Rev. William Corby, 
C.S.C., is an inspired and inspiring commentary upon the American 
priesthood. Born in Detroit the 2d of October, 1833, he early 
entered the Congregation of the Holy Cross. In 1861 one year 
after his ordination he resigned his professorial and pastoral duties 
to go to the front as a volunteer chaplain. He served as spiritual 
director to the Eighty-Eighth New York Regiment of the Irish Bri- 
gade during four years of the thickest and most critical fighting of 
the Civil War ; then at its close he quietly returned to his Con- 
gregation. Father Corby was subsequently elected President of 
Notre Dame University (in which office he was responsible for re- 
building that institution after the fire of 1879), and finally attained 



19 io.] WITH OUR READERS 427 

to the distinction of Provincial General of the Congregation of the 
Holy Cross in the United States and Assistant General for all parts 
of the world. His valorous and holy life closed the 28th of Decem- 
ber, 1897. 

The monument at Gettysburg represents the priest at the his- 
toric moment of administering general absolution to the men about 
to enter battle, July 2, 1863. The late General St. Clair Mulholland 
has left a graphic account of the event : " Father Corby stood on a 
large rock in front of the brigade. Addressing the men, he ex- 
plained . . . that each one could receive the benefit of the ab- 
solution by making a sincere act of contrition and firmly resolving 
to embrace the first opportunity of confessing their sins, urging 
them to do their duty well, and reminding them of the high and 
sacred nature of their trust as soldiers and the noble object for which 
they fought. . . . The brigade was standing at ' order arms ' ; 
and as he closed his address, every man fell on his knees with head 
bowed down. Then, stretching his right hand toward the brigade, 
Father Corby pronounced the words of the general absolution: 
' Dominus nosier Jesus Christus vos absolvaf, et ego, auctoritate ipsius, 
vos absolvoj etc." 

Father Corby later explained that he intended this absolution, 
so far as it might be applicable, for all the men of both armies, with- 
out distinction of creed. The chaplain's beautiful act stands unique 
in the military annals of our country, and the greater publicity 
given it, the better both for faith and citizenship. 

The Gettysburg memorial is a gift of the Catholic Alumni So- 
dality of Philadelphia, which, under the moderatorship of the Rev. 
William S. Singleton, S.J., took up the project less than two years 
ago. Valuable assistance was given by the President and alumni 
of Notre Dame University, and the work was brought to completion 
with the unanimous approval of the hierarchy and laity of the 
United States. 



THE increase of the Socialist vote in the United States to some- 
thing over 700,000, the entrance of the first Socialist Repre- 
sentative into the United States Congress, the eulogies passed on 
the present Socialist Municipal administration of Milwaukee, the 
casting of 65,000 votes for the Socialist gubernatorial candidate in 
New York these are among many recent indications of a strong 
popular demand for large changes in the existing order of things. 
It looks very much as if the National Conference of Catholic Char- 
ities had been organized not a moment too soon, and as if the appeal 
for Catholics to join in the work of social reform were an imperative 
summons to perform a duty too long deferred. If we do not want 
Socialism we had better think of forestalling it. 



428 WITH OUR READERS [Dec., 

THE following verses, written by Dr. Maurice Francis Egan, 
which appeared years ago in the Georgetown College Journal^ 
are ot such rare beauty and power that they deserve to be widely 
known ; and so we reprint them here. 

HE CAME. 
The splendors of the mystic sphere 

From Eons torched Thy way ; 
I/it by one star, Thou earnest here 

On Christmas day. 
Saw this clear star in myriad row 

The waiting souls, with rapture dumb ; 
Had there been only one below 

Thou woulds't have come. 



WHY some men should undertake, or imagine that they are in any 
way fitted, to treat certain subjects must ever remain a mystery 
for the thoughtful man, save that the thoughtful man, recalling the 
truth of original sin, remembers that there is no limit to the possibil- 
ities of human self-deception. Irately there has appeared an English 
translation of Dr. E. L,ehman's high-sounding German work, Mys- 
ticism in Heathendom and Christendom. The work is an excellent 
illustration of our opening sentence. Even a purely secular journal 
of ability says of the book : * c Before many pages [are read] the work 
acquires so many inconsistent but * essential ' characteristics that al- 
most anything may be said of it." A perusal of the work shows that 
the author does not know the A B C of his subject. Yet the book has 
been hailed by many with applause and stamped as remarkably eru- 
dite. To quote again the same secular journal : " When the read- 
er closes the book, he is likely to feel that mysticism may indeed be 
a very wonderiul thing ; but that neither he nor Dr. lyehman has any 
clear and exact notion as to what it really is." 

* * * 

MYSTICISM may be defined briefly in the words of Cardinal Wise- 
man, as "the science of love. " It is the science of the personal 
love of God, a love that feeds upon the doctrinal truths of Christ's 
revelation and that is born of and supported by the supernatural life 
of His Sacraments. 

Mysticism is infinite in its degrees. In some measure, it is the 
practice of every faithful Catholic. It reaches from the contrite 
prayer of the sinner, who begs God for mercy, to the sublime union 
of the saint in heavenly ecstasy with God, to whom God has become 
more real even in this life than the things of sense. Its graces are 
the gifts of the Holy Spirit ; nor can they who follow not the Holy 
Spirit know of it. As well might you speak of the beauty of the 
landscape to one absolutely blind. And when one who is not in- 



i9io.] WITH OUR READERS 429 

spired by the definite truth and the love of God, writes upon it, he 
enters a land of utter darkness, where he knows not the first step 
on the road. The spirit of God alone can illumine the way. His 
language is understandable only to His children. Unless others 
will accept the guidance of His messenger, the Church, His delights 
must remain, in the truest sense, a disciplina arcani and the language 
of His visitations cannot be transcribed for the carnal man. 

As Coventry Patmore wrote : "The' science of love ' is, indeed, 
' mysticism * (a puzzle and a confusion) to the many who fancy its 
experiences incommunicable as the odor of a violet to those who have 
never smelt one to be those of idiosyncratical enthusiasm or in- 
fatuation : but among ' mystics ' themselves, the terms of this science 
are common property. Deep calleth unto deep a prophecy which is 
not of 'private interpretation,' but one which has a language as 
clear as is that of the sciences of the dust, and as strict a consensus 
of orthodoxy. A St. Catherine of Genoa and a St. John of the 
Cross know each what the other is saying, though to a Huxley or a 
Morley it is but a hooting of owls." 

The Editor of " The Catholic World." October 14, 1910. 

DEAR SIR : My attention has been called to your notice of A Renegade 
Poet, by Francis Thompson, in the current number of THE CATHOLIC 
WORLD. I find it most unpleasant to be involved in a controversy, for dis- 
cussion of this kind is of necessity more or less undignified. In this matter, 
however, I have no choice. 

In March, 1909, I first undertook to collect Francis Thompson's prose 
essays, with a view to an authorized edition of them. In May I had hardly 
begun the work, when a member of Mr. Meynell's household was introduced 
to me, from whom I have received nothing but kindness. I met her in 
Boston, and was encouraged to continue the work. She wrote to Mr. Wil- 
frid Meynell, Francis Thompson's literary executor, and also to Mr. Everard 
Meynell, the poet's biographer, informing them of my purpose, and giving 
them my address. I heard nothing from them whatever until the end of 
July, when a letter came from Mr. Wilfrid Meynell warmly congratulating 
me on an article on Francis Thompson, which I had lately published in 
Poet-Lore. This essay has since been republished, with revisions and addi- 
tions, as the introduction to A Renegade Pvet, and has been the subject of 
much unfavorable criticism in THE CATHOLIC WORLD and in America. In 
view of this, it may be interesting to quote Mr. Meynell. "I can say," he 
writes, "that it is written in the true spirit of the poet. He would have 
ratified every word of yours about his work." In this letter, however, he 
makes no mention of the essays. About a week before, in some impatience 
at his silence, I had written him of the matter, and, two or three days after 
the first letter, came a second letter from him, wherein he says: "I can 
only wish that you had communicated earlier with me." In my letter 
to him I enclosed a list of the essays I had chosen, with references to period- 
ical, volume and page. 

On receiving his second letter (dated July 12, 1909) wherein he stated 



430 WITH OUR READERS [Dec. 

that he had prepared a volume of the poet's essays which was ready for pub- 
lication, I wrote to him on the 3oth of July in part as follows: "I am very 
sorry that I should have even momentarily conflicted with a volume pro- 
jected by the poet. ... I had gone on and completed my collection of 

Thompson's essays on the supposition that Miss C had written to you 

in May about my work, and that you had, at least tacitly, approved of it. 
Could it not be arranged for me to still edit the essays? "Why not send me 
a list of those essays which conflict with those I have chosen? The treasury 
of the poet is surely sufficient for me to draw upon it for other essays to take 
their place." I furthermore asked him if he would be prepared to consider 
a royalty on this independent volume of essays. To this letter Mr. Meynell 

made no reply. Meanwhile, I had written to Miss C to ask if she had 

written to the Meynells. I heard nothing from her at that time because of 
illness, and abandoned the idea of publishing the book. In February of this 
year I wrote to her again at my publisher's request, and she replied that she 
had written to the Meynells just as I had supposed. I then decided to pub- 
lish the book, and accordingly it was issued last spring. If necessary, I shall be 

glad to publish both Mr. MeynelPs and Miss C 's letters, and, on the other 

hand, am quite willing that he should publish mine and my publisher's. As 
a last word, I wish to make it clear that The Ball Publishing Company has 
acted honorably in this matter from first to last, and that they refused to 
publish the essays until it was quite clear to them that I was morally entitled 
to edit the book. I am most anxious that this fact should be made clear to 
your readers. I desire that the issue, if issue there be, should be fought out 
solely between Mr. Meynell and myself. I am, very sincerely yours, 

EDWARD J. O'BRIEN. 
* * * 

The Editor of "The Catholic World." OCTOBER 22, 1910. 

DEAR SIR: In reference to your article on our publication, A Renegade 
Poetj and Other Essays, by Francis Thompson, and to the ethics of publish- 
ing the same, will you allow us to say that our first offer to Mr. O'Brien was 
to publish the volume if Francis Thompson's literary executor would approve 
it. When Mr. Meynell wrote that he was preparing an edition we dropped 
the matter of publication. 

It was only after we were convinced that Mr. Meynell had been aware 
that Mr. O'Brien was collecting these articles for publication, and that he 
made no objection to it, that we again took up the matter. Mr. O'Brien sub- 
mitted to Mr. Meynell the list of essays that he had intended to use, and 
asked him to mark any or all that he was going to use in his volume, offer- 
ing to use none of them. Mr. Meynell has never answered this letter. We 
may be wrong, but we decided that if the publication of the essay on Shelly 
had not been so great a success, no objection would have been forthcoming 
to Mr. O'Brien's collection. 

Upon the advice of one of the most noted Catholic educators of this coun- 
try, we decided that Mr. O'Brien was morally and legally entitled to edit the 
volume and we published it. For its contents we have no apologies to make 
and believe the book to be one of the most worthy volumes that has been 
published for many a day. Very respectfully yours, 

THE BALL PUBLISHING COMPANY. 



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THE 

CATHOLIC WORLD. 

VOL. XCII. JANUARY, 1911. No. 550. 

WHAT WAS THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 

BY HILAIRE BELLOC. 
II. 

|O far we have been attempting an answer to the 
question " What was the Roman Empire ? " We 
have seen in the answer to that question that it 
was an institution of such and such a character, 
but to this we had to add that this institution 
was affected from its origin and was at last permeated by an- 
other institution of a religious character. This institution had 
and has for its name "the Church." 

Our next task must, therefore, be an attempt to answer the 
question " What was the Church in the Roman Empire ? " for 
that we have not yet touched. In order to answer that ques- 
tion we shall do well to put ourselves in the place of a man 
living in a particular period, from whose standpoint the nature 
of the connection between the Church and the Empire can 
best be observed. And that standpoint in time is the gener- 
ation that extended through the close of the second century 
into the latter half of the third century. A man born shortly 
after the reign of Marcus Aurelius, living through the violent 
civil wars that succeeded the peace of the Antonines, sur- 
viving to witness the Decian persecution of the Church and 
in extreme old age to perceive the promise, though not the 
establishment, of an untrammeled Catholicism (it had yet the 
last and the most terrible of the persecutions to pass through), 
would have been able to answer our question well. He would 
have lived at the turn of the tide. Let us suppose him the 
head of a Senatorial family in some great provincial town 

Copyright. 1910. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE 

IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK. 
VOL. XCII. 28 



434 WHAT WAS THE CHURCH [Jan., 

such as Toulouse. He would have found himself one of a 
comparatively small class of very wealthy men to which was 
confined the municipal government of the city. Beneath him 
he would have been accustomed to a large class of citizens, 
free men but not senatorial ; beneath these again his society 
reposed upon a great body of slaves. 

In what proportion these three classes oi society would 
have been found in a town like Toulouse we have no exact 
documents to tell us, but we may infer that the majority 
would certainly have been of the servile class, senators just as 
certainly a very small body (they were the great landowners 
of the neighborhood), and we must add to these three main 
divisions two other classes which complicate our view of that 
society. The first was the freed men, the second those per- 
petual tenants nominally free but economically and already 
partly in legal theory bound to the wealthier classes. The 
freed men had risen from the service class by the act of their 
masters, but they remained bound to those masters, very 
strongly so far as social atmosphere went, and to no small ex- 
tent in legal theory as well. This preponderance of a small 
wealthy class we must not look upon as a stationary phenom- 
enon: it was increasing, and in another half-dozen genera- 
tions it was destined, in the decline of public power, to form 
the outstanding feature of all imperial society. 

It is next important to remember that such a man as we 
are conceiving would never have regarded the legal distinc- 
tions between slave and free as a line of cleavage between 
different kinds of men. It was a social arrangement and no 
more. Most of the slaves were, indeed, still chattel, bought 
and sold, and many of them even incapable of any true family 
life. But there was nothing uncommon in a slave's being 
treated as a friend, in his being discovered as a member of 
the liberal professions, of his acting as a tutor, as an admin- 
istrator of the fortune, a bailiff, or a doctor. Certain official 
things he could not be; he could not hold any public office of 
course; he could never plead; and he could not be a soldier. 

This last point is essential, because the Roman Empire, 
though it required no large armed force in comparison with 
the total numbers of its vast population (for it was not a 
system of repression no such system has ever endured), yet 
could only draw that force from a restricted portion of the 
population, and in the absence of adventure in the use of the 



i9i i.] IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 435 

armies mainly as frontier police, it was not easy to obtain the 
recruitment required. The wealthy citizen we are considering 
would have been expected to "find" a certain number of re- 
cruits for the service of the army. He found them among his 
bound free tenants and enfranchised slaves ; he was increasingly 
reluctant to find them, and they were increasingly reluctant 
to serve. 

Let us imagine such a man going through the streets of 
Toulouse of a morning to attend a meeting of the Curia. He 
would salute and be saluted, as he passed, by many men of 
the various classes I have described. Some, though slaves, he 
would greet familiarly ; others, though nominally free and be- 
longing to his smaller following or to that of some friend, he 
would regard with less attention. He would be accompanied, 
it may be presumed, by a small retinue, some of whom might 
be freed men of his own, some slaves, some of the tenant 
class, some in legal theory quite independent of him, and yet 
by the economic necessities of the moment practically his de- 
pendents. As he passes through the streets he notes the 
temples dedicated to a variety of services. No creed dominated 
the city, even the local gods were now but a confused mem- 
ory; a religious service of the official type was to greet him 
upon his entry to the Assembly, but in the public life of the 
city no fixed philosophy, no general creed appeared. 

Among the many buildings so dedicated, two perhaps 
would have struck his attention : the one the synagogue where 
the local Jews met upon their Sabbath, the other a Christian 
church. The first of these he would look on as one looks to- 
day upon the mark of an alien colony in some great modern 
city. He knew it to be the symbol of a small reserved un- 
sympathetic wealthy race scattered throughout the Empire. 
The Empire had had trouble with it in the past, but that 
trouble was long forgotten ; the little colonies of Jews had 
become negotiators highly separate from their fellow- citizens, 
unpopular but nothing more. With the Christian Church it 
would be otherwise. He would know as an administrator (we 
will suppose him a pagan) that this Church was endowed; 
that it was possessed of property more or less legally guar- 
anteed. It had a very definite position of its own among the 
congregations and corporations of the city peculiar and yet 
well secured. He would further know, as an administrator 
(and this would more concern him for the possession of 



436 WHAT WAS THE CHURCH [Jan., 

property by so important a body would seem natural enough), 
that to this building and the corporation of which it was a 
symbol were attached an appreciable number of his fellow- 
citizens, a small minority of course in any town of such a 
date (the first generation oi the third century), but a minor- 
ity most appreciable and most worthy of his concern from 
three very definite characteristics. In the first place it was 
certainly growing; in the second place it was certainly, even 
after so many generations of growth, a phenomenon perpetu- 
ally novel ; and in the third place (and this was the capital 
point) it represented a true political organism the only sub- 
sidiary organism which had risen within the general body of the 
Empire. 

If the reader will retain no other one of the points I am 
making in this description, let him retain this point: it is, 
from the historical point of view, the explanation of all that 
was to follow. The Catholic Church in Toulouse would have 
been for that senator a distinct organism; with its officers, its 
peculiar spirit, its own type of vitality, which, if he were a 
wise man, he would know was certain to endure and to grow, 
and even if he were but a superficial and unintelligent sen- 
ator he would recognize as unique. 

Like a sort of little State of its own it included all classes 
and kinds of men, and like the Empire itself, within which it 
was growing, it regarded all classes of its own members as 
subject to it within its own sphere. The senator, the knight, 
the tenant, the freed man, the slave, the soldier, in so far as 
they were members of this corporation, were equally bound to 
certain observances. Did they neglect these observances, the 
corporation would expel them or subject them to penalties of 
its own. He knew that though misunderstandings and fables 
existed with regard to this body, there was no class in which 
its members had not propagated a knowledge of its customs. 
He knew (and it would disturb him to know) that its organi- 
zation, though in no way admitted by law, and purely what 
we should call " voluntary," was strict and formidable. Here 
in Toulouse would be a monarchical head called by the Greek 
name of Episcopos. Greek was a language which the cultured 
knev? and used throughout the western or Latin part of the 
empire to which he belonged; the title would not, therefore, 
seem to him in any way alien any more than would the title 
of the " Presbyteres," who were the official priests under this 



.] IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 437 

monarchical head of the organization, or the title "Diacones," 
which was attached to the last order just below the priests 
who formed the inferior officials of the body. 

He knew that this particular cult, like the innumerable 
others that were represented by the various sacred buildings 
of the city, had its mysteries, its solemn rituals, and so forth, 
which these officials of its body alone might engage in, and 
which the mass of the local " Christians " for such was their 
name attended as a congregation. But he would further 
know that it differed wholly from any other of the many ob- 
servances round it by a certain fixity of definition. It was 
not an opinion, nor a fashion, nor a philosophy (in the ac- 
cepted sense of that term) ; it was not a theory nor a habit, 
it was a definite body corporate, extremely jealous of its unity 
and of its precise definitions, and filled, as was no other body 
of men at that time, with passionate conviction. By this I do 
not mean that the senator so walking to his official duties 
could not have recalled from among his own friends more than 
one who was attached to the Christian body in a negligent 
sort of way, perhaps by the influence of his wife, perhaps by 
a tradition inherited from his father: he would guess, and 
justly guess, that this rapidly growing body counted very 
many members who were indifferent and some, perhaps who 
were ignorant of its full doctrine; but the body as a whole, 
in its general spirit, and especially in the disciplined organization 
of its hierarchy t did differ from everything round it in this 
character of conviction. There was no certitude left and no 
definite spirit or mental aim, no "dogma" (as we should say 
to-day), taken for granted in the Toulouse of his time save 
among the Christians. 

The mass were attached, without definite religion, to a 
number of customs, in social morals they were guided by 
certain institutions, at the foundation of which were the 
Roman ideas of property in men, land, and goods; patriotism, 
the bond of smaller societies, had long ago merged in the 
conception of a universal empire. This Christian Church alone 
represented a complete theory of life, to which men were at- 
tached as they had hundreds of years before been attached to 
their local city with its local gods and intense corporate local 
life. Without any doubt the presence of that Church and of 
what it stood for would have concerned him ; if he were like 
most of his kind in that generation it would have concerned 



433 WHAT WAS THE CHURCH [Jan., 

him as an irritant; its existence interfered with the general 
routine of public affairs. If he were, as a minority of the rich 
then were, in sympathy with it though not for it, it would 
still have concerned him. It was the principal exceptional 
organism of his time : and it was growing. 

This senator goes into the Curia, he deals with the busi- 
ness of the day: it includes complaints upon certain assess- 
ments of the Imperial taxes ; he consults the lists and sees 
there (it was the fundamental conception of the whole of that 
society) men drawn up in grades of importance exactly cor- 
responding to the freehold land which each possessed. He 
has to vote perhaps upon some question of local repairs, the 
making of some new street, or the establishment of some 
monument. He leaves the Curia for his own business and 
hears at home the accounts of his many farms, what deaths 
of slaves there have been, what has been the result of the 
harvest, what purchases of slaves or goods have been made, 
what difficulty there has been in recruiting among his tenantry 
for the army, and so forth. Such a man was concerned one 
way or another with perhaps a dozen large farming centres 
or villages, and had some thousands of human beings depend- 
ent upon him. There might possibly, even at that distance 
from the frontiers, be rumors of some little incursion or other 
of barbarians; perhaps a few hundred fighting men, come 
from the outer Germanies, had taken refuge with a Roman 
garrison after suffering defeat at the hands of neighboring 
barbarians; or perhaps they were attempting to live by pillage 
in the neighborhood of the garrison and the soldiers had been 
called out against them. He might have, from the hand of a 
friend in that garrison, a letter brought to him officially by 
the imperial post, which was organized along all the great 
highways, telling him what had been done to the marauders 
or the suppliants; how to some had been given land under 
conditions nearly servile, some perhaps recruited for the army. 
The news would never for a moment have suggested to him 
any danger to the society in which he lived. 

He would have passed from such affairs to recreations 
probably literary, and there would have been an end of his 
day. 

In such a day what we note most is the aspect of the 
Catholic Church in a then pagan city, and we should remem- 
ber, if we are to understand history, that by this time it was 



i9i i.] IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 439 

already the phenomenon which contemporaries were also be- 
ginning to note most. 

That is a fair presentment of the manner in which a num- 
ber of local affairs (including the Catholic Church in his city) 
would have struck such a man at such a time. 

If we use our knowledge to consider the Empire as a 
whole, we must observe certain other things in the landscape 
touching the Church and the society round it which a local 
view would not give us. In the first place there had been in 
that society from time to time acute spasmodic friction break- 
ing out between the Imperial power and this separate volun- 
tary organism, the Catholic Church. The Church's partial 
secrecy, its high vitality, its claim to independent administra- 
tion, were the causes of this. Speaking as Catholics, we know 
that the causes were more profound. The conflict was a con- 
flict between Jesus Christ with His great foundation on the 
one hand, and what Jesus Christ Himself had called " the 
world." But it is unhistorical to think of a " Pagan " world 
opposed to a " Christian " world at that time. The very con- 
ception of " a Pagan world " requires some external manifest 
Christian civilization against which to contrast it. There are 
none such, of course, for Rome in the first generation of the 
third century. The Church had around her a society in which 
education was very widely spread, intellectual curiosity very 
lively, a society largely sceptical, but interested to discover 
the right conduct of human life, and tasting now this opinion, 
now that, to see if it could discover a final solution. It was 
a society of such individual freedom that it is difficult to speak 
of its "luxury" or its "cruelty"; a cruel man could be cruel 
in it without suffering the punishment which centuries of 
Christian training would render natural to our ideas. But a 
merciful man could be and would be merciful and would 
preach mercy. It was a society in which there were many 
ascetics; whole schools of thought contemptuous of sensual 
pleasure but a society distinguished from the Christian par- 
ticularly in this, that at bottom it believed man to be sufficient 
to himself. Here was the great antithesis between the Church 
and her surroundings. It is an antithesis which has been re- 
vived to-day. The Church did not believe man to be suffi- 
cient to himself, nor naturally in possession of those keys 
which would open the doors onto full knowledge or full social 
content. 



440 WHAT WAS THE CHURCH [Jan., 

A word as to the constitution of the Church. All men with 
an historical sense know by this time that the Church was 
what I have described it, an organized society under bishops, 
and, what is more, it is evident that there was a central pri- 
macy at Rome as well as local primacies in various departments 
of the Church, as at Carthage, as at Alexandria, as at Jerusa- 
lem. But what is not so generally emphasized is the way in 
which Christian society appears to have looked at itself at that 
time. 

That conception which it had of itself can, perhaps, best 
be entered upon by pointing out that if we use the word 
"Christianity" we are unhistorical. "Christianity" is a term 
in the mouth and upon the pen of the post-Reformation writer; 
it connotes an opinion or a theory, a point of view, an idea. 
The Christians of the time of which I speak were attached to 
no such conception. Upon the contrary they were attached 
to its very antithesis, to the conception of an organized body 
instituted for a definite end, disciplined in a definite way, and 
remarkable for the possession of definite doctrine. One can 
talk, in speaking of the first three centuries, of stoicism or epi- 
cureanism or neoplatonism, but one cannot talk of " Christian- 
ism " or "Christism." Indeed, no one has been so ignorant or 
uahistorical as to attempt those phrases. But the current phrase 
"Christianity," used as identical with the Christian body in 
the third century, is intellectually the equivalent of " Christian- 
ism " or " Christism " ; and, I repeat, it connotes a grossly 
unhistorical idea. In other words, it connotes something his- 
torically false. 

Let me give an example of what I mean: 

Four men will be sitting as guests of a fifth in a private 
house in Carthage in the year . They are all men of cul- 
ture, all possessed of the two languages, Greek and Latin, 
welUread and interested in the problems and half- solutions of 
their sceptical time. One will profess himself materialist, and 
will find another to agree with him ; there is no personal God, 
certain moral duties must be recognized by men for such and 
such reasons, and so forth. He finds support. The host is 
not of that opinion ; he has been profoundly influenced by cer- 
tain mysteries; he has come to feel of the spiritual life as 
something quite as real as the natural life round him. He has 
curiously followed and often paid at high expense the services 
of necromancers; he believes that in an initiation which he 



i9i i.] IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 441 

experienced in his youth he actually came in contact with the 
spiritual world. Such men were not uncommon. The declining 
society of the time was already turning to suffer influences of 
that type. The host's conviction, his awed and reticent atti- 
tude towards such things, impress his guests. One of the guests, 
however, a simple, solid kind of man, not drawn to such vaga- 
ries, says that he has been reading with great interest the 
literature of the Christians. He is in admiration of the tradi- 
tional figure of the Founder of their Church. He quotes cer- 
tain phrases, especially from the Gospels. They move him to 
eloquence and their poignancy and illuminative power have 
an effect upon ,his friends. He ends by saying: "For my part, 
I have come to make it a sort of rule to act as this Man Christ 
would have had me act. He seems to me to have led the 
most perfect life I ever read of, and the practical maxims which 
are attached to His Name seem to me a sufficient guide to 
life. That," he will conclude simply, "is the groove into which 
I have fallen, and I do not think I shall ever leave it.' 1 

Let us call the man who has so spoken, Ferreolus. Would 
Ferreolus have been a Christian? Would the officials of the 
Roman Empire have called him a Christian? Would he have 
been in danger of unpopularity where Christians were unpopu- 
lar? Would Christians have received him among themselves 
as part of their strict and still somewhat secret society ? Would 
he have counted with any single man of the whole empire as 
one of the Christian body ? 

The answer is a most emphatic negative. 

No Christian in the first three centuries would have given 
a pinch of snuff for such a man; no imperial officer in the 
most violent crisis of one of these spasmodic persecutions which 
the Church had to undergo would have troubled him with a 
single question. No Christian congregation would have re- 
garded him as in any way connected with their body. Opin- 
ion of that sort, " Christism," had no relation to the Church. 
How far it existed we cannot tell, for it was unimportant. In 
so far as it existed it would have been on all fours with any 
one of the dozen opinions and more which floated about the 
cultured Roman world. 

Now it is evident that the term " Christianity," used as a 
point of view, a mere mental attitude, would include such a 
man, and it is equally evident that we have only to imagine 
him to see that he had nothing to do with the Christian reli- 



442 WHAT WAS THE CHURCH [Jan., 

gion of that day? For the Christian religion (then as now) 
was a thing, not a theory. It was expressed in what I have 
called an organism, and that organism was the Catholic Church. 

The reader may here object: "But surely there was heresy 
after heresy and thousands of men were at any moment claim- 
ing the name of Christian whom the orthodox Church rejected. 
Nay, some suffered martyrdom rather than relinquish the name." 
True, but the very existence of such sects should be enough 
to prove the point at issue. They arose precisely because 
within the Catholic Church exact doctrine, unbroken tradition, 
and unity, were all three regarded as necessary marks of the 
institution. The heresies arose one after another, from the ac- 
tion of men who were prepared to define yet further what the 
truth might be, and to claim with yet more particular insist- 
ence the possession of living tradition and the right to be re- 
garded as the centre of unity. No heresy pretended that the 
truth was vague and indefinite. The whole gist and meaning 
of a heresy then was that it, the heresy, or he the heresiarch, 
was prepared to make doctrine yet more sharp, and to assert 
his own definition. What you find is not the Catholic Church 
asserting and defining a thing and then some time after the 
heresiarch denying this definition; no heresy comes within a 
hundred miles of such a procedure. What happens in the 
Church at that time is that some doctrine not yet defined, or 
some rule of discipline not yet universal, is laid down by such 
and such a man, that his final settlement clashes with the 
opinion of others, that after debate and counsel and also au- 
thoritative statement on the part of the bishops, this man's 
solution is rejected, some other orthodox solution is defined, 
from that moment the heresiarch, if he will not fall into line 
with defined opinion, ceases to be in communion, and his re- 
jection no less than his own original insistence upon his doc- 
trine, are in themselves proofs that both he and his judges 
start from a conception of unity and definition as the necessary 
marks of Catholic truth. No early heretic nor no early ortho- 
dox authority or office dreams of saying to his opponent: 
" You may be right, let us agree to differ, let us each form 
his part of Christian society and look at things from his own 
point of view." The moment a question is raised it must of 
its nature, the early Church being what it was, be defined one 
way or the other. 

Let me finally and briefly set down what we know, as a 



i9i i.] IN THE ROMAN' EMPIRE? 443 

matter of historical and documentary evidence, the Church of this 
period to have held. What we know is a very different matter 
from what we can guess. We may amplify it from our con- 
ceptions of the probable according to our knowledge of that 
society, as, for instance, when we say that there was probably 
a bishop at Marseilles before the middle of the second century. 
Or we may amplify it by guesswork in consonance with some 
preconceived abstract idea, as do some scholars when they say 
that the words of Hegessipus, " I made a list of the bishops 
of Rome," must be wrong, because there were not any bishops 
at Rome in his time. Or when we say that the Presbyters 
of such and such a Church in such and such a period were 
not priests offering the Sacrifice of the Eucharist, but merely 
an informal body ot " Elders." There is an infinite range from 
guesswork, both orthodox and heretical, but the plain and 
known facts which repose upon historical and documentary 
evidence, and which have no corresponding documentary evi- 
dence against them, are both few and certain. 

Let us take such a writer as Tertullian and set down what 
was certainly true of his time. The central act of worship of 
the Christian Church was a consecration of bread and wine by 
priests in the presence of the initiated and baptized Christian 
body of the locality. The bread and wine so consecrated were 
certainly called (universally) the body of the Lord. The faith- 
ful also certainly communicated. The sacred elements were 
certainly treated as objects worthy of the highest possible, the 
highest conceivable, reverence and care. There was certainly 
at the head of each Christian community a bishop. The num- 
erical proportion of the Church in the city of Carthage, where 
Tertullian wrote, was certainly large enough for its general 
suppression to be impossible. One might argue from one of 
his phrases that it was a tenth of the population. Equally 
certainly did the unity of the Christian Church and its bishops 
teach the institution of the Eucharist, the Resurrection, the 
authority ot the Apostles, and their power of tradition through 
the bishops. A very large number of converts were to be 
noted, and (to go back to Tertullian) the majority of his time, 
by his testimony, were recruited by conversion, and were not 
born Christians. 

Such were known to have been, in a very brief outline, the 
manner of the Catholic Church in these early years of the 



444 WHAT WAS THE CHURCH [Jan., 

third century. Such was the manner of the Church as a Chris- 
tian would have been acquainted with it who, himself a young 
man at the time, would have later witnessed the persecution 
of Decius, and might have lived to the very eve of the Church's 
triumph a hundred years later. 

I have purposely chosen this moment, because it is the 
moment in which Christian evidence first emerges upon any 
considerable scale. Many of the points I have set down are 
demonstrably anterior to the third century. We have Justin 
Martyr from the description of the Mass. We have the letters 
of St. Ignatius, we have the letter of St. Clement, and so forth. 
But the literature of the early Church is extraordinarily scanty. 
It is no exaggeration to say that the writings of what are 
called Apostolic times, that is documents proceeding immediate- 
ly or almost immediately from men who could remember the 
time of our Lord, form not only in quantity (and that is suf- 
ficiently remarkable), but in their quality and character, too, a 
far superior body of evidence to what we possess of the genera- 
tion of men succeeding; that is, to the documents proceeding 
from men who could remember the Apostles in old age only 
and presented to men who could only so remember them. 

I would beg the reader to note with precision both the 
task upon which we are engaged and the exact dates with 
which we are dealing, for there is no matter in which history 
has been more grievously distorted by religious bias. 

The task upon which we are engaged is the judgment of a 
portion of history as it was. I am not writing here from a 
brief. I am concerned to set forth a fact. I am acting as a 
witness or a copier, not as an advocate or lawyer. And I say 
that the conclusion; we can establish with regard to the Chris- 
tian community on these main lines is the conclusion to which 
a man will come quite independently of his creed. He will 
deny it only if he has a definite bias against the Faith. It is 
the Church seen from the outside as it were : our knowledge 
of its mission, our confidence in its divine origin, do not move 
us to these conclusions any more than they move us to our 
conclusions upon the Battle of Waterloo: they are plain history. 
To show that they are plain history, the reader must consider 
the second point I have mentioned, a consideration of the 
dates. 

We know that we have in the body of documents contained 
in the canon which the Church has authorized, documents pro- 



i9i i.] IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 445 

ceeding from men who were contemporaries with the origin of 
the Christian religion. All scholarship is now clear upon that 
point. The authors of the Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles, 
Clement also, and Ignatius may have been deceived, they may 
have been deceiving. I am not here concerned with that point. 
The discussion of it belongs to another province of argument 
altogether but] they were contemporaries of the things they 
said they were contemporaries of. In other words, their writ- 
ings are what is called " authentic." If I read in the New 
Testament of such and such a miracle, I believe it or I doubt 
it, according to other canons than those involved in these 
pages. But I know that I am reading the work of a man who 
can be appealed to as a witness of the beginnings of the 
Church; and that the customs, manners, and institutions he 
mentions or takes for granted are those of this origin of 
Catholicism. Well, there comes after this considerable body of 
contemporary documentary evidence (evidence contemporary, 
that is, with the very spring and rising of the Church and pro- 
ceeding from its first founders), a gap which is somewhat more 
than the long lifetime of a man. This gap is with difficulty 
bridged. The vast mass of documentary evidence has, of course, 
perished, as has the vast mass of all ancient writing. The 
little preserved is mainly preserved in quotations and fragments. 
But after this gap we come to the beginning of a regular series, 
and a series increasing in volume, of documentary evidence. 
Not, I repeat, of evidence to the supernatural, but of evidence 
to plain and every-day affairs, evidence to the way in which 
the Church was constituted, to the way in which she regarded 
her mission, to the things she thought important, to the prac- 
tice of her rites. Now it is all important for the reader, who 
desires a true historical picture, to seize the proportionate 
evidence of the dates with which we are dealing and the society 
to which those dates relate. 

It is all important because the false history which has pre- 
sumed to have its own way for so many years is based upon 
two false suggestions of the first magnitude : first, the sugges- 
tion that the period was one in which vast changes could pro- 
ceed unobserved, and vast perversions of original direction be 
rapidly developed ; and secondly, that the space of time dur- 
ing which those changes could take place was considerable. 

Because those days are far remote from ours, such sugges- 
tions can be made. If we put ourselves, by an effort of the 



446 WHAT WAS THE CHURCH [Jan., 

imagination, into the surroundings of that period we can soon 
discover how false they are. 

The period was not one favorable to the formation of 
legends. It was one of a very high culture. The proportion 
of curious, intellectual, and sceptical men which that society 
contained was perhaps greater than any other with which we 
are acquainted. It was certainly greater than it is to-day. 
Those times were certainly less susceptible to mere assertion, 
mere repetition, and mere suggestion than are the crowds ot 
our great cities under the influence of the modern press. It 
was a period astonishingly alive. Lethargy and decay had 
not yet touched the world of the empire. It built, read, trav- 
eled, discussed, and, above all, criticised, with an enormous 
energy. 

In general it was no period during which a totally new 
fashion could rise within the community without its opponents 
being immediately able to combat it by an appeal to the evi- 
dence of the immediate past. The world was one and the 
world was intensely vivid. 

Well now, in such a world let us see what was the distance 
in mere time between this early third century of which I 
speak and what is called the Apostolic period, that is the 
generation which could still remember the origins of the 
Church in Jerusalem and the preaching of the Gospel in Gre- 
cian, Italian, and perhaps African cities. 

Let us consider a man advanced in years, well read and 
traveled, present in those first years of the third century at 
the celebration of the Eucharist; there were many such men 
who, if they had cared or been able to do so, could have re- 
proved novelties and denounced perverted tradition. That 
none did so is a sufficient proof that the main lines of Catho- 
lic government and practice had developed unbroken and un- 
warped from the very beginning. For an old man, who so 
witnessed the constitution of the Church and its practices as 
I have described them in that moment, would correspond to 
that generation of old people whom we have with us to-day, 
who were born in the late 2o's and early 30*5 of the nine- 
teenth century; the old people can just remember in Europe 
the French Revolution of 1830, or the English Reform Bill, 
and who were almost grown up during the troubles of 1848 
and the establishment of the second Empire in Paris : the old 
people in the United States who can remember as children 



i9i i.] IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 447 

the election of Van Buren to the office of president, the 
old whose birth was not far removed from the death of 
Thomas Jefferson, and who were grown men and women when 
gold was first discovered in California. 

Well, pursuing that parallel, consider next the persecution 
under Nero. It was the great event to which the Christian 
would refer as a date in the early history of the Church. It 
took place in Apostolic times. It affected men who, though 
aged, could easily remember Judea in the years connected 
with our Lord's mystery and His Passion. St. Peter lived to 
witness, in that persecution, to the Faith. St. John survived 
it. It came not forty years later than the day of Pentecost. 
But the persecution under Nero was, to a man, such as I have 
described, assisting at the Eucharist in the early part of the 
third century, only ten years further off than the Declaration 
of Independence would be from the old people of our genera- 
tion to whom I have alluded by way of parallel. A man in 
such a position in the third century could certainly remember 
many who had themselves been witness of the Apostolic age. 
The old people who had surrounded his childhood would be 
to St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. John, what the old people who 
survived say, to 1840, would have been to Washington, to 
Jefferson, and to Lafayette. They could have seen and talked 
to that first generation of the Church as the corresponding 
people surviving in the early nineteenth century could have 
seen and talked with the founders of the United States. 

It is quite impossible to imagine that the Eucharistic 
Sacrifice, the custom of initiation, Baptism in the name of the 
Trinity, the establishment of an episcopacy, the fierce defense 
of unity and orthodoxy, and all those main lines of Catholi- 
cism which we find not only firmly established but the very 
foundation of the Church in the early third century, could 
have risen without protest by a sort of ignorant corruption 
and perversion of an original so very recent and so open to 
every form of examination. That there should have been dis- 
cussion as to the definition and meaning of undecided doc- 
trines is natural and fits in both with the dates and with the 
atmosphere of the period and with the character of the sub- 
ject. But that a whole scheme of Christian government and 
doctrine should have developed in error and without protest 
in a period so brilliantly living, full of such rapid intercom- 
munication, and above all so brief, is quite impossible. 



448 THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE [Jan. 

That is what history has to say of the early Church in 
the Roman Empire. The documents may tell a true or a 
false story; their authors may have written under an illusion 
or from a conscious self-deception; or they may have been 
supremely true and immutably sincere. But they are contem- 
porary. A man may respect their divine origin or he may de- 
spise their claims to instruct the human race; but that the 
Christian body from its beginning was not " Christianity " but 
a Church, and that that Church was identically one with what 
was already called before the third century * the Catholic Church, 
is simply plain history, history as plain and straightforward 
as the history, let us say, of municipal institutions in con- 
temporary Gaul, and indefinitely better proved and therefore 
indefinitely more certain than, let us say, modern guesswork 
as to the state of the "Anglo-Saxons" at the time of the 
invasions of Britain or the "Aryan" origins of the European 
race, or any other of the pseudo-scientific hypotheses which 
until recently were made to pass for historical truth. 

We have next to observe three developments that followed : 
first, the great increase of barbarian hired soldiery within the 
empire; secondly, the weakening of the central power as com- 
pared with the local power of the small and increasingly rich 
class of great landowners; and thirdly, the rise to an official 
position (and a predominating position) of the Catholic Church. 
All these three phenomena developed together; they occu- 
pied about two hundred years. When they had run their 
course the Western Empire was no longer governed as one 
society from one Imperial centre. The chance heads of cer- 
tain Roman or auxiliary forces drawn from barbaric recruit- 
ment had established themselves in the various provinces and 
were calling themselves " Kings." The Catholic Church was 
everywhere the religion of the great majority ; it had every- 
where alliance with, and often the use of, the official machinery 
of government and taxation which continued unbroken; and 
it was, far beyond all other organisms in the State, the central 
and typical organism which gave the European world its note. 

This process is commonly called "the Fall of the Roman 
Empire"; and I shall in my next article try to answer the 
question what that fall was. I shall try to explain what really 
happened in this great transformation. 

* The Muratorian Fragment is older than the third century. 



THE TOURNAL OF MY LIFE. 




BY A NUN. 
II. 

NE day as I was looking, according to my wont, 
at the view from the little hili, a melancholy 
train of thought took possession of me, and the 
staid deep shadows from the stately trees seemed 
to speak to me of repose and stability. In a 
field to the right, just outside our grounds, lay a little cottage 
half- buried in a group of oak and pine; from a chimney at its 
gable end rose heavenward a clear, straight column of smoke, 
its soft white vapor relieving the heavy background of foliage ; 
above was a blue sky with downy cloudlets skimming its surface 
and looking like [the reflection of some living thing as their 
shadows swept rapidly across the bright grass below. There 
was no sound save the unceasing coo of the wood pigeon in a 
tree beside me. The horse-chestnuts had lost their bloom and 
the thick foliage had the full depth of midsummer green. Each 
object seemed to speak to me of the life I was about to under- 
take ; this same view I should have before me until my death 
and would it not become deadly monotonous ? And was not 
the life itself apt, in time, to become one in monotony with the 
scene I looked out upon? Might not its never-ending repose 
and stability create reaction and drive me in the future to flee 
the cloister ? 

Yet again, if I stayed on, might I not be one of those, and 
there were many such in the convent, who were never em- 
ployed in exterior work, whose whole energies outside the 
religious exercises had no scope on which to spend themselves 
save the daily routine of labor, often only house-labor; was 
this neo-platonic idea of burying one's capabilities with a view 
to please God right? So had I heard the world speak of the 
contemplative life; and, after all, was not its judgment just; 
was not this the true, sane view about it; were not the un- 
monotonous moments in such a life as fleeting as the reflec- 
tions of the cloudlets I had just been watching across the 
grass, and which were all gone now, nothing being left but the 
VOL. xcii. 29 



450 THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE [Jan., 

dark shadows which, with the sun's course, made the daily 
circle of each tree ? 

I came down from the hillock and went to my cell, all 
depressed and wavering. A weary, irresolute night and day 
followed, but the succeeding morning, during Mass, I asked 
God with all the fervor I could command to enlighten me. I 
asked my Mother Mary to speak for me to the Holy Spirit; 
and I repeated with a heavy heart the Veni t Sancte Spiritus, 
which prayer since that day I have always loved and said in 
all my difficulties and anxieties. 

When Communion time came I went up to the altar rail 
to receive, and as I walked back to my stall the thought of 
our Lady's life came before me. Must she not have been in- 
tended by God as a model for the children of all genera- 
tions? And what could have been more monotonous than her 
daily, exterior life? Did she then, Tasked myself, sacrifice 
her energies and capacities to please God ? Surely He never 
would have consented to any course that could impair or cur- 
tail His Mother's gifts ; rather would He daily ennoble them 
by His Presence and direct them in a heavenward course. 
Yet it lay in her power to accept or reject the high mission 
for which she was created: so was it with me. I was free to 
return to the world and there find vent for such energies and 
capacities as I possessed, or to embrace the religious life 
where my employment would be mapped out for me at the 
discretion and judgment of another; but in exchange for this 
sacrifice, this outward bondage, I looked for an inner freedom 
that would give my spirit wing. 

I began then to define monotony, and I thought if it 
means a life void of keen joys and sorrows, then of all lives 
since the world began the Mother of God's was the least 
monotonous. What bliss could ever compare with hers at the 
Nativity, or in the hourly after possession of her Child? As 
He grew must she not have watched with daily increasing joy 
the unfolding of His Divine beauty? What woe, too, could 
ever equal hers when she saw Him rejected by His own people, 
or as she stood beneath the cross on Calvary ? 

The world of society, thought I, seeks constant distraction 
because it dreads the monotony that gives time for thought; 
for it is conscious that reflection will inevitably show it the 
follies of its own life. May not a nun, then, court monotony 



1 9i i.] THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE 451 

to give her time to think, not of the folly but of the wisdom 
of her life ? Thought it is that feeds the spiritual life and puts 
afar all monotony of spirit. 

With these reflections now uppermost I prayed that morn- 
ing that my spiritual life might never be monotonous, that I 
might put a living intensity into the daily routine of common 
life, so that my happiness might, be independent of my ex- 
terior employment, that I might use all material actions, how- 
ever uninteresting or uncongenial, as mere necessary condi- 
ments for my spiritual growth. I felt the making of my own 
life was in my own hands; if my energies flagged, then, indeed, 
this life here might be poorer and less productive than a life 
outside the cloister. 

In this new frame of mind I once more ascended the little 
hill. Oh, what strange, varying creatures we are ! I looked 
again upon the lofty trees with the same dense shadows, and 
to my lips came the words: "Under thy shadow I will rest." 
I looked upon the column of smoke rising like incense and I 
thought so should my prayer rise straight to heaven, free and 
untrammeled by all circumstances and surroundings. Out of 
sight I knew was a burning fire and up through a narrow 
chimney did the smoke work its way, till I saw it rise in 
freedom above; so must my prayer come from a heart on 
fire with love, and so must my inner life gain strength and 
force by living within the straight confines of the Rule. Thus 
would self-freedom be purchased. 

So did I now look upon the clear, vapory beauty of the 
smoke in mid-air, so fittingly typifying my own spiritual life. 
The blue sky told me that all my brightness and joy must 
come from above and the cloudlets flitting again across its 
surface made me fancy, in my new frame of mind, that perhaps 
they were emblematic of my future life, and that it would be 
a bright one with only quickly passing sorrows ; but I dared 
not ask for such a fate; my practical nature made me feel 
that such ways were hazardous and the common beaten track 
was best for me. 

The wood pigeon was not cooing that day, but a lark was 
singing and I thought of the poet's words: " Like an embodied 
joy whose race is just begun." Then my thoughts went back 
to my own loved waves of the West, and I thought how they 
had been my first Novice Mistress, and had given me my first 



452 THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE [Jan., 

lessons in strength and freedom which my second Mistress was 
now developing. 

As I stood on the hill I recited the Magnificat, half to my- 
self and half aloud, with a gladsome thrill of thanksgiving to 
God for bringing me here, and so my struggle passed. 

On the fifth of August I made my Profession. Auntie Meg, 
Honor, and her husband were present, but not my father. I 
did not ask him to come, because the ceremony was a very 
solemn one, and I feared he would feel it too much. 

As I stood before the altar I made my vows aloud, and in 
the beautiful opening words of the formula I began by calling 
upon the heavens to hearken to my voice and the earth to 
listen to the words of my mouth. Having solemnly pledged 
myself to God as the only object of my love and made my 
vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, I left the altar step. 
My heart was high with hope and happiness in my newly- 
found Lover. I spoke with Him much that day of myself, 
of my own needs, and of all those dear to me. 

It is customary for the newly professed to wear a wreath 
of white flowers; into my wreath I wound a few wild ane- 
mones which I picked with Honor when we were walking to- 
gether in the grounds after the ceremony, and at the end of 
the day I gave them to her to take home to Father for me. 
Twenty years after, when he was dying, he asked to have them 
placed in his coffin, so that they might be buried with him- 
We both loved each other best in the world to the end. 

My cousin, Mary C , comes to see me almost every year, 

and her husband, whom I have always looked upon as a de- 
voted brother, and who is now a judge, occasionally pays me 
a visit when he is holding the Assizes in our part of the coun- 
try. Upon one occasion- I had a discussion with him which I 
should like to relate. He came to consult me about his eldest 

girl, U , who was then twenty-four and wished to be a nun. 

Now Mr. C is a thorough man of the world ; he is clever 

and ambitious, but he is fair-minded and kind-hearted, U , 

he told me, was very intelligent, full of life and energy, and 
of an active turn of mind. He did not like to oppose her vo- 
cation, yet he had great doubts as to her ultimate happiness in 
a life where there was so little scope for a girl of her char- 
acter ; or, worse still, where her energies and talents might 
be deliberately thwarted, which he was led to believe was not 



i9i i.] THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE 453 

an uncommon occurrence in convents. He explained all this 
to me, and said that he had promised his wife, who was in 

favor of U *s vocation, to talk the matter over with me, and 

ask my advice: then he continued with energy, rising as he 
spoke and walking up and down the room : " Were you nuns 
such as the medieval nun I would place no hindrance in the 
child's way. In those days you had a status in the land, and 
were powerful factors for good ; convents were centres of learn- 
ing, industry, activity ; and all this, crowned by the spiritual 
life, formed a lever in society which gave you a prominent part 
in training the youth of the country. You were the refuge of 
the sinner. You gave a home and employment to the indigent ; 
you were a centre of cultivation for youthful talent; with every 
class, the poor and the wealthy, you were in touch : the wife 
and the mother of all ranks sought support, comfort, Christian 
training, from her sister in religion. In a word, the medieval 
nun was trained to a noble vocation and she fulfilled it, whereas* 
now " he threw himself into the armchair again and turning 
to me continued "Well, now I have no doubt you nuns are 
very good women, harmless at any rate; you wrap yourselves 
round in your own little conceits, say your prayers, perform 
your little round of prescribed duties, and " he proceeded 
slowly as if thinking what next to say " and you employ 
the residue of your time in making pincushions for bazaars." 

Then, after a pause, he said: "Excuse me for speaking so 
plainly; but the truth is you have become too sensitive for 
the useful wear and tear of life, too high strung to bear much 
contact with the rough and ready world, too chary of the vul- 
gar eye intruding into your sanctuary. You hide your system 
too jealously from the enquiring world, and are too centred in 
your own sanctification, too small altogether, and narrow in 
your aims. You know I always regretted your having become 
a nun." 

While he was pouring out this diatribe I bethought me how 
to answer him, for there was much truth in what he said. No 
doubt things had greatly changed. The suppression of convents 
at the Reformation had brought its inevitable consequences: 
the power of the nun was obliterated from the land, and when 
convents again began to form they were forced to live in utter 
seclusion ; for, though the day of active persecution had passed, 
the day of prejudice and false statement was at its height and 



454 THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE [Jan., 

continued till our own time. All this could not have been 
without effect upon the well-being of monastic life. Then 
again the convents, while banished, were recruited almost ex- 
clusively from the old Catholic families at home, to whom all 
honor is due for retaining the faith, but who had to do so at 
the price of losing their intellectual position in the country. 
They had no means of education at home and they lived in 
constant fear of being branded with disloyalty to the crown 
because they acknowledged the supremacy of the Pope; where- 
as, in reality, they were intensely loyal. Whenever their reli- 
gion came to the front it was regarded as some interference 
of a foreign power, and the populace had a confused idea that 
it partook of high treason. 

So they lived and vegetated in their secluded homes. This 
state of things did but intensify their native conservatism; 
they could not compete in the race of life with their country- 
men; first, because of legal disability, and, after emancipation, 
from mental disability brought about by generations of unedu- 
cated and fostered by the intermarrying which was necessary for 
the preservation of the faith. When such members joined the 
Religious Orders they brought their own spirit into them, a spirit 
indeed of loyalty to the old faith, of high principle and refine- 
ment; but as to literary culture, they were almost totally de- 
void of it. Long enslavement had left them with little spirit to 
cope with any intellectual awakening. They had kept the faith 
in safe deposit during the troubled times, but their grit was gone; 
it had been ground to dust in long years of pressure. From 
such material one could hardly expect the medieval nun to be 
resuscitated. However, as time went on, emancipation began 
slowly to take effect. Some of the more vigorous communities, 
who had taken refuge abroad, returned to their own country 
and began again to give such education as in their maimed 
condition they could impart. This state of things has now 
almost passed away, a new element is coming into convents, 
and the nun of to-day seems foremost in her desire for the 
advancement of women to their right level. 

When Mr. C took breath, I was about to reply, but 

just then Sister B came into the parlor with a message 

from Reverend Mother, to invite Mr. C to lunch. As she 

had made his acquaintance on one of his former visits, she sat 
down to chat for a few minutes. Full of his subject, he 



i9i i.] THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE 455 

accosted her by saying: "I have just been abusing nuns to 
my cousin here, and telling her that I wish you were like the 
nuns of medieval times." 

"Ah!" replied Sister B "this is the age in which 

nothing that is not visible and tangible is prized. You motor 
through life with such speed that even your thinkers are all 
in a hurry to produce the result of their thinking. You ought 
to follow nature and, like the acorn, drop into the earth and 
be hidden and die to the world, and then bring forth fruit, as 
it does the everlasting oak. I am not at all so sure that we 
don't do as much as the medieval nun. If I did not feel," 

Sister B continued, " that I myself was conferring a great 

boon on all the world outside though it is so dense and so 
material that it will never understand this I should return to 
society and have a good time of it. The medieval nun and 
we of the present serve the same Master, and I hope we serve 
as faithfully as she; though she, in an age when He was rec- 
ognized; and we, in an age when He is ignored; and so our 
services take a different form. She was the official of His 
palace ; and we are, I hope, His comforters in prison. So 
long as we truly serve, what does it matter? Perhaps at the 
end one of the surprises in store for clever people will be to 
find that the modern nun, by her whole burnt offering of self^ 
has achieved as much for the world and for her Master's 
cause as her sister of many opportunities and much distinction 
in olden times." 

"But" replied my cousin, "you nuns, what do you do 
with yourselves all day ? And what might you not be doing 
in the world outside if you would only stay there ? " 

"Do!" replied Sister B , "I should like to see you 

spend one day as we do ! Why the very idea of the spiritual life 
is to be 'eternally progressive, unquenchably active, insatiable 
in knowledge, and unlimited in aspiration'; and in whatever 
age a nun lives, if she is true to her vocation, her interior life 
must be all this, or else it is far better for her to stay in the 
world. But the mistake you make is your modern mania for 
results; this will be stamped as an age of quick and brilliant 
achievements, but is it an age of moral greatness ? I don't 
know; I am too little conversant with the world outside to judge. 
When I read Newman, as I often do, I ask myself, now that 
he is dead, is there any one left with repose enough and 



456 THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE [Jan., 

reverence enough to think out his own thoughts in all humility 
and teach the world as he did? You can, no doubt, answer 
this question, but I am only a poor ignorant woman and can* 
not answer half the questions that I put to myself/' 

Just as she finished speaking a bell rang and Sister B 
rose quickly, explaining that it was her bell and that she must 
answer it. " I may not be able to return," she said to my 
cousin, a as that bell is probably some poor forlorn spirit of 
high or low degree that will need comfort or instruction or 
hospitality, and I may be detained to provide it for him." 
Then, turning to me, she said: "You must finish the argument 
for me; and mind that you don't let the learned judge have 
the better of it." 

When she had left my cousin remarked that her presence 
created a certain freshness like a sea breeze, and that he al- 
most felt the healthy flavor of sea salt on his lips. 

At length, taking up the vexed question, I agreed with 
him in much of what he said about the medieval nun ; but, 
as I reminded him, it was 'not only the nun, but womankind 
altogether, that had lost the power she undoubtedly wielded in 
olden times. However, in his view of the modern nun, I 
could not agree with him, although I own appearances are 
against her. I assured him that Sister B was right in say- 
ing that at the present moment we certainly do not vegetate. 
"Even with us who are contemplative (though not exclu- 
sively so) the stress of modern life seems to affect us. I 
think it must be that we are in a state of transition, for with 
those amongst us who are of an active temperament and who, 
though clothed, as every contemplative nun should be, with 
the armor of her state, viz., works of expiation, impetration, 
and self-combat, have yet a residue of energy which needs an 
outlet. This, at ^times, creates a certain mental thirst, aggra- 
vated no doubt by our reawakening and the desire to clothe 
our literary nakedness so as to enlarge our power and influ- 
ence with those with whom we come in contact, since a nun 
should be behindhand in nothing that can add to her moral 
equipment. Even we, though more especially the active 
orders, see that the exigencies of our age require a more ex- 
tended curriculum; and that, like our Holy Mother Church, 
we must adapt ourselves with earnestness and energy to the 
growing needs of our times; and this we are trying to do. 



i9i i.] THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE 457 

" As education, in which we are beginning successfully to 
compete, is liable to be taken out of our hands, we look to 
fitting ourselves to undertake other forms of training to help 
Catholic interests. We might have reading-rooms, industries, 
games, debating societies, so that no sins of omission may be 
on our heads. I sometimes dream of a future for us extended 
and fruitful of good, as was the medieval nun of whom you 
think so highly. Now as to your daughter's vocation, I can- 
not think it wise to oppose it at all, unless, indeed, for 
the sake of testing its reality. If she be really called to a 
religious life, she will not be satisfied in the world, and the 
happiest fate there would not make her happy. A vocation 
means a certain want or yearning for a fuller interior life, and 
this the world does not satisfy. The monastic system recog- 
nized this need of the soul and is, therefore, formed to satisfy 
it; and it has, besides, a wonderful power of self-develop- 
ment. Let U be a nun ; and though she leaves you she 

will be none the less a daughter to you ; rather more, for her 
affections will deepen, and her thought and energy expand. 

" It is not true that the intelligence is thwarted in con- 
vents, quite the contrary; though it is true that there is not 
always scope for the residue of energy of which I have been 
speaking. This is a want sometimes felt. It is a legacy from 
the dark night through which we have passed, and is quickly 
dispersing with a brighter horizon. 

" As to your remark about employing our time in making 
pincushions and such things, nuns often get the credit of so 
spending their time when such trifles are but the product of 
some aged or infirm sister, whose years or health incapacitate 
her from the more useful needlework which we get through 
during our hours of recreation, and it makes her happy to 
feel that her fingers are occupied in some little helpful way 
for others. You remind me of a similar objection related by 
one of the Fathers of the Desert of a huntsman who, seeing 
St. John the Evangelist amusing himself with a partridge on 
his finger, reproached him for wasting his time in such trifling, 
upon which the good saint asked him why he did not always 
keep his bow bent. The huntsman replied that, were he to do 
so, it would lose all its force. 'Then,' responded the saint, 
'be not surprised that I should sometimes relax my mind, for 
it is only to fit it the better for divine contemplation.' " 



458 THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE [Jan., 

When I ceased speaking my cousin remained silent a little 
while, and then said he was glad that he had spoken so openly 
to me, and that perhaps after all his wife was right. 

"Let your wife's judgment prevail," I said. "I do not 
think that you will ever regret having yielded to her." 

He rose shortly afterwards and left me. Later I had a 

letter from his wife telling me that \) , with her father's 

full consent, had entered an active order. 

It is the day of my silver jubilee, my sisters have been fete- 
ing me all day; we have dined under the big spreading oak 
in our field, and I have received the valued little attentions 
customary on such occasions. The day is now over and I sit 
in my cell looking out through the open window, and looking 
back at the twenty-five years that have passed like a dream, as 
do all things when we look back upon them. Amongst us 
here are the eager and energetic, the naturally sluggish and 
inert, the buoyant and lethargic, the hopeful and despondent; 
we are of different' nationalities, of different social grades, dif- 
ferent views, capacities, temperaments; but all are united in 
one common aim, pledged to one vow, to work for God and 
for the salvation of souls. As the bee is ever working in the 
hidden hive for the benefit of those outside, who are uncon- 
scious and careless of its occult labors, so do we strive to help 
the world from within our convent home. And as in the bee- 
hive there is a perfect communism of goods, so it is with us. 
It is said that the world creeps into every cloister, and this I 
suppose must be true as long as we are in the world ; but as 
far as human nature can live in the world and yet not be of 
it, so far is the religious life free of its taint. Nowhere outside 
the cloister is, or indeed could, communism be practised as 
within its walls. It is ,the life of the community; without it 
religious life would perish. Our property, goods, money, tal- 
ents, even our family position, all are thrown into the stock 
pot to be used for the common good. Such a life could not 
work except where all such accidental distinctions are, though 
not lost, swept along in the wave of communism that gathers 
up as it passes and uses all contingent forces to strengthen 
and perfect it in its warfare with the spirit of the world, against 
which its very existence proves it to be in enmity. 

There is much affection, or perhaps it is more accurate 



i9i i.] THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE 459 

to say much thoroughness and earnestness, in our intercourse 
with one another, and this comes out and shows its genuine- 
ness whenever any sister is in trouble. We undertake volun- 
tarily a hard life; for hard it is, although the Rule can, accord- 
ing to our spirit, be mitigated. Though each individual soul 
is formed to it and by it, yet, on its side, its spirit is to adapt 
itself to the necessities of each case. Take, for example, the 
food which is always ample and good, but of the plainest, all 
that savors of delicacies being prohibited. In cases of indispo- 
sition, the order is to relax the Rule, and no one, in the most 
devoted family, could receive more care and attention than a 
sick nun from her sisters in religion. So it is with every- 
thing, our hours of sleep are short, yet the young are, if neces- 
sary, gradually accustomed to this under the watchful eye of 
the Novice Mistress. 

Seeing all this, it may be supposed that my life has been 
a very happy one. Yes, indeed, this has been so, interpreting 
the word happiness as I once heard it defined, viz. t having a 
definite object and feeling that you are advancing towards it. 
But this advancement with me has been wrought and quickened 
by suffering. In our keen spiritual moments we wish for suf- 
fering, realizing in theory that it is the most powerful weapon 
for the advancement of God's kingdom on earth, and also be- 
cause at such moments to be identified with Him Whom we 
love is our greatest need. Very different are our feelings when 
our wish is granted. The cross is upon our shoulders and we 
look around to see who it is that has placed it there ; we seek 
amongst our sisters or our circumstances for the perpetrator of 
the deed, blaming these incidental causes, whilst ignoring the 
fact that God makes use of ordinary means to grant us what 
we desire ; and that our own flesh and blood must ever be the 
ordinary channel of communication for such gifts from Him. 

Perhaps I was too bold in my prayer, but it is one of my 
beliefs that any one in or out of the cloister who is earnestly 
religious cannot be long without suffering, and that this suffer- 
ing is usually of a kind with which the world can have little 
sympathy. With me, I felt at times a hunger to be identified 
with my Lover, I felt that my happiness depended on this 
and that I cared for nothing on earth in comparison to it; 
and as the years pass they do but increase this need. Yet all 
the while I feel that I am 



460 THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE [Jan., 

" Myself archtraitor to myself, 
My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe; 
My clog whatever way I go." 

At one time I had a phase of suffering in which I shrank 
from the tenderest touch. The kindliest interference caused me 
pain, and sometimes acute pain. Left unaided, save by the 
Savior's hand, my spirit ached indeed, but with a certain sense 
of peaceful endurance and a blessed sense of resignation ; and 
yet at times would come a kind of joy so bracing that I would 
question whether we live most keenly in the joy born of suf- 
fering or the joy born of bliss; but through it all, thank God! 
I felt that peace which is the outcome of struggle, ^subjugated. 
To make peace with one's own heart on battle terms is the 
most enduring form of peacemaking. 

Again, at times, God has given me a sense of joy when I 
literally felt like one walking on air; but we are not put into 
this world to walk on air, but rather on the low, solid ground, 
and so all Christian lives must be hard, and those who seek 
more will find more, i. e. t a harder life. 

During my religious life I have been employed for many 
years in active work with others, and, again, in simple house- 
hold drudgery, but I have learnt that we can make " drudgery 
divine." As I did my menial work my mind was free to dwell 
on happy thoughts, sometimes I would think of what heaven 
must be like, and though I know its first and foremost joy is 
love, yet on its other joys I liked to dwell, and would fancy 
that there I should be in full possession of a number of pleas- 
urable capacities, emotions, capabilities, which are now within 
us, but which can be neither born nor developed here, though 
in a sense we are conscious of their existence. Sometimes, 
it may be but once in a lifetime, they flash across our minds 
or hearts for an instant and are gone; or I would think of it 
as the power of comprehending the mystery of life; or, of 
grasping some great truth that on earth is outside our ken, 
and for the knowledge of which we hunger here. So it will 
be seen that my inner life was not monotonous, and even 
when I suffered most I never wished it so to be. My 
thoughts, too, would range back at times to home and to the 
days when Honor and I and Auntie Meg would discourse to- 
gether on any and all subjects, and to how we freely discussed 



i9i i.] THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE 461 

the range of virtues, and how humility in those days was not 
in much favor with me for I esteemed it a poor spirited thing, 
and to how Auntie Meg would laughingly tell me that I did 
not even know the meaning of the word. 

Now that I venerate it in my sisters as something God- 
like, it attracts me without my being able to take hold of it; 
'tis something that I admire, but cannot attain to. When I 
contemplate it in others it reminds me of the morning mist 
that tries to hide the sunshine ; but only succeeds in adding 
a mystic beauty to its rays as they peer through it with soft- 
ened radiance; or I like to think of it as the morning dew 
that throws its mantle over the flower and yet does not con- 
ceal but rather adds to its lustre ; or I liken it to the stock 
dove, that bird of contemplation whose peaceful, solitary note 
is but the echo of an inward peace which he wills not to 
communicate, yet those soothing tones suggest the plaintive- 
ness of earth combined with the restful bliss of heaven. And 
thus do I see those endowed with this virtue strive to hide 
their goodness from others, and fail in the effort, as effectu- 
ally as this very humility hides their own virtue from them- 
selves. Sometimes when I feel buoyant about myself I think 
that perhaps I am getting a little of this great virtue, and 
then the thought comes to me that the surest sign that I am 
without it is to think myself possessed of it; and so I can but 
go my way, still striving and hoping before the end to arrive 
at that truth with which it is synonymous. 

All these thoughts have passed through my mind while I 
still sit at my cell window, the cool night air is coming in as 
I write; the moon is so bright that I have put out my candle, 
it is shining full on the text above my bed : " Till the day 
break, and the shadows retire, I will go to the mountain of 
myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense " (Cant. iv. 6). Up 
must I toil then by the steep hill of prayer and the rugged 
mount of mortification, till the gladsome day break and in 
the "flecker'd dawning" my long-strained eyes rest entranced 
on the Light of Life. Though long and weary the way, as 
with difficulty and much backward sliding I essay to scale the 
heights, yet is the pilgrimage so wondrously sweetened by 
His company that even now before our journey's end " Whoso 
tikes His cross and follows Christ will pardon me for that I 
leave untold." 



462 THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE [Jan., 

As I review the past five and twenty years my mind turns 
to religious life as a system. It is not for me to judge of 
what the Church has commended since the days of the Apostles, 
and of what we are told has held back God's avenging hand 
more than aught else that man can do ; but as each individual 
mind is created with its own independent thought, so do I sit 
here to-night and ruminate. Can we, I ask myself, be called 
generous ? In desire a nun certainly is. She voluntarily gives 
up a life of ease, believing herself called to a larger scope of 
duties than the woman of the world, who usually confines her 
interests to her own offspring and her immediate surroundings. 
The nun forgoes the lawful pleasures of her sex, for she is 
human like her sister outside the cloister; but as her aims are 
greater and her ideals higher, she emancipates herself from 
all ties and makes an exchange of this world for the other; 
she yields her hold upon the corruptible crown, only that she 
may take fast hold of the incorruptible, though it is not the 
crown, but the never-ending love of which it is the symbol, 
that she covets. She does not feel called upon to help the 
world by fulfilling the ordinary destiny of her sex, because the 
history of the world has taught her that the overwhelming 
majority of her sisters will always feel called to that state. So 
she is free to help in a propagation solely of the Spirit. 

Still, taking for granted a belief in another world, can it 
be called a sacrifice, when we think of the liberal and sure re- 
turn promised ? Looking at life from a purely common- sense 
point of view, the fact remains that the nun is the most prac- 
tical of her sex, for she has chosen the better part, the better 
half of life, and to make sure of the best is only acting ac- 
cording to reason. 

The life of every woman worthy of the name is ruled by 
love; it is not so with man, in him ambition! is the stronger 
passion, and when the two clash love usually goes to the wall ; 
but since we women are so constituted, does it not seem rea- 
sonable that we should choose the surest and the most abiding 
love ? 

Since I have become a nun to how many a sad tale have I 
not listened from those who come to us in trouble and mis- 
fortune to seek sympathy and encouragement. I think of 
them, and their number has not been small, and then my 
thoughts turn to my own life and to how truly God gives us 



i9i i.] THE JOURNAL OF MY LIFE 463 

the hundredfold in return for giving up our little all to Him. 
I lead a life under Rule from morning to night, from year's 
end to year's end, but about this Rule and the whole system 
of religious life (as far as my own experience goes), in little 
things and great, essential and non-essential, there is a balanc- 
ing sense of proportion that at first unconsciously enamers, 
one knows not why, and later on in life, as one grows older, the 
beautiful equity of the balance impresses one with a conviction 
that such a system and Rule of life could never have been 
framed or endured by mere human wisdom. The saintly founder 
drew his code from inspiration. I see him, pen in hand and 
thought in God, a being human, with a spirit superhuman, as 
he traces out for his children a constitution all tender in its 
consideration for human frailty, yet with a power in its laws 
to adapt the spirit to rise above all things earthly. He wrote 
and framed laws in advance of his time, and, with a prophetic 
eye on future ages, he tells us it behooveth much to con- 
sider the minds of the age in which we live. 

When such thoughts come to me I can but turn to my 
God and thank Him in wondering love that for such a life He 
should have chosen me. 



NOTE. The author of this paper died the year after her silver jubilee. At my request she 
wrote the foregoing little sketch of her vocation and her views on monastic life. She gave it 
to me during her last illness. I asked her if I might show it to some mutual friends, and she 
answered me : " I wrote it freely for you alone, but when I am dead I care not who sees it ; 
only, you must promise me to make no comment on the writer, and, she added maliciously, 
*' to tell no tales out of school." So my lips are sealed about her of whom both pleasure and 
edification would urge me to speak. [CHAPLAIN.] 




FAMILY AND DIVORCE IN JAPAN. 

BY JOSEPH FRERI, D.C.L , 
General Director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. 

JHE conversion of a whole nation from paganism 
to Christianity in the Far-East is still an un- 
known fact. Friends of the missions ask them- 
selves, perhaps, why the work of the world's 
evangelization progresses so slowly ? They may 
say: "We have thousands of missionary priests, brothers, and 
nuns at work in the field, and where is the fruit of their la- 
bors ? Of course they obtain some results, but are those re- 
sults in proportion to the sacrifices made ? It is true the 
various missionary organizations report each year that a few 
thousands have entered the fold; but how small those figures 
appear when we think of the billion of people who are not 
Christians! And at that rate, when will the world be con- 
verted ? " 

These good friends of the missions would like to see the 
Gospel carried to that thousand million within the present 
generation. Their charity causes them to become impatient at 
the slowness of the process. The object of this sketch is to 
place before their eyes one of the many obstacles the preach- 
ing of the Gospel encounters in pagan nations, especially in 
those which have attained a certain degree of civilization. 

The obstacles to the conversion of either an individual or 
of a nation are many and of a varied nature. For the indi- 
vidual there is the difficulty of giving up a religion handed 
down to him by his forefathers, and in which he has believed 
for years; or, if he has always lived without religious prac- 
tices of any kind, he may fail to see the need of them. 
When there is question of entering the Catholic Church, diffi- 
culties arise from all sides. In these days of free-thought and 
unrestrained criticism, one must humble himself under the yoke 
of authority and admit, through faith, mysteries which the 
mind cannot comprehend. Much good-will, nay, an immense 



i9i i.] FAMILY AND DIVORCE IN JAPAN 465 

amount of courage, is required to accept and follow rules of 
morality, far more strict than those of the pagan code, and 
this, whilst remaining in pagan surroundings. 

But this is not all. The nations of the Far-East are proud 
of their ancient civilization. They are deeply attached to the 
customs and tradition of their ancestors. Their social organiza- 
tion was constituted outside of all Christian idea, and the adop- 
tion of Christianity by a whole nation would necessarily entail 
important changes in the most intimate and general customs 
of life. It is difficult to bring about such changes; the social 
condition of a nation, especially of a civilized nation, cannot 
be altered as easily as its political status. 

It is true there are certain principles generally admitted 
even among non-Christian peoples. They all condemn murder, 
theft, and lying. To some extent no one can be insensible to 
calumny, remain deaf to truth; and all have some notion of 
the just and the unjust. Without this no society could be 
possible. 

But if we go farther, we find that, education, customs, 
authority, self-interests, which differ according to countries, 
have the effect of diversifying the tastes, the feelings, the ap- 
preciations, and, in a word, the social and moral conditions of 
different nations. 

In Europe and America those differences are well-marked 
and known, and yet we dare say that they are rather super- 
ficial and do not affect the character of the peoples. This is 
because the Christian idea presided at the moral formation of 
those nations. All, so to say, were born and grew in a Chris- 
tian atmosphere. 

Such is not the case in Asia. The social organization there 
is altogether different from ours ; more than that, it differs ac- 
cording to countries, as we will see if we compare India with 
Persia or China. Now, in the social organization of all the 
Far- East there are certain practices incompatible with Chris- 
tianity: one of these is divorce. 

It is well-known that in countries where Confucianism pre- 
vails, the family is established on a basis quite different from 
ours. The members of the family have not among themselves 
the same relations as with us, and the family itself is neither 
formed nor dissolved in the same manner. 

With us marriage is the foundation of a family and divorce 
VOL xcn. 30 



466 FAMILY AND DIVORCE IN JAPAN [Jan., 

its dissolution. A violent rupture of family ties between mar- 
ried persons, and between parents and children, is abnormal 
and against nature, and the Catholic Church has always fought 
against it. Whatever may be the pretexts to justify divorce, 
no one can deny that its consequences are disastrous for the 
future and the honor of the woman, and for the moral forma- 
tion and education of the children. The children, especially, 
are to be pitied. For if, on the one hand, divorce brings to 
parents hatred, loneliness, shame, remorse, and jealous disputes 
over the children ; it is, after all, the children themselves who 
are sacrificed so that their parents may recover a shameful in- 
dependence ; the children find themselves in an unnatural at- 
titude toward those who gave them life; their education is 
endangered and will be received from strangers. They are the 
chief victims of the rupture of the family ties. 

In the land of the Rising Sun things are altogether differ- 
ent. Family, not being founded upon marriage, is not de- 
stroyed by divorce. Family is not there the natural group of 
parents and children. It is a collection of individuals who 
may have no ties of blood one with the other; it is a clan, a 
" house," a name, which must be perpetuated indefinitely, by 
artificial means if necessary. Of course, a single marriage may 
suffice if everything succeeds'; if not, successive marriages will 
be contracted, or concubines will be introduced, or the adop- 
tion of outsiders will be resorted to. 

This organization of the "house" is based on the plan of 
the patriarchal family, as described in the Old Testament. But 
paganism added to it a religious feature, and one which im- 
plies a moral obligation ; it is the worship of ancestors. Let 
it not be supposed that this worship is merely made up of 
feelings of reverence and gratitude for the forefathers; real 
acts of worship are paid to them; and the individuals who 
should neglect them would be held guilty of a base ingrati- 
tude for denying their ancestors something which cause them 
to suffer. Hence the obligation to perpetuate the " house " in 
order that the worship suffer no interruption. 

This exaggerated notion of the reverence and gratitude due 
to ancestors has existed in the Far- East for over twenty cen- 
turies ; in fact from the annals of those peoples we might be- 
lieve that it has always existed. Hence it is easy to imagine 
how deeply rooted it must be, what a large place it occupies 



i9i i.] FAMILY AND DIVORCE IN JAPAN 467 

in the life of the nation, and what hold it has on the minds 
of the people. 

It may be asked whether the influences of Western ration- 
alism upon the educated classes of Japan is not undermining 
that worship of the ancestors, whether it is still for them a 
sincere religious worship ? We believe it is. For over three 
centuries the leading class in Japan, that of the Samurai, has 
been heading toward rationalism and irreligion by novel inter- 
pretations of the doctrines of Confucius; and yet the Samurai 
have remained as faithful as the common people to the cult of 
their fathers. Rationalism, which, in Japan as elsewhere, has 
more or less invaded philosophy and science, is undoubtedly 
driving away from all religion the educated Japanese, but even 
these do not seem willing to give up the family worship. To 
build up that spirit of patriotism and nationalism, which is 
such a source of strength for the empire, they feel the need 
of some basis, and they find it in the past ; in the civil and 
religious worship of the ancestors of the Emperor, of ancient 
heroes, of the soldiers who died for the country. All classes 
take part in that worship of the great men of the nation, the 
natural consequences being that each house is careful not to 
neglect its own ancestors. 

But leaving aside the question of ancestor worship, let us 
glance at the present family, at what we termed the " house," 
the clan. We will soon perceive that it has retained unchanged 
the fundamental doctrine that it must be preserved from ex- 
tinction by all means and at all costs, whatever may be the 
social and moral consequences of this indisputable principle. 

For the Japanese it is a surprise, nay, an insoluble enigma, 
to hear that, according to Western customs, families deprived 
of children are allowed to die out, instead of perpetuating 
themselves by adoption. 

Not long ago a Catholic missionary wrote that one day the 
father of a large family proposed to him to adopt one of his 
own sons. The man's real motive, of course, was to lighten 
his burden by letting the priest pay for the education of the 
boy. But he did not touch upon this side of the question. 
Although all Japanese are anxious to extract as much money 
as possible from the foreigner, it is bad taste to show it; and 
the only argument that the good man brought forth an argu- 
ment which in his mind was amply sufficient to convince the 



468 FAMILY AND DIVORCE IN JAPAN [Jan., 

missionary was that the missionary would thus start a family, 
have a son who, after the death of his adopted father, would 
be under a sacred obligation to think of him, to take care of 
his tomb, and pay him the customary religious duties. The 
man who made the proposition was not a Christian, but this 
incident shows the conception of the family in the Japanese 
mind. 

Of course, the most natural means to attain that end is 
marriage. And in fact there are few, if any, celibates in Japan. 
In the census of the population the number of "houses" is 
as carefully indicated as the number of individuals; mention is 
even made of the nature of the " house " whether it is a noble 
one, of descendants of Samurai, or of persons of a lower class. 
But the number of married couples is not recorded, it is un- 
important. At certain periods of its history one house may 
include three or four married couples, whereas another may be 
represented by only a boy ten or twelve years old. Neither 
do the statistics record the number of celibates over thirty 
years of age, because practically there are none. 

Now if matrimony is a means to perpetuate the " house," 
it is not the only one, and cannot be the only one. In case 
a married couple have no male child, they must have recourse 
to some other means to perpetuate their name ; and one of the 
most frequent is adoption. Sometimes the adopted son enters 
his new family while still in his tender years, and is brought 
up by his new parents; sometimes when he is a youth or even 
an adult. But at whatever age he may change quarters, from 
the moment the adoption is legally effected, the adopted son 
must pay to his putative father and mother all the duties im- 
posed by nature and tradition, and in Japan these duties are 
numerous, strict, and often burdensome. 

On the other hand, he is entirely freed from all obligations 
toward the authors of his life, who lose all their rights over 
him. This complete rupture of the most sacred ties is so 
deeply rooted in the habits of the Japanese people, that there 
are thousands, nay millions, of individuals who have entirely 
forgotten their parents, have become utter strangers to them, 
and have transferred to others their filial affection. This shows 
what a small place the individual occupies among Japanese in 
comparison with that of the " house," and to what degree the 
individual must subordinate his feelings to the interest of the 



i9i i.] FAMILY AND DIVORCE IN JAPAN 469 

clan. The ties of blood which with us are the strongest are 
every day broken by a multitude of men, who consider it per- 
fectly natural, because the principle that the "house" must 
perpetuate itself is the preponderant motive of the social 
order. 

To that principle not only are the ties which unite parents 
and children sacrificed, but also the bond of matrimony; and 
here again we see the individual sacrificed for the benefit of 
the " house." That peculiar entity which we termed " house " 
absorbs most of the rights, leaving few, indeed, to the indi- 
vidual. 

Since matrimony has in view the interest of the clan rather 
than that of the couple it unites, it naturally follows that if it 
proves a failure, that is, is sterile, or endangers the peace, 
the prosperity, the health of the members of the "house," it 
must be dissolved and another one contracted. Thus divorce 
as much as marriage works for the welfare of the house. 

We said above that matrimony does not create a new 
" house." The destructive effects of divorce are, therefore, 
not to be feared. Divorce merely brings about a change of 
persons, and we may assert that they have recourse to it to 
perpetuate the name of the house just as previously they had 
had recourse to marriage. From this, we may begin to realize 
the immense distance that separates the Oriental Confucianist 
from the Western Christian, as far as the organization of the 
family is concerned. With us the defenders of divorce must 
admit that it destroys the family ; they try to justify it by 
invoking the rights of the individual, superior, in their mind, 
to those of society. In the Far-East divorce is justified from 
an entirely different point of view. The individual is sacri- 
ficed, woman especially, to the so-called rights of the "house." 
And as this principle, universally admitted from all antiquity, 
is not questioned by any one since to question it would be 
to shake the organization of the " house," the basis of all 
social order it follows that divorce is a most common occur- 
rence, and that there are millions of individuals divorced and 
remarried in Japan. 

It must be confessed, however, that divorce may be brought 
about by other causes besides the good of the "house," such 
as, difference of tempers, quarrels, and divisions between the 
family of the husband and that of his wife, illicit passion, 



470 FAMILY AND DIVORCE IN JAPAN [Jan., 

caprice, love of change, etc. But, whatever may be the cause, 
divorce, as well as marriage, is a mere incident which does not 
affect the existence of the "house"; whether a marriage is 
contracted or dissolved, the " house " continues. It is true that 
the qualities or the defects of the wife have an influence over 
the prosperity of the " house," and, in consequence, the man 
in quest of a wife tries to get as good a one as possible. 
But if he has made a mistake, it is easily corrected: the wife 
is dismissed, another takes her place, and the welfare of the 
" house " .is not much more affected than by the change of a 
servant. 

This fundamental difference in the notion of the family ex- 
plains what, at first sight, appears so strange in the domestic 
life of the Far-East that motives of interest or of social con- 
veniences are the only ones that determine alliances of families; 
that the authority of the parents to decide the marriages of 
their children, especially their daughters, is supreme, the con- 
tracting parties are not even consulted; that marriage, i. e., 
the introduction of a young lady into the family, is of second- 
ary importance, because the contract may be broken as easily 
as it was made, and without causing unfavorable comment, so 
common is the practice; that the young woman occupies, of 
course, only a secondary position in the family, and may be 
divorced from her husband against her and even his will, by 
the mere decision of the parents of the husband ; that, finally, 
the breaking of family ties, which with us is one of the sad 
features of divorce, is accepted in Japan as the most natural 
thing in the world. 

There is no contract concerning the possession of the chil- 
dren ; they always belong to the father, being part of the 
"house" he represents. When their mother leaves them to 
make rootn for another woman, they must transfer their affec- 
tion to the newcomer, to whom they will pay all the duties 
due to a mother; and immemorial custom has caused the prac- 
tice to be accepted by all without the slightest reluctance. It 
may happen that the new wife is not inclined to show much 
affection to the children of her predecessor, and they may 
suffer. Bat this is exceptional. In general the Japanese woman 
understands her duties in this matter, and so much the more 
because divorce does not place her in a false position, as is 
the case in Christian nations. Nothing is more common than 



i9i i.] FAMILY AND DIVORCE IN JAPAN 471 

divorce in the middle and lower classes of the Japanese 
people. 

Among the wealthy and leading classes divorce is not so 
frequent; but this does not ameliorate the condition of the 
women of those classes, because in its stead we find concubi- 
nage. Under the old regime, the number of concubines was 
determined for each degree of the noble class of Samurai, ac- 
cording to the prescriptions of the sacred books of Confucius. 
Those prescriptions have been abolished, but the practice con- 
tinues, the number of concubines being now determined by the 
caprice or the wealth of the individual. Concubinage is not 
recognized in law, yet public opinion admits it, and the statute 
does not entitle the lawful wife to a divorce for such a cause. 
One of the great principles taught to woman by Confucius is 
that in these matters she must accept whatever her husband 
wishes to do, and submit to it without the least resentment or 
jealousy. Needless to say the principle is not reciprocal, and 
the husband has the right to repudiate a faithless wife. 

It is easy to imagine that with such practices adoption, 
divorce, concubinage the word "family " has not in Japan the 
meaning it has with us. The relations which marriage and 
blood create with us are secondary there and changeable at 
will. The first and supreme tie between individuals is the 
" house." The notion of stability of the married couple, which 
for us is the basis of the strength of the family, is transferred 
to the "house." The whole social fabric rests on that founda- 
tion, and, strange to say, it has proved solid enough to main- 
tain in a prosperous state those peoples of the Far- East. The 
national vitality of Japan, its force of expansion, and its won- 
derful progress, are proofs of it. 

Numerous are the examples we could quote, even taken 
from the upper classes, to show how artificial the so-called 
Japanese family is. Let us take, for instance, the family of 
Prince Ito, the famous statesman, assassinated by a Corean a 
year ago. Born of poor farmers, he was ten years [old when 
his father, named Hayashi, was adopted by an old man of the 
name of Ito, which name he took. The young man was sent 
to college, and later on to the university, where he gave proofs 
of a remarkable intelligence. His rise was rapid. Soon ad- 
mitted into the noble class of the Samurai, then still in exist- 
ence, the services he rendered to his emperor and country were 



472 FAMILY AND DIVORCE IN JAPAN [Jan., 

repeatedly rewarded by titles of nobility, until he reached the 
highest, that of Prince or Duke. At his death he left two 
sons: the elder, who became chief of the "house" and heir 
to the title of prince, is an adopted son ; as a matter of fact 
he is the son of Marquis Inoue, a life-long friend of Ito, who 
had a fortunate career somewhat similar to the latter's. The 
other son was born of a concubine and has received the title 
of Baron. 

It is not safe to trust the official statistics concerning mar- 
riages and divorces. Marriage has always been a strictly pri- 
vate affair in Japan ; it affects the " house " alone, and has no 
relation with civil or religious law. Every marriage must be 
recorded by a state official, but often the declaration is not 
made before the birth of the first child; and if, after two or 
three years of common life, there is no child, the parties sep- 
arate without any formality. The name of the woman not 
having been entered in the public records, need not be taken 
off. From this fact, frequent enough among the people at large, 
It follows that the statistics are incomplete and untrustworthy. 
However, it is generally admitted that in Japan the proportion 
is one divorce for three marriages. 

Although divorce has not in Japan the meaning and social 
bearing it has in the Western world, since its claim is to in- 
sure the stability of the " house," nevertheless the Japanese, 
having become acquainted with Western civilization, and the 
light in which divorce is viewed by Christian nations, felt 
humiliated at being looked upon by foreigners as inferiors so 
far as marriage and the organization of the family are concerned. 
It is an open secret that the present Mikado, gloriously reign- 
ing, is the son of a concubine, as well as the Crown Prince, 
heir to the throne. And whilst this is a matter of perfect in- 
difference to the Japanese, they do not like foreigners to remark 
on it. It was, therefore, decided, at the time of the marriage of 
the Crown Prince some ten years ago, that the right of suc- 
cession to the throne would belong to legitimate sons only, 
and that divorce would never take place in the imperial 
family. 

It was out of the question to abolish divorce for the people. 
The practice is too old and too frequent. Nevertheless, the 
new civil code of laws, adopted in 1898, has endeavored to 
do something for the rehabilitation of woman. Some civil 



i9i i.] FAMILY AND DIVORCE IN JAPAN 473 

rights are granted to her; very few as yet, but, as she had 
none before, this is a step in the right direction a&d a prom- 
ise for the future. It is a promise only, because when legisla- 
tion is too far ahead of the habits of a people, there is great 
danger that it will remain a dead letter for many years. Thus 
it is difficult to imagine a Japanese woman appealing to the 
courts for help against her husband or [relatives. The tradi- 
tional custom is that these may dispose of her at will, and it 
will be a long time before she is bold enough to rid herself of 
that slavery ; it will be a long time before such action on her 
part is looked upon with favor by society. From time im- 
memorial, each " house " has enjoyed complete autonomy to 
dispose of its members and transact its private affairs. When 
such customs have the weight of centuries, the people do not 
ask for a change, nor feel the need of it, especially if that 
change would curtail the powers of the male sex. On the 
contrary, they arrange matters so as to [leave ineffective, as 
much as possible, the new code of laws. 

That is what happens in regard to divorce. Of course, if 
the parties mutually consent, the divorce is granted at once; 
if they do not, the statute of 1898 decrees that the case will 
be brought before the court and the judge shall decide whether 
the cause alleged is one of those for which divorce may be 
obtained, as determined by law. Some of those causes are of 
such a nature that it might have been as well to declare that 
a husband may divorce his wife at will. Prince Togukawa, 
President of the Japanese House of Peers, whb recently visited 
New York, declared in an interview, that " a Japanese husband 
may divorce his wife if, after marriage, he finds he no longer 
loves her ! " 

Any lukewarmness on the part of the wife in the worship 
of her husband's ancestors, and even lack of veneration for his 
parents, are causes for divorce; and how far that veneration 
must go will be illustrated by the following example : 

" One of our Japanese savants,' 1 writes Jiro Shimoda in the 
Japan Magazine, "has said that, though a wife were complete 
in all accomplishments of the modern world, she would still 
not be a perfect wife if she did not know how to shampoo 
the head of her husband's father or mother. To married wo- 
men of the West this idea may come as a shock, but in all 
respectable circles of Japanese society it is taken as a matter 



474 FAMILY AND DIVORCE IN JAPAN [Jan., 

of course. In fact, any violation of it would be a legitimate 
cause for divorce. . . ." 

But even if none of these trivial causes could be alleged, 
the Japanese woman is held in such a submission to her husband 
that, practically speaking, she cannot refuse her consent to di- 
vorce. Furthermore, the expenses entailed by a lawsuit, the 
aversion for outside interference in family affairs, and the dread 
of all judicial proceedings, keep away from tribunals persons 
of the lower class, which means the great majority of the na- 
tion and the class where divorce is more frequent. It may, 
therefore, be asserted that the law of 1898 has not brought 
about any material change. 

However, the new code has permitted a delusion, and the 
Japanese, anxious to show that social morality is progressing 
with them, pretend that divorce is on the decline in Japan. 
Up to 1898, the official records reported one divorce for three 
marriages. Suddenly, the following year, that proportion de- 
creased by half and was one divorce out of six marriages. 
These figures have been maintained ever since. Whatever ex- 
planation may be given for this unexpected change, it must be 
admitted that, either up to 1898 the statistics were grossly in- 
accurate, or that the figures quoted since that date are mis- 
leading and do not report the true condition of affairs ; the 
latter is the more probable conjecture. For what could have 
been the motive of exaggerating the number of divorces in 
the statistics published before 1898? Whereas, nobody will 
believe that an institution, as old and popular as divorce is in 
Japan, could have been so radically modified within the space 
of one year, by the enactment of a law, the value of which we 
have examined above. A custom so generally admitted, and 
which is the outcome of the constitution of the family, cannot 
be abolished by the stroke of a pen. The decrease in the 
number of divorces reported by the statistics is fictitious; no- 
body doubts it. But Japan makes a proud exhibition of it be- 
fore the Western world, hoping to grow in the world's es- 
teem. 

The truth is that no real transformation of the customs of 
the people has taken place, and there is no reason why it 
should take place. Marriage among the Japanese is as un- 
stable now as ever, and the tie as frail and as easily broken 
as in the past. 






i9i i.] FAMILY AND DIVORCE IN JAPAN 475 

A complete study of these important questions would fill 
a volume, and it is difficult to give in a few pages an accur- 
ate description of a condition of affairs so diametrically op- 
posed to ours. What we have said may suffice to make us 
realize the radical change the conversion of such a nation to 
true Christianity would suppose. It is not merely a question 
for the individual to accept a set of doctrines, and adapt his 
private conduct to a new code of morality. The family itself, 
which is the basis of the whole social fabric, must be trans- 
formed. 

Now the Japanese has no desire for a new order of things. 
He is satisfied with- the present one and strongly attached to 
it, since he considers it the main source of the national strength 
of his country. He loves the stability of the Japanese family, 
as instituted by Confucius, whilst he regards as injurious the 
over-developed individualism of the Western nations. 

Furthermore, he cannot help seeing that we are not free 
from shortcomings, even defects, which leads him to think that 
our civilization is not so very superior to his. Why, therefore, 
should he give up his secular practices for ours ? Of two evils, 
he prefers the one he is accustomed to, and which he con- 
siders the lesser. Finally, each family is anxious to retain the 
absolute autonomy it has always enjoyed in those delicate 
questions of marriage and divorce. They resent a religious 
interference which pretends to keep them within well-defined 
bounds and to impose on their conscience sanctions hitherto 
unheard of. 

There are other obstacles in the way of Catholic mission- 
aries in Japan. The state of mind of the Japanese people in 
regard to those vital questions, may suffice to convince us 
that the conversion of the Japanese nation to true Christianity, 
will necessarily be a difficult and slow work. It will meet with 
much resistance, not perhaps on the part of each individual 
taken singly, but on the part of the social body ; its customs 
and traditions, which enslave the individual, are not to be easily 
modified. The transformation will require a long time. 




THE MACE BEARER. 

BY HELEN HAINES. 
I, 

)Y letter from Janet, shyly acknowledging her love, 
surprised and transported me. She would be 
mine at Christmas, and this was how September. 
How characteristic it was of her teasing witchery, 
this waiting to write from vacation haunts, five 
hundred miles away, instead of answering my pleadings on the 
day we parted. Ah, it was great, it was thrilling news ! 

In every way, save one, our union is desirable. We have 
known each other since babyhood. Only a little stream divides 
our plantations, which the great war overlooked, thus preserv- 
ing our traditions and by our marriage, our resources will be 
best conserved. Furthermore she will brighten my lonely stu- 
dent life with the fires of her enthusiasms. There is, indeed, 
one obstacle Janet is not of the faith. But in my present 
sense of possession, I was in no mood to heed sinister warnings. 

I prepared at once to follow her, but it was time my God- 
father, the Bishop, knew how we sped, so I lingered over a 
train to tell him. How many hours we had spent together in 
this same library ! How many times had we reviewed the 
manuscripts of my Ancient France, before the volumes appeared 
to make my reputation ! 

He listened with all his wonted interest and affection as 
who, knowing Janet, would not leaning forward to question 
me, as in my youngster and university days. 

"No Duras has married out of the faith," he reminded me 
gently, as the story ended, and he rested his head on the chair- 
back, scrutinizing my face with his kind, keen eyes. 

I smiled. " Perhaps no Duras had such provocation." 

" So, Guy, you think you can bear your faith so doughtily, 
it will suffice for two ? " 

"Janet is something of an Ismist," I conceded. "But she 
knows what the faith is to me. I'm no coward, Padre dear, 
but you wouldn't have me go a-missioning to every fair Gen- 
tile; I've been too uncertain of her; but later on " 



i9i i.] THE MACE BEARER 477 

" Ah, ' later on,' " he sighed. " It is so often never." Then 
he sat upright. "Let us balance your equipment your's and 
Janet's. For you there is* the inheritance of a mighty faith, 
serene in God's promises and revelations. For you the divine 
Son dies on the cross. For you He has appointed the Church, 
a teaching guide, which has spurred human endeavor to its 
highest spiritual achievements. For you there are the Sacra- 
ments, uniting the living and the dead; and that great miracle 
of divine compassion, the Real Presence on our altars. For 
Janet what suffices ? A kindly charity to all ; benevolence to 
the poor; a happy optimism concerning the future life; and 
her faith, if faith it may be called, looks to a man on a cross, 
as a pattern of gentle, human endurance. Oh, my son, if He 
is but a man on a cross, why not St. Peter or any one of that 
legion of martyrs from the first century to the poor Jesuit 
crucified in the last Boxer rebellion ? Try to think what the 
Incarnation really means ! Ah, can any of us apprehend the 
glory of it although Holy Church rings its bells thrice a day 
to remind us ? " 

His glowing words held me, and there opened out for me 
piteous future visions. But Janet would soon be my wife. 
" Love goes where it will, dear Godfather," I said. 

We stood now, and he held me by the shoulders. "I blame 
you not for loving, Guy, and but for one thing : faith and the 
grace of God are His gifts. Have you asked them for her ? 
Come" 

I followed him through the columned passageway into the 
church, and we knelt together outside the altar rail before the 
Ineffable Presence. I, poor needy publican, could only make 
a humble act of contrition and rise, for it was nearly train 
time. I touched my dear Godfather's arm, but he did not 
turn ; and so I left him, storming for me, for Janet, the bat- 
tlements of God. 

It seemed but an instant afterward, as I was whirling out 
of the city intent upon this rift in my happiness, there came 
a terrific impact, the crashing of timber and shattered glass, 
the hissing of steam mingled with groans and imprecations, 
the helpful hurry of the unhurt, and as I sank into oblivion 
the rustling of brooding pinions, bringing stillness, peace. 

When I roused drowsily again, it was to other surround- 



478 THE MACE BEARER [Jan., 

ings, and to a dim knowledge of hideous pain. Consciousness 
ebbed and flowed, like some huge wave, cresting to bewildering 
heights, to be again and again sucked under, submerged. 
Thus I swooned from an awareness of voices to bleak silences. 
But gradually there was forced upon me a steady drone of 
sound, which I knew for prayer; and, after a time, the words 
were borne in upon me: 

" Licet enim peccaverit, tamen Patrem, et Filium, et Spir- 
itum Sanctum, non negavit For though he has sinned, he has 
not denied the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost." 
Ah, I had not done that, nor would I ever! But some dear 
one, who who 

I struggled wondering, and my eyes opened. I lay upon 
a great bed, and where the curtains parted I saw a young 
knight of handsome, haughty features. He was in partial armor, 
as though called hastily to the death watch. 

" Orate pro eo," he antiphoned devoutly, calling on the 
saints of God. " Orate pro eo." Then his gaze, wandering, 
fell upon me. He started and cried aloud : " Peace, my lord 
Bishop, Sir Guy de Duras lives ! Peace, his body, not his 
soul needs us ! " 

At this outcry, a confused medley of figures surged toward 
my bed. The knight, who had spoken, bent over me. "By 
the Blessed Trinity, my lord Guy, it is joyous to see your 
eyes again ! We thought, in very truth, you had slipped us." 

I must have swooned again, for it was a long time, or so 
it seemed to me, before I outgrew entire bewilderment ; and 
it was not until I had been forced many times to sip a nauseous 
and bitter draught, the room and its occupants assumed a 
clearer outline. I felt a hound on the bed beside me lick my 
face, and my limp fingers closed about a crucifix. The familiar, 
tortured figure gave me courage to look upon my surround- 
ings, to face this strange ordeal. 

I was in a great vaulted chamber, lighted by small windows 
in deep recesses, and I seemed to be an object of solicitude 
to many. Ecclesiastics and knights, with their squires, pages, 
and attendants, came and went. They sat upon the benches 
under the windows, or stood talking in groups before the huge 
fireplace to the right of my bed, which none passed without 
a prayer. Privacy could be assured me by drawing the tapes- 
tries, which would have made of my corner a small curtained 



i9i i.] THE MACE BEARER 479 

room. But the curtains were pushed aside, so all could see 
me, and hence I had the opportunity to observe and to listen ; 
to reflect, with all the aid of my once boasted scholarship, 
upon what I was seeing and hearing. As my vision clarified, 
I recognized the armor and costumes, the speech, manners, and 
customs as those of France France in the middle of the four- 
teenth century. 

Conscious indeed I was of another state of being, although 
the old life and its friendships seemed but the activities and 
phantoms of a dream, while my real self was a part of this 
great period I had somewhere known as history. 

But day by day, as ;.I realized my former existence had 
dropped from me like the feathers of a molting bird, not my 
intellectual strength, but my physical weakness taught me one 
imperious fact : These men and I had one great common bond. 
Their prayers were mine. Our iaith united us. Her precious 
ministrations bridged the ages. 

Even in these earliest hours, I knew I must prolong my 
convalescence until I was assured of the part I was to play. 
I summoned all my fortitude, and for a time assumed a dumb, 
but smiling recognition, as though, with my other injuries, a 
great paralysis had tied my tongue. For weary weeks I lay 
in sombre stillness, spent with pain, comforted only by the 
music of Mass or Vespers in a nearby chapel, or the solemn 
chant of monks in the hours of the empty night. 

My condition was a matter of prolonged concern to the 
great knight, who had first spoken to me, and who, as I soon 
learned, was my lord Edward of England, the Black Prince. 
When I trusted myself to speech, he came to me almost daily, 
for it was out of the great love he bore me, and, as those 
about me were pleased to say, for my brave deeds on that 
dread nineteenth of September, he had brought me, nearer 
dead than living, after the battle of Poictiers, to Bordeaux, and 
had housed me in the great Abbey of St. Andrew, where he 
was now holding his impressive court. 

My Prince's distress over my state was my own, for another 
reason. The Church was my one bulwark, and I longed to 
place my strange burden at her feet ; but how to explain or 
ask for advice, I knew not. Gentle and learned monks there 
were in the Abbey of St. Andrew, and shrewd ecclesiastics 
skilled in the polity of governing and of courts, but to my poor 



480 THE MACE BEARER [Jan., 

intelligence, my strange affair seemed a subject for the highest 
jurisdiction. Neglect of the Sacrament, where none neglected 
it, might bring upon me the suspicion of this devout Prince; 
but I could not approach the Altar unshriven of my enforced 
duplicity. When I was able to assist at daily Mass, I vowed 
a pilgrimage to Avignon. There dwelt one who even now was 
striving, through his envoys, to make peace between these rival 
princes, and whose austere example, in an age of luxury and 
amusement was as compelling as that of the Roman Pontiff, 
who had trimmed the lamp of faith in troubled other days. 

Gradually, as physical strength returned to me, I became 
interested in the motion and life around me. Money was easy 
and plentiful that winter of 1356 and 1357, owing to the booty 
taken from the French, and the ransoms paid by the captured 
nobles. The months passed in pageants planned to amuse our 
royal prisoner, John of France, whose grand apartments were 
in another part of the great abbey, and whose interest was in 
tourneys and banquets, rather than in the pitiful condition 
of his conquered realm. 

It often angered me that the Prince, who was deeply re- 
ligious and held so high a sense of duty, should at the same 
time be so prodigal of pleasure. But he was young and 
adored, surrounded by a glittering society the men bent 
upon diversion and aggrandizement, the women counting their 
lovers and their gifts. When no longer crippled, I was in 
frequent attendance upon him, and he distinguished me by 
every mark of consideration, compelling me to share his 
amusements and his sports. 

But best I liked to escape the folly of the court, and to 
visit, at their desks, the monk copyists, who with many a pic- 
tured saint, quaint arabesque and flower, adorned the Word of 
God: Or sometimes on my charger, the Prince's gift, to ride 
alone, throughout all the country round Bordeaux. 

One evening, returning from such an expedition, I learned 
I had been commanded to a banquet in honor of the Pope's 
envoys. My people quickly made me gay, and slipping into 
the feast hall unobserved, I took the only vacant place, beside 
a fair and lovely woman, who had but just reached Bordeaux 
from her estates near Toulouse, the Lady Jeanne de Thibaut. 

She had come, she told me, with her treasurer, Cural, and 
a considerable retinue, to pay the heavy ransom demanded for 



] THE MACE BEARER 481 

her uncle, whose ward she was. Already rumors were rife 
that John would go to England, and if these proved true, this 
lord, Count Eustace de Thibaut, who was close to the captive 
King, would accompany him. 

"So harsh a business, Lady Jeanne de Thibaut/' I said, 
marveling at her undertaking, ''would better become some 
kinsman knight." 

She turned and smiled upon me, her beauty conjuring for 
me some faint but evanescent spectre of the past, as the 
sun lattices the thicket's tangle, but does not disperse the 
shadows. 

Her answer recalled me. "I am familiar with such busi- 
ness, my lord of Duras ; my masters from Thoulouse have 
taught me the sciences and the ars metrick. An' if my good 
uncle were not ransomed, his life were forfeit." 

"But you have kinsmen, lady." 

" Nay, my lord, none since Poictiers save Sir Bertrand, 
the Cardinal Envoy, and my guardian." 

Her sad speech touched my heart in its loneliness. "By 
my faith, Lady Jeanne," I cried, " when such as you turn 
beggar, Lucifer himself would give alms." 

"The collections have been made by our treasurer," she 
answered to my impetuosity. " Sir, you must know, my 
uncle's town and mine have paid yearly to our king the wage 
of five hundred men at arms and fifty thousand crowns. 
Think you this ransom has rejoiced our people ? Nay, my 
lord, not so; but gold drops from the bones of a dead peas- 
ant, when Cural rattles them." 

" He must be a trusty knave," I said. 

Her eyes widened with horror, and she made the sign of 
the cross. 

" Lady, you may trust me," I whispered earnestly, for her 
speech hesitated. 

"Sir, Cural is an heretic confessed," she answered grate- 
fully, yet looked about us, "and for his impiety and greed 
my people' have risen against him. I brought him hither to 
escape their wrath." 

" By the Mass, fair lady, mercy should be your part, it so 
becomes you." 

" Ah, my lord, what is mercy ? Your Prince's mercy to my 
guardian has made men sweat, blood and little children starve; 
TOL. xcii. 31 



482 THE MACE BEARER [Jan., 

while mine to this wretch " she shrugged in her stiff irides- 
cent silks, and the jewels in her coif gleamed in the torch- 
light " I trust the noise of it may not reach Sir Bertrand. 
The Thoulousatn, Sir Guy de Duras, has ever been perverse, 
and in my mother's ancestry there has been some straying 
from the faith." 

" Ah, no one, lady," I cried ardently, " could think you 
otherwise than the faith's fairest daughter ! " 

Thus was no heart eased in all that brilliant assemblage. 
This sombre, splendid hall, hung now with priceless tapestries 
and royal standards, flaming with tall torches held by motion- 
less men-at-arms, encompassed all emotions. For long months 
Innocent VI. had labored toward peace. But peace brings 
poor reward to noble knights. The Gascons, who had helped 
the English capture the King of France, were making huge 
demands, if the Black Prince conveyed him to England. The 
English were noble conquerors, the French as nobly con- 
quered, and according to degree with their ladies they sat 
together, and all were incomparably arrayed in rich stuffs, fur- 
trimmed and velvets, while gems flashed from finger, chain, 
and sword hilt, or from belt and clasp and head dress. But 
without that authority, represented by the ecclesiastics in their 
robes of state, there would not have been even this seeming 
amity. 

Such things I thought on, and others that I learned from 
Lady Jeanne as the long courses proceeded in dignified suc- 
cession, and I had progressed towards something warmer than 
friendship by the time the spiced wine was served, and grace 
said, when the tables being removed, the minstrels came to 
amuse us. But at length the great prelates and lords signified 
their withdrawal, and the entire company formed a lane for 
them to pass between. 

I know not whether it was the sight of our Prince that 
recalled to the Lady of Thibaut the French defeat; but under 
cover of the bustle in the hall she asked swiftly : " What 
progress do these negotiations make, my lord of Duras?" 

"Lady, they have sped but slowly." 

"An* the Bogie offer these Gascons gold enough, our King 
goes to England! " 

" The Bogie, Madam ! " cried I, all loyal to my Prince. 

"Bogie or devil is he in Languedoc," she insisted, her 



i9i i.] THE MACE BEARER 483 

voice rising. "The very babes are in terror of his name. 
Through God's mercy he passed us on his march last year to 
the Greekish Sea." She sighed aloud, not heeding the ap- 
proach of the high dignitaries. "But those he neglected then 
are his now by Poictiers ! " 

" By my troth, my lady, it was a great victory, nobly 
wrought." 

"Ah, Sir Guy de Duras was of the victors!" 

I bit my lip to hide a smile at her ready wit. The Car- 
dinal de Perigord leaned towards her and she bent over his 
proffered hand. 

" Soft words, my lady cousin, become the conquered," he 
murmured and passed on. 

Lady Jeanne's eyes were flashing, and her curled lip pro- 
tested haughtily. I should have forborne to tempt so high a 
spirit. 

"Beauty, my lady of Thibaut, has ever the privilege of 
overboldness," I ventured to plague her. " You and your 
kinsmen are England's guests." 

"But who pays for all these splendors, sir? Who, but the 
lords of France ! " 

I trembled and those about us started, as her words were 
more than audible, and the Prince, who was near, had a quick ear. 

He paused now before us. "By my Faith, Lady Jeanne 
de Thibaut, your tongue cuts like a sword of Thoulouse ! " 

She swept him a low obeisance. "My lord Prince," she 
answered, " I would it were one and was making headway." 

