THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
MONTHLY MAGAZINE
OF
V
GENERAL LITERATURE AND SCIENCE
PUBLISHED BY THE PAULIST FATHERS.
VOL. XCVIII.
OCTOBER, 1913, TO MARCH, 1914.
NEW YORK:
THE OFFICE OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD
120 WEST 6oTH STREET.
1914.
CONTENTS.
Tin I ccK-ia. Abbot
N . 6j3
Ascr: -.. in the 1
Thrrc Centuries. Kertrand 1 .
... 772
Beginning. A At Railham. John
uah, . . . 153. 3 '7. 44^
Caldcy. How, Came Home. A. //.
67
California. The Oberammergau of.
Stuart Madden, . .183
Canon Sheehan. John J. Morgan, 486
lie Literature: A Convert's
of. Frederick D. Chester, 81
Catholic Maori, The, at Home.
354
Catholics and the Italian Elections.
JiinVrt. S.J.. . . . 664
Christian Asceticism in the First
Three Centuries. Bertrand L.
Conway, C.S.P., . . . 772
Church, The, and French Democ-
racy. Hitaire Belloc,
146. 3?9. 461, 593. 734
Clergy and Social Action in Ire-
land. The. Charles Plater, SJ., 43
Convert's View of Catholic Litera-
ture, A. Frederick D. Chester, 81
Council of Trent: The Original
Diaries of the. Bertrand L. Con-
CS.P., .... 467
Daughter, Soldier Songs of a Sol-
dier's. Myrtle M. Cavey, . .213
Democracy, The Church and
French. Hilaire Belloc,
146, 309. 461. 593, 734
Desert Type. The. L. March Phil-
lift's, 24
Disintegration, The, of Socialism.
Henry Sommerville, . . 173
Earliest Men, The. Sir Bertram
.1. ll'indle, LL.D., . 433, 652
Ecclesia Anglicana, The. Abbot
Gasqnet, O.S.B., . . .633
Edict of Pope Callistus, The.
Hcrtrand L. Conway, C.S.P., . 641
Education, Siberian. Richardson
\\'ri,jhi. . . . . . 740
Ethnology and Missionary Work.
C. C. Martindale, SJ., . . 790
Foreign Periodicals,
123. 264, 405, 555, 698. 835
General Convention, The. of the
I'rotrstant Episcopal Church.
John !'. Fcnlon,
he Superb. Joseph Francis
-
504
205
354
Hocking. Professor: The Meaning
d in Human Experience.
Edmund T. Shanahan, S.T.D.,
Home, Th'c Catholic Maori at.
M. ft
1 aldcy Came Home. A. M.
\ankirell, .... 67
Ideal. The One. W. E. Campbell, 364 Work, Ethnology
Industrial Relations Commission, C. C. Martindale, SJ
STORIES.
All -Alone Jim. Mary Catherine
'>'. .....
Nearly Two Thousand Years Ago.
George Woodruff Johnston.
The Personnel of the. John A.
h'yan, D.D., ....
Italian Elections, Catholics and the.
/. Quirico, SJ.,
Meaning of God in Human Expe-
rience, The. Edmund T. Shana-
han, S.T.D., ....
Men, The Earliest. Sir Bertram
C. A. Windle, LL.D.,
Millet, Jean Frangois. Charles
Baussan. .....
Music : The Time-Spirit in.
Thomas J. Gerrard, . 339,
Oberammergau, The, of California.
C. Stuart Madden,
On Certain Phases of Socialism.
William J. Kerby. Ph.D., .
One Ideal, The. W. E. Campbell.
Original Diaries of the Council of
Trent, The. Bertrand L. Con-
way, C.S.P., ....
Personnel, The, of the Industrial
Relations Commission. John A.
Ryan, D.D., ....
Philosophy of Social Progress, A.
W. E. Campbell,
Pope Callistus, The Edict of. Ber-
trand L. Conway, C.S.P., .
Protestant Episcopal Church, The
General Convention of the.
John F. Fenlon.
Railham, At A Beginning. John
Ayscough, . . . 153, 317,
Recent Events,
127, 272, 412, 561, 706,
Remainder, The Unconsidered.
Edmund T. Shanahan. S.T.D.,
Sacred Scriptures : The Westmins-
ter Version of the. Joseph Keat-
ing, SJ., .....
Siberian Education. Richardson
Wright,
Social Action, The Clergy and, in
Ireland. Charles Plater, S. J... .
Social Progress, A Philosophy of.
W. E. Campbell. .
Socialism: On Certain Phases of.
William J. Kerby, Ph.D., .
Socialism, The Disintegration of.
Henry Somerville,
Soldier Songs of a Soldier's Daugh-
ter. Myrtle M. Cavey.
Type, The Desert. L. March Pliil-
Time-Spirit in Music, The.
Thomas J. Gerrard, . 339,
Unconsidered Remainder, The.
Edmund T. Shanahan. S.T.D.,
Venice. Evelyn March Phillipps.
Westminster Version of the Sacred
Scriptures, The. Joseph Keating,
\Yith Our Readers,
'37,
The Curse of Castle Eagle. Kath-
The Passing of the Pequot.
34 " Oliver," ....
The Squire of Saint Louis. Joseph
Mills Hanson,
349
arine Tynan. 86. 225, 371, 517. 668, 798 Reid.
The Testing of Isabel. Christian
The Mission's Last Tenant. Mary
Catherine Crowley, . . . 47 g
The Visitor of Christmas Eve.
Annie Jolliffe, .
Erin's Resurrection. P. /. Cole-
man.
""" 2O1 u- i
In Spirit and in Truth. Francis P. Mickey,
POEMS.
Saints Round the Altar. Emily
Donnelly, SJ., .
789 The Consoler of the Afflicted.
Keeping in Giving. Emily Mickey, 326 Deborah Tollman,
221
664
i
433
603
496
183
289
364
467
221
721
641
504
448
841
577
54
74*
43
72i
289
173
213
24
496
577
794
54
851
790
760
194
615
327 '
182
53
CONTENTS
in
The Housewife's Prayer. Blanche
Kelly,
The Ideal. Eleanor Downing,
The Other Love. Eleanor Down-
ing, ......
The Sisters of Perpetual Adoration.
224 E. M. Dinnis, . . .516
731 The White Rider. Thomas Walsh. 667
" Yea, and His Own Life Also."
Francis P. Donnelly, S.J., .
Abel, ...
Addresses to Young Men, . . 696
A Divine Friend, . . . 695
Adventures in Papua, . . . 402
Agatha's Hard Saying, . . 403
A Group of Nation Builders, . 404
A Hosting of Heroes, and Other
Poems, ..... 246
Alleluia's Sequence from "Harmon-
ics," ..... 402
A Little Sister, .... 258
Allen's Defence of English Catho-
lics, ..... 552
American Literature, . . . 690
A Minimum Wage by Legislation, 401
An Average Man, . . .115
An Outline of Christian Thought
Since Kant, .... 255
Armelle Nicolas, 1606-1671, . . 553
Art in Spain and Portugal, . . 694
A Social Reformer, . . . 403
Austen, Jane, .... 547
A Wreath of Feasts for the Little
Ones, . . . . .in
Behold the Lamb, . . in
Beyond the Tomb, . . . 696
Blessed Sacrament Book, . .119
Bodily Health and Spiritual Vigour, 249
Bond and Free, .... 403
By the Blue River, . . . 830
Callista, . . . . .119
Cases of Conscience for the Laity, 697
Chart of Irish History, . . 826
Chippewa Music, .... 829
" Christ's Cadets," . . . 542
Columbus and His Predecessors, . 685
Commentarii in Psalmos, . . 262
Compendium Theologicae Dogmati-
cae, ...... 253
Corinne of Corrall's Bluff, . .261
Court Masques of James I., . . 548
Crime and Its Repression, . . 398
Culture and Belief, . . . 402
Daily Praise, .... 259
Devotion to the Blessed Virgin an
Earnest of Salvation, . . 696
Dieu: Existence et Cognoscibilite, 554
Dion and the Sibyls, . . . 403
Dirk : A South African, . . 682
Diurnale Parvum, . . .261
England and the Sacred Heart, . 828
Fabiola, . . . .119, 403
Faith, Hope, and Charity, . . 119
Fifth Book of the American Nor-
mal Readers, . . . .120
First Notions on Social Service, . 402
France To-Day, .... 682
Franciscan Tertiaries, . . . 541
Ghosts in General, . . .401
Good Friday to Easter Sunday, . 260
Gospel Verses for Holy Commun-
ion, ...... 403
Gracechurch, .... 244
Grievances in Ireland, . . . 402
Growth in the Knowledge of Our
Lord, . . . . .112
Guide to the Study and Reading of
American History, . . .106
Gustaye III. et la Rentree du Cath-
olicisme en Suede, . . . 554
Hannah of Kentucky, . . .118
Happiness and Beauty, . . no
Histoire de 1'Apparition de La Sal-
ette, 834
Histoire de la Philosophic An-
cienne, ..... 697
192
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
554 History of the Discovery and Con-
quest of Costa Rica,
Holy Land and Holy Writ, .
Homilies for Sundays and Feasts
of Obligation, . . .
Hors de l'glise pas de Salut,
How the Angel Became Happy,
Hygiene for the Worker,
Idols
Illustrated Catechism for First
Communion, ....
Immanence, ....
Initiatives Feminines, .
International Eucharistic Congress
of Vienna, ....
Introduction a 1'Union Intime avec
Dieu, .....
Ireland's Story, ....
Irish History, ....
L'Agonie des Fleurs,
L'Atheisme et L'Existence de Dieu.
L'Edit de Calliste ; tude sur les
Origines de la Penitence Chre-
tienne, .
L'Esclave des Negres, .
La Bonte chez les Saints,
Lacordaire, .....
La Femme Chretienne et La Souf-
france, .....
La Jeunesse de Wesley,
Landmarks of Grace,
La Vocation Ecclesiastique, .
Leading Events in the History of
the Church, ....
Le Miracle et ses Suppleances.
Le Mystere de la Tres Sainte Trin-
ite, . . .
Le Mystere de ITncarnation, .
Les Biases, .....
Les Commandements,
Les Conventionnels Regicides, .
Les Entravees, ....
Les Sept Sacraments de 1'figlise, .
Letter to a Religious Superior,
Letters and Instructions of St. Ig-
natius Loyola, ....
Let Us Defend Ourselves,
Life and Characteristics of Right
Rev. Alfred A. Curtis, D.D.. .
Life of the Viscountess de Bon-
nault d'Houet, . .
Life, Science, and Art,
Little Pilate, and Other Spanish
Stories, .....
Lourdes, .....