There was a rustle and a stir, but it passed. Prince Ed- 
ward well knew how courtesy became him; and where there 
was beauty could forgive a shrewish answer. He laughed now, 
and we all breathed freer; then, as he was moving on, he 
turned to me: "Sir Guy de Duras attend me to-morrow in 
my cabinet, after Mass." 

II. 

Lady Jeanne's masters from Thoulouse had taught her other 
things, it seemed to me, beside the sciences and the ars 
metrick. On the instant, I saw her in a melting mood, re- 
gretting her imprudences, and knew not whether I loved her 
better so, or when she spoke bitterly, for every word she had 
uttered was so true I could but wonder at her courage, 



484 THE MACE BEARER [Jan., 

Nevertheless I obeyed, with trepidation, Prince Edward's 
behest. But if he resented the little episode at the close of 
the gala evening, or my connection with it, his manner did 
not betray him. He was looking to an interview with Sir 
Bertrand touching on the affair of peace, so proceeded at once 
to the business for which he had summoned me. 

" My lord Guy," he said, " we have acceded to the de- 
mand of the Gascon nobles, and the price is set. We pay one 
hundred thousand florins; and next month, when the weather 
fairs, we sail with my good cousin, King John, to England." 

I knew not what was coming, and my heart beat high ; 
but it was not resentment over the extortion of these Gas- 
cons. My one thought was that attending my lord to Eng- 
land, I should not again see Jeanne. 

"It is our pleasure," the Prince continued, his stern eyes 
upon me, " that you serve us here." 

I knelt to cover my glad confusion. " Here or elsewhere, 
my Prince," I murmured, kissing his hand. 

This expression of my devotion pleased him, and he raised 
me. "I trust you," he said kindly. "We are appointing gov- 
ernors, who will be empowered fully to act in our absence. 
It is our wish you be of them, and bear the symbol of our 
authority in certain provinces." 

"By the faith I owe you, my lord Prince," I cried, over- 
whelmed, " I shall endeavor to merit your condescension." 

Prince Edward turned to a rude chart of Aquitaine and 
France, and his finger followed the line of the Garonne, and 
the irregular boundary of Aquitaine to the south-eastward. 
" These, my Mace Bearer," he smiled upon me, " these prov- 
inces, with their cities and towns and their fortresses on the 
frontier, are yours. If peace comes or a truce, get revenues 
for the future. But this business will not be managed as the 
Holy Father hopes. All the Thoulousain smarts under our re- 
cent raid. There is one here now." 

I flushed, for there was something sinister in his meaning. 
"My lord, I cried impulsively, "there are ways of peace, and 
of joining fair lands which streams divide. Love finds a ford." 

" What mean you, my lord of Duras ? " 

"Sir, my speech admits of but one meaning. I would 
marry the Lady Jeanne de Thibaut, with your permission and 
Count Eustace's." 



i9i i.] THE MACE BEARER 485 

"Sir Guy, Sir Guy," he thundered with darkened brow, 
"There is a taint in that blood" 

"Sire!" 

"By the Trinity, I would sooner see you tried for treason. 
Heresy there has been on her mother's side." 

" Love goes where it will, dear Prince." 

"Aye, love," he sighed, and I knew his thought, "but 
marriage is another thing. Have you forgot that all Thoulouse 
ran heretics' blood ? " 

"Sir, it was long years ago." 

"By the faith, it takes centuries to squeeze out the last 
drop of unbelief. And now, it seemeth me, Sir Guy himself 
is but lukewarm in his faith." 

It was the accusation I had long expected, and my spirit 
drooped. " There is that upon my conscience, my lord," I 
faltered, " that will not ease until I make a pilgrimage." 

" Guy, it were sin to doubt you," the Prince said simply, 
his quick wrath cooling, for he well knew the pilgrim's path. 

Our interview had lasted overlong, and was now concluded 
by the arrival of the Cardinal Envoy. My lord motioned to 
me to remain awhile, and then crossed the room to lead his 
distinguished guest to the seat he himself had occupied, while 
I craved a blessing. 

" My lord Cardinal," laughed the Prince, when this cere- 
mony was over; "here is one who needs thy blessing; and a 
foolish knight, taken captive by a lady's beauty, he would 
wed her." 

" 'Tis no uncommon sight," the Cardinal smiled upon me. 

Prince Edward's voice grew ominous. "The lady, Eminence, 
is Jeanne of Thibaut." 

Sir Bertrand's manner changed. " My lord of Duras, think 
well before you enter the holy estate of matrimony with such 
an one and beget children bastards in their faith." 

" My lady's faith is above suspicion, my lord Cardinal." 

" Holy Church would be assured of it* Souls are souls, 
Sir Guy de Duras, and man or woman, such has but one to 
save. In these months of the Count Eustace's detention here, 
his treasurer has openly denied the Trinity and the Incarna- 
tion. The people, whom he has oppressed, are murmuring, 
but my young lady cousin has defended him." 

I longed to say what part the Count's ransom played in 



486 THE MACE BEARER [Jan., 

this affair; but my tongue was silenced by the presence of 
the Prince. 

" Nay, Sir Guy," the Cardinal added more kindly, taking 
my dumbness for assent, " turn your thought to knightly 
deeds, for which we understand your noble Prince will pro- 
vide ample opportunity." 

III. 

This interview in the cabinet of the Black Prince, which 
had so strangely terminated, convinced me that my lady must 
purge her own fair name from all accusation of heresy, before 
I wed her. But my love for her was augmented by her iso- 
lation, as was the determination, I had avowed to my lord 
Edward, to proceed with the proposals of this marriage, and 
which, whispering to Lady Jeanne at our next meeting, I saw 
were acceptable to her sweet modesty. 

Sir Bertrand I did not see again, for the envoys left Bor- 
deaux immediately, taking with them an agreement for a 
truce of two years, instead of the peace on which Innocent 
had set his heart. Soon after their departure, the civil author- 
ities of Thibaut demanded Cural's return to examine him on 
the charge of extortion : so I had to be content with my 
lady's promises to keep me informed of how she fared, and 
how the treasurer's case proceeded. 

There was need now of dispatch in my negotiations with 
Count Eustace de Thibaut for the hand of his ward, because 
he would soon go to England; and Prince Edward, whether 
he suspected my enterprise, or for the reason of our coming 
separation, was insistent in his demands upon my time, and 
I knew no knights of the court I could trust with these nego- 
tiations in the proper manner, because none dared brave his 
opposition. 

I had fair hope that Count Eustace, who was grasping, 
would see the wisdom of joining Lady Jeanne's inheritance to 
the dependencies of a favorite of our great overlord ; for there 
was grave danger in his own absence and with Cural's down- 
fall, her lands and towns would tempt the marauding bands of 
dispersed mercenaries wandering over France, or be confiscate 
to the Church. 

But the Count, who was slippery and subtle, seeing my 
ardor, treated me coldly, till near time for him to leave Bor- 



i9i i. J THE MACE BEARER 487 

deaux, and when the signed agreement was next my heart, 
he had managed me so well, I had begged him to accept a 
large sum to be paid the Cardinal for him, at the time of the 
marriage, for his care of his niece during his wardship. 

The marriage was not to proceed until the festival of 
Christmas, there being good reason for the delay. I must ac- 
quit myself of my new responsibilities, and make my own 
peace at Avignon ; also, while my Prince's gifts sufficed for 
me to go forward, and to keep my official state, the money 
for Count Eustace must come from my dependencies, already 
overtaxed. I saw now why Jeanne her guardian's life in the 
balance had supported the impious treasurer. 

It was late April when the ships with their high burden 
passed to England and the embarkation was a sight both joy- 
ous and sad. Sad for the noble prisoners who were leaving 
France, and joyous to look upon the handsome ships so well 
purveyed, with the emblazoned banners of the great lords 
glittering in the sun, and the music of clarion and tiumpet 
wafting from the sea. The royal captive had been provided 
with a ship for himself and his following, that all might be the 
more at ease. The Black Prince, with many lords and knights, 
English and Gascon, was in another ; while in the fleet were 
five hundred men-at-arms and two thousand archers, for none 
knew what might befall them on the voyage. 

My heart almost failed me at my Prince's leave-taking, the 
more since I had so wilfully mistreated him in dealing with 
Count Eustace. Still there was no sign that he suspicioned it. 

" Guy, Guy," he said to me at the last, " by my troth, I 
am sore vexed to depart, and am envious of your fortresses. 
In England there awaits me pleasure only and inaction." 

" Oh, my lord Prince," I cried, " return to us and Aqui- 
taine i This truce is but a poor affair to soothe such claims 
as yours ! " 

His eyes softened, and he embraced me. " Guard well 
your frontiers, Sir Guy"; and as other knights pressed about 
us, he whispered significantly : " Guard well your faith 1 " 

So he had known ! had guessed my subterfuges, and had 
realized that, faith or unfaith, I was bent upon the marriage 
with Lady Jeanne. 

" I entreat your prayers, my lord," I stammered now in 
answer, " and, sir, may God speed you." 



488 THE MACE BEARER [Jan., 

My mounting color and chagrin meant nothing to those 
near us but the pain of parting from so loved a master and 
so complaisant a friend. Under cover of the confusion I with- 
drew, vowing, since I had deceived him in a matter so per- 
sonal and dear, that none save Lady Jeanne herself should say 
me "Nay," my public acts should make all reparation to my 
lord. There was no longer need for me to tarry in Bordeaux, 
for my officers had so well prepared, everything was ready for 
the journey through my new possessions. I was impatient, too, 
to prove myself after the idle months devoted to pleasure, 
when Prince Edward's friendship had taxed my wit to the 
uttermost, and I had been ever on guard, ready with recol- 
lection and invention. But now I was drawn into the vortex 
of his hopes and ambitions, compelled to move as he and his 
advisers would have me ; although my most poignant memories 
were those that prophesied the frustration of all his proud de- 
sires. In achievement I hoped to lose these haunting auguries. 

I had authority to develop, organize, and govern as seemed 
best to me, and in sanguine days I boldly thought to change 
the course of empire. This truce would give time for my 
projects to mature, and for the battered country to reinvigorate. 

Such simple devices as the backward look gave me, in 
uses of material which later centuries showed had been now 
neglected, I would utilize. My armorers should temper their 
steel shafts more highly, and no coat of mail then fashioned 
could withstand them. My merchants should have government 
protection, not oppression; and if all the governors would 
unite to secure their galleys, by the time our Prince returned 
a strong merchant-marine would be assured. No hired mer- 
cenaries, but well paid troops should defend my fortresses. 
My poor should be well housed, and own their bit of land, 
while all my roads should be safeguarded and repaired. 

But the long months passed in a slow progress through 
city, town, or stronghold, and everywhere there was need for 
my prestige and all my diplomacy. The wars had brought 
bitter racial rivalries, and our feudal customs differed one 
province from another. The charters of my towns varied, so 
long weeks were wasted in disputes of jurisdiction. Corpora- 
tion and citizen railed, one against the other, and the towns 
besought relief from the levies of their overlords. Nor could 
these conditions be ignored, as chaos would have followed. 



i9i i.] THE MACE BEARER 489 

What had the power of my Prince availed me as history 
raced along ? The marriage tribute for Count Eustace ; there, 
alas ! my people grasped the meaning that each new governor 
held for them. But to effect economic reforms I, with all my 
knowledge of the future, had been as impotent as any others 
of my time. 

So wearied of it all I was that in the late autumn I dis- 
missed my officers to their homes to keep their Christmas 
festival, while I retired to a strong castle which rose out of 
the Garonne on my frontier toward Thoulouse. 

My lady I had not seen since she had left Bordeaux; but 
through our messengers I knew of her and how Cural, after 
languishing long in prison, had been released, because the 
sums he had raised were either for the King or Count, and 
there was no reason to detain him. Nevertheless I would my 
lady were freed from all concern of such a man, fearing for the 
old suspicion of her faith ; and now I longed to hear from her 
again, bidding us haste to Avignon as the time drew near for 
our marriage to ease my soul and hers. 

Yet all foreboding seized me, as spiritless, I sought the 
tower set apart for me in the fortress, and looked out through 
narrow apertures upon a cloud-tossed night. 

Below me swept the Garonne. Across the river Languedoc 
and France, and on the far horizon glowed the fair walled city 
of Thoulouse ; while all the towns and lands to its southward, 
between the devastating marches of my Prince, were Jeanne's. 

Still gazing, my sight became focussed upon a horseman 
speeding from across the river to the ford above the castle. 
But the waters were high, and as the poor beast floundered 
in struggling, the rider stood upon his back calling upon the 
saints for mercy, and the horse for courage. I saw the current 
take them, and was well content when both made Aquitaine, for I 
could follow them no more, the ramparts hiding them from view. 

Then presently I heard my guard cry out, the drawbridge 
lower, and in a moment more my squire entered the apartment 
with another. 

In the firelight he stood, this sorry messenger, and his 
clothes dripped water on the rush-strewn floor. I summoned 
him, and he handed me a jewel I had given Jeanne. 

" My lord Guy de Duras," he knelt ' beseechingly, " the 
Lady of Thibaut implores your haste. 19 



490 THE MACE BEARER [Jan., 

IV. 

It seemed I had lacked some such impetus to action, await- 
ing my love's wishes, but now all my resolution came again, 
my quaverings gone, my orders given a fresh horse for the 
messenger, my Prince's charger for myself, the Count's remu- 
neration and I passed from Aquitaine to Languedoc. 

I thought to pause at one of Jeanne's castles or some town 
or in the larger city of Thibaut, which has a Bishopric. But 
my mind was moody and fixed on the adventure, so I asked 
no question. Then, as on and on we rode, I turned upon the 
fellow to find out where she was. 

"Sir, my lady lies in Thoulouse at the merchant's house, 
where Cural hides and sent for her." 

I scowled and spurred my horse. In the drifting darkness 
we gave the horses head, and then were we twice bemired; 
and once some cut- throats sprang upon us from the shadow of 
a vineyard; but our good steeds outstripped them. At length 
we made Thoulouse, and everywhere I marked the signs of 
Prince Edward's late destruction. 

My companion was known to sentry and to guard, and we 
passed on unchallenged to the merchant's. We did not stop 
before the silent, shuttered entrance, but turned into an alley 
past warehouses to the stables, where we dismounted, and the 
man, caring for the weary beasts, directed me. I crossed a 
crowded courtyard to a turret door, wherein a stairway, broad- 
ening out in landings to the upper floors, circled to the roof. 

On the first landing I saw a light stream greeting through 
the arras where, in a spacious room, the lady Jeanne awaited 
me. The floor was laid with leopard skins, the tapestries were 
drawn, the windows curtained, and though my lady sat before 
the fire, she was wrapped in a furred mantle, for the night 
was numbing chill. She laid aside a Book of Hours as I went 
to greet her, but she seemed as far as when I had looked upon 
the night and wondered where she was. 

"By my troth, my lady," I faltered under her steadfast 
gaze, " I had looked to a more prosperous meeting. The 
monies of your guardian are here. Shall we speed together 
to Avignon ? " 

" Nay, my lord ; you must go hence alone. I have other 
longings of which I shall inform you." 



i9i i.] THE MACE BEARER 491 

I paused now upon the threshold of a hot retort. "My 
Lady of Thibaut," I said firmly, " the time has come for you 
to free your name from this besmirching. Since Cural is re- 
leased, why hides he here ? " 

"He hides, Sir Guy, from those that he has wronged, and 
wronged for me and mine. For if all Thibaut hates him for his 
practices, he is worse hated for his unbelief. As soon as it is 
day the Bishop, who on my account stands somewhat delicately, 
will send him to Avignon for his trial. And there, sir, I do 
entreat you see my cousin, the Cardinal, and beg the wretch's 
life." 

I paced the floor now up and down, for I had no liking 
for this errand. " Lady, I would I were anywhere but here," 
I said, "but since you so entreat me, I may not refuse. But 
judge now whether it be merciful to permit this erring soul to 
wander, and so spread his defection." 

"Strip him of his gains, my lord of Duras," she answered, 
a wise smile hovering round her lips, "but save his life. 
Prayers come swifter to the needy soul." 

I paused before her where she sat, pitying my conflict, and, 
thinking of the futile months, I saw that I was needy. What 
was left to me his Mace Bearer as my Prince had fondly 
called me ? The ready tears sprang, as the answer came the 
faith she alone would be unchanged, as she had been un- 
changing. 

"What are these longings, Lady, of which you speak?" 

Her beauty shone with holy radiance. " Sir, do you re- 
call that once I asked what mercy was? These shuddering 
days have taught me what it is, and where. It is in those 
houses of Holy Church, where prayer is the sole weapon. 
Such places I would found on my estates for those, who know 
no mercy, for none is shown to them. For, look you, what 
are a few gold pieces given in alms outside a castle gate, 
where one comes late, and all are hungry." 

Unworthy as I was, I knelt to kiss her robe, but she would 
not suffer it. " And now, my lord, whence go you ? " she 
asked me, rising. 

" To find peace, lady," I answered, and passed on down the 
stairs into the great city. There, wandering, I came upon the 
convent of the Friars Preachers, where I thought to pass the 
night before my pilgrimage. 



492 THE COLLOQUY Jan., 

I found them all preparing for the Feast of Christmas, and 
listening to their nocturnals and their choruses, I fell asleep, 
the holy music following all my dreams until the morning 
came, and from the great church, the harmony of organ and 
of voice surged to that triumphant welcome to the Infant 
Christ Venite, Venite Oh come let us adore Him. 



Thus I awoke refreshed, serenely vigorous, to see my God- 
father's face, benignant yet concerned, and across the old 
familiar room of books, a dear form kneeling before a Christ- 
mas crib. 

"Janet, there*" I asked the Bishop. 

"Where else, my son, on Christmas Day?" 

I looked upon him, wondering. 

"Prayer compasseth all things, Guy," he said. "'Tis man's 
most potent weapon." He placed Janet's hand within my own, 
and happy tears stood in her eyes. 

She whispered, bending to me : " God has crowned all 
these suffering weeks, dear Guy. He has been gracious to 
me." 

"To us," I added reverently. 



THE COLLOQUY. 

BY KATHARINE TYNAN. 

" IN the crevice of the rock 
Oh, My sister, My dove 

Show Me thy lace! " 
"I the soiled of the flock! 
Though I yearn, Thou wouldst turn 

From my disgrace. " 



i9i i.] THE COLLOQUY 493 

"But know you not" (He said) 
"When I died, from My side 

Poured blood and water: 
Water clear and blood red 
To wash white in death's despite 

Thy sins, daughter ? ' ' 

"See my heart, shrivelled, small, 
Cold as stone, cold and lone, 

Sad its story ! 

Why dost Thou come at all ? 
Here's no place for Thy grace, 
King of Glory. " 

"It is hard, yet not so hard 
As the bed where I was laid 

For thy dear sake. 
In the balm and spikenard 
In death's swound, all one wound. 

Till third day-break." 

"My bosom for Thy head 
And my breast for Thy rest, 

I, the unkind one ! 
Go higher ; in my stead 
Seek one white, ardent, bright 

Seek Thou and find one." 

He said: " Upon the Tree 
With content was I spent 

I, the I^over! 
I, Who have chosen thee 
Warm thee through, make anew 

Over and over." 

" In the crevice of the rock 
Then break me, re-make me 

After Thy fashion. 
I, the impure of the flock! 
Keep me, and steep me 

In the sea of Thy Passion ! " 




MRS. MEYNELL: AN APPRECIATION. 

BY KATHERINE BRfiGY. 

|HE world was first aware of Alice Meynell (or, as 
she then was, Miss Alice Thompson) as a poet. 
It was back in 1875 that the little initial volume, 
Preludes , blossomed into life like a March violet 
early enough, one can never forget, to win Rus- 
kin's enthusiastic praise. Three of its selections (" San Loren- 
zo's Mother," together with the closing lines of the " Daisy" 
sonnet, and of that unforgettable " Letter From a Girl to Her 
Own Old Age") he forthright declared "the finest things he 
had yet seen or felt in modern verse." That was a personal 
estimate, to be sure, since Tennyson, Browning, Patmore, and 
Swinburne were all in the act of writing memorable things; 
but what a thunderously significant tribute to lay at the feet 
of a young girl just lifting up her voice in song ! Abyssus 
dbyssum invocat. More than quarter of a century has passed, 
and the Preludes have scarcely seen fulfillment ; since in the 
actual matter of poetry Mrs. Meynell has published but two 
additional volumes, the Poems of 1893 (an augmented reprint 
of the original booklet) and the slight but weighty Later 
Poems of 1901 ; these, with fugitive strains of rare beauty in 
some favored review, make up the sum. Yet no authentic 
poet nor any authentic critic of to-day dare deny her fel- 
lowship in the hierarchy of song. The voice in its moment 
was ex cathedrd ; having spoken, she may hold her peace. 

She has elected all along to speak in a deliberately vestal 
and cloistral poetry. Remote as the mountain snows, yet near 
as the wind upon our face, is her song. It is seldom sensuous, 
the very imagery being evoked, in the main, from the intel- 
lectual vision; and there are moments when "amorous Thought 
has sucked pale Fancy's breath " quite out of the stanzas. 
Yet these tremble with a deep and impassioned emotion emo- 
tion which seems aloof because it is so interior. For the char- 
acteristic note of Mrs. Meynell's music is not yearning or as- 
piration; it is not the dear and consummate fruition of life; 



191 1.] MRS. MEYNELL: AJV APPRECIATION 495 

still less is it a mourning over things lost. It is the note of 
active renunciation. Renunciation of the beloved by the lover, 
that both may be more true to the Heart of Love ; renuncia- 
tion by the poet, the artist, not only of the poor, precious 
human comforting, but likewise of his own sweet prodigality 
in art that he may see a few things clearly, without excess; 
in fine, the ultimate and inevitable renunciation of the elect 
soul. 

Renunciation of the beloved by the lover that, surely, is 
not a new note ; quite a universal note, life and art would seem 
to say ! It is instinct with the power and passion which are 
the raison d'etre of poetry. Yet it is never a seriously chosen 
and admitted strain save by the very little flock; and Mrs. 
Meynell has made it quite her own. One exquisite sonnet, 
" Renouncement " (perhaps the best kown of her entire legacy), 
has concentrated the message but the companion poem may 
be discerned to beat with a music still more poignant. "After 
a Parting " it is named : 

Farewell has long been said; I have foregone thee; 

I never name thee even. 
But how shall I learn virtues and yet shun thee ? 

For thou art so near Heaven 
That heavenward meditations pause upon thee. 

Thou dost beset the path to every shrine; 

My trembling thoughts discern 
Thy goodness in the good for which I pine; 

And if I turn from but one sin, I turn 
Unto a smile of thine. 

How shall I thrust thee apart 

Since all my growth tends to thee night and day 
To thee faith, hope, and art ? 

Swift are the currents setting all one way; 
They draw my life, my life, out of my heart. 

Another early poem, "To the Beloved," should be quoted 
in contrast. Surpassingly tender and delicate is its feeling; 
but its reticence, its singular peace, are almost a rebuke to 
more vehement possessors. 



49^ MRS. MEYNELL: AN APPRECIATION [Jan., 

Oh, not more subtly silence strays 

Amongst the winds, between the voices, 

Mingling alike with pensive lays, 
And with the music that rejoices, 

Than thou art present in my days. 

Thou art like silence all unvexed 
Though wild words part my soul from thee. 

Thou art like silence unperplexed, 
A secret and a mystery 

Between one footfall and the next. 

Darkness and solitude shine, for me. 

For Life's fair outward part are rife 
The silver noises; let them be. 

It is the very soul of life 
Listens for thee, listens for thee. 

Mrs. Meynell's own quintessential vehemence is reserved for 
the denial, the abeyance of love ! 

All this perennial, repetitional sacrifice of the lower to the 
higher good was foreshadowed in her earliest verses. It is a 
solitariness never far from our poet's song a wistful loneliness 
in the youthful pages; a pain high-heartedly borne, welcomed, 
treasured above all cheaper gifts, in the more mature pages. 
Much has been said about that unique and heart-shaking "Let- 
ter From a Girl to Her Own Old Age." But there is a less 
known apostrophe, " The Poet to His Childhood," about which 
something remains to be spoken. It probes to the heart of 
the sacrificial vocation whether poetic or sacerdotal matters 
little: 

If it prove a life of pain, greater have I judged the gain. 
With a singing soul for music's sake I climb and meet the 

rain, 

And I choose, whilst I am calm, my thought and laboring 
to be 
Unconsoled by sympathy. 

Mrs. Meynell has loved the Lady Poverty as truly as ever 
the Assisian did: but hers is a Lady whose realm is over 
letters as well as life. She dwells in the twilight and the 



1 9 1 1 . ] MRS. ME YNELL : AN APPRECIA TION 49 7 

dawn ; her cool, quiet fingers are pressed upon the temples of 
love ; in " slender landscape and austere/' in nature marvel- 
ously, but not rapturously, understood, she is found. And 
close beside her treads another Lady, "our sister, the Death 
of the Body " Death the Revealer, making clear at last the 
mysteries of weary Life. This is distinctively the motif, very 
personal and very perfect, not merely of the much-praised 
sonnet "To a Daisy," but of Mrs. Meynell's nature poetry as 
a whole. 

Through " The Neophyte " and " San Lorenzo Giustiniani's 
Mother " the self-same cry is variously but unmistakably heard. 
It stings the soul in that late and mystical lyric: 

Why wilt thou chide, 
Who hast attained to be denied ? 

Oh learn, above 
All price is my refusal, Love. 

My sacred Nay 

Was never cheapened by the way. 
Thy single sorrow crowns thee lord 
Of an unpurchasable word. 

Oh strong, oh pure ! 
As Yea makes happier loves secure, 

I vow tnee this 
Unique rejection of a kiss 

More than one meditation of this final volume suggest the 
influence of that immemorial (and in these latter days too 
little known) treasure-house of poetry and vision, the Roman 
Breviary. But always the distinction and the originality of 
Alice Meynell's thought, the peculiar personality of her vision, 
have about them a very sacredness. Not lightly comes the 
illumination of the singular soul: that particular judgment so 
transcendently more appalling than the final and general judg- 
ment ! She has not feared to travel up the mountain side 
alone to look down, with eyes that have known both tears 
and the drying of tears, upon the ways of human life. 

In the matter of artistry and poetic technique, Mrs. Mey- 

nell's work is like fine gold-smithery ; classic gold-smithety, 

exquisite and austere. "I could wish abstention to exist, and 

even to be evident in my words," she has somewhere written ; 

VOL. xcii. 32 



498 MRS. MEYNELL: AN APPRECIATION [Jan., 

but the words are scrupulously chosen. Her mastery over 
slight forms the quatrain, the couplet is quite as consum- 
mate, and almost as felicitous, as Father Tabb's. And through 
this ethereal poetry shine lines of the highest and most serious 
power. 

They who doomed by infallible decrees 
Unnumbered man to the innumerable grave, 

falls upon the ear with Miltonic grandeur. Any poet must re- 
joice in the fancy which perceives day's memories flocking 
home at dusk to the "dove-cote doors of sleep," or which 
cries out so subtly in the colorless February dawning: 

A poet's face asleep is this grey morn ! 

Mrs. Meynell's poetry, like a certain school of modern 
music, suggests and betrays rather than expresses emotion. 
It is definite but intangible. It creates an atmosphere of 
angelically clear thought, of rare delicacies of feeling, and 
speaks with a perfect reticence. Mistakenly, perhaps, the 
hasty might dub it a poetry of promise: on the contrary it is 
a poetry of uncommonly fine achievement. But it does not 
achieve the expected thing. We are conscious of a light, a 
flash, a voice, a perfume the soul of the Muse has passed 
by. And we were looking for the body, flower-crowned ! 

When all is said, it is in her prose that Mrs. Meynell has 
attained the most compelling and indubitable distinction. In 
much critical work and some biography, and in a series of 
essays covering subjects all the way from " impressionist " art 
to the ways of childhood or from " Pocket Vocabularies " to 
the " Hours of Sleep " her pen has prevailed with a master- 
ful delicacy. These brief pages are seldom distinctly literary 
in theme ; yet they have made literature. Scarcely ever are 
they professedly Catholic or even religious; yet the whole 
science of the saints rests by implication within their pages. 
Alice Meynell is the true contemplative of letters. For con- 
templation, which in the spiritual world has been described as 
a looking at and listening to God, is in the world of art a 
looking at and listening to life. It is an exceedingly quiet 
and sensitive attention to all that others see but transiently, 
superficially, in the large. We can scarcely believe there are 



1 9 1 1 . ] MRS. ME YNELL : AN APPRECIA TION 499 

many minds capable of the exquisitely subtle and sustained 
attention, the delicate weighing, the differentiation, and withal 
the liberal sympathy, which have been the very keynote of 
her criticism. Take, as an instance, this pregnant passage 
upon the return and periodicity of our mental processes: 

Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities 
not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless the recur- 
rence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last 
year, it does not suffer now ; but it will suffer again next 
week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of events ; it 
depends upon the tides of the mind. Disease is metrical, 
closing in at shorter and shorter periods towards death, 
sweeping abroad at longer and longer intervals towards 
recovery. . . . Even the burden of a spiritual distress 
unsolved is bound to leave the heart to a temporary peace ; 
and remorse itself does not remain it returns. Gaiety takes 
us by a dear surprise. . . . I^ove itself has tidal times 
lapses and ebbs which are due to the metrical rule of the in- 
terior heart, but which the lover vainly and unkindly attri- 
butes to some outward alteration in the beloved.* 

Coventry Patmore (who, in his own turn, has been the sub- 
ject of Mrs. Meynell's most illuminative criticism) declared fully 
one- half of the volume just quoted to be "classical work, em- 
bodying as it does new thought in perfect language, and bear- 
ing in every sentence the hall-mark of genius." Only the 
poets, perhaps, have shared with the saints this singular con- 
templative attention to things great and small. And in the 
nature painting which colors Mrs. Meynell's pages the same 
quality is conspicuous. Neither the lyre nor the brush seems 
strange to the hand which has so sketched for us the majesty 
of the cloud not guardian of the sun's rays merely, but " the 
sun's treasurer"; the course of the southwest wind, regnant 
and imperious; and that "heroic sky," beneath whose light 
"few of the things that were ever done upon earth are great 
enough " to have dared the doing. Not Wordsworth himself 
has more graciously sung of the daffodil. And who has so 
understandingly praised the modest yet prevailing grass of the 
fields, or the trees of July, or given so discerning a study to 
the "gentle color of life"? 

*The Rhythm of Life. 



500 MRS. MEYNELL: AN APPRECIATION [Jan., 

Up and down upon the earth, to and fro upon it, wander 
the children of men; but few, indeed, may be trusted to catch 
the authentic spirit of place. Scarcely even our beloved Rob- 
ert Louis, it would seem, since we have his own record that 
the act of voyaging was an end in itself there being 

Nothing tinder Heaven so blue 
That's fairly worth the travelling to ! 

But to the eyes of this woman there is not the same blue in 
more than a single zenith. In one most characteristic passage 
she cries: 

Spirit of place ! It is for this we travel, to surprise its sub- 
tlety ; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, 
seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own acci- 
dents, its habits, its breath, its name. . . . The untrav- 
elled spirit of place not to be pursued, for it never flies, but 
always to be discovered, never absent, without variation 
lurks in the by-ways and rules over the tower, indestructible, 
an indescribable unity. It awaits us always in its ancient 
and eager freshness. It is sweet and nimble within its im- 
memorial boundaries, but it never crosses them. . . . Was 
ever journey too hard or too long, that had to pay such a visit? 
And if by good fortune it is a child who is the pilgrim, the 
spirit of place gives him a peculiar welcome. . . . He is 
well used to words and voices that he does not understand, 
and this is a condition of his simplicity ; and when those un- 
known words are bells, loud in the night, they are to him as 
homely and as old as lullabies. 

It is almost a pity, for letters, that so few poets have been 
mothers; it is the abiding pity of childhood that so few moth- 
ers have been poets ! Mrs. Meynell has an entire volume 
dedicated to The Children, and sealed with that gracious un- 
derstanding of childlife which nothing other than experience 
can quite authenticate. It is so easy to sentimeHtalize over 
children easy, also, to regard them as necessary nuisances; 
but to bear with them consistently, in a spirit of love and of 
discovery, is a beautiful achievement. "Fellow- travelers with 
a bird" (as Alice Meynell felicitously calls the protective 
adults) may learn strange and hidden things, an they have 
eyes to see or hearts to understand ! Not so impatiently will 



191 1.] MRS. MEYNELL; AN APPRECIATION 501 

they frown upon the strange excitement which sparkles from 
the child's eyes, as from the kitten's, at dusk inherited 
memories of the immemorial hunt, and of the "predatory 
dark " a thousand years ago. Not so surprising will seem the 
eternal conflict oi bedtime, if they once realize the humorous 
and pretty fact that the little creature " is pursued and over- 
taken by sleep, caught, surprised, and overcome. He goes no 
more to sleep, than he takes a ' constitutional ' with his hoop 
and hoopstick." In "The Child of Tumult "Mrs. Meynell has 
given a most tenderly subtle study; and here is her word 
upon the forgiveness of children : 

It is assuredly in the absence of resentment that consists 
the virtue of childhood. What other thing are we to learn of 
them? Not simplicity, for they are intricate enough. Not 
gratitude; for their usual sincere thanklessness makes half 
the pleasure of doing them good. Not obedience; for the 
child is born with the love ot liberty. And as for humility, 
the boast of a child is the frankest thing in the world .... 
It is the sweet and entire forgiveness of children, who ask 
pity for their sorrows from those who have caused them, who 
do not perceive that they are wronged, who never dream that 
they are forgiving, and who make no bargain for apologies 
it is this that men and women are urged to learn of a child. 
Graces more confessedly childlike they make shift to teach 
themselves.* 

Many a man and many a woman have written more nobly 
than they have lived ; into the art has gone the truest part of 
the soul. But what unique conviction breathes from work 
which is at one with life nay, which is the fruit of deep and 
costly living ! The acuteness, the activity, the profundity of 
Mrs. Meynell's thought could not have failed to achieve in 
English letters. But her sympathy and her eternal rightness 
of vision are qualities in which we rejoice, humbled. These 
have given to her work that peculiar intuitive truth which is 
the rarest of beauties. " Her manner," wrote Mr. George 
Meredith, " presents to me the image of one accustomed to 
walk in holy places and keep the eye of a fresh mind on our 
tangled world.' 1 Catholic readers, at least here in the States, 
would seem to have been less cognizant of this superlative 

* The Children. 



502 MRS. MEYNELL: AN APPRECIATION [Jan., 

merit. For no single virtue of all Mrs. Meynell's work is of 
the obvious or popular kind. Her pages are packed with 
thought, and the style one of exceptional precision and ex- 
ceptional beauty is yet given to ellipse, to suggestion rather 
than emphasis, and to a quite inalienable subtlety. She speaks 
to the higher, even the highest, faculties of the mind. She 
has plead all along for singularity of soul ; for distinction and 
elevation of personality ; for the rejection of many things from 
our multitudinous modern life. 

Sometimes, as in " Decivilized," it is with trenchant wit and 
rony that her sentence has been passed : 

The difficulty of dealing in the course of any critical duty 
with decivilized man lies in this when you accuse him of 
vulgarity sparing him no doubt the word he defends him- 
self against the charge of barbarism. Especially from new 
soil transatlantic, colonial he faces you, bronzed with a half 
conviction of savagery, partly persuaded of his own youthful- 
ness of race. He writes, and recites, poems about ranches 
and canyons ; they are designed to betray the recklessness of 
his nature and to reveal the good that lurks in the lawless 
ways of a young society. . . . American fancy played 
long this pattering part of youth. The New Englander 
hastened to assure you with so self-denying a face he did not 
wear war paint and feathers, that it became doubly difficult to 
communicate to him that you had suspected him of nothing 
wilder than a second-hand dress coat. And when it was a 
question not of rebuke, but of praise, the American was ill- 
content with the word of the judicious who lauded him for 
some delicate successes in continuing something ol the litera- 
ture of England, something of the art of France. . . . 
Even now English voices, with violent commonplace, are con- 
stantly calling upon America to begin to begin, for the world 
is expectant. Whereas there is no beginning for her, but 
instead a continuity which only a constant care can guide 
into sustained refinement and can save from decivilization. 
. . . Who shall discover why derivation becomes degen- 
eration, and where and when and how the bastardy befalls ? 
The decivilized have every grace as the antecedent of their 
vulgarities, every distinction as the precedent of their medio- 
crities. . . . They were born into some tendency to der- 
ogation, into an inclination for things mentally inexpensive. 

But oftener the word has been spoken gently, almost casual- 



191 1.] MRS. MEYNELL: AN APPRECIATION 503 

ly; that the multitude seeing might not see, and hearing might 
not understand. Yet this attitude of Mrs. Meynell's is as far 
as possible from disdain. For the " narrow house," the obtuse 
mind baffled and inarticulate, for the shackled body, the grop- 
ing soul, she has spoken with largest sympathy. Further than 
Charles Lamb's goes her defense of beggars since she pleads 
their right not simply to free existence, but to a common and 
fraternal courtesy. All the great and elemental things of life 
have claimed allegiance from Alice Meynell; her mind, like 
Raphael's, " a temple for all lovely things to flock to and in- 
habit." Love and the bond of love, the grace and gaiety of 
life, the woman's need of a free and educated courage, the 
delicacies of friendship one finds their praise upon her reticent 
lips these, with unflinching truth to self, and a faith lofty and 
exquisite. For the pathos of the sentimentalist (ubiquitous 
and not without a suspicion of the ready-made!) our artist 
has shown slight patience. She will not laugh at her fellow- 
men neither will she insist upon weeping over them. There 
is restraint, " composure " in her dream of life. Yet per- 
chance we open the fortuitous page, and some such lines as 
these face us : 

It is a curious slight to generous Fate that man should, 
like a child, ask for one thing many times. Her answer every 
time is a resembling but new and single gift ; until the day 
when she shall make the one tremendous difference among 
her gifts and make it perhaps in secret by naming one of 
them the ultimate. What, for novelty, what, for singleness, 
what, for separateness, can equal the last? Of many thous-. 
sand kisses the poor last but even the kisses of your mouth 
are all numbered. 

It is as old as sweet and as sad as the world ! 

Art to Mrs. Meynell has been a thrice holy thing : a voca- 
tion of priestly dignity, of priestly pain, as her poems wit- 
nessed. More than once have her words likened the convent- 
bell, imperious, not to be foregone, to the poet's elect fetters. 
" Within the gate of these laws, which seem so small," she 
tells us, " lies the world of mystic virtue." Now here is a 
viewpoint of the highest and rarest insight. What urbanity, 
what sweetness, what prevailing harmony it carries into the 
troublous matter of living ! It has attained perspective and 



504 MRS. MEYNELL: AN APPRECIATION [Jan. 

perspective is the end as well as the means of life. Surely it 
is for this prize alone that we wrestle and run. To treat life 
in the spirit of art that, declared another artist- seer, Pater, is 
not far from the sumum bonum: not far from the kingdom of 
heaven, one might add, since the ultimate artist is God alone. 

Truth, then, has been the first of Mrs. Meynell's equip- 
ments. First truth of seeing (which only the few may ever 
attain), and then truth of speaking a rare enough accomplish- 
ment. With her work, as with that of Henry James, the 
fancied obscurity rises mainly from this exceedingly delicate 
truthfulness; a fastidious requirement of the word the word 
without exaggeration, without superfluity. Only with Mr. 
James this desire has led to repetition, with Mrs. Meynell to 
reticence. Having called her contemplative, we now perceive 
her to be ascetic. The " little less," both in matter and man- 
ner, has seemed to her a counsel of perfection. 

Only we, the losers, would quarrel now and again with this 
perfect abstinence would drink oftener, if that might be, from 
a spring of such diamond clearness, of such depth and healing. 
The fields of modern literature had been more flowery for such 
nourishment ! In all truth, modern thought must needs bear 
both blossom and fruit, because of its shy visits. For Alice 
Meynell has been very potent in her reserves. She has borne 
the pennant of the Ideal, with never a dip of the banner, over 
many a causeway, up many a battlemented height. She has, 
by many and by One, been found faithful. Scarcely shall we 
find a more adequate praise for this English word-painter, 
Catholic and precieuse t than her own praise of the Spanish 
Velasquez that she has "kept the chastity of art when other 
masters were content with its honesty." 

NOTE A bibliography of Mrs. Meynell's collected work would include Poems, Later 
Poems, The Rhythm of Life, The Color of Life, The Children, The Spirit of Place, Ceres' Run- 
away, Ruskin, The Children of the Old Masters, The Flower of the Mind (an anthology), trans- 
lations of The Nun by Rend Bazin, and Lourdes by Daniel Barbe", an Introduction to the por- 
traits of John S. Sargent, etc. etc. 







A LOWLAND TALE. 

BY MARGARET KERR 



E'S no comin', wife/ 1 Sanders sighed for the fifth 
time. 

" It's ower early for him yet," was the reas- 
suring reply. He cudna be here afore six o'clock, 
and its wantin' half an hour. Come sit ye doon 
and rest yersel'; ye'll be fair din afore he comes." 

Silence reigned again as the old man seated himself beside 
his wife. They made a pretty picture, sitting side by side at 
the far end of their sheltered little garden. The old lady, busily 
knitting, was dressed in her Sunday best, and the evening sun 
played upon the silvery curls that had escaped from beneath 
the white frilled cap which framed her face. Her expression 
was one of absolute calm and contentment, very different from 
that of the old man beside her. He seemed restless and anxious 
and couldn't sit still. Every few minutes he walked to the 
garden gate and shaded his eyes as he looked down the road, 
as if anxiously expecting some one. 

" Marget, wumman, I canna rest," he said, returning to her 
after a last tour of inspection. 'Til gang a wee turn up the 
road and meet the lad ; maybe he wud like to see me comin'. " 

" Awa' wi' ye then and meet him," she replied, rising and 
patting him on the shoulder, " fine I ken'd ye wud'na bide 
wi' me. I'll awa' to the hoose and hae a' things ready for ye 
when ye come." 

Without more ado the old lady entered the cottage, while 
Sandy Sanders passed through the little wooden gate and 
sauntered up the road, upon which he momentarily expected 
to behold the object of his anxiety. 

Margaret Knight and Andrew Sanders had married late in 
life, and of the marriage there had only been one idolized and 
cherished child. The exceptional abilities of this child had led 



506 A LOWLAND TALE LJan., 

his parents to sacrifice their own pleasure for his advancement. 
At first, it cannot be denied, it had been a sharp pang to the 
father that his son should not become a carpenter and carry 
on the traditions of the family; but the boy's requests, added 
to the repeated appeals from his schoolmasters, had won the 
day, and he entered on his studies for the civil service. That 
self-sacrifice had been well rewarded, for from the time when 
David had spelled out his first words with Mistress Laidlaw at 
the infant school, to the present time, he had carried all before 
him. Work came to him as play to his companions ; he never 
seemed to flag, his brain never seemed to tire. Prize after prize 
he won, and bursary after bursary, until his name became a 
by-word on the countryside: Surely he would not fail them 
at the last! 

A week before the story begins he had entered upon his 
final examination, and was returning to his home for his well- 
earned holiday, and to support his old parents now their work- 
ing days were over. 

Within the cottage Margaret prepared the evening meal, 
crooning softly to herself the while. Once during her progress 
she stopped before a picture on the wall: " Davy, ma ain lad," 
she murmured, her eyes moistening as she gazed on the hand- 
some face before her. It was a habit she had. Often during 
the day she would pause before the picture and breathe some 
prayer for her only child. This, however, was no hour for 
meditation, she must make sure everything was ready for him, 
everything of the best. All was done at last ! and she sank 
into a chair to have one more look and make certain nothing 
was forgotten. Yes; there was the table in his favorite spot 
by the window; upon it were all the cakes and scones he liked 
best, and the treasured teapot he had given her eight years 
before. At the head of the table was the big armchair he had 
made with his father, and by her place was the "creepie" he 
had wrought by himself as a surprise for her birthday. Sud- 
denly, at this point in her reflections, she became aware that 
some one was calling her. With a beating heart she ran to 
the door to behold a breathless husband stumbling over the 
green. 

"He's through, Marget ! he's through!" he cried, "he's 
beaten a' the rest." Behind him was the tall and handsome 
figure of David, his face wreathed in smiles, in undisguised 



i9i i.] A LOWLAND TALE 507 

amusement at his father's excited way of announcing his suc- 
cess. In a moment his mother's arms were round his neck: 

" God bless ye, Davy." Then, holding him at arms' length, 
she said : " Oh ! lad, I'm proud o' ye." 

II. 

Five years have elapsed. Margaret Sanders is seated by 
the fire mending her husband's stockings; Sandy is installed 
in his big armchair, his feet in the fender, puffing away at his 
meershaum pipe. They had been talking over old memories, 
of their courtship and early married life, of David from the 
troubled days when he was "among his teeth "to the present. 
Every now and then the old man would take his pipe from 
his mouth and draw his wife's attention to some amusing an- 
ecdote with a chuckle and a " div' ye mind, dearie?" 

During one of the lapses in the conversation a voice was 
heard outside as of some one calling. 

" See whaur it is, Sanders. Maybe it's some puir body 
wantin' summat this cauld nicht." 

Obedient to his wife's behest, Sanders slipped his feet into 
his shoes and went to the door. 

" Mistress Laidlaw ! " he exclaimed, " whit for are ye oot 
on sic an a nicht ? Come awa' bem and warm yersel'. Ye'll 
hae to tak a cup o' tea wi* Marget afore ye gang in a' the 
cauld. Come awa', come awa'," he continued, preceding her 
into the room. 

He was so taken up with offering hospitality that he never 
noticed the deadly pallor cf her face; the woman's instinct in 
Margaret, however, immediately detected that there was some- 
thing very much amiss. Taking her friend by the hand she 
set her down in the chair she had just vacated, removing her 
damp cloak from her shoulders and placing a footstool under 
her feet. Then taking one of the cold hands in her own she 
smoothed it gently, and a look of great tenderness came into 
her face. 

" Alison," she said, " what es 't ? Tell me what's wrong. 
Maybe I cuid help ye." 

The newcomer covered her face in her hands, rocking her- 
self backwards and forwards, saying : " Oh, God ! hoo can I 
tell her, it'll break her heart." 

A look of dismay spread over the sweet old face of Mar- 



5o8 A LOWLAND TALE [Jan., 

garet Sanders, while her mind instantly seized the truth. " It's 
David ! " she gasped. " Alison, he's deed ? " 

11 Oh! no, no"; replied the other, "no that bad; it's it's 
jist he's ta'en and lost what was'na his to loose; and Mr. 
Robinson 'ill hae nae mair to dae wi' him. Here's David's 
letter, ye'd best read it." 

Mechanically Margaret Sanders took the proffered letter, 
gazing at it without taking in a word of its contents. Her 
husband, seeing her thus, gently took it from her and read 
aloud the following: 

" Mistress Laidlaw," it began, " will you do me a great 
service? I have brought ruin on my parents and disgrace 
upon my name. A while ago I took ^50 from a bank, think- 
ing to make a big sum out of it; I have lost it all and more. 
I can never show my face again at home : take care of Father 
and Mother for the sake of auld lang syne. I am going away 
to forget and be forgotten. 

DAVID SANDERS." 

The letter dropped from the old man's hands ; a cold, gray 
look crept over his face, and for fire minutes he sat as one 
stunned. Then, picking up the letter, he looked it over and 
over: "Gone! and no address! Oh, David! it was a cruel 
thing to do ! " 

Suddenly a cry of horror escaped his lips as he beheld his 
wife. " Marget ! Marget ! " he wailed, " dinna look like that ! 
Dinna heed! It's no true. He'll be comin' hame the morn's 
morn he tell't us he wud come." 

Then, dropping on his knees beside her, he feverishly 
rubbed her lifeless hands. 

"Oh! wife! speak to me! Div' ye no hear me callin'? 
Dinna leave me too. I canna bide wi'out ye." 

The stricken woman made no response. She sat in her 
chair, her eyes wide open, but grasping nothing that went on 
around her. Every effort on the part of her husband and 
friend proved unavailing. At length they laid her on her bed, 
and everything having been done that could be thought of for 
her comfort, Alison Laidlaw drew a chair beside her and set- 
tled herself for a vigil. 

" Sanders," she said, turning to the distracted man, "away 
to your sheets! I'll watch by Marget; and if she waukens 



i9i i.] A LOWLAND TALE 509 

I'll come for ye." And, continuing to herself: "You're no fit 
to watch yersel', and I doot there'll be mony a nicht Marget 
'11 lie like this." 

And indeed her words proved true. For many nights and 
many days did Margaret Sanders lie unconscious, with a strained 
expression on her face, as if she were seeking for something 
she could not find. On the fifth day the doctor made a pro- 
longed examination, at the end of which he came to Sanders 
and said in his kindly way: 

" Man, I can do no more for your wife ; it rests with you, 
you must make her greet. She is not quite unconscious now; 
it's more as if she was too wearied to rouse herself. If you 
can shake her out of it, she'll do." 

So saying he patted the old man on the arm and left the 
house. Sanders, worn out in mind and body, sank down on 
the chair by the bed and laid his head on the pillow beside 
his wife. Slowly great tears ran down his haggard face. 
" Mak' her greet ? Hoo could he dae it." He taxed his 
brain, until he fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. 

" Man, hoo changed ye are," murmured Alison Laidlaw to 
herself as she crept into the room after her school hours were 
done, " your face is ten year aulder and your hair's whiter nor 
snow." For a moment she stood sorrowfully gazing at the old 
couple, who, but a week before, had been so peaceful and happy 
in their little home. Then, going forward to the bed, she 
touched Sanders on the shoulder, saying: 

" She's moved, Sandy." He raised his head and saw that 
indeed Margaret had moved, the hand that had been beneath 
the coverlet was now lying stretched out towards him. 

"Alison," he said, " the doctor's been, and he says we mun 
mak' her greet. I have been dreaming, wumman, and I seed in 
ma dream hoo wee'll dae it. Ye ken the hymn we hae always 
sung syne we was mairit? I'll sing it the noo. Wull ye help 
me ? Ma voice is no as strong as it used to be, wi' wantin' 
Marget." 

Together they knelt down beside the bed, Sanders taking 
his wife's outstretched hand in his own. 

" Lead kindly light, amid the encircling gloom," they began, 
at first in faltering tones, but their voices gained in strength 
as they sang. Slowly the strained look left Margaret's face, and 
a dawning smile hovered on her lips. As the last words of 



5io A LOWLAND TALE [Jan., 

the hymn sounded in her ears she raised her hand, laying it 
tenderly on Sandy's head : 

" Ma ain man/ 1 she whispered, and the tears rained down 
her face. 

" I'll leave ye the noo," said Alison Laidlaw, " and be back 
in half an hour." 

III. 

" What's wrong, wife, wi' Mistress Laidlaw ? " said Sanders 
some months after the incidents of the last chapter. 

" Wrong wi' Alison ? " queried his wife, " she's no been 
in the day. Is she no at the schule ? " 

"No"; replied the other. "I was jist ha'en a wee bit 
crack wi' Patrick Thompson when she passed me on the road ; 
she was as near runnin' as ever I seed her. I cried on her, 
but she wudna stop, she jist ca'ed oot ower her shuther : ' I've 
nae time havering the day, Sanders; I'm awa tae the toon! 
Tell Marget I'll no be see'in' her the nicht.' I canna think 
whit can hae cam ower her, I've never seed her so excited 
like." 

" Alison excited and goin' tae the toon," repeated Margaret 
incredulously, " it's no like her. I trust naethin's wrong. May- 
be she had a letter frae yin o' her nieces spierin on her. 
Ony way, it's nae use frettin'; she'll likely be in the nicht, for 
a' she said she wudna." 

Early in the afternoon Sanders rose from his chair: "Are 
ye wantin' onything, dearie ? " 

" No, man ; I'm fine ! " 

" I think I'll awa' doon the road and see hoo the men's 
gettin' on wi' the dyke. Are ye sure yer no wantin' naethin', 
Marget ? " 

" No, dearie; I'm rale fine. But, Sanders," she called after 
her retreating husband, " ye micht jist ask at the schule when 
Alison's expeckit hame. I canna help feelin' kind o' anxious 
aboot her." 

Left alone the old lady gave herself up to her own sad 
thoughts. To the casual observer she had made a wonderful 
recovery from her severe illness ; but if the truth were known 
it was only her intense love for her husband that kept life in 
her aching heart. The shock of her son's fall, great though 



.] ^ LOWLAND TALE 511 

it had been, was forgotten in the misery of his subsequent be- 
havior. Their working days were over, and he had deserted 
them just at the very hour when he was most needed. Why 
had he never written to her, nor thought to tell her where he 
had gone ? He knew they could not pay his debts, and he 
had left them to make the best of it, supposing they would 
forget. Oh ! it was a cruel blow, one from which she could 
never recover. Again and again she reproached herself wherein 
she had failed ? What duty left undone ? What part of his 
training she had left unfinished, that he should think it better 
to act as he had done ? Her loyal heart was always shielding 
her child from blame, and searching in her own conscience for 
the reason of his cowardice. 

The moon was slowly rising behind a bank of clouds and 
the night air was still as two figures made their way along 
the deserted lane leading from the high road to Blinkbonnie. 
It was late and silence had fallen between them during their 
slow progress. As they drew near the village the younger of 
the two halted every now and then, as if his strength would 
take him no farther. He was a young man, of perhaps some 
thirty years. A weary, drawn look was on his face, and his 
eyes shone with an unnatural brightness. His lips were tightly 
compressed together and his hands worked nervously by his 
side. For the third time during their approach to the village 
he turned as if to go back. In an instant his companion had 
him by the arm and faced him round the way she intended 
him to go, saying : 

"David Sanders" for it was no other than he and his old 
schoolmistress " can ye no mind yer mither ? Think o* her ! 
think o' yer faither 1 Dinna think o' yer ain shame, lad, it's 
no the hour for that ! Be a man, lad, as you used aye tae be. 
Ye wudna ? Ye cudna gang back noo ye hae cam' sae faur." 

Two days previously Alison Laidlaw had received a letter 
from an old friend in Edinburgh, in the course of which the 
writer spoke of a young man in distressful circumstances with 
whom they had lately become acquainted: "It is a sad case, 1 ' 
wrote Mrs. Scott, "the young man must have known better 
days. He seems to be kind of starving himself and saving 
every penny. My man is fearfully taken up about him. I 
took him in a few bit things the other day, and he nearly 



512 A LOWLAND TALE [Jan., 

broke down with gratitude. He murmured something about 
his mother and not troubling me long, but didn't seem to wish 
to speak, and I have not been able to see him since." 

For two nights after the receipt of this letter Alison lay 
sleepless. The more she thought, the more she wondered 
whether her surmises could be true. Time and again she said 
to herself: "Alison, you're jist an auld fule, I doot you're 
doited." But she couldn't rest. It was useless making her- 
self ill over an idea, silly though it might be; she must go to 
Edinburgh and see for herself, " Elspeth Scott's an auld freend 
and kens fine hoo tae baud her tongue." 

Without a word to any one she set out, that Saturday 
morning, on her quest, and, on arrival, confided her suspicions 
to her friend. The latter was full of sympathy and curiosity, 
and they started in search of the object of interest, carrying 
with them refreshments as an excuse for their visit. On 
reaching the door of the young man's wretched lodging Mrs. 
Scott observed it to be standing slightly open. She motioned 
to her friend to come forward: 

" Knock for yoursel'," she whispered, " and ye'll ken by the 
voice o* him whether it's him or no." 

" No, Elspeth, do you rap ; ma hand's trembling mais 
awfu*. I'll listen." 

Mrs. Scott knocked gently. "May I come in?" Alison's 
heart beat so loud she could scarcely hear. 

" Knock again, wumman, I canna wait ! " Still no response. 

"Pit your heed round the door; maybe he's no there." 

Mrs. Scott complied, and hastily drew back, saying: "He's 
there, look for yoursel'." 

A faint cry escaped Alison's lips as she beheld the spec- 
tacle before her. Seated at a table in a bare room was a 
young man, his arms outstretched before him, and in his right 
hand a sheet of paper. His head had fallen forward on his 
arm and he remained motionless. In a moment she was be- 
side him ; she tenderly laid her hand on the stooping shoulders, 
and in a quavering voice said : " David Sanders ! thank God 
I've found ye ! " 

The man raised his head and passed his hand over his 
eyes as he stammered forth a string of incoherent words. 
Cold, misery, and lack of nourishment had done their work, 
and it was very evident to both women that he was on the 



i9i r.] A LOWLAND TALE 513 

brink of a collapse. Again his head fell forward, and once 
more he raised it, this time his words were more intelligible. 

"Take this to Mother," he said, holding out the paper, 
" tell her I've worked till I've paid every penny. I did 
wrong. God knows I see it now." 

His head dropped again, and a great sob convulsed his 
body. 

A few minutes later his old Mistress held a cup of warm 
soup before him: "Drink this, David, Mrs, Scott has brought 
it for you." 

Half choking he swallowed the first mouthfuls, and then 
the warmth seemed to bring life to his starved person, for he 
eagerly finished it and appeared ready for more. When his 
hunger had been appeased they placed him on his ill- covered 
bed. 

" He'll sleep noo for a time, Elspeth, and when he waukens 
I'll tak' him tae his mither." 

For four hours did David Sanders lie in an exhausted 
sleep, and for four hours did Alison Laidlaw watch by him. 
Then a shudder passed over his body, as opening his eyes 
wide he stared round him. 

"You're better noo, David. Come, lad, we must be stir- 
ring. You're comin' wi' me; this place is far ower cauld for ye." 

It took David some time fully to understand the situation. 
But he was much too overcome to argue; indeed he scarcely 
knew what he was doing. Few preparations were necessary, 
for he had no possessions save the clothes he wore. To Ali- 
son the only point at issue was to get him to his home. 
There was no need for words of explanation ; one look at the 
man was sufficient to see how keenly he had suffered, and how 
he had humbled himself in his repentance. 

They had reached the cottage. For a moment David 
stood on the threshold listening. Yes ; they were the voices 
of his mother and his father united in prayer and pleading : 
"Lord, bring Davy home!" 

"They're aye waitin* on ye, lad; gang tae them noo; they'll 
dae the rest." 

And as she was about to leave him, she turned with an 
encouraging smile: "And ye micht tell yer faither I'm back 
frae the toon." 
VOL. xcii. 33 




THE WORTH OF THE COMMONPLACE. 

BY WALTER ELLIOTT, C.S.P. 

IT. FRANCIS DE SALES, that minter of both 
the gold and copper coin ol spiritual commerce, 
calls attention (Devout Life, III., xxxv.) to the 
double perfection of the Valiant Woman of the 
Book of Proverbs: "She hath put forth her 
hands," he quotes, "to strong thicgs"; that is, to things high, 
generous, and important, and yet she disdained not to "take 
hold of the spindle" (Prov. xxxi.). Never forget the distaff 
and the spindle, the saint insists, even if you are gifted to 
embroider tapestry of silk and gold. Then he utters one of his 
immortal maxims: "Take care to practice those low and hum- 
ble virtues, which grow like flowers at the foot of the cross." 
Adopting his own artless style of comparison, we notice 
that the biggest of animals, the whale, feeds on the littlest 
fish in the sea. As to ourselves, however big may be the 
quantity of our food, it must be pulverized and mashed in our 
mouths before going to the stomach for digestion ; we live on 
many atoms rather than on much bulk of nutriment. 

So does the little-by-little process of virtue feed our 
thoughts unto perfection. The rule admits only of rare excep- 
tions, such as miraculous conversions. Big acts of virtue, to 
be sure, sooner or later will be required of us only to be per- 
formed after minute, long-drawn-out preparation. Therefore 
meantime, right now, and as a current condition, God requires 
the little acts. How can a man who repines at a headache 
gladly accept God's dread fiat of death? Can ene who is 
content to be commonly a pigmy be relied on to be occasion- 
ally a giant ? 

Some of us are like those public speakers who emphasize 
the chief words and slur over the little ones of their discourse. 
If you would be great, make little actions a training school 
for doing great ones. After all, perfection as a work- a- day 
grace, is a current force and an ordinary condition of love; 






i.] THE WORTH OF THE COMMONPLACE 515 

perfection is a continuous state and a well-connected series of 
loving mental activities. Outwardly this state of soul must 
offer in God's sight the soul's correspondence with the con- 
stantly renewed opportunities of virtue. These are not great 
but little virtues. 

Herein is the divine worth of the commonplace. For in 
regard to the greater calls of God, one wisely hesitates and 
takes time, prays for light, seeks counsel. But there is no 
such liturgy for the morning and evening t sacrifice of self- 
denial in little things, the instinctive preference of another's 
comfort to one's own, the automatic restraint of an irascible 
temper, all for the love of Jesus Crucified. 

Perhaps no teaching of our Redeemer is more amazing 
than this: "For whosover shall give you to drink a cup of 
water in My name, because you belong to Christ : amen I say 
to you, he shall not lose his reward" (Mark ix. 40). The 
motive " because you belong to Christ " is the bridge between 
so cheap a gift as a cup of water and so glorious a destiny 
as the beatific vision. 

It is not the money value of the threads of gold and silver 
and silk and wool (to revert to a previous illustration), that 
makes precious a piece of tapestry. And as the coloring and 
the grouping of the tapestry are its only real excellence, so is 
the soul's motive the only real excellence of any act a great 
one with a little motive is dwarfed into insignificance, a little 
one with the great motive of " you belong to Christ " is given 
an extra " weight of glory," be it no more than a cup of water, 
or a kindly glance into the face of an angry man. This doc- 
trine, as unquestioned as Gospel truth can make it, is a great 
comfort to those whose deepest searchings of consciousness 
are like the jingling of nickles and pennies in a poor man's 
pocket. The housemaid scrubs floors, and the doctor of di- 
vinity lectures on the Trinity; the difference is all in favor of 
the professor as to the matter, but as to personal merit of 
these employments, it may easily be reversed by the compari- 
son of motive. 

As a little signet ring can bind a whole kingdom, because 
it is worn on the king's finger, so a little hand's turn of grati- 
tude for Christ's sake can win entrance to the kingdom of 
heaven. Truthfulness as absolute in little things as in great, 
delicate shadings of kindliness in conversation, cold shivers of 



5i6 THE WORTH OF THE COMMONPLACE [Jan., 

sensitiveness to the divine honor in examens of conscience, 
rigidity of observance of a devout rule of life behold per- 
fection as far as it is a practical method. It is a comfort to 
know that God concerns Himself with all means of grace, 
great and little. To many, the disenchantment wrought by 
a second conversion, will be the tardy discovery that bigness 
is not greatness in spiritual things. 

After our Savior fed several thousands of men in the 
wilderness by a .wondrous miracle, He said to His disciples: 
" Gather up the fragments that remain, lest they be lost. They 
gathered up, therefore, and filled twelve baskets with the 
fragments" (John vi. 12-13). Ask these Apostles mark you, 
they were men destined to conquer the whole world to Christ 
what was their part in the miracle ? Gathering up fragments, 
they answer proudly ; saving pieces of fish and bread that 
were left over. An honorable part, a laudable co-operation. 
It was all their Master asked of them; and this He even com- 
manded. What a lesson ! If he values the little things of His 
kitchen and dining-room, so does He value yet more the little 
things of His altar rail and confessional, our bedside prayers 
and our little aspirations, even our velleities and fleeting de- 
sires. Nay, the feeble yearnings of a cowardly nature are not 
anregarded. " The Lord hath heard the desire of the poor ; 
Thy ear hath heard the preparation of their heart" (Ps. x. 17). 

The Lord did not say: Gather up the fragments and you 
will show by their amount the greatness of My miracle. No ; 
but " lest they be lost." The petty virtue of economy was 
thus lifted into the high throne of gospel poverty. An enor- 
mous miracle associated with a wee little virtue. We are 
long in learning that there is such a thing as giving up all 
to Christ, and then wasting many baskets full of useful frag- 
ments. The broken victuals are virtues as much Christ's as 
the rich feastings of heroic love. 

" What do you do with all those coppers ? " a pastor was 
once asked as he was seen laboriously counting his penny col- 
lection. "The bank is glad to get them," he answered, "and 
deals them out to grocerymen and confectioners; and I am glad 
to deposit them. I could hardly get along without them." 
One sou a week supports the vast army of Catholic missions 
to the heathen all around the globe. 

Consider that it takes as much power to create a grain of 



i9i i.] THE WORTH OF THE COMMONPLACE 517 

sand as the sun in heaven. And consider this : whosoever is 
careful about the little things of God, will necessarily value 
great ones with holiest reverence; but not (necessarily) vice 
versa. Therefore says the Wise Man : " He that feareth God, 
neglecteth nothing" (Eccles. vii. 19). 

Notice what Jesus did when He raised to life the dead 
daughter of Jairus (Mark v.). They were all so astonished at 
seeing the corpse rise up and walk, that they forgot to care 
for her. Not so Jesus. He immediately commanded that some 
food should be given to her. Raising the dead to life did not 
hinder His care for her comfort: here is a majesty of love in 
which the great does not hinder the little. 

He learned all this (as we may say) in the divine school of 
His Father, telling us that by Him all the hairs of our head 
are numbered (Matt. x. 30) ; that He counts the little sparrows 
that fall from the housetop; and safeguards even the iotas 
and jots and tittles of His law, till ail be fulfilled (Matt. v. iS). 
He learned it, as we have seen, from His Mother; and from St. 
Joseph, saving the little pieces of board after the day's work, 
hunting for a lost nail, bringing in the small strips and shav- 
ings to Mary to kindle the hearth fire. Here it was Oh, what 
a divine truth ! that Jesus was made accustomed to say to His 
disciples : " Gather up the fragments " for the love of God ; do 
not be wasteful of the least trifling good; bear in mind that 
two mites may mark the whole merit of a distinguished con- 
tributor to the divine treasury of virtue (Luke xxi. 3). Like 
the sweepings of a goldsmith's shop, the waste and leavings 
of a soul working for God form a precious spiritual asset. 

Herein we note the relationjof natural virtues to their divine 
counterparts, the supernatural ones: the natural minister to 
the supernatural. For example, kindness is handmaid to 
charity and frugality to holy poverty. Frugality is a tender 
to poverty. A great battleship goes to sea accompanied by a 
tender, a common ship full of supplies and ammunition. She 
is not a war ship, yet she is necessary for offering battle; a 
battleship dare not risk an engagement without such a con- 
sort. So frugality is not in itself a Christian virtue, but it 
carries along holy poverty's supplies and ammunition. As 
Nazareth was the school of Calvary, so the household is the 
school of the sanctuary. The widow's mites were saved by fru- 
gality and invested by charity. Alas for the home in which little 



5i8 THE WORTH OF THE COMMONPLACE [Jan., 

economies are despised, or for the soul in which little devo- 
tional practices are ridiculed. 

This applies with special force to the virtue of chastity, 
which, as a divine trait, is so well served by the natural trait 
of modesty. We are familiar with the frequent case of con- 
verts, whose cleanliness of soul plainly has won for them the 
nuptials of the Lamb in the grace of conversion to the true 
faith. Their native instinct of sexual refinement they cherished 
for its own sake, and God now endows them with the chastity 
of " the angels of God in heaven " (Matt. xxii. 30). Even of 
the licentious man, who is yet ashamed of himself and manages 
to keep up appearances, we may cherish hope: his bad 
practises are against his good principles, which will yet prevail. 
And good Christians shall have no small reward for their small 
purities. They fear and avoid what is not exactly unchaste, 
but yet not quite pure a double meaning word, a doubtful 
article in a newspaper. 

We read in wonder of the marvelous things our Lord re- 
vealed to St. Teresa in an almost continuous succession of 
ecstacies we never dream of such privileges for ourselves. 
But do we remember that one of her notable books, The Way 
of Perfection, treats simply of how to say the Our Father with 
attention ? Supernal wisdom was never more worthily em- 
ployed than in the diminutive doctorate of teaching little ones 
how to prattle their prayers. Our Lord did not reproach his 
Apostles for not watching with Him throughout the whole of 
that awful night before His crucifixion ; but He did complain : 
" What ? Could you not watch one hour with Me ? " (Matt. 
xxvi. 40). That I can do, O Lord, once a week anyway or 
I can give Thee the fraction of an hour. And I can hear 
Mass with decent attention ; and make sure of not coming late ; 
I can recite the Angelus ; I can say my table prayers. 

Consider the little things of zeal for souls. One does not lie 
awake thinking of sinners, and yet may one have a kindly spir- 
itual interest in them; he can and he does help others whose 
calling or whose gifts make them leaders in soul saving. He 
cannot preach a powerful sermon, but he can manage a cate- 
chism class. He cannot lecture on God, but he can help get 
an audience for some one who can. He cannot write a brilliant 
controversial article, but he can take a Catholic magazine and 
lend it to his non-Catholic neighbor. 






i9i i.] THE WORTH OF THE COMMONPLACE 519 

Take the case of study. It is a noble thing when one 
studies from purely supernatural motives, originally for God, 
explicitly so and only so, exclusively and always for God. 
Well, our motives are hardly so high ; saints and saintly souls 
do that way. But commonly one takes natural love of study 
and other natural motives, ready made, found set and fixed 
in nature, and these he dedicates to God. Thus if by nature 
we possess a thrifty habit of mind, we easily save the pennies 
of knowledge, and the dollars take care of themselves. Hereby 
we win not extensive information of divine things, but yet a 
detailed and integral completeness in what we do know. God's 
gain is in the merchantable character of our stock in trade 
rather than in its extent and variety; though we be but ped- 
dlers of His truth and love, we are not without a large com- 
mission of gain. 

Note that in the case of Dives and Lazarus, the rich man's 
fragments were the poor man's coveted feast coveted and begged 
and refused. Lazarus lay at the rich man's gate, " desiring to 
be filled with the crumbs that fell from his table, and no one 
did give unto him" (Luke xvi. 21). If Dives had but saved 
the broken victuals of his sumptuous feasting for a beggar's 
scanty meal, it would never have been said of him : " The rich 
man died and was buried in hell." He was not called on to 
invite the beggar to his banquet hall; but he was obligated 
at least to give him the kitchen refuse and the table waste for 
which his mouth watered. He was buried in hell because he 
would not give away the leavings of his luxury. Jesus gave 
His great feast to the hungry multitude, and kept for Himself 
and His beloved Apostles only the leavings. Dives would not 
even do the reverse of this. He gorged himself to death on 
the dainties of luxury, and despised the famishing plea of the 
beggar for the crumbs and sweepings of his dining-room. 
Many a Catholic will surely have to suffer many days in pur- 
gatory, for feasting sumptuously on the good things of holy 
faith, forgetful of the non-Catholics at his gate, languishing for 
the crumbs the pleasant words of truth, the kindly invitations 
to Mass and to sermons, the little books of religion that would 
save their immortal souls. 

Fidelity to God is a permanent state only when it takes in 
little things for His sake with the fidelity due to Him in great 
things. No one was ever canonized for doing great things with 



520 THE WORTH OF THE COMMONPLACE [Jan. 

the ease of native greatness ; but many a saint is embalmed 
in eternal memory by the divine testimony of miracles, for 
living a routine life with miraculous fervor. The prime secret 
of holiness is how to do ordinary actions with extraordinary 
love. The obvious advantage of this doctrine, seldom known 
till after the chagrin of many spiritual disappointments, is that 
it makes the vestibule of perfection common ground for all, 
whether heroes or underlings. The daily life of all is the 
average humdrum of the commonplace. No other novitiate is 
open to the most gifted, nor refused to the dullest of souls. 
Habit makes the man, and habit depends on a constant succes- 
sion of influences ; but great events and heroic calls are not 
constantly repeated, but are rare. Little opportunities to be 
good are always at hand, are naturally successive, are super- 
naturally distributed everywhere, and supernaturally blest. 
What is naturally present with us daily and hourly, God makes 
supernatural and providential. Habits of virtue, like any other 
habits, must come gradually and easily, or hardly come at all. 
Happy is the Christian, who, for the love of God, fixes his 
mind on the divine opportunities of home and business, and 
loses none of them for the practice of virtue. Happy the 
Christian whose natural tendencies to good, are insensibly made 
into supernatural habits of virtue. 

It is thus that it comes to pass that one is made a true 
servant of God. He grows to be as avaricious of his time as 
a miser of his gold, because his time is literally opportunity 
for good, all of his time. What seems reasonable recreation 
to another, to him seems prodigal waste of a most precious 
commodity ; or rather his recreations are joyful only because 
they are the familiar means of making others happy. He 
carefully saves the pennies, that is the little passing moments 
of the day. He penuriously devotes them to occupations useful 
to his neighbor, or sanctifying to his own soul, whether in the 
quiet recollection of a religious mind, or communing with 
greater souls in spiritual reading. 




McCLURE'S, ARCHER, AND FERRER. 

BY ANDREW J. SHIPMAN. 
II. 

JHERE is a continuation of the history of the trial 
and condemnation of Ferrer in the December 
number of McClure's, thereby concluding Mr. 
Archer's article upon the subject. Had that por- 
tion of the article been seen by me at the time 
I penned the remarks in the last number of this magazine I 
would have pointed out several other instances of seeming bias, 
unfairness, and lack of information upon the part of the author. 
As it is, one must confess that the article as a whole bears 
out nearly all that was said by Catholics regarding the death of 
Ferrer or any part which the Church or the religious orders 
might have taken to effect the result. In his second article 
Mr. Archer, by his omission of any statement of the kind, seems 
to acquit them, as he concentrates all his criticism upon the 
Spanish government and military officers. There is no wish 
on the part of any Catholic to champion the civil or military 
administration in Spain ; its faults and shortcomings may be 
manifold, but when the Church and her religious orders are 
made the authors and instigators of the prosecution of Ferrer, 
and are charged directly with putting him to death without 
even the form of a trial, it is, indeed, time to protest vigorously 
and to examine the case in all its bearings. 

Certainly Mr. Archer's article shows clearly, even from the 
testimony of one who has mixed ^closely with Ferrerites and 
kept aloof from his opponents, that such expressions as were 
used by Mr. Perceval Gibbons in his article on Ferrer in Mc- 
Cluris of one year ago are untrue. There is certainly no 
basis for the latter's statement that, after the Madrid episode, 
"the government and the orders had lost the first round of the 
fight, but they had gained experience, which served them well 
when Ferrer again fell into their hands. This time (Barcelona 
trial) they improved even on a special court and no jury ; 
they abolished '.witnesses and limited the discretion of the man 
they themselves nominated to conduct the defense" or the other 
statement of Gibbons, in concluding the description of the trial 



522 MCCLURE'S, ARCHER, AND FERRER [Jan., 

of Ferrer : " The government and the orders had won the second 
round of the game. The dice were loaded, it is true ; the game 
was not honest" ; to say nothing of the dozens of innuendos 
scattered throughout the earlier article. For this much we 
must be thankful to Mr. Archer; he has amply proved that 
there was a trial and that there were witnesses, and he does 
not lay the blame and execration on the orders and the Church. 

But Mr. Archer, as was pointed out in the December number 
of this magazine, does not take the trouble to ascertain all the 
facts, or divest himself of his prejudices, even where he might 
easily have done so. This causes him to overlook the obvious 
and easily ascertainable, and very justly casts discredit upon 
the efficiency and impartiality of his work. A few instances of 
this kind in his concluding article may be pointed out. 

For instance, he drags in La Ley de Jurisdictions, which has 
little or nothing to do with the case. It certainly did not ap- 
ply to Ferrer and the Barcelona riots, although by its terms 
it might well have done so. It is a law defining the jurisdic- 
tion of military tribunals for offenses committed (a) directly 
against the army or navy, as for example by soldiers on duty 
or in uniform ; or (b) where it may be doubtful as to the nature 
of the offense, which essentially may be an offense by civil law 
but committed where the army or navy are already in control. 
But it is a law applying directly to acts committed in peaceful 
times. We have almost analogous provisions in regard to Federal 
and State jurisdictions, and an offense committed in the corri- 
dor of a United States court house or post-office, or the bound- 
ary line thereof, immediately divests the State courts of juris- 
diction and turns the prisoner over to the United States courts. 
It must be remembered that Barcelona was under martial law 
from July 26, 1909, until near January, 1910; the civil powers 
were superseded, and the whole city was under the control of 
the military commander. The writer was present in Barcelona 
when General Valeriano Weyler succeeded that commander, 
Don Luis de Santiago Manescau, who had issued the July 
proclamation which suspended all civil authority and declared 
the city in state of war and subject to the provisions of the 
Military Code. Articles 3 and 4 of his proclamation read : 

Article 3. Jurisdiction of offenses affecting public order in 
any political or social sense comes under my authority ; and 
the authors (autores, Mr. Archer's favorite word) of them can 
, be tried by summary court-martial. 



i9i i.] MCCLURE'S, ARCHER, AND FERRER 523 

Article 4. Persons publishing notices or directions in any 
form whatsoever tending to disobedience of military orders 
will be considered as guilty of sedition ; as well as those 
who make attempts against freedom of labor, or cause impedi- 
ment or destruction of railroads, street car lines, telegraph 
or telephone lines, or any other conductor of electricity, or 
water mains or gas pipes. 

Mr. Archer does not tell us of these things; yet he might 
easily have inquired about them. They were the reason why 
Ferrer was tried by court-martial, and extra indulgence was 
given to him, since he might have been tried summarily in- 
stead of having a formal trial of twenty-eight days, the testi- 
mony of which filled 1,200 written pages, not one of which 
Mr. Archer seems to have examined, contenting himself solely 
with the resume in the "Juicio Ordinario " (which he calls the 
" Process"), nor does he seem to have examined the fifty 
packets or files of exhibits likewise adduced in the case. It 
is very evident, therefore, [that the Ley de Jurisdicciones is 
simply lugged in to make coloring matter. 

Again in eliciting sympathy for Soledad Villafranca, the 
mistress of Ferrer, and blaming the authorities for not taking 
her, and her friends' evidence, he says : 

Meanwhile Soledad Villafranca was eating her heart out at 
Teruel, in total ignorance of what was passing at Barcelona. 
She and some of her comrades in exile were the persons who 
could best speak as to Ferrer's employment of his time during 
the week of revolt ; and they naturally expected, day after 
day, to be called upon for their evidence. This expectation 
was encouraged (unofficially, of course, and very likely in 
good faith) by their jailers. A member of the Palace police 
. . . bade her wait patiently and the summons would 
come in due time. 

Mr. Archer doesn't tell us that the provisions of the Span* 
ish military code forbid the examination of the prisoner's 
family and relatives as witnesses against him by the prosecu- 
tion. He doesn't tell us either that that Code provides (Ar- 
ticle 479) that the prisoner shall be present at the examin- 
ations of witnesses, even though he be held incomunicado, nor 
that (Articles 362 and 365) he can reply in writing or orally 
at every moment of the trial (sumario) to any accusation made 
by any official, and that (Article 465) he may give his declar- 
ations or testimony as many times as he likes; although Mr. 



524 MCCLURE'S, ARCHER, AND FERRER [Jan., 

Archer does admit that, according to Article 458, the accused 
may testify " without being required to take an oath," thus 
relieving a prisoner from the charge of perjury if his testi- 
mony be false. This last privilege Mr. Archer curiously turns 
into an excuse for Ferrer's obvious falsehood as to having 
been at the Casa del Pueblo and having there met with Ardid. 
The sumario may be extended (Article 548) for further testimony, 
the ratification of witnesses, and the summons of further wit- 
nesses maybe requested by the accused in cases of "common 
offenses/ 1 or for the " further taking of proof which he thinks 
would protect his rights" (Article 548). Mr. Archer speaks of 
the " common offenses," but kindly omits the latter provisions. 
To say that the prosecution was bound to summon witnesses 
for the defense, where the accused and his counsel failed to 
call them, or to request them to be called, when testimony was 
being taken, is somewhat of a novelty. 

The Auditor pointed this out in his dictamen or opinion 
rendered in the case (" Process," p. 59) : 

If, as the defense asserts, the affidavits of Soledad Villa- 
franca and the other associates of the accused, now residing 
at Teruel, could have exculpated Ferrer Guardia, they had 
time to make such affidavits in the twenty-eight days during 
which the sumario lasted, and besides the accused might have 
summoned them in his investigations ; but they would have 
been required to submit to examination in the same manner 
in which all such persons were interrogated who had been 
cited in them. But not having requested any such testimony 
until after the case had been taken up in plenario, it was not 
possible to accede to his petition on account of the prohib- 
ition of paragraph 5 of Article 552 of our Code. 

In other words, the defense did not answer orally or in 
writing to the accusations and proofs adduced, did not offer 
witnesses in his behalf during twenty-eight days, because, as the 
Auditor points out, they would have been examined, perhaps, 
so as to incriminate themselves, him, or others. But they 
waited until the other witnesses were dismissed or dispersed 
and then made an offer themselves to testify it does not ap- 
pear that the accused ever called for them orally or in writing. 
Mr. Archer gives us to understand that the court-martial 
should have halted its procedure, which had got past the 
point of taking testimony, and of its own motion called wit- 
nesses in defense of Ferrer. 



i9i i.] MCCLURE'S, ARCHER, AND FERRER 525 

It must be remembered that Ferrer was a man of some 
education he is lauded as being a man. of learning and fore- 
sight by his partisans that he wrote numerous letters, and 
that even in prison he was permitted to write his own account 
of the matter, which was sent to Charles Malato on October I, 
1909, as Mr. Archer shows in a foot-note in the November 
number of McClure's. Hence he could easily have written 
his defense for the court, detailing exactly where he was 
during every day of the riots, yet he did nothing of the kind. 
Mr. Archer makes much of the foul dungeon or cell in which 
he says Ferrer was confined in the fortress of Montjuich. 
Yet my friend Don Casimiro Comas, a lawyer of Barcelona, 
says Ferrer was confined in the Model Prison (Cat eel Celular) of 
Barcelona (which apparently is as much up-to-date as the Tombs 
Prison of New York), where his trial also took place until he 
was sentenced. Even Mr. Archer in the November McClure's 
gives the date of his letter to Malato as the " Carcel Celular, 
October i, 1909." But these facts are kept in the back- 
ground in his article. 

Later on he proceeds to review in extenso the evidence in 
the case, carefully separating it into separate portions, thus 
breaking the connection between events. One hardly knows 
just what to make of his analysis, for lit is difficult to know 
whether he is reviewing the trial of Ferrer or reviewing the 
methods of Spanish judicial procedure. If Ferrer had been 
tried by an ordinary Spanish criminal court, with a jury, the 
method of procedure and the taking of evidence would have 
been the same. Of course, in no event could Ferrer have 
been tried by the usual processes of English or American law. 
He would have had to be tried according to Spanish law and 
procedure, and hence all criticism of. the method or procedure 
is entirely beside the point. It is like " going out and swear- 
ing at the court." 

For instance, he speaks of " unsupported opinion and hear- 
say." That is allowable under the Spanish rules of evidence, 
and that kind of evidence would have been received in the 
ordinary criminal trials] in Spain. We have, in America and 
England, the rules of evidence so refined that nothing but 
direct evidence with certain exceptions is received ; and hear- 
say and opinion evidence (other than certain experts) is com- 
pletely barred. But upon the continent of Europe, under the 
Roman law, it is not so; there they say that the same methods 



526 MCCLURE'S, ARCHER, AND FERRER [Jan., 

that a man takes in the ordinary affairs of life to establish a 
fact, whether by hearsay testimony or not, should be followed 
to establish a fact in court. They point out that the business 
and reputation of every man in the world would go by the 
board, were direct evidence alone required in the affairs of 
everyday life. I am not arguing the point, I am only stating 
the practice. This practice Mr. Archer seems entirely to 
overlook, and desires thereby to score a point, by judging a 
Spanish trial by comparison with the standards set up by the 
English common law. 

When, however, the evidence is direct evidence, Mr. Archer 
undertakes to step, in imagination, upon the bench of the trial 
judges at the court-martial, sift the evidence and decide that 
it is not against Ferrer. Even our appellate courts here do 
not do that, at least not in theory of law. They always say that 
the trier of fact, whether jury, referee, or judge, saw the wit- 
nesses, were nearer to the facts, and knew more about them than 
persons who [see them in print long afterward. Hence we 
can very well assume that the seven judges of the Ferrer court- 
martial knew better what weight to give to the direct evidence 
then, than Mr. Archer can after the lapse of nearly a year. 

This will be more apparent when we come to take up the 
specific case of the testimony of Don Francisco de Paula Coll- 
deforns, who testified that between 7:30 and 8:30 in the even- 
ing of July 27, 1909, he saw a man, whom he recognized from 
photographs as Ferrer, " captaining a group " near the Lyceum 
Theatre on the Rambla in Barcelona. I have had the very 
spot pointed out to me by a cabman. One may very well 
recognize Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Taft, from having seen their 
photographs, although he had never laid eyes on them before. 
We must remember that Ferrer had not long before been im- 
plicated in the bomb explosion in Madrid, when the attempt 
was made on the lives of King Alfonso and Queen Victoria, 
and his portrait was published dozens of times in all the 
Spanish and French illustrated papers, and he was as well 
known by portraiture as any political or aviation celebrity is 
here. Hence it was not such an unusual thing for a news- 
paper-man to be able to recognize him from a photograph. 

Mr. Archer makes much of the fact that the recognition 
took place between 7:30 and 8:30 according to the testimony, 
and reasons that it was too dark to see any man's features 
then. Now the sun went down in Barcelona about 7:20 during 



i9i i.] MCCLURE'S, ARCHER, AND FERRER 527 

the week of July 26, and twilight lasted until nearly 9 o'clock 
at that period of the year. Barcelona is situated somewheres 
near the latitude of Providence or Boston ; and one can test 
the point any time between July 26 and 31 of the year. 

Again Mr. Archer, in reviewing this evidence says that 
Mongat, where "Mas Germinal" is situated, is "eleven dusty 
miles" from Barcelona. It is only eleven kilometres, so Mr. 
Archer's pen must have slipped unwittingly, as that would be 
but about six miles from the Rambla or Plaza de Colon, in 
the very heart of Barcelona. He also says that, " the authori- 
ties had carefully refused to admit the evidence of Ferrer's 
family, who (now, in 1910) assert that he never quitted Mas 
Germinal that day." Yet on the very morning of the 27th he 
took Francisco Domenech, the barber, to breakfast at Bada- 
lona, which is a village two miles or more from Mongat on 
the way to Barcelona. To walk all the way from Mongat to 
Barcelona requires only from two to two and a half hours. 
Hence it may very well be that Ferrer, now that things were 
becoming lively in Barcelona, stayed for a large portion of the 
day the heated portion, it will be perceived and in the 
afternoon went into Barcelona. His "family" could easily 
swear he was at home that day, and Senor Colldeforns likewise 
see him "captaining a group" on the Rambla in the city* 
Ferrer, with his experience in the Morral bomb case, and in 
previous cases, would naturally be strong on making out an alibi. 

And just here Mr. Archer has put in a piece of innuendo. 
There is nothing in this second article which directly asserts 
any connection between the Church or the orders and Ferrer's 
trial. But he found it necessary to put a head- line, "The 
Catholic Journalist," and to repeat the phrase two or three 
times in that part of the article. It supplies an apparent mis- 
sing link, because it connects the Catholic Church in some 
indefinite way with the prosecution. Well, the army officers 
were Catholics, the court officials were Catholics, all the wit- 
nesses were Catholics where they were not the anarchist and 
atheist companions of Ferrer. Why single out the journalist 
who saw Ferrer? It seems as if it were done with the motive 
of accenting the Church as a prosecuting witness. 

As a matter of fact El Siglo Puturo is not a church paper. 
It is the Carlist paper, and merely incidentally, as part and 
parcel of its politics of Throne and Church, puts forward 
Catholicism. Of course the newspaper man was "a Catholic 



528 MCCLURE'S, ARCHER, AND FERRER [Jan. 

journalist," but to have called him a Carlist would have left 
out much of the peculiar attitude of Mr. Archer. 

Then he insinuates that the authorities put Ferrer in such 
a woe-begone garb in the rueda, or group of prisoners, that 
his recognition by Seiior Colldeforns was a foregone conclusion. 
In other words, he charges deception on the part of the court, 
without a single fact to support it. The law of recognizing 
and identifying the accused is plain (Articles 422 and 424): 

The rueda must be constituted of at least six persons of simi- 
lar appearance to the person who is to be identified. 

As Ferrer was completely shaven when captured, and if he 
were allowed no toilet accessories while in prison, as Mr, 
Archer declares, he must have been covered with a gray, 
stubbly beard, which would necessarily make his identification 
amid six others similar to him very difficult to Seiior Colldeforns. 

So much for the analysis and reasoning indulged in by 
Mr. Archer. When his whole article is gone over in this 
manner, the fact stands out pre-eminently that there was evi- 
dence against Ferrer which even Mr. Archer cannot put out 
of the way. Space forbids a complete analysis of the entire 
article, and a discussion of Mr. Archer's statement that "the 
documentary proofs consisted of two papers." In fact, there 
were 50 files or dockets of them offered in evidence, consisting 
of correspondence, circulars, reports, and memoranda of all kinds. 

Yet even with Mr. Archer's special pleading for he does 
not seem to have endeavored to interview Senor Colldeforns, 
or to analyze the dockets of the documentary evidence, or 
even look over the original evidence testified and sworn to by 
the witnesses he concludes that: " I am not at all sure that, 
had Ferrer been fairly tried under reasonable rules of evidence 
(query, under English common law evidence), he would have 
got off scot-free." 

This is certainly a vindication from the rampant assertions 
that were made that the Catholic Church had " railroaded " 
him to death. Judicial errors may be made in any country ; 
but it is quite another thing to say that a person was done to 
death without trial and without witnesses. We Catholics only 
ask that in these matters the same yardstick be used to meas- 
ure events in Spain as would be used to measure events in 
New York or Oklahoma. 



IRew Books. 

THE FORM OF PERFECT LIVING. By Richard Rolle. Ren- 
dered into modern English by Geraldine Hodgson. Lon- 
don: Duckworth & Co. 

THE MOUNT OF VISION: A Book of English Mystic Verse. 
Selected by Adeline Cashmore, with an Introduction by 
Alice Meynell. London: Chapman & Co. 

" God loves a clear mind about God and God's deeds/' 
So wrote Richard Rolle in the earlier half of the fourteenth 
century. Richard Rolle was one of those pure in heart to 
whom our Lord gave " a clear mind about God and God's 
deeds.'* We find in his treatises great clearness of thought 
combined with that tender simplicity of feeling which has al- 
ways seemed so characteristic of English mystical writers. 
Four of these treatises are given in Miss Hodgson's book, the 
two main ones being 7he Form of Perfect Living (for those in 
religion) and Our Daily Work (for those in the world). 

Love of our Lord, meditation on His words and deeds, 
imitation of His thought and character these are the notes 
so constantly touched but always varied with beautiful melo- 
dies which never grow hard, wearisome, or complex. In the 
little treatise on charity, for instance, we are told to love 
our enemies and sinful men, since these are our fellow- Chris- 
tians. " Look and bethink thee how Christ loved Judas, who 
was both His bodily enemy and a sinful caitiff; how goodly 
Christ was to him; how benign; how courteous; how humble 
to him whom He knew to be damnable; and nevertheless, He 
chose him for His Apostle, and sent him to preach with the 
other Apostles; He gave him power to work miracles; He 
showed to him the same good cheer in word and deed ; also 
with His Precious Body; and preached to him as He did to 
the other Apostles. . . . And, above all, when Judas took 
Him, He kissed him and called him His friend. All this 
charity Christ showed to Judas, whom He knew to be damna- 
ble. In no manner of feigning or faltering, but in soothful- 
ness of good love and clean charity. For though it were 
truth that Judas was unworthy to have any gift of God, or 
any sign of love, because of his wickedness; nevertheless it 
VOL. xcii. 34 



530 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

was worthy and reasonable that our Lord should appear as 
He is" (p. 187). 

It is a far cry from the mind and heart of fourteenth-cen- 
tury England to the modern mind and heart. The mysticism 
of Richard Rolle, of Mother Julian of Norwich, or of Walter 
Hilton is in many ways different from that of our later days: 
one -cannot resist the conviction that it has come down to us 
from heights of spiritual experience at once more real, difficult, 
rare, and practical. Mrs. Meynell, in her introduction to Ike 
Mount of Vision, lays timely stress on this very noticeable 
fact. "It is ominous," she writes, "to hear the name of mys- 
ticism so easily used, given, and taken, without a thought of 
the cost." She complains of a recent novel in which "the 
motive and the whole subject was mysticism. Visions were 
easy to come by ; and revelations, and such extreme things as 
'the unitive life* things for which the saints thought fifty 
years of self-conquest and self-abandonment a paltry price 
were discussed as incidents of well-read aspiration. There was 
no mention of the first step, there was much chatter of the 
last. No one in the band of confident people engaged in this 
story in artistic work for a celestial end seemed to have en- 
tered upon the indispensable beginnings, to have overcome 
anything within, to have shut his mouth upon a hasty word, 
to have dismissed a worldly thought, to have compelled his 
heart to a difficult act of pardon, to have foregone beloved 
sleep, cherished food, conversation, sharp thoughts, or darling 
pride. The saints, on the other hand, gave themselves to that 
spade-work before permitting themselves so much as one credi- 
ble dream" (p. x.). 

All this is well and truly said, but it should not discourage 
us. What we lay folk need now is not high and difficult treat- 
ises on mysticism, but books that will inspire and spiritualize 
the dullness of our -common lives. The Mount of Vision is a 
book of this kind. All of us are only too apt to indulge in 
dreams of merely material business, and out of such dreams to 
make the stuff of our daily and habitual conduct. We need 
visions of a less material nature, visions that will cool our sel- 
fish lust for things of the passing hour, or, at any rate, teach 
us in some vivid and convincing way to set things in all their 
littleness over against the more permanent and personal reali- 
ties of human life. 



NEW BOOKS 531 

Men have found many and various witnesses to the abiding 
nature of spiritual reality according to their different times 
and temperaments. Now they have been afraid to enjoy nat- 
ural beauty lest it should tempt them to disloyal neglect of 
their only Love. St. Bernard would not lift his eyes to the 
beauties of Lake Geneva. "No ascent of a mountain for the 
sake of the view from the top seems recorded between Had- 
rian's ascent of Etna and Petrarch's of Mount Ventoux; and 
Petrarch's qualm of conscience when he had done it is signifi- 
cant." St. Bernard left nature for God, but St. Francis came 
back to nature through God. It may be just as possible, 
because just as hard, to leave business for God and to come 
back to it, afterwards, through Him. 

What soul was his, when, from the naked top 
Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun 
Rise up and bathe the world in light! . . . 
. . . Far and wide the clouds were touched, 
And in their silent faces could be read 
Unutterable love. . . . 
In such access of mind, in such high hour 
Of visitation from the living God, . . . 
Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired. 

His mind was a thanksgiving to the power 

That made him ; it was blessedness and love ! (p. 72). 

But there are other ways and moods of inspiration. Cra- 
shaw's for instance, in his wonderful address to St. Teresa: 

Oh thou undaunted daughter of desires! 

By all the dowr of lights and fires ; 

By all the eagle in thee, all the dove; 

By all thy lives and deaths of love; 

By thy large drafts of intellectual day, 

And by thy thirst of love more large than they ; 

By all thy brim-filled Bowles of fierce desire 

By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire; 

By the full kingdom of that final kiss 

That seized thy parting Soul, and seal'd thee His; 



53* NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

By all the Heav'n thou hast in Him 
(Fair sister of the seraphim !) 
By all of Him we have in thee; 
Leave nothing of my self in me. 
Let me so read thy life, that I 
Unto all life of mine may die (p. 30). 

The note of Richard Crashaw is the note of Richard Rolle, 
and of all really Catholic inspiration, devotion of the most 
passionate and personal kind to our Lord Himself: 

I sing the Name which none can say 
But toucht with an interior ray (p. 32). 

We must not think wrongly of God, He is both far and 
near, and yet He is neither, for spiritual distances, as St. 
Augustine tells us, are not measured by space but by affection : 

. . . God is never so far off 
As even to be near; 
He is within; our spirit is 
The home He holds most dear 

To think of Him as by our side 
Is almost as untrue, 
As to remove His throne beyond 
Those skies of starry blue (p. 69). 

But, after all, it is the angel of the child, and not of the 
seer, who ever beholds the face of the Father in Heaven. 
Perhaps the most beautiful, the most simple, and the most 
profoundly mystical poem in the world is that little one of 
Father Tabb's called " Out Of Bounds." 

A little Boy of heavenly birth, 

But far from home to-day, 

Comes down to find His ball, the Earth, 

That Sin has cast away. 

Oh comrades, let us one and all 
Join in to give Him back His ball ! 



i9ii-] NEW BOOKS 533 

HEROIC SPAIN. By E. Boyle O'Reilly. New York: Duffield 
& Co. $2.50. 

We are so accustomed to narrow prejudice, if not actual 
animosity, in contemporary works on Spain, that it is with a 
distinct feeling of satisfaction we find that country viewed 
from a sympathetic and Catholic standpoint. 

We have here a writer fitted to understand the country and 
form a correct estimate of it ; one who speaks its language, is 
familiar with its history and literature, shares its faith, and 
who went leisurely through the by-ways as well as the fre- 
quented routes. 

The result is a favorable appreciation of the national char- 
acter, and the impression made recalls an equally favorable 
opinion expressed more than a generation ago by a distin- 
guished Maryland author and jurist, Teakle Wallis, whose long 
residence in Spain made him say that the middle and lower 
classes were the finest in Europe. 

Miss O'Reilly was a witness to the edifying faith, the dig- 
nity and purity of life of the people in the rural portions, 
and, indeed, throughout all of Northern Spain. She thinks, 
however, that a shadow is cast on the fair picture by the popu- 
lar devotions to images and processions which take place, not 
only in country parishes, but even in cities like Seville, and 
have a tendency to withdraw the mind and heart from the 
complete devotion due to the great central points of religion 
and worship. 

Of course in a book dealing historically with Spain, the 
perennial subject of the Inquisition has to be treated, and we 
are indebted to the author for an excellent chapter which we 
wish might be read by all non-Catholics. 

The digressions scattered throughout the book are, in our 
opinion, a serious defect, and are out of keeping with the 
general scope of the work. A fair degree of familiarity with 
modern Spanish novels in the original, forces us to regard 
Miss O'Reilly's opinion of them, given at some length, as too 
favorable, and apt to be misleading as to the value of their 
moral tone and influence. 

The book is cumbersome in form, and we hope that in a 
second edition, which it merits, it will be made lighter and 
handier. But these few faults are easily outweighed by its 



534 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

merits, and Catholics should not fail to avail themselves of the 
opportunity to read an agreeable book in which justice is done 
to a much maligned Catholic country. 

MARY ALOYSIA HARDEY, RELIGIOUS OF THE SACRED HEART. 
With an introduction by the Rev. T. J. Campbell, SJ. 
New York: America Press. $2. 

Few American women of the nineteenth century were as 
well known and loved as Mother Aloysia Hardey, who founded 
the convent of Manhattanville and nearly all the houses of the 
Sacred Heart in the eastern states. Her biography, now pub- 
lished for the first time, is interesting, not only as a life of a 
remarkable woman, but also as a brief history of the commu- 
nity to which she belonged, and, indeed, a review in part of the 
history of the Catholic Church in the United States during the 
period of its greatest expansion. Descended from the oldest 
Maryland Catholic families, Mother Hardey was born in 1809 
and died in 1886. At an early age she showed unusual strength 
of character, and on finishing her studies, at the age of six- 
teen, she entered the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Grand 
Coteau, Louisiana. So well did she respond to the religious 
training given there, that she accomplished in a few years the 
spiritual task over which others spend a lifetime, and when she 
was only twenty-three the saintly Mother Duchesne could write 
of her in terms of the highest praise. 

In that same year she was appointed Superior of the con- 
vent of St. Michaels, La. When Archbishop Hughes secured the 
promise of a convent of the Sacred Heart in New York, Mother 
Hardey was called from Louisiana to aid Mother Gallitzin in 
making the foundation. The struggles of the community and 
their many trials before they succeeded in establishing the 
school at Manhattanville is a story that must be read in detail 
to be appreciated. 

Mother Hardey's duties as Superior in an educational order 
brought her in touch with all ranks and classes of society. Her 
deeply sympathetic nature, her unalterable serenity, wonderful 
tact, foresight, and business capacity won for her respect and 
admiration. Archbishop Spalding said of her : " Madame Hardey 
is a woman created by God for the accomplishment of a great 
work and there will never be another like her." A Detroit 
lawyer, whom she consulted when her convent was founded 



NEW BOOKS 535 

in that city, said: "I would rather contend with ten lawyers 
than with one Madame Hardey. She is the cleverest woman I 
ever met." 

They who, either as religious or pupils, were brought under 
her influence tender unanimous praise to her for her sanctity, 
her kindness, and her wise, strong counsels. Perhaps the 
greatest evidence of her worth is the fact that she is still a 
living, uplifting influence in the lives of many. If the author, 
whose name is not given, had made a more judicious use of 
the superabundant material at her disposal, the character of 
her subject would have stood out more clearly, but this fault 
will be pardoned by those who are interested in details about 
the other persons mentioned in the book. 

THE COST OF A CROWN: A STORY OF DOUAY AND DURHAM. 
A Sacred Drama in Three Acts. By Robert Hugh Ben- 
son. London: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.25. 

This, the second published play from the pen of Father 
Benson, was written at the request of the late Bishop of Hex- 
ham and Newcastle for the centennial celebrations of St. Cuth- 
bert's College, Ushaw. It is a dramatized epitome of Vener- 
able John Host's life. Father Benson hedged himself around 
with many difficulties when he selected to follow historical de- 
tails so closely as to make up his third act with dialogue 
taken verbatim from the recorded report of the martyr's trial. 
One inevitable result coming from this is the rather tame end- 
ing to the play. There can be no doubt that the second act 
is by far the best; the second scene in it being particularly 
good. But both the first and third acts drag just a little. 

The narrative throughout is simple; plot there is none. 
John Bost is seen in the first act as a student at Rheims; in 
the second act as a priest in England, where he managed to 
offer Mass and preach for thirteen years, and still escape the 
clutches of the law. Eglesfield, a spy, now comes on the 
scene, and after confessing and receiving Holy Communion 
from Father Bost betrays him to the authorities immediately 
after Mass has ended. The third act is merely the passing 
of the death sentence on the priest. Each act is preceded by 
a few verses sung before the curtain rises, and followed by a 
tableau accompanied by a sacred song. This arrangement im- 



NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

presses on the audience the fact that they are witnessing a 
sacred drama, as Father Benson calls the work. 

There are no female characters. And the play, although 
demanding a goodly number of performers, presents no diffi- 
culties for production by any seminary or high school. A 
slight modification would make the Prologue suitable for re- 
production. 

Some illustrations have been added to the text, but we 
have not been impressed by them. 

THE LIVES OF THE POPES IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 
By the Rev. Horace K. Mann. Vol. IV. 891-999. Vol. 
V. 999-1048. St. Louis: B. Herder. $3 per volume. 

Our readers have been long familiar with the plan and 
general character of Father Mann's work on the history of the 
Popes. Volumes IV. and V., which have now appeared, bring 
the story down as far as the middle of the eleventh century. 
" The Popes in the Days of Feudal Anarchy " is the title of 
these two volumes, for they cover that dramatic period which 
for many reasons enjoys so terrible a pre-eminence in the 
annals of blood and scandal. 

In a certain sense, therefore, these are the most important 
contributions that Father Mann has to make to the history of 
the popes. Every " school-boy " is familiar with curdling tales 
and damning generalizations that are commonly drawn from 
the records of the iron age of the papacy. The trial of dead 
Formosus, the loves and ambitions of the House of Theophylact, 
the murders and simonies, the intrigues and adulteries and re- 
bellions, the three-sided quarrels of Greek and Saracen and 
Roman, the civil strife and fratricides; the contest of German 
and Provencal and North Italian and Tusculan patrician for the 
same fair spoil, the treachery, the lust, the savage cruelty reign- 
ing in high and sacred places these make a long chapter of 
ecclesiastical annals never to be forgotten while there lives a 
controversialist to gloat over chronicles of sin and shame. Be- 
cause of our indifference we too often abandon to their fate 
these victims of traditional condemnation. We leave them to 
be sentenced by unjust judges, without even the pretence of 
a trial or hearing. We surely ought carefully to consider the 
other side: to hear whatever is alleged in their defense and to 
examine how far the disqualification of prejudice may be urged 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 537 

against their accusers. Old Liutprand of Cremona, for ex- 
ample, would get far less credence for his tales of scandal if 
we had ready on the tip of pen or tongue a critical estimate 
of his reliability. 

Father Mann's work is not monumental and not final ; but 
it is careful and conscientious, and it possesses splendid utility. 
It says the best that can be said of the darkest figures in the 
darkest scenes of churck history, and it will be henceforward 
an indispensable aid to the case for the defense, when the 
tenth and eleventh century popes are summoned to the bar of 
history. 

KNIGHTHOOD IN GERM AND FLOWER. By Professor John 

Harrington Cox. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. $1.25. 
Twenty-five years ago our children were regaled with the 
colorless pietism of " Elsie Book " literature ; to-day they are 
familiar with Arthur, and Siegfried, and Bayard and all the 
nature lore of wood and field is theirs for the asking. This 
changed aspect of juvenile reading- matter, fruit ot much large 
wisdom and much patient scholarship, is one of the hopeful 
signs of the times. The book before us is a worthy addition 
to the new order. It brings together two representative tales : 
the great Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf, and the fascinating 
medieval romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The 
volume, which will delight hero-worshipping childhood in all 
ways (save, perhaps, in its title ! ) deserves a warm and wide 
recognition. 

THE TURN OF THE TIDE. By Mary Agatha Gray. New 

York: Benziger Brothers. $1.25. 

This book is exactly what it professes to be "a story of 
humble life by the sea." It chooses as its scene a little Catho- 
lic fishing village on the east coast of England, and smugglers' 
caves, always exciting and mysterious since publishers lost 
their night's sleep to finish Guy Mannering, form its darkly ef- 
fective background. The style is not above criticism, and the 
author makes reckless use of the historical present. The story 
is readable and very human. 

THE STRANGE CASE OF ELEANOR CUYLER. By Kingsland 
Crosby. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. $1.20 net. 
In the glaring sunlight of a July day, and near one of the 



538 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

busiest corners on Broadway, the daughter of a great financial 
magnate disappears mysteriously, and the story of the ensuing 
search is told by Mr. Kingsland Crosby in The Strange Case 
of Eleanor Cuyler. The strangest point in the case is how 
the author ever contrived to spread over three hundred and 
forty pages the material which should have made one good 
magazine short story, with the careful hyphen of Mr. Brander 
Matthews. Are we returning to the days of seven-volumed 
Clarissa Harlowe ? 

STORY TELLING WHAT TO TELL AND HOW TO TELL IT. 
By Edna Lyman. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co. 75 
cents. 

This is a book that will give much useful information con- 
cerning the value of reading or telling tales to children and of 
many books from which suitable tales may be taken. Its 
chapter on "The Responsibility of Society for What Children 
Read " is particularly thoughtful and praiseworthy. Yet with 
regard to this book, as with so many others that seek to direct 
us in the things of the mind, we must say that if, according 
to the author, reading should acquaint us with lofty truths 
and high ideals, then the book falls short, very short, of what 
we would look for in such a volume. Children should not be 
wearied with a burden of religious and moral instruction, and 
a story is a story; but there are great short stories that will 
give children substantial truth and abiding ideals, that will, in 
their own charming way, instruct while they entertain, and 
works of this sort are hardly included in the author's list. 

THE MIDDLE AGE. By David Schaff. Vol. V. Part II. of 
History of the Christian Church, by Philip Schaff. New 
York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $3.25. 

The book before us terminates a series of seven volumes 
on the history of the Christian Church, projected and, except 
for the Middle Age, completed by Dr. Philip Schaff. Dr. 
David Schaff, Professor of Church History in the Western 
Theological Seminary, has, we understand, devoted a consider- 
able number of years to the preparation of this Fifth Volume. 
Divided in two sections, the second of which now appears, it 
contains much more than a thousand pages of text. 

Covering so important a period of church history as the 



i9".] NEW BOOKS 539 

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this volume calls for the very 
highest qualifications on the part of its author. Into a terri- 
tory filled with such fierce and frequent disputes, no writer 
should enter unless equipped with scholarship so profound, 
impartiality so thorough, and accuracy so minute that readers 
will be enriched out of his fullness of knowledge and enlight- 
ened by his judicial discrimination. To this enviable distinction 
Dr. Schaff had not attained ; and so this is a book he should 
not have attempted to write. 

To adduce all the evidence for this verdict is not within 
our province. By way of illustration merely, we draw atten- 
tion to the striking contrast between the ideal historian and 
the man who, without a reference, represents Thomas Aquinas 
as teaching that the souls in purgatory "belong to the juris- 
diction of the Church on earth" (p. 758); who avers that in 
the sixteenth century " the popular mind did not stop to make 
the fine distinction between guilt and its punishment, and, if 
it had, would have been quite satisfied to be made free from 
the sufferings entailed by sin" (p. 759); who ventures the 
statement that John Gerson knew nothing of "the rights of 
conscience " (p. 217) ; who says the Unam Sanctam " pronounces 
all offering resistance to the pope's authority as Manicheans" 
(p. 20. The quoted text of the Bull shows quite another mean- 
ing) ; and who, in the endeavor to make a point against Boni- 
face VIII., transforms the phrase de necessitate salutis into "an 
essential of salvation " (p. 28). 

To the reader who looks into the pages referred to above, 
Dr. Schaff's unfitness to write scientific history will be appar- 
ent. That painstaking methods of work and scrupulous accu- 
racy are not characteristic of him will be further evident from 
a scrutiny of his bibliographies, those, for example, which 
preface Chapters I. and III. If it were not too small a straw, 
one might more easily have gathered the same impression from 
the frequency with which Latin words are mishandled or mis- 
spelled (*.., p. 12 and p. 29). 

THE SCOURGE. A Novel of the New South. By Warrington 
Dawson. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co. $1.50. 