Lourdes and the Holy Eucharist.
L'Unite de 1'figlise et le Schisme
Grec, .....
Madame de Cosse-Brissac,
Manual of Self-Knowledge and
Christian Perfection,
Manuel de Sociologie Catholique,
Marcella Grace, ....
Marsh Lights, ....
Mass of St. Anthony, .
Meditations on the Agony of Our
Lord Jesus Christ,
Meditations on the Sacred Heart,
Memoirs of Baron Hyde de Neu-
ville
Merrilie Dawes, ....
Minimum Wage Legislation,
Minor Works of St. Teresa Con-
ceptions of the Love of God, Ex-
clamations, Maxims, and Poems.
495
823
248
696
262
401
118
403
695
121
262
121
833
552
4O2
696
833
553
553
696
254
833
121
403
262
107
834
263
554
262
554
554
261
263
696
552
697
686
688
822
393
403
402
263
833
119
834
403
39i
403
697
119
549
3Qi
401
IV
CONTEXTS
::us Sociales de
1'Cpousc Chrcticnne,
Modernism '" Thought,
',.,- / . '
1 mlin il Enl
ent II s'eleve, .
.
My Lady Poverty. . .
New Grange (Brugh Na Boinne)
and Other Incised Tumuli in Ire-
land.
688
404
261
402
402
257
land. .
:d 263
mcnt Rhymes,
.-, Hill, a Romance of Sacrifice,
,am, .
( izanam : I.ivre du Centenaire, .
Pages d'Art Chretien, .
church History for Use
with the Stereopticon,
icers of the Cross in Canada, .
Policy and Paint. ....
Practical Manual for the Superiors
of Religious Houses, .
Prodigals and Sons,
Purification After Death,
Quotations in Poetry and Prose,
Reeve's Physical Laboratory Guide,
Religious Orders of Women in the
I'nited States, ....
Report of the Commissioner of
Education for the Year Ended
June 30, 1912, ....
Retraites Fermees,
HI. me. .....
Round the Year with the Stars, .
nlotal Vocation,
Selected Poems. ....
Spiritism Unveiled,
\gnes
\ntonio of Economists, .
St. Anthony, ....
\nthony 's Almanac,
St. Francis de Sales and His
Friends. .....
St. Francis of Assisi, .
Rita of Cascia,
':-. of Colorado,
Sister Kthcldreda's Experiment, .
Social Renewal, ....
Soyons Apotres, ....
:.il Methods of Instruction,
Spiritualism and Christianity,
nlard Catholic Readers by
( ir.ules, .....
Sur Mnn Chemin,
;<d Labor and the Trades
Is Act. ....
nted Leaves and Other
Stories. .....
:< on the Diadem, .
'1 In- Administrative Removal of
i-ording to the Decree
Maxima ('lira. ....
The Catholic Church, The True
i h-irch of the HiMe.
The Catholic Student's "Aids" to
the I'.ihle
The Chief Sufferings of Life and
Their Remedies,
The Church and Labor,
The Church: A Mother to Ix>ve
and to lie Proud Of,
The Coming Storm.
ryston Family. .
ire of Alcoholism.
The Dominican Order and Convo-
cation.
The Kiithth Year. . . !
ipcror Marcus Aurelius, .
ulish Novel,
nth and Duties of a Catholic.
The Franciscan Poet* in Italy of
the Thirteenth Century,
830
829
121
122
263
404
247
68 1
832
691
402
393
118
550
393
833
403
105
121
828
542
121
552
403
120
I 06
403
I 2O
118
401
250
833
824
402
261
834
550
119
697
821
545
I 33
825
402
831
546
539
252
551
404
679
402
818
The Fundamentals of the Religious
Life,
The German Centre Parly, .
The History of the Protestant Ref-
ormation, .
The Holy Child Seen by His Saints,
The Holy Hour
The Honor of the House.
The Honourable Mr. Tawnish, .
The Housing Problem in Philadel-
phia, .
The Inside of the Cup,
The Interior Life,
The Irish Contribution to America s
Independence, ....
The Life of Blessed Henry Suso,
The Life of Christ,
The Life of Francis Thompson, .
The Life on Earth of Our Blessed
Lord for Little Catholic Children,
The Life of Rev. A. de Ponlevoy,
S.J
The Light of His Countenance, .
The Maid of Spinges, .
The Making of a Trade School, .
The Mantilla, . .
The Marriage of Mademoiselle
Gimel, . ...
The Melancholy Heart,
The Monk's Pardon,
The Morning Watch,
The Mother of Jesus in Holy Scrip-
ture, .....
The Nature of Human Society,
The -New France,
The Old Franciscan Missions of
California, ....
The Posture of School Children,
The Practical Catechist,
The Promises of the Sacred Heart,
The Real Democracy, .
The Religious Forces of the United
States, .....
The Revolt of Democracy,
The Road Beyond the Town,
The Saviour's Life,
The Seven Last Words on the
Cross, .....
The Seventh Wave and Other Soul
Stories, .....
The Sorrow of Lycadoon,
The Spirit of Our Lady's Litany, .
The Story of Mary Dunne, .
The Student's Handbook to the
Study of the New Testament,
The " Sumnia Theologica " of St.
Thomas Aquinas,
The Tears of the Royal Prophet,
The Temples of the Eternal,
The Veneration of the Blessed
Virgin, .....
The Vision of Peace, .
The Vocation of the Celt,
The Way of the Heart,
The Westminster Hymnal,
The Why and Wherefor of Paro-
chial Schools, ....
Thesaurus Fidelium,
Thirty Ways of Hearing Mass,
Thomas Hardy'a Wessex,
Through Good Humor to Happi-
ness, .....
Through Refining Fires,
Twenty-Two Hymns,
I'nexpected Affinities, .
I'niform Social Laws, .
Vers la Vie pleine,
Veuillot, Louis, . . . 121,
Vincent de Paul, .
Vocations to the Teaching Orders,
Woman in Science,
Worldlyman: A Modern Morality
of Our Day, ....
116
258
403
827
403
392
392
404
113
692
247
817
43
389
552
696
403
396
1 20
260
691
402
40?
248
404
241
826
109
"3
403
103
1 08
543
no
814
402
259
542
396
1 17
120
403
4OI
4O2
I I I
827
695
831
II-
543
399
1 20
402
397
lib
263
553
537
402
690
540
THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XCVIII. OCTOBER, 1913. No. 583.
THE MEANING OF GOD IN HUMAN EXPERIENCE.*
BY EDMUND T. SHANAHAN, S.T.D.
N attempt at a rational defence of religion is so rare an
event in these sentimental times as to deserve special
notice, whether one agree or not with the position
taken. The general tendency of thought is in the
opposite direction, religion being regarded as a mat-
ter of feeling, not to be dignified with the name of knowledge.
When the modern student of religious phenomena finds rational
elements intruding themselves on his attention at almost every
turn of the history of religion, he usually explains these away,
or at any rate thinks that he does so, on the old and flimsy theory
the persistent ghost of a defunct psychology that ideas
are nothing more than faint copies of feeling, pale replicas and
dreamy forms of the images of sense. This copy-theory of the
relation between ideas and feelings in human consciousness has
wrought untold mischief with the study of the nature of knowledge
in general, and religious knowledge in particular. In each case
the whole question at issue is prejudged by a metaphor, instead of
being investigated and decided on its merits.
The trouble, as Professor Hocking well and pointedly says, is
not with ideas, but with our idea of ideas. We make the initial
mistake of conceiving their nature and function too physically,
and then turn about, in the high dudgeon of a James or a Bergson,
*The Meaning of God in Human Experience. A Philosophic Study of Religion.
By William Ernest Hocking, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Philosophy in Yale
University. New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press. $3.00 net.
Copyright. 1913. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
VOL. XCVIII. I
THE MEANING OF GOD [Oct.,
, upon ifol themselves a long list of faults for which
-ml not they, are really to blame. The rigidity, poverty, and
nnitmle which it is the fashion of the times to see and deprecate
in the ideas we frame of reality, all disappear when we correct
our too mechanical conception of them; when we rightly conceive
the growth of human knowledge as from wholes to parts in increas-
ing distinctness, and not from parts to wholes by physical addi-
tions, as in a game of blocks or in a house of cards. Nor do
ideas rise from the sea of feeling to drop back again into the
parent waters, like spoondrift. They are not such phosphorescent
flashes on the surface of the spirit's deep. On the contrary, they
exist in their own right, altogether distinct from the feelings which
are their companions, and not, as some would have it, their vora-
cious devourers. " All feeling reaches its terminus in knowledge ;
cognizance and feeling are but different stages of the same thing." 51
It is to get beyond feeling, not beneath it, that we feel ; and con-
sequently the rational, the intellectual element in religion is not an
incidental by-product, a spark thrown off in passing, but something
which is essential, constituent, and distinctive.
All theories therefore which divorce feeling from knowledge,
or conceive the relation between these two as that of substance
to shadow, fall far short of the disclosures of human experience,
and fail to do justice to the facts. There is a compulsory ele-
ment in religion, and dogma is its expression. We are not left
to our own free choices. Obedience is as much a mark of knowl-
edge, if not more so than liberty. " Ideas are what we think with,
not what we think of, in the order of nature." t It is of an inde-
pendent object that we are forced to think, and the independence of
that object is capable of convincing proof. The plain matter of
fact to be squarely faced is that we are in contact with reality,
not merely as makable, but as given; not merely as passing, but
also as permanent. Valid religious ideas are consequently within
our reach; and these ideas are not arbitrary matters of choice,
nor mere instruments that serve us in the carrying-out of our grow-
ing purposes, as the pragmatists claim, but obedient, faithful rec-
ognitions of what experience plainly reveals as existing in inde-
pendence of our finite wills, purposes, and interests.
It is impossible then to establish the foundation of religion
on the quicksand of human feeling, or to fasten a volatile es-
sence upon it. Ideas are at its root and heart. " As mature persons
Pages 67, 68. tPage 79.
1913.] IN HUMAN EXPERIENCE 3
we can worship only that which we are compelled to worship."*
And such an object neither pragmatism with its lackadaisical offer
and enlargement of free choices, nor idealism with its holocaustic
sacrifice of the many to the one, can ever reach or furnish. To
reach the essential standpoint of religion, we must therefore turn
away from idealism and pragmatism to mysticism, to that mysticism
which is inherent in human experience, which yields us " an ade-
quate object of worship," and demands of us obedience and sub-
mission. In fact, religion is " the present attainment in a single
experience of all those objects which in the course of nature are
revealed only at the end of infinite progression." " Religion is
anticipated attainment.''!
There is one fundamental point in this fine preliminary anal-
ysis, with which we are heartily in accord. It is the claim that
we have a direct, immediate intuition of a reality not ourselves.