Mr. Warrington Dawson, in this novel, pictures the devital- 
izing effect of a tradition incapable of development, self- recu- 
peration, and adaptability to circumstance. This has exposed 



540 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

the scarred South to "the scourge of money-seekers, who knew 
how to bleed but not how to staunch.' 1 In vain the reader 
seeks a ray of light to illumine the gloom as Mr. Chesterton 
might say, Mr. Dawson draws with charcoal on a black-board. 
One might overlook the pedantry which places a little known 
Correggio in a remote Virginia town, had Mr. Dawson not 
impugned the culture of his readers by the blunder of attrib- 
uting knowledge of the painting to a woman who died in the 
painter's infancy. 

MARY MAGDALENE. By Maurice Maeterlinck. New York: 
Dodd, Mead & Co. $1.20. 

The prime difficulty in connection with this play is the ac- 
ceptation of the liberties taken with biblical history. Mary 
Magdalene is represented as the woman taken before our 
Lord for Him to decide whether she should be stoned for her 
sin; Lazarus is the brother-in-law of Simon the Leper, Martha 
being married to the latter; the Sermon on the Mount is de- 
livered in Simon the Leper's garden, in Bethania; and lastly 
a supreme difficulty the release or death of our Lord de- 
pends on the virtue or sin of Mary Magdalene, because of 
Christ being held under arrest by her Roman lover. If these 
misrepresentations be charitably forgotten, and we look at the 
drama itself, we find that it is one of great power. 

In the first act, laid in the garden of an old Roman resid- 
ing in Bethania, Mary Magdalene appears as an imperious, 
passionate woman; then the shouting of a multitude announces 
that Christ (" a sort of unwashed brigand," as Mary terms 
Him) is about to speak. From the adjoining garden of Simon 
come the words of the Sermon, and Mary suddenly determines 
to go down and look at the preacher. But at sight of her the 
populace cry out, and drive her away, and follow her with 
stones to kill her. A Voice is heard coming from the distance : 
" He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone 
at her!" 

The remaining history of the great penitent is hidden until 
the third scene of the third act, when Verus, her Roman lover, 
makes to her an offer which gives her the alternative of re- 
turning to her former life, or of allowing Christ to die a male- 
factor's death. This scene is worked out admirably ; the lan- 
guage being sublime in places. Verus looks upon Mary's love 






i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 541 

of Christ with the eyes and understanding of a pagan. She 
tries to make him understand that such love is unlike to any 
earthly love, but he fails to comprehend the difference. Then 
she turns to prayer, and the words Maeterlinck puts into her 
mouth are worth quoting : 

" My God ! My God ! ... I am nothing, I am defiled 
with every defilement: what matters this one which brings Thee 
life ? . . . But am I in question ? Is it not Thou alone 
Whom I defile to-day in defiling Thy salvation, Thou from 
whence the source of all purity and of every happiness and of 
every life will spring ? . . . I no longer know where to 
thrust back my soul ! . . . Nothing remains to me if I 
lose it; nothing remains to us if I save it ! . . ." Her in- 
decision ceases, her declaration comes decisively, when she 
cries to Verus: "I will be your slave, I will live at your feet, 
serve you on my knees for the rest of my days ; but give me 
His life without destroying in my soul and throughout the 
earth that which is the very life of our new life ! " There is 
no alternative; Verus is firm. Bat she also remains firm, and 
the curtain drops as Christ passes under the windows on His 
way to Pilate. 

The play is a splendid piece of writing, but we very much 
fear that the liberties incorporated into it will militate against 
its success. One special feature to be commended is the re- 
verent treatment of our Lord, Who never appears, but Whose 
voice is heard from afar. Neither is there a breath of the 
slightest indelicacy throughout, particular care being evidently 
taken over the choice of words in the scene between Mary 
and Verus. The ingratitude of those whom Christ benefited 
is well presented in the last act, where all desert Him. 

ST. AUGUSTINE AND AFRICAN CHURCH DIVISIONS. By the 
Rev. W. J. Sparrow Simpson, B.D. London and New 
York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.25. 

Though the author's aim was, no doubt, to present an ac- 
count of St. Augustine's efforts to restore peace and unity to 
the African Church, this little volume is practically a history 
of Donatism. Fully one-third is given over to the early his- 
tory and struggles of the Donatists, those puritanical schisma- 
tics who kept the Church in Roman Africa in constant turmoil 
during the entire period between two great persecutions at the 



542 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

hands of two different sets of enemies, Roman and Vandal. 
Because of the variety of interests which were involved, the 
fierce passions which were aroused, and the greatness of some 
of the combatants, the subject offers much that is alluring to 
the literary historian; but the picturesque, in fact at times the 
really important side of the controversy seems to have escaped 
Mr. Simpson. The style is colorless and the narrative never 
rises above a dry presentation of bare fact. Even from this 
latter point of view the work is far from being satisfactory, 
as to some facts and incidents due prominence is not given. 
Thus, while the author is careful to state how Constantine de- 
cided to refrain from force in his dealings with the Donatists, 
not sufficient stress is laid on the futile efforts which he had 
already made, and which no doubt showed him the hopeless- 
ness of such a course. 

Some few chapters are devoted to a summary of the Teach- 
ing of St. Augustine on the Church and on Toleration. The 
former is eminently inadequate and unsatisfactory. In the lat- 
ter the author points out how St. Augustine, under the stress 
of conflict, changed his mind regarding coercive measures in 
matters of faith. But even though Augustine, as a result of 
his experience in the Donatist quarrel, did change his opinions 
regarding the propriety of using compulsion to bring about 
conversion, it is hardly just to say of him that: "he sounded 
the first notes of that long strain of intolerance of which the 
world has by no means heard the last even yet." To the prin- 
ciples regarding Toleration, as laid down by Augustine and as 
expounded by Bossuet, the author in his last chapter traces 
" the increase of zeal for the conversion of the Huguenots. 1 ' 
This stepping-stone brings him to the present. He says: "It 
must be remembered that the method of coercion still forms 
part of the Roman Catholic principles." 

The work contains nothing new. Frequently references are 
made merely to the author without mention of his works, 
which is a very unsatisfactory proceeding in an historical 
volume. 

A LIFE FOR A LIFE. By Robert Herrick. New York : Mac- 
milian Company. $1.50. 

Strong food, indeed, and fitted only for strong minds is 
Robert Herrick's latest attack upon modern society. A Life 



191 1.] NEW BOOKS 543 

for a Life is deficient in plot, and, except for the hero, the 
characters are mere types, not individuals. And yet it is, in 
some respects, a great work, for it teaches well a great and 
needed lesson. Hugh Grant, a country lad who has gone to 
the city seeking opportunity, pauses upon the threshold of 
wealth, power, and the possession of the woman he loves, 
because he realizes the wickedness of the modern industrial 
system. Judged by the standards of " the men who do things," 
his life was a failure. Yet in those latter days, when the fiery 
grasp of cancer was burning into his vitals, he achieved what 
they had vainly sought peace, that peace which the world 
cannot give. He reached the only knowledge worth having in 
this world, that science of the saints which the Church has so 
lovingly cherished. "Not in joy, not in the heart's desires," 
he realized, "lies life!" "Life lies chiefly within. , . . 
And as he lay there, at last calm and serene, he saw that the 
devious steps of his feet had led but to one great purpose- 
to fit him to die." 

MEDITATIONS FOR EVERY DAY IN THE YEAR, ACCORDING TO 
THE DOCTRINE AND SPIRIT OF ST. ALPHONSUS MARY DE 
LIGUORI. By Rev. Louis Brouchain, C.SS.R. Translated 
and Edited by Rev. Ferreol Girardy, C.SS.R. Two vols. 
St. Louis: B. Herder. $3. 

If one desires a manual of meditations full in matter and 
stimulating in spirit, he is likely to be content with a recent 
translation of the late Father Brouchain's French work. 

It seems a. large one, but on examination it is found to be 
so only because it is a complete devotional summary of our 
Redeemer's message to men : " Be ye perfect as your heavenly 
Father is perfect" (Matt. v. 48). The whole life of man, as 
the Gospel would make it, is here reasoned out and fitted to 
the Church's round of praise and worship. The style is in 
most part sententious, and when it is more flowing, it is not 
verbose. Scripture references are abundant, and a doctrinal 
thread is plainly traced everywhere. This makes it a useful 
work for preparing instructions, whether public or private. 

The devotionalism while fervent, is yet what may be called 
safe and sane without any risk of being jejune: the series of 
excellent meditations for the first Fridays of the whole year 
bearing abundant witness to this. 



544 MBIT BOOKS [Jan., 

The author spent several years as a devoted Redemptorist 
missionary in the latter half of the last century, and then for 
the rest of his career was engaged in the higher offices of 
spiritual direction, such as novice master and confessor of 
religious communities. The fruit of a life thus spent, written 
leisurely and with patient revision, is found in these two vol- 
umes. Their popularity is shown by the constant succession 
of new editions in the original tongue. 

The publishers have given us plain and sightly print and 
durable binding. 

THE DEVIL'S PARABLES; AND OTHER ESSAYS. By John 
Hannon. London: R, and T. Washbourne, Ltd. 2s. 6d. 
net. 

This volume is made up of a dozen essays. They form a 
decidedly palatable mixture of the literary, the practical, and 
the philosophical, leavened by a good-sized pinch of sound 
theology, and spiced by a witty sarcasm that Dean Swift him- 
self might envy. The author begins with the much- discussed 
purpose- novels, to which he gives the effective name, "Devil's 
Parables," and which he condemns in a straight line from 
Rabelais to the Modernists. Alas for the circulating libraries 
and the women's New Thought Clubs, if Mr. Hannon had his 
way ! Elsewhere, but in the same line of thought, he thrusts 
mercilessly at the modern literature of vague, pseudo-religious 
meanerings, and quotes a comic opera bit to them : 

"You must lie upon the daisies, 
And discourse in novel phrases 

Of your complicated state of mind. 
The meaning doesn't matter, 
If it's only idle chatter 

Of a transcendental kind. 
And every one will say, 
As you walk your mystic way : 

' If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me, 
Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young 
man must be 1 '" 

The other essays in the volume are happily diversified. 
The subject of " gifts" is handed prettily and suggestively; a 






i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 545 

fairly original point of view is offered regarding "The Coming 
Race"; and there is a very graceful essay on "Child-Poetry." 

It must be admitted that Mr. Hannon is a bit inclined to 
be didactic. Lay sermons masquerade easily as essays. He 
redeems himself, however, by flashes of Celtic wit, and we 
only wish he would let it flash oftener. He does not seem to 
realize that he is frequently at his best when at his lightest. 

Of the art of quoting Mr. Hannon is past master. He does 
not use quotations as controversial bullets, nor does he drag 
them in for display. They enter gracefully, and amorg his 
own thoughts we greet them as old friends in a new assembly. 
And Mr. Hannon need never be afraid as at times he seems 
to be to give full, generous credit to the non-Catholics who 
have happily voiced God's truth. His thought is always in- 
tensely, energetically Catholic ; that he quotes frcm those out- 
side the Church cannot mar it in the least. Such testimony 
proves that they who have not its fullness must at times rec- 
ognize the light. 

THE CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA. Vol. VIII. Infam.-Lapp. 
Vol. IX. Lapr.-Mass. New York : Robert Appleton 
Company. 

The eighth volume of 'The Catholic Encyclopedia, racgirg 
alphabetically from " Infamy " to " Lapparent," and the ninth 
from " Laprade " to "Mass Liturgical," clearly illustrate the 
editors' aim " to give its readers full and authoritative informa- 
tion on the entire cycle of Catholic interests, action, and doc- 
trine." In these volumes, it seems, nearly every department that 
falls within the scope of the encyclopedia is fully ard variously 
represented, Scriptural and historical articles being especially 
conspicuous. Two well- written, general articles on Scripture 
are "Biblical Introduction," by Francis E. Gigot, and "Inspi- 
ration of the Bible," by Alfred Durand, SJ. These are fol- 
lowed by many special articles on various Scriptural subjects. 
Deserving of special mention are the articles on " Isaias," by 
Charles L. Souvay, C.M., and " Gospel of St. John," by Leo- 
pold Fonck, S.J., which, while conservative in tone, measure 
up to the best standards of modern scholarship. 

A feature of the eighth volume is the series of articles on 
" Ireland " and the " Irish." E. A, d'Alton deals with the 
history of the country, and Douglas Hyde with its literature, 
VOL xcn. 35 



546 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

while other able writers tell us the story of the Irish in the 
United States, Australia, Canada, Great Britain, South Africa, 
and South America. Lugi Tacchi Venturi contributes a lengthy 
and competent article on "Italy"; "Italian Literature" is ex- 
pertly handled by Edmund Gardner, and John de Ville gives 
an interesting account of the "Italians in the United States." 
" Japan " is fully treated in an article by Justin Balette, of 
Tokyo, with a section on "Christianity in Japan," by FranOts 
Ligneul, also of Tokyo. The history of " Jerusalem " receives 
exhaustive treatment at the hands of Barnabas Meistermann, 
O.S.F., Adrian Fortescue, and Louis Brehier. Joseph Blotzer, 
in a twelve-page article on the " Inquisition," explains the 
principles of that institution, and sets forth the historical facts 
connected with it, acknowledging abuses wherever they existed 
and condemning the many exaggerations prompted by anti- 
Catholic sentiment. 

By far the most important article of the ninth volume is 
that on " Martin Luther," by Dr. Henry G. Ganss, than whom 
no better authority could be obtained. The author, however, 
does not force his own views upon the reader; he collects his 
data from the works of impartial writers, mainly non-Catholics, 
and leaves the reader to his own conclusions. The article on 
" The Gospel of St. Luke," by Professor Cornelius Aherne, is 
one of the best Scriptural articles which has so far appeared 
in the Encyclopedia. Dr. Joseph MacRory treats the Gospel of 
St. Mark in his usual, lucid style, and gives, in the preceding 
article, an interesting and informing account of the Evangel- 
ist's life. 

The foregoing, chosen from articles on Scriptural and his- 
torical subjects, are only fair specimens of what may be found 
in every department of ecclesiastical science. 

Again the illustrations call for special comment, especially 
the colored plate reproductions of Raphael's " Julius II." and 
Ghirlandajo's "Adoration of the Shephards," and the full page 
entitled "The Head of Christ in Art," showing twenty differ- 
ent representations of the head of Christ. 

THE WHISTLER BOOK. By Sadakichi Hartmann. Boston: 
L. C. Page & Co. $2.50. 

A new work on Whistler gives us the important details of 
his Ufa, a brief sketch of the outstanding features of his char- 



i9".] NEW BOOKS 547 

acter, and a careful study of his work. Rightly and happily 
it is the work and not the man to which attention is chiefly 
directed. The writer interprets the artist for us; tells us what 
he aimed at; points out differences between him and his fellow- 
artists; brings out clearly the peculiarities and excellences of 
his style and thus enables us to be intelligent if not enthusi- 
astic students of his genius. While admiration is the predom- 
inant note of the present study, it is tempered by an occasional 
and thoughtful criticism. There is an excellent bibliography, 
including magazine articles concerning the artist, and a list of 
his paintings and sketches. The value of the book is greatly 
increased by its numerous fine illustrations of Whistler's work. 



v 



DICES FROM ERIN, by Denis A. McCarthy, is a new 
and enlarged edition of Mr. McCarthy's verses. It is 
good to find so much grace, simplicity, and sincerity as, for 
instance, in the Christmas lyrics of this popular songster. He 
will charm and cheer many hearts by his spirited yet unassum- 
ing verses. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. $i. 

OF. TERESA OF SPAIN is written by Helen Hester Col- 
^ vill, who is a non-Catholic; but her book is reverent and its 
author evidently admires phases of sanctity which she con- 
fesses herself utterly unable to understand. Hence she has 
often contented herself with picturing the extraordinary and 
beautiful incidents in the life of the saint without attempting 
to explain. Her work will present to many a non-Catholic, in 
an attractive way, the great Teresa; and perhaps the same non- 
Catholic will later turn to Teresa's own accounts of her inner 
life and of her toilsome, fascinating work of Foundations. New 
York: E. P. Button & Co. $2.50. 

pONSIDERING the amount of worthless stuff that is offered 
^ to-day for the so-called instruction and guidance of young 
boys and girls, one cannot but commend Mother and Daughterly 
Mrs. Burton Chance. This small book is evidently written with 
a sincere heart. It has a wholesome tone throughout, and 
makes an earnest appeal to young girls to build up their 
characters; look seriously upon life; cultivate spiritual ideals; 
and not waste their days in dress, in idleness, and in selfish- 
ness. In its measure it is good and praiseworthy. Yet when 



548 NEW BOOKS [Jan., 

looked at according to that measure which alone can satis- 
factorily build up human character to humanity's highest ideals, 
we must say that it falls short. The positive teachings of Jesus 
Christ, a supernatural life with Him through His Sacraments 
these are absolutely necessary if one is to understand and 
reach out for the Christian inheritance, which is essentially not 
of this world but of another. The young may understand these 
things as well as the old. In truth, as Mrs. Chance so wisely 
puts it, unless they understand them when young, they will 
never understand them at all. But there is much in Mrs. 
Chance's book well worthy of praise; and that praise we gladly 
extend. New York: The Century Company. $i. 

''PHIS treatise on the existence of God (Dieu : Son Exist- 
* ence et sa Nature, par 1'Abbe Broussolle. Paris : 191 1), is one 
of a series of volumes on religious instruction. The author 
insists in two places (pp. 15, 83) that he does not intend it for 
unbelievers. This is well. For we have not any hesitation in 
saying that to such persons it would do more harm than good. 
Not that 1'Abbe Broussolle is unorthodox. But he fails in a 
great essential for making theology attractive : he lacks method. 
The plan of the work is good, but the manner in which it is 
worked out is far from being so. A superabundance of foot- 
notes is continually drawing the attention away from the text. 
This would not be objectionable if the notes were of any use, 
but as two-thirds of them could be cut out and never missed, 
and the remaining third incorporated into the text with bene- 
ficial results, they prove only a source of distraction. On an 
average page we find about eighty words of text for the les- 
sons, and about three hundred and forty words in foot- notes! 
After each of the lessons that make up the treatise come 
Lectures, which are decidedly the best portions of the work. 
Although we have made these strictures we can recommend 
the book to those who desire to have at hand a treatise to 
which reference can be made easily. The two Indexes will be 
helpful for such use. 

On the title-page the publisher takes time by the forelock: 
he dates the book 1911. 

THE private life of Talleyrand (La Vie Ptivee de Talley- 
rand, par Bernard de Lacombe, i vol. Paris: Plon Nourrit 
et Cie ), is an intimate study of the illustrious diplomat. M. de 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 549 

Lacombe's first work on Talleyrand has been justly recognized 
by the Academy and, thanks to the present copious volume, 
certain points hitherto obscure are now elucidated in a definite 
manner. The author unhesitatingly treats, however, the sub- 
ject of Talleyrand's marriage as a fact, while many other ex- 
cellent French writers deny it. As regards the edifying death 
of the author of the Concordat, the eminent historian seems 
to accept the authorized opinion of the Duchess of Dino and 
Mgr. Dupanloup, whose papers he has largely utilized. He 
does not believe that Talleyrand, in his last moments, wished 
to play the diplomatist with God, and adduces a series of very 
convincing reasons for his belief. 

ONE of a series of six small volumes addressed to pious 
souls is La Sainte Vierge, par 1'Abbe P. Ferge. Paris: 
Pierre Tequi, each containing thirty meditations. Simple in 
style and practical in method, the work breathes the spirit of 
St. Francis of Sales, each meditation concluding usually with 
a direct quotation from the amiable director of souls in form 
of a spiritual bouquet. The beautiful thoughts of other great 
saints are happily dispersed throughout, so that the book can- 
not fail by its unction and solid doctrine to impart an increase 
of love and devotion towards Mary. 

T GUIS XVI., Etude Historique, par Marius Sepet. Paris: P. 
*-' Tequi, is an historic study of the character and govern- 
ment of the last king of ancient France, and is neither a 
panegyric nor an elegy. The reign of Louis XVI. is a striking 
epoch of history, and his life one of the most interesting and 
singular examples of human destiny. This study may be con- 
sidered independent in itself and sufficient in its sphere, but it 
is also connected with the preceding works of the author on 
the Revolution, which it completes and with which it forms a 
picture not inexact of the fall of ancient France. 

A N advanced literary notice that will be of interest to our 
" readers is the announcement from Houghton Mifflin Com- 
pany that they will publish in the early spring a memoir of 
the late John La Farge, with a study of his work. The book 
will be written by Mr. Cortissoz, a prominent art critic and 
friend of Mr. La Farge. We hope to give our readers an ex- 
tended notice of the work when it appears. 



foreign JperioMcals* 

Ike Tablet (12 Nov.): "The Ascent of Mount Wilson," in 
which Rev. A. L. Cortie, S.J., tells of his trip across 
the American Continent and of the meeting, at the Mount 
Wilson Observatory, of the International Union for Co- 
operation in Solar Research. "The New Mode in 

Music." The revolution in the musical world which has 
been brought about by the invention of the pianola. 
(19 Nov.): Queenstown gave Mr. John Redmond an 
enthusiastic welcome when he landed from his mission 
to America. He and Mr. T. P. O'Connor had been suc- 
cessful in collecting some $200,000 for the funds of the 

Nationalist Party. An interpretation, by the S. Con- 

sistorial Congregation, of the new rule dealing with the 
reading of newspapers, reviews, etc, in ecclesiastical 
summaries and houses of study. It is not intended to 
stop the reading of certain Catholic magazines arid 
those needed by students in their work. A corre- 
spondent writing to the London limes urges the necessity 
of " rest cures for the poor," particularly for those suf- 
fering from nervous breakdown. 

(26 Nov.): "Bilingual Schools in Ontario," by Francis 
W. Grey. How the racial difficulties existing between the 
Irish and French Catholics affect the Catholic school 
system, and may eventually jeopardize the faith of the 

children committed to the Church's care. In France 

the Law of Separation and its Associations Cultuelles are 
having a discouraging effect on the Protestant Reformed 
churches. A lack of financial support and the dwindling 
number of candidates for the ministry are the two chief 
undesirable results. 

(3 Dec.): According to the Lisbon correspondent of the 
London Times one of the next decrees issued by the 
new Government in Portugal will be that of separation of 
Church and State. Recent deaths in the Sacred Col- 
lege have reduced the number of Cardinals to fifty- one. 

Expository Times (Nov.): In "The Witness of the Four Gos- 
pels to the Doctrine of a Future State," the Rev. Alfred 
Plummer, D.D,, contends that the language settirg forth 
that doctrine is highly metaphorical. He urges the 
" abandonment of the frightful dogma of unending ago- 



i9i i.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 551 

ny." The Rev. R. Martin Pope, M.A., contributes 

an article entitled, "Studies in Pauline Vocabulary." 

And the Rev. W. W. Holdsworth writes on "The Life 
of Faith." 

(Dec.): Notes on Sir Oliver Lodge's new book, Reason 
and Belief. He is said to teach a theory of pre-exist- 
ence, though not transmigration or re- incarnation. 
Rev. Kirsopp Lake reviews Harnack's Problem of the 
Second Epistle to the Jhessalonians. Harnack concludes 
that St. Paul is the author, but that he wrote to differ- 
ent persons than in the First Epistle. 

The National Review (Dec.) : Episodes of the Month deals at 
length*, and somewhat bitterly, with serious charges 
against Mr. Redmond ar,d his Home Rule policy 
" Lord Kitchener and Imperial Defence," pictures a 
wretched state of inefficiency of the British Army and 

Navy. " Tariff Reform and the Cotton Trade " is 

treated by A. B. Law. Reminiscences of Paris in 

other days are given under the title " Paris qui Parss." 

A Maurice Low writes as usual of American affairs, 

treating of the recent elections and Mr. Roosevelt's defeat. 

Ihe Irish Ecclesiastical Record (Nov.): "Irish Honesty," by 
M. O'Byrne. The young people of Ireland are urged 
to preserve, as a national virtue, the heritage of honesty 
handed down by their forefathers. Some special temp- 
tations to dishonesty are set forth. " Fragment from 

'Leabhar Breac'" an anonymous tract on clerical duties. 
It is pointed out that a remarkable likeness exists be- 
tween this list and the list in the rule of St. Benedict, 

Chapter IV. of Instrumenta Honorum Operum. "Some 

Irish Ecclesiastics at the Seminary of St. Nicholas du 
Chardonnet, Paris, A. D. 1735-1791." The list of names, 
and the facts connected with them, have been taken from 
two registers preserved in the National Archives, Paris. 

The New Ireland Review (Nov.): Francis W, Bernard gives a 
thrilling account of " The Captivity of Cervantes," full of 
local color and the indomitable spirit of this truly great 

man. In a subtle and sympathetic analysis of "The 

Novels of James Lane Allen," Ethel Goddard Davidson 
pays tribute to his " garnered wisdom and reflection," 
deep insight into the human heart, and exquisite word- 
painting. In his women he excels: "unique in excel- 



552 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Jan., 

lence"; "unique in faultiness "; "they are, every one, 
women " ; and by " high ethical and spiritual consider- 
arions " Mr. Allen rises above the weaker writers' 
treatment of the primal facts of sex, birth, mating, and 
death. The critic protests, however, against a morbid 
tendency in Mr. Allen's later work, lest it divert his 
crystal waters into the stream of modern "turgid fic- 
tion." Two articles of national interest present, re- 
spectively, a basis for the further "Industrial Revival" 
of Ireland, and a plea for an Irish School cf Art, born 

of national inspiration. Enri M. S. O'Hanluain, in a 

concise exposition of the history of " Constitutional 
Agitation in Ireland," claims the "Language Movement" 
will secure educational freedom as the crowning se- 
quence to the religious and economic freedom already 

attained. Rev. E. Boyd Barrett examines the claims 

of "Thought-Reading and Telepathy" to be ranked as 
a science, from the viewpoint of Metaphysics, Physiology, 
and Experimental Psychology. While admitting its claim 
to likelihood, he demands more facts and formulated 
hypotheses capable of verification. 

Le Correspondent (15 Nov) : "Tolstoy," by Eugene Tavernier, 
gives a resume of the life and writings of Count Leo 

Tolstoy. "Buenos Ayres in 1910," by Henri Cordier, 

sums up the history of the one hundred years of 
Argentine as a republic, with a description of the capi- 
tal as a model twentieth-century city. "The Causes 

of General Discontent," by Henry Moysset, is the third 
article on the subject. "The Public Spirit in Ger- 
many," by the same writer, in which he discusses the 
prevailing conditions in the social, industrial, and polit- 
ical world in Germany of to-day. 

Annales de Philosophic Chretienne (Nov.): "From St. Bona- 
venture to Duns Scotus." R. Desbuts begins a series 
of three articles upon the methods employed by St. 
Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus 
respectively, in proving the existence of God.* H. 
Velassere, on " Moral and Sociology," concludes the 
latter science to be " a precious auxiliary " of the former, 
indicating at once the limitations of, and new obliga- 
tions involved in, the moral code. In "The Psy- 

> chology of W. James," L. Laberthonniere says he knows 



i9i i.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 553 

not how to reconcile with his own experience James' 
theories of knowledge and belief. 

Revue du Clerge Francais (15 Nov.): Writing of the "History 
of Religions," P. Dhorme, O.P., treats of " The Semites " 

(exclusive of the Hebrews and Arabians). S. Cl. 

Fillion, in "The Fight for the Existence of Christ," 
criticises the theories of M. Arthur Drews and other 
German Liberals, which state that not only Christian 
dogma, but even the historical basis of Christianity rests 
upon the fortuitous combination of Pagan and Jewish 

Myths. J. Riviere reviews the following recent works: 

On the Stability and Progress of Dogma t by Father Alex- 
ius M. Lepicier, O.S.M. ; 7 he Origin and Development 
of the Government and Law of the Church in the First 
Two Centuries t by A. Ha mack ; Syrian Monophysitism, 
by Joseph Lebon. M. Harnack's conclusions show a 
remarkable approximation to those of modern Catholic 
scholars. The results of M. Lebon's researches seem to 
indicate that the current ideas of Monophysitism exagger- 
ate its heretical character, which was really a mere 
question of words. 

(i Dec.): A. Sicard writes of the "Revolutionary Ideal 
of Charity." He shows the change during the French 
Revolution in the idea of care for the poor, from the 
old idea that they were to be relieved by the charity 
of others, to the idea that the State owed them sub- 
sistence as a debt of justice ; the consequence of the 
change was a spoliation of all the ancient patrimony of 

charity. A. Delplanque discusses a recent critical 

edition of the Correspondence of Bossuet, published by 
MM. Ch. Urbain and . Levesque in their collection of 

the Great Writers of France. E. Vacandard reviews 

the following recent works : The Church and the World 
in Idea and in History, a volume of " Bampton Lec- 
tures, 1 ' by Walter Hochouse; Magic and Witchcraft in 
France, by De Cauzona; The Church and Witchcraft, 
by E. Nourry ; General History of the Church, the 
Renaissance, and the Reformation, by Fernand Mourret. 

" The Statue of Jules Ferry " is an extract from an 

article by A. de Mun in the Gaulois. 

Revue Pratique d* Apologetique, (i Nov.): "The Supreme Con- 
version of Pascal," considers his relation to Jansenism 



554 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Jan., 

and the Papacy. The discovery of the Memoirs of P. 
Baerrier, has suggested a new question: Did Pascal re- 
cant two years before his death? H. Petitot, the writer 
of the present article, thinks it probable that he did not. 

" The Agreement of Faith and Reason on the Most 

Holy Trinity," by L. Labauch. The agreement is based 
upon the following principles: The authority upon which 
faith rests ; that this mystery is not contrary to the 
principle of reason, nor of truths rightly acquired ; that 
by analogous reasoning we can make the mystery clearer. 

Revue Benedictine (Oct.): D. J. Chapman criticises Professor 
Hugo Koch's views on St. Cyprian. The latter, follow- 
ing the Anglican tradition, is said to insist on the saint's 
opposition to St. Stephen, to the neglect of his main 
doctrine, the unity of the Church. His mistaken inde- 
pendence, thinks Dom Chapman, was not the expression 
of a carefully weighed theory, but the error of a prac- 
tical man on a point which he thought to be not of 

faith. D. U. Berliere describes the futile efforts made 

after the Council of Trent to unite into one congrega- 
tion the four Benedictine abbeys of the diocese of 
Liege. The purpose was to preserve them from the ex- 
cessive power of the abbots and to prevent relaxed dis- 
cipline. The bishops, however, opposed the idea of con- 
gregations and some monks feared the reformed rule. 

La Scuola Cattolica (Nov.): "Juvenile Delinquency." A. Au- 
gusto uses the term " army " to express the number of 
youthful delinquents in Italy at the present day. The 
remedies he proposes are: the inculcation of a greater 
religious sentiment in the individual, the family, and 
society ; the infliction of severe punishments on parents 
who wilfully neglect the education of their children ; the 

limitation of the liberty of the press; etc. -A. San 

Felice translates two Assy ro- Baby Ionian prayers, one to 
Marduk, the other to Gibil, the god of fire; these are 
properly liturgical prayers. 

La Civilta Cattolica (5 Nov.): "Religion and Public Morals." 
Having in mind the fact that the Italian authorities are 
aiming at the exclusion of every vestige of religion from 
the schools, the writer insists upon the necessity of re- 

ligious instruction as the basis of morality. "The 

Chronology of the New Testament," by L. Murillo, 



1 91 1.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 555- 

S J., of the Biblical Institute. The relations of the 
chronology of the Gospels with universal history, and 
the extent of our Lord's life, and especially of His pub- 
lic life, are the main topics of this paper. " The 

Giornale a'ltalia on the Jesuits." The assertion of this 
periodical, that " the Jesuits are more poweiful than 
ever: they are the rulers of the Catholic Church; they 
are the very Church itself," is indignantly denied as 
" unworthy of a religious order, whose glory is to obey and 

not to rule." "The Churches of the Ancient Jesuits 

in Germany," is a review of a work by J. Braun, S.J. 
(19 Nov.): "The Portugese Revolution." The new Re- 
publican government of Portugal is characterized as 

tyrannous. "Strikes and Right Reason." "When 

strikes are contrary to right reason, they should be 
denounced; but when conformable to it, they ought not 
to be condemned." This is the theme of the article. 

La Ciencia Tomista (Nov.-Dec.): Father Alberto Colunga, 
O.P., writes on "The Senses of Scripture and the Laws 
of Hermeneutics." Historical, allegorical, tropological, 
and anagogical senses are distinguished. Special atten- 
tion is given to the former, which is defined as "the 
meaning corresponding to the letter of the text." 

Espana y America (i Nov ): Gives the Latin and Spanish text 

of the Encyclical on Modernism. P. E. Negrete, 

writing on " Modernistic Literature," quotes certain pas- 
sages from a letter of the Pope to Caspar Decurtin, of 
the University of Fribourg, pointing out the dangerous 
influence of the modern novel. " China and the Russo- 
Japanese Treaty," by P. G, Castrillo. The author thinks 
that China is doomed to dismemberment. 
(15 Nov.): P. T. Belloso describes "The National Ex- 
position of Fine Arts " in Madrid. The work of Lopez 
Mezquita, Munoz Degrain, Bermejo, and others is men- 
tioned. P. H. Monjas writes on the present relations 

between " Spain and Chile." He attributes the good 

feeling now existing largely to the religious orders. 

" The Law of the ' Padlock/ " according to P. A. Blanco, 
was cleverly engineered through the Senate by Canalejas, 
and does not really express the wishes of the Spanish 
people. This law prohibits for two years the formation of 
religious orders in Spain without governmental permission. 



IRecent Events, 

The speeches of the Emperor are 

Germany. almost the only thing to which 

reference need be made. At a 

private visit made to the Benedictine Abbey of Beuron, his 
Imperial Majesty declared that from the beginning of his reign 
it had been a particular pleasure to support the Benedictines 
in their efforts. His reason for so doing was that wherever 
they had been at work they had not only striven to maintain 
and strengthen religion but had also distinguished themselves in 
the province of Church music, of art, and of science. He called 
upon them to support him in his efforts to maintain religion 
for the people. "This is all the more important,' 1 his Majesty 
declared, "since the twentieth century has let loose ideas, the 
struggle against which can only successfully be carried through 
with the help of religion and the support of heaven. This is 
my firm conviction, The crown that I wear can warrant 
earthly success only if it founds itself in the Word and Person 
of the Lord. . . . The governments of Christian Princes 
can only be carried on in the sense of the Lord's teaching. 
. . . They must help to strengthen the religious sense 
which is inborn in the Germanic race, and to increase the 
reverence for Altar and Throne, for these belong one to the 
other and may not be separated." 

On a subsequent occasion he made a declaration which, so 
at least outsiders will think, was even more surprising. Speak- 
ing to the naval cadets, he said that the nation that had the 
smallest consumption of alcohol would be pre-eminent in arms. 
He urged them to avoid its use and ensigns were recommended 
to become 'total abstainers and to become members of the 
Order of Good Templars. Religion must be the basis of life. 
It is spiritual forces that win the victory, and not the least 
of these is the strength of souls, which springs from belief in 
God. 

These speeches, especially the one delivered at Konigsburg, 
to which reference was made last month, and the Beuron 
speech called forth a good deal of criticism, and formed the 
subject of one of the earliest debates after the opening of the 
Reichstag. The result was a discomfiture of the Emperor's 
critics. His Majesty seems to have recovered the regard 



I9H-] RECENT EVENTS 557 

which the rash utterances of a few years imperilled, and has 
resumed that position of independence of which his premise 
to Prince Biilow had deprived him. 

But expenses are growing greater and fresh taxation is un- 
avoidable. The men in the army are to be increased, and a 
further addition is to be made to the navy. The annual dtf- 
icit requires the usual loan. The march of Europe towards 
bankruptcy goes on apace. 

The re-arranged Cabinet of M. 
France. Briand was assailed a day or two 

after its formation, and when the 

question 'of confidence came to the vote the numbers who 
supported it were so few in comparison with those who had 
approved the former Cabinet that a call was made for its res- 
ignation. This, however, was merely a political cry of hatred, 
for the supporters are numerous enough, so long as they hold 
together, to assure the carrying out cf M. Briand's programme. 
On October 30 the majorities in favor of M. Briand ranged 
from 146 to 294, while on the loth of November the majority 
fell to 87. Extremes met in opposition, the Extreme Right 
and the Extreme Left. Although it cannot be said that in 
this case in media stat virtus, yet it approximately applies. 
For M. Briand has adopted the policy of Vapaisement, which 
consists in the abandonment of the petty persecution which 
for so long a time was practised, and which consisted in the 
private denunciation of persons suspected of Clericalism or 
Royalism in the Civil Service and the Army and Navy. This 
abandonment has not pleased Socialists, nor a considerable 
number of the Socialist Radicals. On the other hand, M. 
Briand will accept no support from the opponents of the 
established secular schools with which the State, he affirms, is 
identified. And so a part of his programme and of that of 
the new Ministry is to enact measures necessary for protecting 
the ecole la'ique, and to develop instruction in the directions 
which the future of democracy demands. 

Electoral, administrative, and judicial reforms are promised. 
The long-talked-of income tax bill, slumbering in the Senate, 
is to be passed into law. The first and chief measures of the 
new government, however, are those which the recent strike 
has shown to be necessary. The rights of labor are declared 



558 RECENT EVENTS [Jan., 

to be inviolable, but violence is to be repressed. The right to 
strike in the case of private industries is to be limited by an 
enforced reference to arbitration, while in the public services, 
such as railways, strikes are to be made illegal under all cir- 
cumstances, although means for settling the claims of the em- 
ployees on those roads are to be provided. Sabotage of every 
kind is to be punished and the incitement to it. The carrying 
of these proposals into law will take a good deal of time and 
involve long discussion. 

That the Republicans do not greatly love one another is 
made evident by the proceedings of the Rochette Commission. 
M Rochette was a gentleman who had for many years been 
swindling the unwary members of the community. This had 
been well known, but it had been found impracticable to bring 
him to justice in the way in which French law required. M. 
Cieounceau's government found a means of putting an end to 
M, Rochette's career, and he is now in prison suffering for his 
misdeeds. The way in which M. Clemenceau acted did not 
please M. Jaures and his brother Socialists, and they were able 
to persuade the Chamber to appoint a Commission of Inquiry. 
This Commission has afforded to France and the world the 
spectacle of the examination of the highest officers of State 
almost as if they were criminals. While these proceedings 
indicate how much importance is attached to the observance 
of the law, they seem calculated to bring the men who have 
served their country into discredit and disregard. 

The recent death of Count Tolstoy 
Russia. reveals to the outside world how 

small is the hold which the Or- 
thodox Church has upon the people, and of how inefficient 
is the influence exerted by the State in support of religion, 
and this in a country in which Church and State are most 
closely united. Notwithstanding the excommunication which 
had been placed upon him, an excommunication from which he 
refused, a few hours before his death, to seek a release, and 
notwithstanding the consequent refusal of religious burial, on 
hearing the news of his death in the capital theatrical perform- 
ances and lectures were in some cases suspended, and audiences 
stood up in sign of mourning, a subscription for a national 
memorial was at once inaugurated, while in the provinces the 



i9i i.] RECENT EVENTS 559 

newspapers appeared with black borders. The churches were 
the only places in which no notice was taken of an event which 
moved to its depths the vast majority of the inhabitants of the 
Empire. Not only the Duma but the Upper House adjourned 
as a mark of respect; the Tsar himself gave expression of his 
sorrow at the death of the great writer, the Premier paid a 
public tribute to the author of immortal productions of genius, 
while an immense assembly, made up chiefly of peasants, was 
present at the funeral, at which religious rites were forbidden. 
Throughout Russia the day was celebrated as a day of mourn- 
ing, and this although both Church and State did all it officially 
could to set a bin upon one whom they denounced as "the 
rejected of God, the accursed mocker of Christ, and the shame- 
less and insensate apostate." All these events indicate that a 
great cleavage exists between the governors and the governed, 
even in autocratic Russia. 

Although self-government is not 
Austria-Hungary. enjoyed to a very large extent by 

the inhabitants of the Dual Mon- 
archy, yet they are not completely debarred from exercising 
control over their rulers. An account has to be given from 
time to time of the way in which the nation's affairs have been 
managed; and although no formal penalty is attached to mis- 
doing, yet there is a loss of honor and reputation which is 
felt keenly even by the most self-centred autocrats. The dele- 
gations of Austria and of Hungary have, after an interval of 
two years, been holding their sessions in order to receive from 
the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, of the Army and Navy, and 
of Finance, reports of their conduct. Doubtless a certain trepi- 
dation was felt, especially by Count Aehrenthal, who in the 
interval has been responsible for bringing the country to the 
verge of war and for imposing upon a people, already over- 
weighted with taxation, a large additional burden. The military 
preparations rendered necessary by the annexation of Bosnia 
and Herzegovina involved the expenditure of no less a sum 
than fifty millions of dollars, while for the assistance given to 
Austria during the crisis Germany, which never renders a ser- 
vice for nothing, has compelled her ally to enter upon the 
building of Dreadnoughts. The expenditure for those will be 
so great that the authorities have not ventured openly to lay 



$6o RECENT EVENTS [Jan., 

their demands before the representatives of the people, but have 
allowed a private firm of ship-builders to undertake the work 
of building two battle-ships, nominally at their own risk, but 
trusting to patriotic feeling to take over and pay for the ves- 
sels when built. 

It is even said that Jewish bankers have incurred responsi- 
bility for payment, and the head of the firm has been honored 
in consequence by a visit from the Heir to the Throne. For 
a Court that would not receive from this country an Ambassa- 
dor because his wife was a Jewess, it is something of a humilia- 
tion to be thus dependent upon so ill-treated a race. The two 
Dreadnoughts being built in this underhand way do not by 
any means satisfy the demands of the naval authorities. At 
least two more are to be laid down in the present year, with 
an undefined programme for the future. 

Strange to say, the reason alleged for this immense increase 
is the relative weakness of the Austrian Navy in comparison 
with that of Italy, although Italy is a member of the Triple 
Alliance, and therefore an ally of Austria ; and the Triple 
Alliance, it is constantly being asseverated, is as firm and strong 
as ever. But in military circles in Vienna, Italy is looked 
upon as the potential enemy, and in the columns of an influ- 
ential paper an earnest appeal has recently been made to be 
ready for war with Italy on the ground of the offensive ac- 
tivity of that country. 

A spokesman of the Slavs in the delegations and however 
great may be the contempt of the German Austrian for these 
races they cannot be altogether neglected, forming as they do 
60 per cent of the population expressed the dissatisfaction of 
many of them at the loss of reputation entailed by the wan- 
ton violation of an international treaty at the moment when 
the tendency of civilized nations is towards arbitration and the 
development of international law. Count Aehrenthal vindi- 
cated himself by an appeal to his conscience, alleging that 
there had been no violation of any point cf law. But in his 
opinion the chief thing was the end not the means. " We 
have success on our side" these were the facts that spoke for 
his policy. 

The morality of Count Aehrenthal's policy was called in 
question on another matter by one of the representatives of 
the Czechs. This was with reference to the famous Friedjung 



i9ii.] RECENT EVENTS 561 

forgeries, made in order to convict of forgery certain Servian 
subjects of the Dual monarchy. A Czech representative af- 
firmed that they had been made at the Austro- Hungarian 
Legation at Belgrade and implied that Count Aehrenthal could 
not very well have been, or at least still be, ignorant of the 
fact. The reply made by Count Aehrenthal was so weak that 
no one was surprised when it was rumored that he had ten- 
dered his resignation. It did not prove to be true, for the 
Count is not at all thin-skinned. It is not with secular pow- 
ers alone that he is in disfavor. Intercourse with the Nuncio 
has been discontinued during a considerable period, and at a 
meeting held at the Rathhaus, in Vienna, at which the Cardinal 
Archbishop of Vienna and other prelates were present, it was 
declared that he was one of those Ministers and diplomatists 
whose knees tremble and bodies quake before those Powers 
that dispose of cannon and quick firing guns, but who have no 
regard for a higher and far mightier Power. 

It may, perhaps, be thought that too much attention has 
been paid to the present Foreign Minister. The fact, however, 
is that he is the personification of the new policy and activity 
of Austria- Hungary, which has transformed the Dual Monarchy 
from being a Conservative Power upon which reliance had 
been placed, into a power, the policy of which now excites 
misgiving and distrust. The anxiety increases when it is as- 
serted that Count Aehrenthal is the mouthpiece and represen- 
tative of the Heir to the Throne, and that in the new reign, 
which cannot be very far off, the uncontrolled and dominating 
spirit of the government will be of like character to that of 
the Count. This, however, is matter rather of guesswork than 
of knowledge. 

The work of that form of Socialism which consists in the 
ownership by the State of what the individual has hitherto 
possessed is being realized in Austria, not by arguments and 
discussion, but by action, indirect, indeed, but effectual. Tax- 
ation for necessary expenditure absorbs as much as 50 per 
cent of the income of many. While in Vienna there has been 
carried out a very extensive municipalization of industries, for 
the City owns and manages not only the tramways, slaughter- 
houses, markets, and the furnishing of electric light and power, 
but also such businesses as the breweries, and funerals, and 
cemeteries. There is, too, a strong Christian Socialist move- 
VOL. xcn. 36 



562 RECENT EVENTS [Jan., 

ment ; its members, indeed, form the largest party in the Aus- 
trian Reichsrath. As has already been mentioned the authori- 
ties of the Church sanction by their presence meetings that 
are held under its auspices. 

That a way is being found in which the aspirations for 
social improvement are reconciled with the Catholic principles 
of justice is a fact worthy of note, and attention may be called 
to a work recently published called Une Capitate Chretienne 
Sociale : Vienna, par E. Boeglin, in which a full account of 
the work in Vienna is given. A somewhat pathetic event shows 
that in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, equal progress has 
not been made. Three hundred Hungarian workmen, evicted 
on account of the deplorable housing conditions that exist, and 
forced to spend the night in the open, sent a telegram to the 
British Premier asking him to furnish them with house and 
home : to act in their behalf in the same spirit in which he 
had acted when he sent a battle-ship to rescue the King of 
Portugal when he lost his house and home. 

The situation in Turkey has some- 
Turkey, what improved, although it cannot 

be considered perfectly satisfac- 
tory. The Cabinet, while nominally in control, is still in reality 
ruled by the Committee of Union and Progress, which acts 
behind the scenes, and therefore in an underhand and irre- 
sponsible manner totally at variance with all the principles of 
constitutional government. This Committee, however, is itself 
divided into Extreme and Moderate Parties, and within the 
last few weeks the influence of the Moderate Party has become 
greater. It was full time, for the proceedings of the Turks in 
Macedonia were of so barbarous a character, in the way in 
which they carried out the anti-brigandage law, that bands for 
self-defense were again being formed, and it seemed likely 
that a period of murderous outrages would be renewed, such 
as characterized for so long the Hamidian regime. This danger, 
however, seems to have been averted. The fact that martial 
law, under which the capital has been placed ever since April, 
1909, is to be brought to an end within a few months, and 
that Passports are to be abolished, seems to show that some- 
thing of the spirit and not the mere letter of a constitution 
has begun to animate its rulers. 



i9ii.] RECENT EVENTS 563 

A more moderate course of action towards Greece has been 
adopted. There was a time when it seemed that Turkey was 
bent upon making war, notwithstanding all the efforts made 
by the Greeks. A more conciliatory course was taken owing, 
it is believed, to the good offices of Austria. Cretan ardor 
for annexation to Greece cannot be restrained by the efforts 
of the four protecting Powers, combined with those of Greece 
itself and 'Turkey. The Assembly at its recent meeting took 
the oath of allegiance to King George. Turkey sent her pro- 
test to the Powers, who answered promptly, saying that it was 
not worth while to pay any attention to such foolish proceed- 
ings. Towards Persia Turkey has been for some time adopting 
a somewhat aggressive course, pushing forward her troops 
towards the East to take possession of what the Persians say 
is Persian territory. The advances of money which, after so 
much trouble, have been secured from Germany and Austria, 
after having been refused by France, may perhaps exercise a 
moderating effect upon Turkish counsels. But Great Britain 
and France cannot help a feeling of chagrin that their influ- 
ence at Constantinople has become so much less than it was 
at the establishment of the new regime. 



The recent Elections in Greece by 
Greece. which the policy of M. Venezelos 

has been endorsed gives reason to 

hope that a settlement is impending of the many questions 
by which Greece has for so long been agitated. At one time 
the prospect was very dark. The members of the Assembly 
which had been elected for a revision of the Constitution were 
divided as to the very objects for which they were to work. 
Some were in favor of making themselves into a Constituent 
Assembly, and of proceeding thereupon to a fundamental 
reconstruction of the Constitution. Others, looking upon this 
as a breach of the conditions under which they had been 
elected, refused to concur. 

To this fundamental difference as to their functions, per- 
sonal jealousy added another. With general concurrence M. 
Venezelos had been called from Crete to become the Premier, 
in order to supersede the politicians whose work had resulted 
in ruin and had led to revolution. In Crete he had given 



564 RECENT EVENTS [Jan., 

proofs of statesmanship, moderation, resource, firmness of 
purpose, and personal integrity. He had come to Greece un- 
trammeled by party ties or compromising engagements. But 
almost immediately after his appointment as Premier the old 
politicians showed themselves at their worst, and refused, by 
abstention, to give to him a vote of confidence. M. Venezelos 
at once tendered his resignation, which the King refused to 
accept, and within a day or two afterwards the Revisionist 
Assembly was dissolved. The old party leaders denounced M. 
Venezelos as a dictator, and even denied the right of the 
Crown to dissolve the Revisionary Assembly. The opposition 
leaders proceeded to call a political strike. The elections 
were to be boycotted and no participation was to be taken 
in them. This appeal was made by M. Theotoki, M. Rallis, 
and M. Mavromichalis. But a better understanding of their 
duty seems to have animated the electors, for this appeal 
seems to have fallen upon deaf ears, and the new election has 
ratified the policy of M. Venezelos, upon whom alone, along 
with the King, rests the hope that something like a settle- 
ment will be made. 

The programme of M. Venezelos is not confined to the 
revision of the Constitution, but embraces a reorganization of 
the methods of taxation, the present system pressing unduly 
on the poor. Indirect taxation is to be reduced and the income 
tax and succession duties adopted. An Agrarian question ex- 
ists in Thessaly and in a somewhat acute form, for some of 
the landlords are Turks, whose rights are secured by Treaty, 
and the occupying tenants are calling eagerly for expropria- 
tion. Previous governments have treated this question with 
criminal negligence. M. Venezelos has promised to do all in 
his power to better conditions, but, as he felt unable to compel 
the expropriation of the landlords, his efforts were so little ap- 
preciated that an attempt was made to derail the train which 
was carrying him back to Athens. 

The internal situation was aggravated by the attitude taken 
by Turkey. Indeed it seemed at one time that war was only 
a question of hours, Turkish troops were assembled on the 
frontier, and the press of Constantinople was heaping insults 
on Greece. The danger, however, seems to have been averted. 



RECENT EVENTS 565 

THE YEAR 1910 A RETROSPECT. 

FRANCE. 

The end of the year leaves M. Briand Premier as its be- 
ginning found him, but with a reconstituted Cabinet, and one 
in which he is, with the exception of M. Fichon, the only man 
of any great distinction. The characteristic feature of the year 
has been the outbreak of a strike which threatened to paralyze 
the commerce and industry of the nation and to leave it de- 
fenseless in case of foreign attack, of which almost every nation 
on the continent lives in constant dread. The first work of the 
new Cabinet is to pass measures to secure the country from 
the recurrence of such a danger, and when this has been done 
to proceed to the judicial, electoral, and administrative reforms 
which have been so long promised. The discontent of a more 
or less large number of workingmen with the conditions under 
which they labor is the great cause for anxiety as to the im- 
mediate future, and efforts are to be made, not merely to repress 
violent proceedings on their part, but also to remove all just 
cause for discontent. The bitterness of the workingmen, and 
their willingness to proceed to any extreme in order to secure 
their ends, are the chief things to dread for the new year, and 
manifest clearly how little the secular education which is now 
given by the State secures stability and peace. 

The foreign relations of France remain almost unchanged. 
The alliance with Russia and the entente with Great Britain are 
as firm as ever. With Germany there has been no friction, 
the agreement concerning Morocco having been carried out by 
both parties both in the letter and the spirit. A certain cool- 
ness, however, exists between Austria- Hungary and France, 
due to the fact that the loan which Hungary wished raised in 
France could not be negotiated, the French not being willing 
to find funds which might be used against them, owing to the 
closeness of the alliance which now exists between Germany 
and the Dual Monarchy. Something of the same kind of es- 
trangement has taken place between France and Turkey, and 
for the same reason, that France would not lend money to Tur- 
key except upon conditions which Turkey thought too deroga- 
tory to its dignity. 



566 RECENT EVENTS [Jan., 

GERMANY. 

The end of the year finds the German Reichstag approach- 
ing the conclusion of its labors, and the spring of the new 
year will witness the election of a new house. A few changes 
of Ministers have taken place, but the same Chancellor still 
remains at the head of affairs, although he has failed to pass 
into law his Bill for the reform of the Prussian Franchise. 
The controlling influence in the Reichstag is the co-operation 
of the Conservatives and the Centre. In the country the So- 
cial Democrats are gaining in strength whenever by-elections 
take place. The Emperor has come to the front again the 
idea which was entertained some two years ago, of confining 
his Majesty within strictly constitutional limits, having to all 
appearances been abandoned. The army as well as the navy 
is to be increased, and consequently the annual taxation and 
the permanent debt. There is no reason to think that any 
change has taken place in German plans to become a great 
sea-power. With Austria-Hungary the bonds have become 
closer, while over Turkey German influence has become 
greater, and is being extended, indeed,. even to Persia. It can- 
not be said with certainty what are the relations with Russia, 
whether they are more or less cordial. What took place at 
the recent interview at Potsdam between the Kaiser and the 
Tsar remains shrouded in obscurity. 

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY. 

The chief event in the Dual Monarchy calling for mention 
is the defeat of the Independence Party at the Hungarian 
elections and the advent to power of the supporters of the 
dual system, as established in 1867. This is altogether pleas- 
ing to the aged Emperor- King, and has removed one of his 
chief anxieties. His German subjects rejoice in the close 
union with the German Empire which now exists, but to the 
Slavs, who form the majority of the Empire, this same union 
is a matter of supreme apprehension and dread. As with all 
the European powers, the raising of money is the supreme 
need of the hour, and this is more difficult in Austria than 
elsewhere, for the burden of taxation is already overwhelm- 
ingly large. 



i9i i.] RECENT EVENTS 567 

The Friedjung forgeries have given an unsavory taste to 
politics and have had the effect, along with the other circum- 
stances attendant upon the annexation of the provinces, of 
causing a feeling of general distrust. 

RUSSIA. 

In Russia M. Stolypin remains in power, notwithstanding 
all the efforts which the Reactionaries have made to supplant 
him. The Duma seems to have become a permanent institu- 
tion, and to be able to exercise some degree of control. The 
agrarian laws passed under its auspices are said to have had a 
very salutary effect upon the well-being of peasant life. Its 
action towards Finland has not been equally beneficent and 
the end has not yet been seen of the conflict which has begun. 
Great Britain and Russia have been co-operating fairly well 
in Persia, although anxiety is felt by some as to what the 
ultimate outcome may be. The projected railway to unite the 
Russian system with the Indian system by a road through 
Persia would, if carried, be a new link in the chain which is 
bringing the whole world into ever closer union. 

ITALY. 

The Sonnino Ministry, which, it was hoped, would inau- 
gurate an era of honest purpose at least, if not of complete 
achievement, lasted no longer than five months, and gave way 
to a Cabinet, at the head of which was M. Luzzatti, a dis- 
tinguished financier. Very little has been done to alleviate the 
economic evils which Rome itself, but especially the South of 
Italy, have had to suffer for so long a time. In Naples, for ex- 
ample, large numbers of the people have no means of getting 
cheap and wholesome food. Vast numbers are crammed to 
suffocation in "rookeries," for which they have to pay exor- 
bitant rents. The neglect of their duty, which has character- 
ized the more recent governments of United Italy, has been 
recently exposed by a member of the Senate in a pamphlet 
called La Nostra Politica. Signer Villari describes the squalid 
misery and horror of the Neapolitan slums, and accuses the 
successive governments of perpetuating the evils which they 
had inherited from the former regime, and of being as cor- 
rupt themselves as were those whom it was their duty to pun- 



568 RECENT*EVENTS [Jan., 

ish. In fact inefficiency, if not corruption, seems to be the 
note of most if not all of the agencies worked by modern 
Italy. With the exception of Finance, failure is found every- 
where, both in State and Municipal authorities. This is especial- 
ly true of the rulers of Rome, who have aroused by their inepti- 
tude the criticism of the antiquarians and artists of all parts 
of the world ; while the utterances of the Syndic, M. Nathan, 
have made him the laughing-stock of both continents, even of 
those who are no friends of- the august authority whom he 
has attacked. The fact that he was elected for a second term, 
after he had broken every promise which he had made at his 
first election, because he was able to persuade the electors that 
his opponents were Clericals, although [they were not, shows 
the character of the people who now live in Rome, and makes 
it evident that they have as good a government as they de- 
serve. 

Italy still remains a member of the Triple Alliance and if 
the utterances of officials are to be credited she is a contented 
and devoted member. But there are indications that this is 
rather what it is wished should be believed than a reliable 
statement of fact. Large numbers of Italians have no love 
for Austria, and Austrians know this. The frontier of the 
two countries is being fortified with all practicable energy. 

This very brief survey ought to include a reference to the 
progress of the advance of constitutional government through- 
out the world, especially as the largest and the smallest of 
States have, in the course of the year, either adopted or taken 
important steps towards its adoption. On the one hand, the 
Prince of Monaco has conferred a Constitution upon his sub- 
jects, and they will no longer be under his absolute rule. Let 
us hope that they will not continue to tolerate the gambling 
den which has so long debased their land. 

To the millions of China a Constitution was promised in 
1906, but it was not to be carried into full effect for ten years. 
In the meantime steps were to be taken gradually for the re- 
alization of an Imperial Parliament. Provincial Assemblies and 
a National Assembly were to be called. These steps have 
been taken and the preparatory Assemblies are in working 
order. The surprising thing is that the desire manifested for 



i9i i.] RECENT EVENTS 569 

the full Parliament by the National Assembly was so strong, 
and the determination to have it so intense, that the Regent 
has been forced to promise that the Imperial Parliament shall 
be called within three years' time. It was said that the prom- 
ise of a Parliament when first made was mere "bluff," but the 
Chinese have shown that they would not suffer this indignity. 
The financial chaos is the main reason that necessitates this 
change. 

In Russia, Turkey, and Persia the experiments that are 
being made are being watched with mingled anxiety and hope. 
Peoples spoiled by long centuries of bad government cannot 
easily emerge, as they are not fitted for self-government. Their 
undue submission to autocracy has destroyed character. 

Passing to the other end of the scale, it is worth referring 
to the fact that the governing authority in the Commonwealth 
of Australia is a Labor Ministry supported by a majority in 
both the Senate and the Lower House, and secure of power 
for some five years. In Great Britain itself the mainspring of 
the agitation against the House of Lords is not the mere desire 
of a change in the political institutions of the country, the real 
object is to remove the obstacle which stands in the way (as 
is thought) of the economic amelioration of the working classes. 
A further extension of old-age pensions, insurance against dis- 
ability and sickness, are among the proposals to be carried 
out in the immediate future, while the good estate of the peo- 
ple at large, and not that of a favored few, is to be the domi- 
nant principle of government. 



With Our Readers 

THE attacks of the incredulous have given Christian Scientists 
much practice in answering difficult questions, but we think 
that even the shrewdest of their sophists will find it a task to tell 
just what happened at Chestnut Hill, Boston, on December 3. The 
Medical Examiner, who was called in after the event, answers the 
question bluntly enough, Mrs. Mary Baker Glover Eddy died. The 
immediate cause of her death was probably pneumonia. It is not 
enough to answer that the Medical Examiner is a creature who is 
under " the illusions of mortal mind." After all, the prophetess is 
dead, and her followers, who, by the way, do not believe in matter, 
have buried her material remains. The main question to be 
answered is : Why did she die ? If disease is only a fancy of the 
unenlightened, how did such an absurd notion ever enter into the 
mind of her who was the lamp of enlightenment for the world ? Did 
that sublime intelligence create the spectre of pneumonia and suc- 
cumb of fright at this wraith of its own fashioning ? If so, in what 
hope can lesser minds abide that they can withstand the delusions 
of sickness and of death ? 

But it has been shown over and over again that argument is of 
little avail against the type of mind that takes to Christian Science. 
The death of their founder will be a shock to all, a blow to some. 
But we need not expect that it will rid the country at once of this 
freak religion. Not until death has claimed its full toll of the pres- 
ent generation of believers will it have passed into the history of 
perished errors. The zeal of fanaticism, the habits of years of 
credulousness, the cohesive power of property, will keep it alive for 
yet awhile. Its existence will not have been in vain, if its scourges 
will impress in even small degree on the Protestant mind the 
dangers of individual religious speculation. Such vagaries would 
be impossible if the religious consciousness were submissive, as 
Christ meant it to be, to an authority which is Catholic, that is, 

universal in time, and place, and experience. 



''PHERE is ever a sweet reasonableness in the service of the saints 
1 and, paradoxical as it may seem, though over them hangs the 
ever present shadow of Calvary, they never lose that sense of 
gracious humor which lightens earth with something of the pleas- 
ant, peaceful joy of heaven. Take its reasonableness from the 
Christian revelation, and you fall into Manichaeism ; rob it of all 
laughter and human joy and you become a slave of Montanism or 
Puritanism. 

So wonderfully does it reach from end to end, ordering all 
things sweetly, that it bears its own .evidence of its divinity. As it 






i9i i.] WITH OUR READERS 571 

came from God Himself, as it was given from heights to which no 
man of himself could ever attain, so also in its interpretation, in its 
guidance for human kind, human history bears testimony to the 
truth that it needs an interpreter fortified by the divine gift of infalli- 
bility. 

* * * 

"THE life and death of Lyof N. Tolstoy furnish striking evidence 
i in support of this truth. Tolstoy was a man of evident sin- 
cerity ; of unique ability ; of tremendous power as a writer. His 
name and his books are known throughout the world, and are ad- 
mired for their extraordinary artistic power. But Tolstoy was never 
content to be simply a story writer, never content to limit himself to 
the field in which he was undeniably well-qualified. From the first 
he gives evidences of the preacher, the teacher. And this conviction 
grows upon him until it possesses him entirely and he practically 
lays claim to a new gospel, or rather to the only true interpretation 
of the gospel of Jesus Christ. For he says he believes in Christ 's 
teachings, and all that he lays down he claims to draw from those 
teachings. 

He left the literary field. He became obsessed with his " mes- 
sage." He did not hesitate to pronounce dogmatically upon every 
fundamental question of life and death ; upon questions philosophi- 
cal, social, and religious. When he stepped beyond his province, 
when he entered that region where he should have listened instead 
of dictated, he showed himself illogical, inconsistent, self-contradic- 
tory in a word, an absolute failure. As a doctrinaire he has re- 
ceived but little attention from the world. Were it not for the ap- 
pealing art of his stories, his teachings would not have received 
even the little consideration that they have won. This is due to the 
fact that in his teachings he was by no means consistent ; and in his 
life he was self-contradictory and almost ridiculous. At the end 
men pitied him ; they did not, because they could not, admire him. 
He had robbed the Gospel of salvation of all reasonableness ; had 
made it a mass of contradictions and inanities ; he had shown him- 
self absolutely devoid of the saving sense of humor that must savor 
even our sympathies if they are to be healthy and helpful. I,ike 
many would-be leaders in the " reform " of Christianity he took a 
few of the sayings of Christ, exaggerated them, perverted them to 
his own undoing, and made himself an unhappy slave of his own 
morbid, over-scrupulous consciousness. " Renunciation " was the 
keynote of his teaching, and in this, in itself a negative thing, 
Tolstoy sought to find life. His doctrine was negative ; his practice 
was negative. Is it any wonder, then, that he should have shown 
himself more a disciple of the Nirvana of Buddha, than of the per- 
sonal immortality to which we have been redeemed by Jesus Christ ? 



572 WITH OUR READERS [Jan., 

Is it any wonder that though he claimed to look up to the teachings 
of Christ, he should in his egoism and self-sufficiency deny practi- 
cally the whole of the teachings of Jesus Christ, make himself at 
one time an opponent of celibacy under any aspect ; at another its 
champion ; and then again the apologist for the Mormons ; that he 
should at times make salvation dependent upon this or that unim- 
portant detail, and give himself to the new ethical craze of the hour ? 
He protested as a leader against established religion and established 
government ; showed himself the most dangerous of anarchists ; 
preached freedom from obedience to any human authority ; dis- 
puted constantly and bitterly with his wife and family. Finally, 
not knowing what to accept, what not to renounce, he grew dis- 
gusted with life even at its best and its fairest, and hurled his dia- 
tribes against the world that he found unutterably bad, yet which 
Christ found worthy enough to love even unto death, and to save 

unto eternity ? 

* * * 

THE world is God's ; yet we must not 'be of the world. We must 
take up our cross and follow Him. He that will not bear the 
cross can never attain. We must discipline the body. It is a 
Brother Ass, yet it is also the temple of the Holy Spirit. We must 
use the things of the world, yet as if they were loaned to us. We 
must love creatures, yet above creatures we must love God. Who 
will enable us to preserve the delicate balance ? Who will guide us in 
the solution of this paradox ? To be a slave of the material is to be 
lost ; to look upon God's handiwork of nature as utterly bad is also 
to be lost. As a divine I4ght taught us the secret of life's philoso- 
phy, so also a divine Height is needed to illumine man's continuous 
voyage lest he suffer shipwreck upon the Scylla of the flesh or the 

Charybdis of Manichseism. 



A MOST timely article, which it would do welt for the editors of 
many of our secular and many also of our so*called " religious " 
journals to read if they are within the zone of persuasion appeared 
in the Yale Review of November, 1910. It is written by Luis Garcia 
Guijarro, and entitled " The Religious Question in Spain." The 
article is an excellent review of the events that have led up to the 
measures advocated by the Canalejas government. Speaking of 
anti-Clericalism the writer says : 

Since clericalism does not exist in the political order, since there is in 
the governmental power nothing which savors of clericalism, those who enter 
that power with the promise to fight it, eventually either do nothing, because 
there is nothing to do, or have to give themselves over to a policy of extreme- 
ly bitter war upon Catholicism, which policy is the only anti-Clericalism really 
existing in Spain, 



i9i i.] WITH OUR READERS 573 

The Socialist leader says of Canalejas' policy : " Je ne vois que 
du ' bluff'; beaucoup de bruit et trespeu de besogne." 

- 

IN the death of the late Michael Cudahy, of Chicago, the Catholic 
Church of the United States lost one of its most prominent and 
worthy laymen. The daily and weekly press gave extended ac- 
counts of his public life, of his rise in the mercantile world, and of 
how, against great odds, by his exceptional ability and insight, he 
achieved unusual business success. 

We wish to add here our word of praise of his strong, sterling, 
Catholic character. In his private life he was always the sincere, 
devoted Catholic, and by his example edified others and impressed 
the worth of Catholic faith and practice upon all who knew him. 
He was a whole-souled Catholic ; not one who believed that his ob- 
ligation ended simply by an observance of those laws that are obliga- 
tory upon all the children of the Church ; not one who interpreted 
in a small way the duty of supporting those great works that enable 
the Church to do her work ; but a man of Catholic character and 
Catholic sympathy, interested, zealous, self-sacrificing. The work of 
the Church was his work also, and in overflowing measure the tem- 
poral blessings that God had granted him were used to promote 
that work. He gave abundantly, not only of his means, but also of 
his personal service. As his sympathy and interest as a friend were 
deep, strong, and abiding, so did he always possess and manifest a 
living, active interest in the Church and her welfare. He was a 
trustee of the Catholic University an institution which he aided by 
large sums of money. In his adopted city he built a large Catholic 
college. He gave freely to the poor; his gifts to different Catholic 
institutions were many and generous. Because of his life his name 
will stand as that of a zealous, devoted Catholic ; because of his 
good works it will be placed among the great benefactors of the 
Church in the United States. 



IN a recent address delivered before the Federation of Catholic 
Societies at their recent Convention in New Orleans, his Excel- 
lency the Apostolic Delegate, speaking on the question of Capital 
and I^abor, said : 

The Church, speaking directly to the poor and laboring classes, says: 
" Remember that you were created for a better and happier end than for 
merely earthly possessions and transitory enjoyment." 

This happy end is connected with the zealous observance of your duties 
according to your state in life. Hence, perform fully and faithfully the 
works which have been freely and according to equity agreed upon ; do not 
injure the property or outrage the person of your master. Abstain from 
every act of violence and injustice. It is upon these conditions that jou will 



574 WITH OUR READERS [Jan., 

be able to bear patiently the burden of your transitory life and assure for 
yourselves the everlasting treasures of heaven. 

To the rich and the capitalist, she says : " Do not make of your gold and 
silver a mammon of iniquity. Pay just wages to your workmen; do no 
injury to their just savings by violence or fraud; do not expose them to cor- 
rupting seductions and scandals; do not impose upon them labor which is 
beyond their strength, or unsuitable for their age or sex. Succor the poor 
and the indigent. Be to them all an example of economy and honesty, and 
show yourself to them rather as a benevolent father than as a stern master. 
Remember that you all are alike brothers in the "same great human family, 
and, as such, you must love and respect one another. Remember, also, that 
on the day of judgment a special account will be demanded of you by God 
Himself, and you shall be judged according to the manner in which you 
shall have observed these commandments." 



INTERESTING figures in the latest issue of the Bulletin of the 
1 New York Department of I/abor are the following as to member- 
ship in Trade Unions. 

United States and Canada, . . 2,500,000 (estimated) 

Germany, 2,447,578 

Great Britain and Ireland, . . 2,347,461 
New York State, . . . 407,226 

For the first six months of 1910, the mean number ot trade-union 
members reported as unemployed in New York was 19.2 per cent. 

* * * 

PEVERAI, very significant events in the history of industrial re- 
O lations are reported this month. One is the signing of the agree- 
ment which terminated the cloak-makers' strike of last summer, in 
which some 70,000 employees were concerned. The agreement 
establishes a permanent board of arbitration and a committee of 
grievances, and which is noteworthy sets up a Joint Board of Sani- 
tary Control to establish standards which both manufacturers and 
Unions must maintain. 

A decision rendered by Mr. Justice Goff in the Supreme Court 
(on an issue raised in the cloak-makers' strike above mentioned) 
held that a strike for a closed shop, under the given circumstances, 
constituted an illegal conspiracy to deprive other men of the oppor- 
tunity to exercise their right to work. 

The new New York law on workmen's compensation has under- 
gone its first test and passed the ordeal triumphantly. In the Su- 
preme Court in Erie County, Mr. Justice Pound sustained the con- 
stitutionality of the statute against the plea that it deprived the de- 
fendants (a Railway Company) of liberty and property without due 
process oi law, denied equal protection of laws, and violated the 
right of trial by jury. 



.] BOOKS RECEIVED 575 

22 BLOMFIELD ROAD, LONDON, W., 4 November, 1910. 
To the Editor of The Catholic World: 

DEAR REV. SIR : My name being mentioned in Mr. O'Brien's letter, I 
take upon myself the burden of reply, for with just such a tissue of irrel- 
evancies my father has already dealt in writing to the Ball Publishing Com- 
pany. I can only repeat that as soon as my father was informed by Mr. 
O'Brien of the intended publication of Thompson's prose collected from old 
magazines, he wrote begging Mr. O'Brien to hold his hand. In the face of 
this request Mr. O'Brien proceeded with his publication, on the ground, he 
now says, that he had previously mentioned his intention to a lady of Buf- 
falo, my sister-in-law, whom he had casually met in Boston. I need hardly 
say that her reference, in a letter to me, to the half-formulated ambitions of 
a stranger, did not seem to put my father under the obligation of tracing 
this gentleman who, he naturally supposed, would write directly to him, seek- 
ing an official sanction. He had my father's address and even sent him a 
printed essay on Thompson, which my father, after his manner of welcom- 
ing American admirers of Thompson, no doubt too generously praised if it 
contained the appreciation of Thompson's prose you have quoted to condemn. 
No hint was given of the purpose to which the essay was to be put; nor 
could my father guess that it was intended to preface any such volume as the 
one Mr. O'Brien still quaintly calls his " authorized" edition. 

When Mr. O'Brien did at last communicate his plan to Thompson'sliter- 
ary executor, with what looks like a nicely calculated tardiness, the reply, 
although despatched immediately, was of no avail. Needless to say, my 
father's only concern, as Thompson's literary executor, is to make it clear 
that he gave no countenance to the issue of a volume that is not, in his 
opinion, fitly representative of Francis Thompson's prose, the more so as a 
volume of wider range, planned by Thompson himself, is about to be added 
to the authorized edition of his works. I am, dear Rev. Sir, 

Yours sincerely, EVERARD MEYNELL. 



BOOKS RECEIVED. 

BENZIGER BROTHERS, New York : 

Hints for Catechists on Instructing Converts. By Madame Cecilia. 75 cents net. Our 
Lord's Last Will and Testament. Thoughts on Foreign Missions. 55 cents net. Feasts 
for the Faithful. Translated from the Catechismo Maggiore by special permission of 
the Holy See. 30 cents net. From Geneva to Rome via Canterbury. By Viator. 45 
cents net. 
HENRY HOLT & Co., New York : 

The Fall of the Arctic Seas. By Deltus M. Edwards. $2.50 net. Jean Christophe, Dawn, 

Morning, Youth, Revolt. By Remain Holland. $1.50 net. 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, New York : 

Romantic California. By Ernest Peixotto. $2.50 net. The Intimate Life of Alexander 

Hamilton. By Allan McLane Hamilton. $3.50 net. 
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & Co., New York : 

State Socialism in New Zealand. By James Edward le Rossignol and William Downie 

Stewart. $1.50 net. 
SENTINEL PRESS, New York : 

Calendar of the Blessed Sacrament for 191 /. 25 cents. 
M. H. WILTZIUS COMPANY, New York and Milwaukee : 

Andros of Ephesus. A Tale of Early Christianity. By the Rev. J. E. Copus, SJ. $1.25. 
War on the White Plague. By Rev. John Tschall. Paper, 60 cents net ; cloth, $i net; 



576 BOOKS RECEIVED [Jan., 1911.] 

MACMILLAN COMPANY, New York : 

Home Life in Spain. By S. L. Bensusan. $1.75 net. Siena and Southern Tuscany. By 
Edward Hutton. $2 net. The Life of Robert Browning. By W. Hall Griffin. $3.50 
net. 
DODD, MEAD & Co., New York: 

A Diplomatics Wife in Many Lands. By Mrs. Hugh Fraser. Vols. I. and II. $6 net. 
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York: 

Shelbume Essays. $1.25 net. 
FUNK & WAGNALLS, New York : 

Lights and Shadows of Life on the Pacific Coast. By S. T. Woods. $1.20 net. 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE, Washington, D. C.: 

Chippewa Music. By Frances Densmore. Antiquities of Central and Southeastern Mis- 
souri. By Gerard Fawke. 
LITTLE, BROWN & Co., Boston: 

Sicily in Shadow and in Sun. The Earthquake and the American Relief Work. By 

Maud Howe. $3 net. Heroes of California. By George Wharton James. $2 net. 
L; C. PAGE & Co., Boston: 

Royal Palaces and Parks of France. By Frances Miltown. $3. Mary Ware in Texas. By 
Annie Fellows Johnston. $1.50. Famous Scouts. Including Trappers, Pioneers, and 
Soldiers of the Frontier. By Charles H. L. Johnston. $1.50. A Texas Blue Bonnet. 
By Emilia Elliott. $1.50. 
SMALL, MAYNARD & Co., Boston: 

Florida Trails. By Winthrop Packard. $3 net. The Conservation of Water. By John 
L. Mathews. $2 net. What Eight Million Women Want. By Rheta Childe Dorr. 
$2 net. 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY, Cambridge, Mass.: 

A Guide to Reading in Social Ethics and Allied Subjects. By Teachers in Harvard 
University. 

HOUGHTON MlFFLIN COMPANY, Boston : 

Education in the United States Since the Civil War. By Charles F. Thwing. $1.25 net. . 
^UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, Chicago: 

The Meaning of Social Science. By Albion W. Small. $1.62. 
SISTERS OF CHARITY, Mt. St. Joseph-on-the-phio : 

Little Blossoms of Love, Kindness, and Obedience. By Sister Mary Agnes McCann. Vol. I. 
CATHOLIC EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION, Columbus, Ohio : 

Report of the Proceedings and Addresses of the Seventh Annual Meeting, Detroit, Mich. 
B. HERDER, St. Louis, Mo. : 

; The Young Christian Teacher Encouraged. By Brother Constantius. Second edition. 
$1.25. Old Christianity vs. New Paganism. By Rev. Bernard J. Otten, S. J. 25 cents. 
A Life's Ambition. By M: S. Kelly. 35 cents net. The Making of Jim ONeill. A 
Story of Seminary Life. By M. J. F. 35 cents net. The Lectionary : Its Sources and 
History. By Jules Bandot; $i net. 
THE TORCH PRESS, Cedar Rapids, la. : 

Forest and Town. Poems. By Alexander Nicolas de Menil. $1.25 net. 
AVE MARIA PRESS, Notre Dame, Ind. : 

Joseph Haydn : The Story of His Life. By the Rev. J. M. Toohey, C.S.C. $1.25. 
CHAPMAN & HALL, London : 

The Mount of Vision. A Book of English Mystic Verse. Selected by Adeline Ashmore. 
Introduction by Alice Meynell. The Small People. A Little Book of Verse About 
Children for their Elders. Selected by Thomas Burke. 
BURNS & OATES, London : 

The Order of the Visitation. By Abbot Gasquet. 60 cents net. 
HERBERT & DANIEL, London: 

Martha Vine. Anonymous. 6s. 
WILLIAMS & NORGATE, London : 

The Constitution and Law of the Church in the First Two Centuries. By Adolf Harnack. 

5s. net. 
GABRIEL BEAUCHESNE ET CIE., Paris: 

Jlsus Christ, Sa Vie, Son Temps. Par le Pere Hippolyte Leroy, S.J. 3 frs. L'Eglise 
et I' Enfant. Par Jules Grivets, S.J 0.50. La Doctrine Morale de I' Evolution. Par 
Emile Bumeteau. i/r. 25. Dieu Existe. Par Henry de Pully. 0.50. 
P. LETHIELLEUX ET CIE., Paris: 

Exposition de la Morale Catholique. Par E. Janvier. 4 frs. 
AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY, Melbourne, Australia: 

The Superior Excellence of the Catholic Religion. By Rev. M. H. Mclnerney, O.P. One 
penny. Roses and Rosaries ; and Other Stories. By Miriam Agatha. One penny. 




THE 

CATHOLIC WORLD. 

VOL. XCII. FEBRUARY, 1911. No.. 551. 

PRIVATE PROPERTY AS IT IS. 

BY WILLIAM KERBY, PH.D. 

[HE indiscriminate defence that is made of private 
property against those who so earnestly attack 
it leads many to undertake to protest too much 
against any invasion whatsoever of property as 
we know it. We even find that some who de- 
fend the theoretical right of private property persistently ig- 
nore the fact that the condition of millions practically refutes 
the argument proposed. There is something wrong when we 
argue that every man has a natural right to private property 
and at the same time, millions are actually hindered frcm hav- 
ing any except for daily consumption. It is well to distinguish 
between property in itself, its symbols and the mechanism 
which is developed in its processes. We should, in arguicg 
for private property, take account of the social supplements 
to individual property supplied by the state and to that extent 
weakening the claims for individual ownership. Thus, for in- 
stance, if we argue that a man has a right to property in order 
to educate his children, this does not carry us very far since 
society supplies the schools practically gratis through which 
children may be educated, even in their religion. Again it is 
well to take account of the unearned increment in property, 
for surely a man's title to a piece of land in itself must be 
stronger than his right to the unearned increment in its value. 
We must take account also of the furious passion for property 
which probably leads many of us to fail to discriminate when 
we speak about it. Property has gone so far away from its 

Copyright. 1911. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE 

IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK. 
VOL. xcii. 37 



578 PRIVATE PROPERTY As IT Is [Feb., 

original function, it has taken on so many secondary and 
lamentable features that it is only with the greatest difficulty 
that we can speak accurately of it. While nature and nature's 
God placed certain inherent limitations on ownership, the in- 
genuity of men has succeeded in setting them aside. 

Wheat, corn, meat, fruits are bulky. They are stored with 
difficulty, and each of them will in time decay. These fea- 
tures originally constituted a natural limitation for ownership, 
even when the genius of man devised methods of drying and 
preserving, thus conquering decay and conferring a species of 
immortality on the objects of human consumption. They may 
be easily stolen and consumed by others. Thus, a social dan- 
ger was added to the constitution of things tending to check 
the passion for ownership. The genius of man overcame these 
obstacles by inventing imperishable symbols of either natural 
value such as metals or of legal value such as paper money. 
At any rate, there is neither decay nor forbidding bulk in 
money, in small quantities at least. When, then, a money 
symbol appears, many of the obstacles to ownership are set 
aside. In this manner men procure a general purchasing power 
for things rather than things themselves. 

Yet on the whole, money is bulky and heavy. It is im- 
personal, inviting theft. The genius of man advances and de- 
vises simpler symbols for money itself. These are all forms 
of credit known generally as stocks, bonds, mortgages, certifi- 
cates, etc., etc. They have practically no bulk whatever. 
Taey are usually registered in the name of the owner, and 
thereby legally sanctioned. One who cannot be identified as 
their owner, cannot ordinarily convert them into money. In 
this way practically all of the obstacles to the possession of 
things have been removed and the way has been opened for 
that passion to develop which has caused to be written the 
bloodiest pages in the history of the human race. Some who 
defend private property seem to merge these three stages of 
private property into an indiscriminate defence. In other 
words, the institutions in and through which property is or- 
ganized seem to acquire in the minds of many, a degree of 
sacredness and permanent natural sanction equal to that of 
property in its natural form. Those, on the contrary, who 
attack private property insist with all of the cleverness of 
instinct and the zeal of conviction on making this distinction 



i9i i.] PRIVATE PROPERTY As IT is 579 

and on carrying it through their entire propaganda. While we 
conservatives seem to argue in defence of private property as 
a means to an end, we usually refuse to go into the facts 
which would determine whether or not it is a satisfactory 
means to that end. It practically becomes an end in itself in 
our way of presenting it. The radicals, on the contrary, do 
take it as a means to an end and declare it unsatisfactory. 
They then propose their revolution together with what may be 
called equivalent rights by which the functions of property 
right are to be provided for. 

All of these features and phases of private property bear 
directly on the controversy to which private property in these 
days gives occasion. But the most acute phase of that con- 
troversy turns on the relative importance of property and of 
human life in our civilization. Heretofore the idea of property 
had been constantly widened until every feature of its rights 
was elaborately protected, while the definition of human life 
has been held to such narrow proportions that life practically 
in its essential features has been unprotected in our institu- 
tions. Murders have been unpunished in the history of indus- 
try, homes have been robbed of their supporters, workers have 
been robbed of their health, and all of this with impunity, 
because of the narrow definition of life as the law aims to 
protect it. The controversies about property may be reduced 
to an endeavor to widen the definition of human life in such 
a manner as to meet the dangers to it peculiar to modern in- 
dustry and social conditions. 

In one section of our population there is found too little 
of private property and in another there is found too much. 
Those who possess property in what seems to be ideal measure 
are compelled to live in such fear of losing it and to take 
such precautions in defence of it, because of the ordinary risks 
of business, that much of the joy of it is lost. Relatively few 
in these days, are capable of managing their property intelli- 
gently, particularly if we have in mind industrial securities* 
Those who admit that they have sufficient property probably 
have too much. Many of those who claim that they have too 
little of property have sufficient. Some one has well said that 
being rich consists in the capacity to satisfy the imagination. 
If this is true, the miser is poor and the tramp is rich. If on 
the other hand, the poor are those who are striving to become 



58o PRIVATE PROPERTY As IT is [Feb., 

rich, poverty is much more widespread than statistics show. 
We are far away from the good definition of Ruskin who 
claimed that property consists in the good things that a man 
has honestly got and can skillfully use. The complaints that 
come regularly from centres of culture that the age is com- 
mercialized, that it is money-mad, have undoubtedly much 
warrant. A detailed study of the methods resorted to in sup- 
port of religion and charity, which ought to be the dearest 
interests in any civilization, would furnish a sad enough com- 
mentary on the domination of property in the thoughts of men. 
One would think that Dickens was writing in our own day 
when he says sarcastically in Our Mutual Friend ': "As is 
well known to the wise in their generation, traffic in Shares 
is the one thing to have to do with in this world. Have no 
antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, 
no manners; have Shares. Have Shares enough to be on 
Boards of Direction in capital letters, oscillate on mysterious 
business between London and Paris, and be great. Where does 
he come from ? Shares. Where is he going to ? Shares. 
What are his tastes ? Shares. Has he any principles ? Shares. 
What squeezes him into Parliament ? Shares. Perhaps he 
never of himself achieved success in anything, never originated 
anything, never produced anything ! Sufficient answer to all : 
Shares. O mighty Shares ! To set those blaring images so 
high, and to cause us smaller vermin, as under the influence 
of henbane or opium, to cry out night and day: 'Relieve us 
of our money, scatter it for us, buy us and sell us, ruin us, 
only we beseech ye take rank among the powers of the earth, 
and fatten on us ! ' " 

Much in line with this is his remark in Nicholas Nickleby 
" Gold conjures up a mist about a man more destructive of all 
his old sense and lulling to his feelings than the fumes of 
alcohol." 

In these latter days a philosophy is being developed in the 
interests of those who have too little property. Another is 
maintained in the interests of those who have too much. Still 
another is arising in the interests of those who have sufficient 
but are compelled to obtain it at too great a sacrifice of time 
and effort or who desire to share more widely in the doubtful 
comforts and luxuries of civilization. Reformers pretend to an- 
swer the needs of all of the social classes concerned. In order 



i.] PRIVATE PROPERTY As IT Is 581 

to understand the controversy, however, it is necessary to make 
some study of the present constitution of property as it is 
viewed in current discussions. 

I. 

For the purpose of this description our population may be 
divided into three classes: dependents, spenders, and savers. 
The statistical measurement of the classes is unnecessary as it 
is point of view rather than quantities that is kept in mind 
and this exposition has to do with only the last named class. 

There are in the United States some millions who are sup. 
ported by charity, receiving it either intermittently or continu- 
ously. For one reason or another all of these dependents are 
economic failures. That is, they are not self-sufficient. In a 
social system where the individual is supposed to take care of 
himself and his family, they who cannot do so are failures. 
It makes no difference whether these dependents are helpless 
through their own fault or through the fault of social and in- 
dustrial institutions. Those who fail through their own fault 
refute certain arguments in favor of private property. Those 
who fail through the fault of institutions or conditions over 
which they have no control, testify to the failure of our insti- 
tutions to secure just distribution of property. The case is 
somasvhat similar with the criminal class. The criminal poor 
cast reflections on our property system just as well as the 
criminal rich, because the ethical restraints in which and through 
which a system of private property is made safe, have failed 
to reach both classes. There is no need to push this thought 
too far. It is suggested largely as a point of view. 

We may take up as a second class those who are indepen- 
dent of charity but who consume all that they earn. We may 
include on the one hand the family in which the father and 
mother and maybe the children work, the combined income of 
all being consumed in the support of the family ; and, on the 
other hand, the spendthrifts, whatever their income, provided 
they spend all that they obtain. In the first case, saving is 
impossible and in the second it is deliberately not desired. 
Between these two extremes we find large numbers, of course, 
who earn comfortable incomes and spend them, being enabled 
to come into touch with many culture interests and to achieve 
high and edifying development of character. They consume 



582 PRIVATE PROPERTY As IT Is [Feb., 

their total income, however, and belong to the class in ques- 
tion. We may include also those who are constrained in one 
way or another to support a style of life a little bit beyond 
their income and are exposed to the necessity of rigid and 
even painful economy in private in order to keep up appear- 
ances. Here too, all income is spent. 

We may combine into the third class all savers; that is all 
who accumulate, whether much or little. Savings may be in- 
vested in buying a home or in bank deposits or in any form of 
insurance or in loans or securities of any kind. Whenever any 
portion of income is retired and not consumed we have techni- 
cally, saving. In this class alone we find the verification of the 
average argument in defence of private property. Here we 
find foresight, self-denial, industry, judgment. Through this 
class capital is accumulated and essential provision made for 
industrial progress. The range of motives which stimulate this 
class is, of course, varied. It may be a fear of the future or a 
deep sense of responsibility; it may be a desire for power or 
for a higher standard of life to be acquired through present 
self-denial. The motive is of no particular account at present. 

While we find the philosophy of private property thorough- 
ly vindicated in this class of savers, it is unfortunately too 
well vindicated, for it is against some in this class that com- 
plaints are so frequently made. It is some among them who 
are declared to be money-mad, worldly, hard-hearted. In this 
class are found those who are accused of ignoring in their 
seeking of property, the legitimate and needful restraints of 
conscience, of civil law, of self-respect, of social duty and of 
elementary humanity. Money seekers and money savers are 
accused of destroying the very institutions through which their 
property derives its safety. Newspapers recently quoted a 
New York Supreme Court Justice who declared in a legal 
opinion : " The age of patriotism has yielded to the age of com- 
mercialism. Uppermost in the human mind to-day is not the 
stars and stripes but the dollar mark." " At least forty per 
cent of all the money appropriated for public use is lost in 
graft. All things could be possible if this frightful leak could 
be stopped." The term " predatory wealth " has become a by- 
word. The comments that are heard in our everyday life, in 
homes and on street cars, at social and at business gatherings 
among conservative classes, reveal a widespread conviction, far 



i9i i.] PRIVATE PROPERTY As IT Is 583 

away from radical circles, that the immoral and disorderly 
passion for property has taken on simply appalling propor- 
tions. 

Thus, the dependents suggest one commentary on our 
private property system, the spenders suggest another and the 
savers, still a third. Setting aside the first two we may now 
endeavor to obtain an insight into the organization of property 
by studying it from the standpoint of the individual saver. 

II. 

Some thrifty soul saves $500. What is to be done with it ? 
It is not worth much for purposes of investment in land, in the 
hope of an unearned increment. It is not worth much to start 
an independent business unless the saver borrow some more. 
He may, it is true, buy a little fruit stand or venture to open 
a tiny grocery store, but he probably Jacks the knowledge and 
experience necessary to make either venture a success. Any 
particular thing to which our saver could turn his hand and 
work efficiently with $500 would be exceptional rather than 
typical. The course that presents itself to him as most feasible 
is to deposit it in a bank or to buy some kind of industrial 
security, known as stocks or bonds. He does this and tens of 
thousands of others do it until the tiny streams of saving be- 
come great rivers through which power is furnished for the 
whole industrial world. 

Individual industries or, as they may be called, economic 
units, are massive in present day life. The capital required 
for an average industry is much greater than that commanded 
or owned by one individual, or at least too great for one in- 
dividual to submit to a single industrial risk. It is found best 
from every standpoint to draw in capital from many sides; in 
other words, to borrow from the public. The capital, there- 
fore, that is usually required to conduct a typical modern in- 
dustry is divided into a definite number of parcels or shares 
which are sold indiscriminately to individuals. The individuals 
who purchase these are among the savers that we have in 
mind. 

Corporations replace the individual employer, hundreds of 
thousands and even millions in capital are invested in single 
enterprises, hundreds and even thousands of workmen replace 
the ten or the twenty, and the continent replaces the town as 



584 PRIVATE PROPERTY As IT Is [Feb., 

a field of operation, and the market is the world itself. Mas- 
sive production, massive quantities of capital, masses of labor- 
ers, demand for the highest type of genius in the management 
of industry, are all distinctive features of the modern indus- 
trial world. Small remarks, in his General Sociology : " A host 
of artificial persons are actors on the scene and they are re- 
latively as much superior to real persons as the mythological 
gods were in turning the tide of battle now one way and now 
another before the gates of Troy. Corporations that replace 
persons, giants as mighty in the economic field as the ancient 
mythological gods were in the field of war, have transformed 
the situation in the working world. 1 ' 

These industrial giants attract the savings of men and women 
generally and thus the opportunity for investment is offered 
even to the modest saver of $500. Let us now follow the 
average investor to discover the distinctive features of private 
property as it is. 

First: The individual who saves and invests his savings in 
industrial securities which are taken as typical, becomes a part 
owner in one or in many of these enterprises without being 
complete owner of any. Shares or bonds held in five different 
industrial plants make the investor part owner of each of them 
but complete owner of none. If a railroad has forty thousand 
stockholders, it has forty thousand partial owners. If twenty 
thousand persons hold its bonds, it has twenty thousand cred- 
itors. Thus, a steel plant may have thirty thousand owners, 
a department store may have two thousand, a bakery may have 
one hundred, and a bridge may have fifty. In all of these 
cases, we have stock companies or corporations, total capital 
divided into parcels and ownership scattered in the manner 
indicated. Individuals, therefore, are part owners in one or in 
many industries as the case may be but complete owners of 
none. 

Second : As a result of the condition alluded to, the owner- 
ship of property is usually separated from its management. 
The actual owners do not manage, and the actual managers 
do not own, except in part and very often in small part. It 
is, of course, impractical for the forty thousand, twenty thou- 
sand, or five hundred joint owners of any industry to attempt 
to manage it. They must manage through representatives. 
These will constitute a Board of Directors whose members will 






i9i i.] PRIVATE PROPERTY As IT Is 585 

be selected from among the stockholders. The Board of Di- 
rectors will elect executive officers into whose hands they give 
over the entire management and to whom they entrust the 
carrying out of the policies determined. Thus we find owner- 
ship separated from management as a second feature of mod- 
ern industrial property. 

Third : In point of fact, the owners of the business, that is 
the stockholders, tend to become indifferent to all problems 
of management, and exercise practically no control. The di- 
rectors tend to obtain complete control and appear to be an- 
swerable in reference only to the dividends which the owners 
expect. If the dividends be high, the directors may do as they 
please. This situation confers grave and welcome power on 
the directors and confers equally grave and welcome exemption 
from the responsibilities of ownership on the actual owners of 
the stock. These owners know nothing about the business. 
Annual meetings of stockholders fail usually to educate them. 
Their one test is dividends and they ask no other. One is re- 
minded of Meredith's words in The Egoist: "In the Book of 
Egoism it is written : Possession without obligation to the object 
possessed approaches felicity." 

Fourth : In the conduct of a corporation such as those 
held in mind, a tendency usually appears to accumulate fifty- 
one per cent of the stock into the hands of one person or one 
clique or group which will thereby secure practically absolute 
control. Corporations are usually governed by the majority 
vote of their stock. This means that 51 per cent of the stock 
in any business exercises 100 per cent of the control or direc- 
tion of actual policies followed, and it means furthermore that 
49 per cent will, in an issue, have no more to say about the 
spirit in which their property shall be managed than they have 
with the direction of the Emperor of China. In other words, 
such is the actual drift of business that 49 per cent of the 
owners in any business lose all of the wider rights and privi- 
leges which are supposed to result from ownership. The major- 
ity stock in one of the most famous and infamous American 
Trusts was owned by eight individuals and estates. 

The refinements of business mechanism have gone so far 
that it is not even necessary to own 51 per cent of the stock 
in order to exercise the control which it confers. When the 
manipulation stage is reached in the history of any stock, if 



586 PRIVATE PROPERTY As IT is [Feb., 

one is far-sighted and secretive, one may be able to gather 
in 51 per cent of a stock by depositing only 10 per cent of 
its value in cash. The stock itself may then be deposited as 
a collateral for a loan equal to the other 90 per cent. The 
purchaser thereby obtains 51 per cent voting power at only a 
nominal cost. He is then in control of the corporation and 
its policies. The consequences of these two features of modern 
business are rather far-reaching in the history of private prop- 
erty. The majority stock may refuse all information as to 
earnings, assets, liabilities, and surplus. Even where the law 
compels annual meetings these cannot break down the power 
of the 51 per cent. The inside ring in a board of directors 
may dictate arbitrarily what the stock will earn, just what will 
be the policies to be followed. The minority owners must ac- 
cept its dictum or sell out. 

It may thus happen that the owners of the 49 per cent of 
stock may be law-abiding, ideal citizens. They may have 
Christian convictions and may aim to shape their views upon 
them. They may be moved by the noblest human instincts in 
their attitude toward their fellow- men, but they cannot govern 
a single dollar in their investments in such a way as to give 
expression to these convictions unless the majority stock is 
willing. A church or a university, a charity or a school of 
ethics, may own endowments and invest them. They may be 
high-minded to the last degree, but they cannot dictate how 
their investments should be conducted nor how the businesses 
in which they invest shall be managed unless the majority stock 
consent. They may stand and see the laborer robbed of his 
hire, they may see workingmen and women and children robbed 
of life and of health, they may see every form of refined op- 
pression which modern business has devised and modern neg- 
lect has perpetuated, but they cannot lift a finger to stop this 
so long as a majority of the stock in any given concern is 
against them. 

This statement might find illustration in the fact that for 
sixteen years a notorious trust refused all information to stock- 
holders concerning earnings, assets, liabilities, and surplus. 
Its recent history of corruption shows to what evil extremes 
this condition may lead, and it furnishes picturesque commen- 
tary on the universal demand now made for publicity in cor- 
poration accounts and activities as a means of reform. 



i9i i.] PRIVATE PROPERTY As IT is 587 

Fifth : The individual who is part owner in one or in many 
enterprises but complete owner of none, tends to act and think, 
to vote and to judge as though he were the sole owner. An 
investment of $5,000 in railway bonds or stocks cannot succeed 
unless the railroad as a whole succeeds. Hence, always in ten- 
dency, and frequently in fact, the individual who own a num- 
ber of shares of stock or a number of bonds will react on public 
opinion as though he were the single owner. The spirit of 
property as a whole enters him much, as the philosophers tell 
us, as the soul is whole and entire in each part of the body. 
The sum of the, owners of any one industry, therefore, consti- 
tutes a social backing for its interests. To take one illustration, 
the last statement of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company showed 
64,869 shareholders. The complete outstanding shares being 
a little over 8,000,000, the average holding of the individual 
was approximately 127 shares. Now, the owner of 127 shares 
of Pennsylvania Railroad stock will tend to take attitudes on 
questions of public policy, of labor and of all things affecting 
dividends as though he were practically the sole owner of the 
railroad. In other words, the organization of business tends 
to drive the individual owners into a way of thinking and act- 
ing on public questions that would never be dictated by the 
individual's property interests, if his holdings were not amal- 
gamated with tens of thousands of others, and if the success 
of his particular investment did not depend absolutely on the 
success of the industry as a whole. When we recall that law- 
yers, physicians, schools, churches, charities and all other 
investment seekers, 'tend constantly to make their investments 
in share holdings of this kind, we can understand the tremen- 
dous pressure in favor of property sentiment that is engendered 
throughout society. Were all of these holdings isolated and 
unrelated there could be no such property conservatism as we 
know it. Directors of enterprises shrewdly count on this. 
Sometimes when great corporations have appealed to the public 
for protection against hostile legislation or threatening social 
movements, managers have pointed with earnest assertion to 
the army of 15,000 or 20,000 or 40,000 owners whose interests 
they claimed were placed in jeopardy. Just as there are those 
who maintain that widely scattered public securities constitute 
a basis for patriotism, in like manner managers of industries 
understand that widely scattered holdings of their securities 



588 PRIVATE PROPERTY As IT Is [Feb., 

develop patriotic interest of owners in the welfare of corporations 
whose securities they hold. By this mechanism of business, 
therefore, the attitude of the individual toward property is made 
much more marked than could otherwise be the case. 

Sixth: Two further processes appear which are of supreme 
importance in drawing our industrial giants into closest inter- 
dependency. On the one hand interests are now so highly 
differentiated that one depends on half a dozen others for its 
successful issue. The manufacturer of machinery and tools 
depends on the general expansion of industry for his market. 
Steel plants depend on railroads, railroads depend largely on 
crops and on industrial output for their freight. The Civil 
War in the United States affected England because it inter- 
rupted the growth of cotton which kept the wheels moving 
over there. Each large industry, therefore, has its own zone 
of related industries with which it must be in sympathy and 
co-operation. Thus we get what we may call "the objective 
solidarity of industries," the development of community in- 
terests. 

It will occur to the reader that since the individual inves- 
tor may become part owner in many industries, he becomes 
theoretically a voter in each of them and consequently he is 
eligible to directorships in them. This fact paves the way for 
the concentration of directorships. One individual may hold 
directorships in a dozen or in two dozen different corporations. 
Now his influence as a director in each of these corporations 
will be exercised with due regard for the interests of the 
other corporations with which he is allied actively. Hence, 
we have the merry scramble for directorships and the marvel- 
lous and inscrutable methods by which directors are chosen. 
Senator La Follette produced, in a remarkable speech in the 
United States Senate some years ago, a list of approximately 
one hundred individuals who held over two thousand director- 
ships in American corporations. When we recall that the in- 
finitely intricate credit system of the country is involved in 
the relations of corporations among themselves, and when we 
further recall that it is possible for relatively few individuals 
to secure control of the sources of credit, or to master such 
banking influences as give them practically the power of a 
dictator, it will not seem surprising that all industrial interests 
tend more and more toward a common understanding. 



19 1 1.] PRIVATE PROPERTY As IT Is 589 

This gives us a new feature of modern property organiza- 
tion. The individual owner, thinking and feeling largely as 
the whole owner in anyone industry; industries tending more 
and more to be objectively dependent one on another and 
tending more and more to be subjectively allied through con- 
centrated directorships, constitute a basis of the brotherhood of 
property which is unparalled in the history of man. We 
might even carry the analysis farther by showing the function 
of holding companies or underwriting syndicates, but sufficient 
has been said for present purposes. Boffin had an inkling of 
this great truth when Dickens put these words into his mouth : 

"A man of property owes a duty to other men of prop- 
erty and must look sharp after his inferiors." 

While the population in a new country is scattered; while 
roads are bad and railroads are lacking ; while transportation 
by water is poor and distances are great, we will find civiliza- 
tion undeveloped, and there will be a low state of social con- 
sciousness. Beyond any doubt this condition of a population 
and the circumstances that govern communication will keep 
the people simple and to an extent, individualistic. They will 
develop little power but possibly much peace; little of the 
vain temptations of life but much of its moral security. How- 
ever, if once railroads enter, if good roads are constructed and 
the telephone and telegraph appear, differences of time and 
of space are practically wiped out and communication is con- 
stant and easy. Far reaching results promptly appear. We 
obtain a high state of social consciousness and a sense of 
power and unity. Forces will appear and problems will de- 
velop that make necessary a set of stronger insitutions to pro- 
tect the social order. The case is parallel, in a way, with 
property. When the savings of individuals are isolated, when 
the thinking and judgment of each saver are thrown back 
upon his own modest accumulations and are but little related 
to others, we shall have a condition of decentralization that 
will hinder the passion for property and keep it in an humble 
place. Higher interests of life will be more or less paramount 
because the tempting powers of accumulation have not yet 
appeared. But introduce an era of amalgamation, wipe out 
the differences of time and place, merge all of the properties 
of millions of men and women into one vast industrial prop- 
erty; turn those millions of tiny streams of savings in the di- 



590 PRIVATE PROPERTY As IT Is [Feb. 

rection of one great common reservoir of industrial capital, 
build channels through which these waters may Row at the 
will of men and you have worked a revolution. The revolu- 
tion will be not only in property and its organization but it 
will be as well in the thinking and judgment of men, in their 
standards, in their ethical concepts and definitions. Now we 
are in the latter condition to-day. We have emerged out of 
the former state, carrying with us ethical standards that fitted 
then but that are entirely inadequate now. 

We shall never understand the modem controversy on pri- 
vate property until we realize that it has become one tremen- 
dous social interest. The industrial processes together with 
the mechanism of credit and finance have practically made one 
fundamental unity in property, and it is now property as one 
monstrous power and not millions of small holdings, owned 
and managed by individuals that is distinctively the subject 
of controversy. 

Possibly, the strongest force of collective consciousness in 
the world to-day is that which is based on property. It is 
this unified collective consciousness that is held in mind in the 
attacks that are made by organized labor and by Socialism on 
the present organization of property. The timid individual 
owning $500 is no being to be afraid of. He offers no men- 
ace to our institutions. He has no power to sway the minds 
of men, he has no temptations to undermine the institutions of 
government. But the individual into whom the spirit of the 
modern organization of property as a whole has entered, who 
is caught by its power and swayed by its temptations; the 
individual who through mastery of property becomes master 
of men and master of institutions, he it is that is held in mind 
in the denunciations of capital and capitalism which are con- 
stantly hurled forth from the ranks of organized labor and 
Socialism. Therefore, it would be well for us to keep this in 
mind in our defence of private property and in meeting the 
attacks that are made against it. We tend too much to argue 
in defence of the small owner and of the legitimate uses of 
property and we tend to overlook the complicated mechanism 
just hinted at by which property is completely revolutionized. 
Continuing the study an effort will be made in the next arti- 
cle to describe the indictment drawn against private property 
by Socialism. 




CORDS OF NATURE. 

BY CHRISTIAN REID. 

[HE trans-continental express had been standing 
for an hour, waiting for the way ahead to be 
cleared of a freight wreck, and a number of pas- 
sengers from the different Pullmans, which made 
up the train, were profiting by the delay to take 
a little exercise beside the track. Most of these were men 
who walked briskly up and down without paying much atten- 
tion to the long line of coaches; but now and then a few 
paused to stare at the last of this line, one of the luxurious 
private cars with which the American public has become so 
familiar, and inquire to whom it belonged. 

" Bretherton's car," a man said in answer to such an inquiry 
from his companion. "No, he's not aboard. I asked the con- 
ductor. Only his family on their way to join him in New York." 

" Oh, his family ! " The man who had made the inquiry 
looked again quickly at the great black and gold car by the 
side of which they were walking. " That means his er ? " 

" Wife and daughter. They constitute his family, I believe." 

"Yes, just so." The speaker moistened his lips slightly. 
"A wife and er daughter, as you say." 

Something odd and constrained in his tone caught the at- 
tention of the other, who glanced at him inquisitively. They 
were merely traveling acquaintances, and he began to wonder 
a little who this dissipated-looking, but still handsome man 
might be. Despite a certain shabbiness of attire, and the signs 
of intemperance which marred the well-cut outlines of his face, 
he possessed a distinctly attractive personality, owing perhaps 
to the frankness of his blue eyes, and to a certain grace of 
manner that seemed to indicate some standard of refinement 
from which he had not altogether fallen. It was a manner 
which made it possible to hazard the question, "You know 
them perhaps ? " 

There was an instant's perceptible hesitation, and then the 
man laughed as oddly as he had spoken. " I have known 
them in the past," he said; "but it's extremely doubtful whether 
Mrs. er Bretherton would care to recognize me now." 



592 CORDS OF NATURE [Feb., 

His companion thought it more than doubtful ; but he 
nodded with an answering laugh toward the car. " Here's your 
chance to test her remembrance/' he said. 

The other paused abruptly. The careless suggestion seemed 
to act on him like an electric shock. It was clear that such 
a thought had not entered his mind before but that, once sug- 
gested, it found a response which thrilled him in a manner there 
was no mistaking. 

" By heavens 1 " he said, more to himself than to the other, 
" I believe I will." 

The next minute, as if not caring to take time to think, 
he wheeled around, and swung himself up to the platform of 
the car by which they were passing. The man who had been 
walking with him paused in astonishment. He was entirely 
unprepared for such rapid action, and he stood wide-eyed and 
expectant, waiting for the immediate descent which he expected. 

But there was no such descent. The door of the car 
chanced to be unguarded, and opening it the tall, well-built 
figure disappeared from the view of the watcher. " Ten to one, 
he'll come out again in a hurry ! " the latter said to himself, 
chuckling slightly. But minutes passed: he did not reappear; 
and the man left standing alone, at last turned away with a 
sense of baffled curiosity, wondering what claim of past ac- 
quaintance with the wife of the powerful railway magnate, this 
shabby stranger could have, strong enough to induce her to 
pardon the unceremonious manner in which he presented himself. 

If the person who thus wondered had possessed an Asmo- 
deous-like power of looking into the interior of the car which 
the stranger had entered, he would have seen that the hand- 
some woman, reading and reclining in the depths of a large chair, 
who glanced up with surprise as the door opened, was fully 
aware of the presumption of such an unauthorized entrance. 

"This is a private car," she said haughtily; and when the 
man at whom she had barely glanced, still stood looking down 
at her without either speaking or retiring, she extended her 
hand to touch a bell. Then the man spoke : 

"Don't do that, Mildred," he said. "You'll be sorry if 
you do." 

She started violently, and her book fell with a crash to the 
floor, while she stared up at him with the expression of one 
who recognizes an unwelcome ghost from the past. 

** So it's you / " she gasped. 



i9i i.] CORDS OF NATURE 593 

" Yes, it's I," he answered. He sat down in a chair before 
her, and for a moment they regarded each other in silence. 
What memories rose in the minds of each, it would be diffi- 
cult indeed to tell. It was again the man who spoke first: 

"You are handsomer than ever, Mildred," he remarked. 
" It's quite as I thought it would be. A life of ease and 
luxury agrees with you. You were right in. thinking that you 
were made for it." 

"You are insolent to speak to me in this manner!" the 
woman replied with a catch in her voice, a flash of anger in 
her eyes. " I will not tolerate it. You have no right to speak 
to me at all." 

" Perhaps not." He laughed a little. " Yet I seem to re- 
call an occasion when we were told that what God had joined 
together, no man had power to put asunder; and if you were 
bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh once " 

She interrupted him fiercely. " How dare you force yourself 
into my presence in order to insult me?" she demanded. "If 
you don't go away at once, I will have you put out of the car." 

"Hardly, I think," he returned coolly. "You would find 
that rather a difficult undertaking a trifle more difficult than 
putting me out of your life by means of a decree of divorce. 
I made that easy for you " 

"You certainly did," she interrupted again with the same 
fierceness. " No court would have denied me a divorce from 
a man like you." 