This is a fact of consciousness against which no theory to the
contrary should prevail, and we congratulate Professor Hocking
for having accepted the original report of experience, instead of
substituting another for it, as has been the fashion since Descartes'
time. Subject and object come to us united, in that direct stage
of experience which precedes reflection. This wonderful synthesis
may be pried apart by analysis, but it still subsists unbroken under
the concrete, intuitive gaze of consciousness. We have no direct
intuition of our own existence before having been aroused from
without. It is of a combined action of the subject knowing and
object known that we are primarily conscious, not of either apart.
The philosophers who refuse to acknowledge this fact, may spend
all the time and labor they please in attempting to derive the outer
world of objects from the inner world of selves, or vice versa.
All such fallacies of separatism lead eventually to disaster. We
must face the fact of simultaneousness here, and cease trying to
introduce priorities of any kind between our knowledge of self
and our knowledge of a reality distinct from, and independent of.
us. What better proof that we have an idea of independent reality,
than the fact that philosophers devote so much energy to proving
the idea worthless? Surely, they are not disputing about some-
thing of which they have no knowledge, with which they are
utterly unacquainted !
But, while we agree with Professor Hocking as to the fact
that we have a direct intuition of reality in the concept of being,
*Page 152. tPage 31.
4 THE MEANING OF GOD [Oct.,
we part company with him on the value which he attributes to this
concept. It is not so thoroughly ontological in character as he
seems to think. The concept of existence which we all have, and
which is also at the same time an experience, consists in an ex-
tremely vague, indeterminate knowledge that represents nothing
in particular, but everything in general. And this indeterminate-
ness which is its essential feature, necessarily implies and pre-
supposes that it is abstract stripped and despoiled of all indi-
vidual conditions. The abstract is essentially indeterminate; the
indeterminate essentially abstract. The fullness characteristic of
concrete reality is conspicuously absent. The idea we all have of
existence is therefore the intuition of reality in a concept which
represents it truly, but incompletely, and not a vision of reality in
itself '_, much less a vision of God.
Of the fundamentally real character of this concept, there
can be no legitimate doubt. But that it is real through and through,
completely so, representing not merely existence, but also an ex-
isting individual, this is an excess of realism which will not
bear searching scrutiny. We cannot know, a priori by a direct
intuition of the mind, the essence of anything. Essences do not
exist ready-made for our immediate inspection, and we enjoy
no such penetrative insight. All the essences we know, whether of
being or substance, motion or rest, are all abstracted by a spon-
taneous, natural, selective activity of the human mind. They are
mental products as well as real apprehensions. The productivity
of the human mind goes hand in hand with its apprehensions of
reality. That is why the essences we know are all generic and
transcendental, not mere matters of experience. In fact, strictly
speaking, we are not conscious of the concept of being; we are con-
scious rather that we possess it. It is a primitive, vague datum
in all minds, the starting-point of subsequent reasoning. In it
and through it we have an abstract mental representation of
reality, and not a concrete vision. The reality that we see is
no individual being in experience or out of it, but simply the
community of all things and persons in the possession of the
fact of existence. And even this community and communion is a
universal idea which the mind frames, not a fact of which we
have direct cognizance or immediate experience. The origin of
the idea of being is therefore the measure of its value, and this
value is that of a fundamental reality common to all, not of a
special reality particular to one. Knowledge is therefore the
1913-] IN HUMAN EXPERIENCE 5
reality of the surrounding world, incompletely apprehended; and
" dogma " an incomplete apprehension of the reality that is Divine.
It is this vision of a bare Existent shadowy and dim in
outline, and escaping all but the most meagre description which
forms the constant theme, on which the author plays a long
series of variations. Religion, inspiration, mysticism, dogma,
prayer, worship, revelation, infallibility, altruism are all defined
in relation to this grim and gaunt, almost spectral meaning of the
world Totality. The mystic wishes to become total;* dogma has
its origin in mystic impressions ;f the infallibility of the religious
institution proceeds from the certainty of its mystics ;$ prayer is
indistinguishable from the desire for a vision of the Whole ;
and worship like wise. || Such is the penalty attached to an attempt
to write history deductively to force the many into the one and
then out again, considerably the worse for the hydraulic pressure
of method to which they have been subjected. The result is a
lack of distinctness. None of the terms used contain the tradi-
tional meaning. Nothing is said of the supernatural life, distinct
from, continuous with, and superior to, the natural in which the
Christian mystics believed. Of course, we are well aware that in
a philosophical study of religion, a comparative method of inquiry
must have its place. But should it not be supplemented by a direct
method of study also, and not be exclusively employed?
Take, for instance, the question of altruism, as discussed by
the author in his disquisition on " vicarious happiness."^ A due
consideration of the Christian doctrine on this point would have
suggested a far different solution of the problem from the stoical
alternative to which he has recourse. Self-renunciation is not
proposed by the Christian religion as an end in itself, but as a
means to self -development. In procuring the good of others, I am
obtaining my own at the same time ; in working for humanity, I am
working for the glory of God also. The individual and the social
good, the divine good and the human, are not two opposite ends be-
tween which I am asked or expected to choose. Why then divide
them, and create opposition, where a simultaneous conception and
accomplishment are both possible? Why revive Stoicism? One
of the finest things about the teaching of Christ was the idea that
the good of God, of Self, and of Neighbor is one and the same
good in three relations simultaneously realizable. Surely, we have
*Page 387. tPage 457. tPage 455. Page 438.
HPage 418. fPages 136, 496.
6 THE MEANING OF GOD [Oct.,
not lost the faculty of seeing a thing in more than one relation, of
realizing that thought may be double-barrelled, of discerning the
individual, social, and religious aspects of a good that is three-
fold and yet one; undivided, though unfortunately not indivisible,
The mills of method grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small
on some occasions, emphasizing the common at the expense of the
specific, and to the impoverishment of the latter.
And while we are touching on this topic of separatism a
fallacy in which the thought of our day unfortunately superabounds,
separating aspects of problems, and setting them over against one
another as hostile opposites or contradictory choices we may as
well mention an ascription of this same fallacy to the Schoolmen,
made by the author in passing, which has no foundation in fact,
or at least, not a tithe so much as his words would lead the reader
to suppose. The Scholastics, he says, " incline (with their genius
for slippery distinctions) to invent a third status between truth
and falsehood wherein certain parts of religious dogma must con-
sent to dwell."* Nothing could be further from the truth than this
sweeping condemnation, nothing less deserved than this curt dis-
missal from consideration of philosophic thinkers who abhorred
the view attributed to them, and stamped it out of the schools of
the thirteenth century. In fact, only Siger of Brabant and Boethius
of Dacia, two lone figures in the Latin Europe of the time, took
refuge in this paradox of Averroism, against which St. Thomas
wrote in protest the two works, De jEternitate Mundi, and De
Unitate Intellectus contra Averroistas. The " slippery distinction "
in question was of Arabic, not of scholastic origin. It was foreign
to the genius and common presupposition of Christian philosophy
from the beginning, to admit any essential lack of harmony or im-
possibility of reconcilement between natural and revealed truth.
The Schoolmen were anything, therefore, but the artful mental
cabinet-makers alleged, and the idea of a twofold truth never se-
cured a foothold in the Middle Ages, thanks to men like St. Thomas
who banned in the thirteenth century the all too apparent artifice
and subterfuge which Ritschl, and the pectoralists generally,
warmed over and re-served in the nineteenth. The author's pen
slipped in writing this severe notice, and we feel sure that he will
withdraw it from later editions in the interest of historical truth
and accuracy.
The results of the author's preliminary inquiry into the ele-
*Page 61.
1913.] IN HUMAN EXPERIENCE 7
ments, common to all natural forms of religion, are regarded as
furnishing a fresh background and new frame for the ontological
way of establishing the Divine Existence; and the remainder of
the volume is accordingly given over to a restatement of this po-
sition, an unfavorable review of the traditional proofs from reason,
the meaning of mysticism and worship, and finally the fruits of
religion. His claim is that we have a veritable experience of
" Infinite Spirit other than ourselves."* The idea of God is im-
plicitly present in some " elemental experience," though not ex-
plicitly recognized at once as there. The most primitive fact of
experience itself is the experience of that Not-myself which is
permanently making me.f The original source of this knowledge
of God is an experience of not being alone in knowing the world,
especially the world of Nature.! This fundamental experience
and its idea deserve to be called concrete a priori knowledge,
because prior to all further experience^ My current social ex-
perience, the finding of any fellow finite mind, is therefore an ap-
plication of my prior idea of Another; in a sense, an application of
my idea of God.|| In my experience of Self and Nature, I am ex-
periencing identically all that Other Mind which is contemplating
that same object^ The great Other Self whom we call God is im-
plicitly present in the knowledge we have of Self and Nature. God
then is known and permanently known as that Other Mind, which
in creating Nature is also creating me. " Of this knowledge," says
the author, " nothing can despoil us." This knowledge has never
been wanting to the self-knowing mind of man."**
The foregoing exposition is a mosaic of the author's own state-
ments, rearranged by the reviewer to economize space. It will be
seen at a glance that Professor Hocking's appeal is to the realism
of social experience rather than to natural realism to the world
of selves rather than to the world of things. The validity of this
appeal is open to question. It has about it that persistent Car-
tesian fault of regarding the knowledge of self as somehow pre-
ceding the knowledge of external objects, and it is inconsistent
furthermore with the original intuition of consciousness in which
the Self and the Not-self are found simultaneously together. The
author has evidently forgotten here the fact of simultaneous pre-
sentation, which cuts the ground from under all such priorities as
he endeavors to establish.
*Page 241. tPage 570. tPage 236. SPage 278.
II Page 297. flPage 299. **Page 297.
8 THE MEANING OF GOD [Oct.,
But let that pass. The logic of the situation, as he sees it,
is ontologism; not the old ontologism of St. Anselm, which made
a flying leap from idea to reality, but the more moderate kind
which claims that the mountain has already come to Mahomet, and
rendered unnecessary Mahomet's journey to the mountain. It is
not, therefore, an inference from an idea to a corresponding reality,
but the exact reverse of this, which Professor Hocking proposes.
The idea we have of God, he says, is also at the same time an ex-
perience; and all we have to do is to recognize the experience for
what it really contains. This experience was " miserably " ex-
pressed by early man in his groping after spirits, but it is none the
less true and valid as a report of fact, for having been thus mis-
read and misinterpreted. God was already there and grasped in
the sense of mystery* which early man experienced, but could not
properly declare. The idea he had of God lacked no essential ele-
ment. All that it lacked was that ever-increasing richness of con-
tent which the historical course of human experience has since
added to it.