He nodded. " Quite true. Argument, mutual recrimina- 
tions are useless. But you cannot deny, Mildred, that you 
were tired of me and, even more than of me, you were tired 
of narrow means and a narrow life ; you wanted wealth, luxury, 
pleasure, things I couldn't give you do you think I've for- 
gotten how often you complained that your beauty and your 
social gifts were wasted as my wife, and that you would not 
have married me if you had known that I had no power to 
give you what your nature that is, your vanity demanded ? " 

Involuntarily, as it appeared, she glanced into a mirror 
opposite, which reflected all the details of her well-groomed 
beauty the beauty that in the richness of chestnut tints in 
hair and eyes, the satin smoothness of lovely skin, and the 
still delicate features, gave the effect of a splendid animal, kept 
by constant care in a state of the highest physical perfection. 
VOL. xcu. 38 



594 CORDS OF NATURE [Feb., 

"And wasn't I right?" she asked. "Look what I am! 
and think what I should have been by this time, as your wife 
and domestic drudge." 

"It is quite plain," he assured her. "Given the condi- 
tions, the result was a foregone conclusion; and only a fool 
would have expected anything else. If Bretherton hadn't ap- 
peared, no doubt some other man would have appreciated the 
possibilities of the situation." 

She interrupted him now by rising abruptly from her seat. 

"I will not listen to another word!" she cried. "I sup- 
pose you are drunk, but if you don't leave the car immedi- 
ately, I will have you put out, if it takes the whole train 
crew to do it." 

"1 am not drunk at all," he told her. "I am sure you 
know that. And I shall not leave the car until I have seen 
my daughter. It is to see her that I am here, though I have 
so far omitted to say so." 

The woman stared at him for an instant, and then sank 
back in her chair, as if realizing that the struggle between 
them was yet to come. 

"You can't see her," she said. "There is nothing to be 
gained by it. I will not have her distured and troubled by 
remembering " 

"That she has a father," he ended, as she broke off. "Yet 
the fact is a fact, nevertheless, you know. Not even the law 
can give a child two fathers, however many husbands it may 
allow a woman." 

"But the law," she retorted, "can give a child to her 
mother when the father has proved himself utterly unworthy; 
and the law gave Elizabeth to me." 

" I'm aware of it," he answered. " I should like to argue 
with the law a little about that about how good it is for a 
child to be brought up in another man's house, to see her 
mother another man's legal wife, while her own father is living 
but such argument being impossible, I'll only remind you 
that the law at least allows me the right to see her." 

" At stated periods, yes. But since you haven't claimed 
the right in a long time, I thought I really thought you had 
consideration enough to understand how much better it is for 
her that you should efface yourself from her life." 

" That's an idea I have entertained for some time," he 
replied. "It not only struck me that I wasn't exactly the 



i9i i.] CORDS OF NATURE 595 

kind of a father for a girl to care for, I not only knew all 
that you must have told her about me I seemed to read it 
in those clear, wondering eyes of hers whenever we met but 
I honestly thought it best for her that I should, as you say, 
efface myself, let her have the advantage of all you were able 
to give her, let her respect you without any doubt about the 
er new relations into which you have entered " 

" How dare you ! Oh, how dare you ! " the woman ex- 
claimed passionately. 

" But I am beginning to think that I was mistaken," he 
went on. " It has occured to me lately that a father not only 
has some rights which even divorce laws respect, but that he 
has some duties of which no law can relieve him. I forgot 
those when I made it easy for you to take Elizabeth from me." 

" One has heard of Saul among the prophets, and of many 
hypocrites and humbugs," she said in a tone of mockery, 
" but to hear you talking of duties, surpasses them all." 

"True enough," he admitted. "But again I think the 
score is even between us. The fact is that neither when we 
were married nor later, did either of us ever think of any 
duties, we thought only of pleasing ourselves, and so the child 
fell between us." 

" Nothing," she asserted, " could have been happier for the 
child than the change in her life. Putting aside your shame- 
ful habits, what could you have given her in comparison with 
what Bretherton is able to give? He is as fond of her as if 
she were his own daughter, and she has had every advantage 
of education, travel, culture, and with his great wealth behind 
her, the world is at her feet. We are now on our way abroad 
where all the plans are made for her coming out into society 
we have already taken a house in London for the season 
and there is no telling what success she may achieve. She is 
full of delighted anticipation, and you ^wouldn't surely, if you 
care anything about her, you wouldn't spoil it all by obtrud- 
ing yourself into her life!" 

There was no room to doubt the earnestness of this plead- 
ing; and the man looked at the speaker with something 
startled and wistful in his eyes. 

" I wouldn't wish to spoil any chance of happiness for 
her," he said. "But surely to see her especially since you 
are taking her so far away just to see her for an hour, could 
do no harm." 



596 CORDS OF NATURE [Feb., 

" It would do great harm ; it would annoy, depress, sadden 
her" 

"To see her own father?" 

Deliberately the woman lifted her hand and pointed to the 
mirror at which she had glanced before. 

"Look at yourself," she said. "Are you a father whom a 
refined girl could do other than shrink to acknowledge ? And 
wouldn't the memory of what you are stay with her, to darken 
the bright prospects of her life ? For Heaven's sake spare her 
and go ! " 

The man's glance followed her pointing hand, and seeing 
his image reflected in the glass catching the lines of dissipa- 
tion on his face, and the shabbiness of his dress, accentuated 
by the luxury around him he rose to his feet. 

" You've been merciless, Mildred," he said. " But then, not 
as a reproach, but simply as a statement of fact, I may add 
that you have always been that to me. And now, as before, 
you have the letter, if not the spirit of right on your side. 
I freely own that I'm not a father whom such a girl as you 
describe would like to see. No doubt the child who used to 
be so fond of me is dead and buried ; and I might no more 
care for the fashionable young lady you've made of her, than 
she for the father you discarded. So you have your way now, 
as always before. I'll not trouble you again. Goodbye." 

Before she could speak, had she been inclined to do so, 
he turned and, as abruptly as he had entered, passed out oi 
the car. 

In accordance with the law which seems to prevail in rail- 
way matters as in other affairs of human life, that troubles 
never come singly, following the delay from the freight in the 
morning, the express limited, rushing along that night at in- 
creased speed to make up its schedule time, crashed into a 
switch carelessly or designedly left open at a way station, with 
the usual result of appalling disaster. 

As a rule, in accidents of the kind the heavy Pullman 
coaches stand the shock with immunity, while the cars pro- 
vided by the railway for its passengers, are generally splin- 
tered into kindling wood. But in this case the train being 
made up of Pullmans, several of the foremost shared in the 
wreck, although the last coaches of the long line, including 
the Bretherton car, kept their place on the rails. Even in 






i9i i.] CORDS OF NATURE 597 

these, however, the shock of the terrible impact hurled sleep- 
ers from their berths, and roused every one to a realization of 
the awful fate which had overtaken the train. Horror-stricken 
faces looked at each other, and half- clad men and women 
poured out into the night to add to the panic and confusion 
of the scene. 

In the Bretherton car, Mrs. Bretherton and her daughter, 
like every one else rushed from their state-rooms; but they 
went no farther than the platform of the car. A forward 
glance was sufficient to drive them back shuddering and the 
elder woman immediately placed a servant on guard at the 
door, with imperative orders to permit no one to enter. What 
fear was in her mind, what memory of the intrusion of the 
morning prompted this, it is easy to imagine; and it was prob- 
ably the same instinctive fear which made her sit down in the 
saloon, while urging her daughter to return to her state-room, 

" You might as well go back to bed, and to sleep if you 
can," she said. "We are quite safe now, and there's nothing 
to do but wait." 

The tall, handsome girl, wrapped in a silken kimono, looked 
at her with an expression of wonder. 

" Wouldn't one be made of strange material," she said, " if 
one could sleep with that" she made a motion of her hand 
forward " so close to one ? Surely we should make an effort 
to help." 

" How can we possibly help ? " 

"Well, yon could offer some of the many things with which 
the car is supplied linen, stimulants " 

"I'm perfectly willing to do anything of the kind," Mrs 
Bretherton said eagerly. "I'll put the supplies of the car at 
the disposal of those who are caring for the injured, if you 
will be satisfied and go to bed." 

Her daughter looked at her again with a singular expres- 
sion. 

" I was about to add," she said, " that if you don't object, 
I'll take Ellen "this was the least hysterical of the maids 
" and go and see what I can do." 

"Elizabeth!" The exclamation was vehement. "You 
must know that I object as strongly as possible. There is 
nothing you could do which there are not other people to do 
much better." 

" On the contrary," the girl replied quietly, " there is no 



598 CORDS OF NATURE [Feb., 

one able to do better what I must do and I think you surely 
know what that is." 

Her mother glanced at her with startled apprehension. 
"What?" she asked sharply. "I know nothing" 

" Oh, yes," the other interrupted, " you know very well. 
You cannot have forgotten that my father may be among the 
injured or the dead." 

Mrs. Bretherton fell back, as if under a physical blow, and 
for a moment there was silence. Then : 

"So he broke his word !" she cried. "You have heard 
from him " 

The girl shook her head. " No," she said. " He has not 
broken his word, and I have not heard from him directly, 
But, although you were not aware of it, I was present during 
part of your interview with him this morning. 
i "How could that be? Where were you?" 

" I was standing behind that curtain." Elizabeth pointed 
to the drapery which hung at the entrance of the passage be- 
side the staterooms. " I came out of my room without know- 
ing that any one was here, but I heard your voice before I 
drew back the portiere, and I have no apologies to make for 
listening to what was said. It concerned me more than any 
body else, for I heard him pleading to be allowed to see me, 
and and I justified all that you said, for I shrank from see- 
ing him t and I was glad when you sent him away." 

Mrs. Bretherton drew a deep breath of relief. " I knew 
that you would be," she said. 

" Yes, you knew that I would be," the girl assented, " since 
you knew who should know better ? what manner of person 
I am, how selfish, how worldly, caring only for the pleasures 
and luxuries of life. You described me well ; you were right 
in saying that I would not have wished to be annoyed by 
seeing him ; and he was right in believing that there would 
have been no pleasure for him in seeing me. I listened, I 
approved, I let you send him away without a single word of 
kindness, and then well, then a strange thing happened, some- 
thing seemed to awake in me, some cord of nature, I suppose, 
and during all the hours since that time I have been able to 
think of nothing but the things he said, and of memories of 
the past which I thought were buried and forgotten." 

"They should be forgotten," her mother declared. 

"So you have always said, and I have been ready to be- 






i9i i.] CORDS OF NATURE 599 

lieve," the girl replied. " There was everything to gain on the 
side of forgetting. But to- day the past has come back to me 
in a flood, and I have seen things in a light in which I never 
saw them before. I have lived over my childhood, and I 
don't want to say anything to wound you but I am sure that 
he would have been a different man he was always a lovable 
one if you had been patient " 

"With his vices?" 

" No, with the conditions of your life, for my childish 
memories bear him out in saying that the vices might not have 
existed if you had not let him see that you wanted to be rid 
of him." 

" Of course I wanted to be rid of him ! I had ceased to 
care for him, and as for being patient with the conditions of 
my life, you talk like an ignorant child. Your life, since I 
changed it for you, has been so different that you cannot im- 
agine what it is to be cramped by narrow means, condemned 
to drudgery, monotony, everything that is most odious " 

" But duties, solemn obligations," the girl spoke as if to 
herself "are they to be thrown aside when they become irk- 
some and unpleasant ? " 

"That's cant!" her mother retorted angrily. "I don't 
know where you learned it." 

" I don't know either," Elizabeth confessed. " It is only 
to-day that such thoughts have occurred to me. But since 
they came they have been insistent, and I have seemed to 
realize that there are higher things in life than seeking one's 
pleasure and happiness ; that there are claims which cannot be 
disregarded without loss to all that is best in oneself. I was 
a contemptible coward when I stood behind that curtain and 
let you send my father away, because I did not want my 
selfish ease disturbed. But I can't be a coward now, mother. 
I must go and find him. I should despise myself forever if I 
failed to do so." 

She turned to move away, but Mrs. Bretherton caught the 
folds of her kimono. 

"Elizabeth," she implored, "don't be foolish! There can 
be nothing gained by your going. If you wish to learn 
whether or not anything has happened to him, I'll send and 
make inquiries." 

"I must make them myself," the girl told her firmly, but 
not ungently. "There is no reason why you should inquire 



600 CORDS OF NATURE [Feb., 

about him ; the law has declared that you are no longer his 
wife; but, as he said, no law can make me another than his 
daughter. So it is my place to seek him. Don't keep me I 
must dress quickly and go." 

She drew her draperies from the hand that still tried to 
detain her, and went rapidly toward her stateroom, while 
Mrs. Bretherton remained where she had been left, staring be- 
fore her with eyes which saw nothing of that on which they 
rested. She had not stirred when the servant whom she had 
placed on guard at the door, came presently to say that the 
conductor of the train wished to speak to her. 

" Let him come in," she said, and when the man entered, 
he was struck by the ghastly pallor of the face which looked 
up at him. It occurred to him that her expression was that 
of one who was bracing herself to hear dreaded tidings. 

" I'm sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Bretherton," he said hast- 
ily, "but of course you know that we've had an awful wreck, 
and that many of the passengers have been killed or desper- 
ately injured. Among the last there's a man who begged me 
to bring a message to you. His name is Maitland." 

Mrs. Bretherton found her lips strangely stiff as she re- 
plied : " I know him. What is the message ? " 

The conductor looked down a little nervously. " It's really 
more a message for your daughter than you," he explained. 
"The man says that he is her father, and he wishes to see 
her. He told me to tell you that you will pardon him for 
breaking his promise, since he is probably dying." 

Mrs. Bretherton glanced toward the curtained passage leading 
into the car, where a girl in a dark dress now stood. " There 
is my daughter, who can answer for herself," she said coldly. 

Elizabeth Maitland came forward. " I've heard your mes- 
sage," she told the conductor. " Will you be kind enough to 
take me to my father ? " Then, as the man moved toward the 
door, she turned to her mother. " Have you no word for him 
since he is dying ? " she asked. 

The woman shook her head. " What word could I have ? " 
he asked in turn, in a dull tone. 

If the daughter thought of one that might have come from 
her with a good grace, she did not say so; with a deep sigh 
she went hurriedly on. 

It was an hour or more afterwards that to the impatient 



i9i i.] CORDS OF NATURE 601 

woman, pacing up and down the length of her luxurious apart- 
ment, like an imprisoned animal, the welcome news was brought 
that a relief train had arrived, and that her car, together with 
the other uninjured coaches, was to be drawn from the wreck, 
and sent on its way to New York. As soon as she heard this, 
she called her steward and bade him go find Miss Maitland 
and bid her come immediately. " Tell her she must not de- 
lay for anything that we are going on at once!" she charged 
him imperatively. 

After the man was gone, she resumed her pacing to and 
fro, with even more impatience of manner than she had dis- 
played before. For a fear that she would not acknowledge 
was clutching at her heart. It was an Elizabeth she had never 
known who had been revealed to her in their last words to- 
gether, and she had an instinctive dread of some further and 
even more undesirable revelation. If the girl had been so 
strongly moved by the conversation she overheard in the 
morning, by the few words her father had then said, what 
might not be the effect of her meeting him under such cir- 
cumstances as fate had now brought about? An anger, the 
more intense for its impotence, possessed Mrs. Bretherton, 
and as she walked, she found herself tearing into shreds a 
handkerchief she was holding in her hands. Never for an 
instant had she acknowledged to herself that her conduct to- 
ward her husband was not justified, she had grown to hate 
him as representing all that was most detestable to her selfish, 
worldly nature, long before she left him, but she had nevertheless 
a vague fear of some avenging nemesis, and she knew that this 
nemesis could only strike her through the daughter who was 
the sole creature, beside herself, whom she loved. All her 
pride and ambition were bound up in Elizabeth, for she re- 
garded the man whom she had married as merely a purveyor 
of the things for which in days of comparative poverty her 
soul had thirsted, the power, luxury and pleasure which wealth 
alone can give. And now, if this most unfortunate meeting 
with the father whom she had learned to forget should in any 
degree alienate Elizabeth from her, it would be, the mother 
felt, more than she could endure. And yet what would be left 
but endurance for her who had ever refused to bear anything 
that was opposed to her own desires ? She did not say to 
herself that perhaps the time had come when she would no 
longer be allowed the power to refuse; she only waited, in 



602 CORDS OF NATURE [Feb., 

growing fear and impatience, until the door of the car opened, 
and her daughter entered. 

Mrs. Bretherton paused abruptly. " Thank Heaven you've 
come ! " she cried. " We are to be taken away from this hor- 
rible place, and sent on our journey without further delay. 
I've told the railroad people that it is absolutely necessary that 
we should be in New York to sail on the Mauretania" 

Elizabeth went up to her, and laid a hand gently on her 
shoulder. AH the fear of which she had been vaguely con- 
scious now seized Mrs. Bretherton in acute grasp as she looked 
at the face so close to her, for a change had passed over it 
since she last saw it. There was something altogether strange 
in the expression which shone in the eyes that met her own, 
and which seemed to have changed the familiar features. 

" Mother," the girl said quietly, " you must sail without 



me." 



"Elizabeth!" it was a gasp of positive, terror "What do 
you mean ? " 

" Just what I say," Elizabeth answered. " I was coming 
to tell you when I received your message. I am sorry to 
grieve you, but I must stay with my father. It is he who 
needs me now." 

" Needs you ! but they said he was dying ! " Mrs. Brether- 
ton cried. "I hoped that by this time he was dead." 

" You hoped it ? " 

" Yes, why shouldn't I ? " the woman fiercely demanded. 
"He has never been anything but a curse to me, and now if 
he is coming between us, why shouldn't I wish him dead ? 
But you won't let him take you from me ! Elizabeth, you can't 
do such a thing I " 

"I can do nothing else," Elizabeth told her sadly. "If you 
could see him you would understand, and perhaps not be so 
bitter against him. He is not trying to take me from you. 
He thought that he was dying when he sent for me, and he 
wanted to tell me good-bye that was all. But when I saw 
him oh, Mother, I remembered so much ! how he had loved 
me, and how I loved him in the days we were together, and 
and don't you see that I have no alternative, that whethe r 
he dies or lives, I must stay with him now that he needs me 
so desperately ? " 

" I see that you are mad 1 " her mother cried with increas- 
ing passion. " The thing is impossible I will not hear of it 



i9i i.] CORDS OF NATURE 603 

You will ruin your life by such an insane sacrifice. Bretherton 
has spent money like water on you, and he will never forgive 
such ingratitude, such a disappointment " 

" Ah, I am sorry," the girl said, " sorry to be the cause of 
disappointment to him, as well as to you. But I can't help 
it. There is something drawing me stronger than the things 
he can give me, and stronger even than my love for you. The 
love is not less, but I feel that you do not need me you have 
so much besides while that poor man lying yonder will have 
nothing if I forsake him.' 1 

" He can be taken care of I am willing to spend all the 
money necessary for that," Mrs. Bretherton said eagerly, "if 
only you will give up this mad idea " 

" Mother! " The girl drew back with an involuntary recoil. 
" You can't think so poorly of him as to believe that he would 
allow you to spend Mr. Bretherton's money on him ? Oh, how 
much you must have forgotten before you could say such a 
thing ! " 

" And how much you forget," her mother retorted, ' ' when 
you talk of casting your lot with a man who never at any time 
was able to make more than a support, and who now will be 
helpless. How do you expect to live ? how will you endure 
the poverty you will have to face, the privations, the drudgery ? 
you, who have known nothing but ease and luxury and the 
pleasant things of life since I took you away from him ? " 

"I don't know," the girl answered. "It will be hard, no 
doubt, but I can learn to work " 

Mrs. Bretherton burst into an angry laugh. "You work!" 
she cried derisively. "What insane folly you talk! Oh, for 
heaven's sake let us have no more of this! Think of all that 
is waiting for you, of the preparations to give you as brilliant 
an introduction into the world as any girl ever had. Eliza- 
beth, you can't break my heart by this madness now ! " 

But Elizabeth looked at her with a light in her eyes such 
as no one had ever seen in them before. 

" Mother," she said solemnly, " it almost breaks my heart 
to hurt you, but I must remind you that it is your action 
which has forced this hard choice on me. Ah, when God 
gave the command, ' Honor thy father and thy mother/ He 
did not mean it to be a divided duty. But the children who 
are the victims of divorce are torn by a hopelessly divided 



6o4 CORDS OF NATURE [Feb. 

allegiance. I have scarcely thought of my father during the 
years of our separation, and I have been willing to forget 
that I owed any duty to him. Even this morning, as you 
know, I was ready to let him go out of my life. But now I 
see that my duty towards him is not lessened because you 
left him ; and when he needs me I must go to him. You 
have had me all these years; now it is his turn. Is it my 
fault that I must choose between you ? that I am torn in two 
because your claims conflict ? " 

There was a strain of judicial severity in the clear young 
voice, and the woman to whom the poignant question was ad- 
dressed sank into a chair, and covered her face with her 
hands. For the first time she recognized the unalterable con- 
sequences of human actions; for the first time realized her 
powerlessness before the far-reaching results of her own, and, 
so realizing, found no word to utter. The tense silence was 
still unbroken when the door was abruptly opened, and a rail- 
way official appeared. 

"We are about to move your car out, Mrs. Bretherton," 
he said. "You asked to be given warning." 

Mrs. Bretherton looked up. "Yes," she said in a dull 
voice, " I wanted to know on account of my daughter but 
she is here now." 

"You will be under way in five minutes," the man told 
her, as he turned to go out. 

The door had hardly closed upon his figure when Mrs. 
Bretherton suddenly fell on her knees before her startled 
daughter. 

"Elizabeth," she pleaded wildly, "I beg, I implore you 
not to leave me ! " 

But even as the girl stooped to raise her, she felt all the 
solemnity of farewell in her touch and in her kisses. 

" I must go, mother," she said. " It tears my heart, but 
the other duty calls me with a claim I cannot resist. Good- 
bye." 

A few minutes later Elizabeth stood on the ground, watch- 
ing the lights of the train as they disappeared. When the night 
had swallowed them up, she turned and walked toward the 
place where the victims of the wreck were laid out in ghastly 
rows. 




LOOKING FOR A JOB. 

BY WILLIAM M. LEISERSON. 

|AVE you ever looked for a job ? 

If you are one of those fortunate people who 
possess a particular talent or skill which is in 
demand, you may not have had much trouble 
in finding work ; but if you are just an ordinary 
workingman as most of us are you know what a discouraging 
and disheartening experience it is. 

When I was a little fellow and left school to earn my own 
support, I wanted a place in a business where I could "work 
up." I thought a railroad or a steamship system offered the 
best career. Therefore I wrote to nearly all the railroad and 
steamship offices in New York. My disappointment was great 
when, after weeks of waiting, I had received but one answer 
and that informed me that there was no vacancy. 

I turned my attention in other directions. I made the 
round of newspaper offices and answered "ads." I hurried to 
those places which wanted the applicants to call. Always I 
found a long line ahead of me; and I was surprised at the 
number of " grown-ups " who appeared in answer to advertise- 
ments for boys at $3 or $3.50 per week. No matter how early 
I came, there always seemed to be some people ahead of me. 
Usually the position was filled before my turn came, by some 
one who had had experience. My teachers' recommendations 
were good, but I was without experience, so months passed 
and still I was without work. When I finally did get a posi- 
tion it was through the influence of a friend who took me into 
a business for which I had little inclination. 

Thousands of boys in America start out blindly as I did, 
in pursuit of a job. Where is the employer, the industry, to 
use their willing services ? They do not know. I did not know. 

Several years later I had occasion to look for work in Chi- 
cago. I wrote letters. I called in answer to advertisements 
in the newspapers. I found that many of the people who ad- 
vertised were not employers, but employment agents, and they 
had "just filled the position" before I came. I tried tramping the 
streets in tke business districts looking for signs " help wanted." 



606 LOOKING FOR A JOB [Feb., 

How many people are going through this same dishearten- 
ing experience every day in our large cities of America ? How 
many are drifting into casual labor, living by odd jobs, with 
all the unsteady and demoralizing habits an irregular working- 
day brings? How many are losing hope, becoming vagrants, 
drunkards, tramps? Unemployables, we call them when we 
find they won't or can't work. But were they always unem- 
ployable? There are many who would make the most useful, 
the most faithful workers, if they only knew how to look for 
a job, or where to look for it. And here we see the tragedy 
of the man who has worked in one place for years. It is a 
cruel fact that the more faithful a man has been to one em- 
ployer, the less likely he is to know how to find another job 
once he is displaced. So, he more quickly loses hope than a 
young man, and more rapidly becomes demoralized because he 
does not know how to look for work. 

And yet, while wage-earners are suffering distress from lack 
of work or insufficient work, employers complain of a lack of 
labor. This condition is inevitable in America as long as we 
have no well organized, efficient exchange or common meeting 
place for the buyers and sellers of labor. We have organized 
wheat exchanges, cotton exchanges, produce exchanges, and 
exchanges for most other commodities. But where is the labor 
exchange? Why should labor hunt from door to door to find 
its buyer? 

Some people say it might undermine the self-reliance and 
take away the initiative of the workingman if the city or state 
helped him find a job or helped employers to find workmen. 
They would, therefore, let chance bring together employers 
needing help and wage-earners needing employment. So we 
continue to have our army of unemployed, our tramps, our 
vagrants, and our beggars. 

GERMAN LABOR EXCHANGES: A GOVERNMENT ENTERPRISE FOR THE 

PEOPLE. 

In Germany they are not afraid of having the government 
do things for the people. In fact, they are quite used to it. 
And there you will not find the great army of unemployables, 
" won't works " and " can't works " that are so familiar in our 
own country and in others which fear the effect of government 
enterprise on the individual. For, over there, men, women, 
boys, know they can find all the opportunities for work by 
going to the Labor Exchange. 



i9i i.] LOOKING FOR A JOB 607 

As a contrast to the experience of an American boy, let 
us follow a German boy leaving school for a job. He receives 
from his teacher a blank application for a position. It has 
been sent over to the school by the Stadtische Arbeitsnachweis 
(Municipal Labor Exchange). He fills out the application in 
the presence of his teacher, and on it is noted his preference 
in the way of a career, his standing in school, his aptitudes as 
viewed by his teachers, together with much other information. 
This application is transmitted to the exchange. The person 
in charge of the department for juveniles places it on file. The 
boy is told to come to the exchange from time to time, and a 
separate waiting room is provided where all the boys may sit 
and read. When an employer needs a boy he telephones to 
the labor exchange. Sometimes he writes. He tells just what 
he wants the boy for, the kind of work, the hours, the wages 
he will pay and what the opportunities for advancement are. 
The person in charge of the boys' department looks over the 
application blanks, picks out those most likely for the position, 
calls those applicants from the waiting room (or sends them a 
card to call at his office) and selects the boy who seems to 
have the greatest aptitude for that particular work, and this 
one is. sent to the employer. Thus employers know that only 
those who are inclined and fitted to their work will be sent 
to them, and the boy has some chance to choose his career. 

When a German wage-earner has lost his work he is not at 
a loss where to turn. Practically every city now has its 
Arbeit snachweis. There are about 200 such exchanges either 
directly operated by the municipalities or supported by their 
funds. The man who needs employment goes to the exchange 
and registers on a blank immediately handed to him. He 
states his name, age, residence, trade, and place of previous 
employment. He is given a card which entitles him to the 
use of the waiting room. In a few cities he has to pay a 
small fee for registration, but usually the services of the ex- 
changes are free to all. In fact, the labor exchanges owned by 
municipalities are all free. But there are a number operated 
by philanthropic associations which receive subsidies from the 
city governments, and these sometimes charge a small fee, 
usually about five cents. After he has registered, the appli- 
cant goes to the waiting room. The registration card tells 
him to which waiting room whether to that for unskilled la- 
borers or to one of the various departments for skilled trades. 



6o8 LOOKING FOR A JOB [Feb., 

There he will find men of his own class and calling, smoking, 
reading newspapers, or engaged in quiet conversation over 
their steins of beer. If he is in Berlin, and if he is hungry 
while waiting, he may get a lunch at cost price, and if his 
clothes or shoes need mending there is a tailor and a shoe- 
maker who will make him look presentable to an employer for 
a very small fee ; and there are in Berlin also shower baths in 
the building, of which he may take advantage. The women 
and the children have separate departments, with separate 
waiting rooms. The women do their sewing and they appear 
like a contented lot of housewives as they sit waiting to be 
called for work. 

The waiting room looks like a stock exchange. Black- 
boards with lists of positions vacant line the walls, and 
notices of various kinds are tacked on bulletin boards in dif- 
ferent parts of the room. From time to time a clerk with 
many papers in his hand steps into the room and the men 
gather around him. He calls out the orders for help. Those 
who wish to apply for the jobs call out the numbers of their 
registration cards and go into the office to be interviewed. 

To be. more specific, let us say an unemployed German 
has the experience as a teamster which is required in one of 
the positions proclaimed by the clerk. He enters the office. 
There he may find the employer ready to hire him if he is 
satisfactory; or else one of the office force will talk to him, 
inquire about his experience; and if the clerk deems him sat- 
isfactory, the man will give up his registration card and re- 
ceive instead a card of introduction to the employer. Should 
he be hired, he asks the employer to sign the card and he 
puts a stamp on it and drops it into a mail box. It is al- 
ready addressed to the exchange and tells that the applicant 
has secured the position. Should he not get the place, he 
takes the introduction card back to the clerk and receives 
again his registration card. 

Oar German workman has a feeling for his fellow men. 
He would not like to take another man's place when that man 
has gone on a strike to better his condition. He wants to be 
informed when there is a strike in any establishment to which 
he may be sent. Employers, on the other hand, want the 
exchange to send them men during the times of strike as well as 
at other times. How shall the exchanges keep neutral in time 
of conflict? This troubled the cities at first. But they found 



i9i i.] LOOKING FOR A JOB 609 

a way out. Every exchange has a managing committee com- 
posed of equal representatives of wage-earners and employers 
with a chairman who is neither an employer nor a workman. 
This committee looks out for the interests of both sides. When 
there is a strike it sees that the applicants for work are in- 
formed of the fact ; and when some want to take the work 
in spite of the strike the committee arranges for these men 
to be sent to the employers. As a matter of fact, however, 
few apply for work in those places where there are strikes. 

When the labor exchanges were first established the work- 
ingmen were opposed to them, while employers were indiffer- 
ent. The unions feared the use of them as strike breaking 
agencies. However, a few labor leaders recognized the need 
of affording a common meeting place for employers seeking 
help and workmen seeking employment, and defended the ex- 
changes and co-operated with them. In 1898 they succeeded 
in winning the support of the German Trade Union Congress. 
Since then labor has been definitely favorable to the public 
employment offices. 

The employers also have learned to favor them. They 
thought at first that none but unskilled and incompetent work- 
ers could be had at the city labor bureaus. It took much ad- 
vertising and frequent visits to get them to send all their 
orders to the exchange. But they have been won over. Ex- 
perience has taught them the advantage of an organized labor 
market to which they can telephone their orders whenever 
they need help. 

The only opposition now comes from two great industries, 
the metal trades and mining. But the employers in these 
trades favor the principle of the labor exchange. They only 
want to retain control of the labor market in their own hands 
and to use it as a weapon against the unions. The metal 
trades associations of employers and the mine owners have 
organized labor exchanges from which all employers in the 
association are compelled to hire their help. These exchanges 
do a very big business. In Berlin alone the labor exchange 
of the Metal Trades Association finds places for about 16,000 
men annually. 

In his City Labor Exchange the German workman finds all 
the opportunities for work that are available not only in his 
own town but throughout the empire. In the waiting rooms 
VOL xcii. 39 



6io LOOKING FOR A JOB [Feb., 

he sees posted " Lists of Vacancies " which are issued by the 
Associations of Labor Exchanges in the different parts of the 
country. There are eleven such associations corresponding to 
certain geographical divisions, as for example, "The Associa- 
tion of Bavarian Labor Exchanges," the " Central German 
Labor Exchanges Association," " North Elbe Labor Exchanges 
Association," and so on. At regular intervals the offices in 
each of these divisions send to the headquarters of the asso- 
ciation a list of those positions which they have not been 
able to fill. In turn, a list is made at headquarters of the 
vacancies in all the cities and distributed to the exchanges 
throughout the country. In this way it is possible for men 
out of work in Prussia to know whether it would be worth 
while to go to Wurtemberg or any other state. 

The exchanges themselves sometimes arrange the transfer 
of the men from one part of the country to another, making 
sure beforehand, however, that no one is sent .to a distant 
place unless a position is open for him. A few of the Ger- 
man states allow men thus sent to ride on the government 
railroads at half fare ; and all the states contribute to the sup- 
port of the associations of exchanges within their boundaries. 

Covering the entire country is the Association of German 
Labor Exchanges which receives a subsidy from the imperial 
government. This organization helps to start new exchanges 
and improve old ones. Also it holds annual conventions for the 
purpose of discussing ideas that will tend to promote the effi- 
ciency of the exchanges. And it publishes a monthly paper, 
Der Arbeits Markt (The Labor Market) which contains news of 
the work of the bureaus in all the cities. 

The first of the city labor bureaus was established by 
Dresden in 1887. Since then they have spread and developed 
rapidly. The authorities throughout the country are anxious 
to further their work. Recently the Reichstag passed a bill 
prohibiting the establishment of private employment offices ex- 
cept in such employments as are not dealt with by the public 
labor exchanges. This is the first step toward abolishing en- 
tirely all private employment offices. 

In 1909 the municipal labor exchanges of Germany secured 
about 950,000 positions for unemployed work people. Most 
of these, it is true, would have found work for themselves, 
without the aid of the labor exchanges, but there is no doubt 
that thousands would have been in distress from want of work 



i9i i.] LOOKING FOR A JOB 611 

if it had not been for these exchanges. Also it is true that 
the exchanges find work for all much quicker than they could 
possibly do so themselves! thus saving the wage-earners much 
time between jobs. 

The cost of this work in a large city is well illustrated by 
the accounts of the Berlin exchange. It secures about 100,000 
positions annually at a cost of about 100,000 marks. That is, to 
find a place for a workingman costs one mark or about 23 cents. 

A very important part of the work that the exchanges do 
is to furnish information as to the state of the labor market. 
In Germany the records of the exchanges are very carefully 
and accurately kept and the cities use them in dealing with 
the problem of unemployment. When it appears that there is 
an over-supply of labor, municipal work, such as building 
schools, extending streets, repairing dams, etc., is given to the 
unemployed. Men are hired through the labor exchange; and 
as soon as the labor market is relieved and there is plenty of 
work in private employment the cities suspend as much of 
their work as possible. There is a definite policy so to ar- 
range the municipal and state work as to have it done during 
dull times when private employers are laying off their work-men. 

What led the German cities to establish free employment 
offices ? It was found to be cheaper and in other ways more 
desirable to find work for an able-bodied man than to give 
him charitable support. The municipalities have to support all 
those who are in distress from want of employment. Labor 
exchanges find work for many who might otherwise become 
charges, and also give the authorities a means of determining 
whether a man is really looking for work or is merely feigning. 

Great Britain has since February, 1910, established about 
150 labor exchanges which find work for some 1,500 persons 
daily. Following the lead of Germany also, every continental 
country, as well as Australia and New Zealand, has established 
labor exchanges. 

Some of our states have passed laws providing for free em- 
ployment offices, but usually the appropriations for their support 
have been inadequate and appointments of the office force have 
been dictated by politicians. The result is that, with few ex- 
ceptions, their work is insignificant. 

Surely it is time for us in America to see the necessity for 
organizing the labor market efficiently. 




THE OASES OF THE SOUR 

BY L. MARCH PHILLIPPS. 

|F the reader were to take camel at Biskra on the 
northern edge of the Sahara and penetrate into 
the desert for about a week's march, in a south- 
easterly direction, he would find himself in the 
country of the " dunes," or pure desert, here 
known as the region of 1 Souf. For he must understand 
that, though the whole Sahara goes under the name of desert, 
yet it is not all desert in the same degree of perfection and 
purity. It contains many tracts which grow a sort of sparse 
covert of meagre, sun-bleached bushes and a few tufts of wiry 
grass on which the wandering Bedouin shepherds drive their 
goats to feed in winter time, but which, through the long 
droughts of summer, are so dried up and shrivelled by the re- 
lentless heat that no kind of sustenance is to be derived from 
them. Then the shepherds seek more favourable pastures, and 
in the late spring months the borders of the desert are scat- 
tered over with vagrant herds nibbling their course towards 
the slopes of the Atlas Mountains clothed with verdure and 
wetted with mist. 

And besides these intermediate tracts, where life still strug- 
gles fitfully, there are others, further gone in dissolution, which 
indeed have said farewell to life for good and all, but which 
yet bear, as skeletons do, the semblance of what they were 
when the breath and growth of life animated them. These 
landscapes, of an inexpressible melancholy, yet preserve in the 
main the structural features of ordinary scenery. Hills and 
valleys are there, and plains and sudden ravines and the beds 
oi rivers, with their lesser tributaries clearly marked and cut 
in the rock, with boulders rounded by the action of water 
lying in them. But all now is a mineral waste. These rudi- 
ments are unclothed. The hills are built of naked crags, the 
valleys and plains are expanses of sandy and stony debris 
with plateaux and tablelands of bare rock intervening, the 
streams and river beds have been dry these many ages. These 
of all the regions of the Sahara are the most mournful to 



i9i i.] THE OASES OF THE SOUF 613 

travel through. Death is nothing in itself: it counts only as 
the negation of life. Human dust is dust only. Show us the 
form from which life has fled and we will believe in death. 
So it is here. A landscape is spread before you but it is a 
dead landscape. All the forms survive which you associate 
with natural fertility, and it needs no more effort of the im- 
agination to hear water tinkling in these brooks and to see 
cattle feeding on these slopes than to hear dead lips speak 
and to see dead eyes unclose. What so terribly manifests the 
power of death is the presence of the victim it has struck 
down. 

But there is another and final stage, and it is on this that 
you enter when you attain the Souf country. This is the 
state of utter dissolution when all semblance and appearance 
of organic form is lost and wholly blotted out. No trace any 
longer exists of the original skeleton structure of hill and 
valley and ravine and river bed, but all has melted down into 
landscape dust, the dust of pure sand. There is an old super* 
stition or belief which attaches, I believe, to almost all deserts, 
which Marco Polo, and many Arabs and travellers the world 
over from the most ancient times, have noted, that the deserts 
are infested and peopled with spirits seemingly human but 
always malignant. These the belated traveller frequently en- 
counters. He hears by night the sound of their camels walk- 
ing, and voices speaking and sees their caravans passing, and, 
following after them, he gets led away and perishes miserably 
in the wild desert. These are legends which seem to belong 
very appropriately to those usual aspects of desert scenery 
which retain the semblances of natural landscape, for nothing 
can be easier, as I have just said, than to re-invest this scen- 
ery with all the attributes of the life that has left it and to 
re-people it with living habitants. Itself the spectre of life, it 
seems to crave a spectral population. But I never heard of 
such stories attaching to the dune regions, nor do I think they 
do. There is nothing here in Nature to support them. These 
are places too dead to nourish even ghosts. 

All 'around you to the horizon, unbroken for many a 
day's march, the dunes of the Souf extend, taking the form 
not of ridges but of rounded hillocks, in size averaging, I 
should judge, about thirty to fifty feet high. They are set as 
close as they can stand together, so that, looking out from 



614 THE OASES OF THE SOVF [Feb., 

some vantage point, one sees nothing but an endless, dense 
array of white sand summits, contrasting with a wierd abrupt- 
ness with the intense and uniform dark blue of the sky. The 
monotony of such an arrangement is beyond the power of 
words to describe. Gradually as the senses, accustomed to 
Nature's variety, feed on this perpetual uniformity, the effect 
of the landscape eats into one's consciousness. There is noth- 
ing here at all but the one thing, sand, so that the whole 
landscape, all soft white contours and nothing else, appears to 
be the monument of the desert's victory and conquest over 
Nature. This is its significance. It is towards this that the 
sand is constantly working. In those regions we lately spoke 
of, dead but not dissolved, which yet retain organic form and 
structure, the sand even now is at its deadly work. Driven 
hither and thither by the strong desert wind, its dry waves 
beat perpetually on rock and cliff, undermining and eating 
them away, till the overhanging masses come tumbling down ; 
and on the scattered fragments the sand sets to work anew at 
its task of disintegration. The fierce heat aids. For such 
here are the extremes from the heat of day to the chill of 
night, and such the effect of the sudden contraction of 
matter thus occasioned, that frequently rocks and stones split 
into pieces with a report like an exploding shell. Thus while 
the sun blasts, the sand pulverises, and the work of reducing 
the whole landscape to its component atoms of sand- dust 
goes steadily forward. All the boulders and pebbles that strew 
the desert's floor are rounded, as by running water, by the 
sand's perpetual friction. It is so quietly patient, so silent 
and invidious in its methods, that it appears innocuous and 
lulls suspicion. Who would give loose sand the credit for such 
awful powers of destruction ? Yet such it possesses. From life 
to death, from death to dissolution, are the stages the desert 
has passed or is passing through, and the prime agent in this 
process of destruction is the sand. 

But look yet a little closer. There are occasionally to be 
found, even in the dune region, tiny spots of fertility which 
seem a thousand-fold more luxuriant and welcome by reason 
of the encompassing sterility. Beneath the sand the hard and 
waterproof desert Moor retains some springs of moisture, and 
where these have been tapped there arises small but prodigal 
groves of palms and gardens of fruit trees. They are but tiny 



i.] THE OASES OF THE SOUF 615 

spots, the name they go by is the " cup " oases, and they are 
commonly set in clusters or loose chains following the course 
of the unseen water course below. The feet of the palms being 
in the moisture beneath, their heads usually reach to about 
the level of the desert sand, so that on a desert march one 
sometimes finds oneself arrived at the very brim of one of 
these groves before it is visible, and then, quite suddenly, there 
spreads at one's feet a little rich dark green carpet of palm 
foliage with the blossoms of apricot and peach trees twinkling 
beneath it in the deeper shade. Often, riding across the desert, 
I have mistaken these cup oases, filled to the brim with ver- 
dure, for patches of evergreen bushes or low scrub growing in 
the sand. Only when you approach them closely do you real- 
ize that the feathery foliage into which you seemed about to 
ride is carried on tall stems rooted fifty feet below. 

The reader will understand with what feelings of delight 
and blessed security the wanderer who has been long exposed 
to the chances of desert travel, who has experienced its scorch- 
ing heat by day and cold by night, its lashing sand storms, 
and, above all, those phantom dangers and sense of continuous 
insecurity which attend those who journey in a waterless 
country, he will understand how one subject to such chances 
must regard the abrupt transition from the exposure and glare 
of the sand tracts to these little heavens of verdure and tran- 
quillity. It is difficult to give an idea of the contrast. The 
present writer was exposed once in a small sailing boat to one 
of the white squalls which visit the lake of Como, and, driven 
almost at random down the lake, he managed by good luck to 
struggle into the tiny wall-encircled harbor which juts forth 
at the end of the Arcomati point. The transition was instan- 
taneous from furious wind and dashing water to absolute still- 
ness and peace. Six feet off the storm raged and sang, and 
here the clustering figs drooped motionless overhead and the 
rose colored oleanders were reflected in the quiet pool below. 
Such is the suddenness of the change from the stress of desert 
marching to the cool security of one of the Souf oases. 

But he little knows the desert and its surreptitious and 
fawning methods of attack who counts on this security too ab- 
solutely. The desert is never beaten. Even while you stretch 
your limbs in the pleasant shade it is devising plots for your 
undoing. The surrounding dunes are all your enemies, and 



6i6 THE OASES OF THE SOUF [Feb. 

their one ambition and object in life is to effect the obliteration 
of these spots of verdure as they have obliterated all other 
signs of life which the desert contained. With the wind help- 
ing it as usual, the sand keeps pouring its little avalanches 
and cascades of grains down the encompassing slopes into the 
oasis. The work is silent, and, like all the desert does, appar- 
ently innocent, so almost imperceptible is the advance it makes. 
But in reality each tiny oasis stands a perpetual siege and 
owes its existence to a ceaseless vigilance. Walk up the sur- 
rounding dunes and you will find their summits all paved over 
and pinned down with a matting of palm leaves to prevent 
the sand from being blown along and drifted by the wind. 
Even so the air in windy weather is so charged with the yellow 
grains that all objects at a few yards are blotted out in the 
murky obscurity. At such times many tons of sand must be 
discharged into the neighboring oases, and the villagers are kept 
busy clearing it away and carrying it back to the desert in 
baskets. These are open assaults, but even in still weather 
little driblets of grains are perpetually at work attempting the 
secret annexation of some unguarded inch of cultivated ground. 
Looking back on those regions and the life men lead there, 
the outstanding fact about them seems this hostility of the 
desert. The sand is the agent of death and dissolution.. With 
all life it is on terms of deadly enmity. To travel on it is 
dangerous, to dwell in it impossible, and even those small 
strongholds of fertility called oases which occasionally relieve 
its monotony are ceaselessly watched by the old enemy and 
ceaselessly tested and attacked. A man lives by vigilance 
here, even as he lives whose enemy's point is at his breast. 
Who shall wonder that the glances of Arabs are so alert and 
wary and suspicious, that their movements are of such catlike 
promptitude and swiftness, their forms so sinewy and enduring, 
and their whole demeanor and presence so suggestive of unre- 
mitting vigilance ? Watch a Bedouin even in town bazaars. 
He has the step and bearing and glance of one who is in an 
enemy's presence and feels himself in danger. It is the habit 
of his breeding. Only sleepless viligance can stand a chance 
against the sleepless enmity of the desert. 




WHAT WAS THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE? 

BY HILAIRE BELLOC. 
III. 

|HAT state of society which I have described in 
my last two papers, the ordered and united so- 
ciety of the Roman Empire, passed into another 
and very different state of society: the society 
of what are called "The Dark Ages." 
From these again arose after adventures and perils which 
will be later touched upon, the great harvest of medieval civil- 
ization. Hardly had the Roman Empire turned in its maturity 
to accept the fruit of its long development (I mean the Catholic 
Church), when it was already apparent that the organism had 
grown old and was about to suffer some great transition. 

This close succession of fruit and decay is precisely what 
one would expect from the analogy of all living things: for 
as a plant has its vigorous springtime, thenTits blossoming, and 
finally, just after it is most fruitful, falls into the deadness of 
winter, so one would imagine the long story of Mediterranean 
civilization to have proceeded. When it was at its final and 
most complete stage, one would look for some final and com- 
plete philosophy which should satisfy its long search and solve 
its ancient riddles: but after such a discovery, after the fruit 
of such a maturity had fully developed, one would expect the 
end. 

Now it has been the singular fortune of our European civili- 
zation that the end did not come. Dissolution was in some 
strange way checked. Death was averted ; and the more closely 
one looks into the unique history of that salvation the salva- 
tion of all that could be saved in a most ancient and fatigued 
civilization the more one sees that this salvation was effected 
by no agency save that of the Catholic Church. Everything 
else, after, say, 250 A. D., the philosophies, the barbarians, the 
current passions and the current despair, made for nothing 
but ruin. 



618 THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE [Feb., 

There is no parallel to this in all the history of mankind. 
Every other great civilization has, after many centuries of de- 
velopment, either fallen into a fixed and sterile sameness or 
died and disappeared. There is nothing left of Egypt, there 
is nothing left of Assyria. The Eastern civilizations remain, 
but remain immovable; or if they change can only copy ex- 
ternal models. 

But the civilization of Europe the civilization, that is, of 
Rome and of the Empire had a third fortune differing both 
from death and from sterilization : it survived to a resurrection. 
Its essential seeds were preserved. 

Men carved less well, wrote verse less well, let roads fall 
slowly into ruin, lost or rather coarsened the machinery of 
government, forgot or neglected much in letters and in the 
arts and in the sciences, for five hundred years. But there 
was preserved, right through that long period, not only so 
much of letters and of the arts as would suffice to bridge the 
great gulf between the fifth century and the eleventh, but also 
so much of what was really vital in the mind of Europe as 
would permit that mind to blossom again after its repose. 
And the agency, I repeat, which effected this conservation of 
the seeds, was the Catholic Church. 

It is impossible to understand this truth, indeed it is im- 
possible to make any sense of all of European history if we 
accept that story of the decline of civilization which is currently 
put forward in non-Catholic societies, and which has seemed 
sufficient to non-Catholic historians. 

Their version is, briefly, this : 

The Roman Empire, becoming corrupt and more vicious 
with the spread of luxury and with a sort of native weakness 
to be discovered in the very blood of the Mediterranean, was 
at last invaded by young and vigorous tribes of men bringing 
with them all the strength of certain native barbaric virtues 
and proceeding in blood from that stock which later rejected 
the unity of Christendom and began the modern Protestant 
societies. 

A generic term has been invented by the modern theorists 
and historians whose version I am here giving; the vigorous, 
young, uncorrupt, and virtuous tribes which broke through the 
boundaries of the effete Empire and rejuvenated it, are grouped 
together as "Teutonic:" a German strain very strong, both 



I9II.] THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 6ig 

numerically, and also in intensity and virile power superior to 
what was left of Roman civilization, came in and took over 
the handling of affairs. One great body of these Germans, the 
Franks, took over Gaul; another, the Goths, took over in vari- 
ous branches, Italy and Spain. But most complete, most fruit- 
ful, and most satisfactory of all, was the eruption of these 
vigorous and healthy men into the outlying province of Britain, 
which they wholly conquered, exterminating its inhabitants and 
colonizing it with their superior stock. 

It was inevitable (the anti-Catholic historian proceeds to 
admit) that the presence of uncultured though superior men 
should accelerate the decline of arts in the society which they 
thus conquered. It is further to be deplored that their simpler 
and native virtues were contaminated by the arts of the Roman 
clergy and that in some measure the official religion of Rome 
captured their noble souls; for that official religion permitted 
the poison of the Roman decline to affect all the European 
mind even the Teutonic mind for many centuries. But at 
the same time this evil effect was counterbalanced by the in- 
eradicable strength and virtues of the Northern barbaric stock. 
They brought into Western Europe the subtlety of romantic 
conceptions, the true lyric touch in poetry, the deep reverence 
which is the note of modern religion, the love of adventure 
in which the old civilization was lacking, and a vast respect 
for women. At the same time their warrior spirit evolved the 
great structure of feudalism, the conception of the medieval 
knight and the whole military ideal of medieval civilization. 

Is it to be wondered at that when' great new areas of 
knowledge were opened up in the later fifteenth century by 
suddenly expanded travel, by the printing press, and by an 
unexpected advance in physical science, the emancipation of 
the European mind should have brought this pure and barbaric 
stock to its own again ? In proportion as Teutonic blood was 
strong, in that proportion was the hierarchy of the Catholic 
Church and the hold upon men of Catholic tradition, shaken 
in the early sixteenth century, and before that century had 
closed the manly stirp of North Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, 
and Britain had developed the Protestant civilization which is 
progressive, healthy, and in competition already the master of 
all rivals; destined soon to be, if it be not already, supreme. 

Such is a not exaggerated summary of what the anti- 



620 THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE [Feb., 

Catholic school of history has given us from German and from 
English universities (with the partial aid of anti-Catholic aca- 
demic forces within Catholic countries) during the first two- 
thirds of the nineteenth century. 

Needless to say there went with this way of writing his- 
tory a flood of hypothesis which was presented as fact.. Thus 
the representative system was (of all things in the world!) 
imagined or hoped to be a barbaric, Teutonic, non-Roman and 
therefore non-Catholic thing. The gradual decline of slavery 
was attributed to the same miraculous powers in the northern 
pagans; and in general, whatever thing was good in itself or 
was consonant with modern ideas, was referred back to this 
original source of good in the business of Europe. 

Meanwhile the bias against civilization, Roman tradition 
and the Church, showed itself in a hundred other ways: the 
conquest of Spain by the Mohammedans was represented as 
the victory of a superior people over a degraded and con- 
temptible one. Every revolt, however obscure, against the 
unity of European civilization in the Middle Ages, and nota- 
bly the worst revolt of all, the Albigensian, was presented as 
a worthy uplifting of the human mind against conditions of 
bondage. And, most remarkable of all, the actual daily life of 
Catholic Europe, the habit, way of thought and manner of 
men, during the period of unity from say the eighth century 
to the fifteenth was simply omitted ! * 

At the moment when history was struggling to become a 
scientific study, this school of self-pleasing generals held the 
field. When at last history did become a true scientific study, 
this school collapsed; but it has yet, as an inheritance of its 
old hegemony a singular power in the lower and more popu- 
lar forms of historical writing; and where the English lan- 
guage is spoken it is almost the only view of European de- 
velopment which the general student can obtain. 

It will be noted at the outset that the whole of the fan- 
tastic picture which this old and discredited theory presented, 
is based upon a certain conception of what happened at the 
breakdown of the Roman Empire. Unless these vigorous 
young barbaric nations did come in and administrate, unless 

* Every English-speaking schoolboy has probably heard at some time in his life, of King 
Alfred, and certainly not one in a thousand but would be astonished to hear that King Alfred 
went to Mass ; and that one in a thousand if you were to tell him that truth would probably 
disbelieve it. 



191 1.] THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 621 

they really were very considerable in number, unless their 
character in truth was what this school postulated it to be, 
unless there did indeed take place a struggle between these 
great German nations and the Mediterranean civilization in 
which the former won and ruled as conquerors over subject 
peoples, unless these primary axioms have some historical truth 
in them the theory which is deduced from them has no his- 
torical value whatsoever. A man may have a preference, as 
a Protestant or merely as an inhabitant of North Germany or 
Scandanavia, for the type of man who originally lay outside 
the Roman Empire. He may as an anti-Catholic of any kind 
hope that civilization was decadent through Catholicism at the 
end of the united Roman Empire, and it may please him to 
imagine that the coincidence of barbaric with Protestant Eu- 
rope is a proof of the former's original prowess. Nay, he 
may even desire that the non-Catholic and non-traditional 
type in our civilization shall attain to a supremacy which he 
has not yet actually reached. But the whole thing is only a 
pleasant (or unpleasant) dream, something to imagine and not 
something to discover, unless we have a solid historical foun- 
dation in the destruction of the Roman Empire in the way 
and by the men whom it presupposes. The whole hypothe- 
sis, the validity of the whole point of view, depends upon our 
answer to the question, "What was the fall of the Roman 
Empire?" If it was a conquest such as we have just seen 
postulated and a conquest actuated by the motives of men so 
described, then this old anti-Catholic school, though it could 
not maintain its exaggerations (though, for instance, it could 
not connect representative institutions with the barbarians) 
would yet be substantially in perspective with the truth. 

Now, the moment documents began to be seriously studied 
and compared, the moment modern research began to approach 
some sort of finality in the study of that period wherein the 
United Roman Empire of the West was replaced by sundry 
local Kingdoms, students in proportion to their impartiality 
became more aud more convinced that the whole of this anti- 
Catholic attitude reposed upon mere myth and legend. 

There was no conquest of effete Mediterranean peoples by 
vigorous barbarians. Such barbarians as were preserved in 
the Empire or as entered it during the great period of transi- 
tion, were not of the sort which this anti-Catholic theory pre- 



622 THE " FALL " OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE [Feb., 

supposed. They had no conspicuous respect for women of 
the type which should produce the chivalric ideal. They were 
not free societies but slave-owning societies. They did not 
desire, attempt, or dream of the destruction of the Imperial 
power: that disaster which was gradual and never complete 
in so far as it came about at all, came about in spite of the 
barbarians and not by their conscious efforts. Again they 
were not numerous; on the contrary they were but handfuls of 
men, even when they appeared as pillagers and raiders over 
the frontiers; when they came in large numbers they were 
wiped out. They did not introduce any new institutions or 
any new ideas, and (save in Britain) * it is demonstrable that 
they introduced no appreciable element of new blood. 

Again, you do not find in that capital change from the old 
civilization to the Dark Ages, a rise of legend and of the ro- 
mantic and adventurous spirit, in a word of the sowing of the 
modern seed where the barbaric pillagers or the regular bar- 
baric soldiers pass. Romance appears much later, and it ap- 
pears more immediately and earliest in connection with pre- 
cisely those districts in which the passage of the few Teutonic 
barbarians had been least felt. There, again, is no link between 
barbaric society such as we know it and the feudalism of the 
Middle Ages; there is no trace of such a link! There is on 
the contrary a very definite and clearly marked historical 
sequence between Roman civilization and the feudal system, 
attested by innumerable documents which, once read and com- 
pared in their order, leave no sort of doubt that feudalism and 
the medieval civilization reposing on it were Roman things. 

In a word, a cessation of central Imperial rule in Western 
Europe, the cessation of the power and habit of one united 
organization centralized in Rome to color, define and admin- 
istrate the lives of men, was an internal revolution; it was not 
impressed from without. It was a conversion, not a conquest. 

All that happened was that Roman civilization having 
grown very old, failed to maintain that vigorous and universal 
method of local government which it had for four or five hun- 
dred years supported. The machinery of taxation gradually 
weakened; the whole of central bureaucratic action weakened; 
the greater men in each locality began to acquire a sort of 

* The case of Britain, as we shall see in the next article, is doubtful and, therefore, inter- 
esting in the extreme. 



191 1.] THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 623 

independence, and sundry soldiers, as we shall see in a moment, 
benefited by the slow (and enormous) change, occupied the 
local " palaces/' as they were called, of Roman administration, 
secured such advantage as what was left of the Roman scheme 
of taxation could give them, and, conversely, had thrust upcn 
them so much of the duty of government as the decline of 
civilization could still maintain. 

That is what happened, and that is all that happened. 

As an historical phenomenon it is what I have called it 
enormous. It most vividly struck the imaginations o! men. 
The tremors and the occasional local cataclysms which were 
the symptoms of this change of base from the old high civil- 
ization to the Dark Ages, singularly impressed the numerous 
and prolific writers of the time. Their terrors, their astonish- 
ment, their speculations as to the result, have come down to 
us very vividly. We feel after all those centuries the shock 
which was produced on the mind by Alaric's sack of Rome, or 
by the march of the Visigoths through Gaul into Spain, or by 
the appearance of the mixed horde called after their leaders 
Vandals in front of Hippo in Africa. But what we do not 
feel, what we do not obtain from the contemporary documents, 
what was a mere figment of the academic brain in the genera- 
tion now just passing away, is that anti-Catholic and, as it were, 
anti-civilized bias which would represent the ancient civiliza- 
tion as conquered by men of another and of a better stock 
who have since developed the supreme type of modern civili- 
zation, and whose contrast with the Catholic world and Catho- 
lic tradition is at once applauded as the principle of life in 
Europe and emphasized as the fundamental fact in European 
history. 

The reader, however, must not be content with this mere 
affirmation, though the affirmation is based upon all that is 
worth counting in modern scholarship. 

He will ask what, then, did really happen ? After all, Alaric 
did sack Rome; the Kings of the Franks were German chief- 
tains, and so were those of the Burgundians, and so were 
those of the Goths, both eastern and western. In other words, 
the false history has got superficial ground to work upon, and 
it is the business of anyone who is writing true history even 
in so short a series of articles as this, to show that such ground 
is only superficial. 



624 THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE [Feb., 

In order to understand what happened we must first of all 
clearly represent to ourselves the fact that the structure upon 
which that ancient civilization had in its first five centuries 
reposed, was the Roman Army. By which I do not mean 
that the number of soldiers was very large compared with the 
civilian population, but that the organ which was vital in the 
State, the thing that really counted, the institution upon which 
men's minds turned, and which they thought of as the founda- 
tion of all, was the military institution. 

When (as always ultimately happens in a complex civiliza- 
tion of many millions) self-government had broken down, and 
when it was necessary, after the desperate faction fights which 
that breakdown had produced, to establish a strong centre of 
authority, the obvious and, as it were, necessary person to 
exercise that authority, in a State constituted as was the Ro- 
man State, was the Commander-in- Chief of the army; and all 
the word " Emperor " the Latin word Imperator means, is a 
commander-in-chief. 

It was the Army which made and unmade Emperors; it 
was the Army which helped to construct the great roads of 
the Empire; it was in connection with the needs of the Army 
that they were traced; it was the Army which secured (very 
easily, for peace was popular) the civil peace of the vast or- 
ganism, and it was the Army which, especially, guarded its 
frontiers against the uncivilized world without ; upon the edge 
of the desert, upon the edge of the Scotch mountains, upon 
the edge of the poor, wild German lands, the garrisons made a 
sort of wall within which wealth and right living could ac- 
cumulate, outside which small and impoverished bodies of men 
destitute of the arts (notably of writing) save in so far as they 
rudely copied the Romans or were permeated by adventurous 
Roman commerce, lived under conditions which in the Celtic 
hills we can partially appreciate from the analogy of ancient 
Gaul but of which in the German sand plains and woods we 
know hardly anything at all. 

Now this main instrument, the Army, the instrument re- 
member, which not only preserved civil functions but actually 
created the master of all civic functions, the Government, went 
through three very clear -stages of change in the first four 
centuries of the Christian era. 

These changes have been fairly known to historians since first 



191 1.] THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 62$ 

history was seriously studied in modern times. But it needed 
a group of quite modern scholars to point out their vast 
significance; for it is the transformation of the Roman Army 
which gives the clue to the otherwise inexplicable phenomenon 
of the transition which took place in the fifth and sixth cen- 
turies between the full civilization of Rome and the beginning 
of the Dark Ages. 

In its first stage the Roman Army was still theoretically 
an army of true Roman citizens.* As a matter of fact the 
army was already principally professional, and it was being re- 
cruited even in this first stage very largely from the territor- 
ies which Rome had conquered. Thus we have Caesar raising 
a Gallic legion almost contemporaneously with his conquest of 
Gaul. But for a long time after, till well into the Christian 
era, the Army was conceived of in men's minds as a sort of 
universal institution rooted in the citizenship which men were 
still proud to claim throughout the Empire and which belonged 
only to a portion of its inhabitants. 

In the second phase, which corresponded with the begin- 
ning of a decline in letters and in the arts, which carries us 
through the welter of civil wars in the third century and, in- 
troduces the remodelled empire at their close, the Army was 
becoming purely professional and at the same time drawn from 
whatever was least fortunate in Roman society. The recruit- 
ment of it was treated much after the fashion of a tax; the 
great landed proprietors (who, by a parallel development in 
the decline, were becoming the chief economic feature in the 
Roman State) were summoned to send a certain number of 
recruits from their estates. 

Slaves would often be glad to go, for, hard as were the 
conditions of military service, it gave them citizenship, certain 
honors, a certain pay, and a future for their progeny. The 
poorer freed men would also go at the command of their lord 
(though only of course a certain proportion for the conscrip- 
tion was very light compared with modern systems, and was 
made lighter by re-enlistment, long service, absence of reserves, 
and the use of veterans). 

During this second stage, while the Army was becoming 

* A soldier was still technically a citizen up to the very end. The conception of a soldier 
as a citizen, the impossibility, for instance, of his being a slave, was in the very bones of 
Roman thought. 

VOL XCII. 40 



626 THE " FALL " OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE [Feb., 

less and less civic, and more and more a profession for the 
destitute and the unfortunate, the unpopularity and the igno- 
rance of military service among the rest of the population was 
increasing. 

Recruiting was evidently becoming difficult, and the habit 
was growing of offering the impoverished peoples outside the 
pale of the Empire the advantages of residence within it, on 
condition that they should be liable to serve as Roman soldiers. 

The conception of towns and territories within the Empire 
which were affiliated and allied to it rather than absorbed by 
it, was a very ancient one. That conception had lost reality 
so far as the old towns and territories it had once affected 
were concerned, but it paved the way for this constant and 
increasing use of barbaric troops, an increasing number of whom 
were drafted into the regular corps, and whole bodies of which 
were more and more frequently accepted en bloc and under 
their local leaders as auxiliaries to the Roman forces. 

Some such bodies appear to have been settled upon land 
on the frontiers, to others were given similar grants at very great 
distances from the frontiers; thus we have German barbarians 
at Rennes in Brittany. And, again, within the legions, who 
were all technically of Roman citizenship and in theory re- 
cruited from the full civilization of Rome, the barbarian who 
happened to find himself within that civilization tended more 
than did his non-barbarian fellow citizen (or fellow slave) to 
accept military service. He would nearly always be poorer; 
he would, unless his experience of civilization was a long one, 
feel less the hardship of military service; and in this second 
phase, while the army was becoming more sedentary (more at- 
tached, that is, to particular garrisons), more permanent, more 
of an hereditary thing handed on from father to son, and dis- 
tinguished by the large portion of what we should call married 
quarters, it was also becoming more and more an army of men 
who, whether as auxiliaries or as true Roman soldiers, were in 
blood, descent, and to some extent in manners, and even in 
language, barbarians. There were negroes, there were proba- 
bly Celts, there were numerous Germans, and so forth. 

In the third stage, which is the stage that saw the great 
convulsion of the fifth century, the army, though not wholly 
barbaric, was already in its most vital part barbaric. It took 
its orders, of course, wholly from the Roman State, but great 



191 1.] THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 627 

groups within it were perhaps not Latin- speaking, and were 
certainly regarded both by themselves and by their Roman 
masters as non-Roman in manners and in blood. 

It must most clearly be emphasized that not only did no 
such thought as an attack upon the Empire enter the heads 
of these soldiers, but that the very idea of it would have been 
inconceivable to them. Had you proposed it they would not 
even have known what you meant. That a particular section 
of the army should fight against a particular claimant to the 
Empire (and therefore and necessarily in favor of some other 
claimant) they thought natural enough, but to talk of an attack 
upon the Empire itself would have seemed to them like talking 
of an attack upon bread and meat, air, water and fire. The 
Empire was the whole method and meaning of their lives. 
At intervals the high and wealthy civilization of the Roman 
Empire was, of course, subjected to attempted pillage by small 
and hungry robber bands without its boundaries. 

As the machinery of Government grew weak through old 
age, and as the recruitment of the army from barbarians and 
the large proportion of auxiliary regular forces began to weaken 
that basis of the whole State, the tendency of these pillaging 
bands to break in, grew greater and greater ; but it never oc- 
curred to them to attack the Empire as such. What they 
wanted was permission to enjoy the life which was led within 
it, and to abandon the wretched conditions to which they were 
compelled outside its boundaries. Sometimes they were trans- 
formed from pillagers to soldiers by an offer extended by the 
Roman authorities; more often they effected their raids in the 
absence of a good garrison in their neighborhood ; a force 
would march against them and if they were not quick at get- 
ting away would cut them to pieces. But with the progress 
of Roman decline the attacks of these small bands became more 
frequent. Towns had to regard such attacks as a permanent 
peril and to defend themselves against them. The raiders would 
sometimes traverse great districts from end to end, and whether 
in the form of pirates from the sea or of war bands on land, 
the ceaseless attempts to enjoy or to loot (but principally to 
enjoy) the conditions that civilization offered, grew more and 
more persistent. 

It must not be imagined, of course, that civilization had 
not occasionally to suffer then, as it had had to suffer at inter- 



628 THE " FALL " OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE [Feb., 

vals for a thousand years past, the attacks of really large and 
organized barbaric armies.* Thus in the year 404, driven by 
the pressure of an Eastern invasion upon their own forests, a 
vast Gothic host under Radagasius pushed into Italy. The men 
bearing arms alone were estimated (in a time well used to 
soldiery and to such estimates) at 200,000 ; and it is a confused 
conception of events of that sort which has led superficial or 
biassed history into the idea of national invasions and conquests 
by the Germans. 

But as a matter of fact those 200,000 were wiped out. The 
barbarians were always wiped out when they attempted to 
come as conquerors. Stilicho (a typical figure, for he is of bar- 
barian descent, yet in the regular Roman service) cut to pieces 
one portion of them, the rest surrendered and were sold oft 
and scattered as slaves. Immediately afterwards you have a 
violent quarrel between various soldiers who desire to capture 
the Imperial power. The story is fragmentary and somewhat 
confused : now ene usurper is blamed, and now another, but 
the fact common to all is that with the direct object of usurp- 
ing power a Roman general calls in barbarian bands of pil- 
lagers (all sorts of groups, Franks, Suevians, Vandals) to cross 
the Rhine into Gaul and to help in the civil war. The Roman 
Army of Britain acclaims a usurper of the name of Constantine, 
who drives the pillaging bands beyond the Pyrenees into Spain ; 
and the end of the five or six years of the trouble is the re- 
conquest of Gaul by the legitimate Emperor Honorius, who 
puts things in order again. The succeeding generation presents 
us with documents that do not give a picture of a ruined 
province by any means; only of a province which has been 
traversed in certain directions by the march of barbarian robber 
bands, who afterwards disappeared, largely in fighting among 
themselves. 

We have, of course the third in the series of these true 
invasions in force the very much more serious business of 
Attilla and the Huns. In the middle of the century, fifty years 
after the destruction of the Goths, these Asiatics, with numer- 
ous other barbaric dependents of theirs from the Germanics, 
penetrated into the heart of Gaul. The end of that business, 

* For instance, a century and a half before, the Goths, a barbaric nation just north of the 
Eastern Empire had broken in and ravaged in a worse fashion than their successors in the 
fifth century. 



.] THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 629 

infinitely graver though it was than either of the two others, 
is just what one might have expected. The regular and disci- 
plined forces of the Empire with their auxiliary barbaric trocps, 
destroy the barbarians' power near Chalons, and the third of 
the great invasions is wiped out as thoroughly as was the 
first. 

In general, the barbaric eruptions into the Empire failed 
wholly wherever regular troops could be found to oppose them.* 

What, then, were the successes ? What was the real nature 
of the action of Alaric, for instance, and his sack of Rome 
and how, later, do we find "kings "in the place of the Roman 
Governors ? 

The real nature of the action of men like Alaric, is utterly 
different from the imaginary picture which the " Teutonic " 
school would provide us with. Consider the truth upon Alaric, 
and contrast it with the imaginary picture. 

Alaric was a young soldier of Gothic race in command of 
a Roman auxiliary force, and as much a Roman officer, as in- 
capable of thinking of himself in any other terms than those 
of the Roman Army, as any one of his colleagues. He had 
his commission from the Emperor Theodosius, and when Theo- 
dosius marched into Gaul against the usurper Eugenius, he 
counted these auxiliaries as among the most faithful of his 
army. It so happens, moreover, that the auxiliaries were 
nearly all destroyed in the campaign. Alaric survived, and 
was rewarded by further military dignities in the Roman mili- 
tary hierarchy. He is ambitious, in particular of figuring in 
the chief branch of the service, namely that regular nucleus 
of the Roman forces which, though in blood was perhaps 
by this time almost as barbaric as the auxiliaries, was based 
on a corporate tradition of Roman citizenship and inherited 
all the kudos of the highest branch of the service. Alaric's 
ambition is, then, the title of Magister Militum, with the dig- 
nity that accompanied that highest of military titles. The 
Emperor refuses it. One of the Ministers begins to plot with 
Alaric and suggests to him that he might gather other bar- 
baric auxiliaries under his command, and make things uncom- 
fortable for his superiors. Alaric rebels, marches through the 
Balkan Peninsula into Thessaly and Greece, and down into the 

* It was the absence of regular troops in Britain, as we shall see in the next article, which 
lends to the invasion of that province its peculiar character. 



630 THE " FALL " OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE [Feb., 

Peloponesus; the regulars march against him (according to 
some accounts) and beat him back into Epirus. 

There ends his first adventure. He remains in Epirus at 
the head of his forces, having made peace with the Govern- 
ment and enjoying a regular commission from the Emperor. 

He next tries a new adventure to serve his ambition in 
Italy, but his army is broken to pieces at Pollentia by the 
regulars. The whole thing is a civil war between branches of 
the Roman service and is motived, like all the Roman civil 
wars, by the ambitions of generals. Alaric does not lose his 
commission after his latest adventure; he begins to intrigue be- 
tween the Western and Eastern heads of the Roman Empire. 
The great invasion of the Goths under Radagasius is for him 
of course, as for any other Roman officer, an invasion of bar- 
baric enemies. 

When the invasion was over and destroyed, Alaric had the 
opportunity to become restless again, and asked for certain 
arrears of pay that were due to him. Stilicho, the great rival 
general, admitted his right to arrears of pay, but just at that 
moment there occurred an important but obscure palace in- 
trigue which was based, like all the real movements of the 
time, on differences of religion, not of race. Stilicho, who is 
suspected of attempting to restore paganism, is killed. In the 
general confusion certain of the families of the barbaric auxil- 
iaries garrisoned in Italy are massacred by the non- military 
population. As Alaric is a general in partial rebellion against 
the Imperial authority, the barbaric auxiliaries join him. 

The total number of Alaric's men was very small; they 
were only 30,000. There was no trace of nationality about 
them; they were simply a horde of discontented soldiers ; they 
had not crossed the frontier; they were not invaders; they 
were part of the long-established and regular garrisons of the 
Empire; and, for that matter, many garrisons and troops of 
equally barbaric origin, sided with the regular authorities in 
the quarrel. Alaric marches on Rome with this disaffected 
Roman Army, claiming that he has been defrauded of his due 
in salary, and leaning upon the popularity of the dead Stilicho, 
whose murder he says he will avenge. His thirty thousand 
claim the barbarian slaves within the city, and certain sums 
of money which had been the pretext and motive of his re- 
bellion. 



191 1.] THE "FALL" OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 631 

As a result of this action the Emperor promises AJaric his 
regular salary as a general, and a district which he may not 
only command but plant with his few followers. Even in the 
height of his success, Alaric again demands the thing which 
was nearest his heart, the supreme title of Magister MiHtum, 
the highest post in the hierarchy of military advancement. 
But the Emperor refused to give that. Alaric marches on 
Rome again, a Roman officer followed by a rebellious Roman 
Army. He forces the Senate to make Attalus nominal Em- 
peror of the West, and Attalus to give him the desired title, 
his very craving for which is most significant of the Roman 
character of the whole business. Alaric then quarrels with his 
puppet, deprives him of the insignia of the Empire, and sends 
them to Honorius ; quarrels again with Honorius, reenters 
Rome and pillages it, marches to Southern Italy, dies, and his 
army is dismembered. 

There is the story ot Alaric as it appears from documents 
and as it was in reality. There is the truth underlying the 
false picture with which most educated men were recently 
provided by the anti- Roman bias of modern history. 

Certainly the story of Alaric's discontent with his salary 
and the terms of his commission, his raiding marches, his plunder 
of the capital, shows how vastly different was the beginning 
of the fifth century from the society of three hundred years 
before. It is symptomatic of the change, and it could only 
have been possible at a moment when central government was 
at last breaking down. But it is utterly different in motive 
and in social character, from the vague, customary conception 
of a vast barbarian invasion led by a " war lord/' pouring 
over the Alps and taking Roman society and its capital by 
storm. Indeed it has no relation to such a picture. 

If this be true of the dramatic adventure of Alaric which 
has so profoundly affected the imagination of mankind, it is 
still truer of the other contemporary events which false history 
might twist into a " conquest " of the Empire by the barbar- 
ian. 

There was no such conquest. All that happened was an 
internal transformation of Roman society in which the chief 
functions of local government fell to the chiefs of auxiliary 
forces in the Roman Army. 

There was no destruction of Roman society, there was no 



632 THE " FALL " OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE [Feb. 

breach of continuity in the main institutions of what was now 
the Western Christian world ; there was no considerable ad- 
mixture (in these local civil wars) of German blood no ap- 
preciable addition at least to the large amount of German 
blood which, through numerous soldiers and much more numer- 
ous slaves, had already been incorporated with the population 
of the Roman world. 

But in the course of this transformation of the fifth and 
sixth centuries local government did fall into the hands of 
those who commanded the auxiliary forces of the Roman 
Army and they were by birth barbarian. From these men the 
royal families of Europe, and from their government the na- 
tional groups of Christendom, descended. 

It behooves us next, therefore, to describe how and why 
this change in the government of men took place, how and 
why local government succeeded the old centralized imperial 
government, and how and why the administration of such 
government fell to the auxiliary soldiers who took it up on 
the breakdown of the Empire. 

This will be treated in the next division, " The Beginnings 
of the Nations." 




FREQUENT COMMUNION FOR YOUNG AND OLD. 

BY JAMES A. MOLONEY; 

|HE chief shepherd of the flock has recently re- 
asserted through a solemn decree of the Sacred 
Congregation the right and the duty respecting 
young children of feeding upon the Body of 
Jesus Christ in Holy Communion. The bishops 
to whom the decree was primarily addressed because each is 
sole pastor of his diocesan people, have already instructed the 
priests to begin at once distributing the Bread of Life to their 
little ones and thus conform to the positive behest of our 
Holy Father, who himself has given expression again to the 
mind of our Blessed Lord and of His holy Church. The de- 
cree in question has furnished abundant documents showing 
the teaching and the practice of the Catholic Church from 
apostolic beginnings down through the ages until this present 
day. It leaves us no option in the matter of giving Com- 
munion to young children when their little minds, like so 
many budding flowers, begin to open in the light of human 
understanding, which is commonly supposed to be about the 
age of seven years. Nor does the decree leave our own ma- 
turer minds in doubt upon so capital a question, for it un- 
equivocally lays down in the plain and solemn language of the 
Fourth Ecumenical Council of the Lateran, the true and only 
belief of Catholics : " If any one shall deny that all the faith- 
ful of both sexes, who have attained the use of reason are 
obliged to receive Communion every year, at least at Easter 
time, according to the precepts of holy Mother Church, let 
him be anathema." 

This formula and others like it coerce not the Catholic into 
believing, but rather give him cause to rejoice in the acquisi- 
tion of certain truth: one of intellectual freedom's proudest 
faculties is the power of embracing heartily every undeniable 
proposition. 

Before dwelling at greater length upon this indubitable 
teaching of the Church, it will be well to state at once and 



634 FREQUENT COMMUNION FOR YOUNG AND OLD [Feb., 

briefly the authorized custom in the giving of Communion for- 
merly and at present in the Eastern Churches and in the 
West. From the very beginning it has been the practice, as 
it is to-day in the Orient, to administer the Eucharist imme- 
diately after baptism to mere infants. Until the thirteenth 
century this same practice was prescribed and obtained 
throughout the universal Church. About that date, however, 
another custom began to take root and grow and spread 
abroad far and wide, until it was formerly and authoritatively 
approved and prescribed by the Lateran Council for the entire 
Latin Church. That custom has been ratified again and again 
by our highest authority upon earth, notably by the great 
Council of Trent : it is the practice which Pope Pius X. would 
have prevail everywhere under the Latin rite, and utterly sup- 
plant the manifest abuse of denying to a portion of those who 
have a right to it participation in the divine sacrament of the 
Lord's Supper. Now who precisely are those that have not 
only the right, but a duty likewise, to eat at the table of 
the Lord ? At the very least, all those who, in the words of 
the Council, have attained the use of reason. 

The question consequently is not of seven years, of ten, or 
of fourteen strictly speaking, since the light of reason breaks 
through the individual brain not according to the number of 
years it has taken to develop but in accordance with the re- 
quired development. It not infrequently happens that a bright 
child of six has keener intellectual vision than a dull-brained 
child of eight. Observation has averaged the various ages at 
which children begin to exercise their hitherto latent under- 
standing at seven years. In a very general way the abuses 
deplored by the Holy Father originated in the view taken of 
the phrase "use of reason." Two causes for the condemned 
practice of deferring Communion till the age of ten or twelve 
have been specified and reprobated by the Pope; the innova- 
tors unreasonably required a better drilling in Christian doc- 
trine for the Blessed Eucharist than for the sacrament of pen- 
ance. Their mind upon this matter is easily inferred from the 
fact that they admitted the child to confession long before he 
was entitled in their estimation to receive first Communion. 
Examination in the catechism was employed as a test for 
discrimination among the candidates. Another cause of this 
comparatively modern innovation was an error borrowed from 



i9i i.] FREQUENT COMMUNION FOR YOUNG AND OLD 635 

the Jansenists which manifested itself in the undue insistance 
upon an exaggerated preparation of soul for the becoming re- 
ception of Holy Communion. The belief that the Holy Eucha- 
rist should be given as a reward only, not as a bracing stimu- 
lant and needful corroboration of human frailty, showed a 
faith tainted by heretical teachers. The Middle Age Angelic 
Doctor not only wrote " Tantum ergo Sacramentum venerewur 
cernui" but likewise " O salutars Hostia . . . da robur fer 
auxilium" If extraordinary preparation were essential, how 
could infants incapable of preparation have been permitted to 
receive ? 

Ability to discriminate between what is right and what is 
wrong requires some use of the reason and betokens the pos- 
sibility of committing sin. If, then, admission to the sacra- 
ment of penance presupposes the use of reason, what else does 
the denial of admission to Communion at the same age imply 
but that the use of reason does not qualify for reception of 
the Eucharist ? And this denial incurs the Council's anathema. 
The abuse based upon it does downright injustice to young 
children, endangers early innocence, and thwarts the undoubted 
desire of Jesus Christ. 

The blessed sacrament of the Eucharist was instituted by 
our loving Lord to be the instrument for uniting all men to 
His own mystical Body. Salvation is utterly impossible for any 
one not so united. Christ is the head of the invisible body, 
men are the members. He is the vine, we are the branches. 
Severed from the head the life-giving center, a member must 
necessarily die ; the branch cut off from the trunk can evident- 
ly receive no sap, it can only wither in death. Our divine 
Savior, eternally God, but man also from the time of His Incar- 
nation, is the only Mediator between man and his Maker. By 
ineffable union the human nature of our blessed Redeemer is 
linked to the divine. It may reverently be said that on one 
side Jesus Christ is man, while on the other side He is very 
God. By incorporation with the God-man we are thus brought 
into saving contact with the Deity through the intermediation 
of Him Who died for us on a cross. To become incorporated 
requires a divine operation and the instrument fashioned for 
that purpose at His last supper upon earth by a divine Person 
is no other than the Holy Eucharist. By Communion we are 
intimately united to the Head of the mystical body and in 



636 FREQUENT COMMUNION FOR YOUNG AND OLD [Feb., 

that way brought into the merciful embrace of the Divinity. 
There is no other door which will open into heaven for us but 
Jesus Christ. Through Him we must pass to, or forever remain 
outcasts from, that beautiful home on high. Said Christ : " be- 
come like little children" first, then "come ye all to Me: I 
am the Way." The objection is invalid which would deny this 
eucharistic instrumentality on the ground that baptized infants 
and some adult lovers of their Lord can see salvation without 
the actual reception of Holy Communion. 

The same objection would tell with equal cogency against 
the necessity of sacramental baptism ; for some are saved who 
have never been actually washed by the cleansing waters. In 
both cases the virtual stands for the actual reception of the 
sacrament. That little children can be saved without their 
first Communion is no argument, therefore, against the ap- 
proved custom strenuously emphasized by Pius X. of giving 
Communion to all those capable of discriminating between this 
sacred food received at the holy table of the Lord and the 
ordinary victuals served them in the dining-room at home. 
Our Savior has said : " My Flesh is real food, and My Blood 
is real drink." The flour and water wafer has been changed 
from bread into the living Body of Christ. It still looks like 
common food, for its appearance was not changed. It looks 
like bread in order to show that what we receive is food, 
though not of the common sort but the bread of angels. The 
sacred Body into which the bread is changed being alive has 
blood and soul, and being the Body of Jesus Christ it is that 
of a divine Person. The faintest glimmer of budding reason 
will suffice for a child's understanding of the change of one 
thing into another, the difference between a dead body and one 
that is alive, and what it is to be God and not a man. A life- 
less lesson from the bare catechism may not set things in the 
faint light of the child mind, but the priest or any other teacher 
who has learnt the simple and natural mode of communicating 
elementary truths will be fairly understood after the fashion of 
a child. He has but to remember his former self in order to 
be at home immediately in the talk that conveys the ideas of 
children to a little child. 

Moreover, the foregoing simple information is by no means 
a requirement of a test for first Communion. Nothing more 
in the way of enlightenment is required than the knowledge 



i9i i.] FREQUENT COMMUNION FOR YOUNG AND OLD 637 

that Communion is not common but sacred food for the soul. 
It is a young child, indeed, who does not know that God above 
will reward the good in heaven and punish the wicked in 
hell. Besides, every child who has a mother knows some- 
thing of love and will understand what a favor it is to be the 
friend and beloved of Jesus. What answer will they make 
who are called to account for unduly keeping apart two such 
pure lovers as Jesus and the child, the Lamb of God from a 
lamb of his own flock? This human lamb, moreover, is in con- 
stant danger of being carried off and devoured by a roaring 
lion who is forever roaming around through this wilderness 
of a world savagely seeking for prey. Would you be so cruel, 
so manifestly unjust, as to forbid him the protection of One 
in Whose presence the devil trembles, while recalling to mind 
the grinding heel that crushed his serpent's head ? Would 
you hold back that little spouse of our Savior till spiritually 
starved into the commission of mortal sin and disrobed of her 
snow-white innocence before her wedding day ? Would you 
not rather introduce at an early age the children of your flock 
to One who is the Way in the only true sense; lead them 
into the true light of Him who is Truth itself; and direct their 
innocent steps afield to the rich pastures and living manna 
provided for them by their dearest Shepherd Who is Himself 
the Life ? 

He is " the living bread that came down from heaven," 
not really like that manna of old which kept men alive for a 
time but could not confer immortality : the youngest child that 
eats this heavenly bread will never die for " he shall live for* 
ever/ 1 " Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid 
them not " is as authoritatively interpreted by the Pope a divine 
injunction to give Communion to little ones as well. The 
Holy Eucharist is the sacrament which unites us to Christ: 
love means union, and Jesus loved the 'children. The white 
purity of their innocent souls has a charm for the innocent 
Lamb of God, Who loves them with more than maternal ten- 
derness, and longs for the holy hour when they shall sit down 
at the same table with the senior members of the household. 
With His own sacred hands our blessed Savior will break for 
their eating the Bread of Life. He will feed His flock like a 
shepherd, giving special care to the lambs of the flock, occas- 
ionally taking them up by turn into His arms to foster, fondle 



638 FREQUEN7 COMMUNION FOR YOUNG AND OLD [Feb., 

and caress them. Is there a heart so wanting in responsive 
tenderness as not to be touched by such divine embracements ? 
Wiio will have the irrational hardihood to repulse those children, 
who come flocking round the mild and attractive Person of 
Jesus Christ ? Do you not dread the indignant reprimand of 
their gentle Lord, lovingly occupied in laying a hand here and 
there upon each young head, embracing them one by one and 
blessing them all together ? He loved to have the white-souled 
little ones come trooping trustfully to His presence and gloried 
in beholding Himself the heavenly magnet attracting their 
young hearts. 

To resume and enforce in sober statement the compelling 
statutory commands of our Holy Father and the Church, no 
one is allowed in practice or belief to deny that every Catholic, 
whatever be his age, who has the use of reason is not merely 
allowed Jbut strictly obliged to receive Communion. Who is 
to decide 'for young children unable to form a decision for 
themselves ? The natural father of the child is bound in con- 
science to watch that little one's mind unfold as the body de- 
velops, and at the first efflorescence of reason to take steps to 
have that youthful candidate for holy Communion conducted 
to the holy table of the Lord, to be intimately and mysteriously 
united to Him and fed upon the spiritual food of His sacred 
Body and most precious Blood. As confession always precedes 
first Communion, the confessor has an opportunity of obeying 
the injunction given to him and forming the final decision re- 
garding the fact of the child's capability to discern the Body 
of the Lord which he proposes to receive. Beyond the neces- 
sary condition of sanctifying grace, the confessor has nothing 
to pass upon but that question of fact, namely, whether or not 
this candidate for first Communion has come to the use of rea- 
son. Granting the use of reason, the child's right and duty 
to communicate are undeniable and the confessor is not at liberty 
to deny him Holy Communion. In ministering to the spiritual 
needs of a parish discipline is a prime necessity and the pas- 
tor must be its head master. Will not this decree occasion a 
clash between the disciplinary chief and the confessor, by as- 
signing to the latter a duty which has hitherto been performed 
by the pastor ? Not necessarily nor even likely, for the rea- 
sonable rector, in conformity with the decree, will look for 
children about the age of seven to receive first Communion, 



i9i i.] FREQUENT COMMUNION FOR YOUNG AND OLD 639 

leaving the confessor to decide in each individual case regard- 
ing the child's mental capacity. When the candidate informs 
his pastor that his confessor did not judge him fit the matter 
will be settled, and no rational pastor will interfere with the 
execution of the law. Some method will probably be adopted 
to insure order, and instead of a disorderly first Communion 
of one now, and again another, general first Communion will 
take place at stated times, say at the same intervals as for the 
periodic confession of children, thus guaranteeing the edifying 
memory of a great day in the history of every Catholic life. 
To impart richness and robust vigor to that life, frequent and 
even daily Communion is strongly recommended. 

By a sacrament we are born again to a new life, by a sac- 
rament we are brought to full spiritual stature, by a sacrament 
the wounds of the soul, though they be mortal, are healed; 
so likewise we are fed and our spiritual life is sustained by a 
sacrament, which is called the holy Eucharist, and contains 
the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of our Lord Jesus 
Christ. This life of the soul is maintained and fostered by 
eating " that bread which came down from heaven," much in 
the same way as our natural life is supported by eating our 
ordinary meals ; for the natural has been made after the pattern 
of the supernatural. We were born first by natural generation 
in order to be born again by water and the Holy Ghost. 
Were there no heaven, there would be no earth. Time is be- 
cause of eternity. The bodily life is for the sake of the life 
eternal. This participation of the divine life, means that God 
lives in us and we in Him, and that as the Son has by nature 
the same life as the Father in its infinite fullness so we share 
it by grace. This new life, as well as the old, requires food 
for its maintenance. Being better acquainted with the needs 
of the common life of nature, we are accustomed to use the 
light of this knowledge in our understanding of the supernatural. 
And as we know that lack of food for a protracted period re- 
sults in death, so we say by analogy that to deprive the sou 
of its heavenly sustenance for an undue time causes spiritual 
starvation or cessation of the new life. The analogy goes fur- 
ther; for as we debilitate, without destroying, our bodily life 
by stinting the supply of nourishment, so we can weaken and 
cause partial paralysis of the soul by unduly prolonging the 
interval between our Communions. 



640 FREQUENT COMMUNION FOR YOUNG AND OLD [Feb., 

Furthermore, proper frequency and regularity of meals will 
keep the body up to its work and in a condition of vigorous 
health; in a somewhat similar way frequent Communion tones 
up the soul, gives it strength and suppleness, renders it solid 
and steady as the impregnable rock. The quality also of our 
daily victuals has much to do with our bodily well-being; 
but the excellence of the divine food is unquestionable. Ex* 
cellent food is best adapted for assimilation ; the food prepared 
for us by Christ is assimilated in such a way that we are 
transformed into Him. Food that is well assimilated is profita- 
bly eaten at frequent intervals, for in such case " good diges- 
tion waits on appetite and health on both." A healthy condi- 
tion of body is dependent also upon medicine, particularly in 
acute passages of life. Ordinary food is medicinal as well as 
nourishing, and so is spiritual refection through holy Com- 
munion. It expels the noxious humors of a libidinous body, 
allays the unruly fervor of the passions, soothes the chafing 
of an irascible temper, brings down the dangerous inflammation 
of a haughty mind, accelerates the action of a sluggish heart, 
and reduces that excessive temperature of a disordered soul 
which is unquestionably fatal if not timely checked. 

The Council of Trent, cited by the Pope in this decree, 
calls Communion "an antidote." Its medicinal action secures 
us against the poison of mortal sin. By corroborating the 
soul's stamina it bestows the power of resisting the assaults 
of innumerable baccili and dislodging the fatal germ. In the 
same way it guarantees the soul against smaller faults; as the 
well-toned body is analogously preserved from the common 
slight colds and similar small ailments. No wonder, then, that 
it is the wish of the Church and the expressed desire of the 
celebrated Ecumenical Synod of Trent "that at every Mass 
the faithful who are present should communicate." Pope Pius 
X. in another decree published by his command in 1905, declares 
that in composing the Lord's Prayer Christ meant us to ask 
the Father to give us this celestial bread daily ; in other words, 
our blessed Savior wished us to be daily communicants. By 
means of the Eucharistic Sacrament we are united to God ; in 
union there is strength, particularly where the union is with 
One who is omnipotent. The frailty of our tainted nature 
should of itself suggest association with the strong. Many, on 
the contrary, make their own weakness the cause of keeping 



i9i i.] FREQUENT COMMUNION FOR YOUNG AND OLD 641 

them away from the holy table ; they do not count themselves 
entitled to frequent Communion till they have become better 
Christians. This is like abstaining from your victuals because 
you have not yet the strength which comes from frequent, 
regular, and fortifying food. The Pope insists upon it that 
Communion is not reserved for the pious devotee. To take 
up again the analogy between nature and grace, between what 
is fitting for the man and what is suitable for the Christian, 
I observe that unless only those who are in health and not 
liable to be ill should visit the doctor and take his medicine, 
the Catholic who feels his own weakness and has experienced 
frequent fits of spiritual ennui and is fearful of being unable 
to persevere in well-doing, is the one man above all others who 
has need of frequently feeding upon the Body of Jesus Christ 
and, if it were possible, of going daily to Communion. 

You can legitimately fancy our blessed Savior preaching 
from the tabernacle and saying: "Come ye all to Me"; for 
"I came not to call the righteous, but sinners; they that are 
well do not need a physician, but they that are ill." In the 
decree on Frequent and Daily Communion we find these 
words: "The primary purpose of the Blessed Sacrament is 
not that the honor and reverence due to our Lord may be 
safeguarded or that holy Communion may serve as a reward 
of virtue." In all His labors, wonder- workings, and speeches 
Christ's main object was the eternal welfare of the world; so 
when He cried out with gentle tenderness and touching pity 
for mankind: "Oh come to Me all -ye who labor and are 
heavy laden and I will give you rest," the prime meaning was 
this profound one: you who are most miserable, receiving here 
the hard buffets of fortune and no hope of an eternal reward 
hereafter; you who are crushed to earth by the heavy bur- 
den of all the ills which men are heir to; you who are poor 
wanderers in this thorny vale of tears, " like sheep without a 
shepherd when the snow shuts out the sky"; you who labor 
hard, receiving but a wretched, temporary, evanescent reward 
for your labors and are withal borne down by the inward 
weight of your own sins oh come to Me, and I will give 
your wandering minds the steady light of divine faith to guide 
them, your despairing souls the cheering prospect of better 
times in the world to come, and your chilled hearts the fire 
of true love which will make all things come easy to you : I 
VOL. xcn. 41 



642 FREQUENT COMMUNION FOR YOUNG AND OLD [Feb., 

will give you the repose of a good conscience here and the 
delightful rest of paradise when your work is finished. " The 
labor we delight in physics pain ; " Christ bestows that love 
which lightens labor : He is our Physician. To Him we go 
by Communion, and He comes home with us, abides in the 
house of our soul, watches over us in our daily avocations, 
steadies our steps again when we stumble, and is ever by our 
side, cheering us by pointing to the great reward, and showing 
the tried affection of a true Friend : " greater love no man hath." 

Union with Christ entails a new instalment of that grace 
which makes the soul pleasing to the eye of God and gives in- 
creased stability to every good habit of mind and heart. The fre- 
quent Communicant has a keener vision of the world invisible, 
a more abiding trust and ineradicable hope in God, and a 
deeper love of Jesus which is proof against every temptation 
to betray the Master. Daily Communion is apt to intensify 
that salutary fear of the Lord which is a gift of the Holy 
Ghost; it is meant to make us look more lovingly toward God 
as our Father and through love to keep His law; it will have the 
effect of stiffening anew our resolve to put nothing before the 
observance of that law; it greatly quickens that spiritual in- 
stinct by which we readily discern the divine will in our 
regard ; it keeps us more on the alert to guard against the wiles 
of the enemy; it reanimates our taste for spiritual things so 
that we may inwardly rejoice in God's service and be jealous 
of His honor on all occasions. To receive daily is to go to 
school every day to the best Master and have our minds dis- 
ciplined to drink in the spirit of Christ's Gospel and acquire 
a lucid view of its contents. 

Our actions rise out of our thoughts, and practice opposed 
to the wisdom of Christ can be traced to that wisdom of this 
world which is foolishness with God. It is of paramount im- 
portance to fill the mind with religious truth well- digested and 
thoroughly assimilated, till it saturates the soul and is woven 
into the texture of the brain. This can be done only by con- 
forming one's own life to that of Jesus Christ. He is truth, 
and in Him we shall see light. In Christ there is no dark- 
ness, and association with Him will free us more and more 
from that blindness of mind caused by the exhalations reeking 
up from an unpurified heart. Those who receive their Lord 
often will gradually and progressively acquire His spirit and 



i9i i.] FREQUENT COMMUNION FOR YOUNG AND OLD 643 

so be able to penetrate to the marrow of the good tidings and 
realize the Gospel by a profound synthetic factor of mind and 
heart. That discipline of the mind and mental furnishing 
which run counter to the Christian doctrine is worse than 
worthless. Christ is the Light of the world, and every intel- 
lectual torch not kindled thereat gives but a lurid flame and 
blinding smoke. If the child of seven sees only by the faint 
light of dawning reason, first Communion and frequent Com- 
munion afterwards, by uniting his soul to the living Luminary, 
will awaken and develope that noble gift of understanding 
with which he was endowed in baptism. And what is more, 
his little mind will be informed in such fashion as to enlist 
the feelings of his whole spirit and cause him to grow up into 
the completeness of a logically consistent Christian man. 

Be he young or old the thorough- going Catholic who 
keeps constantly communicating with Christ in the Eucharist 
will view all things in Him, follow the radiating line of every 
human happening to the one Center of all, and steady his 
own mind by contemplating created things in the majestic 
unity of the Creator. To do this is true wisdom, nor is there 
any other philosophy worthy of the name. The Eucharistic 
Christ will impart that meek and lowly spirit which character- 
ized his own blessed Mother and to which He has attached 
the promise of a Kingdom. He will speak whispered words 
of comfort to the sorrow-laden, fill with satisfying sweetness 
the upright heart of him who would have justice prevail 
though the skies should fall down upon our heads, mould the 
spirit of man to mercy toward his fellows and thus insure the 
divine mercy for himself, create a pure heart within the human 
breast and purge the inward eye, enabling it to behold the 
invisible God ; fortify the soul to suffer for truth's sake and 
temper the entire man to considerate forbearance and love 
of peace. If Communion intensifies the sevenfold gift accom- 
panying sanctifying grace and that gift entails the fruits of 
the Holy Ghost, the oftener we sit down to the Eucharistic 
banquet the greater should be our charity, joy, peace, patience, 
benignity, goodness, long- suffering, mildness, faith, modesty, 
continency, chastity. 

These graces, gifts, and blessings primarily affect the spir- 
itual part ; but noble as it is by origin and by nature, the soul 
does not constitute the man. The body is part of his sub- 



644 FREQUENT COMMUNION FOR YOUNG AND OLD [Feb. 

stance, and though lapsing into inorganic earth when forsaken 
by the immortal spirit, will one day be reorganized, reunited, 
and share the superior partner's immortality. " It is sown in 
corruption ; it will rise in incorruption. It is sown a mortal 
body; it will rise a spiritual body." In expressing this con- 
soling truth revealed to us from heaven through St. Paul, the 
inspired apostle employs a figure of speech, comparing the 
body's burial in the earth to the agricultural operation of sow- 
ing. Now the seed of immortality, which according to divine 
promise will germinate at the final consummation, is sown in 
the living body by Holy Communion. Christ has said : " He 
who eats My Flesh and drinks My Blood ... I will raise him 
up at the last day." Speaking to Martha, inconsolable for the 
loss of her brother Lazarus, who was dead and buried four 
days, the weeping Jesus, who loved Lazarus, said to the sis- 
ter : " Your brother shall rise again. Martha said to Him : I 
know that he shall rise again on the last day." This is gos- 
pel; now listen to the faith of the patriarch Job commemo- 
rated in the Old Testament : " I know that my Redeemer liv- 
eth, and that on the last day I shall rise again from earth : 
and in my flesh I shall see God my Savior. I shall see Him 
my very self and not as if I were another person : and I shall 
look upon Him with these same eyes of mine." 

The Catholic teaching about the body's resurrection from 
the grave on the last day, founded upon divine revelation and 
implied in the quoted words of Jesus Christ, is this, that our 
bodies shall rise again from the tomb by virtue of the Blessed 
Eucharist. There is no doubt, therefore, as to the resurrec- 
tion and its efficient cause. The thought that, though our 
dear ones have descended into the horrid stillness of the grave 
where we ourselves shall one day join them, we nevertheless 
may see them face to face with the very same eyes and 
clothed in the selfsame bodies we saw upon earth, should be 
an inducement to eat frequently, and even daily, the Body and 
drink the Blood of Jesus Christ, and thus multiply and ac- 
cumulate our hopes of seeing God our Savior with glorified 
eyes of flesh in heaven, and of there sitting down with our 
friends once and forever to the everlasting banquet prepared 
from all eternity for the true and faithful lovers of Christ the 
Lord. 




THE GENERAL CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL 

CHURCH. 

BY JOHN F. FENLON, D.D. 
I. 

seem of late years to have been growing quite 
incurious of the course of events among our 
neighbors, the various denominations of Protest- 
antism. From time to time, it is true, events in 
which they had a part have called forth note- 
worthy utterances from some of our leading churchmen; yet 
very seldom, and hardly except when our own path had been 
crossed, our cause attacked, or our feelings hurt. Of interest 
in the internal affairs of Protestantism itself we have shown lit- 
tle, probably we have felt little. 

The reason is not hard to find. The old controversial in- 
terest has died away, since controversy has come to be gener- 
ally regarded as productive of little good and tending to em- 
bitter relations; and the intrinsic interest in the story of 
contemporary Protestantism has little magnetism for us. We 
listen to it as to an old story, an oft-told tale with few varia- 
tions, with little new and little to give us pleasure. The course 
which American Protestantism has taken was long ago predicted; 
no unforeseen developments of doctrine, nor any striking mani- 
festation of vitality or progress has occurred to attract our 
special interest. There is nothing to surprise unless it be the 
very slow coming of the inevitable; and this should not sur- 
prise the discerning. For a century or more Protestantism has 
been repeatedly declared to be on its death- bed; but evidently, 
like the English monarch, it is an unconscionably long time 
dying. We are far from desiring its early demise; because, 
though we do not, of course, admire its distinctive features, 
we rejoice that it preserves so much of our common Christian 
heritage and trust it shall continue to distribute it among those 
who will not come to us. Heaven preserve us always from an 
unbelieving and godless race ! 

The end seems still far off; for any widespread and once 
powerful religion, unless force intervenes, will lose its hold only 



646 CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH [Feb., 

very gradually. In a certain sense, indeed, Protestantism is 
already dead ; for the distinctive doctrines of Luther and Calvin 
slumber in old tomes or live a languid life in the hearts of a 
few old-fashioned pastors and professors. They have vanished 
from the hearts of the people. But the Protestantism of Prot- 
estantism the opposition to Catholic principles and doctrine 
and to the Catholic Church is still vigorous, though a grateful 
change has tempered much of its bitterness ; and a Protestant- 
ism which clings to the Bible and finds therein the words of 
eternal life, which believes in Christ and accepts Him as Savior 
however vague its ideas of doctrine remains to day the 
dominant faith of our land. Its adherents are not all church- 
goers; there is still, thanks be to God, a great deal of faith 
in God and in Christ, and much deep religious spirit, bearing 
fruit in religious life, as well among the many who seldom go 
to church a delinquency for which Protestantism has only 
gentle blame as among those who are strict church members. 
Unbelief, then, is not so widespread as common report would 
have us think. We credit undue importance to the preachers 
of new doctrine; the new religionists and the higher critics 
are abroad in the land, but they are taken much less seriously 
by the people than they themselves are prone to imagine. The 
new is ever apt to be noisy; the young idea is an infant crying in 
the night ; novelties are hawked about on the streets and blazed 
forth on electric signs, but the staple goods fill the shelves and 
draw their regular stream of customers. We do not deny that 
our few large dealers in higher critical novelties and our many 
smaller ones who peddle their remnants of theories made in 
Germany drive a rather brisk trade among us ; and some of 
their wares will inevitably prove to possess lasting qualities. 
But, after all, they attract as yet only a relatively small por- 
tion of the American public; though it is, unfortunately, a most 
influential portion, whose judgment, aided by the logic of 
Protestantism and its propensity to rationalism, will tell upon 
the mass. At present, then, if belief is rather vague, so too 
is unbelief; and it is not improbable that the mass of the 
American people retain more old-fashioned religious belief, 
more of the Catholic creed, than the people of some so-called 
Catholic portions of Europe. Dogma, unfortunately, is not 
held in very high esteem because the belief in an authoritative 
teaching Church has been lost and here lies the original sin 
of the nerveless and flaccid religious thought of this day. 



i9i i.] CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 647 

Nevertheless, all due allowances made, we are convinced there 
is a more solid basis for a structure of doctrinal religion than 
is commonly estimated. At any rate we are certain to gain 
nothing by pessimism, by aloofness, and lack of interest. If 
our hope were greater and our interest in the religious affairs 
of our neighbors more living, then our help would become 
more intelligent, more friendly, and more effective. 

The ills of American life do not yield to the silence cure, 

II. 

If the trend of religious thought, then, among the Ameri- 
can people in general and among the Protestant denominations 
in particular ought to attract more notice from our speakers, 
writers and journalists, there is, in addition, a special reason 
for us to be interested in the development of the Episcopal 
Church. There, as we know, an acute struggle never ceases 
between Catholic and Protestant ideas; nor indeed between 
old fashioned Protestant ideas and new. It is worth while, oc- 
casionally, to watch the fortunes of the battle, which, perhaps, 
can best be observed on a broad field at their Triennial Gen- 
eral Convention. We purpose then to speak, too lengthily, we 
fear, for many readers, of the last Convention which was held 
at Cincinnati, October 5-21; to note a few of its proceedings,* 
with their spirit and tendency; and to comment at leisure, as 
we go along, no doubt too discursively. The reader is duly 
forewarned. 

This Convention, we think, was one of unusual interest and 
great importance. Its opening was marked by the sermon of 
one whom it is a pleasure to mention Bishop Wordsworth, 
of Salisbury; for we owe not a little to this distinguished Eng- 
lish scholar, who has made the Latin Bible the favorite object 
of his study. It is he (with Mr. White) who has given us the 
best edition of the Gospels in St. Jerome's version; its text, 
indeed, is so universally recognized as pure, both by Catholic 
and Protestant critics, that he can have left little in this por- 
tion of the Bible to be done by the Vulgate Revision Commis- 
sion. In his sermon, the Catholic spiritual note of the old 
Oxford, so accentuated in Newman, Pusey, the Kebles, and Isaac 
Williams, is again struck, yet not, we feel, with the clearness 
and force of the old masters the men who awakened a new 

* They are not officially reported, but accounts of them, substantially accurate, we pre- 
sume, are given in The Churchman, of New York, and The Living Church, of Milwaukee. 



648 CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH [Feb., 

spirit in Anglicanism and, without intending it, so wonderfully 
aided the Catholic revival in England. Bishop Wordsworth's 
theme is the reform of the Church and he wisely goes to the 
root the reform of the clergy. He urges the necessity for 
" times of retreat, of loneliness, of detachment " for those en- 
gaged in the ministry, he pleads for a strict spiritual training 
of ecclesiastical candidates in the seminaries, " quiet homes of 
spiritual life " where " they for a time may be alone with God, 
like Moses on Sinai " and learn to become " regular and obedi- 
ent, self-denying and happy in their ministry," so as not to 
be " worn out or crushed by premature practicality." The 
seminaries in England which have moulded themselves on this 
Catholic ideal have produced, he declares, the men who are 
the strength of the Anglican Church. We cannot but rejoice 
at their success, for two reasons ; first, because the men trained 
in them spread a deeper and truer doctrine in the Church of 
England ; and, secondly, because so many of them and of the 
people whom they instruct leave the Established Church for 
their true home, like if such a light fancy be pardonable 
ducklings who forsake the hen that mothered them, and in 
spite of maternal warnings and predictions of inevitable dis- 
aster betake themselves to the kindly bosom of the water. 

Perhaps this English bishop had reason to believe that the 
Episcopalian seminaries of this country, despite their excellent 
points, do not in general promote such a life of discipline, 
self-denial, meditation and prayer as he finds, for example, at 
Cuddeston, near Oxford. This would be an opinion in no way 
discordant with the echoes that we hear now and then, which 
bear witness to ideals somewhat different from our own ; and 
such a judgment, we infer, is very clearly implied in the beau- 
tiful and faithful description of Catholic seminary life recently 
given us by Father McGarvey, who knows both types well 
through personal experience.* However this may be, it is pre- 
cisely in regard to the recruiting of the clergy that the pros- 
pect of the Episcopal Church is least bright. " Candidates for 
Holy Orders," we learn from a report submitted to the con- 
vention, "have declined steadily from 510 in 1504, to 469 in 
1907 and now to 431. It is evident that the ministry is not 
attracting its due proportion of young and able men." The 
blame is ascribed chiefly to the worldliness that has come with 

* Ecclesiastical Review, November, 1910. 



i9i i.] CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 649 

increased prosperity, a cause which will touch all churches. 
During this period, however, our own seminaries have seen a 
remarkable increase and two of them have a larger enrollment 
than the twenty theological seminaries of the Episcopal Church. 
It is noteworthy that the Episcopal Church, which is every- 
where the church of the wealthy and well-to-do, at present 
recruits its ecclesiastical candidates largely if not chiefly from 
among the poor. At least we draw this inference from the 
statement that ninety per cent of the students at the General 
Theological Seminary earn part of their expenses by work in 
missions, etc. If the straightened circumstances of the stu- 
dents will teach the ministers of the future sympathy with the 
poorer classes, and insight into their needs, the Episcopal 
Church may be redeemed from one of its greatest reproaches 
that while it has succeeded among the wealthy, it has sig- 
nally failed, nearly always and everywhere, among the poor 
and middle classes. There is one mark of the true Church, at 
least concerning which it maintains a fit and modest silence 
"the poor have the Gospel preached to them." 