What are we to think of this enthusiastic discovery and pre-
sentation of the author? Is this what the "citizen of no mean
city " meant when he bade the Athenians " seek God, if happily
they may feel after Him or find Him, although He be not far
from everyone of us ? " It is necessary to distinguish sharply at
this point between the facts of experience and the construction which
the author is pleased to put upon them. The two do not hang so
inseverably together as is claimed. In acknowledging the real ob-
jective character of human experience, Professor Hocking has made
a most timely and most worthy contribution to the overthrow of
anti-realistic philosophy too long in the ascendant ; but in maintain-
ing that an ontological interpretation is the only one which this
objectivity of human experience will bear; in contending that the
knowledge of Another which we primarily have is the knowledge
of God, he has hung his theistic thesis on an extreme form of re-
alism, tried and found wanting on so many previous occasions as
to justify the prediction that it will not prove capable of surviving
on this, notwithstanding the new and bright manner of its rehabilita-
tion, with all the sciences lending their variety of color to its dress.
It is curious how history repeats itself in this attempt to
revive ontological ways of thinking; and it is interesting to note
that about the middle of the last century Catholic schools of
*Page 233.
1913.] IN HUMAN EXPERIENCE 9
thought witnessed a like series of attempts at constructive synthesis
by ontologically-minded men. There was Gioberti, to begin with;
and Rosmini later, not to mention Orestes Brownson, the distin-
guished participator in the Brook Farm Movement of the late
forties. In the Vatican Council, the late Pope Leo, of glorious
memory, then Bishop of Perugia, sought to have the Council con-
demn the proposition that an immediate vision of God was natural
to the human soul. Monsignor Gasser, the Chairman of the Com-
mittee on Faith, pleaded against consideration of this proposition
at the time by an already overburdened committee. Besides, the
matter had already been settled ten years before when the ontolo-
gists submitted to the Holy Office a summary of their doctrine in
seven propositions which, after mature examination, were singly
and severally condemned. Ontologism, under whatever form pro-
posed, confounded our natural knowledge of the Creator with the
supernatural intuitive vision reserved for the blest in the future
life. This was the reason of its condemnation. Among the seven
propositions condemned was the following, which is singularly
pertinent to the present issue : " A connate knowledge of God,
simply as Being, includes in an eminent way all knowledge, so that
through it we implicitly know reality under whatever form it is
knowable."
The ontologists made the same appeal to the mystics then as
Professor Hocking does now, only to be beaten off in their effort
to wrest to themselves and to the support of their own thesis this
august patronage of the Saints. It was pointed out to them that
mysticism was the state of grace become conscious, and that this
religious experience of God and the supernatural afforded no proof
whatsoever of the purely philosophical position of ontologism.
The rich legacy of Christian experience was not to be exploited
by thesis-hunters in search of material for foregone conclusions
and preconceived ideas. Ontologism would yield only an emaciated
Christianity at best, and it was doubtful if it would yield even
that. The whole matter was thus threshed out adversely in all its
bearings. Professor Hocking is, therefore, ploughing no new
ground in the present thesis. He has taken a road well beaten,
over which some Catholic philosophers of no mean merit tried to
travel, until they found the going rough, and the chosen way no
thoroughfare.
But to return to the main line of thought from this side-excur-
sion into history. We were speaking of the rehabilitation of on-
io THE MEANING OF GOD [Oct.,
tologism, and the curious instance which it affords of history
repeating itself. This repetition is not so curious, however, when
we look into the proximate conditions by which it was brought
about. Like circumstances, like results. There has been a growing
dissatisfaction for some years past say fifteen to twenty with
absolute idealism; with its tendency to uncontrolled speculation;
with the all too subjective character of its methods; and especially
with the persistent habit which professors of this particular brand of
philosophy all seem to have, of tunnelling under experience for
reality instead of looking for it on the surface-level of conscious-
ness. Pragmatism expressed this dissatisfaction in no uncertain
voice, and disturbed the absolutists in their dogmatic slumbers, long
enough at least to make them open and rub their eyes. But prag-
matism itself was so half-hearted in the measures of relief which
it proposed, that it provoked a counter reaction in the present
vigorous movement of neo-realism, which is slowly feeling its way
back from the recesses of idealism to the world of external rela-
tions. Pragmatism, it has been said, Was not a philosophy, but a
clever attempt to avoid one. However this may be, the fact re-
mains that pragmatism, despite all the practical opportunism which
it incidentally at least professed, did not furnish an adequate
object capable of winning and holding the worship of man. For
this reason as for others, neo-realism is crowding it off the stage
at the present writing. The need of bringing philosophy back
to a closer contact with reality was never so widely felt in modern
times as now. The psychological climate has again changed. Is it
any wonder then that, in response to such a situation, ontologism
should find all the stars again propitious for its reappearance?
It has always had the alluring air about it, of bringing mystery
from heaven to earth, of letting us touch the intangible, and lift
the veil, as it were, from the very face of the Unseen.
No one acquainted with the monopoly of modern thought by
monistic idealism can fail to appreciate the effort now being made to
dissolve this philosophical " trust." Its dissolution is the pressing
need of the hour, if philosophy is to be reformed and given a new
orientation. But we have our fears that the solution proposed by
Professor Hocking would really prevent the trust in question from
continuing under a change of name. It is indeed true that we have
the idea of Another, and that we are in direct relation with a reality
not ourselves. But that this reality with which we are in immediate
relation is the reality of God rather than that of things, does not
1913.] M HUMAN EXPERIENCE 11
at all follow. It is altogether too much to claim that the idea of
God is a premise, not a conclusion. Idealism has been so long
trying to solve the problem of the world from the divine side, that it
is time we became more modest, and considered the immediate
human origin and character of our knowledge and of our problems
in the world about us.