If the " Report of the Committee on the State of the 
Church " is not very encouraging in regard to the ministry, it 
indicates progress in most other respects. In six years " com- 
municants " or members have increased more than 130,000; at 
present the number given is 937,861, while in the committee's 
estimate, "there are at least one million persons in this land 
entitled to communicate in our churches; and twice as many 
may fairly be claimed as 'adherents' more or less adhesive." 
If only the High Church party could succeed in instilling its 
principles into a large proportion of this mass the outlook 
would certainly be brighter in this country for the growth of 
a deeper and firmer Christian spirit. 

One hopeful feature of the report is the increased number 
of pupils under the care of the Church. In 1907, there were 
14,000 pupils in the parish schools of the Episcopal Church 
and 9,000 in their Industrial Schools; in 1910 they numbered 
respectively 29,000 and 19,000, doubling their enrollment in 
each case. The percentage, however, is still low, as these 
schools total only 58,000 while the Sunday Schools have 
457,000. This indicates, at least, a growing recognition of the 
necessity of a religious education. Some day the Protestant 
Churches in this country will awake to the realization that 



650 CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH [Feb., 

they have been their own greatest enemies; as the people 
drift further and further away from them, the folly will be ap- 
parent of expecting those uninstructed in the principles and 
spirit of a Church to remain its loyal members. The most 
earnest and discerning Protestant leaders of many denomina- 
tions already perceive that the neglect of religious instruction 
in the daily education of our American children means inevit- 
ably the unchurching of the masses in our country ; it has, 
indeed, to a great extent, already brought it about. Religion 
ought to be the element in which children live, move and have 
their being; but religion as American Protestant children are 
made to feel it is like a cold douche once a week. If relig- 
ious life is feeble in their homes as it so frequently is and 
absent from school, we may safely infer, even without the 
blessed light of modern pedagogy, that their religious educa- 
tion is bound to be deficient and ineffective. The Sunday 
School is a very inadequate substitute; and poor makeshift as 
it must necessarily be, it is often robbed of the value it has 
by inability to distinguish religious truth from questions o! 
geography, history, criticism and archeology, more or less con- 
nected with the Bible and more or less useful. 

We know indeed where the difficulty lies. Protestantism 
no longer has the courage to teach. She (if we may personify 
the Church of a thousand sects) has become the Doctor dubi- 
tantium, leaving her children to choose their own opinions. 
She feels that the divine commission "Teach all nations" is 
no longer for her; or, as one cynically put it, she is ready to 
accept it in the form of the typographical error, "Teach all 
notions." Certain it is, unless Protestantism can find a way 
to give more definite religious instruction and more of it, she 
will lose much of her power as a religion and take more and 
more the form of a social and charitable organization. 

III. 

We have tarried too long at the door of the Convention; 
now to its proceedings. They are of interest to us, not 
so much for the legislation enacted as for the indications 
of the theological temper and tendencies of its members. Dis- 
regarding then some acts important to Episcopalians, let us 
note a few signs of the times. 

The most important utterance at the Convention, if we 
were to judge by the size of the newspaper type announcing 



i9i i.] CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 651 

it to the public, was the denial that the Bible is the word of 
God. This was made, or at least seemed to be made, in the 
course of a three-minute speech compressed unwisdom by a 
minister from Oregon. No one replied to him ; possibly be- 
cause they knew the man. But a newspaper sensation re- 
sulted ; and the Episcopal Church was put in a very bad 
light, until the offending minister, in a carefully written state- 
ment, explained he had been misunderstood, and declared his 
belief in the Bible as the word of God. The incident is note- 
worthy as showing that, despite the inroads of rationalism in 
the Episcopal Church as well as elsewhere, the denial of the 
inspiration of Scripture is still a scandal. It is worth remark- 
ing, too, that a conference representing all varieties of opinion 
in the Church, adopted a resolution which incidentally de- 
scribed the Holy Scripture " as containing all things necessary 
to salvation and as being the rule and ultimate standard of 
faith." The bruised reed is not broken. Belief in the inspira- 
tion of Scripture is still essential and, we trust, still vigorous 
among Episcopalians, though most likely we should find their 
ideas of inspiration unsatisfactory. 

The old tenacious clinging to the King James version as 
the only Bible authorized for public use has, after many years 
of opposition, given way; the Convention while retaining the 
old version as the standard, permits the reading of the lessons 
in the Revised Versions, English and American. This is a 
step which brings the Protestant Bible a little nearer to the 
Catholic, since the Revised Version, at least in the New Tes- 
tament, is much closer to our own than the King James text. 
With a very few exceptions, the differences in meaning in the 
New Testament are quite unimportant, though the verbal dif- 
ferences remain numerous. The one great difference between 
the Catholic and Protestant Bibles concerns the deutero ca- 
nonical portions of the Old Testament, which Protestants re- 
ject; but here again, as regards the Canon, they have in recent 
years drawn nearer to the Catholic position partly, we admit, 
though not entirely, owing to a less strict view of inspiration 
and have shown a much higher appreciation of these por- 
tions of Holy Writ. 

The Catholic position forbidding the remarriage of any di- 
vorced person was adopted by the House of Bishops, but 
through lay influence ia the House of Deputies, action was post- 
poned till the next general Convention; when, it appears, it 



652 CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH [Feb., 

has a good chance of becoming the law of the Church. It is 
gratifying to note that a very large and increasing number of 
Protestant scholars, not only among Episcopalians, interpret 
our Lord's words concerning divorce in the Catholic sense 
absolute prohibition of remarriage. If the Episcopal Church, 
in its coming conferences with other Protestant bodies, can in- 
duce them or help them to take a higher and firmer stand 
against divorce, it will be rendering a great service to Christ- 
ian civilization. We are not sanguine that the various Protest- 
ant Churches will accept, in its entirety as the Episcopal Church 
most likely will, the Catholic position on divorce; most of 
them will probably continue to permit the remarriage of the 
innocent party who has been freed on the ground of the 
other's infidelity. We do expect, however, and have a right 
to expect, that they will not continue to disobey the plain 
command of Christ, which no ingenious interpretation can 
obscure, and will cease to condone and encourage one of the 
greatest evils of society. We do expect their ministry our 
good opinion prompts us to expect it to purge itself of the 
deepest stain upon its Christian name. 

The preceding Convention, by the adoption of the famous 
amendment to Canon 19, was widely supposed to have com- 
mitted the Episcopal Church to the policy of the "Open 
Pulpit, 11 by which others than Episcopalian ministers might be 
allowed to preach in their churches. This amendment caused 
consternation among the Catholic- minded element in the 
Church for it led, or might easily lead, to the view that Episco- 
pal ordination was unnecessary and conferred nothing essential- 
ly different from the ordination of any Protestant Church. 
Thus would the Anglican claim to apostolic orders be wounded 
to death in the house of its friends, and the blow would be 
more effective and more cruel than the Papal denial. The 
immediate effect of the " Open Pulpit," if permission were freely 
granted to non-Episcopal ministers, would be a lowering of 
the Church's doctrinal tone. The measure, so interpreted, 
could only mean to them the decatholicization of the Episcopal 
Church and the merging of it in the mass of Protestant sects. 
A memorial, therefore, signed by over eleven hundred clergymen, 
in protest against such an interpretation of the Canon, was 
presented to the House of Bishops. The reply of the Bishops 
denied that the amendment modified, in the least degree, "the 



i9i i.] CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 653 

position of the Church which restricts the ministry of the 
Word and the sacraments in our congregations to men who 
have received episcopal ordinations"; what it did enact was to 
restrict to the bishop the right to grant permission to those 
not members of the ministry to address an Episcopal congre- 
gation on special occasions. This interpretation of the bishops, 
evidently, does not close the door of the pulpit but leaves it 
ajar. They admit the Canon may have beea misused in a few 
instances but see in it nothing to disquiet the peace of the 
Church. 

This interpretation, the unanimous voice of the bishops, 
seems the only one in harmony with the Prayer Book and the 
Ordinal. To the High Church position it was absolutely es- 
sential. Nor do we think it at all unwelcome to the members 
of other parties in the Church for they, too, like to think of 
their orders as different from the self-originated Protestant 
ministry, and as a link with all the Catholic Churches of the 
world and with the Church of the Apostles. Though we do 
not recognize any distinction in validity between Episcopal 
and Protestant orders, still we are glad the Episcopal Church 
does not abandon or diminish its claim ; for it is the necessary 
foundation of the Catholic doctrines still preached by many of 
its clergy. 

IV. 

In all this there is, no doubt, much to please one who 
seeks for traces of Catholic doctrines and principles. Merely 
noting, on our way, the strong denial of the sacramental 
character of Extreme Unction, which does not take us by 
surprise, we pass on to the most warmly debated question at 
the Convention the proposal to change tHe name of the Church, 
now officially styled the Protestant Episcopal Church of Amer- 
ica. " We must be Catholic and Protestant," said the chair- 
man of the House of Deputies in his opening address; while 
everyone who is not a member of that denomination and many 
who are, would say they must be either one or the other. 
One deputy suggested that the Church be called the Protest- 
estant Catholic Church of America ; but another objected to 
that name as appealing too strongly to the American sense of 
humor. The situation of the Church is indeed peculiar and 
difficult. It claims to have suffered no break of continuity 
with the Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation and 
to remain to-day one of its branches; but the churches in 



654 CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH [Feb., 

communion with the See of Peter and the Orthodox Catholic 
Churches alike refuse to acknowledge this claim. Denied the 
Catholic name by the Catholics, they are claimed as Protest- 
ant by Protestants; so that a good High Churchman feels 
himself in a very cruel situation, not unlike that of one dis- 
owned by his own kith and kin and claimed as a brother by 
men of another race and darker color. Now, no party in the 
Episcopal Church objects to having it considered a part of the 
Catholic Church; this is the essential belief of the High 
Church party, while to the members of the other parties, the 
idea of a Catholic Church is too great and too beautiful not 
to be loved and too vague and harmless to raise any objection. 
The battle wages then around the retention of the name 
Protestant. It is an ugly name, all agree, and a merely nega- 
tive one, though we Catholics feel it describes well the one 
element common to all Protestant Churches on which they 
could unite the spirit of protest against the Catholic Church. 
The effort to drop the name came in the form of a proposal 
to change the title-page of the Prayer Book. The High Church 
party had unsuccessfully contended in the last Convention for 
the name of "American Catholic Church." At a Pre-Conven- 
tion Conference representing all parties in the Church, a com- 
promise form was adopted which reads as follows: 

" The Book of Common Prayer 

and Administration of the Sacraments 

and other Rites and Ceremonies of 

THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH. 

According to the use of that portion thereof 

known as 

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 
in the United States of America. 

Togetker with 
The Psalter or Psalms of David." 

The question was debated long, earnestly and warmly, but 
in excellent temper; we believe an analysis of it will be in- 
teresting, among other reasons, for the light it sheds upon 
the opinions and sentiments of the delegates. 

The ultra-Protestant party contended for the retention of the 
Protestant name because they gloried in it and its associations ; 
it stood for protest for the truth of God against the error of man ; 
was a necessary safeguard against hierarchical domination and 
marked the freedom of the Church, as " episcopal " expressed 
its authority ; meant an open Bible, a free people and self- 
reliant character; expressed the real nature of their organiza- 



i9".] CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 655 

tion, for Protestantism is its very backbone ; would not separ- 
ate them from other Protestant Churches and would afford ef- 
fective opposition to Rome, towards which, at present, there 
was no prospect of approach. Moreover, there was nothing 
contradictory between " Protestant " and " Catholic," and the 
name Protestant Episcopal expressed best the real catholicity 
of their Church. To drop it would offend the great majority 
of Episcopalians and drive away many ; it would mean the 
surrender of the name to the Reformed Episcopal Church and 
consequent damage to their own. To adopt the new title page 
would put them in a ludicrous position, as theirs was not the 
prayer book of the Catholic Church. 

The High Churchmen, who were rare among the speakers, 
favored the title page because it expressed the historic conti- 
nuity of the Church through the episcopacy ; it might open 
the way to those who wished to withdraw from Rome and 
help the Church's relations with the Eastern Orthodox Chris- 
tians. They pleaded that they had made great concessions and 
ought to be met half-way. To retain the name Protestant 
would merely prolong the controversy, for the fight against it 
would go on and was bound to win; to drop it would bring 
peace, and help on the true work of the Church. 

A middle course seemed to please the majority of the 
speakers. While the name " Protestant Episcopal Church " 
was objectionable to High Churchmen, "American Catholic' 9 
was equally or more offensive to the ultra Protestant. Either 
name was likely to cost the Church dear in loss of members. 
Hence the necessity of a compromise. The proposed title page 
expressed the note of Catholicity, which is a doctrine of their 
creed accepted by all; its Protestantism is guaranteed by the 
accompanying resolutions. Nothing then is surrended and a 
rock of offence is removed. The new title distinguished them 
in the eyes of Rome from the many Protestant bodies of 
America, yet did not shut off approach to them. The Pro- 
testant name was not used by Protestant denominations; so 
why should the Episcopal Church cling to it ? It had come to 
be recognized as no longer big enough to express the Christian 
idea. It gave a wrong emphasis, for it was not their chief busi- 
ness to protest against Rome. Its purpose had been served 
in its day; but now a name was demanded that would har- 
monize with the broad religious tendencies of the day, its 
yearning for unity and catholicity. 



6$6 CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH [Feb., 

When the question came to a vote, a large majority oi the 
clergy favored the new title; so, too, a majority of the laity, 
yet one less than the number required to carry the measure. 
The Church remains, therefore, the Protestant Episcopal 
Church of America; but an analysis of the vote and the trend 
of opinion seem to indicate pretty clearly the success of the 
measure at the next General Convention in 1913. 

In our summary of the reasons advanced for the change, 
we omitted one that was certainly most influential. It was 
pleaded by several speakers that the dropping of the Protes- 
tant name from the title page of the Prayer Book, which 
would then appear as the Prayer Book of the Holy Catholic 
Church, would be a most powerful help in foreign mission 
fields, particularly among Roman Catholics. The question was 
no longer academic or partisan, but practical and pressing. 
The danger lay in not realizing how much the change of name 
meant in the foreign missions ; a great missionary bishop is 
quoted as authority that in his field it made the difference 
between success and failure. 

The measure had been defeated ; but many of those who 
saw the value of the name abroad could not rest content. It 
was proposed by the Committee on Constitution that in edi- 
tions of the Prayer Book in foreign languages any missionary 
bishop be authorized to alter the title page and the preface 
(which is quite Protestant in tone). Many of those who op- 
posed the change at home, one speaker tells us, were just they 
who called most loudly for it in Latin America. Others dis- 
approved of the plan of having one title at home and another 
abroad. The proposal was laid on the table by the close vote 
of 162 to 156. 

The advantages of the proposal hardly need to be pointed 
out. If a missionary among the poor Cubans or Brazilians 
declares himself a minister of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 
and offers them a Prayer Book of the Protestant Episcopal 
Church, he will probably meet with a cold reception or per- 
haps with one unpleasantly warm ; but if he declares himself 
a Catholic priest and offers them a Prayer Book of the Holy 
Catholic Church, his chances of success are certainly greater. 
Poor, half-instructed Cubans and Brazilians will probably be 
slow to discover that they understand the terms in a sense 
quite different from that of the missionary. 



i9i i.] CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 657 

Will this appeal to the American people as quite straight- 
forward ? We think not. And though we regret exceedingly 
to give offence, we will not conceal our opinion, which we are 
sure was shared by many at the Convention, that the willing- 
ness of half the delegates to allow their church to appear as 
Protestant in a Protestant country and .Catholic in Catholic 
countries wears a very ugly look. 

The Protestant Episcopal Church sends bishops and mis- 
sionaries to convert, not only heathen, but the people of 
Mexico, the Panama Canal Zone, Brazil, Cuba, Porto Rico and 
the Philippines. Their success has been rather slow but ap- 
pears to be growing. 

V. 

The debate on the name makes this quite clear; the desire 
to drop the Protestant name and appear as Catholic springs 
from no yearning towards Rome, nor is it greatly influenced 
by. any hope of closer union with Eastern Churches. Catholic 
ideas found little expression in the debates; perhaps they 
would have found more, were it not for the prudent fear of 
irritating Protestant susceptibilities and defeating the proposal. 
The chief reasons for desiring the change appear to be a dis- 
like for the Protestant name and the limitations it connotes; 
the love of a beautiful and historic name which might give a 
sense of communion with the Church of all the ages; the hope 
of being distinguished, like the Church of England, from the 
host of Protestant sects ; the vision of a Catholic Church in the 
future which will unite all Protestant Christians and rival the 
Catholic Church; lastly, practical reasons of expediency, chiefly 
looking towards the success of missions in Catholic countries. 

Facts are facts and must not be blinked. We grieve over 
the turn of affairs in the Episcopal Church, for we cannot de- 
lude ourselves with the belief, most welcome though it would 
be, that true Catholic principles and doctrines are being firmly 
held, much less that they are progressing. None of us with 
Christian charity in our hearts can help a deep feeling of sym- 
pathy in this crisis for loyal High Church clergymen, despite 
their too frequent expression of harshness towards us. Their 
situation is certainly a hard one. They cherish most dearly 
the belief that they belong to a branch of the Catholic Church ; 
yet the Catholic Church pronounces their orders invalid and 
themselves heretical, a judgment with which the Orthodox 
VOL. xcii. 42 



658 CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH [Feb., 

Church expresses no dissent. They, in their turn, believe them- 
selves to see corruptions in the Catholic Church which make 
it impossible for them in conscience to submit to her claim. 
Meantime their own Church seems to have come to the cross 
roads. Anxiously they are asking themselves : Will it continue 
on the road that communicates with Catholic truth, or will it 
turn aside to the broad road leading to undenominational and 
undogmatic religion ? 

This is the critical question ; and the answer will be found, 
but only years hence, in the consequences of the most impor- 
tant act of the General Convention the inauguration of a 
movement for the reunion of churches. The Convention was 
fully conscious of entering upon a new and untried way; this 
is evident from their unanimous expression of "grief for [their] 
aloofness in the past, and for other faults of pride and self- 
sufficiency which make for schism." Now they have resolved 
"that a joint commission be appointed to bring about a con- 
ference for the consideration of questions concerning faith and 
order, and that all Christian communions throughout the world 
which confess our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Savior be 
asked to unite with us in arranging for and conducting such 
a ponference." 

This is a most momentous departure for the Episcopal 
Church ; its importance is too great to be discussed in a brief 
space. We wish, however, to express our joy that the invita- 
tion to the Conference is to be sent only to those communions 
confessing belief in the divinity of our Lord; and our earnest 
hope that when the Conference comes if it does come this 
foundation doctrine of Christianity will be accepted by all par- 
ticipants as the basis of discussion. The wording of the reso- 
lution ought to be regarded by all who disbelieve that doctrine 
as an invitation to hold themselves aloof. With this clearly 
understood, the discussion may prove fruitful ; it may draw to- 
gether many hearts that love Jesus Christ and lead to the com- 
munion of many minds that believe in Him as the eternal Son 
of God. If it unites, it will also divide ; it will leave those 
who reject Christ and His divine revelation to go their own way. 

As we speculate on the possible issues of the proposed 
Conference, fear and hope contend in our minds; but at the 
least we can recognize that there is a widespread feeling of 
shame over the divisions among Christians and a sincere desire 



i9i i.] CONVENTION &F T&E EPISCOPAL CHURCH 659 

of reunion. The Catholic position is clearly understood : we 
can never, even to gain a world, surrender the smallest particle 
of the Truth ; for it is not ours to surrender, but has been 
committed to our keeping by Christ Himself. At the same 
time, none desire so ardently as we the reunion of all Christians. 
Our sentiments were recently expressed in the beautiful sermon 
on Church Unity by Cardinal Gibbons, who always says the 
right word with a charity and courtesy that have endeared 
him to the American people and made him an example to flock 
and shepherds. Like him, we join with Episcopalians and all 
Christians in the prayer that " the day may be hastened when 
the words of our common Redeemer, Jesus Christ, may be ful- 
filled, when there will be ' one fold and one Shepherd.' " 

VI. 

The revered name of our Primate stands to American Catho- 
lics as a symbol of the spirit in which we should deal with our 
non Catholic brethren and with the American people in gen- 
eral. Since, unhappily, his so fruitful example has been much 
less imitated than admired, we intend to end with a mild scold- 
ing against scolding, all in the family and springing from 
brotherly love and the Christmas spirit. It is directed against 
or rather towards our brothers of the quill, from whom so 
much is expected and not too much received. 

What, we ask, is our Catholic Press doing to recommend 
Catholicism to the American people ? Something, no doubt ; 
the tone of certain papers is Catholic, firm, sane and balanced, 
kindly and courteous, bright and scholarly. All this, and noth- 
ing less, a Catholic paper should be. The combination of alj 
these qualities, perhaps we must admit, is rare; yet we all know 
journals we should not be ashamed to put into tile hands of a 
non- Catholic with the hope that he would find in them a re- 
flection of the true Catholic mind and spirit. But their com- 
panions, or some of them rather, how shall they be character- 
ized ? They seem, alas, to have effected the most unnatural 
separation under the sun the divorce of Catholicism from the 
spirit of Christ. How seldom we feel in reading the pages of 
some that they are inspired by that spirit. They have the tone 
of party organs and the spirit of party : but the broad spirit 
of Catholicism, which is the spirit of Christ, seeking to draw 
all men to itself and not looking for petty transient victories, 
seems a stranger to their pages. The peace of soul and jo* 



66o CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH [Feb., 

of heart so familiar to a Catholic have vanished. There is no 
tranquil enjoyment of our own thoughts, no natural and easy 
outpouring of our own feelings. We seem to live ever con- 
scious of the presence of a bitter and scornful enemy; we are 
become like unto him with whom we contend. 

We do not recognize ourselves in their mirrors. At times 
even we have the dizzy sensation of wandering through a 
crystal maze ; and what fantastic images the glass gives back 
to us ! Now with woful, elongated face, again with vanishing 
brow where, instead, wisdom should have been fittingly en- 
throned ! Sancta Mater Ecclesia, ever noble and ever vener- 
able, yet ever fresh with the beauty of sweet and unfading 
youthfulness, how she would start to see these distorted images 
of herself ! How, unlike the poet's " baby new to earth and 
sky," she would think as she sadly gazed, " And THIS is I ! " 

An atmosphere of gloom seems to surround some of our 
writers, who seek a sad joy in carping, in fault finding, in 
snarling, in denunciation. Perhaps they come of fighting stock 
and feel they have fallen on evil days which furnish little ex- 
ercise for pent-up prowess. They succeed only in producing 
a species of journal fit neither for our own reading nor to 
give to a friendly inquirer. 

The pity of it all is that American Catholics have to deal 
with the fairest, the most open-minded and open-hearted peo- 
ple on this planet. We can say this, quietly, with a clear con- 
science, in the depth of winter, with the Fourth of July six 
months away. There is, of course, no lack of prejudice and 
bigotry in many of our fellow citizens, much of it crass and 
hard to bear; there are many more, however, whom it would 
be unfair to class among the deeply prejudiced and bigots, 
who have definite and sincere beliefs contrary to our own, and 
so are consistently opposed to the spread of Catholic influence. 
But the residue of anti- Catholic prejudice, which exists in 
nearly all, is not very strong or very active in the great ma- 
jority; though it might become both in certain circumstances. 
We are unwise then, most unwise, when we attune our voice 
to the small bigoted minority, rather than to the friendly and 
open-minded majority. The everlasting sharpening of knives 
in the editorial sanctum becomes a very exasperating noise. 
Continual controversy is a vexation of the spirit. It is some- 
times wise and necessary to answer a fool according to his 
folly; but it is a delicate undertaking, of which the Wise 



i9i i.] CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 661 

Man points out the danger in his proverb : Answer not a fool 
according to his folly lest thou be made like him. The answer 
to bigotry often seems to be merely another piece of bigotry. 
Too great eagerness to reply defeats its own purpose ; for 
when the occasion comes to say a strong word, one is not 
listened to. No one heeds the snarler. 

There is no excuse, then, in this country for not being 
good tempered and natural in public print as in private life. 
Some men seem to change their characters when they take a 
pen in their hand. The best way to speak to the American 
people, or one of the best, surely, is simply to talk naturally 
and at ease among ourselves. We have nothing to conceal ; 
the disciplina arcani was entombed in the catacombs; the 
Catholic Church is not a secret society and Catholic principles 
and doctrines are meant for all mankind. Let us talk out our 
own thoughts and sentiments without restraint. Then we shall 
say something worth listening to ; something also worth pass- 
ing on to a friendly inquirer and likely to leave a good im- 
pression. Then when the time comes, we shall be recognized 
to have earned the right to use strong language. If we speak 
habitually with the soft voice that turneth away wrath, it will 
be known to mean something when we raise our voice. Then 
we shall know how to be strong without being abusive; and 
even, if the occasion demands it, how to be denunciatory, yet 
in HO wise vulgar. 

How soon will the happy day dawn when nearly the whole 
Catholic press will be of this character? Perhaps when the 
hurlyburly's done, when the battle's lost or won, and there 
are no more enemies to fight. We do hope, however, for an 
earlier date. A strong Catholic and Christian press, fearless and 
uncompromising, scholarly and well-informed, sane, never- 
hysterical, courteous and urbane, what an incalculable amount 
of good could it not accomplish in this land ! It will not come 
soon, because no very serious efforts are being put forth to 
make it come. There are millions of dollars for other good 
causes ; but very few indeed, to form Catholic opinion through 
the press and to prepare men of good will for the reception 
of Catholic truth. From inaction and blunders, which have 
cost us so dear, both at home and abroad, past and present, 
perhaps wisdom will be learned ; perhaps it will be learned be- 
fore it is too late. 




THE WILL TO LIVE. 

BY KATHARINE TYNAN. 

JISTER STEPHANIE was troubled about the pa- 
tient in bed 57, who had not the will to live. 

" The will to live, see you, doctor," she said 
looking up out of her bright brown eyes at 
Dr. Delany's six-foot-two of manhood tf the 
will to live, see you, it is one of the secrets to live." 

" Bedad, you're right, Sister," said Dr. Delany in his 
broadest brogue; "you're as ever, unmistakeably, incontest- 
ably, right." 

He was the house-surgeon of the Notre Dame de la 
Misericorde Hospital, which, in spite of its French name, had 
its place in a crowded London street. It had been established 
by an order of French nursing nuns ; and even yet the cor- 
nette of the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul jostled in the 
wards with the neat white cap of the lay nurse. There were 
not enough of the Sisters to go round; so the hospital had 
to fall back to some extent on lay nurses. Dr. Delany had 
been known to say that he would rather have Sister Stephanie, 
whose Paris training was sufficiently old to be out of date, by 
his side during a critical case than the most competent of the 
lay nurses. Cold science, he would say, made no substitute 
for the love of God and the love of humanity. And though 
he had seen Sister Stephanie shake like a leaf as she held the 
basin and sponges during an operation, he had known that 
she would not fail him. The nervous woman with nerve, he 
had been used to say, was his choice for a nurse. He did not 
often find it in the lay nurses once they come to proficiency. 

" Ah so 1 If we could but give the little one the will to 
live ! " 

'Not so "easy, Sister. You mean the golden- haired child 
with the wonderful blue eyes. What's her history, do you 
know it?" 

" Her history, doctor. Let me see. It is a little history, 
but a sad one: No father, no mother; alone in the world*; 
without money." 



i9i f.] THE WILL TO LIVE 663 

"Ah, so," Dr. Delany said, joining his finger tips after 
the manner of Sister Stephanie. "With such a history it is 
perhaps no great wonder that No. 57 has not the desire to 
live." 

"She is Marie Costelloe, a countrywoman of yours, "Sister 
Stephanie said. 

"I thought she was Irish." Irish patients were not so un- 
common at Notre Dame de la Misericorde that the house- 
surgeon should be excited over one more or less. " I thought 
she was Irish. That softness of look belongs to the Irish girl 
more than to any other woman on earth. I must talk to my 
countrywoman. I wonder if we could inspire her with the 
will to live." 

A little later he sat down by Marie Costelloe's bed and 
took her hand gently in his. He felt for the pulse ; it was 
very weak and very irregular. The girl was oddly wasted, 
considering that there was no disease they could discover. 
She lay looking at Dr. Delany with great, shining blue eyes 
hollow in her white cheeks. In health she must have been a 
very pretty girl, brilliantly fair, with slightly curling golden 
hair and a charmingly gentle expression. As she lay on her 
pillows now, wasted and almost dying, she was positively beau - 
tiful. It seemed as though the flame of life burned brightly 
in her before its final extinction. Her eyes shone ; her cheeks 
burned. Her lips, slightly apart, showed the even, milky teeth 
like a child's. A charming thing, Dr. Delany thought; and 
felt a pang shoot through him at the thought of anything so 
young and fair consigned to an early grave. Dr. Delany was 
incurably young, although his close dark curls were slightly 
grizzled, and ten years had passed since he had seen the girl 
who was to be his wife laid away in the grave of a consump- 
tive. He had given her no successor; but his heart, since he 
had lost her, had been more tender than before to women for 
her sake, which is not to say that he had not always been 
soft-hearted where women were concerned. 

He glanced at the patient's temperature in the nurse's 
chart. Slightly below normal in the morning, tending to rise 
during the day till it was somewhat above the normal by 
evening. Nothing very alarming there. Nothing they could 
discover to account for the steady though slow wasting, the 
increasing weakness. No cough, no hemorrhage. Dr. Delany 



664 THE WILL TO LIVE [Feb., 

sent a respectful thought towards Sister Stephanie. She had 
come upon an entirely new ailment, the lack of the will to 
live. Science had not yet given it a name; but how many 
people die of it day after day and year after year! 

"Come, now," he said with his most persuasive brogue, 
"I want you to tell me, my child, just's what's on your mind. 
Isn't it something we could put straight for you? What are 
you fretting about ? " 

"I'm not fretting about anything, sir. 'Tis very quiet and 
peaceful here. Every one's so kind; and I love the pic- 
tures and the flowers; and the window by my bed looks on 
such a pretty bit of garden. It might be miles away in the 
country. I'm very well content, indeed, sir." 

"Oh, are you indeed?" said Dr. Delany with a certain 
kind roughness. " Then you've no business to be content. 
You ought to be thinking of getting well and going out into 
the world again." 

The girl looked at him with a startled expression. 

"I'm not going to get well, am I, sir? "she asked. 

Dr. Delany had often been asked by patients, in something 
of the same frightened voice : " I'm not going to die, am I, 
sir ? " It was his first experience of a positive desire for death. 

"You are going to get well," he said, "if you'll only take 
the trouble. If you won't take the trouble, I'm not going to 
answer for the result. We mightn't be able to keep you alive 
against your will. But there's nothing the matter with you 
from which you can't recover by the effort and determination 
to recover. There's no reason that I can find out why you 
shouldn't live to be a hundred." 

" Oh, sir," said the girl, as though he had uttered her sen- 
tence of death : " and I am so young." 

'That's just it," the house-surgeon said. "You're young 
and you ought to live, God means you to live." And then 
abruptly he said : " Haven't you some one who wants you 
badly ? " 

" No one." 

There was a desolation in the girl's voice that hurt Dr. 
Delany's susceptible heart. 

" There must be some one," he persisted blindly. " At your 
age" he had almost said: "with your beauty" "there must 
be some one to care." 



i9i i.] THE WILL TO LIVE 665 

The girl lifted her hand to her eyes as though to cover 
them, and the movement revealed a rosary-beads between her 
fingers. Dr. Delany had a sudden revelation. 

"You haven't been asking Herself to take you?" he said. 

The girl flashed back at him a look which had something 
of defiance in it. 

" Why wouldn't I ? " she said, " and me alone in the world." 

He tried her with various things to awake her hope and 
interest. He was not an exile himself without knowing some- 
thing of the exile's pains. He suggested that when she was 
well enough they should send her home to Ireland. She would 
go first to a seaside convalescent home. Afterwards, when she 
was strong enough, a place would be found for her. 

Her face lighted at first when he talked of Ireland ; but 
as soon as she discovered that he was trying to win her to live 
she turned away from him almost pettishly. He scolded her 
to no purpose. He argued with her, and his arguments were 
without effect. At last he let her be. She*was really alarming- 
ly weak, from the want of the will to live. It was a difficult 
case. She did her best to take the medicines and the nour- 
ishing foods ordered for her. She was so gentle, so willing, 
that it seemed monstrous to say, as Dr. Delany did, that her 
malady was more acute than Sister Stephanie had suggested, 
that it was in fact the will not to live and not merely the ab- 
sence of the will to live. 

Father Timothy O'Leary, the hospital chaplain, failed as 
signally with her. He was not inclined to agree with Dr. 
Delany and Sister Stephanie. His verdict was that the poor 
child was too weak to make an effort of any kind. She was 
slipping through their fingers as fast as she could. But he 
added an item to poor Marie's melancholy history. To the 
father and mother dead there was to be added a lover who had 
been drowned, in a dreadful accident to a vessel of his Majesty's 
Fleet, some eighteen months previously, in the Pacific Ocean. 
The little ring which the girl wore round her neck, since it had 
become too large for her finger was her engagement ring. 
She had asked that she might wear it in her coffin. Dr. Delany 
was very full of life, very much in love with life, despite the 
griefs it had brought him. Yet he had a passing thought 
that poor little Marie Costelloe might be as well out of it. 
Young, tender, beautiful, bereft, she was not one to be cast 



TOE WILL TO LIVE [Feb., 

without money or friends on the ocean of the world. If the 
prayers which they suspected she was offering, were answered 
might not it be the best thing for poor Marie ? Indeed, 
if it was not the best thing they would not be answered that 
way. 

A few nights afterwards, in the middle of the night, Sister 
Stephanie was on duty in the ward, and had occasion to call 
up the house-surgeon. An alarming case of heart failure fol- 
lowing an operation, in one of the private wards, which lay 
just at the end of Salus Infirmotum, the ward in which Marie 
Costelloe lay. After applying restoratives the patient gradually 
came back to life: the breathing was restored; the blood 
moved freely; the color came back to the cheeks and lips. 
Dr. Delany was well pleased. The patient was a bread-winner. 
His death would have broken up a family. Sister Stephanie, 
leaving an assistant on duty, had helped him excellently. They 
came out of the private ward, where the patient was now quietly 
sleeping, looking very happy over the success of their efforts. 

The light was low in Salus Infirmotum. Here and there 
some one tossed uneasily in sleep. At the end by which they 
entered the ward, Nurse Day, who had taken Sister Stephanie's 
place, was standing, her back to the ward, at a table ; she was 
dropping medicine into a glass by the light of a shaded lamp. 

As they moved side by side down the space between the 
rows of beds Sister Stephanie suddenly put out a hand and 
gripped Dr. Delany's arm. It was an agitated grip, and the 
house-surgeon at first wondered what had caused the usually 
self-contained little nun's alarm. But almost at the moment 
he saw. 

A young man, in a sailor's dress, was standing by Marie 
Costelloe's bed. He had a wholesome, frank, sailor's face ; so 
much they could see despite the dimness. The sailor was look- 
ing down at the girl's face, and his whole attitude and air 
expressed great tenderness. It was evident from the motion- 
less figure in the bed that Marie slept soundly, or was in the 
half-stupor of extreme weakness. While they looked the sailor 
dropped the curtain he had been holding in his hand, and, with 
a lingering look backwards, passed away before them towards 
the door at the further end. 

Dr. Delany, as though he had been suddenly awakened 
from sleep, started out in pursuit It took him barely two 



i9i i.] THE WIZL TO LIVE 

seconds to reach the door and follow the retreating figure iito 
the corridor. He had no idea of anything else but that he 
was following a flesh- and- blood, living man. But in the cor- 
ridor there was no sign of any one, not a sound, although the 
feet reverberated along the high bare corridor, with its stone 
floors, and the stone staircase beyond. 

The house-surgeon sprinted along the corridor and down 
those stairs. In the hall at the foot the night-porter slept in 
his chair, waiting for the casualty cases that might turn up. 
He shook the sleeping man vigorously. Some one had been 
in the wards- a sailor a few minutes ago. How could he 
have got in ? Where could he have got to ? The doors were 
bolted and barred ; no egress that way. He must be skulking 
somewhere. As Dr. Delany used the word he had a sense 
of its inapplicability. There had been nothing of the skulker 
in the sailor's face. 

A thorough search up and down the hospital revealed 
nothing. The night-porter wore a reproachful air. Plainly, if 
he had dared, he would have doubted the house-surgeon's 
eyesight or his sanity. They had thoroughly alarmed the 
nurses on duty, to no purpose. When the search was at ant 
end Tom Delany went back thoughtfully to Salus Infirmorum, 
where Sister Stephanie awaited him, a bright little image of 
solid reassurance. 

"You saw him, Sister." 

" As plainly as I see you, Doctor." 

" Ah, I'm glad of that. Simmons, I could see, thought I'd 
been dreaming. You noticed his arm in a sling." 

"Yes; and the cut across his cheek, newly-healed. Where 
could he have gone to ? " 

" Come out in the corridor for a second, Sister." 

Sister Stephanie followed him out into the corridor with 
its Hare of gas-jets. 

" Did it occur to you, Sister, that the sea-faring young 
man passed through that solid door there ? Certainly I did 
not see it open." 

"It must have opened without our seeing it surely." 

"You believe in ghosts, Sister?" 

" How do I know ? I believe in God and His Blessed 
Mother and the Angels and Saints." 

" Ah, it is wiser not to be dogmatic. If our sailor was a 



668 THE WILL TO LIVE [Feb., 

ghost, he was the most unghost-like person to look at. It 
struck you that way, didn't it, despite the cut on the cheek?" 

"He looked quite of this world a little pale, as though 
he might be recovering from an illness or an injury; but 
quite of the living world." 

" Marie is asleep ? " 

" I have been to look at her. She is sleeping like a lamb 
really sleeping. I thought she smiled in her sleep." 

" Perhaps she might elucidate our mystery, when she 
wakens. We must be very delicate and careful about finding 
out. It might just snap her slight tether if she was to be 
told that this mysterious intruder was by her bedside in the 
night-time." 

"I shall be very careful." 

Going his rounds next morning, with another nurse in 
attendance, Dr. Delany paused by Marie Costelloe's bed. His 
first keen glance at her showed him that she was looking so 
entirely unlike what she had been in his previous experience 
of her that he could hardly believe her to be the same girl. 

"Sister Stephanie reported before going off duty," said 
the other nurse, "that this patient had slept well and taken 
nourishment much more satisfactorily than of late. She has 
been very good since, taking all the nourishment I offered her." 

" Ah, that's a good child. Going to get better, Marie, eh ?" 

"I hope so, sir," the girl responded, with the new bright- 
ness in her gaze which he found so bewildering a thing. 

Sister Stephanie communicated to him later that Marie had 
made a confidence to her. Her lover had come to her in a 
dream and had told her that he was not dead, but had been 
picked up on a floating spar by a vessel bound for a long 
voyage. He had bidden her to be of good heart and to get 
well, for that he was coming home as soon as ever he could 
to claim her. 

" The poor child ! " said Sister Stephanie. " She looked 
at me to see what I thought. 'You don't think it wrong to 
believe in dreams?' she asked wistfully. If I hadn't seen 
with my own eyes, and if you hadn't seen, I don't know how 
I should have answered her. I said that I thought God must 
will her to live and that so He had let her have the hope. 
Dear child, she seemed quite contented. I think she will do 
very well now." 



1 9 ii.] THE WILL TO LIVE 669 

A little later Marie Costelloe was allowed to get up. A few 
days more and she was to be sent to the Convalescent Home 
at the seaside. Up and dressed, her golden hair confined in 
two long plaits, the transparency of her illness still hanging 
about her, her eyes bright and her lips happily smiling, she 
was a most charming creature. Dr. Delany was reminded of 
an old German picture of our Blessed Lady, a young girl, in 
the Temple, whenever his eyes fell on her. 

Now that she was really going to live there was an un- 
easy sense of anxiety in Dr. Delany's mind concerning her; 
and it was shared by Sister Stephanie. Supposing nothing 
happened ! What was going to become of Marie ? Appar- 
ently no misgiving had come to the girl herself. There was 
an eager look of expectancy about her when a door opened 
and anyone came in. She watched the distribution of letters 
in the wards with the same hopeful expectation. When there 
was nothing for her she wore a look that said that her joy 
was only postponed till to-morrow. 

It got on Dr. Delany's nerves. Presently he avoided 
Marie's look of bright expectancy. The day came nearer and 
nearer for her to leave the hospital. He said to himself that, 
if there was anything in it, there was no reason why the dead 
should return just now; no reason at all why he should not 
come in a month's time, a week's time, a year's time, rather 
than now. Yet he had a tense feeling of expectancy of his 
coming now, now. He said to himself, and was amazed at his 
own folly, that if Marie left Notre Dame de la Misericorde 
without anything happening nothing would happen. He guessed 
at something of the same nervous strain in Sister Stephanie, 
but they did not talk about it. He did not talk about the ap- 
parition of the sailor at all and would have put it out of his 
mind if he could. It was not out of other people's minds, he 
suspected, from the whispering of the nurses and the odd looks 
some of the subordinates sent him. Luckily he had been sub- 
stantiated by Sister Stephanie, else some of those good folks 
would have been pronouncing him mad or drunk or drugged. 

It came to the very last day. He had seen Marie Costelloe 
for the last time and had left her waiting for the cab which 
was to take her, with one or two other convalescents, to the 
railway station. Sitting in the nun's community- room, in her 
close-fitting bonnet and modest gray cloak, he had thought her 



THE WILL TO LIVE [Feb., 

as sweet and lovely a creature as he had ever laid eyes upon. 
Sister Stephanie had whispered to him : " She will come back 
to us to the convent, if the young man does not return from 
the dead." 

Yes; doubtless it would be an excellent solution. She 
looked a convent flower. But Dr. Delany did not want her 
to be a nun. He wanted the romance to end in ordinary hu- 
man fashion the lover to come home and marry the girl who 
had all but died of grief for his loss. He did not want her to 
be a nun ; but he kept his discontent to himself. 

Half-way down the stone staircase that led to the hall and 
the swing doors opening on the street, he saw through the 
glass panes of the upper part of the doors the cab, standing 
in the street, that was to take away the convalescents and the 
nurse in charge. He was putting on his gloves as he went 
down into the hall. He stopped at the board in the hall to 
see if there were letters or telegrams or cards for him. 

Turning about slowly with a letter in his hand he was 
aware that the doors had swung open. Some one had come 
in and was staring about him as though for some one to in- 
struct him. A sailor his arm still in a sling, a purple scar 
across his cheek, traces of recent illness on his open and 
pleasant countenance. 

Dr. Delany swung forward to meet him. 

"You are just in time," he said. "In five minutes time 
Marie Costelloe would have left for Eastgate. She is expect- 
ing you. If I were you I would go to Eastgate, too, that is, 
supposing you are a free agent. You look as if a month at 
the sea would do you no harm." 

"Thank you, sir, I don't know how you knew." He was 
looking about him in a wondering way. " I have only just 
traced Marie here. I've had a bad smash- up, sir: but I'm 
alive where a good many of my comrades are dead. Can I 
see her ? I dreamt she was ill and that I was allowed to come 
to her to tell her I was alive. I'm not going back again. My 
arm won't be much use for a time; but I've saved enough to 
tide me over a bad time me and my girl too. May I see 
her, sir?" 

Perhaps for the first time the nuns' little community-room 
at Notre Dame de la Misericorde was the scene of reunion 
between lovers. Marie showed hardly any surprise. Great 



i9i i.] THE WILL TO LIVE 671 

joy, but very little surprise, when her lover walked in to where 
she sat waiting to leave the hospital. He wore a wondering 
air through all the joy of it. When at last Marie was gone 
he was to be separated from her by only a few hours, as he 
was following her to Eastgate as soon as he could make ar- 
rangements he stood staring about him in the long corridor. 

"I was here before, sir," he said to Dr. Delany. "I 
seem to know every bit of the way. Yet I never was here. 
I could swear I was here before and saw my poor girl lying 
still and sad, like a dying thing, in a little bed with check 
curtains. There were beds the same all down the walls; and 
a big crucifix on the wall at the end. I can't explain it, 
sir." 

"Nor I," said Dr. Delany, "unless your spirit was set 
free from your body to travel over all those thousands of 
miles of land and sea to save poor Marie's life." 

"You think it possible, sir?" 

" How do I know ? I put no limits to the things that are 
possible." 

Sister Stephanie had come up close beside them without 
being heard. Her little brown face was irradiated with great 
joy. She heard what Dr. Delany was saying. 

"Nor to the goodness of God," she said happily. "Nor 
to the loving goodness of God." 



SAUL. 

BY JOHN JEROME ROONEY. 

As Saul went riding up the way 

To old Damascus town 
Slaughter and threatenings breathing forth, 

And curses calling down 

"And we shall bring these Nazarenes 

Bound to Jerusalem, 
And the High Priest and Sanhedrim 
Shall wreak the I,aw on them" 

Sudden a dazzling light shone out 

His soldier band around, 
And Saul, with glory-stricken eyes, 

Fell prone upon the ground. 

Then came a Voice: "Saul, Saul, My son. 

Why kick against the goad ; 
Why dost thou place upon thy I^ord 

Thy hatred's bitter load?" 

And he, tho' blind his mortal eyes 

Beneath the Eternal Light, 
That moment first began to see, 

That instant found his sight. 

O faring heart on life's broad way 

Fear not the night ol sense; 
There comes to eyes made dark to earth 

The Vision's recompense. 






Bew Books. 

THE STORY OF OLD JAPAN. By Joseph H. Longford. New 
York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.75 net. 

What Mr. Longford set out to do to supply a work on 
Japanese history written in such a style that it would not 
make greater demands on the reader than would an ordinary 
novel he has successfully accomplished. Indeed there is no 
recent popular novel to be had that can equal this book in 
interest and healthy excitement. And the author's thirty- 
three years residence in Japan as British Consul gives a feel- 
ing of security for the accuracy of his statements, apart alto- 
gether from his evident intimate acquaintance with the litera- 
ture and history ot the empire. The story of the rise of the 
Japanese nation is full of action from the very dawn of its 
mythological period, and as the centuries pass along, the 
activity increases instead of diminishes as the life of the nation 
becomes more varied. Internecine feuds between the various 
provinces which were formed among the six hundred inhabited 
islands comprising the empire of Japan were great and con- 
tinuous. The cruelty, the savage revenge taken, the revolting 
crimes committed by the conquering % parties over the van- 
quished in each of the innumerable fights cause a shiver, and 
it is a real pleasure to learn that the first person to teach the 
Japanese the doctrine and practice of mercy on the battle- 
field was an Irishman. Human life was taken on the slightest 
provocation. If a master had to be strongly reminded of the 
necessity of a certain mode of action, some of his retainers 
suicided to enforce upon him the thought of their earnestness. 
On every page evidences abound of the voluntary death called 
Hara-Kiri (the ripping up of the bowels), and men commit 
this as placidly as a European would take a glass of wine. 
We of the West think more of the preservation of our cattle 
than the Japanese did (and probably do) of the lives of men, 
women, and children. 

The character of the people is summed up by the author: 
they are courteous, courageous, knowing no fear of death 
or pain, impetuous ; they possess great powers of endurance, 
and are industrious. " Truth, charity, sobriety, and chastity 
among the male, are not among their virtues. Of cruelty they 
VOL. xcii. 43 



674 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

are scarcely conscious." Combined with all is their intense 
contempt and hatred of all Western "red barbarians." And 
as we saw in Mr. Longford's pages how this hatred was 
shown we could not keep from asking ourselves repeatedly 
where will it be shown next? Will it be in India or in the 
Philippines? If we judge from their action in the affairs of 
Korea we have to say unhesitatingly that the United States 
will have to undergo the brunt of the attack. Centuries ago 
Japan conquered a part of Korea; they have -recently made 
this as a pretext for their new interference in the government 
of that land. Under the rule of Hideyoshi (1586-1598) Japan 
claimed the sovereignty of the Philippines, and the Shogun 
felt disinclined to receive the embassy from the Islands which 
came, accompanied by four Franciscans, to make an endeavor 
to better trade relations with Japan. That sovereignty may 
become a nice excuse in the future. A few years more to 
recuperate the nation after the recent severe wars with China 
and Russia, a few years more to learn all the tricks of West- 
ern warfare, and the glove will be thrown down. 

If our readers desire to learn the history of Japan and 
this has become almost a strict duty for the English-speaking 
world we recommend Mr. Longford's volume. It will not 
only give delight to those who revel in the clash of arms, but 
it will also give much food for serious thought to those who 
look keenly into the future. It should awaken, we imagine, 
a suspicion for the unnatural calm now existing in this East- 
ern empire, and likewise a wholesome fear for the outcome of 
a possible breach of friendly treaties. The Japanese possess 
long memories, and though they have come into close contact 
with Western peoples they have not allowed their moral quali- 
ties, as Mr. Longford points out, to be modified to any per- 
ceptible degree. What they have studied is the science of 
warfare, and of state government. Their national prejudices 
and hatred may be rudely aroused some day by a demagogue 
shouting "Remember '53!" the year Perry of the United 
States Navy entered the Gulf of Tokio and delivered a letter 
from his government demanding open ports and the humane 
treatment of wrecked sailors. Or it may be "Remember '63!" 
the year that Great Britain sent seven ships and bombarded 
Kagoshima. Then was raised the old cry: "Honor the Em- 
peror and expel the Barbarian." 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 675 

This cry brings back to us the story of the Catholic 
Church in Japan. Mr. Longford treats of this subject in two 
chapters, and graphically describes the marvellous success of 
the Jesuits in their evangelization of the country. He does 
so impartially, but we should like to see a portion of a sen- 
tence on p. 235, referring to the Inquisition, eliminated from 
a future edition, as it is wholly uncalled for. St. Francis 
Xavier, accompanied by two priests and a Japanese convert 
landed in Japan late in 1549. They began at once to preach, 
and with so much success that thirty-eight years later the 
Church numbered 200,000 converts belonging to all ranks of 
society. Owing to a variety of causes the Government's tol- 
erance of Christianity ceased and persecution began. We leave 
the gruesome account to those who take up the book; they 
will learn the wonderful fortitude of the Japanese Catholics. 

A few points could be improved in the second edition. 
The index is too meagre; general headings are omitted; and 
as it stands it is of use to those only who are well-informed 
on the history of the country. For instance, morality, paint- 
ers, artists, drama, native Christians, Philippines, though men- 
tioned to some extent in the text are not to be found 
under their respective letters in the index. Again, the authot 
would do well to make inquiries from a priest or an educated 
Catholic layman regarding the correct equivalents of "Jesuit 
fraternity" (p. 241), "found in the actual service of the Mass" 
(p. 246), and " performed Mass " (p. 279). 

THE SONG LORE OF IRELAND. By Redfern Mason. New 
York: Wessels & Bissell Co. $2. 

One might indeed, one must search far afield before 
finding another single volume encompassing such varied, de- 
tailed and delightful matter as The Song Lore of Ireland. The 
author, would seem to be an Englishman in the sense that 
he has himself to blame if one of these days he finds his 
name coupled with the sons of the Irish renaissance ! For with 
rare Gaelic sympathy and much patient scholarship has he 
traced the " lyric aspect " of Erin, all the long way from 
Druidic minstrels to the folk-songs surviving by field and 
hearth to-day. 

Musical students who listened last year to Mr. Duncan's 
praise of the primitive Greek notation will be interested in the 



676 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

kindred Celtic scales both the original five-note form and the 
essentially characteristic developments of the Moxolydian and 
Hypodorian, with their adherence to the Gregorian flat seventh. 
Students of mystery everywhere will find matter for revery in 
the Banshee's grim cry ; and lovers of poetry will scarcely 
read unmoved the immemorial Lament of Deidre. As for the 
sons and daughters of Ireland, they will find here " Erin's own 
speech," grave and gay and tender; her history in its spon- 
taneity and inwardness. 

The historical side of Mr. Mason's volume is valuably and 
tersely illuminating. " Irish song," he tells us, " is the ex- 
pression of the Celtic genius in music and verse, in everyday 
life and in history. Understood aright, it will turn foreign 
contempt of Erin to foolishness. . . . John of Salisbury 
tells us that in the Crusade headed by Godfrey of Bouillon 
the concert of Christendom would have been mute had it not 
been for the Irish harp. Gerald Barry, the Welsh monk and 
historian, hater of the Irish though he was, declares that 
Erin's harpers surpass all others. That was in the twelfth 
century. . . . When the wife of Pepin of France wanted 
choristers for her new abbey of Nivelle, it was not to Italy, 
to Germany, or to England that she sent, but to Ireland. 
That was in the seventh century. In Elizabethan days the 
songs of Ireland won praise even from her enemy and traducer, 
Edmund Spencer." And so the story has gone on, until our 
own Continental troops marched to freedom to the very Irish 
strains of the immortal "Yankee Doodle" ("All the way to 
Galway "). 

Let not one imagine this versatile study to be unduly 
technical or scholastic in tone. It has the excelling charm of 
seeming almost popular and entirely readable throughout. 

CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIAL QUESTIONS. By W. Cunning- 
ham, D.D. London : Duckworth & Co. 75 cents. 

Dr. Cunningham is so accepted an authority on economic 
matters that we welcome this little book of his as opportune 
and valuable, more especially since he devotes it to a review 
of the economic situation from a definitely Christian stand- 
point. 

If anyone will take the pains to examine the economic 
writings of those authorities who stood sponsors for our mod- 



i9ii.] NEW BOOKS 677 

ern industrial system, he may verify through tens of thous- 
ands of pages the unchristian nature of their teachings. Rus- 
kin described it shortly as the negation of the soul in man. 
"Enlightened self-interest 11 was the text inscribed upon their 
frontals, and those who wished to sit at their feet were bidden 
to leave behind them "the social affections as accidental and 
disturbing elements of human nature, while avarice and the 
desire of progress were the constant elements." It was further 
added that " the self-seeking of each works out for the benefit 
of all " as if to discourage any restraint of those inordinate 
desires which only war against society, in the second place, 
because in the first place, they war against the soul. Such 
definitely unchristian theories led quite naturally to definitely 
unchristian practices. Exploitation of human labor for the 
sole purpose of gross profit was deliberately encouraged. 
Even Puritanism, as the author points out, "was at no pains 
to interfere with the action of the capitalist, or to protect the 
laborer. . . From the time when the rise of Puritanism 
paralysed the action of the Church and prevented her from 
maintaining the influence she habitually exerted, it has been 
plausible to say that Christian teaching appeared to be brought 
to bear on the side of the rich against the poor" (206). 
Masters no longer felt bound to acknowledge the obligation 
of human relationship with their men, much less any responsi- 
bility for their general welfare; the cash- nexus came more and 
more to be the only bond of union, or of disunion as so often 
happens. As a further consequence there grew up still newer 
and still more unchristian theories of class hatred and class 
retaliation, and now, not in one country but in many, giant 
Capital and giant Labor stand over against each other with 
never a thought of their common humanity, eager to display, 
and as far as possible use their respective weapons of angry 
material force. Is it impossible, then, for our great industrial 
civilization to break loose from these early, vicious, and wholly 
unchristian habits of doctrine and practice? 

In answer to the last question, Dr. Cunningham sets forth 
the theory which finds expression in other books of his. It is 
this. Throughout the economic history of Europe the most practi- 
cal and most successful economists have been those who never 
made mere material advantage their object. A case in pointed 
illustration would be the monks, and perhaps theirs is the 



678 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

strongest case of all, though the Quakers might also be ad- 
duced. Some people will raise the question as to whether the 
monks have been the moral benefactors of Europe; no one 
will for a moment deny that they have been its economic 
benefactors. And why ? The answer is very simple. They 
wished to save souls and not to save money. They wished to 
confer spiritual benefits and they could not help conferring 
material benefits by the way ; their spiritual works of mercy 
could never be separated from their corporal works of mercy; 
wherever they pitched and settled they carried out organic 
and lasting social reforms. But they never claimed to be 
about any specially economic business as reformers do nowa- 
days; they simply claimed to be about their Father's business. 
We should do well to think over this notion that social re- 
form, in order to be of permanent benefit, should have a 
spiritual first intention rather than a carnal one. A careful 
reading of Christianity and Social Questions will convince us 
that the notion is altogether sound. We might remember in 
conclusion our Lord's answer when appealed to with a request 
that He would interfere with regard to the division of an in- 
heritance (Luke xii. i and 13-21). "Man! Who made me a 
judge or a divider over you ? " Dr. Cunningham makes this 
comment, " His (Christ's) unwillingness to take an active part 
in secular improvement, on its own account and for its own 
sake, comes out very strikingly. . . The whole dispute was 
about earthly things, and He did not see how to use it as a 
stepping-stone to help the disputants to apprehend spiritual 
realities. . . The Church can only exercise a wise influence 
on social problems by being true to her Master, and striving 
to carry on His work as He saw it, and as He has committed 
it to her charge." 

ROMANTIC CALIFORNIA. By Ernest Peixotto. Charles Scrib- 
ner's Sons. $2.50. 

The story of California with its unequaled woodland giants, 
its magnificent scenery, its fading traces of a dying civiliza- 
tion and its pathetic remains of the holiest work ever under- 
taken for the good of our vanishing Indians is one of which 
the lover of beauty, romance and heroism will never tire. Mr. 
Peixotto has done a good work in telling over some bits of 
the story adding details and recollections that might otherwise 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 679 

have remained unnoticed or been lost and bringing the past 
into contrast with the present. A native of the Golden State, 
he writes as one who loves his theme. 

FLORIDA TRAILS. By Winthrop Packard. Boston : Small, 
Maynard & Co. $3 

The Florida trials along which Mr. Parkard takes his 
readers here and there run into the well-beaten paths of travel 
but soon strike off again into the woods or along river banks 
or through thick undergrowth and over tangled roots into the 
wet and miry haunts of wild fowl. They are routes that many 
of us would not care to take in reality even with a competent 
and interesting guide, but since the invitation calls us to travel 
on the light wings of fancy we can hardly find a reason to re- 
fuse and will be glad in the end if we follow. The author is 
a close and appreciative observer of nature. He knows, too, 
how to win and hold the attention of his readers while he 
gives them much and varied information about the lower forms 
of life that abound in Florida woods and swamps. Better than 
all this he teaches us, who are dull and unobservant men, how 
to see and enjoy the beauty with which the world teems. 

HOME LIFE IN SPAIN. By S. L. Bensusan. New York: The 
Macmillan Company. $1.75. 

Nearly every thing that appears on the surface of Spanish 
life, from religious conditions and practices down through the 
political maze to the varied amusements of the people and the 
things they like to eat is noted down and commented on in 
one way or another by S. L. Bensusan in his book Home Life 
in Spain. A vast amount of information of all sorts and values 
is packed away in its pages; more, in all probability, than any 
other writer on the subject has gathered into a like work. 
Besides, it is well and interestingly set forth, in a spirit of 
kindly criticism mingled with genuine liking for Spanish charac- 
ter and customs. The book, however, has one very serious 
defect. We do not refer now to its obvious superficiality for 
it makes no explicit claim to scholarly depth or thoroughness, 
nor is it clear that one has a definite right to expect such 
qualities in the notes of a newspaper correspondent but to the 
decided bias and scornful prejudices Mr. Bensusan has against 
the Church and the Jesuits. The origin of his prejudices mat- 



68o NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

ters little, and the sincerity with which they are held may also be 
disregarded for we are not now judging the author. The one 
fact of vital present importance is that Mr. Bensusan is bitter- 
ly, though perhaps unconsciously, prejudiced against the Church, 
and consequently he is unfair in his testimony and unjust in 
his judgments. This characteristic, plainly shown in his as- 
sertions that the Church forced illiteracy on the Spanish peo- 
ple; that she to-day stifles their moral and intellectual de- 
velopment; that she inspired what sensible people call the just 
execution but which he styles the murder of Ferrer, spoils his 
work beyond curing and furnishes ample reason why he 
should be ruled out of court when one tries to find explana- 
tions for the ways in which the currents of Spanish life have 
set. 

SACK TO HOLY CHURCH. By Dr. Albert von Ruville. New 
York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.20. 

Converts are themselves living documents, proving the au- 
thenticity of the Church's claims to divine origin. Their com- 
panionship is, perhaps, the most efficacious of all convert making 
influences. Next to this direct, living impact of embodied 
truth, comes the written witness of converts. This supreme 
literature of apostolic zeal begins with St. Paul's Epistles and 
'his discourses recorded in the Acts, and includes such majestic 
names as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and St. Augustine. 
In later times Newman stands forth a giant of the power of 
persuasion exemplified by abstract treatises composed in the 
light of experimental research, as well as by the great narrative 
of his Apologia. And in this connection let us name Isaac 
Thomas Hecker. Who that has read his Life, with its itinerary 
of a guileless soul athirst for God, and his Questions of the 
Soul, but has felt the spell of Catholic truth breathed upon 
him by a heaven-chosen messenger. 

There is a very large number of books that thus reveal 
truth and error in contrast by narrating their conflict in an 
earnest soul, prolonged through years of veritable anguish- 
This library of the psychology of conversion thus ranges from 
the grave apologiae of great leaders of men down through all 
grades of intelligence and culture. 

The comparatively recent conversion of Dr. Albert von 
Ruville has now been put in autobiographical form. He is 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 681 

a prominent professor of the German University of Halle, led 
to study the Church by the attacks of her enemies and Har- 
nack's unsatisfactory explanation of Christian origins. 

There seems to have been nothing novel in either his method 
of research or the matter, doctrinal and historical, that engaged 
his study. But the professor is a powerful mind, and his in- 
vestigations are exceedingly interesting, filled as they are with 
eventful incidents. It is noteworthy that Rheinhold's book, 
The Old and New Faith, a work of recent date, gave the strong- 
est initial impulse, and Moehler's Symbolism, an eighty-year 
old book on comparative religion, gave the final impulse to 
this conversion. 

The concluding chapter of the book deals with the hatred 
against Catholicity, and is oi especial value. " What has struck 
me since my conversion," the author exclaims, "and it is some- 
thing I must joyfully avow, is that I have not been disenchanted 
by any evil thing met in the Catholic Church, but all is purity 
and holiness. One may fancy that in this I have been excep- 
tionally fortunate, But why did I not have the same good 
fortune in Protestantism while I exercised the Christian faith 
in that communion ? I found there indeed much that was beau- 
tiful and good, but also serious, very serious deficiencies, for 
the remedy of which no means whatever could be found, except 
the single one which is expressed in these words: Back to 
Holy Church ! " 

The work is well translated by G. Schotensack and is edited 
with a preface by Father Robert Hugh Benson. 

The English translation deserves a wide circulation, and 
will do great work in leading souls " Back to Holy Church." 

THE HISTORY OF THE POPES. Vol IX. By Dr. Ludwig 
Pastor. Edited by R. F. Kerr of the London Oratory. 
St. Louis: B. Herder. $3. 

The ninth volume of Dr. Pastor's history treats of the 
pontificate of Adrian VI. (1522-1523), and the first years of 
Clement VII's. reign, (1523-1527) ending with his flight to 
Orvieto. 

Even Protestant scholars have seen in Adrian VI. (p. 229) 
"one of the noblest occupants of the chair of Peter; a man 
of the purest motives, who worked only to promote the wel- 
fare of the Church" (Benrath-Realencyklopadie VII 135), 



681 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

but with all his zeal, learning and piety he failed in every 
single aim of his pontificate. He did his utmost to arouse the 
Catholic nations against the Turks, especially when they were 
menacing Rhodes (p. 154), but he failed to realize that the 
Renaissance had destroyed forever the devout enthusiasm of 
the Middle Ages which had made the Crusades possible. 
Ambitious self-seekers like Francis I. or the Emperor Charles 
V. were too engrossed in their own political schemes to care 
a particle for the triumph of the Cross over the Crescent. 
Again Adrian worked hard to combat the Reformation in 
Germany, Switzerland and Sweden, but he met with failure on 
every side. The Diet of Nuremberg, composed of worldly- 
minded prelates and Catholic princes who were in reality 
"out-and-out Lutheran," (p. 141) scoffed at Adrian's letters, 
insulted his Nuncio, and refused to carry out the Edict of 
Worms (pp. 139-40); Erasmus refused the Pope's friendly in- 
vitation to enter the lists against Luther (p. 145) ; Zwingli in 
Switzerland was indifferent to remonstrances and promises (p. 
147) ; Gustavus Wasa of Sweden resented insolently Adrian's 
impolitic attempt to reinstate the Archbishop of Upsala (p. 

151). 

Finally Adrian's earnest efforts at reform of the abuses of 
the Papal court merely estranged him from the great body of 
Cardinals, and made him the most unpopular Pope for genera- 
tions. " The men of that period had become so accustomed 
to look upon the Popes as secular princes, politicians, and 
patrons of art and letters only, that they had lost the faculty 
of understanding a Pontiff who placed his ecclesiastical duties 
before everything, and aimed at being above all, the shepherd 
of souls 1 ' (p. 226). If Adrian on account of Leo X.'s great 
legacy of debt attempted to economize, he was accused of 
parsimony ; if he refused to give preferment to his relatives, 
he was called hard-hearted ; if he frowned down upon the 
pagan culture of the Renaissance, men bred on the traditions 
of a Nicholas V. or a Leo X. styled him a " barbarian, more 
fitted for the cloister than the Papal throne " ; if he tried to 
be neutral in the French-Spanish fight for supremacy, his 
true concept of duty was spoken of in Rome as poor states- 
manship (pp. 88-100, 225, 226). Truly the last non-Italian 
Pope had few to depend upon to carry out his high ideals. 

His famous Instruction to the Diet of Nuremberg admitting 



i9ii.] NEW BOOKS 683 

the abuses so long dominant in the Papal court has often 
been criticized as incorrect, exaggerated, or at the very least 
impolitic (pp. 136-38). For instance he had^ written : "We 
know well that for many years things deserving of abhorrence 
have gathered around the Holy See; sacred things have been 
misused, ordinances transgressed, so that in everything there 
has been a change for the worse. Thus it is not surprising 
that the malady has crept down from the head to the mem- 
bers, from the Pope to the hierarchy. We all, prelates and 
clergy* have gone astray from the right way, and for long 
there is none that has done good ; no, not one. Therefore, in 
our name, give promises that we shall use all diligence to re- 
form before all things the Roman Curia, whence perhaps all 
these evils have had their origin; etc." (pp. 134-5). 

Pastor defends most strongly this letter, declaring it neither 
exaggerated nor impolitic. 

It is a very sad commentary on the state of affairs in 
Rome to read that the death of so saintly a Pontiff was "ac- 
claimed with frantic joy"; and that every act of his "was dis- 
torted by a stinging and mendacious wit, and turned into ridi- 
cule with all the refinement of malice" (p. 223). Although he 
achieved no positive results owing to the shortness of his 
reign, "he left behind him suggestions of the highest impor- 
tance, and pointed out beforehand the principles on which, at 
a later date, the internal reform of the Church was carried 
out. In the history of the Papacy his work will always entitle 
him to a permanent place of honor" (p. 230). 

The second half of the volume treats of the early years of 
the Medici Pope, Clement VII. He was above all else a dip- 
lomat and an unsuccessful one. Instead of learning wisdom 
from the French defeat at Pavia, he was induced to join the 
fatal Holy League of Cognac, which brought down upon him 
the anger of the powerful Charles V., and culminated in the 
terrible sack of Rome (pp. 272, 304, 349, 384). The contemptu- 
ous tone of the Emperor's declaration of war on the Pope (p. 
352) sounds more like the utterance of a Lutheran prince than 
a state paper of the most powerful Catholic ruler of the six- 
teenth century. The horrors of the sack of Rome will always 
remain a blot upon the reputation of Charles V. 

The translation is very well done although one meets oc- 
casionally a grammatical slip (p. 371) or a misprint (p. Si). 



684 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN TEACHER ENCOURAGED. By Brother 
Constantius. St. Louis: B. Herder & Co. $1.25. 

Christian teachers are doing a mighty work for God in this 
country a work of vast consequences lor time and eternity. 
Yet they labor often with but scanty thanks and little under- 
standing. Their need for encouragement, their temptations to 
discouragement are mostly overlooked or ignored. In this ad- 
mirable work, Brother Constantius, with the sympathy of one 
who knows, meets every phase of discouragement with the 
" Sursum Corda " of love and high courage. He sets a high 
standard of mental as well as spiritual efficiency, but the book 
is primarily a spiritual book, written directly for religious who 
teach. Its wise and gentle counsels, its comforting and encour- 
aging tone, its spirit of resignation and of zeal will uplift also 
the heart of amy teacher or worker and prepare it for prayer 
and grace from on high. The book abounds in quotations 
from ascetical and cultural writers, and is well indexed. We 
are glad to welcome this second edition and to repeat our 
commendation given on its first appearance in 1903.* It de- 
serves success in a wider circle of readers. 

TARIFF HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. By F. W. Taus- 
sig. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.50. 

The student of economics, and to some extent the general 
reader, will welcome a new (tne fifth) edition of Professor 
Taussig's standard work on the 'Tariff History of the United 
States. The addition of a chapter on The Act of 1909 gives 
the author an opportunity to discuss from his well-known free- 
trade standpoint the positions and arguments developed by 
protectionists in the last few years. The chapter will be ren- 
dered more .luminous to the general reader by the author's 
article in the December (1910) issue of the Atlantic Monthly. 

WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT. By Rheta Childe Dorr. 
Boston: Small, Maynard & Co. $2. 

This title has been chosen with magnificent unconcern of the 
possible criticism that not even archangels can tell what one wo- 
man wants. The author offers no apology for her audacious- 
ness, but simply points out that the mass of women is less incon- 

*SEB THE CATHOLIC WORLD, March 1903 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 685 

sistent than the individual, and goes on to tell us not of what 
a woman may want, but rather of what women's organizations 
have done. Discursive, varied, well-informed, the author en- 
tertains while she instructs. Sometimes too sanguine, she is 
never extreme. Industrial conditions, the social evil, female 
suffrage, and city administration are chief among the topics dis- 
cussed. To the main thesis of the book, that men must accept 
women as partners in the work of social reform, of course no 
adequate answer is possible. 

We cannot refrain from adding that the press work is 
above criticism. 

UNEMPLOYMENT AND TRADE UNIONS. By Cyril Jackson. 
London: Longmans, Green & Co. 50 cents. 

To the very actively discussed question of unemployment, 
Mr. Jackson's booklet comes as the contribution of a tried and 
expert student. It consists mainly of a survey of the agencies 
now dealing with the problem in England and urges a national 
policy which will deal more systematically and thoroughly with 
the matter. The most important issue involved in this develop- 
ment will be the relation of the State to Trade Unions. Mr. 
Jackson faces the issue coolly and squarely and after recog- 
nizing the shortcomings and the mistakes of organized labor, 
argues for their recognition and support by the State in their 
proper field of protecting the individual workman against un- 
employment and misfortune. "On the whole both the record 
and the present policy of the Unions do justify the state in 
entrusting to them this great responsibility. 1 ' 

THE PRODIGAL PRO TEM. By Frederick Orin Bartlett. Bos- 
ton: Small, Maynard & Co. $1.50. 

Frederick Orin Bartlett, whose Seventh Noon won a popu- 
larity beyond its merit, has published another story, called 
7 he Prodigal Pro Tern. Like the lachrymose romances of the 
eighteenth century, it begins with a heroine bathed in tears. 
The lady's grief is caused by her wandering brother's stubborn 
refusal to come home to comfort their old and infirm father. 
In this case, despite Sam Weller's ^assertion to the contrary, 
tears do really start, not a clock, indeed, but the workings of 
the story. For a young landscape-painter, near in locality, 



686 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

and sympathetic in disposition, offers consolation and a remedy, 
by pretending to be the wandering son, and the deception is 
made possible by the old father's partial blindness. It is 
needless to add that the painter, in his role of "prodigal pro 
tern " falls decidedly in love with his supposed sister, and 
complications ensue. The story has no special merit, but is 
entertaining enough. 

FREDDY CARR AND HIS FRIENDS. By Rev. R. P. Garrold, 
S.J. Benziger Brothers. 85 cents. 

THE OLD MILL ON THE WITHROSE. By Rev. Henry S. 
Spalding, SJ. Benziger Brothers. 85 cents. 

ERIC, OR THE BLACK FINGER. By Mary T. Waggaman. 
Philadelphia: H. L. Kilner & Co. 75 cents. 

The ever-increasing output of juvenile fiction reminds us 
of the story of the thoughtful man who cut a good-sized hole 
in the fence for his cat to crawl through, and then a smaller 
one for the benefit of the kitty. Surely the world's best lit- 
erature, given in wise selection, is the birthright of the chil- 
jdren, and why should they be starved on a diet of Dottie 
Dimple or the Oliver Optic heroes ? The child whose Christ- 
mas stocking bulges with Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, 
Fabiola, Nicholas Nickleby, and, best of all, the English poets, 
preferably in Miss Repplier's excellent collection, may indeed 
believe himself " the heir of all the ages." Beyond a child's 
understanding ? 

" Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
Or what's a heaven for ? " 

cries Browning, and the appreciative imagination of childhood 
will supply any gaps in understanding. 

Yet, considering juvenile literature as an inevitable accom- 
paniment of our over-civilization, we can easily find praise for 
three new additions to the shelves. In the story of Freddy 
Carr and His Friends, Father Garrold has drawn a very true 
picture of the boys in a Jesuit day-school, of their escapades, 
their varied interests, and their own peculiar codes of honor. 
Freddy tells his story in the first person, and is a dear, lov- 
able boy, whose joy and worries will find sympathetic readers. 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 687 

The Old Mill on the Withrose is a new story by Father 
Spalding, and tells of a boy's adventures on a farm in Ken- 
tucky. There is a good, exciting plot, and the local color, 
especially in the negro characters, adds interest to the story. 

Eric, or the Black Finger, is another exciting tale, and has 
considerable merit. A young priest's struggles in a wild 
mountain region, supposedly in West Virginia, and his redemp- 
tion of the boy Eric form the theme of the story, and the 
name of the author, Mary T. Waggaman, will commend it to 
many readers. 

STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. By James Edward Le 
Rossignol and William Downie Stewart. New York : 
Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. $1.50. 

Of great interest and significance is Professor Le Rossig- 
nol's thorough-going account of that little experiment station 
in social advance maintained by the people of New Zealand. 
He confirms Clark in declaring that private enterprise can 
outdistance the state when the competition is fair and the 
government policy financially sound. And he avers that there 
is now no general demand for the further extension of gov- 
ernmental functions. 

JOSEPH HAYDN: THE STORY OF HIS LIFE. From the Ger- 
man of Franz von Seeburg. By the Rev. J. M. Toohey, 
C.S.C. Indiana: The Ave Maria Press. $1.25 net. 

A fine chance has been missed by the author of this book. 
The life of Haydn presents a sufficient variety of incident to 
provide a good basis for an historical novel; and as there is 
some demand and small supply for such works having a musical 
setting, it is a pity that better attempts are not made to pro- 
vide readable stories. Herr von Seeburg's attempt has neither 
the attractiveness of fiction nor the solidity of biography ; it is 
nothing better than an olla podrida of fable and fact combined 
in anything but a skillful manner. He begins fairly well, but 
falls off so rapidly that the latter part of the book has the 
appearance of a badly arranged collection of newspaper clip- 
pings connected together by stray bits of dialogue. 

It would have been just as easy, and by far more acceptable 
to admirers of Haydn, for the author to have followed the bio- 



688 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

graphical details of the composer's life. Herr von Seeburg 
seems to have a craze for overturning these details, whilst 
failing at the same time to supply anything to take their place. 
Thus in the early chapters the meeting of the Maestro with 
Porpora and Metastasio is described in a way that is exactly 
the opposite of what really occurred ; and the account concern- 
ing the composition of The Austrian Hymn is a wild, fantastic 
dream without even a tinge of reality. And in this instance 
much is lost, as the history of this composition presents at- 
tractive features which could be used to great advantage by 
an author in fiction. 

Taken all around it is very doubtful whether Father Toohey 
has not wasted his abilities on a book possessing little or no 
value. We should have preferred him in translating the book 
to have stuck to the Anglo-Saxon "score"* time- honored by 
its technical use among musicians instead of using " partition." 

SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS: SOME UNINVITED MESSAGES. 
By W. J. Ghent. New York: John Lane Company. $i 
net. 

Mr. Ghent's work disappointed us. The first chapter is 
brilliant, amusing, and instructive, the last is partly convin- 
cing; but running through the volume, especially in the second, 
third and fifth chapters, is a vein of bitterness, almost of 
venom, that lessens our esteem for this entertaining writer 
and our confidence in his judgment. 

He loves to preach and can preach forcibly witness his 
warnings to seekers of " success in its ordinary meaning, 1 ' 
success that is "the sacrifice of what is best in man for a 
trumpery prize," success that is only " the lure of men in the 
modern jungle." He loves to scold, too, we fear and scolds 
lawyers, statesmen, clergymen, and journalists under the rubric 
of "Retainers," and his fanatical comrades under the title of 
"Some Socialists." From his rebuke to these last, some lines 
deserve quotation : 

" You extol free thought and free speech, but often you 
deny that freedom in your own ranks. You have scornful derisive 
words for what you call ' capitalist morality,' forgetful that 
though each economic system develops its superficial code, 
the fundamental ethical standards are an evolution through all 
time, and are no more the product of capitalism than they 



19"-] NEW BOOKS 689 

are of tribal communism or of feudalism, or of those inter- 
mediate systems known as household economy and town econ- 
omy. In your wholesale denunciation of capitalism you forget 
the lessons of history, and you ascribe to a passing economic 
system the prevalence of defects and evils in human nature 
which have persisted throughout the life of the race. You 
denounce the capitalist class for its ruthless exercise of might, 
and yet in your message to the working class you often ap- 
peal, not to its sense of social justice, but merely to its con- 
sciousness of numbers and power. Not seldom you forget 
that Socialism is not merely for the Socialists , but for all men ; 
and you distort the meaning of the class struggle into that of 
a medieval peasants' war a revolt of one class to despoil 
and dominate another. 

"You cannot achieve a millenial revolution by holding such 
concepts and employing such means. You are as one on a 
wrong road, on a dark night, miles and miles from home, and 
headed the wrong way. You will need to dismiss your many 
fallacies, to harmonize your many contradictions between pre- 
cept and practice, you will need to orient yourselves and to 
retrace your steps before you can make headway toward your 
goal." 

The book presents a strong argument for the kind of 
Socialism which consists in " the collective) ownership and 
democratic management of the social means of production 
for the common good." But, of course, the case is prejudiced 
by overstatement. 

MARTHA VINE. Anonymous. London : Herbert and Daniel 

$1.50. 

Martha Vine is a love story of simple life. It is a most 
delicate representation of what would be a tragic story were 
we not assured in our hearts that nothing so sweet and un- 
spoiled could end but as divine comedy. A ycuth and a 
maid seem drawn together by a predestined and undeniable 
love but they are at the same time separated in nature, 
thought and expression by the thousand accidents of their 
different temporal estates. Stephen Flint, at first acquaintance, 
seems hardly more than a mere rustic and physical man but 
he develops upon our perception as one who is strong with 
high virtue and interiorly refined by an intimate loving com- 
VOL xcn. 44 



690 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

munion with all natural life. This authentic refinement he 
sometimes cannot, and sometimes will not, disclose. Martha 
Vine is the vicar's daughter and, so to speak, appropriates 
Stephen Flint by her very power of maidenly simplicity and 
directness. Forthwith she recognizes him as " her only love." 
Then follow the fiery trials of mutual discernment, apprecia- 
tion and disillusionment, love's orientation. 

This beautiful little story we devoutly believe to be the 
first fruit of " great things." Nothing has been written of late 
which shows truer kinship to the lineage of Jane Austen, 
with her gracious seemliness, and of Emily Bronte, with her 
marvelous perception of masculine passion. 

ROYAL PALACES AND PARKS OF FRANCE. By Francis Mil- 
toun. Boston: L. C. Page & Co. $3. 

We have at various times spoken of the pleasant books of 
travel by Francis Miltoun. He is a guide of wide experience, 
entertaining in his reminiscences, and happy in his conversation. 
The latest book, or rather we feel that it should be called a 
talk by him, is Royal Palaces and Parks of France. Mr. Mil- 
toun's pictures of palaces, chateaux, and gardens and the telling, 
to those not thoroughly acquainted with France and her history, 
will be a delightful revelation. He is not an historian nor does 
he claim to be ; but with easy, graceful pen he pictures the 
beauty of chateaux and recounts for us the incidents and tales 
that have shed the light of romance over them. The volume 
is handsomely and generously illustrated. 

KARL MARX : HIS LIFE AND WORK. By John Spargo. New 
York: B. W. Huebsch. $2.50 net. 

Although more than a quarter of a century has elapsed 
since the death of Karl Marx; and although he is regarded 
as the organizer of a movement affecting many millions of 
men; and although his name has been long a storm-centre, 
and his personality a popular subject of discussion, yet no ex- 
haustive and authoritative biography of him has hitherto been 
produced. The present volume aspires to be only a provi- 
sional substitute for the adequate and full biography which 
will one day be published by some better equipped German. 
It represents, however, thirteen years of intermittent work on 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 691 

the part of that most reasonable and persuasive of contempor- 
ary Socialists, Mr. John Spargo ; and hence is a book of some 
authority and of considerable significance. 

There is hardly need to note that Mr. Spargo writes with 
the fervid enthusiasm of the disciple. What is more impor- 
tant, he has brought together many data hitherto scattered 
among the books and periodicals of several languages. And 
of particular interest is his estimate of Marx as entitled to 
fame chiefly because of his discovery of "the materialistic 
conception of history." This, although different from the 
general estimate of Marx, is thus far true, that his importance 
as a teacher of pure economic theory has been diminishing 
day by day in the scientific world; and it is now apparent 
that his claim to enduring fame must be based chiefly upon 
his contributions to the economic theory of history. 

This is much like saying that it is by philosophical stand- 
ards that the greatness of Marx will be decided; and that he 
can never be lifted to a higher level in the temple of divine 
philosophy than is accessible to a materialist, That he pos- 
sessed a brilliant, original intellect and an immense fund of 
energy ; that he helped to draw attention to facts and impli- 
cations that had been wholly misunderstood or too little em- 
phasized, this much credit must always be accorded him. But 
he was born an extremist and his bigness is inexorably lim- 
ited by his own exaggerations. Some of the things he said 
and some of the things he did have helped and will still help, 
no doubt, the forward progress of mankind. But it is when 
placed in another setting and combined with other truths and 
other principles of conduct than those which he represented 
that they do most good. Too much is often worse than too 
little; and we may reasonably prefer still to believe that the 
old-fashioned Christian workingman, exploited and oppressed, 
has a better chance of earthly peace and of immortal happi- 
ness than the well-paid, educated, and independent artisan 
who in gaining a juster share of economic wealth, has lost bis 
God. The Gospel sets lower value on, as it holds out less 
promise of, material goods than does Socialism. Yet it has 
done more to enlighten darkness and to banish misery than 
Socialism has. And so long as this is true there will ever be 
multitudes to whom Marxism is a superstition and its preacher 
a false prophet. 



692 NEW BOOKS [Feb., 

THE ILIAD OF HOMER. Translated by Prentiss Cummings. 
Boston: Little, Brown & Co. $3 net. 

The Iliad of Homer has been subjected to so many and 
varied renderings, that there seems hardly a possibility for a 
new one. Yet every translation is wanting in something that 
affords an opportunity for scholars to exercise their ingenuity 
in making the English production a complete success. The 
present work in two volumes is the result of the author's dis- 
satisfaction with previous efforts. His aim has been to follow 
the Greek text as closely as possible, even adopting hexameter 
verse. But in order to popularize his book he has abridged 
the complete Iliad, limiting himself to all the main story and 
the most celebrated passages, thus omitting about half of 
the original. 

His lengthy introduction gives us a glimpse at the many 
difficulties he met with as well as affording helpful hints to 
future translators. The hexameter verse in Greek is certainly 
strong and powerful and while a literal translation is not an 
impossibility there stills remains the question of advisability. 
This Mr. Cummings has not solved except perhaps inad- 
vertently, and we might add negatively. 

BRAZIL AND HER PEOPLE OF TO-DAY. By Nevin O. Winter. 
Boston: L. C. Page & Co. $3. 

South America, if we judge it by the many recent reports, 
must indeed be the ideal continent. And Brazil, according to 
the description of it given in the present volume, should be 
the fairest spot in all that fair land. Though a young re- 
public, hardly out of its teens, as a Portuguese colony it can 
boast of centuries of existence, two of its important cities 
having been founded almost a hundred years before the founda- 
tion of New York and Boston. 

If the perusal of the book arouses us to amazement at the 
beauty and grandeur of the country, at its broad plains and 
high plateaus, its wonderful waterfalls and watercourses, we 
are taken aback somewhat at the indifference of the inhabitants 
towards the great natural resources. For certainly they have 
not used them to advantage. " Order and Progress " however, 
is the watchword of the new Republic and throughout the 
whole country there are signs of general awakening. Perhaps 



i9".] NEW BOOKS 693 

another century will see Mr. Winter's most sanguine hopes 
realized. 

The book undoubtedly will supply an important addition 
to the fund of knowledge that is constantly increasing concern- 
ing South America. It is well written, contains much informa- 
tion, is supplied with numerous photographs and is neatly bound. 
There are times when we would wish that the author had been 
gifted with a greater power of expression, for when he raises 
our hopes high by some promising beginning, words seem to 
fail him, and our hopes remain unsatisfied. 

ANY attempt to make Dr. Brownson and his writings knpwn 
to the generation of to-day, which knows so little of this 
truly great man is heartily welcomed by us. In the pages of 
a small volume : Watchwords from Dr. Brownson, D. J. Scan- 
nell O'Neill gives those passages from the writings of Dr. 
Brownson which have particularly impressed him in his repeated 
readings of the twenty volumes that go to make up the works 
of this author. The selections fulfill all that their compiler 
claims for them in his preface. The volume may be purchased 
from the Society of the Divine Word, Techny, 111., for the 
small sum of fifty cents.: We trust that Father Scannell O'Neill's 
efforts in Dr. Brownson's behalf will be appreciated, and that the 
book will have a wide circulation. 



B 



. HERDER, of St. Louis, has just published A Poet's Way 
and Other Stories, 50 cents net, by F. M. Capes. 



r write appreciatively of Fenelon without offending the 
friends of Bossuet is a task for French diplomacy. Yet M. 
Delplanque (Fenelon et Ses Amis. Paris: J. Gabalda et Cie.), 
has been admirably sincere and just in the accomplishment of 
his purpose. He has presented a lovable picture of Fenelon's 
relations with such men as the Abbe de Beaumont, the Dukes 
of Beauvilliers and Ghevreuse, the Abbe Langeron, and others. 
M. Delplanque has spared himself no pains in preparing this 
work, and as a result he has secured the recognition of the 
French Academy for a delicate office well fulfilled. 



T 



HE names of four worthy pamphlets received from the 
Morning Star Press, St. Joseph's College, Trichinopoly, 



694 NEW BOOKS [Feb. 

India, arc : The Gospel According to St. Mark, Medical Notes on 
Lourdes, The World and the Prime Cause > Why I am a Catholic. 

THE latest pamphlets issued by the Australian Catholic Truth 
Society are entitled : Ferrer the Anarchist, by Rev. M. 
H. Maclnerny, O.P., Matriage, by the Rev. J. Charnock, SJ. 
Belief in a Creative Power in the Light of Science, by Rev. J. 
Gerard, SJ. 

A LITTLE volume, 'Mid Pines and Heather, by Joseph Car- 
michael. London: Catholic Truth Society. St. Louis, 
Mo. : B. Herder, contains two stories. The first, from which 
the book takes its name, is a mild, pleasant tale with two 
love-affairs and a villain conveniently repentant at the end. It 
is readable and interesting. The second story, " The True and 
the Counterfeit," has an impossible plot, and is bettered by 
any paper-covered dime novel of the Dora Thorne or Tempest 
and Sunshine variety. 

A BIOGRAPHY of an Italian member of the Discalced Car- 
melites, who lived from 16611717, and who was beatified 
by Pope Pius IX. in 1865, is entitled: Blessed Mary of the 
Angels, by the Rev. George O'Neill, SJ. New York, Benziger 
Brothers. It unfolds* the story of a contemplative, whose life 
illustrated the doctrines of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross. 

ANEW addition to St. Margaret's Library, Footsteps in the 
Ward; and Other Stories, by H. M. Capes. St. Louis: 
B. Herder, sells at 50 cents per copy. The stories, some of 
them at least, are interesting, but the entire series would be 
benefitted if the colored plate illustrations were omitted alto- 
gether. In almost every instance they offend goed taste, and 
the same also may be said of the cover designs. 



w 



'E regret that through an error, The Form of Perfect Living, by 
Richard Rolle, reviewed in our January issue, was wrongly 
credited to Duckworth & Co. The volume is published by 
Thomas Baker, London, England. 



The Tablet (10 Dec.): The Decree of the Consistorial Congre- 
gation prohibiting priests from holding official positions 
in financial enterprises. The next Eucharistic Con- 
gress will be held at Madrid in June. 
(17 Dec.): "L'Anglican Malgre Lui"; is a new devel- 
opment of the branch theory. Readers who rightly 

appreciate the critical work of Pere Lagrange, O.P., will 
be glad to know that his pamphlet in reply to the 
"Orpheus" of M. Reinach has just been translated into 
English by the Rev. C. C. Martindale, S.J. and pub- 
lished under the title " Notes on the ' Orpheus ' of M. 
Salomon Reinach." 

(24 Dec.): The net result of the General Election is to 
give one additional vote to the Coalition which sup- 
ports the Government. " The Expulsion of the Jesuits 

from Portugal " the full text of the official Jesuit reply 
to the accusations brought against the Society in Portu- 
gal. "News from Ireland" throws some interesting 

light on "Emigration to the United States." Appeal 
is made to the would-be emigrant to stop at home 
where conditions and methods of labor are better un- 
derstood. 

The Month (Dec.): Father Joseph Rickaby, S.J. contributes 
an article entitled "My Friend's Difficulties," which is 
a resume of conversations between the author and a 
friend who cannot accept the dogmas of either a nat- 
ural or a revealed religion. Father Rickaby answers 
his objections. The article is written in dialogue form. 

An article under the caption " Anti-Monasticism," 

by Rev. Joseph Keating, S.J. was suggested by the 
recent banishment of the religious communities from 
Portugal. The article reviews the life of the religious, 
and shows that it is not in any way injurious to the 
political or social welfare of the nation. "The Re- 
vival of the Mystery Play " by Mary Alice Vialls is a 
protest against the morality of the stage to-day and 
claims that a revival of the mystery plays of the Middle 
Ages is the best way to restore the stage to purity and 



696 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Feb., 

simplicity. The author then discusses a modern mys- 
tery play " Bethlehem " by Mr. Laurence Housman. 
(Jan.): The Rev. J. H. Pollen in an article entitled 
" Mary Stuart's Jesuit Chaplain " gives a detailed his- 
torical sketch of Father Samerie, S.J. who, disguised as 
a physician, acted as chaplain for Mary Stuart during 
her imprisonment. " The Obscurity of St. Paul," by 
the Rev. Joseph Keating considers the difficulties in 

understanding the writings of St. Paul. Under the 

caption "The Library of the Exercises" Rev. Charles 
Plater describes a library at Enghien which is devoted 
exclusively to literature on the exercises of St. Ignatius. 
It is divided into four parts: "Texts of the Exercises," 
"Theory of the Exercises," "Practise of the Exercises," 
" History of the Exercises." 

The Irish Ecclesiastical Record (Dec.) : " Lying," by the Rev. 
Joseph Brosnam, M.A., distinguishes between material 
and formal lies. After making the distinction the author 
defends the Irish against the charge imputed to them by 
foreigners of being flagrant liars. Irish diplomacy, sim- 
plicity, wit, etc., is often mistaken for lying. " Car- 
dinal Vaughan : A Study," by Shane Leslie, Esq. We 
quote the closing paragraph. " In conclusion, if we may 
use a term which has been upon the tip of our pen 
while writing this essay, we would say that, with the 
exception of Bishop Challoner's Life, no portrait of an 
English Bishop since the Reformation has come down 
to us in terms so human and yet so sanctified, so un- 
happy and yet so glorified, so stricken of disappoint- 
ment and yet so laden of triumphs, in which a reader 
might conceive that he had been reading a prima facie 
proposition towards the process of canonization." 

The Crucible (29 Dec.): An account of "The Fourth General 
Meeting of the Catholic Frauenbund " held at Dxissel- 
dorf, October 24. The "Problem of the Feeble- 
Minded" by A. V. Johnson, points out the necessity 
for supervision and segregation." The Modern Mrs. 
Jellyby," by A. Gibbs, is an appeal to woman not to 
overstep the danger mark in the interest of "public 
affairs " and social service, to the neglect and detriment 
of her own home and family. The article also appeals 



i9i i.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 697 

to Catholic women for organized association, with a 
movement towards co-operation and committee work. 

"William Blake: Poet, Artist and Visionary." A 

short sketch of his life, by A, Wilson, with a few words 
in reference to his poetical and artistic works. 

Ike International Journal of Ethics (Jan.): Arthur O. Lovejoy 
in "William James as Philosopher" considers "James* 
characteristic traits as a philosopher and the historic 

value of his contributions to philosophy." "The 

Place of Leisure in Life," is a treatment by B. Bosan- 
quet of Aristotle's " Ethics "-" a great book to which 
even expert scholars as a rule hardly do justice." 
" Idealism and the Conception of Forgiveness " is dis- 
cussed by J. W. Scott," because much of our recent 
culture seems antagonistic to it." He concludes that 
"there is no prohibitive barrier anywhere which would 
justify us in ceasing to regard forgiveness as a valid 
human duty." 

Revue du Clerge Francais (15 Dec.): J. Sabourt gives a 
brief sketch of the religious systems of the Iranians 

and Persians. Writing of " The Revolutionary Ideal 

of Teaching," A. Sicard presents a summary ac- 
count of the spoliation of the teaching orders and 
the secularization of the instruction in the schools of 

France during the Revolution. Apropos of the late 

decree of His Holiness Pope Pius X., S. Desers traces 
through the history of the Church the sentiments of 
various ages and various theological authorities on the 

subject of "Frequent and Daily Communion." E, 

Neubert writes of the " Psychological Side of the De- 
votion to Mary." The Princess Murat outlines a plan 

of aiding young girls in preparing for First Com- 
munion. 

Le Correspondant (i Dec.): Francis Laurentie reproduces the 
diary of Count de Chambord kept during the latter's 
exile from France at Frohsdorf, Austria, recording events 
happening between 1846-1848. The article is further 
augmented by notes and observations of M. Laurentie. 
" Manning's Successor," by Thureau Dangin, gives 
a brief history of the Vaughan family ; the controversy 
between the Jesuits and Bishop Vaughan of Salford ; 



698 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Feb., 

and finally his labors as Cardinal. Viscount dc Mont- 
fort gives a graphic account of some of the principal 
engagements of the Mexican War (1864-1867) under the 

title, "Souvenirs of War." "Social Problems in 

Reality and in the Novel," by Georges Fonsegrive, cites 
a serious problem of life and describes how each of the 
foremost French novelists of to-day would solve it," 
Claude Desjoyeaux in " Le Due de Chartres," gives a 
biographical account of the military career of the late 
nobleman. 

(15 Dec.): "The Question of the Orient at the End of 
1910," by Colette Yver discusses the political situation 
in Turkey since the abdication of Abdul Hamid ; in the 
Balkan States and in the new monarchy of Montenegro. 

"Italian Music in Paris," by Charles Widor outlines 

the history of Italian Opera in the French metropolis 
since its introduction by Louis XIV. to the present day. 

"The Revolt of the Brazilian Marines," by Jean de 

la Jaline describes the siege laid to Rio de Janeiro from 
Nov. 22-26 of the past year to compel the President 
and Congress to consent to the abolition of capital 
punishment and increase of pay in the navy. 

Revue Pratique a? Apologetique (15 Dec.): "The Communion of 
Children before the Age of Reason," by L. Andrieux 
a Conference given at Rheims. The author consid- 
ers the discipline of the Church from the first to the 
twelfth centuries. "The Divinity of Jesus Christ Ac- 
cording to the Synoptic Gospels." The writer of the 
article, J. Pressoir, presents his arguments under the 
following heads: I. " Comparisons by which Jesus showed 
His Divine Nature;" II. "Substitution of Jesus for 
God;" III. "The More Direct Affirmations of Jesus 

of His Divinity;" IV. "Conclusions." "Letters to a 

Student upon the Holy Eucharist," by L. Labauche a 
critical exposition of the ideas of Loisy upon the insti- 
tution of the Eucharist. 

Annales de Philosophic Chretienne (Dec.): D. Sabatier reviews 
at length Fortima Strowski's work of three volumes on 
Pascal and His Time. He thinks the work a real con- 
tribution to the study in question. " If, henceforth," he 
says, " we know too little about Pascal himself, the fault 



19 1 1.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 699 

will not be Mr. Strowski's, who, with tenacity, ingenuity, 
and an admirable piety, has turned up this terra in- 
cognita to wrest from it its secrets." 

Revue Thomiste (Nov.-Dec.) : Le Quichaona in " The Progress 
of Dogma According to the Principles of St. Thomas" 
thinks there has been very little progress in the devel- 
opment of dogma since the thirteeth century. In 

" The First Disputes on the Real Distinction between 
Essence and Existence," R. P. Mandonnet, O.P., takes 
exception to the statement of Pere Chossat that Henri 
de Gaud, a colleague of St. Thomas and Gille of Rome 

(^Egidius) were the first to discuss this question. 

" The Knowledge of Christ," by Pere Claverie, O.P., 
treats of the acquired knowledge of our Lord ; the de- 
velopment of His natural faculties, and the manner in 
which He acquired knowledge. 

Chronique Sociale de France (Dec.): Under the title " The Chief 
Problem of the Present," A. Cretinon reviews the con- 
troversy now raging in Germany as to whether Catholic 
workmen should be allowed to join non-sectarian Chris- 
tian economic associations. Liberalism, to be faithful 
to its individualistic philosophy must, according to J. 
Vialatoux, writing on " Collective Rights and Duties," 
deny to the workingman certain such rights, as, i.,, 
collective bargaining. Remy Collin gives some statis- 
tics regarding workingmen's " Rooms without Windows." 
Twenty-five per cent of Montpellier's laborers live in 
such rooms. 

La Revue du Monde (1-15 Dec.): In "The Empire and the 
Holy See " L'Abbe Feret gives a minute history of the 
negotiations preceding and following the occupation of 
Rome, the encroachments of the Imperial power and the 
final rupture of diplomatic relations, taken from letters 
and documents in the Ministerial Archives.- -The 
Archbishop of Manitoba presents the fifth phase of 
"The School Question in the Canadian North West" 
the effort to obtain the repeal of the new laws which 
violated the Constitutional guarantees granted Confes- 
sional schools by the Act of Union. A summary shows 
first an appeal to the Lieutenant Governor to use his 
discretional power; then a minority demand for the re- 



7oo FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Feb., 

peal of the laws; the Honorable . Blake's resolution 
referring the matter to the courts killed the repeal ; 
when the final decision of the courts was adverse the 
Manitoba Minority, under the provisions of the Consti- 
tution appealed to the Governor General in Council; 
the Government then submitted the cause of the schools 
to the Supreme Court for an opinion as to what it might 
or should do. The resolution of Mr. Blake as accepted 
explicitly stated that the opinion of the court was ad- 
visory and would not relieve the executive from the 
ultimate responsibility of action. The Supreme Court 
has not yet given a decision. A continued " History 
of the Benedictine Abbey of Marmoutier" gives in de- 
tail the events of the late eighteenth century, from its 
passing under the dominion of the Archbishop of Tours 
until the Revolution, and the first inventory of the 

Abbey. The social and political corruption, the 

moneyed power of the Jew and his unscrupulous use of 
it engendering the hatred of the French form the sub- 
ject of a continued story "The Booty of the Bee." 

J. Hughes lays down a valuable programme of "Intel- 
lectual Formation." Specialization built upon a broad 
basis of general culture and aimed toward social helpful- 

ness. 

tudes (20 Dec): Jules Grivet's article on the first petition of 
the Our Father " Hallowed be Thy Name "shows 
that " Egoism," is proper to God alone, Who is the First 
Principle, and the Last End, Who in drawing to Himself 

uplifts, and in demanding glory glorifies. A discussion 

of the "Literary Quarrel in Germany" between the 
editors of the Gral and the Hochland, Kralik and Muth, 
the promoter of a National Catholic literature, and its 
decryer, throws local color on the world wide question 
of confessionalism or anti-confessionalism in Catholic 
writers, and proves that a man's worst enemies are those 

of his own household. Louis Tourcher, missionary in 

Tche-li gives an illuminating article on " The Religious 

Spirit Among the Chinese." Interesting sketches of 

five " Mystics" Ruysbroeck, Angela of Foligno, Juli- 
ana of Norwich, Jeanne-Marie of Bonomo, and Gemma 
Galgani are given apropos of new editions or render- 



i9i i.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 701 

ings of their lives and works. Louis Peyredieu pic- 
tures " The Good Old Times " in the Paris of St. Louis. 
In a criticism of Professor Boehmer's work, " The 
Jesuits," and its French rendering with notes, by Gabriel 
Monod, Joseph Brucker acknowledges the effort toward 
impartiality and points out the defects in exactness and 

understanding which mar the work. The "Bulletin 

of Modern History " reviews many valuable additions to 
French literature. 

La Revue Apologetique (Dec.): Charles Decerf presents in de- 
tail the villainous attack on the sacramental system of 
the Church which free-thinkers and free- masons have 
insinuated into modern Belgian politics. The synop- 
sis of M. Ramband's work on Political Economy is con- 
tinued by C. de Kirwan. Labor, capital, unions, and 

industries are treated under the general head of "Pro- 
duction." 

tudes Franciscaines (Dec.): P. Ladislas lays down rules for 
the recruiting of subjects for the Third Order of St. 
Francis, and quotes the exhortations of the Sovereign 

Pontiffs, Leo XIII. and Pius X. in its behalf. An 

enthusiastic appreciation of the Twenty-First Euchatistic 
Congress deprecates Father Vaughan's sermon at St. 
Patrick's and the speech of His Grace of Westminster 
at Notre Dame, as the two discordant notes in the 
universal harmony, and dwells with fresh insistence 
upon the conservation of the French language as the 

"safeguard of the faith" of the French Canadian. 

A fourth paper on " Ossuna and Duns Scotus " develops 
the teaching of Scotus concerning " The Action of God " 
marks the points of difference between Scotus and St. 
Thomas, and presents the method of prayer of the 
Franciscan mystics as the logical sequence of his teach- 
ing. Letters from Capuchin Friars to the superiors 

of Port Royal des Champs show the influence of the 
Friars Minor in the early days of the Reform. This 
influence was superseded by the growing ascendency of 
Du Verger de Hauranne. 

La Scnola Cattolica (Nov.): "The Decree ' Maxima Cura V 
A commentary on the decree promulgated last August, 
together with an account of its origin, object, and power, 



702 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Feb., 

by Francesco Longoni. " Practical Hints on the Na- 
ture of Scruples," by A. Gemelli. The third article of 
similar nature published by the author for the instruction 
and use of confessors. 

La Civilta Cattolica (3 Dec.): In "Universality of Religion," 
the writer states that Tyrrell, like others without faith, 
assumes as evident that there is a " continuity of evolu- 
tion " among all forms of religion which have arisen in 
every place and at all times. However, Catholicism is 
the most perfect of these forms of religion. " They would, 
therefore, draw unbelievers to the faith, while they them- 
selves continue in practical unbelief; they would make 
Catholicism a universal religion, while they deprive it of 
every character which makes it what it is ; they promise 
immortal life to the Church while they destroy it." 
T. Savio, S.J., gives the "History of the Controversy" 
concerning the celebrated passage found in the First 
Apology of St. Justin, where he mentions the worship 
of Simon Magnus by the Romans. This controversy began 
in 1574, when the base of a statue which bore an in- 
scription very similar to the one indicated by Justin, was 

found in the identical place mentioned by him. This 

number contains the "Protest of the Jesuits Expelled 
from Portugal " to their fellow-countrymen written from 

Madrid. A full account is given of the Twentieth 

Italian Catholic Congress held at Modena in November. 
(17 Dec.): "Journalistic Pornography." "The almost 
universal defilement of present day journalism, particu- 
larly in Italy, is indicative of a great and widespread 
corruption of our people." A remedy is urgent and 
necessary. The Catholic press should unite with the 
Catholic clergy and laity in advocating new legislative 

measures against this evil. Hatred for the Catholic 

Church and her rigorous morality inspired the " Conven- 
tion of Florence," at which several apostates from the 
priesthood were present. Minocchi took for his subject, 
" The Celibacy of the Clergy," and discussed it in a 

manner pleasing to his audience, "The ' Orpheus' of 

Reinach. By making the essence of religion to consist 
in the phantasies of animism and in the imaginary ter- 
rors of the tabu, this writer reduces all religion to mere 



i9i i.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 703 

hallucinations. To him, who professes the most crude 
positivism, this is not only an elementary consequence, 
but rather a fundamental axiom. 

Razon y Fe (i Dec.): L. Murillo examines Loisy's arguments 
against the authenticity of the "Synoptic Apocalypse" 
and the numerous critical opinions as to which verses 
refer to the fall of Jerusalem and which to our Lord's 

second coming. Under the heading " The Jesuits in 

the Revolution in Portugal," A. Perez Goyena discusses 
their influence with the royal family, their political pre- 
dominance, their defence in the revolution, and the Dra- 
conian laws passed against them. J. M. G. O. alleges 
the example of many civilized nations against compulsory 
military service for ecclesiastics. 

Espana y America (i Dec.) : P. M. Coco discusses the " Econo- 
mic and Moral Conditions Leading to the White Slave 
Trade. In " Scientific Pedagogy," P. P. M. Velcz re- 
views Fouille's ideas on "Education and Selection from 
the National Point of View/' and the Ave Maria schools 
of D. Andres Manyon, called the Spanish Dom Bosco. 

The Marquis de Sabuz describes the " Colombian 

Campaign against the Impious Press." P. M. B. 

Garcia satirizes American sensationalism, especially as 

seen in Mr. Walter Wellman's recently attempted balloon 

flight. 

(15 Dec.): "Modernistic and Traditional Theology oa 

the Sacrament of Holy Orders," by P. S. Garcia, is a 

defence of the divine as opposed to a merely human 

institution of the priesthood. P. G. Castrillo, under 

the caption "Japan's Annexation of Korea," points out 
the probability of a similar absorption of China. 
"The Augustinians in Brazil and Father Joaquin Fernan- 
dez " sketches the important work of this order there 
and in Argentina. 

Stimmen aus Maria-Laach (Nov.) : Otto Zimmermann, S.J., 
maintains that intellectual certainty can be reached by 
"The Sense of Truth," but that it is foolish to expose 
such a conviction on important questions to a difficulty 

we cannot rationally solve, "The World Philosophy 

of Madach's ' Tragedy of Men ' " by Jacob Overmans, 
S.J., sketches this Hungarian drama embracing the past, 



704 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Feb. 

present and future of mankind. It is pronounced in- 
capable of satisfying the deep longings, which it attempts 
to satisfy because its author is without the true Chris- 
tian faith. H. Pesch, S.J., discusses " A New Tend- 
ency in Political Economy," the infusion of ethics into 
the "dismal science." "The Genius of Ancient In- 
dian Literature," by Robert Zimmermann, S.J. 
(Dec.): In "The Esthetics of Fiction," A. Stockman, 
S.J., advocates "more narrative less description of senti- 
ments. . . . More action and fewer words! . . . 
Above all, less theology and more of the natural happi- 
ness and poetry of everyday life." Father Rauterkus, 
S.J,, discusses the proposed " Imperial Tax on the Un- 
earned Increment " of land in the German Empire. He 
seems to think it impossible to distinguish justly be- 
tween the earned and unearned increment, or to decide 
what share of the latter should go to the Empire, as 
apart from the federated States and municipalities. 
"Twenty-five Years of Experimental Investigations of 
Memory " by J. Frobes, S.J., details the application by 
Ebbinghaus of the scientific method to this field of 

psychology. Complete text of the decree fixing the 

time for First Communion as that of arrival at the use 
of reason. 



IRecent Events. 

The most important of the events 

France. that have to be noticed as having 

taken place in France are the 

proposals that have been made to prevent strike among the 
employes of the public services. Not that they have become 
law; and so strange is the procedure of the French legisla- 
tive bodies it is impossible to say when they are likely to 
reach that stage. Bills introduced from time to time into 
either the Senate or the House of Deputies, are shelved per- 
haps for years, and may then be, as it were, resuscitated and 
ultimately passed into law. 

The most remarkable feature of the new proposals is that 
they deny to the employes of all the railways, even of those 
which do not belong to the State, the right to strike, and 
this on the ground that these employes are virtually servants 
of the State because the maintenance of a regular railway 
service is a necessity alike for the life of the State, and of 
every citizen. The government takes up the position that 
railway servants are agents of the State and on that account 
claims the right of control. While all strikes are to be for- 
bidden under severe pains and penalties, an elaborate system 
of conciliation and arbitration is to be introduced for the pro- 
tection of the employes. Conciliation Boards, in an ascending 
hierarchy, are to be formed; and at the top there is to be an 
Arbitral Court, if conciliation has failed. This Court is to 
decide authoritatively every question in dispute, and obedience 
to its decision is to be enforced. The Chamber of Deputies 
and the Senate are to nominate the members of this Court, 
from five public bodies, among which are the Academy of 
Sciences, and the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. 
These proposals have been criticized, on the one hand, because 
the principle of compulsion is introduced, thereby restricting 
the full liberty of the men ; and on the other hand, because 
the sanctity of contracts is interfered with, by giving the 
Arbitral Court the power to make changes. 

M, Briand's attitude in this matter as in so many others 

VOL XCII.45 



706 RECENT EVENTS [Feb., 

has been one of mingled firmness and conciliation. An at- 
tempt was made in the Chamber to compel the government 
to require the reinstatement of some 3,000 railway- men who 
had lost their positions on account of their conduct in the 
recent strike. This proposal M. Briand refused to support, 
on the ground that the government was responsible for order 
in the State, and for the public safety, and that if anarchy 
were to be tolerated, there would be no possibility of carry- 
ing out the social reforms which he had in view. Discipline 
must be secured in the public services, So determined was 
he on this point that he declared that if the Chamber would 
not support him in these efforts he would at once resign. 
By 354 to 106 the demanded vote of confidence was passed. 
Although the Premier refused a general amnesty, he expressed 
his willingness to see that all who had been dismissed unjustly 
should be reinstated. These proposals for conciliation and 
compulsory arbitration are avowedly modelled upon the legis- 
lation of Australia and Great Britain. Neither the government 
nor the country can be free from anxiety so long as a more 
or less large number of the working-men are discontented 
with the existing order, and are ready to take the most violent 
measures in their power to overturn this order. During the 
recent strike a non-striker was murdered with the complicity 
of one of the leaders of the strike. That leader was subse- 
quently condemned to death. The General Confederation of 
Labor, which has so often made itself notorious for the efforts 
which it has made to bring about a general strike, threatened 
thereupon that if the sentence were carried out, this General 
Strike would be at once declared. Little success so far has 
attended the efforts of this organization, but it is not pleasant 
for French citizens to be continually living even in the pos- 
sibility of so great a catastrophe. There is reason to think 
that so far little progress has been made in the propagation of 
these views. On the good sense of the public as a whole it 
is to be hoped reliance may be placed. 

Within the ranks of the avowed opponents of the Repub- 
lic elements of disorder have been manifesting themselves. 
M, Briand, when returning from the unveiling of the statue to 
M. Jules Ferry, was seized by the collar of his coat by a man 
who proceeded with chivalrous valor to strike him in the face. 
This man was a member of the Committee of the Camelots du 



i9i i.] RECENT EVENTS 707 

Roi, and he took this way of showing their appreciation of M. 
Briand and his work. These Camelots, it appears, are that 
part of the supporters of monarchy who find the methods of 
the regular organization too slow, and seek to bring about 
the restoration of the throne by acts of the character of the 
one just mentioned. The Due d'Orleans, however, did not 
approve of this assault, nor of the methods generally adopted 
by the Camelots. He has declared them to be guilty of diso- 
bedience and revolt, has passed a formal censure upon them, 
informing them at the same time that when he commands he 
intends to be obeyed. The organ of the Camelots , however, 
takes a different view of their duty. They are devoted, it 
says, to his person, but as he has not been in France for 
twenty-four years, he does not know what he is talking about. 
The Duke of course cannot allow the monarchy to be asso- 
ciated with silly acts like the one in question, nor in fact with 
anything that disturbs the public order, but he evidently is 
not able to control his more ardent supporters. 

The Rochette investigation resulted in censure being passed 
on the Minister of the Interior of the then existing govern- 
ment, on the Prefecture of the Police, and on the examining 
magistrate. The Minister is found to have intervened in a judi- 
cial manner when such intervention was inappropriate; the Pre- 
fecture was held to be guilty of introducing a bogus plaintiff, 
fraudulently provided with securities to press his claim against 
Rochette, and the examining magistrate was guilty of negligence 
in not finding out all these irregularities. It would, therefore, 
appear that the appointment of the Committee was justified, 
and was not merely an effort to damage a political opponent. 

It has long been a matter of common belief that intem- 
perance does not exist to any great extent in wine-growing 
countries such as France. This may have been the case some 
time ago, but so great a change has taken place, and the in- 
crease of drunkenness has been so large that the Premier de- 
clares that it has come to such a pass that the very life of the 
nation is at stake. The government therefore has been forced to 
introduce a Bill into the Senate in order to combat the alcohol- 
ism which has become a veritable scourge. The laws against 
drunkenness are to be enforced, and all societies for the pro- 
motion of temperance are to be protected. One of the pro- 
posals is to reduce the number of drink shops to one to each 



;o8 RECENT EVENTS [Feb., 

300 inhabitants, or three for 600 inhabitants. It has not, we 
believe, been found necessary ever before for the legislature to 
intervene in this way and critics are found who maintain that 
it is an unwarrantable interference with the liberty of industry 
and commerce. But, it is replied, the interests ef liberty and 
commerce must be subordinated to higher interests. 

The extent to which French methods of raising revenue 
restrict tlje free activity of the citizens is shown by a new 
law which has been passed putting a tax upon portable cigar- 
ette lighters. Matches are a government monopoly and those 
cigarette-lighters were taking the place of the matches, said 
to be very bad in quality, which the government has to selL 
Hence it became necessary to impose a tax upon this auda- 
cious innovation. 

The foreign relations of France remain undisturbed although 
Germany keeps so watchful an eye upon every movement 
that no French battleship can pay an unwonted visit to a port 
without an explanation being called for, as was shown when a 
short time ago a warship went to Agadir on the coast of 
Morocco. As the explanation was satisfactory, no harm has 
been done. Some little trepidation was felt as to the object of 
the meeting of the Kaiser and the Tsar at Potsdam ; whether 
or no it would lead to closer relations between Germany and 
France's ally, Russia, but any anxiety that may have been 
felt has been removed. It is generally believed that it was 
only with the affairs of Persia and the Middle East that the 
meeting was concerned. 

In Wadai in the middle of Africa French arms have met 
with a reverse, and it seems probable that the forces of Islam 
are being marshalled to withstand the advance of the infidel 
in that region, and there are not wanting those who say that the 
Young Turks are not unconnected with the movement. In this 
part of Africa the boundaries of Great Britain and France 
come into contact, but yet are not strictly defined. Were it 
not for the good feeling which now exists between the two 
countries, grounds for a controversy might have been found; 
but in this case as in that of Savarkar, and of the gun-run- 
ning which finds a source of supply at a French possession in 
the East of Africa, the good- will of both nations has found, or 
will find a ready means of settlement. It is rumored that as 
a means of settling the last question an exchange of terri- 



1 9 1 1 . ] RECENT EVENTS 709 

tories may be made, Great Britain relinquishing the small 
colony of British Gambia on the West Coast of Africa a 
colony entirely surrounded by the French possessions in that 
region. Efforts are being made to remove the coolness felt by 
Turkey towards France, the result of the refusal of the'French 
government to sanction the loan sought by the former country. 
The New Year opens for France, as for the rest of the 
world, in an atmosphere of peace, of which the efforts, so 
often successful, to settle questions by arbitration is at once 
the effect and cause, and this in spite of of reactionaries 
and pessismists who try to throw cold water upon the at- 
tempts of the more hopeful and generous: an atmosphere 
which, as was said by the British Ambassador in his address 
to the President on New Year's Day " permitted the various 
peoples to live in that peace and quietness which alone en- 
abled them to give their serious consideration to the solution 
of the vast social problems, which more and more demanded 
the attention of the various Governments of the world." 



Writers in the German Press ex- 
Germany, press satisfaction at the marked 

improvement that has taken place 

in the international status and prospects of the German Em- 
pire. They believe that a position of greater power and in- 
dependence has been reached than for many years past. The 
fear of an attempt on the part of other Powers to isolate the Em- 
pire, and to surround it by a ring fence has disappeared. The 
death of King Edward and the Constitutional struggle in Great 
Britain have, it is thought, lessened the influence of that 
country in the affairs of the Continent, and thereby a way 
may be opened for Germany with its sixty- five millions of 
people to a more active foreign policy. 

What is called a detente with Russia has been brought 
about by the recent visit of the Tsar to Potsdam ; that is to 
say, the relations between the two countries have become less 
strained. The Triple Alliance is declared to be in as full force 
as ever, and that the bonds are very close between Germany 
and Austria-Hungary no one doubts. The German influence 
at Constantinople, which was the characteristic feature of the 
Hamidian regime, has gained much of its former power. The 



;io RECENT EVENTS [Feb., 

Netherlands, some think, have been made to feel the power of 
their mighty neighbor. A bill for the defense of the country 
is being discussed proposing a system of fortification which, 
while it leaves the way by land open for a German Army, 
is meant to protect the sea-ports from the attack of any other 
Power. This is said to have Germany as its author and pro- 
moter, an assertion, however, which is vehemently denied. 

The attempt of two British Officers to discover the military 
secrets of the Empire is an incident which certainly does not 
tend to improve the relations between Great Britain and Ger- 
many, but as every country is engaged in similar efforts there 
is no just ground for complaint, and in fact little complaint 
has been made. But when it is asserted that this particular 
attempt proves that Great Britain is contemplating an invasion 
of Germany, one more illustration is given of the power of the 
imagination. 

The finances of the Empire are making steady progress 
towards a state of health. There is, it is true, a deficit, but 
not so large as usual, and the loan to be issued this year will 
be the smallest for twenty years. No less money is to be ex- 
pended in the army and navy; in fact the amount is to be 
increased. An increment tax, the introduction of which into 
Great Britain has caused so much discussion, has existed as a 
municipal tax for many years in Germany. It is now proposed 
to adopt it as an Imperial tax. 

The movement, if such it may be called, for making minis- 
ters responsible to the Reichstag, not to the Kaiser, makes no 
progress. In fact the Chancellor recently declared at a sitting 
of Parliament, that he was not its servant, that as long as he 
had the support of the Emperor and the Federal Government, 
he would pursue the policy and propose the legislation which 
according to his own conviction, was good for the Fatherland. 
To any party which should give him its support, he would be 
grateful and gladly accept its help. Towards the Social Demo- 
crats, however, and all their aims unflinching opposition would 
be offered, by the employment of every resource with which 
the State is provided. But this does not prevent German 
citizens from voting for them in ever-increasing numbers, al- 
though social legislation has gone farther in Germany than 
in any other country in the world. 

The long-expected Constitution for Alsace-Lorraine has 






i9ii.] RECENT EVENTS 711 

been adopted by the Federal Council, and the details have 
been published. It has, however, to go through the Reichstag, 
and may therefore be modified in some particulars. In some 
respects it is disappointing. Autonomy is given, but with 
many restrictions. Laws are to be made by the Emperor, 
but not without the consent of the new two-chambered Diet. 
No place is granted to Alsace-Lorraine in Imperial legislation 
and government. To the Federal Council, the provinces are 
to send three delegates, and these may speak but not vote. 
If the vote had been conceded, Prussian predominance in the 
Council would have been at an end, and this sacrifice could 
not be made. Space does not permit the enumeration of all 
the provisions of the new Constitution, although they are in- 
teresting as examples of the latest ideas of what a Constitu- 
tion made in Germany should be. A few points, however, may 
be mentioned. Of the Upper House the two Catholic Bishops of 
Strassburg and of Metz are to be ex-officio members, together 
with, among others, the Presidents of the Evangelical Church, 
and a representative of the Jews. Chambers of Commerce, 
Municipal Councils, Agricultural Councils, and the League of 
Guilds are to elect representatives. For the Lower House the 
franchise is to be universal, with secret ballot and direct voting. 
Persons over thirty- five years of age are to have two votes, and 
those over forty- five years three votes. This is done in order 
to secure moderation in the working of the Second Chamber, 
by giving a preference to those electors who are ripe in the 
experience of life. The second ballot so common on the con- 
tinent is not adopted. The proposed Constitution has not 
been favorably received by all. The Upper Chamber, it is 
said, is constituted in such a way as to make it an instrument 
in the hands of the Berlin authorities for frustrating the pop- 
ular will. A distinguished priest has expressed the opinion 
that it would be better for Alsace-Lorraine to remain in its 
present dependence upon the Federal Council, for in that Coun- 
cil the voice of the South German States is influential. 



A Ministerial crisis has taken place 

Austria-Hungary. in Austria, in consequence of which 

the Premier Baron von Bienerth 
has resigned. His resignation has been accepted, but he has 



712 RECENT EVENTS [Feb., 

been requested to remain in office until a new Ministry can be 
formed. The cause of the resignation was the unwillingness 
or the inability of the Ministry to fulfil certain promises made 
to the Poles to accord financial assistance for the making of 
canals in Galicia. In consequence of this the Poles refused 
that support which was necessary to maintain a majority. 

The government had suffered a defeat a few weeks before 
on a motion to allow the importation of transoceanic meat. 
High prices have increased the burdens which the poor have 
to bear in Austria-Hungary, as well as in most of the other 
countries of Europe. In Vienna the people had assembled in 
tens of thousands, in order to call the attention of the govern- 
ment to the situation, but the government, in deference to the 
agrarian interest, which is making its profit out of the necessity 
of their neighbors, had turned a deaf ear and would not admit, 
as it was in their power to do, the supplies that were necessary 
to lower prices. 

The burdens imposed upon the people are to be still fur- 
ther increased by the measures to keep the peace such is the 
alleged object which the government has adopted. An elab- 
orate programme for the increase of the Navy has been pre- 
pared, providing for the construction of four Dreadnoughts 
and three cruisers, within the next five years, to cost in all 
over sixty millions of dollars. Nor is this the limit, for two 
further Dreadnought divisions of four ships each must be built 
before 1925 if the Austrian Navy is to attain the standard to 
which the naval authorities aspire. It cannnot be wondered 
at that there are large deficits both in Austria and in Hun- 
gary, or that there are some who say that the maintenance of 
peace is becoming more burdensome than war. Forty millions 
for Austria, and thirty millions for Hungary are the deficits 
for the current year. 

It may be remembered that some little time ago a distinguished 
historian, Dr. Friedjung, was put upon trial for libelling a large 
number of the Southern Slavs. He had accused them of treason, 
and had justified his action by an appeal to documents furnished 
him by the Foreign Office. In the course of the trial these 
documents were shown to be forgeries, and forgeries quite 
easily detected, The question now has arisen who it was that 
was the author of these forgeries, and a Slav member of the 
delegations has accused members of the Austrian diplomatic 



i9i i.] RECENT EVENTS 713 

body of being at least cognizant of these frauds. It has in 
fact been brought home to one of the officials, that he was in 
close relations with the individual who has been proved to 
have been concerned in the concoction of documents in ques- 
tion. It still remains uncertain whether or no the Foreign 
Secretary himself was actively ignorant. The advent of Count 
Aehrenthal to power has not redounded to the credit of the 
Austrian conduct of affairs. Rumors have been current that 
he was on the point of resigning, and this is rendered all the 
more probable since his attitude towards certain German pro- 
posals to put duties on shipping is said to have displeased 
the Prussian authorities. 

Early in last December it was an- 
Russia. nounced, on what seemed to be 

good authority, that it had been 

decided to reduce the Duma to a consultative institution, simi- 
lar to the Council of the Empire, under an autocratic regime. 
Happily this has proved not to be true, but it undoubtedly 
expresses the wish of the many enemies in Russia of anything 
like a Parliament, and shows its precarious character, depen- 
dent as it is for the origin and continuance on the will of a 
single man. The Tsar, however, according to a more recent 
announcement is satisfied with the Duma, especially with its 
work on the Budget, and has vouchsafed to express to the 
Chairman of the Budget Committee the pleasure which he felt 
during his recent sojourn abroad, at hearing foreigners praise 
the active and beneficent influence exercised by the Duma in 
the domain of national economy. This possibly may mean 
that it will be more easy on account of this influence to raise 
the new loan which it is said is contemplated, and that on 
this account, its existence is still to be tolerated. 



Italy is one of the few countries in 
Italy. Europe which is able to pay its way, 

year by year. The net Budget sur- 
plus amounts to over three millions of dollars, and this is to be 
applied to meet the losses caused by the recent outbreak of chol- 
era in Southern Italy. A blot on Italian civilization, which has 



714 RECENT EVENTS [Feb. 

often caused criticism, is the widespread cruelty shown to an- 
imals. The government has introduced a Bill into the Senate 
to deal with this matter. The blinding of birds, the infliction of 
unnecessary suffering in the killing of animals, the overworking 
of horses and other beasts of burden are to be visited with 
pains and penalties. Vivisection is to be placed under severe 
restrictions. The introduction of the Bill is due largely to the 
efforts of various societies which have of late been formed for 
the prevention of cruelty to animals. 

In the more strictly political sphere also the government 
is proceeding in the path of reform. A Bill has been intro- 
duced to extend the Parliamentary franchise to all adults who 
can prove that they are able to read and write. For those 
who are thus qualified the exercise of the franchise is made 
obligatory, the omission to vote being punishable with fines of 
five dollars in the first instance gradually rising in amount if 
the offense is repeated. This obligation to vote is not ap- 
proved by the Extreme Parties, for their strength is said to 
be due to the abstention from voting of their opponents. The 
Socialists, in particular, have resolved to oppose the Bill on 
the ground that it " threatens the liberty of conscience of 
citizens, and is in substance illiberal." 



With Our Readers 

THE Catholic teachers throughout our country, great in their 
number and great in their.aims, are doing a noble work for 
souls. Our Catholic laity also are writing an heroic page to their 
credit in history by their generous support of Catholic schools and 
educational institutions. We believe that the necessity of religious 
instruction, presented earnestly and fairly to our fellow- citizens, is 
becoming more and more evident to many who have differed from us. 
We believe also that with regard to proficiency, Catholic education 
particularly in our parochial schools, has already reached a high de- 
gree of excellence and that by constant diligence and attention the 
high degree will be maintained. We -have been perfecting that 
system by high school, college and university. With regard to par- 
ochial schools of a particular diocese the appointment of a supervisor 
has effected a general schedule of studies a common system that in- 
sures a high standard of proficiency ; and much of the success of the 
parochial schools has been due to this harmony and unity. This 
work of systematizing, of making the elimentary fit the higher, of a 
thoughtful consideration of education as a whole of elementary 
school, of high school, of college, and of university, is receiving 
the careful attention of Catholic educators. Much has been done 
to secure it and much more we hope will be done in the immediate 
future. 

It is a work which should call forth the best efforts of all inter- 
ested in Catholic education. It is a work of vital importance, not 
only for the welfare of the Church and for the predominant influence 
which the Church ought to exercise in this country, but also for the 
salvation of souls. Questions of earth and heaven are sometimes 
most intimately connected. We must prepare our boys and girls in 
such a way that, if they be capable and thousands of them are cap- 
able they may go from school to college and to university. They 
must be thoroughly and systematically trained and fitted for the in- 
tellectual work of the day among their fellowmen. Great numbers 
of them should occupy honored positions in the higher professions. 
They should be so thoroughly equipped that their ability would 
command the respect of all ; and they themselves should take their 
place among our rulers ; among those who administer justice ; who 
direct or influence opinion capable writers, public speakers who, 
with the inheritance of Her who has guided nations, will intelli- 
gently, capably, guide our people through the social confusion, the 
chaos of false principles, with which we will soon, if portents fail 
not, have to do battle. 

We welcome, therefore, most cordially a new monthly 7 he Cath- 



;i6 WITH OUR READERS [Feb., 

olic Educational Review, published by the Catholic Education Press 
and under the direction of the Catholic University of America. Its 
first issue is most promising both in quality and in quantity. It 
gives its readers over one hundred pages of reading matter and its 
table of contents includes, 'Ihe Papacy and Education by Dr. Edward 
A. Pace; The Playground Movement by Rev. John J. McCoy; The 
Pastor in Education by Dr. Thomas J. Shahan; Jesuit Education in 
America by Father Swickerath, S.J.; The Teaching Of Religion by 
Thomas E. Shields, and thirty pages of " Notes " on discussion of 
educational topics. 

This beginning, we feel, is an earnest of what will be, and we 
bespeak for this new work the earnest and active co-operation of all 
our Catholics, religious and lay, who are interested in matters ot 
Catholic education. ' _ 

THE exquisite gift of compact expression, which Father Tabb 
possessed in such a remarkable degree, never was made more 
manifest than in a recent issue of the Classical Review. There was 
printed his fine quatrain to Niva with a translation into L,atin by 
Mr. Moss and into Greek by Mr. Seaton, two distinguished English 
classical scholars. We are sure to give delight to many of our 
readers by reproducing the original lines with these two versions : 

Niva, child of Innocence, 

Dust to dust we go ; 
Thou, when winter wooed thee hence, 

Wentest snow to snow. 

Pulvere nos ortos, Niva, qua nil purius, infans, 
Deducto L,achesi stamine pulvis habet ; 

Tu, simul invitavit hiems glacialis, abisti 
Quam cito cognatae nix socianda nivi. 



ayvdv, 
Tupb<; xdviv otxstiQV, UT' av KXfl OdcvaTO?. 



The fine beauty of the English is evident to everyone. Here 
we have, to use the quotation which someone recently applied, with 
great aptness, to Father Tabb's work: " infinite riches in a little 
room." It is not the mere conciseness of an epigram : the expres- 
sion is even more poetical than neat. When we turn to the Latin 
and Greek versions, eheu ! how the beauty of the rose has faded, 
how the facets of the diamond are marred ! We mean no dis- 



i9i i.] WITH OUR READERS 717 

courtesy to these distinguished professors when we state that their 
versions lack the beauty even more than the brevity of the original ; 
we are simply saying they are translators. Turn, reader, and see 

how the line, 

Thou, when winter wooed thee hence 

has been reproduced. In the original it is sweet as the smile of a 
child ; in the version it is as stiff and stately as the bow of a Dow- 
ager Duchess. Always admirers of the serious muse of Father 
Tabb, we confess that our admiration was greatly enhanced by 
reading these translations of the exquisite Niva. 

While we are speaking of Father Tabb we wish to notice a 
curious coincidence between one of his quatrains and some lines of 
a poem by William Watson. In his " Nature " Father Tabb wrote : 

It is His garment ; and to them 
Who touch in faith its utmost hem 
He turning, says again, "I see 
That virtue hath gone out of me." 

And in " The Questioner " of Watson are these lines : 

And they made answer: "Veriiy, 
The robe around His form are we, 
That sick and sore mortality 
May touch its hem and healed be." 



IN striking contrast to the bitter attacks being made upon religion 
in some of the countries of Europe and the rabid attempts of 
some of their politicians to wipe all religion from the face of the 
earth, there was held during the last month in Washington, D. C., 
a reception and dinner to His Eminence, Cardinal Gibbons, at which 
were present many notables, Catholic and non-Catholic, of our Gov- 
ernment. The reception was held at St. Patrick's Church, of which 
Father Russell is rector. We have no intention of reviewing it in 
detail, but the words uttered there by the representatives of our 
Government were most gratifying and encouraging. Members of 
the Cabinet, of the Supreme Court, of the Senate, and of the House 
spoke. All of them had words of praise for the Catholic Church, 
and even though some of them frankly stated that they themselves 
were members of other churches, all without exception claimed em- 
phatically that religion was absolutely necessary for anything like 
stable government and for public morality. It was interesting also 
to note that these statements received the enthusiastic approval 
of all who were present. For the thoughtful American it was a 
happy and hopeful occasion. 



;i8 WITH OUR READERS [Feb., 

It would have been well if the editors of The Independent and 
the Outlook were present. Perhaps they would have rushed horri- 
fied from the room. For the former journal is allowing itself to 
become the organ of the vicious anti-clericals of Europe, and never 
loses an opportunity to publish anything discreditable to the Catho- 
lic Church ; and the latter is, of late, showing evidences of peevish 
temper with regard to the Church, and, more important still, is 
reechoing also, though not quite so enthusiastically, the sentiments 
of anti-clericals. 



ONCE there was a boy, a very young boy who was not really bad, 
but who thought himself very bright and clever. He imagined 
that he was a man, and was absolutely sure that a real man must not 
be too good ; a real man must smoke and swear once in a while ; he 
must at least have some manly faults and not be like those saints 
that one sees in the windows of churches. To be without faults, 
this young boy thought, was to forfeit one's manhood. The boy 
was as proud of his superior knowledge as a young colt of its sense- 
less caperings. And once he stole by the editors of the dignified At- 
lantic Monthly while they dozed or while their attention was directed 
elsewhere, and gave a manuscript to the compositors. The editors 
allowed it to go to press and it appears in the January Atlantic -under 
the brilliant and inspiring title of " The Ignominy of Being Good." 



THK latest decree of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office on 
the question of the medal-scapular will be of interest to our 
readers and we reprint it here : 

Since it is well known that the holy scapulars, as they are called, do much 
to foster devotion in the faithful and excite them to resolutions for a more 
holy life, in order that the pious usage calculated to make them better known 
may grow from day to day, our most holy Father, Pius X.,by Divine Provi- 
dence Pope, although earnestly desiring tkat the faithful would continue 
to carry them as has hitherto been their custom, nevertheless, comply- 
ing with the petitions presented to him by a large number of persons, 
graciously deigned to decree, after taking a vote of the most eminent fathers 
the Cardinals of the Inquisition in an audience granted to the Reverend As- 
sessor of this Supreme Congregation on December 16 of the present year, 
that : it is licit for all the faithful who have been enrolled by the regular 
ceremonial, as is said, or shall afterwards be enrolled in one or several of the 
scapulars of the genuine kind approved by the Holy See, to wear henceforth 
on their persons, instead of one or more scapulars of cloth, a single metal 
medal, either at the neck or otherwise, with, nevertheless, due decorum, by 
which, observing the laws proper to each, they may gain and participate in 
all the spiritual favors (the Saturday privilege, as it is called, of the Blessed 



i9i i.] BOOKS RECEIVED 519 

Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel not excepted) and all the indulgences attached 
to each ; that one side of this medal must bear the representation of our Lord 
Jesus Christ showing His Most Sacred Heart, and the obverse one of the 
Blessed Virgin Mary : that the medal must be blessed by as many benedic- 
tions as number the scapulars to be imposed, according to the number desired 
by the applicant; finally, each benediction may be imparted by making a sin- 
gle sign of the cross, either at the enrolling itself, immediately after the reg- 
ular imposition of the scapular or even later at the convenience of the 
applicant ; it does not matter whether the order of different enrollments be 
observed or not, nor whether the time that intervenes between them is more 
or less. They can be imparted by any priest and even by one distinct from 
him who enrolled the applicant, provided he has faculties, either ordinary or 
delegated, to bless the respective scapulars ; however, the limits, clauses, and 
conditions of the first faculties are not to be changed. 

All things whatsoever to the contrary notwithstanding, even those worthy 
of special mention. 

Dated at Rome from the buildings of the Holy Office, 16 December, 1910. 

L. f S. ALOISIUS GIAMBENE. 

Instructions are to follow concerning medals that have already 
been blessed and the faculties quoted for blessing them. 



BOOKS RECEIVED. 

BENZIGER BROTHERS, New York : 

Christian Mysteries. By Rt. Rev. Jeremias Bonomelli, D.D. Translated by Rt. Rev. 
S. Byrne, D.D. Vol. I., II., III., IV. $5 net. St. Francis and Poverty. By Father 
Cuthbert, O.S.F.C. 40 cents net. St. Clare of Assist. By Very Rev. Leopold de 
Cherance, O.S.F.C. $r net. Memento* of The English Martyrs and Confessors. By 
Henry S. Bowden. 45 cents net. The Groundwork of Christian Perfection. By the 
Rev. Patrick Ryan, sd edition. 70 cents net. Leading- Events in the History of the 
Church: Part I. and IV. By the Sisters of Notre Dame. $4 per volume. 
FR. PUSTET, New York : 

Catechism on the Things Necessary to be Known by Little Children Before Holy Communion. 
3 cents per copy ; 30 cents per dozen ; $2 per hundred. Character Glimpses of Most Rev. 
William Henry Elder, D-D. $1.25 net. The Date of the Composition of Deuteronomy. 
By Hugh Pope, O.P.S.T.L. $1.50. DeMneffabili Bonitate Sacratissimi Cordis Jesu. 
By Cardinal Vives, O.M. $1. 
P. J. KENEDY, New York : 

Revised Darwinism ; or Father Wasman on Evolution. By Rev. Simon FitzSimons. 50 

cents net. 
LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., New York: 

The Roman Empire. By F. W. Bussel. Vols. I., II. $9 net. William Morris. By 
J. W. Mackail, M.A. LL.D. 30 cents net. Non-Catholic Denominations. By the Rev. 
Robert Hugh Benson, M.A. $1.20 net. The Maid of Orleans. By Robert Hugh Ben- 
son. $1.50. The Plain Gold' Ring. By Robert Kane, SJ. 65 cents. The Spirit of 
Power. By L. A. Edgehill. $1.40. 
CATHEDRAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, New York : 

History and Historical Reading. Pedagogical Truth Library. .By Anthony Beck, A.M. 
15 cents. 
LITTLE, BROWN & Co., Boston: 

The Golden Web. By Anthony Partridge. $1.50. Criminal Psychology. By Hans Gross. 

$5 net. Modern Theories of Criminalitv. By C. Bernaldo de Quiros. $4 net. 
ANGEL GUARDIAN PRESS, Boston: 

Down at the Cross Timbers. By P. S. McGeeney, $i. Down at Steins Pass. By P. S. 
McGeeney. $i. 



720 BOOKS RECEIVED [Feb., 1911.] 

SHERMAN, FRENCH & Co., Boston: 

The Unfading Light. By Caroline D. Swan. $1.25. 
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE, Washington, D. C.: 

The Biological Stations of Europe. By Charles Atwood Kofoid. 
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, Chicago: 

Industrial Insurance in the United States. By Charles Richmond Henderson. $2 net. 
B. HERDER, St. Louis : 

History f Dogmas. By J. T. Tixeront. Vol. I; $1.50 net. Vain Repetitions. By 

Cardinal Newman. 10 cents. 60 cents a dozen. 
R. & T. WASHBOURNB, London : 

A Priest and His Boys. From the French by Alice Dease. 75 cents. 
BURNS & GATES, London: 

The Catholic Who's Who and Year Book for ign. Edited by Sir F. C. Burnand. 3*. 6d\ 

net. 
THOMAS BAKER, London: 

A Medieval Mystic (Blessed John Ruysbroeck). By Dom Vincent Scully, O.R.L. zs. 6d. 

net. 
HUBERT & DANIEL, London : 

Eyes of Youth. A Book of Verse. By several writers, including poems by Francis 

Thompson and a Foreword by G. K. Chesterton. 
GABRIEL BEAUCHESNE ET CIE., Paris : 

Histoire Partiale. Histoire Vraie. Par Jean Guirard. 3 frs. 50. Pascal. Par H. 

Petiot. 6 frs. 50. 
BLOUD ET Cis., Paris: 

La R 'e forme de la Pronunciation Latine. Par Camille Couillaut. 2 frs. 50. Leonard da 
Vinci. Par Baron Carra De Vaux. o fr. 60. Thomassin, Par J. Martin, i/r. 20. 
Buchez. Par G. Castella. ofr. 60. La Soeur Rosalie. Par Fernand Laudet. ofr. 60. 
St. Justin, Sa Vie et sa Doctrine. Par Abbe A. Bdry. o fr. 60. Civisme et Catholi- 
cisme. Par E. Julien. ofr. 60. Le Dogme. Par P. Charles, ofr. 60. La Psychologic 
Dramatique du Mystere de la Passion a Oberammergau. Par Maurice Blondel. 
ofr 60. St. Pie V. Par Paul Deslandres. ofr. 60. L ' Apologttique. Par Mgr. Douais. 
ojr.6o. Habitations a Bon Marcht et Caisses d ' Epargne. Par Henry Clement, ofr. 60. 
Les Jeunes Filles Franc.aises et le Probleme de I ' Education. Par Paul Feyel. o fr. 60. 
Le Martyrologie. Par J.Baudot. o/r*6o. Art et Pornographic. Par Georges Fonse- 
grive. ofr. 60. Le Clergt Gallo-Romain. Par Henri Couget. ofr. 60, Histoire de 
L 'Eglise. Par L. David et P. Lorette. 3 frs. Bible et Protestantisme. Par W. 
Franque. 2 frs, 
LIBRARIE ALPHONSE PICARD ET FILS, Paris: 

Nicolas Coussin. Par le P. Camille De Rochcmonteix. 
WM. LINEHAN, Melbourne, Australia : 

Within the Soul. Helps in the Spiritual Life. By the Rev. W. J. Watson, S.J. 
P. LETHIELLEUX, Paris: 

Le Fleau Romantique. Par C. Lecigne. 3 frs. 50. 
PIERRE TEQUI, Paris: 

Jeunesse et Puretl. Par Henri Morice. L'Heure du Matin ou Meditations Sacerdotales. 
Parl'Abbd E. Dunac. Tomes I. and II. 6 frs. par tome. La Bontt et ses trois Prin- 
cipaux Adversaires. Par Joseph Vernhes. 2 frs. Dieu : Son Existence et sa Nature. 
Par 1' Abbe" Broussolle. La Lot d'Age pour La Premiere Communion. Par TAbbe* 
F. Sibeud. 
PLON-NOURRIT ET CIE., Paris: 

La Cite* Future. Par Louis De Meurville. 3 frs. 50. 
BERNARD GRASSET. Paris : 

La Crise Organique de I' Eglisc en France. Par Paul Vulliaud. 2 frs. 
HACHETTE ET CIE., Paris: 

Apres le Concordat. Par C. Latreille. 3frs* So. 
GABRIEL BEAUCHESNE ET CIE., Paris: 

Bossuet et les Protestants, Par E. Julien. 3 frs. 50. Dictionnaire Apologttique de la Foi 

Catholiquc. 5 frs. 
AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY, Melbourne: 

For the Holy Souls: and Other Stories. By Miriam Agatha. One penny. The Happi- 
ness of Catholic Countries. By Rev. M. H. Maclnerny, O.P. One penny. 
LIBRERIA EDITRICE FIORENTINA: 

Theologia Dogmatica Orthodoxa Ecclesice Greece- Russicce ad lumen Catholicce doctrines ex- 
aminata et discussa. Aurelius Palmieri, O.S.A. Tomus I. Prolegomena. 




THE 

CATHOLIC WORLD. 

VOL. XCII. MARCH, 1911. No. 552. 

REFLECTIONS ON CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. 

BY FRANCIS P. DUFFY, D.D. 

|HE recent death of Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy has 
attracted the attention of the whole country to 
her personality and to the ideas which she pro- 
pagated so successfully during the latter half of 
her life. No woman in this country has hitherto 
been made the subject of such extensive obituary notices. 
The tone of these ranges through the whole scale of feeling, 
from worship to scorn, but all agree in looking upon her career 
as a remarkable one. 

Any human being who achieves success in a large way is 
worthy of human interest. And, put in figures, here is the 
evidence of her success. At her death she leaves behind her 
a church establishment which has about a thousand churches 
or societies, four thousand practicing healers, three hundred 
thousand adherents, and property worth nearly thirty million 
dollars. The votaries of her cult are found in different coun- 
tries. They belong, as a rule, to the educated class, and are 
cultured in a middling way. These people look upon her as 
a prophet; some of them seem to consider her divine; there 
are hopes now being entertained of her resurrection. 

What manner of person is it who can leave such an im- 
press upon her contemporaries ? Fortunately, we are not left 
to hasty biographical sketches for the facts of her life. Dur- 
ing the past few years, her career has received attention frcm 
friends and foes. Her biographies make disappointing reading, 
since neither critics nor worshipers seem able to analyze the 
elements of her success. Briefly, she is a New Englander, of 
good stock, with limited early education, and displaying in 

Copyright. 1911. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE 

IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK. 
VOL. XCII. 46 



722 REFLECTIONS ON CHRISTIAN SCIENCE [Mar., 

her writing about the same mental and literary attainments 
that one finds in some pathetic volume of "Poems, published 
by the Authoress" that occasionally drifts into a reviewer's 
hands from some lone village in Vermont or Indiana. In early 
life she had an attractiveness of appearance which shows in 
the latest photographs that she allowed to be published. She 
was thrice a widow, in the Western phrase, "twice sod and 
once grass," her second husband having been divorced by 
her. She was, during half her life, of a neurotic temperament 
invalid-ish and difficile. Her anxiety about her own health ex- 
plains the cult which she took up and propagated. It has 
been sufficiently established that the originator of this medico- 
religious system was not Mrs. Eddy, but a Phineas P. Quimby, 
who first taught her how her imagination could cure the ills 
it had caused. But there is no doubt that the present success 
of the system is due to Mrs. Eddy's book on Science and 
Health With Key to the Scriptures, first published in 1875. In 
the propagation of the movement, Mrs. Eddy for the first 
time shows signs of the masterful ability which we are looking 
for in her life. She had a shrewd eye for financial success, 
selling her book, five hundred editions of it, at a high price. 
And she kept a strong hold over the church she founded, 
making herself the supreme leader, and her book the Bible, of 
all Christian Scientists. Even during her later [years, when 
old age compelled her to retire from active life, she managed 
to keep her undisputed hold over her large following. 

So much for the prophet; now for her message. Science 
and Health makes hard reading for one accustomed to con- 
sistent and logical modes of thought. The work abounds in 
contradictory and meaningless statements. Professor James' 
phrase "paroxysmal unintelligibilities" is perhaps too ele- 
vated for the matter; Mr. Dooley's expression "near- thought" 
hits it off better. Bat in spite of obscurities, there is a body 
of belief in the book, which is the main creed of Christian 
Science. We shall borrow a statement of the philosophy of 
the system from Miss Gaorgine Milmine's Life of Mrs. Eddy. 

She asserted that there is no matter, and we have no senses. 
The five senses being non-existent, Mrs. Eddy pointed out that 
' ' all evidence obtained therefrom ' ' is non-existent also. * * All 
material life is a self-evident falsehood." But while denying 
the existence of matter, Mrs. Eddy gave it a sort of compulsory 
recognition by calling it ' ' mortality. ' ' And as such it assumes 



i9i i. J REFLECTIONS ON CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 723 

formidable proportions. It is error, evil, a belief, an illus- 
ion, discord, a false claim, darkness, devil, sin, sickness, and 
death; and all these are non-existent. Her denials include 
all the physical world and mankind, and all that mankind has 
accomplished by means of his reason and intelligence. 
" Doctrines, opinions, and beliefs, the so-called laws of na- 
ture, remedies for soul and body, Materia Medica, etc., are 
error.'* ... In Mrs. Eddy's system, all that exists is an 
immortal Principle which is defined as Spirit, God, Intelli- 
gence, Mind, Soul, Truth, lyife, etc., and is the basis of all 
things real. This universal Principle is altogether good. In 
it there is no evil, darkness, pain, sickness, or other form of 
what Mrs. Eddy calls " error." Man is a spiritual being only 
and the world he inhabits is a spiritual world." 

It is evident that this system goes much farther than most 
schemes of mental healing. Mrs. Eddy rejects, of course, the 
same medical view of the influence of mental on bodily states. 
For her there is no body. She reprobates mesmerism, or, as 
she calls it, " malicious animal magnetism. " Nor can her 
scheme be called a faith cure; it is not faith, but understand- 
ing, i. e. t knowledge of its non-existence, which removes the evil. 
For the same reason, prayer is rejected. Opposite the copyright 
page of her book she has inscribed the words of Shakespeare 
" There's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." 

There is no urgent call for a refutation of this system of 
thought in a Catholic periodical. Here and there one hears 
of some person of nominal Catholic affiliations who has taken 
up with Christian Science. But the Catholic body, for reasons 
which we shall indicate, has been little affected by this popu- 
lar delusion. It is possible for us to view the movement 
serenely, as a topic which has interest for the observer of the 
vagaries of the unguided human mind in matters religious. 

The first question which urges itself is how to account for 
its astounding success. Its principles run counter to all nor- 
mal modes of thinking; its claims are contraverted by the 
daily experience, even of its adepts. Yet it numbers its fol- 
lowers in the hundreds of thousands. These followers are not 
Hindoo dreamers or Russian peasants. They are mainly men 
and women of Anglo-Saxon Protestant stock, well-to-do, fairly 
intelligent, seemingly sensible, living in the United States in 
the beginning of the twentieth century. How did so many of 
such people come to adopt such a creed as this ? It is only 



724 REFLECTIONS ON CHRISTIAN SCIENCE [Mar., 

a part, a small part, we think, of the answer to say that Mrs. 
Eddy has gotten hold of a phase of truth which the medical 
profession was neglecting. That part of her teaching is cer- 
tainly of most avail in giving her religion a start, by produc- 
ing the pseudo-miracles as well as the serenity of micd which 
is a result of the deliberate avoidance of worry. But the suc- 
cessful preaching of the exaggerated metaphysical system 
which lies back of the healing is an indication, first of all, of 
a revolt against materialism. The half-thinkers of a genera- 
tion ago broke away from religion as a worn-out view of life. 
They could not tolerate its sane views of body and soul, of 
this life and the next, and they proclaimed in the name of 
science that matter is the be-all and the end-all. The further 
the pendulum swings to the right, the harder it will go back 
to the left. It has swung past the centre and to the farthest 
opposite extreme, and now we have the same sort of half- 
thinkers with, aptly enough, the same superstitious reverence 
for at least the word Science, proclaiming that nothing exists 
but thought. 

The movement indicates not only the revolt from Material- 
ism, but the failure of Protestantism. We admit that there is 
always a lot of cranks and curiosity-hunters that no organiza- 
tion should be made responsible for. But still the Protestant 
Churches should have captured or held most of those who 
have adopted Eddyism. But the principle of private interpre- 
tation of Scripture is a continuous dissolvent. Mrs. Eddy can 
hardly be called a Christian in any orthodox sense, but she is 
a good Protestant in her way. For does not her book on 
Science and Health offer in its sub-title " A Key to the Scrip- 
tures ? " And so, for lack of any definite religious authority, 
men are left to run wild in their search for religious truth. 
It is an amusing comment on the principles of the Reforma- 
tion that in this, as in so many other instances, the enfran- 
chised thinkers did not remain at a loose end, but went look- 
ing for a halter. Mrs. Eddy did not let them run wild. There 
is a beautiful paradox in the situation that Mr. Chesterton 
could not fail to seize upon. Everybody has been saying 
(President Eliot, for example, on this side of the Atlantic), 
that the coming religion must be a free religion. 

Whatever else it was (people said), it must avoid the old 
mistake of rule and regimentation, of dogmas launched from 



i9i i.] REFLECTIONS ON CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 725 

an international centre of authority sitting on a central throne, 
no Pope must control the preacher no council, even ; it was 
doubtful whether any church or congregation had the right. 
All the idealistic journalism of the nineteenth century, the 
journalism of such men as Mr. Stead and Mr. Massingham, 
repeated, like a chime of bells, that the new creed must be the 
creed of souls set free. 

And all ol the time the new creeds were growing up. The 
one or two genuine religious movements of the "nineteenth 
century had come out of the soul of the nineteenth century ; 
and they were despotic from top to bottom. General Booth 
had based a big theological revival on the pure notion of mili- 
tary obedience. In title and practice he was far more papal 
than a Pope. A Pope is supreme, like a judge ; he says the 
last word. But the General was supreme, like a general. 
He said the first word, which was also the last ; he initiated 
all the activities, gave orders for all the enthusiasms. The 
idealistic Liberal journalists like Mr. Stead fell headlong into 
the trap of this tremendous autocracy, still faintly shrieking 
that the Church of the future must be free. 

It might be said of this great modern crusade that its mili- 
tary organization was an accident. It is one ol the glories of 
Mrs. Eddy to have proved that it was not an accident. For 
Christian Science also grew up in a world deafened with dis- 
cussions about free churches and unlettered faith. Christian 
Science also grew up as despotic as Kehama, and much more 
despotic than Hildebrand. The tyrannies of Popes, real and 
legendary, make a long list in certain controversial works. 
But can anyone tell me of any Pope who forbade anything to 
be said in any of his churches except quotations from a work 
written by himself ? Can any one tell me of a Pope who for- 
bade his bulls to be translated, lest they be mistranslated ? 

I do not agree with the moderns either in the extreme 
anarchy of their theory or in the extreme autocracy of their 
practice. I even have the feeling that if they had a few more 
dogmas they might have a few less decrees. 

Christian Science demonstrates both by the failure of ortho- 
dox Protestantism and by its own success, the need of the 
note of authority in a religious system. We shall not here 
follow up this line of thought to show where divine authority 
in these matters is lodged. That is familiar ground. Let us 
rather consider how Christian Science, by its defects, shows the 
need of another note of the Church, the note of Catholicity. 

Men may doubt if the Catholic Church be divine; they 



726 REFLECTIONS ON CHRISTIAN SCIENCE [Mar., 

cannot doubt that she is Catholic. They may question whether 
she has a right to speak with the authority of God; they 
cannot deny that she voices the world-wide experience of 
men. Men who go about the world to-day find her every- 
where; but that is the least part of her claim to the title of 
Catholic. The British Empire holds sway over as large a 
number of men. But the British Empire is British, not Cath- 
olic. It represents the ideas and traditions of one people. 
The Chufch is Catholic in time as well as in space. She is 
of all ages and of all peoples. She reflects the thought and 
experience of the past, reshaped to suit her own guiding 
ideals. She inherits of the religion of the Jews, and through 
them of the wisdom of Egypt and of Chaldea. She states 
her dogmas in the language of the philosophers of Greece. 
She has preserved the political and legal institutions of the 
Roman Empire. She presided over the formation of western 
civilization, and has always taken a prominent part in all 
forms of its activity, government, education, philosophy, dis- 
covery and settlement, moral and social reforms. She is the 
one existing institution in the world that represents universal- 
ity of experience. 

This holds particularly true of her experience of the vary- 
ing manifestations of the religious consciousness. She has 
tried out her principles and ideals on all sorts of men, in all 
sorts of conditions. Individuals seldom see the whole of a 
truth. They push principles too hard, exaggerate special ex- 
periences, deny unwelcome facts. Temperament, education, 
shortsightedness, racial prejudices, the "idols of the forum" 
and the " idols of the cavern " obscure their view of the 
whole truth. But in the Church's life, different characters, 
minds, ideals have acted upon one another, and not always 
peacefully, to set the full truth in the light. High schemes 
of perfection are passed upon by practical minded bishops, 
the revelations of the ecstatic are inspected by the cool eye 
of the logician. Schemes of reform are tried cut on the mul- 
titude. National views come and go, leaving their trace, but 
never entirely prevailing, for the Church is Catholic. Heresies 
arise and have their day, and vanish, having done their work 
of showing what views are partial or exaggerated or noxious. 
New systems of philosophy compel a clearer understanding of 
principles. And out of the whole complex of revelation, ex- 
perience and discussion is evolved a set of teachings on reli- 



i9i i.] REFLECTIONS ON CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 727 

gion and life, broad-based, consistent, stimulating, yet sane, 
and suited to the religious needs of all sorts of men. We 
Catholics know (and others might easily infer) that this de- 
velopment has taken place in so remarkable a fashion only 
because God was with the Church He founded. Our main 
purpose here, however, is to show the religious value of this 
phase of the note of Catholicity with which Providence has 
endowed the Church. 

Let us examine the views of Christian Science as tested 
by this Catholic standard. Aside from her absurd interpreta- 
tions of Scripture, there are three points in Mrs. Eddy's 
scheme which attract the attention of the religious thinker. 
They are her theory of " metaphysical" healing, her theory 
of matter, and her theory of evil. 

Take first of all the question of miracles. The material- 
istic scientists aver positively that they are impossible events. 
The " Christian Scientists " aver with equal assurance that 
they are normal events. The Church has long since decided 
that they are possible, actual at times, though not frequent. 
And, in deciding this point, Catholic theologians have studied, 
on broad and sane lines, the whole question of the supra- 
normal, whether mental or physical. St. Paul opened the dis- 
cussion in connection with the manifestations at Christian 
meetings. The Fathers discussed the pagan miracles. The 
great theologians and mystics of the post-Tridentire period 
laid down practical rules from which modern psychologists 
might learn to settle much that now puzzles them. These 
theologians recognize the power of mind over body, the exist- 
ence of abnormal mental states, the incursions from the spirit 
world, and, finally, the power of God working through His 
chosen ones. The Church neither denies the facts, nor jumps 
at conclusions. In accordance with the rules of Benedict XIV., 
every case must be judged on its merits, and only after an 
investigation by learned and prudent men. In the case of the 
canonization of a saint, there is an important official whose 
duty it is to break down all evidence for the miraculous. In 
popular phrase he is called the Devil's Advocate. But the 
Church shows her attitude towards his function by denomin- 
ating him the Promoter of the Faith. It is for such reasons 
that Catholics have not lost their heads in presence of the 
modern cult of the preternatural. It is all an old story with 
them. The Church has dealt with the whole matter for cen- 



728 REFLECTIONS ON CHRISTIAN SCIENCE [Mar., 

turies, and has arrived at settled principles and modes of pro- 
cedure. 

It is the same with the question of the body, its existence, 
and its place in the human composite. There is a little propo- 
sition in the Creed, tucked away at the end, which many 
Protestants nowadays find disconcerting. It bothers them a 
good deal, scandalizes them a little. It runs " I believe in 
. . . the resurrection of the body." They do not know 
what to make of it. The Catholic Church could tell them. It 
has been the basis of sane spiritual life in Christendom for 
nineteen hundred years. It has stood against Docetism, and 
wild Manichseism, and exaggerated asceticism, and the possi- 
bility of a Buddhistic type of monachism ; and it stands now 
against this latest idealistic madness of Eddyism. It proclaims 
that our bodies exist, and that they are good, good enough to 
share in eternal life, if this life be a worthy one. See how 
many heresies, how many wild notions, how many perverse 
views of life are blocked in the beginning by the two words 
" resurrectio carnis ." Those who deny the existence of the 
body open the way to diverse forms of evil. Religious fanatics 
are led to fierce assaults upon the body, as happens in India. 
Moral decadents deny the existence of bodily sins, and fall 
into worse forms of excess. In the Catholic view, the body is 
a part of man, but a subordinate part. Mysticism does not 
scorn it, asceticism merely seeks to control it, religion uses it. 
It has its share in the scheme of salvation hence the outward 
forms of the sacramental system. It has its place in worship 
hence Catholic ritual. It has its place in devotion hence 
Catholic art. The whole view of man is Catholic, and there- 
fore broad-based and sane. 

Let us consider finally the view of evil which Christian 
Science presents. It is interesting to note that most Catholic 
philosophers have a theory of evil which is, at first sight, 
curiously in harmony with that of Eddyism. Evil, they say, 
is a nonentity. Like the hole in a doughnut it is nothing in 
itself It is a defect, a lack, a misfit, a wrong turn, a want 
of order or harmony. Put as a Hibernicism, it is a something 
that is not there. And, as in most Hibernicisms, there is a 
truth in the paradox. Evil is nothing, and yet it is something. 
It is nothing that God has made. He made all things good. 
" For science, nothing is dirt/ 1 said Diderot. Every existing 
thing, considered in itself, has its own goodness and beauty. 



19 1 1.] REFLECTIONS ON CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 729 

So much for the matter in its broad, philosophical bearing. 
But in considering its practical bearing, the Church looks at 
the other side of the question. There is no dallying with 
merely logical deductions from speculative views. Somehow 
or other, the world is out of joint. The disorder is a reality. 
Sin, ignorance, degradation, are huge disorders. The purpose 
of life is to fight against evil. This is the drama of human 
life; failure in it is the only tragedy. It is the business of 
the Church to organize men for this fight against evil, and to 
aid them with the power of God. 

The most dangerous element in Christian Science lies in the 
ethical implications which lurk in its theory about evil. Satan 
chuckles contentedly when his existence is denied. There may 
be persons who can juggle out of sight the horrid fact of sin, 
and still keep their conduct sweet and sane. But theories have 
an unpleasant way of translating themselves into practice. Mrs. 
Eddy, it is true, is no advocate of unrighteousness. On the 
contrary, sin is among those illusions of mortal mind which 
Christian Science is going to dispel. The difficulty is that these 
subtleties are so easily lost sight of in time of real temptation. 
Just at present the votaries of Christian Science are in the 
main worthy folk who have been carefully recruited from among 
the respectable middle class. Their moral iormation is due to 
old-fashioned Christian influences. But if this cult lasts long 
enough to train up a generation in its own principles, we be- 
lieve that its results on character will be shown to be disas- 
trous. Teach that all is God, that our spirits are emanations 
from God, and you destroy the whole basis of free-will, of re- 
sponsibility for our actions, and of retribution. Teach that sin 
is an illusory belief, and, no matter how you strive to hedge, 
you lead straight to the practical conclusion that there can be 
no harm in satisfying one's desires. 

The three touchstones of truth are the test of reason, the 
test of practice, and the test of time. It is a weary business 
arguing with the unreasonable, and bearing with the perverse, 
and waiting for the slow process of decay. How long will it 
be before men grow tired of experimenting with partial and 
baleful theories ? How long before they discover that there is 
among them a teacher who is offering them the Truth, not in 
disjointed and jarring fragments, but in all its Catholic whole- 
ness? 




PICTURESOUENESS AND PIETY, 

BY AGNES REPPLIER. 

|ICTURESQUENESS is not piety," an English 
friend said to me, as we watched the great pro- 
cession of the Saint-Sang wind its way through 
the old streets of Bruges, and I was compelled, 
however reluctantly, to acquiesce in so incon- 
trovertible a truism. Steadfast religion which promotes in- 
tegrity of life rests on more solid foundations than pageantry 
can build; and even the wave of emotion which passed over 
the kneeling throng in the Place du Bourg, when the blare of 
the trumpets suddenly ceased, and the relic in its crystal 
cylinder was held on high amid a profound and reverent 
silence, was but emotion after all. It purified the heart as it 
passed; but stable virtues do not grow out of moments of 
transport. Therefore my friend proffered his discouraging 
criticism, seeing much charm but little merit in that harmon- 
ious grouping, that historic background, that unity of con- 
ception and delicacy of comprehension which bound together 
hundreds of men, women and children in one common senti- 
ment of devotion. 

But when all was over, when the last ecclesiastic had disap- 
peared, the last soldier had trotted down the Rue Haute, and 
the last pair of angels, carrying their gauzy wings in their 
hands to protect them from ill-chance, had scampered home to 
dinner, I found myself growing less and less disposed to ac- 
quiesce unreservedly in the spirit of my friend's manifesto. 
Picturesqueness is a form of beauty, and beauty plays, and has 
always played, an essential part in the world's religious life. 
No creed that has ever held and swayed the soul of man has 
ignored the avenues of approach form and color to charm his 
eye, sweet sound to please his ear, the subtleties of associa- 
tion to nobly inflame his imagination, flowers, incense, rhyth- 
mic motion, harmony of detail, all that can make a just ap- 
peal to his senses, and turn his innate love of loveliness to 
love of God. The muezzin who from the fretted balcony of 
a minaret sends out his voice in that appealing cry which 
penetrates the souls of all good Moslems is the most startlingly 



191 1.] PICTURESQUENESS AND PIETY 731 

picturesque figure of oriental life. At dawn, at noon, at sun- 
set, at nightfall, he calls upon the faithful to adore the Power 
which set the sun in the firmament, and which casts a mantle 
of darkness over the weary earth. The whole spirit of pilgrim- 
age is instinct with beauty, whether the journey be made to 
Rome, to Mecca, or to Jerusalem. Who can forget the thrill 
of rapture which shot through Sir Richard Burton's breast 
when, in early dawn, he saw the walls of the Kaaba, and the 
swaying of the black curtains which Mahometans believe to be 
forever stirred by unseen angels' wings. "I may truly say," 
he averred, " that, of all the worshipers who clung weeping 
to the curtain, or who pressed their beating hearts to the stone, 
none felt for the moment a deeper emotion than did the Haji 
from the far north." 

There is no escape from picturesqueness wherever vital 
sentiments are involved. Strip a church bare of all accessor- 
ies, deny it all beauty of form and color, reduce it to the 
least common denominator, and some element of picturesque- 
ness will triumph vigorously over its severity. When the wan- 
dering tourist in Edinburgh is shown the very spot in St. 
Giles* Church where Jenny Geddes arose and flung her cutty 
stool at the head of Dean Hanna then decently occupied in 
reading the new Liturgy prescribed by Charles I. he real- 
izes once and for ever the deathless nature of the picturesque. 
There was nothing douce about this expression of faith, not 
much of sweetness and light; but the picture remains indelibly 
impressed upon our memories, the incident remains indelibly 
associated with St. Giles. Tablets commemorating both Dean 
Hanna and his assailant are fixed on the church's walls, the 
cutty stool is tenderly preserved in the National Museum of 
Antiquities, and the consequences of the deed are known to 
all readers of history. The story is as much a part of the 
lights and shadows of the Scottish Church as is the story of 
that dour young rebel and martyr, Margaret Wilson, who, re- 
fusing all concessions, scorning all compromises, perished in 
the Solway tides rather than take the oath of abjuration. 
There is nothing in the annals of our race so indestructibly 
picturesque as martyrdom. It is like a vivid flame lighting up 
the long gray reaches of recusancy. 

The external beauty which is inalienable from Catholicism 
has been both loved and feared by non-Catholics, has been 
regarded as a gracious gift, and as a veritable weapon of de- 



732 PICTURESQUENESS AND PIETY [ Mar ' 

struction. Calm unbelievers like Mr. Matthew Arnold, souls 
bien nees t but solitary, have bewailed in bitterness of spirit the 
absence of this charm, of this " nobleness and amplitude " in 
more rational creeds. Catholicism suggested to Mr. Arnold 
the universality of Shakespeare; it rested his mind, tired of 
insular excellence. Genial English clergymen, like the Rev. 
Augustus Jessopp, have somewhat wistfully envied the power 
of Rome to find a place for those two picturesque but peril- 
ous personalities, the mystic and the fanatic, " a place and 
a sphere of useful labor " for both. Even rationalists, like 
Bernez, have admitted with a sigh that while dogma is a source 
of disunion, "ancient ritual observances preserve a common 
esprit de corps" 

On the other hand we know that there are eminent intel- 
lects to whom this well ordered beauty makes no appeal. 
Goethe would not even look at the Franciscan Church when he 
was in Assisi. " I passed it by in disgust," he said, with what 
seems unnecessary emphasis. Professor Huxley has put on 
record the singular sensations produced in his mind by a 
solemn service at St. Peter's. " I must have a strong strain 
of Puritan blood in me somewhere," he wrote from Rome in 
1885, to Sir John Donnelly, "for I am possessed with a de- 
sire to arise and slay the whole brood of idolaters, whenever I 
assist at one of these services." 

One wonders why, under these circumstances, he did as- 
sist. Such unparalleled blood-thirstiness finds its only modern 
counterpart in Miss Georgiana Podsnap's sentiments towards 
the harmless gentlemen who danced with her at her ball. " If I 
was wicked enough and strong enough to kill anybody," con- 
fesses the disillusioned young lady, " it should be my part- 
ners." 

Less vigorous in his antagonism, and with no affinity for 
the role of executioner, Prof. William James has left us in 
" The Varieties of Religious Experience " a clear statement of 
his instinctive dislike for form and color, no less than for au- 
thority and control. The broad bright atmosphere of a uni- 
versal Church, its infinite and harmonious wealth of detail 
which pleased Mr. Arnold's taste, repelled Professor James. 
He was averse to these things because they make for soli- 
darity, because they weld men's souls together, and what he 
sought and prized was spiritual isolation. Religion, as he 
understood it, meant " the feelings, acts, and experiences of 



191 1.] PICTURESQUENESS AND PIETY 733 

individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend 
themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider 
divine." 

This is a circumscribed view, cutting us off at one stroke 
from the inheritance of a past, and from the grace of spiritual 
companionship. To reject as valueless all religious experience 
built upon an accepted creed and nourished by intercourse 
with fellow believers, is to scorn the fair fruits of centuries, 
the world's offering of faith. The clearness of Professor James* 
insight, his profound and matchless sympathy with certain 
phases of feeling and of thought, made his indifference to 
other phases of feeling and of thought a perversion of intel- 
lect. He said most truly that the conversion which enables a 
man to see the high water mark of his own nature is a gain, 
even though the emotion may, like other emotions, be tran- 
sient ; but what he insisted upon is that this conversion should 
not take place in a cloister, and that it should not involve 
the acceptance of dogma. For the traditional he had no re- 
gard, and distinction absolutely repelled him. He contemned 
Saint Gertrude as "paltry-minded," he branded Saint Teresa 
as a superficial and voluble egotist whose "idea of religion 
seems to have been that of an endless amatory flirtation be- 
tween the devotee and the Deity ; " but he quoted with ap- 
proval the remark of a female acquaintance that she loved to 
think she "could always cuddle up to God." The early piety 
of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga he rejected as foolish and fan- 
tastic; but he was charmed when an American boy of seven- 
teen expressed a desire to put his arms around God and kiss 
Him. This limited appreciation of the devout left Professor 
James at war with many foes. " Medical materialism " was 
his great adversary, because it declined all intrusions on the 
part of monkish saint or modern revivalist, because it would 
not have Billy Bray any more than it would have Saint 
Teresa. Professor James did not want Saint Teresa, but he 
clung to Billy Bray, a slender anchorage in the deep waters 
of incredulity. " Religious emotion," says Anna Robeson Burr 
in her analysis of the world's great autobiographies, " may be 
cheap and transient, or it may be vital and distinguished." 
To prefer the cheap and transient to the vital and distinguished 
is to ignore the intellectual element ot belief. 

A few years ago a superintendent of district nurses in 
London wrote an earnest paper for the Contemporary Review, 



734 PICTURESQUENESS AND PIETY [Mar., 

to describe, so far as she understood it, the religion of the 
respectable London poor. It was a most depressing study, 
not because the respectable poor were destitute of religion, 
but because so little of external beauty gladdened their spir- 
itual lives. The writer explained that many of these people 
no longer went to church or chapel because they had " long 
since received and absorbed the truths by which they lived," 
a cold storage process which fails to take into account 
either the weakness of humanity or the consolations of faith; 
and she contended that the patient endurance of the poor, 
their boundless charity to one another, and their habit of ac- 
cepting and fulfilling the duties near at hand, constituted 
religion in the highest acceptation of the word. That this is 
true, nobody is prepared to deny ; but to such simple mar- 
tyrs the sweetness of belief brings compensation, the " noble- 
ness and amplitude" of a mother church softens their sad 
estate. It is not piety alone which throngs the churches of 
Bruges, week day and Sunday alike, with the " respectable 
poor" of that old and civilized city. It is the inalienable love 
of beauty which is the heritage of a people who have but to 
lift their eyes to see the beautiful, and to whom form and 
color are early and indelible impressions. Their lives are hard, 
their food is plain and unvaried, their labor is incessant; but 
their civilization includes a training of ear and eye and mind 
which makes possible for them an appreciation of the long and 
stately services of their Church. They do not stray in and 
out of the sacred edifices; they do not fidget, or whisper, or 
go to sleep; they are not pushed into remote corners to make 
room for wealthy pew holders ; they are part of a great act 
of worship, believers in an ancient creed, heirs, in their poverty, 
of the inheritance of the ages. 

The sense of Christian fellowship which springs from the 
Communion of Saints appears to have been somewhat bewil- 
dering to the superintendent of district nurses, who tells us, 
in evident amazement, that "even Roman Catholics have asked 
for my prayers." To her this request savored of indifference 
to dogma. That it was a matter of course among people who 
ask and give prayers as they ask and give any other com- 
municable kindness, never dawned upon her mind. Those who 
conceive a prayer only as a mental attitude, an unspoken 
effort to recall oneself into !God's presence (which is a noble 
and true conception), have little understanding oi the value of 



191 1.] PICTURESQUENESS AND PIETY 735 

familiar phrases, hallowed by centuries of usage. There is 
something indescribably grateful to the Catholic mind in the 
mere repetition of words (the graceful and touching words of 
the Memorare for example), which thousands of lips are mur- 
muring in every corner of Catholic Christendom, and which 
countless thousands of lips have murmured since St. Bernard 
bequeathed them to the world. It is true that all Christians 
unite in repeating the Lord's Prayer; but Protestant Churches 
have never knit together their members with the Lord's Prayer 
as the Catholic Church has knit together her members with 
the Rosary, men of every nation and of every tongue repeat- 
ing this hallowed formula for one common cause, one univer- 
sal "intention/ 1 If we are endowed with even a spark of im- 
agination, it is no more possible to disunite the Rosary from 
humanity than to disunite it from the divine mysteries it cele- 
brates. We meditate on the Nativity or the Resurrection, but 
we feel that the phrases we repeat are parts of a great chorus, 
strophe and antistrophe, never ending, never flagging, breathed 
simultaneously by Catholics in every quarter of the globe, and 
ineffably sacred with the hopes and fears, the joys and sorrows 
of mankind. I know few things more pious, and certainly few 
things more picturesque, than the little wayside shrines of our 
Lady of Ettal which we find again and again throughout 
Bavaria, and before each shrine a brass rod strung with eleven 
great wooden beads, so that the passing peasant may say a 
decade of the Rosary when he stops to salute the divine Child 
on His Mother's knee. The mere sight of these beads, worn 
smooth by handling, gave me a consciousness of kinship with 
the world about me. I was more than a mere tourist driving 
through a pleasant country. I was, what tourists seldom are, 
in secret and intelligent harmony with my surroundings. 

The interior beauty which is inalienable from Catholic piety 
lends a distinctive charm to Catholic countries. The shrines 
of Spain and Italy, the saint-guarded bridges of Austria, the 
crumbling stone calvaries of Britanny, these are among the 
attractions which Baedeker gravely points out for the guid- 
ance and edification of tourists. Whole villages in Bavaria are 
so decorated that they look like illustrated bibles. Painted on 
the walls of one house is the stable of Bethlehem with the 
adoring shepherds; on the next, a muscular Judith hacks away 
the head of a weakly protesting Holofernes; and a third dis- 
plays the sacrifice of Isaac, with an angel tumbling headlong 



736 PICTURESQUENESS AND PIETY [Mar., 

from an upper story to his rescue. Over the doorways stands 
St. Florian, bucket in hand, to protect the house irom fire; 
and on pump and well-curb are statues of that sweet country 
saint whose name (may she pardon me) I have forgotten, but 
who holds a sickle in her hand to denote her humble avoca- 
tion, and whose prayers keep the springs flowing in the sum- 
mer droughts. 

These things lift the rural mind out of the dead stretches 
of stupidity. One cannot be picturesquely pious and stupid, 
however great one's ignorance or one's knowledge. Some- 
times, as in Brittany, the deep religious feeling of the people, 
combined with the free and artistic expression, have cast a 
glamour over the whole country. A brave, honest, surly, God- 
fearing, hard- drinking race are the Bretons, the best sailors in 
France, the best fishermen perhaps in all the world. Volumes, 
amounting to a library, have been written about them, pic- 
tures that would fill a gallery have been painted of them, and 
enthusiastic authors and artists have dowered them with a 
wealth of qualities which they are far from possessing. The 
"strong, silent Bretons" is a favorite epithet, whereas, in re- 
ality, they are as incessant talkers as was William the Silent 
himself. They have the Celtic quality of imagination, they 
have a capacity for friendship and for unstinted kindness (I 
speak from experience), and they are loyal sons of the 
Church ; but they have no grace of manner, and they reject, 
once and for all, the insidious advances of cleanliness and 
sanitation. Even the impelling power of religion cannot make 
a Breton clean. His church is as heart-wholedly dirty as his 
home. I was in the fishing village of Saint- Jacut-de-la-Mer, in 
the C6tes-du-Nord, on the feast of its patron. The altar of 
St. Jacut twinkled with tapers, and was decked with a profu- 
sion of lovely flowers. A great procession (the Bretons regard 
processions in much the same light as did the ancient Egyp- 
tians) was organized in his honor. But no friendly hand re- 
moved from the statue of the saint its ancient layers of dust. 
There stood the good Bishop, his coating of grime shamefully 
revealed in the blazing candlelight, and I believe that mine 
was the only eye in the church which so much as observed 
his plight. 

It is certainly uncivilized to be dirty, and it is certainly 
uncivilized to be rude-; but to be alive to impresssions cf 
beauty to the beauty of a wild seacoast, to the beauty of 



i9i i.] PICTURES QUENESS AND PIETY 737 

song and legend, to the beauty of carefully preserved costumes, 
of venerable traditions, and of cherished beliefs, implies, en 
the other hand, a high degree of civilization. To feel at once 
the bright sureness of the religious life and its impenetrable 
mystery, is to have one's full share of intuition. " The stu- 
pidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which 
is dead to form " these are qualities incompatible with the 
humanizing influence of a Church which seeks by exterior 
comeliness to symbolize the sweetness of her spirit. From the 
earliest days of Christianity we perceive this conscious striving 
after expression, this absorption of beauty from without. There 
is in Mr. Pater's Marius the Epicurean, an unrivalled paragraph 
which describes the dawning graces of the infant Church, its 
symmetrical growth, its liturgic spirit, and delicate adjustment 
f the religious elements of life : 

And then, in this season of expansion, as if now at last the 
Catholic Church might venture to show her outward linea- 
ments as they really were, worship the beauty of holiness, 
nay ! the elegance of sanctity was developing with a bold 
and confident gladness. . . The aesthetic charm of the 
Church, lier evocative power over all that is eloquent and 
expressive in the better soul of man, her outward comeliness, 
her dignifying convictions about human nature all this, as 
abundantly realized centuries later by Dante and Giotto, by 
the great church-builders, by the great ritualists like Greg- 
ory, and the masters of sacred music in the middle age we 
may see, in dim anticipation/in that charmed space towards 
the end of the second century. Dissipated, or turned aside, 
partly through the great mistake of Marcus Aurelius, for a 
short time we may discern that influence clearly predomi- 
nant there. What might sound harsh as dogma was already 
justifying itself as worship ; according to the sound rule : 
orandi, lex credendi." 



"The elegance of sanctity." Who but Mr. Pater would 
have ventured upon such a phrase ? Who but Mr. Pater could 
have relished so keenly the vitality which he did not absorb, 
and the authority which he did not obey. If from his portrayal 
of the Mass, of that liturgy "full of consolations for the human 
soul, and destined surely one day, under the sanction of so 
many ages of human experience, to take exclusive possession 
of the spiritual consciousness," we turn to certain chapters of 

VOL. XCII.-47 



738 PICTURESQUENESS AND PIETY [Mar. 

certain modern reminiscences, it may help us to set a valua- 
tion on beauty as a religious asset. There is, for example 
Sir Leslie Stephen's highly ironical account ot a Sunday morn- 
ing in the London lecture hall of Mr. Moncure Conway. 
Stephen had been invited to give as an intellectual Sabbath 
entertainment a lecture on materialism. He consented, not 
without misgivings, and discovered too late that Sunday was 
Sunday still, even among the strenuously broad-minded. He 
wrote to Mr. Charles Eliot Norton: 

They asked for a lecture, but I found that they aimed at a 
kind of service, singing Emerson, and taking the first lesson 
out of John Stuart Mill, and the second out of Wordsworth. 
It was a queer caricature, but I suppose it amuses some of 
them. I believe I succeeded tolerably, and though I assured 
them (politely, I hope) that they could not understand a word 
I said, they did not appear to object. The performance was 
rather comic. 

Alongside of this genial substitute for religion may be placed 
Mr. Frederick Locker's description of the funeral services of 
Mr. George H. Lewes, which, as a friend of George Eliot's, 
he attended at Highgate Cemetery. " We were a very small 
party in the mortuary chapel," he writes in his " Confidences," 
" not more than twelve persons. I never before had seen so 
many out-and-out rationalists in so confined a space. A brief 
discourse was delivered by a Unitarian clergyman, who half 
apologized for suggesting the possible immortality of some of 
our souls." 

Well, well, if, as Mr. Frederick Harrison affirms (being in 
the secret), " the religion of man in the vast cycles that are 
to come will be the reverence for Humanity supported by na- 
ture," we can but hope that this religion will achieve in time 
something a little more beautiful and a little more tangible 
than anything with which the capital H of Humanity has yet 
endowed it. Meanwhile, although picturesqueness is not and 
never will be piety, it is still indelibly impressed upon the 
spirit of saintliness, which from time to time winnows earth's 
harvest of souls. And it was one both wise and good who re- 
minded us that " we should be fearful of being wrong in poetry 
when we think differently from the poets, and in religion when 
we think differently from the saints." 




NOTRE DAME DE LA MISERICORDE. 

BY KATHARINE TYNAN. 

|HE wooden hotel in the Alpine village was full 
for the winter sports. There was nothing but 
talk of lug-ing and ski-ing and tobogganing. A 
good many of the people had come from England 
year after year. Elizabeth Sartoris, who had 
been at the Hotel Vernet three seasons running with her Aunt 
Christina, received a good many somewhat empresse greetings 
from her fellow-guests when she arrived. She acknowledged 
them with the air of a queen, but was so unconscious of her 
own pride that nothing would have shocked her more than to 
be called proud. 

She had come for the winter sports. She was a tall, grace- 
ful, splendid figure of a girl, in her beautifully fitting gown of 
purple cloth, which had been made by a world-renowned tailor. 
Some of the women who were her fellow-guests speculated 
curiously about the value of her sables. She came down to 
dinner in a high-necked dress of thick white silk, trimmed 
with beautiful old lace. One would have said from her eyes, 
her lips, that she was very kind, very approachable, yet she 
seemed to withdraw herself from the eager attentions that were 
forced on her. 

A new-comer from her own county recognized her and 
imparted the knowledge to an interested group in the salon, 
which was lit by splendid leaping fires of wood that gave off 
a resinous odor. Cold as it was without there was no excuse 
for any one to shiver at the Hotel Vernet. 

"So you have the rich Miss Sartoris here, 19 said the new- 
comer. "Oh, yes; I know her quite well, by sight. She 
doesn't go into society much. Such a lovely old house, Holm- 
hurst Place, and plenty of money. But a Roman Catholic. 
Of course it makes a difference. She is never quite one of us." 
" Why ? " asked an uncompromising lady with a shrewd, 
humorous face. " Because you won't have her or because she 
won't have you?" 



740 NOTRE DAME DE LA MISERICORDE [Mar., 

"Ah, well, you see, perhaps a little of both," Mrs. Dick- 
enson had spoken so good-humoredly that the new-comer 
could not take offence. "She is so very Roman. She has a 
chapel and a chaplain at the Place ; and about her gates there 
is a little colony of poor people who have been Roman Catho- 
lics since the old days. The Sartoris family were strong 
enough to protect them in days when the law was against the 
Romans, Naturally it can't be very agreeable for our vicar." 

" No, of course not." 

"You see it's rather a Low Church corner of the world. 
In fact some of us groan because we're under the heel of the 
Hardcastle Trust. The Hardcastles bought up the advowsons 
for seven miles round years ago, and have filled them with the 
Lowest of Low Churchmen ever since. It does seem rather 
hard on Elizabeth Sartoris. You see there are no Roman 
Catholic gentry." 

"No one for her to marry, eh?" Mrs. Dickenson asked. 

" Oh, my dear, not a soul she'd think of, though I dare 
say some would be glad enough to think of her. One couldn't 
imagine Miss Sartoris marrying a Hardcastle, and yet one 
never knows. There's Hilary Onslow, the heir to the peerage. 
They do say ... It would be a queer thing if Elizabeth 
Sartoris were to marry one of the Onslows." 

A young man who had been sitting in a corner of the 
salon, apparently engrossed in a book, got up and went away 
quietly. No one took much notice of him. He was a plain- 
featured, very delicate-looking youth, with rather narrow 
shoulders and a hunched-up look as he sat or walked. People 
had said about him at the hotel that he had no business to 
be there at that time of year Davos perhaps, but certainly 
not Grunedaal. They did not get many invalids at Grtinedaal 
so late in the year as this. 

The one redeeming feature of John Vanhomrigh's face lay 
in the eyes. The eyes were of a Southern darkness, somewhat 
at variance with the lantern-jawed face of a very ordinary 
English type. The eyes were capable of startling expression. 
Elizabeth Sartoris, glancing down the table towards where he 
sat, silent and solitary, was somewhat taken aback by the curious 
burning intensity of the glance she met directed towards her- 
self. It startled and somewhat offended her at the first view. 
Then she was struck with a sudden pity. Poor boy, how ill 



i9i i.] NOTRE DAME DE LA MISERICORDE 741 

he looked! And the lines in his face were deeper than even 
bodily ill-health would account for. He looked as though he 
had been under the ploughshare of suffering all the days of 
his life. 

There was nothing of the consumptive about him, no cough, 
no hectic flush, else his exceeding thinness would have made 
her suspect consumption. He was careless about himself, less 
well-fortified against the weather than most people apt to 
leave off his furs. When she met him stepping up the moun- 
tain path, with no more protection against the rigors of the 
blue, frosty air than he would have worn in an English winter, 
she all but spoke to him as she passed, to warn him. Only 
her habit of shy reticence kept her from speaking. 

Miss Christina Sartoris used to say humorously of her niece 
that Elizabeth was the most affable creature alive, if only peo- 
ple would recognize that her affability was that of a queen. 
From her looks one would have said that she was the last 
person in the world to take part in the gaieties of the hotel. 
The hotel enjoyed itself indefatigably. One might have ex- 
pected that after its sports all day it would have been content 
to remain quiet in the evening. But far from it ; it danced, 
it had concerts, bridge tournaments, theatricals, all manner of 
entertainments. Miss Sartoris put in an appearance at nearly 
all these merry-makings. She did not dance, but she was con- 
tent to look on ; she played and sang very well and looked 
so like a St. Cecilia as she sat at the piano that for spectacu- 
lar effect she was a pure delight. She always had the air of 
sitting under a dais when she looked on at the dancers, ever 
ready to turn her beautiful smile to any one who spoke to her. 
Unexpectedly she did play bridge ; and it was good to look 
at her as she sat considering her play, always beautifully 
dressed in her rich, plain gowns made high to the neck, the 
famous Sartoris pearls swinging in her ears; her eyes while 
she tried to remember what had been played looking as though 
they contemplated heavenly things. 

"Proud?" said Mrs. Dickenson to somebody. "You call 
her proud ? Why she is the humblest creature alive ; or the 
proudest. Perhaps it is the proudest. 1 ' 

The one who said it passed by the paradox. Mrs. Dicken- 
son was always saying such absurd things for a clever woman. 
She was obviously a clever woman. 



742 NOTRE DAME DE LA MTSERICORDE [Mar., 

Up to this time no more had passed between John Vanhom- 
righ and Elizabeth Sartoris than the little salutation with which 
she acknowledged his greeting when they met out-of-doors 
or in the passages of the hotel. He certainly was a most with- 
drawing person. He seemed to make friends with no one. 
Always while the gaieties went on he sat in a corner with a 
book and watched Elizabeth Sartoris. 

The weather was beautifully open ; no storms and rather 
milder than was quite desirable for the winter sports. Any 
morning early, before the other guests at the hotel were about, 
John Vanhomrigh might have been seen leaving the hotel 
muffled to the ears, climbing the narrow road that led to the 
road of the diligences by which one traveled through the pass 
into Italy. Miss Sartoris had been a few days at the hotel 
before she followed his example. The first morning she could 
see him climbing ahead of her when she started. A little way 
up one reached the road of the diligences and it was level 
traveling. 

He was too far off for her to recognize him ; but her heart 
lifted towards him as she saw him in the distance. So she 
had some fellow- guest at the hotel who was like herself, of the 
old religion. Living where she did in the country that was 
under the blight of the Hardcastles, as the one or two High 
Church families of the neighborhood were wont to call it, she 
had an eager fraternity for other Catholics. Holmhurst had so 
much the feeling of a fortress, a fortress which housed in its 
little chapel God Himself against an inimical and ignorant 
world, that another Catholic must always seem a friend to 
her. She was connected by family ties with most of the Eng- 
lish Catholic aristocracy. So long had they suffered persecution 
for the faith that they must needs now form a body always 
apart, kindly perhaps, friendly perhaps, but with a certain gulf 
between them and those who were not of the Religion un- 
crossed, almost uncrossable. 

Her heart lifted. So would it lift to the humblest of 
Catholics. There were secret signs, sympathies, understand- 
ings, which brought an Irish peasant closer to her than every- 
thing else that was not Catholic. Perched high on a rock 
overhanging the road of the diligence, with snow to its doors, 
buried sometimes in snow to its eaves, was the little chapel of 
Notre Dame de la Misericorde. A little further on in the 



i9i i.] NOTRE DAME DE LA MISERICORDE 743 

Alpine village lived the Cure, a cheerful, freckled little man, 
who seemed to keep himself alive through the hard winter by 
sheer good humor, for there was little else to keep him alive. 

She had lost John Vanhomrigh now. Entering the little 
chapel, full of the cold, blue morning light, she saw him kneel- 
ing on a prie-dieu at the altar-foot. He was going to serve 
Mass. There were one or two peasants in the chapel. The 
priests was vesting behind a screen at one side of the altar. 

So, amid the kindly, ignorant people, with whom she was 
never in real touch, there had been one who was of the 
household, the fraternity. She wondered that she had not 
known by some sign, explicit or implicit, that he belonged to 
the Religion. There had been a sign if she had known its 
meaning. It was in the curious interest she had felt in the 
young man who was not on the surface of him particularly 
prepossessing. She had been drawn to him in some odd mys- 
terious way. 

After Mass she waited to speak to M. le Cure whom she 
met for the first time this year. He came out of the chapel, 
talking to John Vanhomrigh, and his face lit up as he saw her. 

" Oh, it is the kind, the generous Mees Sartoris!" he said, 
and took both of Elizabeth's hands in his, patting them as 
though she were a small child; "the benefactress of Notre 
Dame de la Misericorde. But what a pleasure it is to meet 
again ! " 

He looked from one English face to the other. Vanhom- 
righ had lifted his hat and Elizabeth had bowed. 

"You are both at the Vernet," said the little man. "Both 
such excellent Catholics. You are acquaint ? What, not ? 
Then I have the pleasure to make two good Catholics acquaint. 
M. Vanhomrigh " he made an incredible hash of John's name 
" and Miss Sartoris. You will be the good friends at the 
Vernet. There are no other Catholics this season." 

They walked down to the hotel side by side, John Van- 
homrigh stepping as though he walked on air. He talked a 
good deal once he was started. Elizabeth said very little, 
only smiled at him in a way which was almost better than 
conversation. All the time she was thinking with a profound 
pity of how ill he looked. The blue light from the snow 
seemed to deepen the hollows of his cheeks and darken the 
shadows about his eyes and lips. They had a curious expres- 



744 NOTRE DAME DE LA MISERICORDE [Mar., 

sion of patience, those lips, as though the owner of them had 
borne much and had learned to bear in silence. 

Despite the hollows and the shadows she could see that he 
was very young, younger than herself, she judged it; perhaps 
not more than twenty three. She was hardly aware of the 
kindness of her eyes, the caressing note in her voice when 
she spoke. 

They breakfasted together and alone. The visitors at the 
hotel were not yet up. And after breakfast they sat by the 
roaring fire in the salon, which would be empty nearly all the 
day till evening, and talked. He did most of the talking. 
Once he was started it was extraordinary how eager he was 
to talk, how his face broke up out of its sombreness, how 
sparkle and gaiety came into it. 

Miss Christina Sartoris had developed a cold. She kept to 
her own room and read by her fire with only the companion- 
ship of her maid who was mending some old lace. Lace was 
the elder Miss Sartoris' hobby ; and she had a very fine and 
beautiful collection and had discovered a maid who had some- 
thing of her own passion for it and could be trusted with the 
cobwebby things. Her niece was thrown on her own resources. 
She came and reported to Miss Christina that she had found 
a friend in Mr. Vanhomrigh he was one of the Vanhomrighs 
of Dale, an old Catholic family like their own. 

" H'm ! " said Miss Christina, doubtfully. " If he is a son 
of Humphrey Vanhomrigh, I'm sorry for him. A sour fanatic. 
He married to keep the estates in the family and has believed 
ever since that God meant him to be a Trappist. You never 
met the Vanhomrighs. His wife was a distant cousin of his 
own. What a pity there is so much cousinship among us! 
The sweetest creature I ever saw, always excepting your own 
dear mother. No one can say I didn't adore my sister-in-law. 
Is it possible that plain-faced poor boy could be Eleanor 
Vanhomrigh's son?" 

He was the son of Humphrey and Eleanor Vanhomrigh. 
Presently Miss Christina Sartoris came downstairs, where she 
would sit in the salon talking to John Vanhomrigh by the fire 
while her niece wrote letters, or worked at the altar-cloth she 
was making for Notre Dame de la Misericorde, or played on 
the piano where it stood in its alcove across a quarter of a 
mile of polished floor, without disturbing the others. They 



19 1 1.] NOTRE DAME DE LA MISERICORDE 745 

had somehow fallen into a little group. Aunt and niece were 
still friendly to the little world of the hotel; but they had 
found their one possible intimate. People wondered at and 
shrugged their shoulders over the odd intimacy; but those 
immediately concerned were quite unaware of it. 

John Vanhomrigh was like what those mountains would be 
when the spring thaw came. Apparently the reserve of years 
had been broken up. Miss Christina Sartoris used to laugh 
and say he was an egoist. It was true that he talked inces- 
santly of himself and his own experiences, horrible experi- 
ences often, for to have been a child of Humphrey Vanhom- 
righ's, and a delicate child, was to have been the child of 
crushing misfortune. No wonder he looked as though the 
ploughshares had gone over his face. 

Elizabeth Sartoris used to sit and shudder as she heard 
him. Occasionally she would get up quietly and go away out 
of the room to conceal her horror, her tears. She could have 
cried out sometimes for a greater reticence as for a mercy. 
He would laugh over the horrors he recited, as is a man's 
way sometimes, pouring out in a quick eager flood, as he 
stood with his back to the fire looking down at them, tales of 
a child's torture, a father's unnatural hatred, till even Miss 
Christina would be moved to protest. 

" He is enjoying for the first time the luxury of being 
pitied," she said to her niece. " He tells us too much. It is 
too appalling ; but yet he has his reticences. Of his mother 
he says nothing. She died of the torture of watching her 
children suffer. Poor Eleanor ! That madman adored her and 
killed her. She took away what little of comfort the children 
had. Humphrey Vanhomrigh ought to have been in a lunatic 
asylum years ago. He has no idea that he is not a model 
father, cursed by the worst children man ever possessed. This 
one is the youngest. So far as I can see the suffering did 
not even bind them together, as it often does. He seems to 
have no friends among his brothers and sisters." 

Soon they knew all that was to be known, how his god- 
father, a Benedictine Abbot, had been instrumental in sending 
him to Davos, as he had earlier saved the boy's life and reason 
by persuading the father to send him to school. 

"Dom Patrick is the one friend I possess," John Vanhom- 
righ said, with the queer nervous twitching of his face which 



746 NOTRE DAME DE LA MISERICORDE [Mar., 

became more pronounced as he grew more excited. " Only for 
him my father would have killed me or driven me mad. I 
don't know why he thought it worth while to save my reason 
or my carcass, as though either was worth saving. Sheer 
goodness of heart, I suppose, and perhaps a desire to save my 
father from the wrath to come. Strange as it may seem my 
father has a friend. Oh, Dom Patrick had to play a Machia- 
vellian part before he could persuade my father to send me 
to school. Without lying, he had to act as though he be- 
lieved my father's statement of the case, urging that for a lad 
so incorrigible school was the only thing. They were the 
only good years I had. The dear black gowns ! They were 
as kind as women ! " 

He broke off, laughing one of his queer laughs which some- 
how seemed to make his tragedy more terrible. If he had 
been tragical about it ! If he had complained ! But he always 
laughed. 

" After all," he went on, " I'm not consumptive. The 
doctors at Davos assured me there was no trace of such a 
thing. I was a puny thing from the beginning, little credit to 
the Vanhomrighs. My father is a very handsome man. It 
was no wonder he detested me. Anyhow I'm going home 
cured. I'd have gone before now if you hadn't come. Think 
of my father's disgust, after the expense of sending me to 
Davos. He suggested that it was hardly worth while getting 
my initials on my trunks. It spoiled them for scmeone else. 
Dom Patrick will have to devise some new way of getting me 
out of reach of my father's hatred. I'm not strong enough to 
turn out on to the world, though I'm not consumptive. My 
father won't allow me anything. He will dislike me more 
than ever for coming back alive." 

Horrible ! horrible ! One would have thought it a relief 
for Elizabeth Sartoris when another man came upon the scene. 
This was Hilary Onslow, Lord Hardcastle's son and heir. He 
had been a captain in a cavalry regiment, and had given up 
soldiering because his father was old and the estates required 
some management. He was an extremely handsome man of 
thirty-five, dark-haired and with a vivid color; some way 
back there had been a Spanish Jewess in the Hardcastle family. 
Hilary Onslow had inherited his ancestress' good looks; and 
the Oriental desire to please had given something of an agree- 
able suavity to his English manners. 



19 1 1.] NOTRE DAME DE LA MISERICORDE 747 

The ladies in the hotel were immensely fluttered by his 
arrival, but it was soon obvious that he had no eyes for them ; 
in spite of what they called his beautiful manners even the 
vainest was soon aware that she did not exist for him. Plain- 
ly Elizabeth Sartoris occupied all his thoughts. 

He had swept poor John Vanhomrigh aside as though with 
a wave of his imperious hand. Opinions were divided as to 
whether Miss Sartoris acquiesced in his monopoly of her. 
There were times when she seemed to accept his claims upon 
her, when she was shy and radiant like any happy girl with a 
lover whom she loves ; times again when she seemed to shrink 
from him. 

The hotel so many of its denizens as were in the secret 
looked on with extraordinary interest at the little drama. 
Mrs. Dickenson had whispered it to one or two before she 
had left. Hilary Onslow had always been in love with Miss 
Sartoris. It was said that the religious question came between 
them. Hilary Onslow was very unlike his father and his 
uncles; very unlike all Onslows who had preceded him. He 
was liberal-minded and only conformed to a certain extent to 
please his father who grew more bitter as he grew older. Yet, 
bitter as he was, he would not have objected to his son's 
marrying Elizabeth Sartoris Sartoris and Hardcastle together 
and the whole country would be theirs. Despite his liberality 
Hilary Onslow might be trusted to bring up his sons in the 
religion of his fathers. Indeed according to Mrs. Dickenson, 
there were people who said that you had only to scratch 
Hilary's skin to find Lord Hardcastle underneath. 

And Elizabeth Sartoris ? Well, people who looked on at 
the game were assured that Elizabeth Sartoris had given her 
heart to Lord Hardcastle's son. It was a case of heart and 
soul, the heart dragging her one way, the soul the other, ter- 
rified for the other souls that might be entrusted to it, per- 
haps, too, repelled by this lover in whose blood and bones it 
was to hate all she held sacred. 

Sometimes the heart was insistent almost dragged her over 
the edge. There were moments when Hilary Onslow almost 
swept her off her feet. She was terrified of her own weak- 
ness, of his knowledge of it plain to be read in his way with 
her, his flushed triumphant glances when she was all but swept 
into his arms. 



748 NOTRE DAME DE LA MISERICORDE [Mar., 

" Trust me, Elizabeth ! " he would say, and would pour ridi- 
cule on the narrowness and intolerance of his family. " You 
shall command me, my dear, once you are mine. Why, you 
might even convert me to your ways in time. Not while the 
old man lives though. I am quite open-minded, for, at the 
present moment, I only believe in Elizabeth, I only bow the 
knee to Elizabeth, I only adore Elizabeth. Who knows what 
the future may hold ? If you keep me as infatuated as I am 
now, why who knows the old religion might come back to 
the Court. Not in my father's lifetime he could leave me 
almost a beggar. You must seem to conform to his wishes, 
unreasonable as they are. But trust your slave foi the fu- 
ture. . . ." 

She had to take refuge in flight. There were moments when 
she did not know whether she loved or loathed him. He had 
a terrible secret attraction for her. On the other hand, some- 
thing in her fought against his power over her with a strong 
repulsion. When he was not whispering his honeyed sweetness 
in her ear she saw clearly that the pagan of to-day was going 
to be the bigot of to-morrow. He would not be the first of 
his name to be the one thing and the other. When she had 
been happiest with him she would suddenly come out in the 
waste places, the faces of her angels turned from her, the 
stars in her heaven misted from her eyes. 

In the trouble and turmoil through which she was passing 
she forgot John Vanhomrigh, or remembered him only fleet- 
ingly when a remark of her Aunt Christina brought him to 
her mind. If she encountered him by chance she smiled at 
him with an absent-minded kindness that was hardly aware of 
him. She had given up those morning climbs to Notre Dame 
de la Misericorde. Guiltily in her own mind she was aware 
that, as she yielded to Hilary Onslow, she turned from the 
dear familiar things that had been with her all her days : the 
friendship of the Blessed Mother and the saints, the joy in 
her prayers, the service of the altar, the delight in assisting 
at Mass. She knew perfectly well what all this portended, but 
she turned away from its significance. She had been resist- 
ing Hilary Onslow and her own heart for so long that she 
felt exhausted, on the point of yielding, pnly too eager to 
cross a boundary from which there would be no turning back. 
After all, why couldn't she trust him ? He was a gentleman, 



i9i i.] NOTRE DAME DE LA MISERICORDE 749 

a man of honor. He was ready to promise her everything. 
In his company, she felt her fears fade away ; she was able to 
put them out of sight. Was it not a meritorious thing, a great 
thing, to win a Hardcastle by so much towards the Church ? 
She said to herself that God would not have given Hilary 
Onslow so much power over her if He had meant her not to 
yield. 

She was on the very point of yielding when something 
happened. She was climbing the mountain-path with Hilary 
Onslow, not beside her, for there was rocm only for one on 
the path. It was a bright beautiful afternoon with the colors 
of the frost in the sky. Already the distant peaks were turn- 
ing rosy while the valleys were yet in crystal and silver. 
From Notre Dame de la Misericorde, out of sight above them, 
there came a single toll oi a bell, followed at a little interval 
by another and yet another. 

" It is for an agony, 1 ' she said, turning eyes suddenly 
solemn upon the flushed handsome face that already had the 
glow of triumph upon it. This last day or two Hilary had 
been playing with his felicity, prolonging the exquisite mo- 
ment when she was his and yet not his. He was of the type 
of man to whom possession might mean satiety. The pursuit 
of Elizabeth Sartoris had been sweetened by its difficulty, the 
strangeness of it, that a devout Catholic and the heiress of so 
many centuries of Catholic tradition should marry with a 
Hardcastle. She was the more dearly desired while she was 
not altogether his: so he prolonged the moment even while 
his ardor almost forced him beyond the bounds he had chosen 
to set for himself. 

"An agony? What is an agony, sweetheart?" he asked. 
" I don't like the sound of it." 

Before she could explain but he saw the red dye her deli- 
cate neck to the soft brown tendrils of hair that fell upon its 
whiteness there came down the path the little Cure with a 
rapt face, his eyes looking straight before him, unconscious 
it seemed of their presence. 

They had to make way for him or to collide with him. 
Elizabeth Sartoris stepped off the path into the new snow 
that had fallen in the night. She went down on her knees. 
Suddenly she was enveloped by an immense horror. Hilary 
Onslow had raised his arm to strike the Cure. Of course he 



750 NOTRE DAME DE LA MISERICORDE [Mar., 

didn't know ; but the horror of it overwhelmed her. She sprang 
at him and seized the outstretched arm. The Cure barely 
aware of them passed on down the mountain path, his eyes 
lowered. 

"An insolent yokel!" said Hilary Onslow. "Why didn't 
you let me punish him as he deserved ? He should have given 
place to you." 

"Oh! oh!" she sobbed, tearless. "You don't know. Of 
course you don't know. He was carrying . . . . " All 
of a sudden she felt she couldn't explain, not to him, "he 
was on his way to a dying bed." 

" And if he was he had no business to drive you from the 
path." 

" Hush ! hush ! " she said. " He didn't drive me. I stepped 
out to let him pass, as you would ..." she sobbed 
again dryly " make way for the King of England, a man like 
yourself." 

Hilary Onslow's hour was past, never to return. When he 
had parted from her in anger she went on to Notre Dame de 
la Misericorde. The incident had shaken her. She had a 
sense of having escaped from a deadly peril, the horror of 
which hung about her still, so that she could not yet be glad 
she had escaped. 

She crept into the little mountain chapel where the shades 
had begun to gather. The stove had been lit and the place 
was warm. There was a faint sweetness from some frozen 
flowers on the altar that began to thaw in the warmth of the 
chapel. The sweetness mingled with the fumes of incense. 
She remembered that it was Benediction day, and she had 
not come. Benediction must have just concluded before the 
Cure left for his sick-call. 

She knelt down and covered her face with her hands. Her 
senses yet reeled from the shock of what had happened. She 
was a little dizzy, a little sick. Hilary Onslow's anger had 
passed over her head like the buzzing of bees. She had hardly 
known what he said. Everything else was eclipsed, swallowed 
up, in the horror of what he had escaped, what she had es- 
caped. Of course he did not know. By and bye she might 
pray for him that he be forgiven the sins of his ignorance. 
At the moment she could not endure the thought of [him. 



i9i i.] NOTRE DAME DE LA MISERICORDE 751 

Someone whispered close to her. It was John Vanhom- 
righ. He had been in the chapel when she entered it but she 
had not seen him. 

"It is growing dark," he said gently, "and there is no 
moon. The paths will be very slippery after last night's snow. 
It will be wise to get back to the hotel before the darkness." 

She looked up at him. His face was pinched and blue 
with the cold : the cold light from the snow outside put dark 
shadows about his eyes and his mouth. His eyes were very 
unhappy. They looked at her with a kind concern as from a 
great distance. Not at all as they had been used to look at her. 

" I am coming," she said, getting to her feet. 

Outside the chapel she slipped on the snow and he steadied 
her, holding her for a moment with his arm. He gave her his 
alpenstock after that and walked beside her, watching her with 
a serious and distant kindness lest she should slip again. 

"You had nearly given up Notre Dame de la Misericorde" 
he said. "I had given up looking for you there. I go back 
to England to-morrow." 

To England I To the home, the welcome, he had painted 
for them, laughing oddly as he talked ! An immense com- 
passion overwhelmed her. Her eyes filled with tears. She 
softened and glowed. The horror of the afternoon receded 
from her. She turned and looked at him with such an ex- 
pression in her beautiful eyes that he gasped. 

"You look at me like Notre Dame de la Misericorde" 
he said, beginning to laugh in the old way. " The picture in 
the chapel, I mean. A poor daub, yet the fellow who painted 
it had seen that look in the eyes of his mother, perhaps. 
Or his wife." 

The mists were off her eyes now. Wave after wave of 
tender pity was flooding her heart till it overflowed with its 
own sweetness. This pale boy, who had endured martyrdom, 
who was returning to it ... why, this was the real 
thing, not that other. That other was . . . she must not 
think of it. This was the real thing. 

John Vanhomrigh uttered a strange little sound. 

" Elizabeth ! " 

The name was like a cry. She turned about on the moun- 
tain path with a most heavenly smile and took the dark, 
boyish head in her arms. 




THE INTIMATE LIFE OF HAMILTON. 

BY CHARLES H. MAcCARTHY, PH.D. 

ADDITIONAL information concerning the career of 
Alexander Hamilton is certain to be warmly 
welcomed by all who are interested in American 
history. An ample biography based upon let- 
ters by Hamilton himself, by members of his 
family and by not a few of the most eminent among his con- 
temporaries can scarcely fail to be received with enthusiasm. 
In a modest preface General Hamilton's distinguished grand- 
son tells us that in his collection are to be found the originals 
of many letters now published for the first time. To a con- 
siderable extent, indeed, this splendid volume is a documen- 
tary history of Alexander Hamilton and his times. It is not 
designed to supersede but rather to supplement existing biog- 
raphies. In general they emphasize his public services. This 
endeavors to set forth his familiar life. In it, among other 
things, we catch glimpses of his courtship and marriage, of his 
efforts to build a home, of his success at the bar and finally 
we get a concise account of his tragic meeting with Aaron 
Burr. This is related with perfect impartiality. Burr is treated 
with more kindness than has been accorded him by authors in 
no way related to his illustrious victim. In this section there 
is marked fairness, indeed there is undoubted evidence of 
generosity. 

In addition to the many valuable letters contained in the 
volume there is not a little sound and temperate criticism. 
It matters little whether one agrees with all the opinions of 
Dr. Hamilton, for these are not obtruded, and besides there is 
furnished material enough to enable every reader to form con- 
clusions of his own. 

The purpose of the succeeding pages is to make clear to 
readers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD the more important of Al- 
exander Hamilton's services to this favored nation. At a time 

* The Intimate Life of Alexander Hamilton. By Allan McLane Hamilton. New York : 
Charles Scribner's Sons. 



i9i i.] THE INTIMATE LIFE OF HAMILTON 753 

when men's minds run much on the differences between politi- 
cal parties it may not be unprofitable to inquire briefly con- 
cerning their origin. With the beginnings of party govern- 
ment in America a portion of Hamilton's career was insepar- 
ably bound up. It is believed, however, that this part can be 
appreciated without considering either his pre-Revolutionary 
activity or his splendid military record in the war for inde- 
pendence. 

The Revolutionary War was almost won before the Ameri- 
can people were able to agree upon a constitution of govern- 
ment. In March, 1781 the thirteenth* State had ratified the 
Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. For a brief 
period that instrument had been tested in war. It was des- 
tined, however, to be subjected to a severer trial in times of 
peace. From neither ordeal did it emerge unscathed. 

With the evacuation of New York and Charleston the 
leading patriots began to consider the situation of their coun- 
try. Whether this was examined from without or from within 
the prospect was discouraging. If the American statesman 
looked abroad, he beheld the possessions of Spain cutting off 
the Confederation from the Mexican Gulf, and, beyond the 
Mississippi, stretching away to the distant Pacific. As a pos- 
sible disadvantage, it is true, westward expansion was not only 
remote but was not then deemed even desirable. Not so the 
complete navigation of the Mississippi ; concerning that right 
there might at any moment arise a situation charged with 
dangers. 

More serious, perhaps, was the retention by the British of 
certain frontier posts that the definitive treaty had agreed to 
surrender. Chief among these were Mackinaw, Niagara and 
Detroit, which were still held by English garrisons. In case 
of quarrels among the States, of which there were expecta- 
tions, these would afford rallying points for a re-conquest. 
Such motives the British authorities would, of course, disclaim. 
They had, however, a decent pretence for remaining. The 
United States had failed to perform all their engagements, and 
the posts might be fairly regarded as hostages. 

Our statesmen knew also that large sums were due to 
France, and that the revenue of the Confederation was insuffi- 
cient to pay even the interest on those generous loans. The 
public debt, increasing with dangerous rapidity, was begetting 
VOL. xcii. 48 



754 THE INTIMATE LIFE OF HAMILTON [Mar., 

contempt abroad and grave unrest at home. Though an ac- 
count of the troubles of that critical era might appear to con- 
duct us far from our theme, it is in reality the shortest way 
of gaining a clear understanding of Alexander Hamilton's 
place in American history. 

Long before the commencement of the Revolution, Benning 
Wentworth, an enterprising governor of New Hampshire, en- 
couraged the people of his province to take up the unsettled 
lands to the west of the Connecticut river. Massachusetts and 
Connecticut, too, furnished pioneers for that region. With 
these commonwealths the settlers had no serious controversy. 
New York was, however, more tenacious of what she regarded 
as her rights in that district, and over its inhabitants she en- 
deavored to assert her authority. At the beginning of the 
war for independence this dispute concerning the title to the 
New Hampshire grants was assuming the appearance of a civil 
war. Constables from Albany were mobbed, and the militia of 
New York was defied. With the outbreak of the Revolution 
the dispute sank to rest but when independence was won, the 
quarrel was renewed. 

With the State of Connecticut, New York had another sort 
of controversy. When citizens of the former commonwealth 
attempted to sell their productions in New York City, the 
authorities taxed them for the privilege. Connecticut sloops, 
too, were required to pay at the custom house such charges 
as were imposed upon vessels from Amsterdam or Liverpool. 
This embarrassment of trade was resented by a brave people, 
who had loyally supported the patriot cause, and at a great 
meeting in New London it was unanimously agreed by the 
business men present to suspend for a year all commercial in- 
tercourse with New York. In that era such meetings general- 
ly heralded war. 

With its population of 30,000 New York City appeared to 
the farmers of New Jersey to be a convenient and profitable 
market. Like the citizens of Connecticut they, too, were 
taxed. Their legislature was, however, in a situation to make 
reprisals. The merchants of New York had but recently built 
on Sandy Hook a light-house for the benefit of their commerce. 
Upon this the Legislature of New Jersey promptly imposed 
a tax of $1,800 per year. 

Far more alarming than these commercial differences was a 



19 1 1.] THE INTIMATE LIFE OF HAMILTON 755 

dispute between Pennsylvania and Connecticut for the pos- 
session of the Wyoming Valley. By a judicial decision of 
1782 this territory had been awarded to Pennsylvania, and in 
the decree of the Federal court the government of Connecti- 
cut appears gracefully to have acquiesced. This region, "fair 
Wyoming/' had been the scene of the terrible massacre of 
1778. It was just beginning to recover from that calamity, 
when, in the spring of 1784, owing to an unusual rise of the 
Susquehanna, drifting ice and swollen waters carried death and 
destruction through all that unfortunate region. Everywhere 
stones and gravel covered the land in such quantities as to 
make cultivation impossible. The wretched inhabitants were 
perishing from cold and hunger. In these circumstances Presi- 
dent Dickinson urged the Legislature of Pennsylvania to send 
relief. That body was not only deaf to the humane appeal of 
the Governor but appears to have regarded the disaster as a 
visitation of Providence. The hated Yankees should have re- 
mained in Connecticut, where they belonged. The Lord had 
merely punished their trespasses. Partly by the neglect and 
partly by the connivance of the Legislature these unhappy 
people were proceeded against with extreme severity. A 
creature named Patterson, who commanded the military forces 
of Pennsylvania, attacked the settlement, " turned some five 
hundred people out of doors, and burned their houses to the 
ground. The wretched victims, many of them tender women, 
or infirm old men, or little children, were driven into the 
wilderness at the point of the bayonet, and told to find their 
way to Connecticut without further delay. Heartrending 
scenes ensued. Many died of exhaustion or furnished food 
for wolves.' 1 * Everywhere in New England the tidings of 
such acts of barbarism aroused the greatest indignation. This 
incident shows plainly the notions of inter-state comity that 
prevailed in the years succeeding the revolution. 

The paper money craze was producing in Rhode Island al- 
most every sort of mischief. Except the business of the bar- 
rooms, trade of all kinds was at a standstill in Providence and 
Newport. This was during the year preceding the calling of 
the constitutional Convention. More interesting, because of 
its consequences, was the dispute between Maryland and Vir- 
ginia over the navigation of the Potomac. In order to ad- 

* The Critical Period of American History. By John Fiske. 



756 THE INTIMATE LIFE OF HAMILTON [Mar., 

judicate it, commissioners from both commonwealths met in 
1785 at Washington's home, Mount Vernon. Before separat- 
ing they agreed to recommend to the legislatures of their re- 
spective States the calling of a convention to meet at Annap- 
olis in the following year. On that occasion, however, only 
five States sent delegates. 

With the proceedings of the Annapolis convention this 
essay is no further concerned than to observe that because of 
the partial attendance of the commonwealths it was concluded 
to attempt nothing more than the preparation of an appeal 
urging every member of the Union to send delegates to a 
convention to be held in Philadelphia in the month of May, 
1787. This important document was drafted by Colonel Ham- 
ilton and was well received throughout the country. 

As early as 1781 Pelatiah Webster's pamphlet had suggested 
a Continental convention. Still earlier, while he was acting as 
aide-de-camp to General Washington, Hamilton had sent to 
James Duane, a delegate in Congress from New York, a very 
remarkable analysis of the political system attempted in the 
Articles of Confederation. Most of his suggestions for the 
" general good " were afterward embodied in the Constitution, 
Art. i t Section 8. In passing it may be remarked that even 
at that early date, 1780, Hamilton advised the establishment 
of a bank. This germinal idea developed and, in time, became 
a great fiscal agency of the new Government. Among the 
great statesmen of that era Hamilton enjoys the proud distinc- 
tion of having been the first to propose the calling of a con- 
vention to form a national Constitution. 

When Hamilton, at the age of thirty, was sent with Lansing 
and Yates to represent New York in the Constitutional Con- 
vention, he found himself entirely unable to agree with his 
colleagues. This fact, together with a modesty for which he 
has seldom been credited, accounts for his failure to partici- 
pate actively in the earlier discussions in that body. His ardent 
patriotism, his fine military record and, above all, his papers 
on finance made him known to every member of the Conven- 
tion. Gouverneur Morris, perhaps his most intimate friend, has 
said that Hamilton had little share in forming the Constitution. 
Nevertheless, he was responsible for introducing into it many 
of its most important provisions. Neither partisan antipathy 
nor personal rivalry can affect this fact. It is not necessary in 



i9i i.] THE INTIMATE LIFE OF HAMILTON 757 

this place to examine the brief outline of a new frame of gov- 
ernment offered by Hamilton to the Convention. The greater 
part of this sketch was embodied in the Constitution. Madi- 
son's Journal has preserved this tentative scheme and also a 
much more ample plan, which, at a later stage in the discus- 
sions, Hamilton submitted to show the system that he preferred. 

It was in presenting to the Convention his sketch of a 
frame of government that he praised so highly the British Con- 
stitution. For this, Hamilton has been accused of a love of 
monarchy and a hatred of republican institutions. Edmund 
Burke, a contemporary, has recorded repeatedly his admiration 
of the British Constitution, and in terms far stronger and far 
more eloquent than Hamilton had done. 

In June, 1788, the New York Convention, with sixty-five 
members in attendance, met to deliberate upon the new frame 
of government. George Clinton was unanimously chosen its 
President. It was known that many would oppose ratification. 
Indeed this opposition had shown itself in the Constitutional 
Convention, from which Lansing and Yates retired before the 
instrument of government had been adopted. Others, who re- 
mained till the close of the deliberations, refused to sign it. 

Thus, even before the Constitution was submitted to Con- 
gress, was begun a contest over its adoption. Richard Henry 
Lee, Melanchton Smith, and others, were beginning to influence 
public opinion by their writings. It was then that Hamilton 
conceived the idea of preparing a score or more of essays that 
would meet the most plausible objections to the proposed plan. 
With him in this undertaking were associated Madison, then 
in New York as a member of Congress from Virginia, and John 
Jay, a distinguished jurist from his own State. So pleased 
was General Washington with these essays that he caused them 
to be reprinted in Virginia. The magnitude of the questions 
at issue and the interest that they excited led their authors to 
modify the original plan of publishing about a score of articles. 
On March 17, 1778, were published thirty-six of ihe earlier 
essays with a preface by Hamilton. A second volume that 
appeared in May of the same year included the remainder of 
the eighty-five numbers that make up the Federalist. Washing- 
ton was one of the few men of that time who perceived in 
these letters to the newspapers something more than a succes- 
sion of party pamphlets of merely transient interest. The prin- 



758 THE INTIMATE LIFE OF HAMILTON [Mar., 

ciples that they discussed, said he, would be interesting to 
mankind "so long as they shall be connected in civil society." 
For the respective shares of Hamilton and his collaborators 
the reader is referred to any good edition of the Federalist. 

Hamilton's place in literature may, perhaps, be best sug- 
gested by contrast. When he was about twelve years old, and 
was himself beginning to attend to the messages of the muses, 
there appeared, January 21, 1769, in the Public Advertiser, of 
London, the first letter over the signature of " Junius." That 
anonymous writer singled out for criticism many of the leading 
members of Government and did not spare even the King 
himself. 

In his own day " Junius" was almost universally admired, 
and for a generation afterward nearly every newspaper writer, 
in the style of his sentences, imitated his epigrammatic turn 
and his chaste diction. When, however, one has read and 
re-read many times these once popular essays, he will come 
at last to the conclusion that there is in them little except 
their form. That is brilliant and imposing. There is in 
"Junius "no rich vein of economic thought nor are there any 
important maxims of political science. 

At the opposite pole stands the Federalist. The concep- 
tion of these letters was Hamilton's; so likewise was the 
preparation of by far the greater number of them. The au- 
thors of this cooperative work had little leisure to polish their 
essays. There was no time " to strike a second heat upon the 
muse's anvil." Many numbers, it is known, received their 
final touches while the printer was waiting. Nevertheless, the 
style is admirable, and in philosophical worth they are far 
beyond the compositions of " Junius." 

Some eminent authorities assert that the influence of the 
Federalist was not at all what our generation is accustomed 
to believe. If they are thinking of only its immediate effect, 
the statement may contain some grains of truth. As a matter 
of fact, however, its direct influence was considerable and its 
indirect influence immense. Still the Federalist is not to be 
venerated as a celestial message that recalled the erring voter. 
Of those who then exercised the suffrage perhaps few had seen 
so much as a single number, and fewer still were those who 
had mastered its contents. It was, however, the grand armory 
from which the natural leaders of society drew their weapons. 



19".] THE INTIMATE LIFE OF HAMILTON 759 

A perfect mastery of the principles embodied in the new 
Constitution was the natural result of preparing these essays. 
This apprenticeship in the pages of the New York newspapers 
made Madison, if not the ablest, at least the most useful 
member of the ratifying convention of Virginia; it likewise 
enabled Hamilton to overcome the very formidable opposition 
in that of New York. In the mind of the writer there has 
never been any sort of doubt that a majority of the political 
leaders in America opposed the Constitution at the time it 
was proposed, and that its final acceptance was the result of 
an intellectual victory. To this no one contributed so much 
as Alexander Hamilton. 

After the adoption of the Constitution the influence of the 
Federalist did not diminish. Indeed, since that time it has 
been accepted as the great contemporary commentary on the 
Constitution, of equal importance with decisions of the high- 
est judicial tribunal. In the world outside it is still admired 
and studied, and it is not improbable that nations yet to be 
will be benefited by adopting the enlightened principles of the 
great classic of the Revolution. 

Of Hamilton's speeches in the New York convention we 
possess no perfect copy nor have we any adequate description 
of their effect. We know only the result. It is idle to 
speculate on all the arguments that he employed and useless 
to attempt to reconstruct his great speeches at Poughkeepsie. 
The outlines that have been preserved reveal to us all the 
great characteristics of the Federalist, the fairness in stating 
the position of an adversary, the ability to generalize and 
the astonishing mastery of detail. The ablest of his adver- 
saries were not only disarmed but were actually moved to 
tears by his eloquence, and they finally permitted the Consti- 
tution to receive an unconditional ratification. Judged by the 
practical test of winning votes it is not certain that we have 
any record of political eloquence equally effective. 

On the question, then, of accepting or rejecting the Con- 
stitution, we find the first difference of sentiment among the 
American people. Those who favored the foedus, or union, 
under the new system were known as Federalists, those who 
opposed it were known as Anti-Federalists. When, however, 
the Constitution was forced upon them, the latter were com- 
pelled to post themselves on some new ground. Thereafter 



THE INTIMATE LIFE OF HAMILTON [Mar,, 

most of them became strict constructionists t while a great ma- 
jority of the Federalists became loose consttuctionists. 

Though but thirty years old, Hamilton had already achieved 
fame enough for immortality. Nevertheless, many believe that 
his greatest work was yet to come, and, perhaps, the subse- 
quent portion of his career is that which is most familiar to 
the American people. However this may be, it was his future 
services that chiefly contributed to remove from the nation 
most of the dangers described in the preceding pages. 

It would be but the repetition of a trite story to describe 
the starting of the Government under the new Constitution. 
The duty of the first President was to nominate, and, with 
the advice and consent of the Senate, appoint heads of de- 
partments. Washington's exercise of the appointing power 
showed great care and even greater judgment. He had but 
few appointments to make, it is true, but these were admira- 
ble in character. To direct the department of foreign rela- 
tions Jefferson, our greatest political thinker, was chosen first 
Secretary of State. As the young Republic had not yet been 
recognized by many European powers, his duties could not 
have extended beyond an occasional exchange of notes with 
the French minister. America's greatest constructive states- 
man, Alexander Hamilton, was selected for the work of organ- 
izing the Treasury Department. Unlike Jefferson, who at 
that time found little to do, Hamilton was a part of nearly 
all the measures of that eventful administration. As often 
happens in the world of politics, and, perhaps, in some other 
worlds, he did his work too well, and, in consequence, aroused 
considerable envy. Success unprecedented attended all of his 
measures. No oriental magician ever attempted such feats as 
Hamilton actually performed. " He touched the corpse of 
public credit," says Webster, " and it sprang to its feet." 

Our introductory pages have described a condition suffi- 
ciently cheerless. The situation must have been, indeed, dis- 
couraging, when even Congress, a body jealous of its powers, 
showed a willingness to entrust to the young secretary the 
solution of nearly all the problems that puzzled them. During 
their first session they were wholly occupied in organizing the 
Government. However, they declared, in a resolution, their 
sentiments on the importance of supporting the public credit, 
and they instructed Hamilton to report a plan at the next 



.] THE INTIMATE LIFE OF HAMILTON 761 

session. This he did in a masterly state paper. It discussed 
the raising and management of the revenue, the temporary 
regulation of the currency and the needs of the coasting 
trade; it examined the great question of the public lands and 
the purchase of West Point; it considered the fundamental 
problems of income and expenditure as well as the intricate 
subject of claims against the Government. At the same time 
he drafted a bill concerning the post-office and suggested a 
scheme for establishing a judicial system. In a word, he 
promptly outlined for Congress a splendid system of public 
finance. In the meantime the indefatigable secretary had set- 
tled a multitude of other important matters, and, above all, he 
had ingeniously contrived to provide for the present needs of 
the Government. 

It is a commonplace observation to say that this celebrated 
report marked a distinct epoch in American history. Hence- 
forth Hamilton was the intellectual leader of a political party 
and he impressed with his genius a school of political thought 
that has exercised upon the material prosperity of this coun- 
try and upon its constitutional system an enduring influence. 
The bonds of union were greatly strengthened, property was 
arrayed on the side of government, public order succeeded 
public prosperity. These prompt results proceeded from no 
happy accident of fortune, from no unconscious policy. Ham- 
ilton knew precisely what he wanted and exactly how to ob- 
tain it. He conceived no isolated measure. In the structure 
designed by this political architect each part had its appointed 
place. 

In rapid succession he presented to Congress the principal 
parts of his great financial system. Years before, he had 
thrown out in a letter to Duane, a hint concerning the estab- 
lishment of a bank. This has already been referred to as a 
germinal idea. Greater maturity of years and judgment, as 
well as an interested study of the subject, enabled him to lay 
before Congress a remarkable paper on the establishment of a 
United States bank. It is not necessary to discuss the social 
and the sectional opposition to this measure. To us it is 
chiefly of interest because it was on this occasion that Hamil- 
ton first developed the doctrine of implied powers. In its 
effects this principle was far-reaching. Concerning the exer. 
cise of those powers enumerated in the Constitution political 



762 THE INTIMATE LIFE OF HAMILTON [Mar., 

parties have not differed greatly. It is in the application of 
the powers derived from them that the Democratic party has 
been distinguished from rival organizations, whether Federalist, 
Whig or Republican. His report on the establishment of a 
mint reveals the same scientific grasp of principles, the same 
mastery of details. The grand policy of all his measures was 
to cement the Union. They were separately proposed and 
separately they were enacted into law. Each was opposed in 
turn, the method of funding the public debt as well as the 
ether regulations. More than twenty-five years later, in the 
celebrated case of McCulloch vs. Md. t Chief Justice Marshall 
fully approved Hamilton's opinions on the bank. His report 
on manufactures still remains the classic argument for pro- 
tection. 

Hamilton's services did not end with an efficient perform- 
ance of the duties of his own department. The confidence re- 
posed in him by Congress and by President Washington gave 
him large employment besides. When the execution of the 
excise law provoked an insurrection in western Pennsylvania, 
Hamilton's genius imposed peace on that troubled region, and, 
what was not less important, gave an early proof of the vigor 
of the new government. It was he, too, who by the letters of 
"Pacificus" reconciled the people to the policy adopted in 
Washington's proclamation of neutrality. 

After he had retired from the Cabinet, he defended Jay's 
unpopular treaty in a series of letters over the signature of 
" Camillus." He furnished both facts and phrases for his friends 
in Congress. Jefferson, who knew the power of Hamilton's 
pen, described him as a host in himself, the colossus of the 
Federalists. 

Though Hamilton could create a commonwealth, he was 
greatly lacking in prudence, the first of political virtues. He 
had just attained to the acme of success. He had been more 
than vindicated by a Congressional inquiry. The publica- 
tion soon after of the X, Y, Z correspondence had aroused in 
the ranks of the Federalists the greatest enthusiasm. Yet in 
a little while their leaders were engaged in bitter disputes 
among themselves. Many unstatesmanlike acts were performed 
by President Adams, many imprudent ones by General Hamil- 
ton. The grand climax was reached in the passage of Alien 
and Sedition Laws. It is not necessary nor does it seem pos- 



i9i i.] THE INTIMATE LIFE OF HAMILTON 763 

sible to apportion among the Federalist leaders their respec- 
tive shares in this blunder. It was destined to write much of 
the history of the United States. Rising out of it and tower- 
ing above it were the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, 
the Hartford Convention, Nullification and Secession. 

After Hamilton's resignation, in January, 1795, when he 
was no longer steadied by the constant opposition of Jeffer- 
son or the unerring judgment of Washington, many of his 
mistakes were more grave in character. Lack of space, pre- 
vents a consideration of his unprofitable and bitter altercation 
with President Adams. Indeed this quarrel was worse than 
profitless; it was fatal to the Federalist party. His rivalry 
with Aaron Burr was fatal to himself. 

Nevertheless, that part of his career succeeding his resig- 
nation from Washington's Cabinet was not barren of useful 
service. To secure the approval oi Jay's unsatisfactory treaty, 
Hamilton wrote the celebrated letters of Camillus, and, in the 
intervals between appearances in court, he turned into its ad- 
mirable form Washington's Farewell Address. 

Distinguished as a soldier, great as an author, endowed 
with rare eloquence and unrivalled as a constructive states- 
man, Hamilton had, nevertheless, some undoubted limitations. 
Gouverneur Morris to the contrary, Hamilton was often impru- 
dent. An interesting illustration of this may be found in his 
connection with the enterprise of the gifted Miranda. William 
Pitt, it is true, had also endorsed the project of revolutionizing 
the South American provinces of Spain. This was to have 
been expected from the supposed necessities of his Govern- 
ment. In Hamilton's case, however, there was no such justifi- 
cation ; besides it involves the. element of ingratitude, for, in 
the hour of America's need, Spain rendered no slight assist- 
ance, and her colonies on the Gulf were still more friendly. 
Precisely why he was prepared to injure Spain in return for 
her late service it is not easy to perceive. Perhaps his attitude 
was not unconnected with visions of personal glory, or it may 
have been that in his mind the Catholicism of Spain dimin- 
ished the merits of her friendship. Whatever may have been 
the convictions of his riper years, as a boy of eighteen he ex- 
hibited, in discussing the Quebec Act, a tincture of anti- Catholic 
feeling. Spain, indeed, was saved, but not by Hamilton's later 
reflections. That merit belongs to President Adams, who had 



764 THE INTIMATE LIFE OF HAMILTON [Mar. 

a rooted antipathy to every thing alien foreign alliances as 
well as foreign wars. Other defects in the character of Ham- 
ilton have already been noticed. To us it seems that a lack of 
prudence was his principal limitation. " Vain and opinionated/ 1 
are the epithets that his friend, Gouverneur Morris, applied to 
Hamilton. Few men had a better right to be attached to their 
opinions, and there probably was never a great man who was 
not perfectly conscious of his superiority. Perhaps no one has 
ever accused Shakespeare of having been self-sufficient, yet some 
of his contemporaries must have been shocked by his undoubted 
confidence in himself. Let the reader turn to Sonnet XVIII. : 

" So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, 
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." 

Nor was this his only offence against the grace of modesty. 
In No, LV. we have these lines: 

"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments 
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme." 

If the reader cares to pursue this idea, proofs still stronger 
may be found in Sonnet LXXXI. 

It may be doubted whether any eminent political character 
in all our history has aroused equal admiration among the 
members of his own party or equal condemnation among the 
members of the opposition. The Federalists regarded him as 
an angel, the Democrats as a demon. He represented wealth, 
and, to them, he was the original inventor of tyranny. From 
his untimely death almost one hundred and seven years have 
passed, yet time has not softened Democratic asperity. In our 
time few Hamiltonian measures would command their suffrages. 
He stood for ideals with which they have little sympathy. 
Even in the usually peaceful commonwealth of letters his 
character has occasioned a like division of sentiment, and we 
may hang up in our memories either the odious picture in 
The Rivals or the noble one in The Conqueror. It matters 
little whether we choose the fair or the foul, the fame of 
Alexander Hamilton will endure with this Republic. 




THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS. 

BY HILAIRE BELLOG. 

[UROPEAN civilization, of which the Catholic 
Church is the spirit, is still one, though its unity 
now (as so often in the past) is suffering from a 
grievous wound. The wounds of the past have 
been healed ; the modern wound we almost hope 
will be healed. But unity, wounded or unwounded, is still the 
mark of it. 

That unity to-day falls into national groups. Those of the 
West in particular are highly differentiated, and Gaul (or 
France as we now call it), the Iberian Peninsula (though di- 
vided into several regions each with its language, of which 
one, Portugal, is politically independent of the rest) is another. 
The old European and Roman district of North Africa is par- 
tially re- occupied by European civilization. Italy has quite 
recently appeared as another united national group; the Roman 
province of Britain has formed one united kingdom and nation 
for a longer period than any of the others. How did these 
modern nations arise in the transformation of the Roman Em- 
pire from its old pagan condition to Christian civilization ? 
We must be able to answer this question if we are to under- 
stand not only that European civilization has been continuous, 
that is, has been one in time as well as one in spirit and in 
place, but also if we are to know why and how that commu- 
nity was preserved. 

Every reader will be familiar with a certain false aspect of 
the subject; a false aspect which gives him to understand that 
great numbers of vigorous barbarians entered the Empire, con- 
quered it, established themselves as masters and ruled its 
various provinces. 

We have seen, in the last article, that such a picture is 
fantastically false and, like all historical falsehood, connotes 
certain false modern views and false deductions with regard to 
modern Europe, which, when they are believed, warp a man's 
sense of European unity and therefore of the necessary unity 
of European religion. 



766 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS [Mar., 

We have seen that the great hordes of barbarians who 
burst through the defences of civilization at various times from 
before the beginnings of recorded history, through the pagan 
period before our Lord's birth, during the height of the Em- 
pire proper in the third century, again in the fourth, and with 
such terrible effect in the fifth, were in the natural course of 
things invariably conquered, absorbed or destroyed. 

I say "in the natural course of things/' Dreadful as the 
irruption of barbarians into civilized places must always be, 
the conquest of civilization by barbarians is always and neces- 
sarily impossible. Barbarians may have the weight to destroy 
the civilization they enter, and in so doing to destroy them- 
selves with it (something of the sort, as we shall see later, 
threatened Britain for more than a century). But it is incon- 
ceivable that they should impose their view and manner upon 
civilized men, and to impose one's view and manner, dare 
leges, is to conquer. 

Moreover, save under the most exceptional conditions, a 
civilized army with its training, discipline and scientific tradi- 
tion of war, can always ultimately have the better of a horde, 
and I repeat, in the case of the Roman Empire the army of 
civilization did always have the better of the barbarian hordes. 
Marius had the better of the barbarians at Aix a hundred 
years before our Lord was born, though their horde was not 
broken until it had suffered the loss of 200,000 dead. Five 
hundred years later the Roman armies had the better of an- 
other similar horde of barbarians, the Goths in their rush upon 
Italy; and here again the vast multitude lost 200.000 killed or 
sold into slavery. 

But we have also seen that within the Roman army itself 
certain auxiliary forces which may have preserved to some 
extent their original tribal character, and probably partially 
preserved their original barbaric tongues, assumed greater and 
greater importance towards the end of the imperial period; 
that is, towards the end of the fourth, and in the beginning 
of the fifth centuries, and in general round about the year 400. 
We have seen why these auxiliary barbaric forces continued 
to increase in importance within the Roman Army, and we 
have seen how it was only as Roman soldiers and as part of 
the regular forces of civilization that they had that importance 
or that their officers and generals, acting as Roman officers 



i9i i.] THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 767 

and generals could play the part they did. The heads of 
these auxiliary forces are invariably men trained as Romans, 
ignorant of any life save that civilized life which the Empire 
enjoyed, regarding themselves as soldiers and politicians of 
the State in which they warred, and Jn general succeeding or 
failing wholly within the framework of Roman thirgs. They 
had no memory or tradition of barbaric life beyond the Em- 
pire, though their stock so often sprang from it ; they had no 
liking for that life, and no communication with it ; their ener- 
gies were developed entirely within those boundaries which 
guarded paved roads, a regular and stately architecture, great 
and populous cities, the vine, the olive, the Roman law and 
the bishoprics of the Catholic Church. 

Armed with this knowledge, which is accurate and scien- 
tific, and differs poles asunder from the legend of a barbaric 
" conquest " of Rome, let us set out to explain that state of 
affairs which a man born, say, a hundred years after the last 
of the great invasions was destroyed under Radagasius, would 
have observed in middle age. 

Sidonius Apollinarius, the famous bishop of Clermont-Fer- 
rand, lived and wrote his classical stuff so long after Alaric's 
Roman adventure and Radagasius' defeat, that the very long 
life of a man would hardly span the distance between them ; 
it was a matter of nearly seventy years between those events 
and his maturity. A grandson of his would correspond to 
such a spectator as we are imagining; a grandson of the great 
bishop (who was married) might easily have been born about 
the year 500. Had he traveled in Italy, Spain and Gaul at 
the age of fifty, this is what he would have seen: 

In all the great towns Roman life was going on as it had 
always gone on, so far as externals were concerned. The same 
Latin speech, now somewhat degraded, the same dress, the same 
division into a minority of free men, a majority of slaves, and 
a few very rich masters round whom not only the slaves but 
the mass of the free men also were grouped as dependents. 

In every city again he would have found a bishop of the 
Catholic Church, a member of that hierarchy which acknowl- 
edged its centre and headship to be at Rome ; everywhere re- 
ligion, and especially the quarrels in religion, would have been 
a main popular preoccupation. And everywhere save in North- 
etn Gaul he would have perceived small groups of men, 



768 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS [Mar., 

wealthy, connected with government, often bearing barbaric 
names, and sometimes acquainted with barbaric tongues, who 
were called Arians\ heretics who differed in religion from the 
mass of their fellow citizens very much as a minority of Prot- 
estants in an Irish county to-day differ from the mass of their 
Catholic fellows. 

The armed forces he might have met upon the roads as he 
traveled would have been rare ; their accoutrements, their dis- 
cipline, their words of command, were still, though in a de- 
graded form, those of the old Roman army. There had been 
no breach in the traditions of that army or in its corporate 
life. Many of the bodies he met would still have borne the 
old imperial insignia. 

The money which he handled and with which he paid his 
bills at the inns, would be mixed in character and value, but 
it would usually be stamped with the effigy of the reigning 
emperor at Byzantium, or one of his predecessors, just as the 
traveler in Canada to-day will handle coins stamped with the 
effigies of Edward VII., of his mother, and sometimes of Wil- 
liam IV. or even of George IV. But mixed with these coins 
would be a certain number bearing in Latin the inscription, 
and stamped with the effigy, of the chief of the local govern- 
ment, and this phrase leads me to a feature in the surround- 
ing society which we must not exaggerate but which made it 
very different from that united and true " Imperial " form of 
government which had covered all civilization 200 years before. 

The descendants of those officers who from 200 to 100 
years before had commanded the auxiliary forces of the 
Roman Empire, were now seated as local administrators in 
the capitals of the Roman provinces. The reader will do well 
to appreciate exactly what was the position of these men, for 
that fatal habit to which these articles have so often alluded, 
perpetually confounds and warps our appreciation of the time 
by lending to words then used meanings wholly modern, and 
by conceiving that materially declining and slowly changing 
world as though it were subject to the conditions of the high- 
est civilization. 

Let us suppose our traveler to be concerned in some great 
commerce which brought him to the centres of local govern- 
ment throughout the Western Empire. Let him have to visit 
Paris, Toledo, Ravenna, Aries. He has, let us say, success- 



i9i i.] THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 769 

fully negotiated some business in Spain, which has necessitated 
his obtaining official documents. To obtain these he will be 
directed to the Palace. 

When we say "palace" to-day we mean the house in 
which lives the ruler of a monarchical state. We talk cf 
Buckingham Palace, St. James' Palace, the Palace at the 
Hague, the Palace in Brussels, and so on. If one of these 
modern heads of a monarchical state, the Emperor of Ger- 
many or the King of Italy, has a private residence in the 
country, we usually talk of that also as a Palace. On the 
other hand we do not speak of the Palace at Washington, 
because the United States is not a monarchy but a republic. 
In other words, a palace simply means for us now in the 
English language a house in which anybody called a King, 
however insignificant or however powerful, from the little man 
at Monaco to the Czar of Russia, happens to live. 

But Palatium in Roman society had a very different mean- 
ing. It signified the official seat of Government, and in par- 
ticular the centre from which the writs for Imperial taxation 
were issued, and to which the proceeds of that taxation were 
paid. The name was originally taken from the Palatine Hill 
in Rome, on which the Caesars had their house. As the 
mask of private citizenship was thrown off, and as the Roman 
commanders- in- chief became more and more true and absolute 
sovereigns, their house became more and more the official 
centre of the Empire. The term " Palace " thus became con- 
secrated to a particular use. When the centre of Imperial 
power was transferred to Byzantium the word " Palatium " 
followed it and was applied to local centres as well as to the 
Imperial city, and in the laws of the Empire, in its dignities 
and honors, in the whole of its official life, the Palace means 
the machine of Government local or imperial. Such a traveler 
as we have imagined in the middle of the sixth century comes, 
then, to that Spanish Palace from which, throughout the five 
centuries of Imperial rule, the Spanish Peninsula has been 
locally governed. What would he find ? 

He would find, to begin with, a great staff of clerks and 
officials, of exactly the same sort as had always inhabited the 
place, drawing up the same sort of documents as they had 
drawn up for generations, using certain fixed formulae, and 
doing everything of course in the Latin tongue. But he 
VOL. XCH. 49 



770 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS [Mar. y 

would also find that the building was used for acts of author- 
ity, and that these acts were performed in the name of a 
certain person (who was no longer the old Roman governor) 
and his Council. 

Let us look closely at that new person seated in authority 
over Spain, and at his Council : for from such men as he 
and from the districts they ruled, the nations of our time and 
their royal families were to spring. 

The first thing that would be noticed on entering his pres- 
ence would be that he had all the insignia and manner of 
Roman Government. 

He sat upon a throne as the Emperor had sat, and the 
provincial delegates of the Emperor. On official occasions he 
would wear the official garments; the orb and the sceptre 
were his symbols we may presume, as they had been those 
of the Emperors and the Emperor's local subordinates before 
him. But in two points this central official differed from the 
old loeal Governor whom he exactly succeeded, and upon 
whose machinery of taxation he relied for power. 

These two points were, first that he was surrounded by a 
very powerful and somewhat jealous body of Great Men; 
secondly, that he did not habitually give himself an imperial 
Roman title, but was called Rex. 

Let us consider these points separately. 

As to the first point, the Emperor in Byzantium, and be- 
fore that in Rome or at Ravenna, worked, as even absolute 
power must work, through a multitude of men. He was sur- 
rounded by high dignitaries, and there devolved from him a 
whole hierarchy of officials, with the most important of whom 
he continually consulted. But the Emperor had not been 
officially and regularly bound in with such a Council. His 
formulae of administration were personal formulae. Now and 
then he mentioned his great officials, but he only mentioned 
them if he chose. 

This person, who had substituted himself for the old Ro- 
man Governors, the Rex, was on the contrary a part of his 
Council, and all his formulae of administration mentioned the 
Council as his coadjutors and assessors in administration, and 
above all (this is most important) in anything that regarded 
the public funds. It must not be imagined for a moment 
that the Rex issued laws or edicts, or, what was much more 



IP"-] THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 771 

common and much more vital, levied taxation under the do- 
minion of, or subject to the consent of, these great men about 
him. On the contrary, he spoke as absolutely as ever the 
Imperial Governors had done in the past, and indeed he could 
not do otherwise because the whole machinery he had inher- 
ited presupposed absolute power. But everything is done 
" with " these great men ; and it is of capital importance that 
we should note this. The phrases of the official documents of 
that time continually run in one of half a dozen regular for- 
mulas all of which are based upon this idea of the Council 
and are in general such words as these : " So and so, Rex, 
ordered and commanded (with his chief men) that so and 
so . . ." 

As to the second point: we note the change of title. The 
authority of the Palatium is a Rex t not a Legate nor a Gov- 
ernor, nor a man sent from the Emperor, nor a man directly 
and necessarily nominated by him. Now what is the meaning 
of that word Rex? 

Centuries and centuries before, indeed a thousand years 
before, the word Rex had meant the chieftain of the town and 
petty district of Rome. It had in the Latin language always 
retained some such connotation. The word " rex " was often 
used in Latin literature as we use the word " King " in English : 
i. e., to describe the head of a state great or small. But as 
applied to the local rulers of the fifth century in western 
Europe, it was not so used. It meant Chieftain or Chief 
officier of auxiliaries. A Rex was not then, in Spain, or in 
Gaul, a King in our sense of the word: he was a chieftain of 
particular armed men. There was no sense of equality or 
similarity between the word Rex and the word Imperator. 
You could perfectly well be a Rex and yet be a subject and 
even an unimportant subject of the Imperator or Emperor: 
the Imperator being, as we remember, the Commander-in- 
Chief of the Roman army, upon which institution the Roman 
state or Empire or civilizatin had depended. 

When the Roman army began to add to itself auxiliary 
troops, drilled of course after the Roman fashion and forming 
one body with the Roman forces, but contracted for in bulk 
as it were, the chieftains of these barbaric and often small 
troops, were called in the official language, Reges. Thus 
Alaric, a Roman officer and nothing more, was the Rex of his 



772 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS [Mar., 

officially appointed auxiliary force ; and as the nucleus had 
once been a small body of Goths, and as indeed he inherited 
his position as an officer of that auxiliary force precisely be- 
cause he was a chieftain of the Goths, the word Rex attached 
to his Imperial Commission in the Roman army and there 
was added to it the name of that particular barbaric tribe 
with which his auxiliary force had originally been connected : 
The Rex, for instance, of the Goths. He was Rex Gotarum 
in Spain, not Rex Hispanicz, or " King of Spain " that 
was altogether a later idea; the Rex at Paris was not Rex 
Gallic?, or King of Gaul; in each case he was the Rex of the 
particular auxiliary troop from which his ancestors some- 
times generations before had originally drawn their Imperial 
commission and the right' to be officers in the Roman army. 
Thus you will have the Rex Francorum, or King of the Franks, 
in the Palatium at Paris. 

In other words, the old Roman local legislative and taxing 
power, the reality of which lay in the old surviving Roman 
machinery of a hierarchy of officials with their titles, writs, 
etc. was vested in the hands of a man called " Rex " that is 
"Commander" of such and such an auxiliary force; Com- 
mander of the Franks for instance, or Commander of the 
Goths. He still commanded in the year 500 a not very large 
military force on which local government depended and in 
this little army the barbarians were certainly predominant 
because, as we have seen, towards the end of the Empire the 
stuff of the army had become barbaric and the armed force 
was mainly of barbaric recruitment. But that small military 
force was also and as certainly very mixed indeed ; there was 
no attempt to preserve the blood of any of the old tribes who 
had enlisted in the service of the Roman army. They inter- 
married freely with all around. Many a slave or broken freed- 
man would enlist; no one cared in the least whether the 
members of the armed forces which sustained society were of 
one origin or another. 

Again, there was no conception in the mind of this Rex of 
rebellion against the Empire. All these Reges without excep- 
tion held their military office and power originally by a com- 
mission from the Empire. All of them derived their authority 
from men who had been regularly established as Imperial 
functionaries. As the central power of the Emperor had as a 



i9i i.] THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 773 

fact broken down, the Rex as a fact administered the whole 
machinery without control ; but no Rex ever called himself a 
local Imperator or dreamed of calling himself so: in theory 
the Empire was still under one control. 

There, then, you have the picture of what held the levers 
of the machine of government during its degradation and trans- 
formation after the breakdown of central authority. Clovis, in 
the North of France, the Burgundian chieftain at Aries, Theodoric 
in Italy, Athanagild later at Toledo in Spain, were all of them 
men who had stepped into the shoes of an unbroken local 
Roman administration, who worked entirely by it, and whose 
machinery of administration wherever they went was called by 
the Roman and official name of Palatium. 

These men were of barbaric stock; had for their small 
armed forces a military institution descended and derived from 
the barbaric Roman auxiliary forces ; often, and usually in the 
early years of their power, spoke a barbaric tongue more 
easily than Latin; but every one of them was a soldier of the 
declining Empire and regarded himself as a part of it, not an 
enemy of it. 

When we appreciate this we can understand how insignifi- 
cant were those changes of frontier which make so great a 
show in historical atlases. 

The Rex of such and such an auxiliary force dies and di- 
vides his " kingdom " between two sons. What does that 
mean ? Not that a nation with its customs and its whole form 
of administration was suddenly divided into two, still less that 
there has been what to-day we call "annexation" or "parti- 
tion " of states. It simply means that the honor and advan- 
tage of administration are divided between the two heirs, who 
take, the one the one area, the other the other, over which 
to gather taxes and to receive personal profit. It must always 
be remembered that the personal privilege so received was very 
small in comparison with the total revenue to be administrated 
and that the vast mass of public work as carried on by the 
judiciary, the officers of the Treasury and so forth, continued 
to be quite impersonal. This governmental world of clerks 
and civil servants lived its own life and was only in theory 
dependent upon the Rex, who was in turn in theory the suc- 
cessor of the chief local Roman official. 

The Rex t by the way, called himself always by some de- 



774 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS [Mar., 

finite Roman title, such as Vir Inluster or Princeps ; and often, 
(as in the case of Clovis) not only accepted directly from Im- 
perial authority a particular though purely honorific Roman 
office, but observed even the old popular Roman customs such 
as, largesse and procession, upon his induction into that of- 
fice. 

Now why did not this man, this Rex, in Italy or Gaul or 
Spain, simply sink into the position of the Roman Governor 
whom he had succeeded ? One would imagine, if one did not 
know more about that society, that he should have done this. 
The small auxiliary forces of which he had been chieftain 
rapidly merged into the body of the Empire, as had the in- 
finitely larger mass of slaves and colonists, equally barbarian 
in origin, for century after century before that time. Though 
the civilization would have continued to decline, its forms 
would have remained unchanged and the theoretic attachment 
of each of these subordinates to the Emperor at Byzantium 
would have endured indefinitely. As a fact, the memory of 
the old central authority of the Emperor was gradually for- 
gotten ; the Rex and his local government as he got weaker 
also got more isolated and the idea of "kings" and "king- 
doms " took shape at last in men's minds, Why ? 

The reason that the nature of authority greatly changed, 
that the last links with the Roman Empire of the East grad- 
ually dissolved, and that the modern nation arose around 
these local governments of the Reges, is to be found in that 
novel feature, the standing council of great men round the 
Rex, with whom everything is done. 

This standing Council expresses the two great forces, the 
one negative and blind, the other positive, creative, and of 
the clearest vision, which between them were transforming 
society. Those two forces were: first the economic force of 
the great landowners, and secondly the organization of the 
Catholic Church. 

On the economic or material side of society, the great 
landowners were the reality of that time. 

We have no statistics to go upon ; only one statement which 
tells us that at the beginning of the fifth century six men 
were the ultimate freeholders of the whole of North Africa. 
But the facts of the time and the nature of its institutions are 
quite as cogent as detailed statistics. In Spain, in Gaul, in 



1 9i i.] THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 775 

Italy as in Africa, economic power had concentrated into the 
hands of exceedingly few men. 

As to the descent of these men none asked or cared. By 
the middle of the sixth century few perhaps were of pure Roman 
blood, and certainly none were barbaric. Lands waste or con- 
fiscated through the decline of population or the effect of the 
interminable wars and the plagues, lay in the power of the 
Palatium, which granted them out again, strictly under the 
eye of the Council of Great Men, to new holders. 

The few who had come in as followers and dependents of 
the " chieftain " of the auxiliary forces benefitted largely, and 
we get more than once vague phrases such as their demand 
for " a third " of the land ; but the thing that really concerns 
the story of civilization is not the origin of these immense 
owners which was mixed nor their sense of race, which 
simply did not exist but the fact that they were so few. It 
explains both what happened and what was to happen. 

That a handful of men, for they were no more than a 
handful, should thus be in control of the economic destinies of 
mankind, is the key to all the material decline of the Empire. 
It should furnish us, if we were wise, with an object lesson 
for our own politics to-day. 

The Imperial power declined largely because of this extra- 
ordinary concentration of economic power in the hands of a 
few. It was these few who in every local government en- 
dowed each of the new administrators, each new Rex, with a 
tradition of imperial power, not a little of the dread that went 
with the old imperial name, and the armed force which it 
connoted ; but the Rex had also to reckon with the mere blind 
strength of highly concentrated wealth. 

There was, however, as I have said, another and a much 
more important element ; it was the Catholic Church. 

Every city of that time had a principal personage in it, 
who knew its life better than anybody else, who had, more 
than anyone else, power over its morals and ideas, and who 
in many cases actually administered its affairs. That person 
was the Bishop. 

Throughout Western Europe at that moment men's interest 
and preoccupation was not race nor even material prosperity, 
but religion. The great duel between Paganism and the Catho- 
lic Church was now definitely decided, after two hard centur- 



776 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS [Mar., 

ies of struggle, in favor of the latter. The Church, from a 
small but definite and very tenacious organization within the 
Empire, and on the whole antagonistic to it, had risen to be 
the only group of men who knew their own minds ; next to be 
the official religion; finally to be the cohesive principle of the 
vast majority of human beings. 

The modern man can distantly appreciate the phenomenon, 
if for "creed "he will read "capital," and for the "Faith," 
"industrial civilization." For just as to-day men principally 
care for wealth, and in pursuit of it go indifferently from 
country to country, and sink, as unimportant compared with 
it, the other businesses of our time, so the men of the fifth 
and sixth centuries were intent upon the unity and exactitude 
of religion. That the religion to which the Empire was now 
converted, the religion of the Catholic Church, should triumph, 
was their one preoccupation. For this they exiled themselves ; 
as minor to this they sunk all other things. The Catholic 
hierarchy with its enormous power at that moment, civil and 
economic as well as religious, was not the creator of such a 
spirit, it was only its leader. And in connection with that in- 
tense preoccupation of men's minds, two factors appeared: 
the first is the desire that the living Church should be as free 
as possible ; hence religion and its ministers everywhere wel- 
come the growth of local as against centralized power. They 
do so unconsciously but none the less strongly. The second 
factor is Arianism. 

Arianism, which both in its material success and in the 
length of its duration, as well as in its concept of religion, is 
singularly parallel to the Protestant movement of recent cen- 
turies, had sprung up as the official and Court heresy opposed 
to the orthodoxy of mere Faith. The Emperor's Court had 
indeed at last abandoned it, but a tradition survived till long 
after that Arianism stood for the " wealthy" and "respectable" 
side of life. Moreover, of those barbarians who had taken 
service as auxiliaries in the Roman armies, the greater part 
(the Goths as the generic term went, though that term had 
no longer any national meaning) had received their Christian- 
ity from Arian sources, in the old time of the fourth century 
when Arianism was " the thing." Just as we may imagine 
that in the eighteenth century Ireland settlers and immigrants 
would tend to accept or to dignify Protestantism, so the Rex 



i9i i.] THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 777 

in Spain and the Rex in Italy had a family tradition; they, 
and the descendants of their original companions, were of what 
had been the " court " and " upper class " way of thinking. 
They were "Arians" and proud of it. The numbers of these 
powerful heretics were small, but their irritant effect was 
enormous. 

Now it so happened that of these local administrators one 
only was not Arian. That one was the Rex Francorum or 
chieftain of the little barbaric auxiliary force of "Francs" 
which had been drawn into the Roman system from the banks 
of the lower Rhine, and which, at the time when the transfor- 
mation took place between the old Imperial system and the 
beginnings of the nations, had its capital in the Roman town 
of Tournai. A lad whose Roman name was Clodovicus, and 
whom his parents probably called by some such sound as Clo- 
dovig (they had no written language) succeeded to the chief- 
tainship of this small body of troops at the end of the fifth 
century. Unlike the other armed chieftains he was pagan. 
When with other forces of the Roman Army he had repelled 
one of the last of the barbaric invaders close to the frontier 
at the Roman town of Tolbiacum, and succeeded to the power 
of local administration in Northern Gaul, he could not but as- 
similate himself with the civilization wherein he was mixed, 
and he and his little band of three thousand were baptized. 
He had already married a Christian wife, the daughter of the 
Burgundian Rex ; but in any case such a conclusion was in- 
evitable. 

The important historical point is not that he was baptized; 
for a barbarian in such a position to be baptized was as much 
a matter of course as for an Oriental who becomes an Ameri- 
can citizen to wear trousers and a coat. The important thing 
is that he was received and baptized by Catholics and not by 
Arians. 

He came from a remote corner of civilization, his men were 
untouched by the worldly attraction of Arianism ; they had 
no tradition that it was " the thing " or " smart " to adopt 
the old court heresy which was offensive to the great mass of 
Europeans. When, therefore, the Rex Francorum was settled 
in Paris about the year 500 and was beginning to administer 
local government in Northern Gaul, the weight of his influence 
was thrown with popular feeling and against the Arian Regcs 



778 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS [Mar., 

in Italy and Spain. The armed force of the Rex Francorum % 
continuing the old Roman tradition of civil war, carried ortho- 
dox Catholic administration all over Gaul. They turned the 
Arian Rex out of Toulouse, they occupied the valley of the 
Rhone. For a moment it seemed as though they would sup- 
port the Catholic populace against the Arian officials in Italy 
itself. 

At any rate, their championship of popular and general 
religion against the irritant small administrative Arian bodies 
in the Palatium of this region and of that, was a very strong 
lever which popular opinion and the Bishops at the head of it 
could not but use in favor of the Rex Francorum's independent 
power, and was therefore indirectly a very strong lever for 
breaking up the now decayed and almost forgotten adminis- 
trative unity of the Roman world. 

Under such forces the power of the Bishop in each town 
and district, the growing independence of the few and immensely 
rich great landowners, the occupation of the Palatium and its 
official machinery by the chieftains of the old auxiliary forces 
Western Europe slowly, very slowly, shifted its political base. 
For three generations the mints continued to strike money 
under the effigy of the Emperor. The new local rulers never 
took or dreamed of taking the Imperial title; the roads were 
still kept up, the Roman traditions though degraded were never 
lost in the arts of life: in cooking, dress, architecture, law, and 
the rest. But the visible unity of the Western or Latin Em- 
pire not only lacked a civilian and military centre, but gradu- 
ally lost all need for such a centre. 

Towards the year 600, though the civilization was still one, 
as it had always been, from the British Channel to the Desert 
of the Sahara, and had even extended a few miles eastward 
of the Rhine, men no longer thought of it as an area within 
which they could always find the civilian authority of one 
organ; and what is more, men no longer spoke of it as the 
Respublica or common weal. It was already beginning to be- 
come a mass of small and often overlapping divisions. The 
things that are older than, and lie beneath all exact political 
institutions, the popular legends, the popular feelings for local- 
ity and countrysides, were rising everywhere ; the great land- 
owners were appearing as semi-independent rulers, each on his 
own estates (though these estates were often widely separated), 



i9i i.] THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONS 779 

and the speech of men was already divided into an infinity of 
jargons. Some of these were of Latin origin, some of Teutonic ; 
some, as in Brittany, were Celtic; some, as in the eastern 
Pyrenees, Basque ; in North Africa we may presume the indi- 
genous tongue of the Kabyles resumed its sway ; Punic also 
may have survived in certain towns and villages there. But 
men paid no attention to the origin of such diversities. The 
common unity that survived was expressed in the fixed Latin 
tongue, the tongue of the Church, and the Church now every- 
where supreme in the decay of Arianism and of paganism 
alike, was the principle of life throughout all that great area. 

So with Gaul and with the little addition to Gaul that had 
risen in the Germanics to the East of the Rhine; so with 
Italy and Dalmatia, and what to-day we call Switzerland, and 
a part of what to-day we call Bavaria and Baden ; so with 
what to-day we call Spain and Portugal ; and so (after local 
adventures of a parallel sort, followed by a reconquest by the 
Emperor proper) with North Africa and with a strip of An- 
dalusia. 

But one province did suffer a much more violent change : 
in one province there took place a real revolution. It was a 
revolution much more nearly resembling a true barbaric suc- 
cess and the results thereof, than anything which the Conti- 
nent can show. In that province there was a breach of con- 
tinuity with Roman things, and therefore in the fate of that 
province those who desire to deny a continuous life of the 
Roman Empire and of civilization, and those who would pre- 
tend that the Catholic Church is not the soul of Europe, are 
driven to find their chief argument. That province was Britain ; 
and we have next to ask : " What happened in Britain when 
the rest of the Empire was being transformed, after the break- 
down of central Imperial power ? " Unless we can answer that 
question we shall fail to possess a true picture of the continu- 
ity of Europe and oi the perils in spite of which that continu- 
ity has survived. 

The reply to that question, "What Happened in Britain?" 
I shall attempt in my next article. 




THE PILLAR OF CLOUD. 

BY WALTER ELLIOTT, C.S.P. 

JT was God's primal purpose to take His " delights 
. . . with the children of men" (Prov. viii. 31). 
Frustrated of His purpose by our first parents' 
abuse of this privilege, He yet grants us a di- 
vine relish in our exiled state by interior com- 
munications of love. A great authority affirms that this interior 
joy is often more than enough to compensate for the loss of 
the earthly paradise (Thomas of Jesus, Sufferings of Christ, 
ix. 7). He sometimes reveals His goodness so vividly as 
to set men on fire with longings for Him and Him alone. 
We do not refer to the ecstacies of the saints, but the 
ordinary jubilations of generous souls. The pains of this life 
are made sweet and its pleasures bitter by the constant recur- 
rence of what is known as sensible devotion of the more 
refined sort. The Lord goes before us "to show the way by 
day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in a pillar of fire ; that 
He might be the guide of their journey at both times " (Exod. 
xiii. 21), so that He is a gift of peace in trouble and of 
thanksgiving in joy. 

I. 

St. Justin the Martyr declared to his pagan friends, that 
he learned to believe in Christ from observing the cheerful 
faces of Christian martyrs amid their awful sufferings. He was 
proficient in philosophy, but the truths shining in the pages 
of Plato were eclipsed by the brightness of Christian faith 
shining in the faces of men dying for Christ's sake. It was 
Justin's privilege to feel and exhibit that terrible joy himself, 
when in due time lie suffered martyrdom. So had it been 
with St. Paul : " Gladly therefore will I glory in my infirm- 
ities that the power of Christ may dwell in me. For which 
cause I please myself in my infirmities, in reproaches, in ne- 
cessities, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ. For when 
I am weak, then am I powerful" (II. Cor. xii. 9, 10). 

This joyous atmosphere of devotional sentiment is not to 
be mistaken for mere emotion. It is fervor, it is intensity of 



i9i i.] THE PILLAR OF CLOUD 781 

purpose, and it is enthusiasm. It is that earnestness which 
made the saints pray like the Psalmist: "I cried with my 
whole heart, hear me, O Lord " (Ps. cxviii. 145). On occa- 
sions they are almost beside themselves their prayer seems 
to others a panic and their zeal fanaticism. So we must say 
with St. Teresa, that devotional feeling 

does not consist in a greater sweetness of devotion, but in a 
more fervent wish to please God ill all things, in avoiding as 
much as we possibly can, all that would offend him, and in 
praying for the increase of the glory and honor of His Son 
and for the growth of the Catholic Church " (Interior Castle , 
IV. Mansions, Ch. I.). 

Devotional sweetness has its perils; but this it does; it 
sickens us of the joys of our fleshly appetites. We may go to 
excess in our joyous imaginings about God and heaven, and 
thereby practise spiritual gluttony. But this will at any rate 
tend to cure us of every kind of bodily self-indulgence. 
Sensible devotion is often a form of sentimentalism, but a 
spiritual form, and it cures us of the sentimentalism of human 
love, and reveals the delusions of worldly pleasure. It is this 
interior happiness that the apostle prayed God to grant his 
converts: "That He would grant you, according to the riches 
of His glory, to be strengthened by His Spirit, with might 
unto the inward man " (Ephes. iii. 16). 

II. 

The danger already referred to lies in the human ad- 
mixture principally from thinking of the good works we per- 
form (we are interpreting St. Teresa, Interior Castle, IV. 
Mansions, Ch. i), and the diligence we give to prayer and 
meditation. "On consideration," says the saint 

we shall find that many temporal matters give us the same 
pleasure such as unexpectedly coming into a large fortune, 
suddenly meeting with a dearly loved friend, or succeeding in 
any affair that makes a noise in the world. Again it would 
be felt by one who had been told her husband, brother or son 
was dead, and who saw him return to her alive. I have seen 
people weep with such joy, as I have done myself. I con- 
sider these joys and the ones we feel in religious matters to 
be both natural ones. But the spiritual ones spring from a 
more noble source they in short begin indeed in ourselves, 
but they end in God. But what I have called spiritual con- 



782 THE PILLAR OF CLOUD [Mar., 

solations are far different. They on the contrary arise from 
God, and our nature feels them and rejoices in them as keenly, 
and indeed far more keenly, than men do in earthly riches. 

Seeking for God here below is, indeed, a pilgrimage of 
sadness, for our tendencies are those of a corrupted nature, 
and our journey is beset with many dangers. Yet the same 
Lord who placed His pillar of fire by night and of cloud by 
day to guide His children in their desert wanderings, never 
fails to do the same with us, so that we say with the Psalm- 
ist: "Thy justifications were the subject of my song, in the 
place of my pilgrimage" (Ps. cxviii. 54). 

A graphic picture of a mind quite overflowing with spir- 
itual joy is St. Augustine's account of his feelings in the first 
fervor of his conversion. 

I could not enjoy enough during those days the surpassing 
joy of musing upon the depths of Thy wisdom in the salva- 
tion of the human race. What tears did I shed over the 
hymns and canticles, when the sweet sound of the music of 
Thy Church thrilled my soul. As the music flowed into my 
ears, and Thy truth trickled into my heart, the tide of devo- 
tion swelled high within me, and the tears ran down and there 
was gladness in those tears (Confessions, Bk. ix. Ch. 6). 

This was a sort of holy inebriation, felt by a mighty soul 
as he heard the welcome of the angels on his entrance into 
that heavenly society, God's Church, of which the Lord had 
said : " Behold I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and the people 
thereof joy" (Isaias, Ixv. 18). What company is so happy 
as a family of pious Catholics, what silence is so sweetly 
soothing as the magnum silentium of a religious community, 
or the peaceful days and nights of a retreat. 

Yet we distinguish between the sensible influence of grace, 
felt in joy, or fervor, or holy awe, and the actual spur to 
good works between the aroma of the fruit and its nourishing 
substance. God bestows joy very often without our co-oper- 
ation; it is not so with acts of virtue. These need our good 
will. This is a distinction of much importance, seldom duly 
considered or even known, especially by beginners. When 
both sentiment and act are inextricably combined, the ideal 
condition is reached. St. Augustine in that same wonderful 
book of Confessions, says that while he was preparing to be 
baptized, "I read the Psalms with my soul on fire;" and in 



i9i i.] THE PILLAR OF CLOUD 783 

the same chapter he speaks of earnest characters as men who 
read or speak "with their heart in their eyes" (Bk. ix. Ch. 4). 

III. 

Sensible devotion is usually, and often exclusively, taken to 
mean the sweetness that is incident to God's service, especially 
in prayer. Yet not sweetness but bitterness is the most precious 
devotional sentiment, the overflowing of our emotional nature 
during moments of regret for sin into tears and sighs, horror 
and pain. Sensible bitternes of contrition is for most of our 
moods a far higher gift of God than the sensible sweetness 
of affection for Him. The Council of Trent places the essence 
of effectual repentance in " pain of soul and detestation of past 
sin " (Sess. XIV., Ch. iv), surely a bitter state of mind, and yet 
the most desirable of all devotional feelings. The gladness of 
holy faith and hope and love let us receive with a welcome ; 
the sadness of grief for sin let us receive with a double wel- 
come. A shade of suspicion hangs over all joy in this life 
even religious joy, for we are in a state of banishment and 
atonement. That shade vanishes and joy becomes immune from 
suspicion only when its happy thrills are received with reserve, 
and we welcome it with the sign of the cross. " My brethren," 
exclaims the apostle, " count it all joy when you shall fall into 
divers temptations " (James i. 2). What a strange joy is this ! 
Surely we must readjust our views of joy and sorrow. Surely 
it takes a stalwart character to be a true Christian. 

Make hay while the sun shines a maxim whose wisdom is 
best known in a rainy climate. So with souls of a gloomy 
temperament, or those whose lives are saddened by constant 
suffering. These often outstrip their sunnier brethren in the 
race of perfection, because adversity is a supreme test of friend- 
ship whether for God or man. " A friend shall not be known 
in prosperity " (Ecclus. xii. 8). In aridity we show God our 
truest love, particularly if we continue faithful to our regular 
devotional exercises. 

All sensible sweetness in prayer beyond merely appreciative 
feelings is to be accepted with calmness, enjoyed with modera- 
tion, and surrendered with gladness, And if it roll and surge 
in the heart with overmastering force it is even to be suspected 
of diabolical origin. Sensible devotion should be treated with 
that rational hospitality, which welcomes the coming, and 



784 THE PILLAR OF CLOUD [Mar., 

speeds the parting guest. It is true that it always makes 
prayer easier. But does it make virtue easier? After prayer 
is over and done, does the force of love reach higher results 
as a consequence of devout feelings? As a rule it does not. 
One comes from semi-ecstasy in prayer and presently loses 
control of his temper he is quite the same man as before. 
He meditates on our dying Savior's thirst with tearful sympa- 
thy, and at the next meal he is powerless to restrain his ap- 
petite for daintiesjust as before. Plain reasoning in medita- 
tion with incandescent resolutions is a better ideal than the 
pulsations of a high spiritual temperature, which sometimes 
knock out of one's head the simple duty of the hour. "And 
as soon as she knew Peter's voice, she opened not the gate 
for joy, but running in she told that Peter stood before the 
gate" (Acts xii. 14). Thus did joy hinder the damsel Rhode 
from duty's task, as it has hindered not a few others ever since. 
The consolations of a devout life should not savor of the 
ordinary feelings of self-content. We seek even in pious ex- 
ercises the comforts of mind craved by unregenerate natuie. 
"Thou hast found honey, eat what is sufficient for thee, lest 
being glutted therewith thou vomit it up"(Prov. xxv. 16). In 
childhood we prefer the sweet things of a meal to the sub- 
stantial food. Now it happens that in the spiritual life we, for 
the most part, continue to be children to the end even unto 
old age we glut ourselves with the sweetness of prayerful 
feelings, instead of nourishng our souls with the strong but 
tasteless food of patience and humility. Sensible, practical 
resolves for the day's work and suffering, dependent wholly on 
the deep flowing realizations of divine things, let these be our 
aim. As to sensible devotion the question ever demands an- 
swer: Are these feelings the fruit of religious conviction, or 
of religious enthusiasm? Are we dependent on taste, or on 
reason and grace ? Too often we fall under the Psalmist's 
admonition : " In the evening weeping shall have place, and 
in the morning gladness. And in my abundance I said : I 
shall never be moved " (Ps. xxix. 6, 7). 

IV. 

God sometimes takes His consolations from us, but His 
mercy ever remains. " For a small moment have I forsaken 
thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a moment 



i9i i.] THE PILLAR OF CLOUD 785 

of indignation have I hid my face a little while from thee, but 
with everlasting kindness have I had mercy on thee" (Isaias, 
liv., 7, 8). The rainbow is to be admired as a beautiful token 
of God's love, rather than worshiped as something god-like. 

We readily forget that this life is a vale of tears, and all 
its brightness not that of an ever unclouded sky, but rather 
the occasional gleams of sunshine between the showers of an 
incurably bad climate. " The heaven of heavens is the Lord's : 
but the earth He hath given to the children of men " (Ps. cxiii. 
16). Let us who are of the earth be content with the earth ; 
it is God's gift and it is good. Heaven with God will be ours 
in due time; the earth with God is our present destiny. 
Later on we shall rejoice as the angels do, but now we are 
but men and our joy is of the earth, that of wayfarers in a land 
of exile, a joy of patience, a joy even of tears. But how holy 
is our sorrow and how powerful an instrument of God's provi- 
dence, since it uncovers the deeper springs of eternal joy. 
Therefore " Is any of you sad ? Let him pray. Is he cheer- 
ful in mind? Let him sing" (James v. 13). 

God sends upon your soul the south wind and sunshine 
and warmth, with the flowers and fruits of devotional feelings. 
Praise Him with joy and thank Him with alleluias. But the 
same God sends the chill of winter, short sunlight, weeping 
skies. Praise Him with fear and thank him with sadness. 
" Cold cometh out of the north, and to God praise with fear " 
(Job, xxxvii., 22). Whatever changes He causes in the weather 
without or our feelings within, there is no change in Himself. 
He is always equally worthy of love, sometimes joyful love, 
sometimes fearful always love with thanksgiving. Praise God 
for a cold heart, for if it means a dreary winter it will be fol- 
lowed by a genial summer. 

Beethoven composed several of his greatest pieces long 
after total deafness had rendered him incapable of hearing a 
single note of music. His soul was so sensitive to musical 
beauty, and so ready and sure in its choice of harmonies, that 
the dim memory of sound was sufficient guidance to his genius. 
So should our faith be ready and sure in trusting God in 
dark days, and in brighter times not unprepared for the in- 
evitable return of the clouds. " In the day of good things be 
not unmindful of evils: and in the day of evils be not un- 
mindful of good things" (Ecclus. xi. 27). 
VOL xcii. 50 



786 THE PILLAR OF CLOUD [Mar., 

V. 

Shall we pray for sensible devotion ? Most assuredly yes. 
It enables us to meditate oftener and longer, to recall our 
good purposes in an atmosphere^ of) joy. "Restore unto me 
the joy of Thy salvation, and "strengthen me with a perfect 
spirit " (Ps. 1. 14). But shall we petition for ecstacies in 
prayer? Most assuredly no. Yet the saints bid us ask of 
God some humble share of theliigher graces of contemplation, 
just as we ask for heaven itself. Ejaculatory prayer here has a 
perpetual utility. St. Bernard says offSt. Malachy that his heart 
was like a bow always bent and continually shooting short 
prayers up to heaven. Let us bear in "mind the Lord's teaching, 
that importunity plagues msn]andfpleases God (Luke xi. 7). 

Our Lord says in the Apocalypse': "Behold I stand at 
the gate and knock. If any man shall hear My voice, and 
open to me the door, I will come in to him, and will sup 
with him, and he with Me" (Apoc. iii. 20). Aye, Lord I 
can answer I bid Thee come in; but the door of my heart 
is locked on the outside by my carnal nature. Thou alone 
hast the key unlock my heart from the outside, enter in and 
we shall feast together, and " let my soul be filled as with 
marrow and fatness, and my mouth shall praise Thee with 
joyful lips" (Ps. Ixii. 5). 

Another lesson from the Resurrection morn. Magdalen 
persevered seeking Jesus, though the empty tomb baffled her. 
She sought Him dead and found Him living because she con- 
tinued resolutely on in her search. What a burst of light and 
love when at last He said: "Mary! "and she answered "Rab- 
boni (which is to say, Master)." (John, xx. 16). So we, if 
we are as persistent in seeking Him in gloom*as in sunshine 
shall finally find Him. Jesus is for the most part;- disguised in one 
form or other because it is by faithful seeking that our love is 
tested by faith and strengthened by hope. Like Mary, we too 
shall seek Him dead and find Him living, indeed there is no 
other kind of seeking and finding Jesus. And it is from that 
kind of meeting that we receive our mission for leading others 
to Jesus : " Go, tell My disciples," He said to Mary. 

This is true, also, of our Lord's seeking after us, for we 
are constantly avoiding and evading Him. Therefore does St. 
Augustine say : " If God sought me when I fled from Him, 
how can He fly from me when I seek Him?" 



i9i i.] To THE SAVIOR 787 

We have not touched upon the mysterious desolation of 
spirit experienced by the saints, which generates what is 
known as disinterested love of God. To love God hell or no 
hell, heaven or no heaven, let none of us venture on this 
perilous and heroic spirituality, nor so much as ask for such 
a trial. Strictly disinterested love is not compatible with truth, 
nor is it even in a modified form anything to be longed after. 
A certain class of souls experience it as a fiery visitation of 
the Holy Spirit, souls far above our own class. 

Yet in a devout fancy we can profit by certain fyearnings 
after God, mentally prescinding though not totally ignoring 
heaven or hell as motives of our love. Bishop Camus tells us 
that St. Francis de Sales was fond of quoting the following 
incident from Joinville's Life of St. Louis. A certain holy 
woman presented herself before one of the king's chaplains, 
bearing in one hand a lighted torch, and in the other a pitcher 
of water filled to the brim. "What are you going to do?" 
she was asked. And she answered: "With this torch I am 
going to burn up Paradise, and with this water I am going to 
put out the fire of hell, in order that henceforth God may be 
served with disinterested love." St. Francis then explained 
that such a love was so noble that it served God from no 
mercenary spirit; not from fear of punishment or hope of re- 
ward. He added that he wished that story to be told on all 
possible occasions (Spirit of St. Francis de Sales, p. 64). 



TO THE SAVIOR. 

BY JULIAN E. JOHNSTONE. 

How blind, who say they cannot find Thee 

In all the glorious world we see! 
When all the golden gates of sunset 

Through fields of roses lead to Thee ! 
When all the stars of Heaven mind Thee, 

In order strung like chiming-bells, 
And on his harp of golden lightning, 

The thunder, I,ord, Thy Glory tells ! 



788 To THE SAVIOR [Mar. 

How strange, who say they cannot know Thee, 

When morning lifts the veil of mist, 
And shows afar the shining city, 

The towers and domes of amethyst ! 
When autumn, with his frosty fingers] 

Pinches the maples rosy red; 
And with their hands aflame with jewels 

The sumachs praise Thee overhead ! 

How cold, who say they cannot love Thee ! 

When like a bird of paradise 
Dropping below his golden feathers 

The sunshine of Thy Splendor flies! 
When joy sits like an angel ringing 

Good will to all, to all delight, 
And like a thousand loving altars 

The lighted cities flame at night ! 

O God ! when on their flutes of silver 

The breezes of the morning play, 
When summer like a loving maiden 

Upon the rosebud-beads of May 
Delights to praise, and give Thee glory, 

Inspire our hearts with love of Thee, 
That all our lives may show the splendor 

Of ships that sail the sunset-sea ! 

Let morning at the open window,* 

An oriole, of Jesus sing : 
Let all the lamps that shine in Heaven 

And on their chains of silver swing, 
Let all the rich and mighty music 

That falls in golden notes of light, 
To men proclaim the name of Jesus, 

And glorify Him, God of Might ! 




THE NEW YORK CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION ON 
STATE AID TO CHURCH SCHOOLS. 

BY MICHAEL H. LUCEY, PH.D. 

N the early years of the last century, before the 
public school system of this state had been 
founded, the Catholic parish schools, in common 
with other church schools of New York City, 
received their proportionate share of the com- 
mon school fund. In recognition of this aid the state reserved 
to itself certain rights in the supervision and in the adminis- 
tration of these schools. This condition of affairs came to an 
end in 1825, owing to irregularities in the disposition of the 
public funds by certain non-Catholic church schools. 

The entire common school fund for New York City was 
then turned over to the schools of the Public School Society, 
a semi-public corporation, which retained its exclusive privil- 
eges until the bitter warfare waged against it by Archbishop 
Hughes. As a result of this controversy the present common 
school system of New York City was founded. 

The Catholic parish schools did not, however, profit di- 
rectly by this victory. It is true that a few years later cer- 
tain individual schools received small appropriations from the 
state and from the city, but the entire amount did not exceed 
a few thousand dollars. 

About this time efforts were being made at Poughkeepsie, 
at Troy, and at a few other places in the state, toward solv- 
ing the vexed question on a rational basis. The pastors of 
the churches in the places mentioned turned their school build- 
ings over to the Boards of Education in the respective towns. 
While the public officials, of course, were under no necessity 
of doing so, yet they invariably retained as teachers those 
who were already serving in the schools, and who possessed 
state licenses. 

Such was the condition of affairs when the Constitutional 
Convention met at Albany in the summer of 1894. At this 
Convention there was no clear-cut demand for state support 
for parochial schools, hence we have not the expression of 



790 STATE AID TO CHURCH SCHOOLS [Mar., 

opinion of members of the Convention on this proposition on 
its own merits. There were various reasons why this demand 
was not made. This was a time in which there was a bitter 
warfare being waged in church circles over the future method 
or means of imparting religious education to children. There 
were those high in authority who were opposed to any meas- 
ure of state control, and who feared that state aid would in- 
evitably lead to this. There were others who feared that a 
too rigid insistence on state aid for church schools would 
jeopardize the appropriation for the charitable institutions 
maintained by the churches. 

But nevertheless, in the debate on the proposed educa- 
tional article, much light was shed as to the views of the 
various members of the Convention on the need of religious 
training as a part of a well-rounded education, the means of 
giving this training, and the relation of the state to the 
schools giving it. 

On August 31, the Convention having resolved itself into 
a committee of the whole, proceeded to a consideration of 
Article 9, relating to free common schools. Section 4, as re- 
ported by the committee on education, was as follows: 

"Neither the state nor any sub-division thereof shall use 
its property or credit or any public money, or authorize or 
permit either to be used directly or indirectly in aid or main- 
tenance other than for examination or inspection of any school 
or institution of learning wholly or in part under the control 
or direction of any religious denomination or in which any 
denominational tenet or doctrine is taught. 

This section shall not apply to schools in institutions sub- 
ject to the visitation and inspection of the State Board of 
Charities. 

The committee on education, in its report, stated that the 
first sentence of the above article needed no explanation or 
defence, and then proceeded to give both. It stated that in the 
opinion of the committee there was no demand from the 
people of the state upon the Convention so unmistakable, 
widespread and urgent, none, moreover, so well grounded in 
right and reason, as that the public school system of the state 
should forever be protected by constitutional safeguards from 
all sectarian influence or interference, and that public money 



i9i i.] STATE AID TO CHURCH SCHOOLS 791 

should not be used directly or indirectly to propagate de- 
nominational tenets or doctrines. The arguments in favor of 
the proposed provision were, in the opinion of the committee, 
conclusive, and the objection that it would result in making 
the schools " godless/' or that it would imply on the part of 
the people enacting it, hostility or even indifference to relig- 
ion seemed, to the committee, to be both groundless and 
absurd. On the contrary, the committee held that by adopt- 
ing the proposed section the Convention would most effective- 
ly aid in all that is highest and best in religion; for by es- 
tablishing the principle that state education must necessarily 
be secular in its character, the field was left open beyond 
question or misunderstanding for religious teaching in the family, 
the Sunday-School, and the Church. 

There was much opposition to the proposed section from 
two quarters. There were those who opposed it on account of 
what they conceived to be its unwarranted attack on religion ; 
and on the other hand there were those who believed that 
the elimination of religious teaching from the schools had not 
gone far enough, and who were, therefore, strenuously opposed 
to the part exempting schools in charitable institutions from 
the genera] ban. 

This latter party, under the able leadership of Messrs. 
Choate and Root, opened fire as soon as the report was pre- 
sented. Mr. Choate moved that the sentence reading, "This 
section shall not apply to schools in institutions subject to 
the visitation and inspection of the State Board of Charities," 
be stricken out, upon the ground that it was a violation of an 
implied understanding agreed upon before the meeting of the 
Convention when the discussion took place at public hearing; 
that it defied the universal public sentiment of the state as 
it had been expressed in all quarters, and finally that it was 
a flagrant derogation of a sound and universal [principle, that 
none but public schools should receive the support of public 
moneys, and that the people of the state, or any section of 
the state should not be taxed for the support of education of 
a sectarian nature in any schools whatever. 

Mr. Peck, speaking for the majority of the committee, and 
against Mr. Choate, referred feelingly to the needs of the wards of 
the state the children of the poor, dependent orphans, the deaf, 
the dumb, the blind. As for the matter of excluding religious 



792 STATE AID TO CHURCH SCHOOLS L Mar > 

education, for his part he would rather have a child taught to 
venerate the Great Spirit of the American Indian than have it 
taught no religion at all. He did not want the homes of the 
dependent children of the state to furnish the breeding places 
of the anarchists and socialists of the future. 

Mr. Lauterbach was also strongly in favor of granting funds 
to asylums, and like charitable institutions for school purposes, 
and moved as an amendment "This section shall not apply to 
orphan asylums or correctional institutions in which education 
is incidental only." He pointed out that according to a state 
law dependent children should, so far as possible, be put under 
the guardianship of those families or institutions whose relig- 
ion was the same as that of their parents. The state, there- 
fore, recognized the fact that every child who became its ward 
should receive religious education. 

Many of the opponents of Mr. Lauterbach declared them- 
selves as not opposed to the principle advocated by him, but 
believed that provision should be made for it in the Charities 
Article. They held that the common school fund should be 
sacredly guarded from any denominational invasion. Their 
platform was, as one member put it, " to appropriate, not mil- 
lions of dollars, not thousands of dollars, but not one single 
cent for the purpose of a sectarian school." 

Mr. Root, in closing the debate said that he, in common 
with many of his fellow-delegates, came to the Convention ex- 
pecting to vote to prohibit all state aid to any sectarian in- 
stitution, whether educational or charitable. He regretted that 
he found the impression gaining ground that the attempt to 
prohibit such aid to sectarian charitable institutions had better 
be abandoned. He, for one, believed in that great principle 
separation of [church and state: "It is not a question of re- 
ligion, it is not a question of creed, or of party ; it is a ques- 
tion of declaring and maintaining the great American principle 
of eternal separation of church and state." 

On being put to vote Mr. Choate's motion to strike out 
was carried, and Mr. Lauterbach's substitute which, in the mean- 
time had been amended to read : " This section shall not pro- 
hibit secular instruction to the inmates of any orphan asylum 
or of any institution to which children may be committed by 
judicial process, in which education is incidental only," was 
defeated by a vote of 55 to 51. 



19 1 1.] STATE AID TO CHURCH SCHOOLS 793 

While this successful attack, under the leadership of Mr. 
Choate, was being conducted on the second clause of Section 
4, Mr. Cassidy led an equally vigorous attack against the first 
section, for which he moved the following substitute : " Neither 
the state nor any sub-division thereof shall use its property 
or credit, or any public money, or authorize or permit either 
to be used, directly or indirectly, in aid or maintenance, other 
than for examination and inspection of any institution of learn- 
ing not wholly owned and controlled by the state or a sub- 
division thereof." 

Mr. Cassidy, in support of his substitute, said that he was 
opposed to the original form because it was unconstitutional, 
that is, opposed to the spirit of the Constitution of the United 
States; it was a surrender to bigotry and fanaticism, and at 
war with the generally accepted doctrine of church and state. 
It merely sought to outlaw some of the agencies of the state 
because of their religious character. The principle involved in 
the separation of the church and state, is that the state, of 
right, exists merely for civil ends, that it should have nothing 
whatever to do with religion. The principle contended for was 
that as the state should not make a grant to a school simply 
because it is a religious school, so it should not refuse a grant 
on that ground. The state ought never to consent to run with 
bloodthirsty dogs, eager to chase down their religious prey. 

Mr. Cassidy went on to declare that a Church, though 
primarily a religious body, is also a civil body, that the State 
may make grants to it for civil reasons the same as to a pecu- 
liarly secular organization ; that when a church school renders 
the state a secular service by giving secular instruction, it 
may receive grants from the regents funds just the same as 
any purely secular school. He, however, disavowed any inten- 
tion of seeking public money for parochial schools. 

Mr. McDonough ably seconded the efforts of Mr. Cassidy. 
Said he : " Why, if you said that there should be no state 
aid in any schools in which socialism is encouraged, or in any 
school in which nihilism is encouraged, or in any school in 
which anarchy is encouraged, and you embodied that in a pro- 
posed amendment to the Constitution, and went to the people 
with it, every one would say that your work amounted to a 
condemnation of anarchy, of nihilism, of socialism. What do 
you do now ? You go to the people and say : ' Not a dollar 



794 STATE AID TO CHURCH SCHOOLS [Mar., 

of aid to any school in which religion is taught.' That is a 
condemnation of religion." 

Mr. Gilbert opposed Mr. Cassidy's amendment on the ground 
that it was not within the province of the state to extend any 
of its money to the promotion of whatever is peculiar to any 
sect or denomination. But by excluding the teaching of de- 
nominational tenets he contended that religion was by no 
means excluded. When all the doctrines peculiar to each sect 
or denomination were swept away there still remained the great 
truths of religion belief in God, belief in responsibility to Him, 
belief in the brotherhood of man, and the reciprocal duties of 
men. All these might be taught the schools would not then 
be "godless," and no room would be left for anarchy. 

The debate being finished, Mr. Cassidy moved that the 
committee of the whole rise, report his amendment formally, 
and recommend its passage. This motion was carried, the 
vote being 68 to 59. 

This victory was short lived, however. Mr. Root immedi- 
ately moved that the Convention disagree with the report of 
the committee of the whole, and recommit the report to the 
committee with instructions to report the amendment as orig- 
inally given, with the exception of the sentence referring to 
schools in charitable institutions, which had already been 
stricken out. Mr. Cassidy objected to this on the ground that 
the matter had just been settled. He was overruled, how- 
ever, and the Convention accepted Mr. Root's motion by the 
vote of 71 to 68, and the section was advanced to its third 
reading. 

Its opponents now made a final but a fruitless stand. Mr. 
McKinstry opposed the educational amendment, saying that 
he was not one who considered the gravest danger menacing 
this nation, the union of church and state. He had heard 
some complaints that some local authorities had seen fit to 
employ Sisters of Charity to teach in a primary department, 
but this aroused no fear in him. Even if they should intimate 
to some ragged little boy that there is a life beyond, that 
there is a higher responsibility than forced obedience to some 
human teacher, that there are other faculties to be culti- 
vated than those which master arithmetic and spelling, still 
the condition would not be alarming. 

Mr. Cassidy likewise opposed, saying that the proposed 



i9i i.] STATE AID TO CHURCH SCHOOLS 795 

article did not shut out the state from using its money for 
private schools that were not denominational. It might sup- 
port a Masonic Academy, for instance, or a Redman's Academy. 
Inasmuch, however, as it was the evident intention of the 
Convention to exclude all possibility of religious education 
from the schools, then they ought to make their position em- 
phatic. To this end he introduced an amendment which, with 
other amendments made was voted down, and the Convention 
adopted the entire educational article, Section 4, which at 
present forms part of the fundamental law of the state, read- 
ing as follows: 

Neither the state nor any subdivision thereof shall use its 
property or credit or any public money, or authorize or permit 
either to be used directly or indirectly in aid or maintenance 
other than for examination or inspection of any school or in- 
stitution of learning, wholly or in part under the control or 
direction of any religious denomination, or in which any de- 
nominational tenet or doctrine is taught. 

The effect of this section was to put an end to all the 
compromises by which public officials and parish school author- 
ities in several parts of the state were attempting to settle 
the vexed school question. The State Superintendent of Edu- 
cation, in the matter of the employment of the Sisters of 
Charity, ruled that the wearing of an unusual garb, worn ex- 
clusively by members of one religious sect, and for the pur- 
pose of indicating membership in that sect, by the teachers in 
the public schools, constitutes a sectarian influence which ought 
not to be persisted in. 

In the well-known "Lima" case the authority thus exer- 
cised by the Superintendent of Public Instruction was held by 
the Court of Appeals to be a reasonable and valid exercise of 
the power conferred upon him. This was so, the Court ruled, 
not because the wearers of such apparel should be excluded 
from teaching in our public schools on account of their reli- 
gious connections or membership in religious orders, since if 
otherwise qualified, and by their acts as teachers they do not 
promote any denominational doctrine or tenet, there is no 
reason morally why they should be disqualified, but because 
the influence of such apparel is distinctly sectarian, even if 
the wearing of it does not amount to the teaching of denom- 
inational doctrine. 




A MASTER OF LANGUAGE. 

BY EDWARD F. CURRAN. 

COUPLE of years ago I came across a short 
story by Joseph Conrad, and as I read, the 
thought came flashing up that at last I had 
found a writer after my own heart; one who 
could produce pure idiomatic language as well 
as construct a good story. Up to then I had thought that I 
knew all the writers of English who were considered to be 
worthy of any consideration, and I innocently pictured to 
myself the future of Mr. Conrad; what he could and probably 
would do. I felt no slight discomfiture when I discovered 
somewhat later on that he had already done some remarkable 
work ; that already under his name in the scant details of a 
literary guide there were some eight volumes credited to him. 
But I felt some consolation for my ignorance when at a future 
day the bookseller to whom I gave the order for these vol- 
umes had also apparently never heard of the author, and again, 
when I turned to the Catholic Who's Who for 1908 and could 
not find his name ; an omission, however, that was supplied 
last year. But all this only goes to show what the quiet in- 
obtrusiveness of those whose work stands on the highest plane 
is in comparison to the noisy bids for popularity and publicity 
of the lower grades of authorship. 

To any serious student of English literature acquainted with 
those writers who are extolled by the commonality of critics 
and reviewers the writings of Mr. Conrad will be a revela- 
tion. There is on every page an indefinable air of distinction. 
Nothing is commonplace, nothing cheap, nothing that savors 
of the vulgar. And yet Mr. Conrad treats in his best work 
of the sea, of the grossest specimens of seamen, of brutes, bul- 
lies, cowards, of men who, in his own words, believe in a here- 
after solely for the purposes of blasphemy. We see all this, 
but we see at the same time an infusion of that feeling of the 
ties of kinship, that milk of human kindness, that sympathiz- 
ing, tender compassion which lies hidden away in the hearts 
of all men, and only occasionally breaks forth in the most un- 
forseen circumstances, and then under the strongest forms. 



i9i i.] A MASTER OP LANGUAGE 797 

Mr. Conrad paints with the sure touch of a capable artist. 
He makes use of all schools, but belongs to none. He is the 
founder of his own school. And his disciples must work hard 
indeed to come within even many degrees of obtaining the 
mastership that he possesses. It is not too much to say that 
he stands head and shoulders over all the writers of fiction of 
the present generation. 

Having spent a large portion of his life on the sea, he 
naturally writes of it, and when he does he is supreme; no 
writer known to me can handle a nautical story like Mr. 
Conrad; no one can put the same life into it. Take up 7 he 
Nigger of the "Narcissus** and page after page of the most 
perfect kind of sea painting meets the eye. Some of us were 
taught in youth that the account of the wreck by Dickens in 
David Copperfield was one of the finest descriptions of a storm 
on the sea. For those who visit the seashore during the 
summer months and watch the ocean gently lapping the sands 
this description may appear wonderful; but to any person 
living near the ocean, and knowing all its many changeful 
moods, the essay of Dickens is as tame as any theatrical stage 
storm; we hear the wind- cloth shrieking over the cogs in the 
wings, and the peas rattling in the rain-box, and our eye is 
caught by the painted sea-cloth with a toy ship undulating at 
the back of the stage, and all that is wanting to make the 
perfect puny stage storm is the flashing of lycopodium and 
the shaking of sheet iron. The whole thing so far as the 
sea is concerned is unreal and theatrical. But now if we 
turn to the storm depicted in The Nigger of the "Narcissus" 
covering some sixty pages, we can live in a veritable storm. 
We can watch the monster seas hurling themselves on the 
ship; we can feel ourselves pitched in the waterways, and 
grappling with the desperation of drowning men anything that 
our chilled hands can seize; we can bear without flinching the 
kicks of our companions who are flung headlong over us as 
we hang on for life; their heels are in our backs, our feet are 
on the face of somebody else. We are on board, are carried 
by a creature made by man a struggling wooden animal 
spoken to and of by our captain as some mighty, incompre- 
hensible, powerful being who must be humored, who must be 
coaxed to battle for life, and not to give up the fight. The 
elements of air and water have met to fight with each other, 
and both combine to crush out of existence man and his crea- 



798 A MASTER OF LANGUAGE [Mar., 

tions that may dare to poke themselves into the fray. There 
is that seemingly eternal darkness of an eternal night, with the 
grim captain, like the spectre pilot of another age, in com- 
mand, and the weather-beaten sailor clinging to the wheel; 
two weird uncanny figures fighting in stolid silence'; the up- 
roarious, anarchical sea and wind, whose apparent desire is to 
destroy all in their path, and then view later on in subsequent 
calm the useless wreckage of their outrageous,*insensate anger. 
And if you get innoculated with a passion for the sea; if 
its salt gets into your blood, and its roar is the music of all 
music to your ears, and its rhythmic swell and heaving bil- 
lows dim your eye with mesmeric effect, and you desire to 
rush and go down with men in ships, you can revel in Mr. 
Conrad's work. For hours you can cruise with him in fair 
winds, you can lie becalmed in the deadliest of tropical heats; 
you can feel under you a trembling ship battling through a 
typhoon. In a short work called after this wind we get an- 
other marvellous description of a storm. It is the story of the 
Nan-Shan fighting her way with her north-of-Ireland captain 
standing to his post in the midst of disaster, and maintaining, 
under the most exceptional circumstances, discipline and order. 
This story and The Nigger of the "Narcissus" show that 
only a sailor like Mr. Conrad could write of the effective 
manner used by ships' officers to command and subdue men. 
In Typhoon, the work effected by the extraordinary orders of 
Captain MacWhirr occupies pages of uncommonly exciting 
reading. In The Nigger of the "Narcissus" after a terrific 
fight for life lasting over a day during which there was no 
food to be had, we come upon the fierce attitude of the sail- 
ors; the ship has just been got out of the worst part of the 
storm, but she must be worked to be saved, and the orders 
of the captain to Mr. Baker are, " Don't give tke men time 
to feel themselves." All are beaten out with the cruel usage 
of the storm, but 

Mr. Baker, feeling very weak, tottered here and there, 
grunting and inflexible, like a man of iron. He waylaid 
those who, coming from aloft, stood gasping for breath. He 
ordered them, encouraged, scolded. <l Now, then to the 
maintopsail, now! Tally on to that gantline. Don't stand 
about there ! " " Is there no rest for us? " muttered voices. 
He spun round fiercely, with a sinking heart. "No! No 
rest till the work is done. Work till you drop. That's what 



19".] A MASTER OF LANGUAGE 799 

you're here for," A bowed seamen at his elbow gave a 
short laugh. "Do or die," he croaked bitterly, then spat 
into his broad palms, swung up his long arms, and grasp- 
ing the rope high above his head sent out a mournful, 
wailing cry for all to pull together. 

And, in another place, Donkin rises out of the scuffle with 
Mr. Baker minus a tooth, to the great delight of any appreciative 
reader who follows carefully the vagaries of the Cockney cad. 

There is only one saint amongst Mr. Conrad's sailors, and 
he is a manifest sham; the halo of quiet humor with which 
he is surrounded by the author makes him just bearable. The 
others are very far indeed from the narrow and difficult path, 
if strong, vivid, picturesque language be recognized as that as- 
sociated with the wide and easy road. In danger as well as 
in security, in storm as in calm, even with death staring them 
in the face, these men fire off volleys of scarlet adjectives ; and 
the officers are their superior in this as in other things, with 
the inevitable result that efficacious work is performed. It can 
be said to Mr. Conrad's credit that he is wholly free from any- 
thing approaching feminine prudery. He does not attempt to 
create a new place of eternal punishment in the next world 
and call it h 1; he is sufficiently reactionary to accept the 
teaching of centuries as regards the reality of an abode called 
Hell, and does not hesitate to write it so; neither is he 
afraid of being guilty of lese majeste by avoiding the mundanely 

polite and non-committal d 1, and by daring to call the hob 

black. In these and some other small points he scouts conven- 
tion ; that sham convention which tries to hide the existence 
of another life under a series of letters and dashes, and yet 
blazons out in big type the filth of this one. But be it noted, 
that he is a Catholic (apparently a good one, if one may judge 
from his novels), and no word that can sully the purest ear is 
ever breathed in his sea stones. In one society story he handles 
a modern theme that perhaps would have been better never 
touched, but even there, though the subject is common enough 
in real life, and objectionable, he does not offend. 

Over some of his novels there is a grim fatality, but it comes 
out more prominently in his shorter stories. As the scenes are 
laid for the most part in the Malay Archipelago and in East 
Africa this peculiar characteristic assumes magnetic qualities 
and attracts us bodily to these far-off lands. Mystery and 
awe surround us; the strange terrors associated with a strange 



8oo A MASTER OF LANGUAGE [Mar., 

land and an uncivilized people beget in us a longing to visit 
such quaint corners of the earth. Mr. Conrad does not picture 
a people possessed of supernatural abilities and dwelling in re- 
splendent palaces, as a very much self-advertized author does 
when laying a scene in Africa. He draws what he has seen, 
and he possesses that ability to make us see as he has seen, a 
real, living, barbarous people. His king squats over a few 
bamboos, with the walls of his hut half rotten, and the effluvia 
of offal rising from beneath the floor. Sane realism predomi- 
nates in his books. 

In analysis of character few writers can equal him, and 
perhaps only Meredith excels him. Mr. Conrad's work in this 
particular sphere is little short of the marvellous. For the past 
decade we have been surfeited by criticism in the press on the 
psychological methods of this and that author. When we come 
to examine this much vaunted work we find that this so-called 
psychology consists in nothing more than the wildest and most 
impossible dreams of the motives urging on the characters to 
perform some act around which the plot may turn. With Mr. 
Conrad there is none of that nonsense. He develops fully and 
minutely, and this perhaps more than anything else will deprive 
him of that class of readers who skip everything except con- 
versation. One word uttered by a character provides him with 
material for pages of delicate analysis wrapped up in the per- 
fection of language. He tosses his characters up and down, 
sympathizes with them for the rough treatment, feels as they 
feel, dwells in their brain, wanders with them in their imagi- 
nation, lives with them and in them, becomes part and parcel 
of their existence, and then exposes their virtues and their 
vices to us; yet all the time there is no Conrad in evidence; 
all we can see is a weak Almayer, a braggart Nostromo, a 
wandering, changeful, moody Jim, a blind Captain Whalley, 
sacrificing all for love of a child, a decivilized Kurtz, a cowardly, 
brutal Donkin ; these live for us as we read. Pages and pages 
of characterization are to be met witk in his works, but no 
person dare skip a word. Every word is required ; every word 
has its value; every word fits into its context with the preci- 
sion of the constituent parts of a finely devised mosaic. 

Besides that, we must be on our guard to follow the story. 
Mr. Conrad takes us by the hand and leads us into a beautiful 
avenue, seemingly endless, decorated with all the perfection 
that art can create, but just as we are beginning to appreciate 



i9i i.] A MASTER OF LANGUAGE Soi 

our walk, we find ourselves in a side alley amidst squalor. We 
cannot determine exactly how we came there, nor can we dis- 
cover how we shall regain a glimpse of the beauty so suddenly 
lost. Then before we can experience any method of transit 
we are out in the sunlight again; and if we look back along 
the avenue we cannot see either entrance or exit. How deftly 
Mr. Conrad takes us from place to place ; introduces, takes away 
permanently, or hides temporarily a character; can only be 
understood by those who read him. He must certainly cause 
a mild degree of madness in those gentry who have set them- 
selves upon rostra to teach story-writing by the rule of three 
for he mercilessly breaks all their smug laws, and is a living 
contradiction of their theories for success in literature. 

At first sight Mr. Conrad's style would seem to lend itself 
easily to imitation, and to offer no difficulty to the plagiarist. 
But on closer acquaintance he becomes as elusive as Newman. 
His vocabulary is extensive, his choice of words full of care, 
his periods perfectly balanced. No analysis will make him 
yield up the secret of his power. His sentences may be picked 
to pieces, but the delicacy of their balance will hide itself from 
profane eyes ; his paragraphs may be shaken asunder, still we 
do not discover what gives them such perfect contour. There 
you have your master craftmanship in all its finality making us 
admire and wonder how everything comes out so admirably. 

It would be difficult to select one of Mr, Conrad's works, 
and style it his best, for, where so much is good, trouble is 
experienced in making a preference. But in all probability 
Lord Jim will stand foremost as a great work in its own line 
an excellent study in characterization. In it is told the 
story of a sailor a mate branded with the mark of Ishmael. 
A wanderer; but one moving and flying onwards solely from 
the workings of his own imagination. One fearful of hearing 
the history of his own frailty, the one act that brought dis- 
grace his leap from the bridge of his damaged steamer when 
he should have stood by her. A man forced to a certain mode 
of life because of the vague, shadowy ideals found only in the 
phantoms of his inordinate egoism. Just the mention of the 
steamer's name in his hearing is enough to make him gather 
his belongings and betake himself off in hiding. The manner 
in which Mr. Conrad treats of the central incident in the book 
Jim's jump from the ship's bridge into the boat is altogether 
out of the beaten paths in constructive literature. At every 
VOL. xcii. 51 



802 A MASTER OF LANGUAGE [Mar., 

sentence we expect the outcome of the event, but like a will- 
o'-the-wisp it eludes us. From that onwards we follow Jim's 
career, sometimes with bated breath, until after seeing him as 
Lord Jim of a strange people, and shivering at his weakness 
and want of stability we come to the end which is dramatic 
in the extreme. If Mr. Conrad had done nothing else than 
create Lord Jim that much would be sufficient to make his 
name live in the history of English literature. 

But fortunately for the lovers of that literature his name 
and fame does not rest on Lord Jim only. It is very doubt- 
ful if that book will not have companion volumes in Nostrotno, 
The Nigger of the "Narcissus" and Almayer's Felly. Person- 
ally I do not care for Nostromo, but that dislike is merely 
subjective; still I imagine that other readers of it will suf- 
fer a like sense of antipathy, or, perhaps, I should say of 
disappointment. There is no strong central motif in the 
book; there are too many actors with equal prominence, and 
the one giving the title to the book is a nonentity. Nearly 
every person who speaks in its pages is lauding the value, 
power, and great natural traits of Nostromo, but when he 
himself comes on the scene, and we are permitted to draw our 
own conclusions we find it hard to make out anything great 
about the man; on the contrary we feel that we have to ex- 
ercise patience in a heroic degree and bear with a supine, 
blustering braggart, a fellow full of the basest and most re- 
pulsive forms of vanity. This is just what Mr. Conrad evi- 
dently wanted to show and impress upon his readers. In 
Nostromo we have a splendid example of the empty reputation 
of the ignorant though popular anti-clerical leader; the man 
who amidst universal corruption was considered incorruptible, 
but who yields to temptation and becomes a thief. The bloom- 
ing forth of that Central and South American hardy annual, 
Revolution, is delightfully done, and one cannot rise from the 
story without feeling a strong desire to punch the heads of 
some of its actors. If what the author writes be true, a few 
good missions would not do Catholicity much harm in the re- 
gions south of the United States. 

When I come to mention 7 he Nigger of the "Narcissus" 
my heart warms, for of all Mr. Conrad's books, it is my favorite. 
Its realism is its perfection. Life on the Narcissus is no make- 
belief drawn from the imagination of one who knows next to 
nothing about the sea; it is a plain (varnished if you will) 



i9ii.] A MASTER OF LANGUAGE 803 

tale of a voyage told by one who knows what he is talking 
about. His limning of Singleton, the weather-beaten seaman 
" who boasted with the mild composure of long years well 
spent, that generally from the day he was paid off from one 
ship till the day he shipped in another he seldom was in a 
condition to distinguish daylight/' is as accurate as the most 
critical could desire. It is this poor bibulous old salt that 
afterwards takes the Narcissus through the storm, standing for 
over thirty hours at the wheel, and then falling senseless when all 
danger was past and the ship was safe. He is only a sample; all 
the other hands on board, Belfast, Donkin, Archie, are most skill- 
fully drawn ; and the Nigger, no I about him not a word ; I will 
not lift the veil, for it would spoil the pleasure of prospective 
readers. All I may say is that his character will prove a fairly 
good enigma to the shrewdest of readers. The book is one con- 
tinuous source of delight to anybody knowing and loving the sea. 
Its closing paragraph will give an idea of Mr. Conrad's style : 

A gone shipmate, like any other man, is gone forever; 
and I never saw one of them i. e. the crew of the Narcissus 
again. But at times the spring-flood of memory sets with 
force up the dark River of the Nine Bends. Then on the 
waters of the forlorn stream drifts a ship a shadowy ship 
manned by a crew of Shades. They pass and make a sign in 
a shadowy hail. Haven't we, together and upon the immortal 
sea, wrung out a meaning from our sinful lives? Good-by, 
brothers ! You were a good crowd. As good a crowd as 
ever fisted with wild cries the beating canvas of a heavy fore- 
sail ; or tossing aloft, invisible in the night, gave back yell for 
yell to a westerly gale. 

An entirely different setting is given in Almayer's Folly. 
Here we are led to the Malay Archipelago, and shown life 
there by one who knew it at first hand. There is a strange, 
weird atmosphere hovering over every page of this story which 
tells of the life of a Dutchman who had married a Malay girl. 
There had been an attempt made to reclaim this girl from 
paganism, and she received the faintest trace of Catholic 
teaching from some nuns, but nothing could squeeze out the 
old leaven, and she returned with her heart full of hatred for 
white humanity, retaining but one relic of Christianity, a small 
brass crucifix which she regarded as an amulet. The whole 
book is pathetic. Almayer's weak character Mr. Conrad has 
a bent for unstable humanity is a revelation ; no literary work 



A MASTER OF LANGUAGE [Mar., 

could be done better. Throughout the book Almayer's frailty 
is obtruding itself, and as an offset we have the determined 
conduct of the wife and daughter, the latter a flower of 
Protestant teaching and a hater of whites : " I hate the sight 
of your white faces. I hate the sound of your gentle voices." 
This girl Nina, and her Malay lover supply all the amorous 
and romantic portions of the story ; and, perhaps, it is better 
to say in passing that one of these scenes may be thought* by 
some parents too ardent for young persons to read. Another 
scene describing Almayer awakening out of a drunken slumber, 
" returning, through the land of dreams, to waking conscious- 
ness," will claim close attention. The short, clippy, nervous 
sentences, followed by a few made up of long, smooth-sound- 
ing words produce a splendid effect. And then on awakening 
follow a succession of hysterical queries by which Almayer is 
trying to find out where he is and what has happened. This 
scene anticipates the end of poor Almayer. 

I should imagine that The Secret Agent will eclipse the 
others in popularity. But, to my mind, it lacks the great 
strength of the books already mentioned. There is not in it 
that air of unity and solidarity which one expects from Mr. 
Conrad. Nevertheless it contains excellent writing and skilful 
work, particularly in the latter portion when Mrs. Veloc be- 
comes the chief actor. In one chapter there is a description of 
a cab-horse that will cause those who know the by-ways of Lon- 
don to rub their hands in delight. It is too good not to quote. 

The conveyance awaiting them would have illustrated the 
proverb that " truth can be more cruel than caricature," if 
such a proverb existed. Crawling behind an infirm horse, a 
metropolitan hackney carriage drew up on wobbly wheels 
and with a maimed driver on the box. . . . Stevie was 
staring at the horse, whose hind quarters appeared unduly 
elevated by the effect of emaciation, The little stiff tail 
seemed to have been fitted in for a heartless joke ; and at the 
other end the thin, flat neck, like a plank covered with old 
horse-hide, drooped to the ground under the weight of an 
enormous bony head. The ears hung at different angles, 
negligently ; and the macabre figure of that mute dweller on 
the earth steamed straight up from ribs and backbone in the 
muggy stillness ol the air. 

Who is it that hasn't seen such another worn-out cab-horse 
with its ancient "growler"? 



i9i i.] A MASTER OF LANGUAGE 805 

It is not easy to classify Mr. Conrad's shorter stories which 
are too short for individual publication in book form, and too 
long to be termed in the strict sense short stories; but as 
there is a diversity of opinion as to what constitutes a short 
story the term will not be considered inappropriate here. Mr. 
Conrad's shorter works are contained in four volumes, and 
while we feel that he is not seen to the best of advantage in 
these, it must be readily declared that none are ill done. The 
story to which I referred in my opening sentence, An Outpost 
of Progress, is, or was, in Mr. Conrad's own estimation his best 
story. I prefer The Brute, a delightful story of a ship that is 
continually causing trouble, as an evener and better balanced 
piece of work; whilst The Lagoon, if its brevity be taken into 
consideration, is better than either. These three are all good ; 
but, would that Mr. Conrad had never written The Return ; it 
is unworthy of him. In the same volume containing this latter 
there is a masterpiece of sarcasm entitled The Duel, the best cari- 
cature of French duelling that I have met; the absurdities of the 
stupid custom are clearly and rather humorously demonstrated. 

After reading these we shall have a faint idea of Mr. Con- 
rad's method of handling short fiction. It is evidently ac- 
ceptable to a large reading public, for three of the volumes 
have gone into a third edition, and the remaining one into a 
second. Indeed it is consoling to any person anxious for the 
welfare of fiction to see how successful Mr. Conrad has been. 
Nearly all his works have gone into second editions, and 
several into a third, whilst Lord Jim, the most difficult to read, 
has reached a fourth. This spells success. It means that Mr. 
Conrad's work will live. Not that similar success does always 
carry such a meaning; but there is absolutely nothing of the 
catch-penny order about anything Mr. Conrad has written. 
His work appeals to cultured readers rather than to delvers 
of erotic fiction. It is too heavy, too solid for the young, 
and I fear that even a large section of young men and women 
will scarcely appreciate its value at sight. Some degree of 
maturity, and a moderately wide knowledge of works of im- 
agination are necessary to assay the richness of Mr. Conrad's 
books, for that reason when he does not gloss over a situa- 
tion he will not be misunderstood by those for whom he 
writes. The more closely he is compared with contemporaries the 
more clearly will be seen his literary power and superiority. 




HOW IRELAND KEPT THE FAITH. 

BY H. P. RUSSELL. 

[HE writer of this article was once asked whether 
he had visited the south of Ireland, and, having 
replied in the negative, was told that in that 
case he did not know what a Catholic country 
was like. On another occasion, whilst on a visit 
to an ancient schloss in Saxony, his host, a Catholic Count, 
drew him into conversation on the subject of English misrule 
in Ireland. "The English are of a different race and a differ- 
ent religion/' observed the Count by way of explaining Eng- 
land's failure; and it became quickly apparent that, though a 
" foreigner," he knew a great deal more about England's 
treatment of Ireland than the vast majority of Englishmen do. 
''The Irish are a Celtic people," observes a writer in a 
recent issue of the Fortnightly Review. "The whole of their 
country has been confiscated three times over for the benefit 
of an alien race. The Irish are a Catholic people. From the 
accession of Elizabeth till towards the close of the eighteenth 
century the endeavor of England has been to force Protestantism, 
upon them by every manner of tyranny, their sacred edi- 
fices and religious endowments being conferred upon an alien 
Church. And under the Tudors began the commercial inva- 
sion of Ireland." 

The union of the two countries is historically traceable, 
indeed, to the initiative of the Holy See; "not once or twice 
only has the Holy See recognized in Ireland a territory of the 
English Crown. Adrian IV. indeed, the first Pope who coun- 
tenanced the invasion of Henry II. was an Englishman; but 
not on his bull did Henry rely for the justification of his pro- 
ceedings. He did not publish it in Ireland till he "had received 
a confirmatory brief from Alexander III. Nor was Alexander 
the only Pope who distinctly recognized it; John XXII., a 
hundred and sixty years afterwards, refers to it in his brief 
addressed to Edward II." The Irish in the twelfth century 
were " lapsing back to barbarism," and " it was surely incum- 



i9i i.] How IRELAND KEPT THE FAITH 807 

bent on the power which had converted them to interpose." 
The object of the Holy See in annexing Ireland to the English 
Crown was "a religious one," while "the circumstantial evils 
in which it had no real part were temporal ; " and it is re- 
markable that the Holy See "is in no respect made charge- 
able by the Irish people with the evils that resulted to them " 
from the union. 

Doubtless, their good sense understands well that, whatever 
be decided about the expedience of the act of annexation 
itself, its serious evils did not begin until the English mon- 
archy was false to the Pope as well as to Ireland. Up to that 
date the settlers in the conquered soil became so attached and 
united to it and its people, that, according to the proverb, they 
were Hibernis hiberniores. It is Protestantism which has been 
the tyrannical oppressor of the Irish ; and we suppose that 
Protestantism neither asked nor needed letters apostolic or 
consecrated banner to encourage it in the war it waged 
against Irish Catholicism.* 

And as England's misrule of Ireland is due for the most 
part to her lapse from the faith, so not until she becomes 
Catholic again can we hope for "a good understanding be- 
tween two nations so contradictory the one of the other the 
one an old immemorial race, the other the composite of a 
hundred stocks; the one possessed of an antique civilization, 
the other civilized by Christianity; the one glorying in its 
schools and its philosophy, the other in its works and institu- 
tions ; the one subtle, acute, speculative, the other wise, 
patient, energetic; the one admiring and requiring the strong 
arm of despotic rule, the other spontaneously developing itself 
in methods of self-government and of individual competition." 
Naught but the one faith which has the power to unite ca- 
tions and races most various, the world over, in unity of re- 
ligion, justice and charity, can serve as a bond of union be- 
tween England and Ireland. Matthew Arnold says: 

What they (the Irish) have had to suffer from us in past 
time, all the world knows. And now, when we profess to 
practice ' ' a good and genial policy of conciliation ' ' towards 
them, they are really governed by us in deference to the 
opinion and sentiment of the British middle class, and of the 
strongest part of this class, the Puritan community. . . . 

* Newman's Hist. Sketches ; Vol. III., p. 257. Cf. Newman's Northmen and Normans in 
England and Ireland. 



5o8 How IRELAND KEPT THE FAITH [Man, 

Our Puritan middle class presents a defective type of religion, 
a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of 
beauty, a low standard of manners. And yet it is in defer- 
ence to the opinion and sentiment of such a class that we 
shape our policy towards Ireland. And we wonder at 
Ireland's antipathy to us ! * 

In truth, amends are due from England to Ireland a 
reconciliation is needed before an attempt at "conciliation" 
can succeed ; and it would appear that with the loss of the 
faith England has lost the power to effect anything of the 
kind. The better to realize this it may be well briefly to re- 
view the story of Ireland's struggle. 

The Irish are "an old immemorial race, possessed of an 
antique civilization." Their conversion to Christianity as a 
nation was due, indeed, to St. Patrick, who, commissioned by 
the Pope, landed in their country in 432, and attended the 
assembly of their kings and chieftains on the hill of Tara in 
that same year. But an active commercial intercourse already 
existed between the Irish and the Christians of Gaul, the 
ports of Ireland being frequented more than those of Britain 
by foreign merchants; and, in their predatory descents upon 
the coasts of Gaul, the Irish had carried hence many Christian 
captives home. Thus was the faith brought into Ireland and 
nourished there; and, accordingly, we learn from Prosper's 
Chronicle that Pope Ceiestine, being informed that many Chris- 
tian communities existed in the country, consecrated and sent 
to them Palladius, St. Patrick's immediate forerunner; and 
St. Columbanus, Ireland's great missionary of the following 
century, writes to Pope Boniface: "the Catholic faith is held 
unshaken by us as it was delivered to us by you, the succes- 
sor of the holy Apostles." That Ireland, moreover, merited 
her title " the Isle of Saints " we have, amongst other testi- 
monies, the testimony of a Catalogue of Irish Saints, of about 
the end of the seventh century found and published by the 
protestant Usher in which some seven hundred and fifty 
bishops and priests, from St. Patrick's, time until towards the 
close of that century, are recorded as having merited the 
saintly title. Of these, many in the latter half of the sixth 
century were probably abbots and monks, since Ireland at this 
time was likewise famed for her monasteries. 

* Mixed Essays. 



i9i i.] How IRELAND KEPT THE FAITH 809 

Another Protestant, the historian Mosheim, assures us that 
the Irish of those early times also "cultivated and amassed 
learning beyond the other nations of Europe/ 1 that "they 
traveled over various countries of Europe, for the purpose of 
learning, but still more for that of teaching/' and in the eighth 
and ninth centuries " were to be met with everywhere in 
France, Germany and Italy, discharging the functions of teach- 
ers with applause ; " that " Irishmen were also the first who 
taught scholastic theology in Europe," and so early as the 
eighth century "applied philosophy to the explanation of the 
Christian religion/' holding "the first rank among school 
teachers." * Ireland in truth, from the time of her conversion 
to the faith was everywhere famed for her learning; her lit- 
erature, composed partly in the vernacular and partly in Latin, 
but for the most part in Gaelic, flourished very abundantly, 
and, despite the terrible vicissitudes through which she has 
passed century after century, still in large measure survives. 
The early historian, Venerable Bede, bears witness also to the 
general belief in the excellence of her schools, in which the 
interpretation of Holy Scripture received such special atten- 
tion that, as an instance, in the middle of the seventh cen- 
tury Agilbert, a French bishop, resided a long time in Ireland 
"for the sake of reading the Scriptures;" while, as illustrating 
the proverbial hospitality of the Irish, a few years later, 
Northumbrian Thanes who visited their country for the like 
purpose, going from place to place to attend the cells of mas- 
ters, were everywhere provided by the generous natives with 
" their daily food free of cost, books also to read, and gratui- 
tous teaching." f 

Of Ireland's missionary zeal suffice it to say that, com- 
mencing with a small island off the coast of Mull as a basis, 
it extended into Scotland, England, France, Germany, Switzer- 
land, Italy. St. Columbanus in 563, founded the monastery of 
lona with a view principally to the conversion of the Ficts of 
the north of Scotland. From thence Aidan, at the invitation 
of King Oswald, went into Northumbria and founded, in 633, 
a monastery in the island of Lindisfarne, of which he became 
the first bishop, and to him and his successors was in large 
measure due the conversion of the northern English; St. Fur- 
sey assisted Felix the Burgundian in the conversion of East 

* ccl. Hist, Vol. I. p; 506, n. t Hist. Eccl. III. 7, 26, 27; 



8 io How IRELAND KEPT THE FAITH [Mar., 

Anglia; Maidulf founded the great convent of Malmesbury in 
Wessex. In France, Fridolin restored the religion of Poitiers, 
and recovered the relics of St. Hilary ; St. Fiacre settled in 
Paris; St. Fursey, again, founded a monastery at Lagny, and 
St. Columbanus the monastery of Luxeuil in Burgundy. In 
Germany, Fridolin, again, the hero of many a tender Volksleid 
and wild legend, was probably the first apostle of the Alem- 
anni in Baden and Suabia. In Switzerland, the town and 
canton of St. Gall preserve the name of an Irish anchorite who 
in the seventh century dwelt in a forest south of the lake of 
Constance and, like St. John the Baptist, by retiring from the 
world drew the world out to him. In Italy, Bobbio was the 
last foundation and resting-place of St. Columbanus. And, 
while a great number of Irish monks inhabited the various 
monasteries of the Continent, others possessed monasteries of 
their own in several countries, these being especially numer- 
ous in Germany where they were erected by the people of 
that nation in gratitude for the great work wrought by the 
Irish monks in the process of their conversion. These Irish 
monasteries in Germany served also as schools for the Ger- 
man youth, as well as hospices for Irish pilgrims journeying to 
Rome. 

" And thus Erin became the Island of Saints, the home 
and refuge of learning and holiness, and the nursery whence 
missionaries went forth to carry the light of faith to the na- 
tions of the European continent. Her seats of learning, her 
monasteries and nunneries, and her charitable institutions were 
unsurpassed, either in number or excellence, by those of any 
nation of the world. Her children preserved the faith of 
Christ as pure and entire as it came from the lips of her 
apostle ; heresy and schism were unknown to them ; and loyalty 
to the successor of St. Peter was one of their most distinguish- 
ing characteristics."* 

The missionary zeal of the Irish after the closing years of 
the eighth century was in a measure occasioned by the Danish 
invasion of their country, when, for the first time, Ireland's 
churches were desecrated, her monasteries and libraries de- 
stroyed, and her priests, monks and poets massacred. The in- 
vaders, however, from time to time heavily defeated, failed to 
subject the island to their rule, and by degrees became Chris- 

* Alaog's Univ. Ch. Hist. Vol. IL p. 49.. 



i9ii.] How IRELAND KEPT THE FAITH 811 

tians, intermarried with the Irish, and adopted their language. 
But, unhappily, the invasion " cooled down the fervid devotion 
of the native chiefs," and " distracted and broke up the long- 
established reciprocity of good offices between the Church and 
State, as well as the central executive controlling power of the 
nation/' and " the chief and the noble began to feel that the 
lands which he himself or his ancestors had offered to the 
Church, might now, with little impropriety, be taken back by 
him, to be applied to his own purposes, quieting his conscience 
by the necessity of the case." * Dublin became a Danish 
town; and shortly before the middle of the eleventh century, 
the Danes of Ireland, being by now nearly all of them Chris- 
tians, obtained a bishop of their own with Dublin for his see. 
The first to occupy this see was Donatus, the next was Patrick, 
who although an Irishman, was, in 1074, consecrated in Eng- 
land by Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom, as well 
as to his successors, he promised canonical obedience. Since 
no other Irish see was ever suffragan to an English one, it is 
probable that the Danes of Dublin sought this alliance on ac- 
count of their relationship by reason of a common descent 
with the Normans, who were then dominant in England. 

So greatly did religion suffer in the following century from 
the wars of the Irish kings and chieftains among themselves, 
and the moral disorder and disregard of the ecclesiastical dis- 
cipline so widely prevalent, that the Popes, aided by the Irish 
hierarchy, were compelled to institute reforms by means of 
legates and admonitory letters. 

Ireland was invaded by Anglo-Norman Knights in 1172. The 
districts occupied by the invaders were designated the "Eng- 
lish Pale," and were confined to a strip of country on the 
east coast, its boundaries varying with the fortunes of the 
English arms. From the inhabitants of the Pale were selected 
the members of the so-called Irish parliament. Throughout 
the rest of Ireland the native princes continued to rule, often, 
however, recognizing an over-lordship in the English kings, 
subordinate to the Papacy, f Anglo-Norman proprietors, who 
lived as chieftains and adopted the Irish laws, language, dress 
and customs, were likewise to be found outside the Pale. It 
was to hold these English settlers in subjection to English 

*O'Curry's Materials, etc. 
fMosheim's Reel. Hist. Vol. III., p. 109, and note. 



812 How IRELAND KEPT THE FAITH [Mar., 

rule, indeed, that the statute of Kilkenny, 1367, made it trea- 
sonable for anyone of English descent to marry, enter into 
fosterage, or contract spiritual affinity with the Irish, or to 
submit to Irish law ; and forfeiture of property was the pen- 
alty for the adoption by such of an Irish name, the Irish lan- 
guage, dress, or customs. This statute, however, proved in- 
operative, and up to the time of Henry VIII. there were 
two parties in Ireland constantly opposed to English rule 
" English rebels," and " Irish enemies," the demarcation be- 
tween them being maintained by the English civil government, 
and introduced, unhappily, into matters ecclesiastical also, so 
far, for instance, as to render it almost impossible for an 
ecclesiastic of Irish race to obtain preferment within the Pale. 
Nevertheless, throughout this period of contention and dis- 
union the two races were one in faith and were alike animated 
by religious zeal to so great an extent, indeed, that during 
the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries not far short 
of three hundred monasteries were founded by them. And 
meanwhile nothing further was accomplished by the English 
towards the conquest of Ireland, English over-sea enterprise 
being devoted instead to conquests in France. 

Under Henry VIII. was mapped out the scheme for expel- 
ling the Irish from their country and peopling it with English.* 

Henry VIII. resolved to be not merely " King of Ireland," 
but also "supreme head" of Ireland's Church. The latter 
claim was strenuously resisted by clergy and people alike, ex- 
cepting a few of the former who were actuated by sordid mo- 
tives, and by some of the chieftains who were won over by 
bribery. Of these clergy who submitted, George Brown, an 
Englishman, was the leader. At one time a Lutheran, subse- 
quently provincial of the Augustinians in England, he had been 
appointed Archbishop of Dublin by Henry's disreputable min- 
ister, Cromwell, when that see became vacant in 1535. He 
was opposed by George Cromer, Primate of all Ireland, who, 
having summoned the episcopate of the country together, 
resolved in union with them to resist to the last Henry's 
endeavor to open a schism in Ireland's Church. When after 
the accession of Edward VI. to the English throne, the 
Prayer Book of the Church of England though not " in a lan- 
guage understanded of the people," since the Irish knew no 

* See Mrs. Green's MaMng and Unmaking of Ireland; also O'Curry's Materials, p. 355. 



i9i i.] How IRELAND KEPT THE FAITH 813 

English was ordered in the king's name to be used in all 
places of worship in Ireland, only Brown of Dublin, another 
English bishop, and two Irish bishops conformed, these being 
supported by another Englishman, who in reward was by royal 
authority advanced to the episcopate, but very soon was driven 
from his see by an outraged people. A few Irish priests, 
three only being named in authentic records, likewise conformed 
and were likewise made bishops. George Dowdall, who had 
succeeded Cromer as the Catholic Primate of Ireland, was 
driven from his see of Armagh, and an Englishman was installed, 
the title of Primate of all Ireland being at the same time trans- 
ferred to Dublin by way of reward to Brown. In Queen 
Mary's reign, George Dowdall, being reinstated in the primacy, 
called together a national synod, which nearly all the bishops 
attended; Brown and his fellows were deposed; and the Par- 
liament of Dublin passed an act declaring that the title 
" Supreme Head of the Church " could not " be justly attri- 
buted to any king or governor," and that the Holy See 
should " have and enjoy the same authority and jurisdiction " 
as had been lawfully exercised by His Holiness, the Pope, 
during the early part of the reign of Henry VIII. 

But soon Elizabeth succeeded to the English throne. 
Alzog* writes: 

during this and succeeding reigns, a violent persecution 
was carried on against the Irish Catholics, so cold blooded, 
systematic and atrocious that, since the time oi the Pharoahs, 

the world has seen nothing comparable to it Such, 

with the exception of short intervals of peace, occurring at 
long intervals, was the normal condition of Ireland for three 
centuries. To hold that country dependent on England, the 
people were kept in a chronic state of insurrection, and the 
ministers oi Elizabeth did not attempt to conceal that they 
practised so infamous a means for so iniquitous a purpose. 
When, goaded to desperation, the people rose in rebellion, 
they were put down by fire and sword, and the work of de- 
struction was completed by the ravages of famine. But while 
this policy carried ruin and death to the people, it secured no 
solid advantage to Protestantism, in whose interest it was in- 
augurated, notwithstanding that Catholic bishops and priests 
were driven from their sees and parishes, their goods confis- 
cated, and they themselves either banished the country or put 
to death. 

* Univ. Church Hist. Vol. III., p. 351. 



8 14 How IRELAND KEPT THE FAITH [Mar., 

Only two of the bishops could be induced to acknowl- 
edge Elizabeth's supremacy, though the conduct of four 
others appears to have been somewhat suspicious; and, ex- 
cept in Dublin, where the see was vacated owing to the im- 
possibility of occupying it, the succession of Catholic bishops 
in all the Irish sees was resolutely maintained throughout the 
long and cruel persecution. So signal, indeed, was Elizabeth's 
failure to prevail with the Irish that, as the Protestant Mosheim 
is forced to admit,* " hence arose a necessity for that violence 
which planted Ireland, in the seventeenth century, with an 
aristocracy alien in blood and religion to her indigenous popu- 
lation, filling the country with claims, prejudices, and animosi- 
ties that distract it up to the present hour.' 1 In the reign of 
James I. the whole province of Ulster was confiscated and 
planted with Protestants from England and Scotland ; and 
under Charles I., who at the bidding of the Protestant bishops 
revived the statutes against Catholics in Ireland, the whole 
province of Connaught was declared the inheritance of the 
Crown and parceled out, accordingly, among the favorites of 
the court. The terrible rising of 1641 was the commencement 
of an eleven years war by the Irish for their religious freedom 
and the recovery of their confiscated property. Cromwell's 
army landed in Ireland some three years before its close and 
eventually completed the conquest of the island. What the 
Irish clergy and people suffered during, and still more after, 
this war, by massacre, exile, exposure, famine, starvation, no 
pen, as Protestant and Catholic historians alike agree, can por- 
tray. Yet, despite all, and although death was the penalty 
for all Catholics found outside the province of Connaught, 
which had been laid waste by war, and though the Puritan 
soldiers slew every priest they could find, so strong was the 
tie that bound priests and people together that even when the 
persecution was at its worst upwards of a hundred and fifty 
priests were to be found in each province. All the bishops 
were exiled, save one who was too old to be moved. St. 
Vincent de Paul is a name honored with gratitude in Ireland, 
since he it was who received and provided for the destitute 
Irish clergy and people when they were cast upon the shores 
of France. Nor will the solicitude and succors of the Holy 
See during many years after the Cromwellian invasion be for- 

* Bed. Hist. Vol. III., p. 134. 



i9i i.] How IRELAND KEPT THE FAITH 815 

gotten in a land so consistently and devotedly attached to the 
Vicar of Christ. 

During some four years of the reign of Charles II. cf 
England, the Catholics of Ireland were left in peace; bishops 
returned from exile, churches were reopened, provincial and 
diocesan synods were held, and the old worship was every- 
where in evidence. Then the Puritans gained a majority in 
the English House of Commons and the storm again broke. 
Peter Talbot, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, was cast 
into prison and died there; Oliver Plunket, Catholic Arch- 
bishop of Armagh, was sent to London, since it was feared 
that by reason of the general esteem for his sanctity not 
even a Protestant jury would convict ^him in Ireland ; and in 
London he was sentenced to be hanged, emboweled, and 
quartered, at Tyburn, and so gained the martyr's crown. So 
did the persecution continue in Ireland until the accession 
of James II. to the English throne, when freedom of worship 
and the removal of civil and military disabilities were once 
more vouchsafed ; and the Irish in gratitude fought for this 
king when, soon after, he was driven from his throne by Wil- 
liam of Orange. They were defeated, alas, and all was again 
reversed; the blasphemous oath against the Most Holy Sacra- 
ment and Sacrifice of the Mass, against invocation of Blessed 
Mary and the saints, and abjuration of papal authority, were 
reimposed ; Catholic archbishops, bishops, vicars- general, deans, 
Jesuits, monks, friars, were ordered to quit the country and 
declared subject to the penalties of high treason if they re- 
turned ; parents who sent their children to the Continent to 
be brought up in the Catholic faith forfeited all rights and 
possessions, as also did Protestant heiresses who married Catho- 
lics; and, as though these, with other persecuting enactments, 
were not enough, considerably more than another million acres of 
land, added to the millions already seized, were forfeited to the 
Crown, the revenues being employed to defray the expenses of the 
war by which a new class of adventurers had been introduced 
into Ireland, consisting chiefly of Dutch and German Protestants, 
whose descendants in Munster are still known as "Palatines." 

Of the enactments of the twelve years of the reign of 
Queen Anne, Alzog * justly observes that they cannot be 
equalled in inhuman atrocity and a satanic disregard for the 

* Univ. Ch, Hist., III., 364. 



816 How IRELAND KEPT THE FAITH [Mar., 

rights of mankind by the records of any legislative body that 
ever disgraced a civilized world. They are absolutely without 
a parallel. Space does not permit us even to begin to enumer- 
ate the iniquitous provisions of the enactments. 

Their character is well described by the statesman Edmund 
Burke : " It was a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, 
and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and 
degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of 
human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted in- 
genuity of man." Mosheim admits that its measures were 
"designed for extermination." Elsewhere, with reference to 
the Cromwellian invasion, he admits that "the country, prob- 
ably, was inaccessible to Protestantism in any form.'** This, 
as experience had proved, was undoubtedly the fact ; there 
remained therefore but the endeavor to exterminate 1 

On the accession of George I., of the House of Brunswick, 
to the English throne, the Scotch revolt in favor of the Pre- 
tender afforded fresh occasion for imprisoning Catholic nobles, 
seizing priests at the altar by means of bribed informers 
these " priest- catchers" being mostly Jews who for the purpose 
feigned conversion to the faith, and additional penalties against 
Catholics generally, on the pretext that in heart they fav- 
ored the Pretender. And in the following reign the rumor 
of an intended French invasion was the pretext for proclaim- 
ing increased bribes for information against Catholic ecclesi- 
astics and all who harbored or protected any Catholic bishop. 

" Driven from their churches, the priests would gather the 
faithful about them on some green hillside or in a secluded 
nook of a pleasant valley, and there, on a rude altar of stone 
in the temple of nature, offer up the everlasting Sacrifice to 
nature's God. Such are Ireland's witnesses to the faith"; and 
so has her green isle, fertilized by the blood of her martyrs, 
been everywhere consecrated. 

In 1798 came the Irish rebellion and the atrocities of its 
suppression. Protestants participated with Catholics in the 
rising; and the Catholic hierarchy and clergy, as a body, did 
their best to quell it. Three years later was effected the legis- 
lative union of Ireland with England, Catholic emancipation 
being virtually promised as its condition, but not conceded 
until nearly a generation later; and such measures of justice 

*EtcI. Hist., Vol. III., p. 522, cf. p. 403. 



i9i i.] How IRELAND KEPT THE FAITH 817 

as have followed have with difficulty been obtained, Protestant- 
ism being always opposed to them. 

At last, in 1869, came the disestablishment and disendow- 
ment of the Protestant Church of Ireland. " One of the most 
stupendous grievances with which a people was ever inflicted/' 
and in the words of Mosheim concerning Protestantism gen- 
erally "linked with a galling sense of pecuniary pillage," 
never had it in any sense, as its title would imply, been the 
Church of the country. Its very name is execrated by a 
people who, as though it was not enough to have despoiled 
them 0f their cathedrals, churches, abbeys, convents, church 
property and charitable institutions, have been compelled, out 
of their poverty and hard earnings, to pay for the support of 
this alien church and its detested clergy. The Protestant 
Church of Ireland remains at this day but a sorry relic of 
the accumulated wrongs and wicked legislation of three cen- 
turies of effort and ignominious failure to force the Irish to 
apostatize from their ancient Faith. Nor have the Irish stood 
alone in their execration of this English Protestant endeavor. 
" Go into the length and breadth of the world," exclaimed 
Gladstone in his effort to make reparation for Ireland's wrongs, 
" ransack the literature of all countries, find if you can a 
single voice, a single book, in which the conduct of England 
towards Ireland is anywhere treated except with bitter and 
profound condemnation." 

Meanwhile Ireland's true Church, to the joy and admira- 
tion of Catholics throughout the world, fought the good fight, 
and has triumphed, and step by step has regained the rights 
of which she was robbed. The fair face of her island is 
covered with churches, cathedrals, convents, colleges, repaired 
and built almost entirely by the weekly contributions of her 
poor and impoverished people, whose generous devotion like- 
wise supports her devoted clergy. So consistently united 
with her Divine Head in His sacred Passion, her long and 
triumphant passiontide is the earnest of a faith and devotion 
that will never fail, and of victories yet in store, to gladden, 
not herself alone, but other lands beyond her seas, whither 
so many of her children have been exiled, to spread through 
the world the triumphs of the Cross. 

TOL. xcn. 52 



Iftew Boohs. 

THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF THE LADY SAINT CLARE. Trans- 
lated from the French Version of Brother Francis Dupuis 
(1563) by Charlotte Balfour; with an Introduction by 
Father Cuthbert, O.S.F.C. New York : Longmans, Green 
& Co. $1.25. 

ST. CLARE OF ASSISI. By Very Rev. Leopold de Cherance, 
O.S.F.C. Translated by R. F. O'Connor. New York: 
Benziger Brothers. $l net. 

What a splendid story it makes, this legend of St. Clare, 
for which we English-speaking Catholics have waited more 
than six hundred years ! One takes it up, complacently, with 
the simple thought of learning something more about that 
winsome but elusive Clare half hidden, half revealed, in the 
early Franciscan chronicles whom we have vaguely known as 
the beloved disciple, friend and counselor of St. Francis of 
Assisi. And straightway, in its first few pages, there is un- 
rolled before us a divine adventure a high-spirited girl, nobly 
born and delicately nurtured, forsaking "all this world and all 
the glory of it" to follow Christ in His Poverty. Is is a tale 
that grips the heart; abounding in dramatic interest, full of 
the tenderest pathos, inspired by a love which never falters, 
instinct with an undyiag loyalty. 

The Golden Legend of the Saints contains few pictures 
fairer than that of the virgin Clare leaving her father's house 
secretly at night and, with a few intimate and trusty compan- 
ions, hurrying through the streets of Assisi down to the little 
chapel of the Porziuncola just beyond the city walls. There 
St. Francis and his first friars came out to meet the little com- 
pany, with canticles upon their lips and lighted torches in 
their hands, and forthwith were celebrated the mystic espousals 
which consecrated Clare to Christ her Lord. 

Again we see her, when the cloister at San Damiano was 
invaded by marauding Saracens, leaving her sick bed with a 
stout heart and, in the face of the enemy, prostrate before the 
Blessed Sacrament borne before her, turning to her Lord with 
words of humble, loving familiarity : " Doth it please Thee, 
my Lord, to deliver Thy defenceless handmaids, whom I have 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 819 

nourished with Thy love, into the hands of the pagans?" And 
we hear, quite naturally, " a voice as of a little child," saying : 
" I will protect thee always." 

Once again we see her, in that memorable interview with 
Pope Gregory at San Damiano. The good Pope, regarding 
absolute poverty as impossible for a cloistered community, 
urged St. Clare to accept such possessions as were prudent 
and necessary under the conditions of their life. " If it be thy 
vow which hindereth thee," said the pontiff, " we absolve thee 
from it." "Holy Father," replied the saint, " absolve me from 
my sins if thou wilt, but I desire not to be absolved from 
following Jesus Christ." So the pages of the legend pass, 
glowing with light and color like a jeweled pageant; crowded 
with heroic figures of God's poor and lowly ones, simple friars, 
knights and ladies, bishops, cardinals, popes, saints, and angels, 
unto the perfect end, when the Blessed Mother of God comes, 
" with a multitude of virgins clothed in white garments," to 
give Clare the celestial kiss and enwrap her with " a mantle 
of wondrous beauty," with which, adorned as a bride, she 
passed from this life into perfect joy. 

It is not our purpose here to give even the broadest out- 
line of St. Clare's life. The story has been told once for all, 
with consummate skill, in the contemporary biography ascribed 
to Thomas of Celano, written on the very morrow of her 
death (1255-1261), at the request of that Pope (Alexander 
IV.) who, in 1255, inscribed Clare's name in the Calendar of 
Saints. AH our modern lives of St. Clare are based upon, or 
translated from one or another text of this " primitive legend." 
Apart from Caxton's quaintly archaic compendium of it in the 
Golden Legend (1483), the first English translation of Celano's 
Life was that made by Father Marianus Fiege, O.M.Cap. and 
published by the Poor Clares, at Evansville, Ind,, in 1900. 
This was a faithful and praiseworthy translation of the Holland- 
ist text. The work is now out of print. In 1909 Father Pas- 
chal Robinson, O.F.M., gave us a translation, in smooth and 
limpid English, of the oldest known copy of Celano's Life, 
written at the end of the thirteenth century and now in the 
municipal library at Assisi. In the opinion of scholars this 
practically represents the contemporary biography of St. Clare 
as it left the hands of the author. To his translation of the 
Life itself, Father Paschal added a critical introduction and 



820 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

an abundance of illuminating notes, which so round out our 
knowledge of the saint and her legend that this work may 
fairly be said to be the definitive edition, in English, of the 
" primitive legend " of St. Clare. 

Of the two recently published lives of St. Clare now to be 
briefly noticed here, that which bears the name of Charlotte 
Balfour (Mrs. Reginald Baliour) on its title page claims our 
attention as possessing features of special interest. It gives 
us a charming English translation of a French version of 
Celano's Life made in the sixteenth century by one Frere 
Franpois Dupuis, who, we are told, had before him a purer 
text of the " primitive legend " than that given by the Bol- 
landists in the Acta Sanctorum. The advantage here is that 
Brother Dupuis' version closely follows that oldest known 
text already referred to as preserved in the municipal library 
at Assisi, with, however, a peculiar beauty of diction all its 
own. It is largely to Mrs. Balfour's credit that she has pre- 
served this charm in her English version, which runs smoothly 
and is pleasant to read. The Legend is, moreover, prefaced 
with an introduction by Father Cuthbert, O.S.F.C. in wnich 
the learned Capuchin gives an able analysis of the significance 
of St. Clare's share in the beginning of the Franciscan move- 
ment. This adds immensely to the value of the book and 
should be carefully read before taking up the Legend which 
follows it. The third part of the book gives passages from 
several of the early Franciscan sources concerning St. Clare 
and four of the Saint's letters to blessed Agnes, daughter of 
the King of Bohemia. A last word of praise is due to the 
happy inspiration which gives us the excellent reproductions 
of Collaert's engravings of incidents in the life of the Saint as 
the illustrations of the volume. 

Turning now to St. Clare of Assisi, translated from the 
French of Father Leopold de Cherance by R. F. O'Connor, we 
have to deal with a work altogether different in character from 
those previously mentioned. Readers familiar with Father 
Cherance's " St. Francis of Assisi " need only to be told that his 
life of St. Clare is written in similar style: somewhat grandil- 
oquent in phrasing, redundant, graphic in description, vivid in 
interest, always picturesque. Basing his narrative upon the Bol- 
landist text of Celano's legend, Father Cherance tells us many 
things about which Celamo says nothing, these details being 



i9ii.] NEW BOOKS 821 

supplied from various Franciscan sources. There are chapters, 
too, such as those dealing with the contemplative life and the 
Franciscan idea, which are edifying rather than biographical 
in interest. One misses the carefulness of statement, the simple 
brevity and the eloquent silences of Celano. Nevertheless, 
from a popular viewpoint, Father Cherance has provided what 
is perhaps the best monograph on St. Clare at present available. 
May it fulfill his desire to make St. Clare more widely 
known and loved. The translation, as we have learned to ex- 
pect from Mr. O'Connor, is thoroughly well done and deserves 
the highest praise. 

There are little slips, inaccuracies or discrepancies in state- 
ments of fact and other minor defects in both these volumes, 
which we have passed over without mention. They will be 
obvious to critical students of the Franciscan Legend, but are 
of little interest or importance to the general reader, and will 
doubtless be remedied in future editions. 

THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS. By Morris Schaff, with 
Maps and Plans. Houghton Mifflin Company. $2. 

Here we have a book on one of the great battles of the 
Civil War by an officer of the staff of General Warren, who 
commanded the Fifth Corps in that momentous if indecisive 
engagement. Inasmuch as a staff officer is almost his chief's 
confidant, we are favored with many liftings of the curtain of 
secrecy enclosing the minds of the principal federal comman- 
ders a most interesting book lor its descriptions of men and 
happenings, and a curious book on account of a certain im- 
aginative quality of the author's character. 

Grant started to ruin Lee's army the first days of May, 
1864. He doubled the Confederates in his numbers, and was 
much superior to them in his equipment. His first disadvan- 
tage was in the dilution of the martial flavor of the federal 
troops by the conscripts and substitutes that had been injected 
into the Army of the Potomac since Gettysburg ; and his 
second was that there interposed between his troops and his 
iron will and clear perceptions subordinate commanders of un- 
congenial temperament and of more than subordinate power. 
It is just to Grant to say that these drawbacks sufficiently ac- 
count for his failure to defeat Lee in battle, and that they, and 



822 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

not Lee's genius, forced Grant to assume McClellan's original 
though thwarted purpose to make a success by the shorter 
line south of the James River. 

The object of Lee was to repeat the glory of Chancellorsville. 
He would force Grant back of the Rappahannock as he had 
done Hooker, precisely one year before. In that he failed* 
although he had on the whole the best of the Wilderness 
fighting and he had all the glory of drawing first blood and 
forcing his antagonist to fight on a field chosen by himself. 
Another advantage he earned by his forcing so early a battle. 
He made it an equal fight as to numbers, because the federal 
superiority was not available in the tangled woods of the 
Wilderness. Give Lee the glory of a marvellously daring ini- 
tiative on the best possible field ; and give his army the glory 
of a bravery as dogged and persistent as that of Gettysburg 
had been fierce and impetuous. 

Another glory of Lee is that when both armies were ex- 
hausted with three days sanguinary battling, he unhesitatingly 
invited Grant to further conflict by standing before him within 
sparring distance with not a single sign of retreat. Never 
before had Grant declined a challenge to fight. He did so 
now, and resorted to manoeuvering; nor was it the last time 
he was destined to take counsel of discretion when Lee's men 
were before him behind earthworks. Would that he had done 
so invariably. The useless slaughter at Cold Harbor would 
have been avoided. 

This volume, besides being a reliable chronicle, is full of 
the life of the Wilderness battles. The color and movement 
and dreadful melody of those three days of most strenuous 
endeavor mutually to slay and slaughter on the part of almost 
two hundred thousand men, alternately fascinates and distresses 
the reader to the end. The author's singular emotionalism 
seems somewhat redundant, especially as he is now far past 
seventy years old. But the redundancy of the terrors and the 
majesty of the issue of the great battle are sufficient excuse. 
And the author redeems his occasional excursion into theatri- 
cals by his invariably painstaking narrative. It is true that 
some of his descriptions are a little perplexing to a civilian, 
but on the other hand a perfect wealth of personal incident 
is everywhere lavished on the reader. 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 823 

EYES OF YOUTH. A book of Verse by various authors, with 
four early poems by Francis Thompson. London: Her- 
bert and Daniel. 35 6d. 

THE SMALL PEOPLE. A Little Book of Verse About Children 
for their Elders. Chosen by Thomas Burke. London: 
Chapman and Hall. 2s 6d. 

In Eyes of Youth we have a collection of lyrics which give 
most full and varied expression to what our liturgy most fitly 
calls suspiria juvenum. There is the passionate call of love 
sounded forth in an " Arab Love Song " by Francis Thompson: 

Light of my dark, blood of my heart, O come ! 


Leave thy father, leave thy mother 

And thy brother; 

Leave the black tents of thy tribe apart! 

Am I not thy father and thy brother, 

And thy mother? 

And thou what needst with thy tribe's black tents 

Who has the red pavilion of my heart ? 

Then we have Mr. Padraic Colum in quite another strain in 
" I shall not die for you." 

O woman shapely as the swan, 
On your account I shall not die. 
The men you've slain a trivial clan 
Were less than I. 

Mr. Shane Leslie captures my personal preference with his 
beautiful "Forest Song," or again with his delightfully differ- 
ent miniatures " The Bee " and " Fleet Street " : 

Away the old monks said, 

Sweet honey- fly 

From lilting overhead 

The lullaby 

You heard some mother croon 

Beneath the harvest moon 

Go hum it in the hive, 

The old monks said, 

For we were once alive 

Who now are dead. 



824 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

Other poems, again, give us youth more tragically, as do 
those of Viola Meynell and Ruth Lindsay. The whole sheaf 
is most Catholic in its range and sentiment, very happy in its 
selection, and altogether full of promise and quality. 

Messrs. Chapman and Hall are putting us under further 
obligations by standing sponsors to another anthology as good 
in its different way as was the Mount of Vision, reviewed in a 
previous number. The Small People is full of good things, old 
favorites and new, which will make the elderly forget their age 
in a feast of youthful memory and feeling. What mother can 
hear Richard Rowland's " Lullaby" without being moved to tears 
of joyful recollection ? 

Upon my lap my sovereign sits 
And sucks upon my breast; 
Meantime his love maintains my life 
And gives my sense her rest, 

Sing lullaby, my little boy; 

Sing lullaby, my only joy! (p. 61). 

There is plenty of true sentiment but not too much. We 
have Laurence Alma Tadema's delightful little old maid who 
" when I'm getting really old, at twenty-eight or nine, will buy 
a little orphan girl and bring her up as mine." Then there's 
" Wee Willie Winkie " and Pet Marjorie's dear little people 
and most pleasing of all "Little Orphant Annie" (p. 168) 
with her wise counsels of perfection to all and sundry young 
people : 

You better mind yer parunts, and yer teachers fond and dear, 
An* churish them 'at loves you, an' dry the orphant's tear, 
An' he'p the pore an' needy ones 'at clusters all about, 
Er the Gobble-uns' '11 git you 
Ef you 

Don't 

Watch 

Out! 

CATHOLIC THEOLOGY. By D. I. Lanslots, O.S.B. St. Louis: 

B. Herder. $1.75. 

Because of the social conditions in which at the present 
day all of us must live, there is most urgent need that every 
Catholic should be trained and trained most thoroughly in the 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 825 

dogmatic teachings of his faith. With a self-sufficient air the 
non-Catholic world puts Christian dogma aside as superfluous, 
but it is awaking to a sense of its dire poverty, and beginning 
to claim that it has some dogmatic teachings. The Catholic, 
both from the point of view of his own personal salvation, and 
from that of his work among his fellows, should have a well- 
digested knowledge of the truths of his religion. He should 
know what they mean ; he should be able through reflection 
and prayer to gain from them that spiritual help and inspira- 
tion which, because they are truths from God, they contain; 
he should be able to unfold them attractively and intelligently 
to his children and explain them to an inquirer. 

It is to be regretted that many a Catholic, save for what 
he may hear in a sermon, or read in an occasional article, 
never, after he leaves his catechism class of his very young 
days, partakes of this solid and most nourishing food of Catho- 
lic doctrine. Books that serve him are not wanting. THE 
CATHOLIC WORLD speaks of such books continually. And 
again it is our pleasure to recommend one that will serve him 
most excellently. It is called : Catholic Theology ; its author is 
the Rev. D. I. Lanslots, O.S.B. Abbot Gasquet contributes a 
brief preface. Father Lanslots set himself the task of writing 
a commentary and explanation of the Baltimore Catechism. 
He has done his work well, and by quotation from the Triden- 
tine and Vatican decrees, by taking as his principal guide St. 
Thomas Aquinas, by historical quotations and references; by 
the use of the latest decrees and instructions of Pius X., even 
to some words on the scapular-medal, he has made his work 
very sound, trustworthy, practical and " up-to-date." Here 
the Catholic will find the latest legislation of the Church on 
such matters as Matrimony and Holy Communion. 

We would like to see such a book as this a household book 
among Catholics : a book that would always be visible, always 
within reach so that it might be taken up and read at any 
time, and that its contents might be made the subject of fam- 
ily conversation. The volume will be of value to priests and 
religious to all who have the work of catechetical instruction 
and the care of converts. We believe that a detailed index 
would make a valuable addition to the book. There is no in- 
dex to the present volume. And we trust its sales will be ex- 
tensive enough to permit the publisher to lessen its price. 



826 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

WHAT PICTURES TO SEE IN EUROPE IN ONE SUMMER. 
By Lorinda Munson Bryant. New York: John Lane 
Company. 

The impression left upon the reader is that Mrs. Bryant 
would be a delightful companion in the galleries that she de- 
scribes. Even when conveyed through the denser medium of 
printed text and engravings, her suggestions widen one's 
vision. It is perhaps inevitable that she should slight some 
of our favorites, but if she does slip into the first pitfall she 
warns us against covering too much ground in too short a 
space of time, she certainly never evidences any lack of intel- 
lectual preparation for her visit to the masterpieces. In the 
Louvre she mentions but one Murillo the Immaculate Con* 
ception. We should have chosen two others as more deserv- 
ing of a notice. And in the Uffizi, what about The Annun- 
ciation of Simone Martini ? 

CHRISTIANITY AND THE LEADERS OF MODERN SCIENCE. 
By K. A. Kneller, SJ. St. Louis: B. Herder. $1.80. 

The recent statement of Mr. Edison denying the immor- 
tality of the soul served as a passing sensation for the "Sun- 
day Supplement." Mr. Edison is an inventor and a mechanic 
but not a scientist. His words, however, may have had some 
effect in certain quarters where it is taken for granted that 
the scientific mind cannot be in any way religious. Happily 
the sciolists who champion such an ignorant attitude are 
rapidly passing away, or at least the popular mind is wiser 
and soberer in this matter than it was twenty-five years ago. 

One of the best practical methods of answering the ques- 
tion whether or not religion is opposed to science is to review 
the inner lives of the greatest of the scientists, to examine 
their religious beliefs; to see experimentally for ourselves 
whether their scientific attitude of mind, their researches and 
discoveries interfere in any way with their belief in God, in 
the immortality of the soul, in the truth of Christ's revelation 
and the teachings of the Catholic Church. 

This method has been followed with much fairness and 
with much erudition by Father Kneller in his work: Christi- 
anity and the Leaders of Modern Science. To put it briefly, 
with an evidence that none may question and with a thor- 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 827 

oughness that is absolutely convincing, the author has demon- 
strated, first, that there is no justification for stating that 
science is intrinsically and necessarily hostile to religion, and 
secondly, that many men of scientific genius accepted the teach- 
ings of Christianity with fervor and simplicity of mind. 

The volume is translated from the second German edition 
and has a preface by Father Finlay, S.J. It is of great prac- 
tical value to the lay Catholic as well as to the priest, for 
many of the former class find daily opportunity to speak to 
friend or acquaintance on the matter, and to set many an in- 
quirer right. The inquirer still asks about science and religion 
and the daily press still publishes attacks on the latter in the 
name of the former. This book is in line with the excellent 
work that Dr. James J. Walsh has been doing, and it will give 
to the reader a store of valuable ammunition. 

To our mind it goes even beyond the claims made for it 
by the author. It shows that science honestly pursued really 
leads to God, and teaches us in the words of Andrea Von 
Baumgartner "to recognize the universe as the temple of the 
Almighty." 

MODERN THEORIES OF CRIMINALITY. By C. Bernaldo de 
Quiros. Translated from the Spanish by Dr. Alphonso de 
Salvio. New York: Funk and Wagnalls. $4 net. 

CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY. By Hans Gross. Translated from 
the German by Dr. Horace M. Kallen. New York : Funk 
and Wagnalls. $5 net. 

Modern Theories of Criminality by C. Bernard de Quiros, 
who interestingly enough, considering the commonly accepted 
notion that Spain is backward in such studies, is a Spaniard, 
and Criminal Psychology by Prof. Hans Gross, are the first 
two volumes in the Modern Criminal Science Series published 
under the auspices of the American Institute of Criminal Law 
and Criminology. At its National Conference in June 1909 
the Institute decided that "it was exceedingly desirable that 
important treatises on criminology in foreign languages be 
made readily accessible in the English language." This series 
is the result. These two volumes are to be followed by works 
of Lombroso, Professors Ferri, Tarde, Garofalo, Aschaffenburg 
and others. 



828 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

The first volume on Modern Theories of Criminality makes 
an excellent review of everything noteworthy written on the 
subject during the past two generations. In spite of its com- 
prehensiveness and the extent of the field it is a book of only 
some 250 pages, probably less than 75,000 words. The most 
interesting feature of all of the modern theories of criminality 
is the attempt to explain responsibility without admitting free 
will. Heredity, environment, and meteorological conditions 
are supposed to explain all crime, yet poor man is held re- 
sponsible for crime. Prince Kropotkin said, it is quite possible, 
given the amount of sunlight, the number of dark days, and 
barometric pressure and hydroscopic records of a year, to fore- 
tell the number of homicides. We will quote a typical instance 
of the explanation of freewill and responsibility. "Henceforth 
we will not say that man is responsible for his actions because 
he possesses a will or because he is free; but because, having 
been created by the power of natural laws which trace for him 
the way of true humanity, he acquires, in the relations which 
he establishes and changes through human intercourse, rational 
and human aptitudes which make him responsible for all his 
actions." There is just one difficulty with most modern writers 
on criminology they do not listen to their own consciousness 
of freedom to do or leave undone their acts. 

Professor Gross's volume, with its five hundred pages, in- 
cludes a very large amount of material. It contains a mass of 
information gathered from all sources with quotations unplaced 
and with authoritative and unauthoritative expressions jumbled 
together. Literary men, poets, specialists in mental diseases, 
publicists, historians, physicists, philosophers, are all quoted 
from, almost as if they were all of equal value. The general 
effect is likely to be confusing rather than helpful. Above 
all, the work makes for that unfortunate sentimentality in the 
treatment of criminals that has hurt our modern law courts as 
institutions for lessening crime. There are many excuses that 
can be made for criminals. Some criminals are quite irrespon- 
sible. The great majority of them, however, even when there 
is an element in some degree excusing their acts, will only be 
deterred from repetitions of it by appropriate punishment. 
Professor Gross's treatment of Women Criminals particularly, 
is quite absurd in its general condemnation of them. One is 
prone to wonder whether these men forget that much of the 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 829 

good of the world has been done by women, and that such 
women constitute a vast majority. Apparently these men have 
studied the criminal women so much that the goodness oi her 
far more numerous sisters has escaped them. 

HEROES OF CALIFORNIA. By George Wharton James. Boston : 
Little, Brown & Co. $2 net. 

In his latest volume, Heroes of California, Mr. George 
Wharton James gives us brief, careful biographies of the many 
Californians famous along varied lines of achievement. He 
begins with the lives of the first explorers, scouts, and pion- 
eers of the Golden State; passes to the civic and patriotic 
heroes of a later period ; gives a chapter to the builders of 
the Central Pacific Railway ; and finally brings us down to 
Bancroft, Luther Burbank, and the very modern Edwin 
Markham. Mr. James might profitably have given more space 
to the work of the Mission Fathers in the early days cf the 
state; his biographies of the two Franciscans, Junipero Serra 
and Francisco de Sarria, are most interesting, and are written 
with a warm and intelligent appreciation. The style of the 
book is, as we expect of Mr. James, scholarly rather than 
popular. The book itself is particularly handsome and has 
many fine illustrations. 

HINTS FOR CATECHISTS ON INSTRUCTING CONVERTS. By 
Madame Cecilia. New York: Benziger Brothers. 75 
cents. 

The opening words of the Archbishop of Westminster in 
his preface to Hints for Catechists are well worth quoting. 
The Archbishop says: "There is no more consoling fact at 
the present day in England than the number of those in every 
rank of life who without any temporal attraction and often in 
actual danger of temporal loss, desire to be admitted within 
the one true Fold of Jesus Christ." 

In order to help those who have the labor of instructing 
such souls, Madame Cecilia has written this volume. It is 
intended not alone for priests and religious but also for such 
of the laity as undertake the work of catechetical instruction. 

Madame Cecilia writes with a knowledge and zeal born of 
extensive reading and wide experience in the treatment of 
different classes of converts. She treats of the qualifications 



830 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

necessary for a catechist ; of the method of teaching and gives 
some brief notes on certain points of Christian doctrine. 
There are added a list of books on different subjects and 
some excellent illustrations of the vestments, sacred vessels, 
etc. We note in passing that a quotation attributed to Flaubert 
really belongs to Joubert. 

Madame Cecilia has done her work well and has given us 
a volume that will form a valuable addition to the books use* 
ful in the growing work of instructing non-Catholics. 

SICILY IN SHADOW AND IN SUN. By Maud Howe. Boston: 
Little, Brown & Company. 

Somewhat disappointed because Messina fills up three- 
quarters of this pretentiously titled book, we must yet grant 
that the author's account of the relieving and the recon- 
structing of the ill-fated city is both worth telling and 
well told. At the center of American affairs in Italy, she 
describes intimately the persons and the methods which 
so creditably conducted our expedition of charity. The 
three hasty chapters that describe other parts of the island 
will perhaps measure up to the demands of the average Amer- 
ican traveler. 

But when will our American publishers come to regard 
misspelled Italian words as a blotch upon their work ? 

OUTLINES OF BIBLE KNOWLEDGE. Edited by the Most 
Rev. S. H. Messmer. St. Louis: B. Herder. $1.50 net. 

The question is oftentimes asked: "What book will give 
me an intelligent introduction to the Bible ; help me to un- 
derstand its different books; its many references; the history 
of its peoples; the purpose of its different authors, etc.?" 
Up to the present it was impossible to answer that question 
satisfactorily; impossible to mention a single volume that 
would not ask either too much time or too much previous 
knowledge on the part of the reader. Now it is beyond dis- 
pute that the Holy Scriptures should be read and read far 
more extensively than they are by Catholics. Perhaps the 
Bible has been more or less of a closed book to many because 
they have never had an introduction to it. Our gratitude 
goes, therefore, to Archbishop Messmer who has been im- 
pressed with this want of our people and has satisfied it. 



i9ii.] NEW BOOKS 831 

The Archbishop's volume entitled : Outlines of Bible Knowledge 
is a book that was much needed, and we cordially recommend 
it to all our readers. The volume treats in a clear, simple 
manner the general questions of biblical history and literature 
and then takes up every one of the books, giving its origin, 
authorship and purpose. A third part treats of the places, 
ceremonies, officials and customs with which one must be more 
or less familiar in order to understand the sacred text. An 
appendix includes the encyclical of Leo XIII. on the study 
of the Scriptures. 

May the volume be welcomed in many homes and do 
much to cultivate a love of God's word. It will make an ad- 
mirable text book for the higher catechetical classes. 

INDUSTRIAL INSURANCE IN THE UNITED STATES. By Charles 
Richmond Henderson. Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press. $2 net. 

To the student desiring a general survey of the different 
systems of workmen's insurance in the United States, no book 
is quite as useful as Professor Henderson's English edition of 
the work he originally contributed to Dr. Zacher's German 
series on Arbeiter-Versicherung. Industrial insurance is a re- 
sponse to generally felt needs, but the systematization of it 
involves problems economic, administrative and legal which as 
yet have not been fully solved. American conditions of life 
seem to indicate that the need of some universal method of 
providing for various forms of disability will increase rather 
than lessen in the coming years. The problems presented are 
therefore urgent subjects of study and such study is greatly 
facilitated by our author's comprehensive display of existing 
plans and tendencies. 

SHELBURNE ESSAYS : Seventh Series. By Paul Elmer More. 
New York and London : G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.25 
net. 

The criticism which Mr. More has given us in this seventh 
volume of his Shelburne Essays is an honor to English litera- 
ture in America. In the editor of The Nation we have a 
writer dowered with the critical equipment of scholarship and 
taste, and with a beautiful definiteness of thought-standards 
all too rare among modern critics. His subjects range from 



8s* MEW BOOKS [Mar., 

the poetry of Wordsworth and Thomas Hood to the socialism 
of G. Lowes Dickinson and the " pragmatism " of William 
James, and the series includes an admirable treatise upon 
criticism itself. In this last, the amount of implied Catholic- 
ity would, perhaps, surprise the author : for his protest against 
the logical outcome of soulless culture his plea for a philos- 
ophy capable of reconciling, nay, of "binding together" the 
moral and the esthetic sense is thoroughly sound. Very 
welcome to Catholic readers, also, is his recognition of the 
essential superficiality of pragmatism, that plausible and un- 
costly philosophy which " would find the limits of truth in 
what we think it expedient to believe." The denial of reason 
as an all-sufficient solution of the mysteries of life is, as Mr. 
More points out, both as old as Plato and as persistently 
youthful as the Christian saint: although in the " smart con- 
temporaneity " of the late Professor James this resemblance 
was conspicuous mainly for its difference. For while the 
Christian substitutes the higher faculties of a spiritual faith, 
the pragmatist utilizes the immediate and transient experiences 
of to-day, dismissing once and for all the idea of an absolute 
truth. 

Mr. More's essay on Shelley is as sane and balanced a 
study as the subject has inspired for many a day; in this 
sense, indeed, a not valueless complement to the poet Thomp- 
son's radiant and sympathetic appreciation. Distinctly Pat* 
morean in his insistence that bad morality is bad art, our critic 
points out that the Skylark poet's essential obliquity of tem- 
perament was distinctive, in the last analysis, of " that self- 
knowledge out of which the great creations and magnificent 
joys of literature grow." 

In the pages upon our own Francis Thompson, it would 
seem that Mr. More's " personal equation " toward order, to- 
ward a somewhat classical restraint and moderation, were less 
happily conspicuous than in any other part of the volume. The 
poet's gorgeous anarchies, his temperamental but poignant per- 
versities of style, are something which no one need trouble to 
defend; which his admirers must even accept as the rind of 
the fruit is accepted. But here are other and more serious 
charges. For an instance: is the close of "The Hound of 
Heaven" an inversion of its powerful opening figure? Nay 
verily; for is not the act of flight a most effective denial (or 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 833 

driving away) of the pursuer ? Surely the torn soul may both 
hunger for and reject its own ultimate Good, 

(For though I knew His love Who followed, 

Yet was I sore adread 
Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside) 

and even here is the root of that dualism in our finite life 
which the critic rightly misses amid the " prettiness " of Vic- 
torian art. For humanly speaking, the regnant peace of the 
unitive life is attained only "when the battle's lost and won": 
it was the glory and the pathos of Francis Thompson to press 
toward this with the close-gripped certainty of Catholic faith. 
We commend these critical studies most definitely to our 
readers; not because we agree invariably with their conclus- 
ions, nor yet because we find their premises infallibly satisfy- 
ing. But they are the sincere word, closely reasoned, of a 
sound and cultured intellect. And throughout Mr. More's 
criticism (as in so much of the best criticism throughout the 
world to-day) we perceive the constructive reaction against 
modern vagueness, mutation, materialism ; the reaching out 
toward a Voice, not yet recognized, which shall speak, in life 
as well as in art, " with authority and not as the Scribes." 
He has himself said the thing "Submission to the philosophy 
of change is the real effeminacy ; it is the virile part to react." 

THE STORY OF OUR LORD'S LIFE, TOLD FOR CHILDREN. 
New York: Cathedral Library Association. $i net. 

The author of this volume has kept in mind the well known 
fact that children love to hear and to read stories of angels and 
of saints and those taken from Sacred Scriptures. Many a child 
learns a story from a picture long before it can read. Stories 
thus learned are never forgotten. Who could forget his nur- 
sery rhymes or simple stories like Jack and the Bean Stalk, 
or the Little Red Riding Hood yet some of us learned these 
from pictures, and before we could read. 

It seems to us that this educational fact has been over- 
looked by many parents and teachers, when considering the 
early religious training of young children. Fairy stories and 
legends from the Norse and Roman mythologies are given to 
them, yet how few religious teachers think of the Life of Christ 
with pictures for children. Yet it is a Life written with such 

VOL. XCII.53 



834 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

majestic artlessness in Holy Scripture, that it would be a per- 
ennial source of wonder and delight to the imagination of the 
child. The author of the Life of Our Lord for Children ap- 
preciates this truth and has woven the Scriptural text with 
the telling of the story, in an unusually successful manner. 
We commend the book to Sunday- School teachers, parents, 
and all those who direct the religious education of very young 
children. 

THE DOCTRINE OF THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. By J. P. 
Kirsch. Translated by J. K. McKee. St. Louis : B. Her- 
der. $1.35. 

In his somewhat lengthy preface to this book of less than 
three hundred small pages the translator assigns a reason for 
presenting to some Anglican readers of to-day a work which 
is not recent. That reason, with another which shall be given, 
should recommend Dr. Kirsch's painstaking, erudite, and scien- 
tific little volume to all who care to have a clear conception, 
by the relation of historical facts, of a doctrine at once fun- 
damental and fertile. Many Church of England Protestants, 
it appears, have awoke to the fact that history does not 
warrant their hereditary belief that the Catholic practice of 
supplicating the saints was an innovation. Dr. Kirsch pro- 
duces the documents, in the Greek and Latin of the Fathers 
aid other writers of the first five centuries, and shows 
beyond question that Catholics did then, as now they do, 
venerate, invoke, and beg the intercession of the saints. Such 
a showing of historical facts cannot fail to interest and illu- 
minate the minds of Protestants and of Catholics, in America 
as in England. Moreover, no one can contemplate these mov- 
ing pictures exhibiting the doctrine of the Communion of 
Saints in living operation among the early Christians without 
a warmer appreciation of what it is to be one of the multitu- 
dinous members compacted by love into the mystical body of 
Christ, comprising angels as well as men living and departed. 

OUR CATHOLIC HERITAGE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE IN PRE- 
CONQUEST DAYS. By Emily Hickey. St. Louis: B. 
Herder. 50 cents net. 

" Apples of gold on beds of silver " would form a fit leg- 
end for Miss Hickey's exquisite rendering of fragments from 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 835 

"Great Tellings" "Elene," "The Dream of the Holy Rood/' 
"Judith" and the rather more widely known Caedmonic verses 
woven into " talk about beautiful things said and done in old 
days; things which to have learned to love is to have incurred 
a great and living debt." 

The little work is not intended as a textbook, but as sup- 
plementary or reference reading for Catholic teachers and stu- 
dents. It throws into bold relief a truth which is systemati- 
cally obscured in professedly neutral textbooks to wit; that 
the Church has been, from her beginning, "the source of fine 
literature, of true art, as of noble speech and noble deed." 

We have searched the volume carefully for some hint that 
it is only a Part I, and is to be brought down to the present 
day. Why not? Who is better fitted than Miss Hickey to 
help Catholic teachers show their students how Faith yet 
gave color and majesty to thought and speech through the 
Elizabethan epoch ; how literature paled and faded and dwin- 
dled in England as religion died within her borders; how a 
budding Renaissance has coincided with the consecutive steps 
taken in religious freedom during the Victorian reign ? 

THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD AS MIRRORED IN THE PERFEC- 
TIONS OF MARY. New York: Benziger Bros. 90 cents net. 

The author of this work has in view the training of chil- 
dren in a deep knowledge of God. He aims to make them 
fly high. Of themselves children could never reach such an 
altitude; but the author has given parents the aids by which 
children might attain thereto. All the chapters of the work 
deal with the Attributes of God. We must, at the beginning, 
find fault with the author's failure to establish clearly in all 
the chapters the perfection of Mary as a Mirror of God's At- 
tributes. There is altogether too much evidence of pious ejacu- 
latory praise of the Blessed Virgin, and too few direct state- 
ments of her perfection in relation to the subject of the chap- 
ter. Apart from this, the book is to be highly commended. 
It will be of considerable value to religious, either for spiritual 
reading, or as an assistance to them in preparing instructions 
for children. 

Out of the eighteen chapters that on the Mercy of God 
strikes us as being very good ; that on the Providence of God 
combines the qualities of being well done and useful at the 
same time ; and that on Generosity is to some degree practical, 



836 NEW BOOKS [Mar., 

though it has the color of a charity sermon "boiled down.*' 
We are of opinion that a sentence in the chapter on the Om- 
nipotence of God is liable to be misunderstood, and may breed 
false and rash judgments in imperfect souls. 

We refer to the assertion on page 40 concerning the pain felt 
by certain persons when in sinful places, "or where worldly 
people congregate." In theory, and when properly understood, 
this is correct ; but it may easily lead to Pharisaism of a re- 
volting kind among those whose virtue is not solidly grounded 
The author puts forward the same idea, but more intelligibly, 
further down on the same page; there he cannot be misun- 
derstood. In the same chapter there is a brief anecdote about 
the clever answer of a child. We have had some small experi- 
ence among children, but we can vouch that we never yet met 
such a juvenile Aquinas. Our experience is that children com- 
mit the rankest of heresy when taken off their guard by a 
previously unheard-of question. 

A novel addition to the book are six short notes by the 
Censor. Every time we opened the volume we instinctively 
turned to these to discover if possible what brought four of 
them there. And now as we close it we trust not for the 
last time we are as much mystified as ever. 

PROBLEMES ECONOMIQUES ET SOCIAUX. Par Max Turmann. 

Paris: Libraire Victor Lecoffre. 3/r. 50. 
M. Turmann needs no introduction to the readers of THE 
CATHOLIC WORLD. Neither do they require to be reminded 
of the growing importance of the subjects and the method 
which have come to be identified in great measure with his 
name. The bearing of economic science upon social activity of 
every sort and the profit to social workers of being well grounded 
in the rudiments of economics are lessons that people are 
learning better and better each year. Exact information and 
a fairly definite social programme are indispensable to the 
proper direction of one's sympathy and one's energy. For 
ability to guide in this respect, Professor Turmann is notable. 
Problems of Organization, American Trusts, American Factories, 
States as Employers, Commercial Education, The American 
Panic of 1907, Feminism, Consumers' Leagues, Home-work, 
are some of the interesting things discussed in the volume at 
hand. 



i9i i.] NEW BOOKS 837 

THIS little volume of verse, Forest and Town, by Dr. Alex- 
ander de Menil (New York: The Torch Press. $1.25 net) 
has been, we are told, long collecting on the author's desk and 
in his heart. The subjects treated are of considerable variety, 
and one is glad that several youthful and previously- printed 
pieces such as "The Blue Bird," and a translation of elusive 
charm from " Hegesippe Moreau " are again included. 

'THIS modest little volume, Mere Hints, Moral and Social. By 
A Rev. John . Graham ($i), includes a number of short es- 
says of decided merit. They are of a practical nature and 
seek to inspire the reader with high ideals and direct him in 
the social duties incumbent upon us all. The essay on " Love 
of One's Work " is especially cheering, and we must also give 
a special word of praise to the chapter on " Literary Influ- 
ences." The book is published in Baltimore by the author. 

A BOOK that deserves popularity with boy-readers is Fa- 
** mous Scouts by Charles H. L. Johnston. It gives bio- 
graphical sketches, attractively written, of many of our American 
scouts, pioneers, and soldiers, from Daniel Boone and Simon 
Kenton down to the ever-interesting Buffalo Bill. Truth is 
stranger than fiction, and Lewis and Clarke are, in, this volume, 
at least, more healthily exciting than any dime-novel " Diamond 
Dick." School boys will surely find keen enjoyment in reading 
the stories of Famous Scouts, and Mr. Johnston is to be 
congratulated on his work. The volume is remarkable, as 
well, for unusually fine illustrations. It is published by L. C. 
Page & Co., Boston. 

'THE CATHOLIC WHO'S WHO AND YEAR-BOOK, Ed- 
*- ited by F. C. Burnand, which, since its first edition, has 
been a useful and a delightful volume, is even more useful and 
just as delightful in its edition for 1911. The compilers have 
added the addresses of all or almost all mentioned within its 
covers. The book gives the names of all the prominent 
Catholics of Great Britain and Ireland, and of some Catholic 
Americans, with a sketch of their education, their work, etc., 
etc. The present volume includes a paper by the Archbishop 
of Westminster on the Montreal Eucharistic Congress. (London: 
Burns & Oates. New York : Benziger Brothers.) 



838 NEW BOOKS [Mar. 



w 



r recommend, particularly to priests engaged in the care 
of souls, as a very useful and handy volume, the latest 
Rituale\Romanum published by Fr. Pustet of New York (price 
$2). The ritual is of pocket size, yet it is unabridged; in- 
cludes the ruling of Pius X. on the Sick and Holy Commun- 
ion ; has a well-arranged index and a supplement for the 
United States which includes an English translation of the 
litany and prayers to be said for a soul departing. 

A DELIGHTFUL volume of extremely practical essays comes 
" to us from Australia. It is entitled : Within the Soul and 
is written by Father Watson, SJ. Father Watson has taken 
for his subjects those small yet great matters that enter into 
all our lives and the spiritual powers, prayers, good reading 
that we should employ to better ourselves. The book shows 
an abundance of literary allusions and a wide acquaintance 
with the best of spiritual writers. The brevity of each essay 
is an^attraction in itself for it will occupy but five minutes of 
the busy man's time. The volume [is published by William P. 
Linehan of Melbourne. 

T A VIELLE MORALE A L'ECOLE (par Joseph Tissier. 
** Paris: Pierre Tequi) is composed of readings by which 
the author seeks to indicate the means best calculated to at- 
tract j young minds to the heights of moral beauty. It is 
divided 5 into four parts which treat respectively of the Prin- 
ciplesfof Moral and Christian Education ; of our blessed Lord 
as a model to be followed; of notable school events as sub- 
jects ,of ^Practical Lessons and lastly of Christian Watchwords. 

*PHE Abbe Duplessy conceived the novel idea of searching 
< the works of Victor Hugo to find therein an antidote to 
the very poison that Victor Hugo himself had distributed so 
liberally. The present volume Victor Hugo, Apologiste (Pierre 
Tequi, Paris, I fr.) proves that his search was not in vain. 
It makes astonishing reading, for the compiler has found that 
in more than four hundred passages Victor Hugo accurately 
explains Catholic teaching both dogmatic and moral. 



jforeign jperiobicals* 

The Tablet (14 Jan.): "America and Arbitration." The latest 
plan suggested as a means of settling international disputes' 
and preserving peace among the nations is to establish 
an Arbitral Court which would have the character of an 
actual Court of Law. This court would handle all dis- 
putes whether they involved honor, territory or money, 
and " would gradually, by its decisions, consolidate its 
own code of international law with its own rules of in- 
terpretation and procedure." " Condemnation of Car- 
dinal Lupon." The Court of Rheims has fined the Cardi- 
nal 500 francs damages for his action in signing the Joint 
Pastoral of the French Bishops on the rights and duties 
of parents in regard to the education of their children. 

(21 Jan.): The attitude of the Vatican towards the 

coming Anti-clerical celebrations in Rome has been 
summed up by one correspondent as "a profound re- 
serve, akin to mourning." No non-Catholic sovereign 
"who gives his official support to the despoilers of the 
Papacy by his presence in Rome on that occasion " will 
be received in audience by the Holy See. 
(28 Jan.): "The Churches of France." The transfer- 
ence of the churches and cathedrals from religious to 
secular hands was, for many of them, the beginning of 
the end. The civil officials have made no provision for 
their up-keep, nor will they empower the clergy to re- 
pair these old historic edifices. A bill purposing to 

forbid the marriage between white and colored persons 
in South Africa has elicited a protest, in the form of 
a public letter from the Vicar-Apostolic of Kimberley. 
The Bishop bases his protest chiefly on moral grounds 
and states that no such law will excuse priests from 
the duty of blessing these marriages. 
(4 Feb.) : " Canada's New Step " deals at length with 
the negotiations for a reciprocity agreement between 
Canada and the United States.*" An Anglican Diarist 
in Rome in 1896 " by Mgr. Moyes, D.D., is con- 
cluded. May Quinlan writes on " Personal Service.' 
The Mission of the Catholic Social Worker becomes 
every day more urgent and more important. Given the 
necessary skill and the requisite knowledge, the on- 



FOREIGN PERIODICALS LMar., 

coming force of Socialism may even yet be directed, 
though it may not be stayed. 

Expository Times (Feb.): The Rev. Louis H. Jordan, B.D., in 
"The History of Religions," announces Dr. Lehmann's 
appointment to the Chair of the History of Religions 
in the University of Berlin the first and only chair of 
its kind in the German Empire. 

The Irish Ecclesiastical Record (Jan.): "The Catholic Church 
in 1910 " Rev. James MacCaffrey. For the Catholic 
Church it (1910) has not been a year of peace. In 
Italy, Spain, Portugal and France anti- religious condi- 
tions were marked. In Germany and Austria the Catho- 
lic position is unchanged. In Belgium the elections 
have again been favorable to the Catholics, Two great 
events of the year were the Eucharistic Congress 
in Montreal, and the Consecration of St. Patrick's Ca- 
thedral in New York. In Ireland we can congratulate 
ourselves on the abolition of the Royal Declaration. It 
is a matter for rejoicing too that the difficulties threaten- 
ing the progress of our National University have been 

amicably arranged. In "The Communion of Saints 

in the Primitive Church," Rev. W. B. O'Dowd, writes 
that "The evidence, broken as it is, proves that the 
custom of praying for the dead existed from the be- 
ginning of Christianity." " Spain and Its Religious 

Orders," Very Rev. M. J. O'Doherty. 

Irish Theological Quarterly (Jan) : In his article on " Modern 
Sociology " Rev. T. Slater, SJ. quotes numerous au- 
thorities to support his statement that " whereas fifty 
years ago the tendency was to exalt the rights of the 
individual citizen at the expense of the power of the 
State, nowadays the tendency is all the other way." 

"The Revolution in Portugal," by Rev. J. MacCaffrey, 

traces the historic causes of the recent uprising giving 
special attention to why the revolution assumed such 
an anti-religious character. Under the title "Bud- 
gets Parliamentary or Local and Conscience," Rev. 
D. Barry, S.T.D. discusses the moral obligation of tax 
paying. "The Doctrine of Incarnation in Hindu- 
ism " is a study in " Comparative Religion " by Rev. 
Peter Dahmen, S.J., in which he concludes that the so- 
called mythological Christs are " rather a sign that the 



19 1 1.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 841 

ground He so carefully and so long prepared in the 
past is now ready to receive the true gospel." 

The Church Quarterly Review (Jan.): "Mr. Gladstone's Let- 
ters on Church and Religion" by D. C. Lathbury. As 
a whole these volumes bear out the impression of su- 
preme consistency which was left by the study of Lord 
Morley's life. It is more than ever clear that the clue 
to Mr. Gladstone's public action, whether it was the in- 
spiration, the enigma, or the stumbling block of his con- 
temporaries, is to be found in following the line of his 
religious development Laura E. Ridding writes " On 

Certain Aspects of Divorce." Writing on the " Juda- 

istic Controversy and the Apostolic Council" the Rev. 
Kirsopp Lake says: "The decision of the Council was 
not a compromise, for in a compromise each party con- 
cedes something." It was not a compromise but a 
triumph a triumph of the most far-reaching consequences 
both for Christianity and for Judaism. 

The Dublin Review (Jan.): Dr. Barry reviews Mr. Moneypen- 
ny's " Life of Benjamin Disraeli." Summing up Disraeli's 
power, Dr. Barry, speaking of the Counter- Revolution 
in the House of Commons in 1837, says "what of Jews 
... in this commotion ? If they held forth one hand 
to democracy they could not loosen the other from 
theocracy which had made and kept them a people. 
The crisis of principles among Jews which followed on 
the revolution is by no means at an end, but, whatever 
happens, Israel could not surrender to a philosophy 
which neither explains nor accounts for it. This is 

what Disraeli saw with the intuition of genius." Cecil 

Barber gives an estimate of the musical productions of 
Sir Edward Elgar; "The Decay of Fixed Ideals "by 
Meyrick Booth tells us that a powerful reaction has lately 
set in in Germany which is rapidly making materialism in 
that country look old-fashioned. Among the leaders of 
the movement is F. W. Foerster. During the last few 
years Foerster has come to take up a very orthodox, 
Christian position. This is of peculiar interest because 
the man was educated in non-religious surroundings, and 
has been led by his own observation to study and re- 
discover the truths of Christianity. The article reviews 
six of Foerster's works. Father Herbert Thurston 



842 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Mar., 

writes on Christopher Columbus and the question of his 

beatification. Hilaire Belloc writes on the economic 

axiom that the cheap article drives out the dear article. 

Francis McCullough writes on the recent Portugese 

revolution. There is a posthumous poem by Francis 

Thompson entitled: "The House of Sorrows." The sub- 
ject of the poem is the late Empress Elizabeth of Austria. 

Le Correspondent (10 Jan.): G. de Lamarzelle writes on the 
conditions of religious and secular instruction in France 

to-day. '* Chateaubriand and the Men of Letters of 

1789," by Andre Beaunier. "The Economic Life and 

the Social Movement," by A. Bechaux, is an article in seven 
chapters, treating of Taxes; Intellectual Culture; Study 
of Alcoholism ; Woman's Suffrage; Comparison of Euro- 
pean Countries Regarding Family Life and Income ; etc. 
(25 Jan.): "The Question of the Colonial Army," by 
Pierre Khorat, is an article written in appreciation of the 
army in the French possessions and calling the attention 
of the French Government to its duty towards them. 

''Social Inquiries," by Henry Joly, is a study of 

conditions in the Southern Italy of to-day, the causes 
and percentage of crime, emigration, disease, country 
life, and finally the reform of the seminaries begun by 
Pius X. "Souvenirs of the Mexican War," by Vis- 
count de Montfort is the third article of the series under 
that title. This article deals with a study of the Mexi- 
can soldier, the seizure of Garayamas, the death of 
Godinet, and the ascent of Popocatepetl." Louis 
XVI.," by De Lanzac de Laborie, is a final word on 
the life and times of this monarch, due to recent publi- 
cations on this subject. 

Revue du Clerge Franfais (i Jan.): G. G. Lapeyre chronicles 
"The Religious Movement in German-speaking Coun- 
tries." He finds that in these regions Modernism after 

a period of hidden fight has thrown off the mask. 

" The Social Evolution of Protestantism," by Ch. Calippe, 
presents a sketch of the shifting of Protestantism from 
the extreme of individualism to an attitude in which 
many of them see in Socialist principles the best appli- 
cation of the Gospel in the domain of Economics. 

Eugene Enrard reviews among others the following: A 
number of poems by M. Gustave Zidler, M. Robert 



i9i i.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 843 

Vallery-Radot, and M. Franpois Mauriac, in which he 
recognizes signs of an idealist and religious reawakening 
in the literature of our time; and "The Barrier," by 

Rene Bazin, whose art he especially praises. T. Birat 

contributes an article on the " Centenary of Montalem- 

bert." J. Delbrel, S.J., discusses the " Theory of the 

Sacerdotal Vocation." 

(15 Jan.): A. Villien gives a brief history of the Sacra- 
ment of Confirmation. J. M. Vidal begins an account 

of the " Religious and Social Action of Italian Catholics 
under the Pontificate of Pius X." The author treats of 
the crisis of Italian Catholic action up to the reform af 
Pius X., the reform itself, and reviews Catholic social 

activity in Italy at the present moment. P. Godet 

gives " A Word on the Origin of the Angelus." " An 

Attempt at Corporate Reunion/' an article by P. Thu- 
reau Dangin is the story of the efforts set on foot by 
Lord Halifax during the pontificate of Leo XIII. for 
the reunion of the ! Anglican Church with the See of 
Rome, and the attitude of prominent English .Catholics 
of the time towards this reunion and its promoters,- 
" The Philosophy of a War," by M. Emile Ollivier, con- 
sists of a number of extracts from " a very interesting 
work recently appearing" on the war of 1870. 
tudes Franciscaines (Jan.): "In "Franciscan Silhouettes from 
the Divine Comedy," H. Matrod sketches "Piccarda" 
as an exquisite flower of sanctity grown upon the wild 

stock of the Donati. " The Remarkable Extension of 

the School of Scotus," gives a summary of the various 
editions of Scotus' works from the writing of " The Ox- 
ford Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard " 
until, in the seventeenth century Father Luke Wadding 
gave to the world a complete edition in sixteen folio 
volumes of his Philosophico-Theological Works.- Fa- 
ther Exupere has a study on the Gospel according to 
St. Matthew, to contravert the critics who find in this 
Gospel no authentic witness to the divinity of Christ. 

" The Fourth Centenary of the Taking of Goa," gives 

opportunity for an interesting history of the feats of 
arms, etc., leading up to that event. - An account of 
Sister Marie- Gertrude, who died in 1908, "A Mystic 
of Our Own Day," is given by Father Jean de la Croix. 



844 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Mar., 

Revue Pratique d* Apologetique (15 Jan.): "Our Grand Semi- 
naries," by J. Guibert. " Against Religious Dilettante- 
ism," by M. S. Gillet. The author considers dilettante- 
ism from three points of view. He regards it in the light 
of Religious Dogmas, Morals, and Worship. The general 
conclusion is that dilettanteism is only a refined form of 

sensualism. Did there exist during the seventeenth 

century religious societies of women of the Blessed Sac- 
rament? N. Prunel answers affirmatively in his article, 
and derives his data from a life of a celebrated Ursuline 
at Dijon, Mother Marguerite Coutier Chateau-Bomay. 

"The Psychology of the Saints and Traditional 

Apologetics," by C. Alibert. The psychology of the 
saints is viewed from two aspects, viz., the revealed 
knowledge of the saints, which is the theologians' con- 
cern, and the " phenomena," which belongs to the phi- 
losopher. The author briefly considers the method in 
which this "phenomena" is dealt with. The last point 
is the agreement of this form of apologetic with tradi- 
tion. L. de la Vallee-Poussin, in an article entitled 

"Religious History; Recent Publications of M. F. Goblet 
d'Ariella," refutes the statement that religion develops 
in parallel lines with civilization and that Christianity 
is an evolution from the beliefs and sentiments of Oriental 
countries. 

La Revue du Monde (1-15 Jan.) : The continuation of the 
Abbe Feret's article on " The Empire and the Holy 
See " tells of increased hostilities, the annexation of 
the Pontifical State and imprisonment of the Pope.-' 
" The History of Marmoutier " relates the various vicis- 
situdes through which it passed after the dispersion of 
the Benedictines until its purchase in 1847 b Y Madame 
Barat for a School of the Sacred Heart. The Grottos 
of St. Martin and of the Seven Sleepers were then re- 
stored and in 1879 a complete restoration was begun by 
Madame Digby which was completed with a great cele- 
bration in 1897. !n 1905 the Government again seized 
and closed Marmoutier. It was saved from partition by 
a rich Englishman, Lord Clifford, and was reopened in 
1908 for the pupils of the College of St. Gregory of 

Tours and the Little Seminary. The continuation of 

the "School Question in the Canadian North West" 



i9i i.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 845 

advances conclusive proof that the so-called neutral 
schools existing under the present regime are a continu- 
ance of the Protestant Public Schools of the old regime 
and that the rights of the Catholics only have been 
violated by the new laws. Mgr. Tache's reply to the 
Open Letters of Mr. Tarte in the " Electeur " is given. 

John Hughes, in a letter from " A Young Royalist 

to a Yeung Democratic Abbe/' contends that the 
theologians who regard the Papal Encyclical on the 
Sillon as merely disciplinary, fail to recognize in the so- 
called " Christian Democracy " the offspring of the ex- 
cessive individualism of Protestant rationalism, a pro- 
moter of " Free-Thought," and an unconscious tool in 
the hands of freemasonry. 

Revue Biblique (Jan.) : J. Labourt concludes his translation of 
the recently discovered "Odes of Solomon"; and Mgr. 
Battifol follows this translation by a learned historical 

commentary on the " Odes." J. Lagrange, writes on 

the present state of the question about the census of 
Quirinius (Cyrinus). 

Revue Benedictine (Jan.) : Dom Morin maintains that the treatise 
in the catalogue of Lorsch, entitled "On Eight Ques- 
tions from the Old Testament," ascribed to St. Augus- 
tine, is at least not entirely the work of the Bishop of 

Hippo. Twenty-one letters of the Benedictines of St. 

Maur written during the first quarter of the eighteenth 
century, are published by Dom U. Berliere, who justly 
claims that such correspondence gives the best possible 
insight into the religious conditions of the time. 

L'Azione Muliebre (Jan.): "The Culture of Women in the Mid- 
dle Ages," by Elena da Persico, is a refutation of the 
assertion, made by the Minister of Public Instruction, 
that all arts and letters were forbidden women in the 
Middle Ages. " In the Field of Labor," gives an ac- 
count of the pittance paid as wages to the seamstresses 

who work for the Italian Army. "Our Women in 

Foreign Countries," reviews the condition of Italian 

working women in Germany. " An Hour of Friendly 

Conversation " suggests the founding of clubs in country 
towns, to teach the peasants various branches of domes- 
tic science, as a means of preventing the girls from 
moving to the cities. 



846 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Mar. 

Biblische Zeitschrift (Jan.) : Professor John Doeller discusses the 
answer given by the magicians to Moses (Ex. 8, 19). 

" This is the finger of God." Charles Sigwalt proposes 

a new reconstruction of the text of the " Canticle of 
Canticles " arranged from a literary and aesthetical point 
of view. 

La Civilta Cattolica (4 Feb.) : The " Oath against Modernism," 
is discussed at length in the first of a series of articles, 
in which it is pointed out that this method of guarding 
against error is nothing new in the history of the Church, 
being merely an application to modern heresies of a 
measure adopted by Pius IV. in the case of Trent, and 
Pius IX, in the case of the Vatican Council. Many 
similar instances are cited between these two Councils, 
especially that in the case of the bull Unigenitus against 
the Jansenists. The pretensions of the " modernists " are 
set forth ; their attempt to distinguish between the 
" Church " and the " Curia " and their allegation that 
the oath confuses mere human opinions with dogma. 
These contentions will be refuted in subsequent articles. 

L. Mechincan, S.J., continues his examination of 

the authorship and date of the Psalms and concludes in 
favor of David as the author of a large number of 

them, and as the first of the inspired Psalmists. The 

late Leo Tolstoi is the subject of a critical and bio- 
graphical study, the first part of which brings him to 

the period of the Crimean War. "Sensuality and 

Mysticism of D'Annunzio " is a burning protest against 
the recent works of the Italian novelist and issues a 
call to Italian men and women to boycott in the most 

vigorous manner possible all his writings and plays. 

"British Rule in India in 1910" is reviewed in a con- 
cluding article wherein the benevolent aims of Great 

Britain are fully recognized. The "Orpheus" of 

Solomon Reinach is further criticized and it is pointed 
out that Reinach's methods depend largely upon a 
straining of chance analogies to unwarranted conclusions, 
loose generalizations, and exaltation of mere hypotheses 

into demonstrated facts. " Religion and Medicine," 

by Charles Vidal is favorably reviewed as a noteworthy 
pronouncement upon sexual hygiene. 



IRecent Events* 



The labor agitations which have 
France. been the cause of so much trouble 

to France and from which there 

is a prospect of still further disturbance, find their main source 
in the General Confederation of Labor. This Confederation 
is a union of some 3,000 trade and labor unions and was founded 
fifteen years ago for the legitimate purpose of securing the 
reduction of the hours of work and for the general improve- 
ment of the condition of the workers. It is worthy of men- 
tion here that until 1884 the severest restrictions were placed 
in France upon the formation of unions of working-men, and 
that these were imposed during the Revolution at the end of 
the eighteenth century. The advocates of liberty were bitterly 
opposed to this form of exercising it. The misdoings of the 
Confederation have led many to propose that the same re- 
strictions should be again placed upon the right to form com- 
binations, or at all events that the Confederation should be 
destroyed root and branch. This was proposed in the Chamber 
of Deputies. To this proposal, however, M. Briand, with 
characteristic moderation, offered a resolute opposition, declar- 
ing that it would be a stultification of the policy which had 
been deliberately adopted by the Chamber, and would involve 
the punishment of the innocent on account of the misdeeds 
of some fifteen or twenty agitators who had managed to get 
control of the organization. The right course to pursue was 
to punish the individuals who had been guilty of advocating 
sabotage and other unlawful acts, to confer on the unions civil 
rights which would lead their members to a fuller sense of 
their responsibility and prevent them from submitting them- 
selves to the tyranny of a few agitators. The liberties con- 
ceded under the law of 1884 should be amplified and then 
the Chamber would see that the good sense of the working- 
men would assert itself. These views commended themselves 
to the Chamber which, by a vote of 390 to 73, expressed its 



848 RECENT EVENTS [Mar., 

confidence that the government would guarantee and develop 
the liberties of syndicalism, and at the same time confine the 
activity of trade and tabor associations within the bounds as- 
signed to them by the law. The government is pledged to 
amend the law of 1884 in the way indicated. 

The Pensions Bill, or rather Law, has been again under 
discussion. It was passed last year, but the way of raising 
money to pay for the pensions remained to be settled. Some 
twelve million of workers will be benefited by the Law. It 
differs from the Old Pensions Law recently passed in England 
in several respects. It does not give so much to each of the 
pensioners, but comes into operation five years earlier, at the 
age of sixty- five, and in some cases as early as fifty-five. Of 
certain classes of workers it requires contributions on the part 
of the recipient. Other classes by means of further voluntary 
contributions may secure a larger pension. It is proposed, but 
does not seem to have been provided for in the law that ad- 
ditional allowances should be made in proportion to the num- 
ber of children in the families of the insured. The law comes 
into force in July. A further measure for the benefit of work- 
ingmen is contemplated when the financial condition of the 
country permits. A State system of insurance against illness 
will then be introduced. 

Riots have taken place in Champagne, and large quantities 
of wine have been destroyed, not out of love of temperance 
and hatred of drunkenness, but because the price of genuine 
champagne, it was thought, was being reduced by the introduc- 
tion of inferior grades for the purpose of adulteration. Troops 
had to be despatched to the scenes of disturbance. The govern- 
ment recognized the fact that there was a degree of justifica- 
tion for the discontent thus manifested, and has promised 
measures of relief. 

In foreign affairs a certain amount of uneasiness has been 
manifested as to whether the renewal of good or better rela- 
tions between Germany and Russia as the result of the inter- 
view at Potsdam may not have affected the closeness of the 
relations between France and Russia. But there seems to be 
a general acquiescence in the opinion that the alliance between 
France and Russia has not suffered in the least. The Dutch 
proposals for the fortification of Flushing are causing some 
anxiety and may become the subject of important negotiations. 



i9i i.] RECENT EVENTS 849 

The Press has been full to over- 
Germany, flowing of discussions about the 

relations between Germany and 

Russia, whether any and what change has taken place, and 
what was its scope and effect. An agreement seems to have 
been reached between the two countries that Russia will not 
interfere with Germany in her plans for the railways through 
Turkey, while Germany for her part will offer no opposition 
to Russian projects for railways in Persia. Whether anything 
else has been decided has not been disclosed. While no nota- 
ble change has taken place in Germany's relations to Austria- 
Hungary, a question has arisen between the two countries 
which remains unsettled. Germany is bent upon imposing 
duties on shipping passing along certain rivers; this, if carried 
into effect, would seriously affect the commerce of Austria, 
The authorities of the latter country have declared that on no 
account will such an imposition be allowed. On the other 
hand the union between the two countries has been accentu- 
ated by the proposal of an eminent authority in Austria for 
altering the banking arrangements of the Austro- Hungarian 
Bank in such a way that Germany may have access to its 
reserves a privilege than which none would be more highly 
prized by Germany. 

The proposed Constitution for Alsace-Lorraine has met 
with much criticism, and little hope is expressed by some of 
its passing into law. In the eyes of some, it gives too much, 
of others, too little. It has enemies on both sides. The 
Chancellor of the Empire, however, has hopes of its passing, 
and it is now being considered by a Committee of the Reich- 
stag. 

The Austrian Cabinet has been re- 
Austria-Hungary, constructed with the same Premier 

at its head Baron von Bienerth. 

The Slav elements have been increased in number, and this 
has enraged all the German Parties who are bitterly opposed 
to all domination except that of themselves. For Slavs of 
all kinds Germans have no little contempt. And as the for- 
mer are becoming more and more numerous the recent pre- 
dominance of the German element is in danger of being lost 
a thing hard to be borne. Some look upon the new arrange- 
VOL xcii. 54 



850 RECENT EVENTS [Mar., 

ment of the Cabinet as marking the transition to the natural 
predominance of Slav influences. The Polish demands which 
were the cause of the recent crisis are conceded it being 
promised by the new ministry that the canal laws in Galicia 
and Bohemia will be revised. 

It would appear from the amount of the subscriptions to 
the Hungarian Loan which the French government refused to 
sanction, that there was no reason at all why the Central Powers 
should ever again seek French help, when to all appearances 
they have at their command such super-abundant resources. 
The Loan was for some fifty millions, the subscriptions amounted 
to more than two thousand nine hundred millions of dollars 
sixty times the sum asked for. There are those, however, who 
think that this was more a political demonstration than a 
manifestation of financial capacity. 



The expected revolution has not 
Spain. taken place in Spain, and there 

is reason to believe that the prob- 
ability of it was a false 'alarm. No fundamental change has 
taken place in the ministry, although there has been a reor- 
ganization on a small scale. Senor Canalejas remains at the 
head with a further lease of power, having sought from the 
King a renewal of his confidence, based upon the legislative 
work done during his term of office, and the promise of further 
reforms. The opposition in the Cortes adopted the most up- 
to-date methods of obstruction leading to all night sittings. 
It did not succeed, however, in preventing the passage of the 
Cadenas Bill, the object of which seems to be to suspend 
for a time active measures against the religious orders. The 
Bill, now become a law, forbids the entry into Spain of any 
fresh communities until the Law of Association which is in 
preparation shall be passed. 

The more extreme of the Republicans at Barcelona, the 
leader of whom is the eloquent orator, Senor Lerroux, have 
been covering themselves with disgrace on account of the way 
in which they managed the municipal affairs of Barcelona. 
The leader of the Republican Bloc in the Council felt it nec- 
essary publicly to expel the delinquents from the party. The 
whole affair has had the effect of discrediting throughout the 



19".] RECENT EVENTS 851 

country the extreme Republicans and to give strength to the 
monarchical cause. What effect the frequent strikes that have 
been taking place at Barcelona will have upon politics it is 
hard to say; they certainly tend to maintain a spirit of un- 
rest. 

The King has been paying a visit to Melilla and the scenes 
of the recent war. He was cordially received both there, and 
on his journey to and fro. A surprising change has been 
wrought in these African possessions of Spain since the war. 
Unwonted signs of enterprise and business activity are being 
manifested. There are Spaniards who maintain that Spain's 
mission is to conquer and civilize Morocco, and who would 
tirge the country to undertake this work. The obstacles, how- 
ever, are too great and the treaty bonds that hold her are too 
strong. It would bring her at once into conflict with France, 
to say nothing of other Powers. It is therefore, however at- 
tractive, a thing remote from practical politics. 



Events in Portugal have brought 
Portugal. to light a state of things which 

cannot but be distressing to all 

who sympathize with a country so long under exclusively 
Catholic influences. That the King should have been expelled 
with scarcely a hand having been raised to save him shows 
how slight a hold monarchy had upon the country. Those, 
however, who remembered how small was the effort to punish 
the assassins of his father and brother were not surprised at the 
general indifference ; but even the better informed did not ex- 
pect that the public would have tolerated and indeed have 
rejoiced in the glorification of these assassins. At the begin- 
ning of the year, however, there was inaugurated at Lisbon 
the " Revolution Museum " at the opening of which four Min- 
isters and various representatives of the authorities were pres- 
ent, as well as large numbers of the general public. In this 
Museum there was one hall designated " The Regicides' Hall." 
This contained the cloak worn by one of the assassins of King 
Carlos and the Crown Prince, and the weapons which were 
made use of, and these were decorated with wreaths and flowers. 
Attempts have been made to deny the truth of this outrage to 
common decency, but to no effect. 



852 RECENT EVENTS [Mar., 

Both sides in fact have been engaged in the futile attempt 
to conceal the real state of things, and to deceive the world. 
Reports were spread by Royalists that disaffection towards the 
Republic was widespread both in the army and the navy, and 
that the workingmen were putting forth impossible claims. 
There seems, indeed, to have been some truth in the latter 
statement, for there have been a great many strikes, not, how- 
ever, in all cases without justification. The demand of the as- 
sistants in stores, for example, that they should not be re- 
quired to work more than twelve hours a day does not seem 
unreasonable. But that there exists any serious insubordination 
in the army or the navy is declared, and apparently on good 
grounds to be a calumnious invention of reactionaries. There 
also have been repeated demonstrations on the part of the 
people throughout the country of confidence in the new tcgimc 
a confidence, however, which is not in all cases deserved. 
For, to all appearances, no government could have proceeded 
in a more arbitrary manner. By simple decree it has sought 
to carry into effect measures which demanded the longest and 
fullest discussion. To endeavor, for example, to separate Church 
and State by its own mere decree, shows how little the present 
authorities have realized what is the meaning of that govern- 
ment by the people which is of the essence of a Republic. 
The fact that to this proposal the inhabitants of the north of 
Portugal are offering strong resistance may be a means of 
teaching the right way in which a Republican fotm of govern- 
ment should be carried on. The many gross abuses that have 
grown up under the past regime doubtless render reformers 
eager to effect reforms as soon as possible. But to do this in 
an arbitrary way, is to perpetuate the worst of the former 
evils. This is true of the proceedings of the Provisional Gov- 
ernment, even when what it has done has been a real reform, 
as it has been in not a few cases. But several of its decrees 
are in their very nature acts of the grossest injustice and in- 
tolerance. The expulsion of religious, the separation of Church 
and State, and the divorce law, are indefensible both in them- 
selves and in the manner in which they have been carried out. 
And so to many who have no objection to the change the 
prospect is dark. 

There is very little expectation, whatever may happen, that 
the late King Manoel will be restored. It is said on what 



i9i i.] RECENT EVENTS 853 

should be good authority that only four telegrams were sent 
from the whole of Portugal to the members of the deposed Royal 
Family on the occasion of the New Year. Another aspir- 
ant to the throne, however, has appeared upon the scene in 
the person of Dom Miguel of Braganza. Dom Miguel's fa- 
ther, while Regent of Brazil, although heir to the throne of 
Portugal, placed himself at the head of the revolution which 
led to the separation of Brazil from Portugal. He became the 
first Emperor of Brazil, but lost all claim to the crown of 
Portugal, for even the most ardent legitimist could not bring 
himself to recognize the right of a revolutionist to reign over 
him. But what Pedro I. had himself lost, he, in violation of a 
very venerable philosophical maxim, thought to transmit to his 
daughter, Dona Maria da Gloria, and succeeded in so doing. 
It is upon her that King Manoel's right to the throne rests. 
Dom Miguel the father of the present claimant was persuaded, 
indeed, to swear fidelity to the new Constitution which was 
made upon Dona Maria's accession, but as is so often the case 
when perfunctory oaths are taken, he found a way of evading 
it. In transmitting the oath to Dom Pedro he enclosed a let* 
ter to him in which he declared that he had taken the oath 
only on condition that it involved nothing detrimental to the 
fundamental statutes of the Kingdom or to his own rights. 

So the present Dom Miguel has no scruple in declaring 
himself the rightful heir. He does not intend, however, to 
enter into any conspiracy against the Republic, or to take any 
active measures to secure the throne. He believes that the 
present experiment will not succeed, that the country will 
have to fall back upon the monarchical system, and that if it 
should wish to do so it would revert to the old Miguelist 
dynasty. The old Constitution would then be restored a con- 
stitution more democratic in its character than the recent one 
which gave the Cortes the right to depose the Sovereign and 
to substitute another, while in many other respects the Parlia- 
ment had more power. Financial reform, progress, and as 
much personal freedom as possible, would be his watchword. 
If the country should call upon him in its approaching hour 
of need he was ready as a duty to it, to come to its aid, how- 
ever thorny the path might be. 

It is beginning to be realized by some of the members of 
the government itself that the methods so far adopted have 



854 RECENT EVENTS [Mar., 

been despotic and arbitrary. The recognition of this is causing 
a definite line of cleavage between the advanced Socialist 
group led by the minister of Justice Senhor Affonso Costa 
and the Moderates or Conservative Republicans. Bureaucratic 
despotism, the policy of personal authority, is producing a re- 
action in favor of toleration, constitutional methods and legal- 
ity. In favor of the latter there seems to be a steady increas- 
ing consensus of opinion calling upon the government to formu- 
late without delay the electoral law which is to regulate the 
elections to the Constitutional Assembly. The government 
promises that those elections shall take place not later than 
April and that they will be sans violence. So far as is known 
the franchise will be restricted to those who are able to read and 
write. 

Turkey and its affairs and interests 
Turkey. internal and external have for the 

past two or three months been 

the subject of wide and prolonged discussion. When the revo- 
lution took place the Young Turks did not receive from Ger- 
many or Austria much in the way of sympathy or support. 
The latter country took, indeed, advantage of the situation to 
seek her own aggrandizement at the advantage of the Ottoman 
Empire. But this has not stood in the way of Turkey's throw- 
ing herself again into the arms of Germany, nor has it pre- 
vented the latter country securing a position of predominance 
if not equal to at least approaching that which she held in 
the days of Abdul Hamid. The Potsdam interview between 
the Tsar and the Kaiser has resulted however in producing a 
certain distrust as to the policy of Germany and to the sus- 
picion that the interests of the two countries may come into 
conflict Russia of course is the great enemy of Turkey, and 
when the Young Turks learned that arrangements had been 
made between the Kaiser and the Tsar with reference to the 
construction of railways within the Turkish dominions and 
this without consulting the authorities of those dominions, 
confidence in Germany's policy has considerably diminished. 
Turkey has been projecting, or at least thinking of, a system 
of strategical railways on the frontiers of Russia in North 
Eastern Anatolia. The arrangement made at Potsdam is said 
to have put a veto upon the construction of those railways 



i9i i.] RECENT EVENTS 855 

as well as to have secured for Russia a connection between 
a projected railway to be built in Persia under Russian auspices 
and the Baghdad railway which is being made by German 
subjects through Turkey's possession to the Persian Gulf. 
Action of this kind was altogether incompatible with the ideas 
entertained by the Young Turks as to the deference due to 
their country. Explanations have, indeed, been made by Ger- 
many but until a complete publication has taken place of the 
negotiations between Germany and Russia, judgment cannot 
be passed upon the character of the future relations between 
the Germany and Austria on the one hand and Turkey on 
the other. 

It is a fact of supreme interest that the scenes of the 
earliest events recorded in history, of the beginnings of the 
human race, the territory comprised within the ancient empire 
of Babylon and Assyria should be in process of being opened 
up by Western enterprise to the commerce of the world. 
The Baghdad Railway when finished will pass through Asia 
Minor, Mesopotamia and through the valley of the Euphrates 
to the Persian Gulf. And if the projected railway to be made 
through Persia connecting the Russian system with that of 
India is carried into execution of which there is good pros- 
pect, modern civilization will supplant, or at least affect, the 
regions once controlled by the unalterable laws of the Medes 
and Persians. An economical and social change will have 
been made as well as the political one which is at present on 
its trial in Turkey and in Persia. 

It is impossible, however, not to feel the gravest of doubts 
about the success of the political experiment which is being 
made in Turkey. Under the form of constitutional govern- 
ment, proceedings suitable only to a despotism of the rankest 
kind have taken place. The policy of Ottamanizing the nu- 
merous races within the empire has been adopted, and this by 
force of arms With the result of causing disaffection every 
where, and open revolt in several regions. It has been found 
necessary even to call out the reserves, so serious has the 
state of things become. The resources of the country, or 
rather the loans which it has been able to raise, are being 
squandered on the army and the navy instead of being used 
for the educational needs of the country and the development 
of its resources. Political prisoners have, it is said, been sub- 



856 RECENT EVENTS [Mar., 

jected to various tortures. This however has been denied, and 
a military court of inquiry has been appointed to investigate 
the charges. The fact, however, that it is a military court to 
which the matter has been referred has suggested doubts as to 
the outcome. 

Without any ceremony, followed by no criticism, certain 
members of the Democratic Party who were accused of pub- 
lishing attacks on Ministers were arrested and shipped off to 
an unknown place of exile by a secret Court-martial. It looks 
as if the leopard could not change his skin, and that the 
Turk under the best of circumstances must still remain the 
unspeakable. Rumors indeed were circulated towards the end 
of January that the mask of constitutionality was to be thrown 
off and that the War Minister, Shevket Pasha, who has for so 
long been the dominant influence, was to assume a virtual 
dictatorship. These have proved so far to be but rumors, and 
there is still reason to hope that Turkey may emerge from 
the dangers that threaten and attain some degree at least of 
political liberty. The foreign relations of Turkey remain very 
much in statu quo, except that with Bulgaria there is a pros- 
pect of a Tariff War. The Bulgarians while a part of the 
Empire enjoyed freedom of trade within its territories, and 
are said to be chagrined at this result oi their independence 
the paying of tariff duties. Being a frugal people, they do 
not like to pay the price, and independence has lost much of 
the value which they attached to it. 



With Our Readers 



ALMOST twenty-seven years ago the late Most Reverend P. J. 
Ryan came to Philadelphia from St. Louis. At that time 
Archbishop Ryan was in the prime oi his intellectual power and his 
splendid physical strength. From the day of his arrival from the 
West until the day of his death, there was a marked and progressive 
development of his influence in the religious and civic life of Phila- 
delphia. The evidence of his high and singular place in the com- 
munity was seen the moment his serious illness became known. 
Anxious inquiries flowed into the Cathedral residence from all parts 
of the world. Messages of sympathy came from the Holy Father, 
from the President, from the Governor of Pennsylvania, from clergy- 
men of every denomination, from professional men, and from citizens 
of the highest and humblest stations. 

It may be doubted whether any other prelate of the Church in the 
United States ever enjoyed in a higher degree and to a greater 
extent than did Archbishop Ryan, the personal affection of the 
people of all classes, for the esteem of those outside of the Church 
was but little less fervent than the love and loyalty of his own 
spiritual children. His dominating personality at every public 
function, civil or religious, his golden eloquence, the charming sim- 
plicity of his character, made the clergy and laity of Philadelphia 
proud of their distinguished Archbishop. 

The fruits of his wise and beneficent administration are seen in 
the growth of the Diocese of Philadelphia in a quarter of a century 
and in its present flourishing condition. In 1884 when he became 
Archbishop of Philadelphia there were 101 parishes, 260 priests, and 
58 parish schools. In his Jubilee Year of 1909 there were 247 
parishes, not including missions and chapels, 588 priests, and 128 
parish schools. 

The characteristic traits of Archbishop Ryan were easily recog- 
nized and fully appreciated. He always assumed a positive and 
unqualified attitude towards Catholic education, and always enun- 
ciated in the strongest terms that education should embrace reli- 
gious and moral teaching, and that religion and morality are in- 
separable. 

His prompt and willing acceptance and practical endorsement 
of every reasonable proposal for the advancement of religion in his 
diocese was the more remarkable because of a natural, conservative 
temperament, which, oftentimes, either looks unfavorably upon what 
is new, or gives it scant consideration. 

He exercised a commanding influence upon public opinion in 
every movement that concerned the social and moral life of the com- 
munity. 



858 WITH OUR READERS [Mar., 

His generous sympathy, his kindly nature, his exquisite tact, 
his consideration and appreciation of the opinions of those not of the 
household of the Faith, were potent factors in making Catholicity 
better understood, and in establishing on a sounder and saner basis 
the relations between Catholics and non-Catholics. At the same 
time, his broad tolerance never modified his clear and uncompro- 
mising exposition of the doctrines of the Church. 



THE following is one of some short papers written by the late 
Lionel Johnson. The authorship of these essays has only 
recently and with much labor been ascertained. They were tin. 
signed when published, and appeared, for the most part, in a 
journal of private circulation that has long since ceased publication, 
so that they are practically unknown to the reading public. We 
have fortunately secured a number of them that surely deserve to be 
widely known, and will publish them in the pages of THE) CATHOLIC 
WORLD. [EDITOR.] 

ON IRISH POETS WRITING ENGLISH VERSE. 

WRITTEN IN IQOO BY UONBI, JOHNSON 

That period of Irish decadence and despair which began with 
the violated Treaty of Limerick, and extended almost to within the 
memory of living men, saw the gradual decline of Gaelic literature 
in Ireland. If Goldsmith be our point of departure, and it be pos- 
sible to collect a body of Irish poetry in English, not unworthy of 
the name, persistently written from his time to ours, that is certainly 
not the case if we look back from Goldsmith's time to Strongbow's. 
As students of such a standard work as Dr. Douglas Hyde's recent 
Literary History of Ireland know but too well, the death-struggle of 
the Irish tongue was long and magnificent ; and an Irish Corpus 
Poeticum y let alone Literarium in general, reaching at least down to 
the age of Goldsmith, would consist, for the vastly greater part, of 
Gaelic and Latin works. There came a day, sad and, in a measure, 
shameful to Ireland, glad and altogther shameful to England, when 
Gaelic speech and literature, dead or dying amongst the wealthier 
and socially upper classes of Ireland, lingered on only in the hearts 
and upon the lips of an oppressed peasantry. From those hearts and 
lips it has never wholly fled, been banished and driven away ; nor 
indeed, has there ever been wanting a succession of Irish scholars, 
by birth or education raised above the humble level, to whom the 
national tongue has been a dear possession, and its preservation a 
sacred duty. That tongue is making to-day, with many signs of 
success, its last stand. But the last hundred years and more have 
witnessed, in all branches of literature, and notably in poetry, the 
rise of Irish writers who, proud of their nationality, have striven to 



i9ii.] WITH OUR READERS 859 

create in the English speech a body of work veritably Irish in spirit, 
in influence, and in tone. 

For reasons already indicated, and for reasons easily discover- 
able, English as an instrument of Irish poetry was late in achieving 
things memorable. The earliest poet of any eminence to shake off 
the conventionalities of eighteenth-century style admirable, as, in 
the hands of such as Goldsmith, they were, the first to join his 
English brethren of the "Return to Nature," of the "Romantic 
Movement,'* to enlarge his imagination and his music, was Moore ; 
to-day almost as undervalued as once he was madly overpraised. 
And since his day scarce an Irish poet of note, writing in English, 
has failed to realize that his literary bounden duty is to conjoin with 
his Irish emotions or themes a handling of the English tongue, 
which shall at least try to equal that of the approved English poets. 
Mangan, greatest of them all ; Sir Samuel Ferguson and William 
Allingham; among the living, Mr. Aubrey de Vere and Mr. Yeats, 
have written their very dissimilar works in this point. They and 
their best colleagues have not written, do not write a bastard Eng- 
lish : poems in an English contaminated with efforts after Irish 
idiom, are at once bad English and bad Irish. Doubtless, such de- 
lightful poets as Callanan and Walsh, to whom a Gaelic turn of 
phrase comes natural, whilst they possess at the same time a com- 
mand of pure English, have given us beautiful things ; and a cer- 
tain charming humor often finds excellent expression in that way. 
But it must be insisted upon that fine English poetry, poetry aiming 
at the heights of beauty in imagination and in music, conception 
and style, can be written by English-writing Irishman in an Irish 
spirit without violating the genius of the English language for 
verse. It may be intensely deplorable we think it is that all the 
greater poets in modern Ireland have been unable to write their 
poems in Irish; but it is admirable that they have chaunted the 
hopes, sorrows, heroisms, legends, myths, beauties, characteristics 
of Ireland with a purity of style, a mastery of technique, of which 
no English contemporary need be, or need have been, ashamed. 

In this direction the course of Irish poetry has been signally 
successful, a progressive artistic education or aesthetic training. 
Consequently with this there has been a renunciation of rhetoric, at 
no loss of passion and strength. Much of the verse dear to every 
Irish Nationalist has been avowedly and of necessity rhetorical ; as, 
for example, is the best and most stirring verse of Thomas Davis. 
But that "white soul" used plain and vigorous verse as part of a 
national propaganda. He chose to play Tyrtaeus for a definite 
practical aim. Yet Greece, which called Sappho the Tenth Muse, 
never called Tyrtaeus the Second Apollo. Rhetoric, when sincere, 
is a potent weapon ; and to be sincere it should be necessary, the 



860 WITH OUR READERS [Mar., 

right thing at the right time and place. The rhetoric of the 
" Young Ireland " singers was of that kind ; but it was not poetry 
in the highest, and it has beguiled Irish versifiers into writing much 
that seems an attempt to take Parnassus by sheer storm and Helicon 
by mere violence. There is in the fiercest poetry, as -^schylus, 
Dante, Hugo knew, a heart and central core of deep sincerity and 
peace. The noblest poetry, as a rule, is not that which rouses a 
mass meeting to enthusiasm ; and yet the loveliest and most august 
Irish poetry of our century is steeped in a passion for Ireland. 

We have touched upon certain false tendencies and qualities in 
much modern Irish verse, which one anthologist (Mr. Yeats) has 
been at pains to avoid in his selections. Such tendencies and quali- 
ties are largely inseparable from a prolonged state of national unrest, 
which throws off an abundance of hasty, unconsidered utterance, and 
affords something less than the amount and opportunities of leisure 
required for the cultivation of art. Further, they are natural to a 
people with imaginative feelings and sympathies widely diffused a 
people in which every other man is a potential poet, an actual 
dreamer, with a spirit readily responsive to things of the spiiit. Ire- 
land is full of half-poets ; it throws a light over her long difficulties 
and ancient griefs. But this floating, wandering, intangible spirit 
of poetry has seldom crystallized into formal art ; it has been wont 
to remain a fugitive and haunting gleam. Such it was even to the 
marvelous Mangan, whose verse at its brief and rare, but perfect 
best, is the supreme achievement of Irish literature in this century. 
And Ireland is too willing to accept, without discrimination or sense 
of proportion, all that her poets give her ; to take the poetic will for 
the poetic deed ; to love any appeal to her emotions more intimately 
than appeals to the more masculine qualities of the imaginative rea- 
son. The imaginative soul of Ireland is hard to stifle under an 
unsympathetic pedantry ; but, equally without doubt, it meets in 
official quarters with little of that wise encouragement without which 
the higher mental faculties do not attain to the height of their pos- 
sibilities. 

It may be that many names of her poets are little known in Eng- 
land, it may be that many have a limited celebrity in Ireland. To 
the average English reader, their themes are often strange and un- 
familiar ; Irish mythology, history, scenery, seem to him outlandish, 
and affect neither his heart nor his memory. To many an Irish 
reader, such things as the majestically and austerely philosophic 
poems of Mr. de Vere come with difficulty ; and Moore's melody at 
its glibbest or some ' ' Young Ireland ' ' drum-beat at its most boister- 
ous, more nearly approaches his notion of Irish poetry ; also, he is apt 
to demand a large supply of easy and immediate sentiment, some 
simple sprightliness or pathetic prettiness, catching to the fancy and 



i9i i.] WITH OUR READERS 861 

to the ear. It matters little, being a question of time ; the end of 
Ireland is not yet, and we are disposed to agree with the prophecy 
recorded by Giraldus Cambrensis, that it will not come "much be- 
fore the day ol Judgment," Without accepting all that enlightened 
enthusiasts and unenlightened fanatics talk about a Celtic Renais- 
sance, we cannot but feel and know that there are beginning and 
continuing in Ireland movements, some of them apparently discon- 
nected, which yet work together for an Irish spiritual ennoblement 
and intellectual enlightenment. 

An Ireland wherein no side of culture shall despise or ignore 
any other, whilst all sides and developments of it become thoroughly 
national, will be an Ireland regenerate and prepared to retake her 
ancient place of pride in the commonwealth of civilization. Angli- 
cized, Americanized, Ireland can never be; but, eagerly welcoming 
her own self -development upon the lines of her proper genius, she 
can become more richly, finely, effectively Irish than she has been 
for long years of dissension and obscuration. Towards such a con- 
summation, the Irish poets of this century, each with his individual 
voice, be it lofty and aloof or homely and heartfelt, have helped the 
course of Ireland, the " Dark Rosaleen " whom the least Irish-seem- 
ing amongst them have served. As Allingham the plaintive, pen- 
sive poet of far Donegal has pleaded : 

" We're one at heart, if you be Ireland's friend, 
Though leagues asunder our opinions tend : 
There are but two great parties at the end." 

And surely Irish poets do Ireland no disservice, if they labor faith- 
fully to express their Irish imaginings in an English verse worthy to 
express them ; if they strive to make the tongue of " the Saxon '' 
convey somewhat of the joyous or the mournful beauty that is in the 
indomitable heart of Ireland. Be that as it may, some five or six 
Irish poets have done it, in poetry that will not pass away until the 
passing away of Ireland. 



1T7HETHER they look to the betterment of the race, or the good 
VV of the individual ; the glory of the State, or the spread of 
God's kingdom on earth ; however remote their standpoint, however 
varied their view, the thought and effort of the wise and good con- 
verge to a common center and focus on the child as the corner-stone 
of the future. To reconstruct life we must build on the child, but, 
before we have children fit to rear a new order, much of the old 
order must be torn away. 

God alone can read us the riddle of the universe, and solve the 
problem of life, but God does not coerce. Man may lighten the 
burden of toil he cannot lift ; assuage the poverty he cannot prevent ; 



862 WITH OUR READERS [Mar., 

lessen the sin lie cannot efiace, and what he may do, that, as a 
Christian, he must do. 

In the Child-Welfare Exhibit, New York has had before it a 
great object lesson in the nature and extent of the handicap under 
which the child of to-day especially the city child enters and com- 
petes in the race of life. It proposed to show how far this is pre- 
ventable, " to furnish information of the kind that leads to action," 
* ' to point the way to lift the burdens from childish shoulders, ' ' to 
straighten the little back bent with the toil and sin of his elders and 
give the child a chance to walk upright and look heavenward. 

The lessons in this compendium of painstaking research were 
addressed to every age and every class. To better environment, a 
higher standard of home was held up to the working man, and to the 
capitalist it was shown, that to provide this home was a paying in- 
vestment. The display of foods and fabrics offered to mothers, the 
practical lesson that " a penny saved is a penny earned," and time 
given to home-made clothes, and home-made food pays better than 
sweated work. 

One of the strangest comments on our elaborate civilization is 
the need to teach children how to play. Loss of opportunity has at- 
trified instinct, and weakened vitality, for nothing quite fills the 
place of play for the physical development of the child. The willow- 
plume industry instanced graphically how childhood has been 
robbed of this opportunity and instinct by the avaricious contractor 
and the vain consumer. The low wage paid the heads of families 
engaged in certain kinds of work, is the compelling force which 
drives mothers and children into these sweated industries. Provis- 
ion for less work, for more out of door play, less dangerous to life 
and limb, for indoor recreation less injurious to health and morals, 
rest as an imperative duty upon all citizens. The Exhibit was fer- 
tile in suggestions as to the means. 

The bitter cry of the children " visited by the sins of the par- 
ents," the statistics of hereditary and preventable disease are an 
awful arraignment. Hospitals and nuns do much to alleviate the 
results of sin and neglect. They must be helped to do more ; but 
what means can avail to prevent, unless grace miraculously touches 
souls deaf to the curse of God and posterity. 

Educational achievement and promise were brighter notes. 
The opportunity for higher education offered by the Public Librar- 
ies and Museums of New York calls for more extensive recognition 
and use, by private and parochial, as well as public schools. 

The improvement in methods of relief ; the increased facilities 
for the care and improvement of deformed and defective children ; 
a treatment of delinquents which makes for correction, rather than 
punishment, and gives the Court guardianship where parents are 



i9i i.] BOOKS RECEIVED 863 

mentally or morally dead to their duty of control all these speak 
hopefully for future accomplishment. More hopeiul still, and of 
deeper import was the demand for increased religious training for 
the child. The figures need no comment 52 per cent, of the chil- 
dren attending day schools in New York are not enrolled in any 
Sunday School, 64 per cent, do not attend any. With the present 
time allowance, it would take the Protestant child forty-one years to 
get the equivalent in religion to his mathematics. The Parochial 
School is the solution offered by Catholics and Lutherans. 

Unfortunately, the figures showing the expenditure of the 
Catholic Church on the child were not shown. They would have 
made a deep impression. 

The Church as Spouse of Christ and a tender Mother has 
always guarded jealously the rights of the child. She demands for 
him the great opportunity of life and forbids the life "to be," to 
be sacrificed to the life "in being.' 1 Although upholding the sacred 
rights of the parent, she takes as her wards the helpless victims of 
violated rights, gives homes to the homeless, care to the sick, oppor- 
tunity to the unfortunate, education of mind and soul to the ignor- 
ant, correction and vocational equipment to the wayward. The 
exhibit contained some of her work for Child Welfare in Church, 
School, Institution, and Home Relief. It is to be regretted that 
much more of Catholic work for the children of Greater New York 
was conspicuous by its absence. 



BOOKS RECEIVED. 

BENZIGE* BROTHERS, New York : 

Life of the Venerable Gonc,alo Silveira, S.J. By Herbert Chadwick, S.J. Jesus is Wait- 
ing. By Matthew Russell, S.J. 75 cents Memorabilia; Gleanings from Father Wil- 
berforce's bote Books. Introduction by F. Vincent, O.P. $1.10. Dnal Kenny. 
By Joseph Guinan. $1.10 net. The Apostolate of the Press. By Charles D. Plater, 
S. J., M. A. 15 cents net. The Roman Missal in Latin and English. $1,85 net. 
JOSEPH SCHAEFER, New York : 

The Life of the Blessed Jhn B. Marie Vianmy, Curt 'of Ars. Compiled from approved 
sources. 15 cents. Litany in Honor of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Curd of Ars. 
15 cents per dozen. 
LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., New York: 

A Manual of English Church History. By Charles Hole, B.A. $1.25 net. Individual- 
ism. By Warren Fete. Ph.D. $1.80. A Roman Diary. By T. A. Lacey. $3 net. 
The Doorkeeper and Other Poems. By John W. Taylor. $1.25. Richard Baxter's 
Self-Review and Stephens Essay on Baxter. Edited by the Bishop of Chester. $1.75 
net. 
E. P. DUTTON & Co , New York : 

William Blake. By G. K. Chesterton. 75 cents net. 
THE TORCH PRESS, New York: 

Forest and Town. Poems. By Alexander Nicolas de Menil. $1.25 net. 
P. J. KENEDY, New York : 

Jesus All Great. By Alexander Gallerani, S.J. Translated by F. Loughan. 50 cents. 
D. APPLETON & Co., New York: 

American Corporations. By John J. Sullivan. $2 net. 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, New York : 

The Jews ; A Study of Race and Environment. By Maurice Fishberg. $1.50. Robert 

Kimberly. By Frank H. Spearman. $1.30 net. 
GlNN & Co., New York : 

The Classic Myths in English Literature and Art. By Charles Mills Gayley. 



864 BOOKS RECEIVED [Mar., 1911.] 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York : 

The Jukes, A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity. By Robert L. Dugdale. 
$1.50 net. A Short History of Women's Rights. By Eugene A. Hecker. $1.50 net. 
Shelburne Essays. By Paul Elmer More. $1.25 net. Incidents of My Life. By 
Thomas Addis Emmet, M.D. 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN Co., New York: 

The Battle of the Wilderness. By Morris Schaff. $2 net. 
OUTING PUBLISHING Co., New York: 

The Trail of the Tenderfoot. By Stephen Chalmers. $1.25 net. 
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, New York : 

The Oxford Book of Italian Verse. Chosen by St. John Lucas. $2. 
RUSSEL SAGE FOUNDATION PUBLICATIONS, New York: 

Homestead. By Byington. $1.50 net. 
B. HERDER, St. Louis : 

The Lives of the Popes. Vols. VI., VII. and VIII. By Horace K. Mann. $3 net per vol. 
The Dtctrineof the Communion of Saints in the Ancient Church. By J. P; Kirsch. Trans- 
lated by J. R. McKee. $1.35. A Romance of Old Jerusalem. By Florence Gilmore. 50 
cents. None Other Gods. By Robert Hugh Benson. $1.50. Father Tim. By Rosa Mul- 
holland. 90 cents net. Free Will. By Hubert Grueuder, S. J. 50 cents net. Church 
Symbolism. By M. C. Nieubarn, O.P. Translated by John Watereus. 75 cents. 
Life Through Labor's Eyes. By George Milligan. 30 cents. A Papal Envoy During 
the Reign of Terror. Edited by the Abbe" Bridier. Translated by Frances Jackson. 
$3.25. Catholic Theology. By D. I. Lanslots, O.S.B. $1.75. Pat. By Harold Wil- 
son. 50 cents. Historic Nuns. By Bessie R. Belloc. 75 cents. A Sheaf of Stories. 
By Joseph Carmichael. 80 cents. First National Catholic Congress. Official Report. 
$1.75 net. Certitude. A Study in Philosophy. By Aloysius Rother, S. J. 50 cents net. 
History of the German People. Vols. XV. and XVI. By Johannes Janssen. Trans- 
lated by A. M. Christie. $6.25 net, both vols. Mczzogiorno. By John Ayscough. 
$1.50. 
L. C. PAGE & Co., Boston: 

Under the Roof of the Jungle By Charles Livingston Bull. $2. 
G. W. THOMPSON & Co., Boston: 

The Little Past: A Cycle of Eight Songs of Child Life. Words by Josephine P. Peabody. 

Music by William Spencer Johnson. $i net. 
LITTLE, BROWN & Co., Boston: 

The Broad Highway, By Jeffery Farnol. $1.35 net. 
THE DOLPHIN PRESS, Philadelphia: 

Manual of the Episcopal Visitation. 75 cents. Report of the Parish Schools. Arch- 
diocese of Philadelphia. 
AMERICAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION, Cambridge, Mass. : 

The Child Labor Policy of New Jersey. By Arthur S. Field, Ph.D. $1.25. 
A. C. McCLURG & Co., Chicago : 

War or Peace. By Hiram M. Chitenden, U. S. A. $i net. 
UNIVERSITY PRESS, Berkeley, Cal.: 

The Process of Abstraction. An Experimental Study. By Thomas Verner Moore, C.S.P. $i. 
BROTHERS OF MARY, Dayton, Ohio: 

Manual of 'Christian Pedagogy. 50 cents. 
INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY, Brooklyn : 

The Shame of It. An Appeal to the Sense of Decency of Southern Catholics. By 

Lucian Johnston. 5 cents each. $2.50 per hundred. 
FORBES & Co., Chicago: 

Truth. Talks with a Boy Concerning Himself. By E. B. Lowry, M.D. 50 cents net. 
THE ANGELUS PUBLISHING COMPANY, Detroit: 

Izamal. By Joseph F. Wynne. 
AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY, Melbourne: 

Lacordaire and Lamennais. By Ruben Parsons, D.D. The Kingdoms of the World. By 

Louisa Emily Dobre*e. Pamphlets one penny each. 
LETOUZEY ET ANE. Paris: 

Les Evangiles Syntptiques. Par Eugene Mangenot. $fr. 50. 
PIERRE TEQUI, Paris: 

Allez a Lui. Par I'Abbe' Frdde'ric Riviere. 3 fr. 50. Le Bienheureux Thtophane 
Venard. d'apres les Te'moignages du Proces Apostolique. 2 fr. Ess&i sur la Foi 
dans le Catholicisme et dans le Protestantisme. Par 1'Abbd Snell. Le Prebleme du Mai. 
Par P. J. De Bonniot. $fr. 50. Visions d' Anne-Catherine Emmerich. Tomes I., II. 
et III. Par Joseph Alvare Duley, O.P. 
A. TRALIN, Paris- 

Oeuvres Completes de Jean Tauler. Traduction Litterale de la Version Latine du 

Chartreux Surius. Par E. Pierre Noel, O.P. 7 fr. 50. 
S. GABALDA ET CIE., Paris : 

L' Habitation Ouvriere et a Bon Marche". Par Lucien Ferrand. 2 fr. 'Histoire du 
Brfviaire Romain. Par Pierre Batiffol. 3/>. 50. 

LlBRAIRIE DE LA SOCIETF, DU RECUEIL SlREY, Paris: 

Le Droit EccUsiastique Matrimonial des Cal-uinistes Francais, Par Joseph Faurey. 
H. LARDANCHET, Lyon : 

La Petite E^lise de Lyon. Par C. Latreille, $fr. 50. 
LIBRERIA EDITRICE FIORENTINA, Firenze : 

Non Moechaberis. Per A. Gemelli, O.F.M. Lire 4. 



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