Granting that the idea of God arose in no superstitious igno-
rance of the causes at work in the upheavals of nature, but rather
in a sense of the mysterious as something knowable, if not known,
would the rejection of this ignorance-theory of Spencer's, due
wholly to his blunder in mistaking the manifestation of an idea
for its actual source and origin, entail as a necessary consequence
the admission of ontologism as the only philosophy that grew out
of the facts or fitted into them? Is there no middle ground? And
if, as the author avers, the consciousness which we have of God, of
Nature, and of Other Selves is common, is this common conscious-
ness analogical or uni vocal? And if the latter, have we really the
distinctive idea of God brought before us for consideration, are
we not rather dealing throughout with the indeterminate idea of
being-in-general, which is not the primal fount of reality at all?
And are the " wholes " which we know, and spend our lives round-
ing out and filling in, proofs of our knowledge of the actual In-
finite, or of something else vastly different in nature from this?
The author says " there is indispensable truth in the tendency to
incarnate God in His works, and to think of Him as there where
His activity is and His objects are."* He does not consider it
" wholly wrong " to speak of God as " an object among objects."
All of which statements, it seems to us, come perilously close to
identifying the idea of God with the idea of being-in-general. At
any rate, the author clears no middle ground, nor does he anywhere
seem to take into due account that external experience, in contact
with which our internal experience originally arose, and still arises.
According to him, the idea of God is a report of experience, coming
from idea masses proximately, and from some elemental experience
originally. The thought of Nature as dependent on Spirit is some
quick embodiment of an elusive but genuine experience. Accord-
ingly, " the ontological argument is the only one which is wholly
faithful to the history, the anthropology, of religion. "f
On the truth of this last statement we would take issue
with the author. It seems to the reviewer too ambitious and too
*Page 321. tPage 307.
12 THE MEANING OF GOD [Oct.,
exclusive to be capable of establishment, and the reasons for
thinking so are three. First of all, the history of religion does
not so conveniently lend itself to any such interpretation. In
the second place, the rational proofs of God's existence rest on
considerations quite other than the author supposes. And, finally,
the facts of experience are implacably at odds with the ontological
supposition of the author, that God is the first object known, or
that knowledge of Him comes to us in some simple, direct, pas-
sive manner of recognizing His presence. A few words on these
three points in turn.
The widespread existence of polytheism in the history of re-
ligion is a fact which cannot be lightly dismissed, on the theory
that " polytheisms are aborted monotheisms."* Abortive panthe-
isms would be much nearer the truth. The supposed tendencies
of polytheism toward monotheism are speculative rather than prac-
tical, metaphysical rather than religious. They existed among the
educated class and left the mass of mankind unaffected. " A poly-
theism that is not in some sense a henotheism," says the author,
" has yet to be discovered." Even so, nothing would follow. A
god supreme over all the members of a college of deities is entirely
different from the one and only God of the lowest forms of mono-
theism. Henotheism is so much a political idea and result, that
a most generous amount of supposition is required to see in it any
elements of real religious unity or progress. We cannot take it
for granted that universal, unwavering progress in religion is true.
There has been decline as well as advance. What common laws
of progress, for instance, would explain the unique fact of Jewish
monotheism ? None.
Only in Israel, among a non-political people, does the idea of one
only God appear as an object of immediate belief, not due to meta-
physical reflection or political syncretism. Elsewhere monotheism
is not, as in Israel, a religious movement leavening the average
mass of mankind, but a metaphysical movement confined to the
cultured few, and discernible only in their speculations. In the his-
tory of religion among the nations at large, the idea of a single
supreme Being is the result of long metaphysical speculation, and
not an experience of which the religious consciousness has direct,
immediate intuition. Evidences there are of a primitive monothe-
ism, and of a primitive revelation made to man evidences of a
purely historical character. These evidences, however, are all of
*Page 325.
1913-] IN HUMAN EXPERIENCE 13
an existing belief in monotheism, and not of a monotheistic idea
gathered from experience in the immediate manner claimed by the
author. We are at a loss, therefore, to account for his dogmatic
assurance, both as to the facts and their interpretation, when he
says : " There is no such thing in history as a primitive monotheism :
but there is a permanent singleness in the thought of deity which
man forever departs from, through loyalty to the variety of deity's
manifestations."* To which we would venture the reply, that a
permanent singleness in the thought of deity is not the permanent
thought of a single deity by any means. Polytheism was, there-
fore, not on the way to monotheism, nor a series of abortive at-
tempts at it, but rather a succession of lapses in another direction
altogether.
To explain it we shall have to abandon as too speculative,
abstract and arbitrary, all theories of the derivation of monotheism
from polytheism. To suppose, as the author does, that the latter
was simply a roundabout process clearing the ground for an in-
tuition of Deity, is to project a modern theory into ancient data
indifferent to it. A merely natural religion historically never existed.
The widely-different religions that appeared in the course of his-
tory cannot be exhibited as manifestations of some one, single, un-
derlying, simple form working its way up from rude beginnings to
polished perfection, according to the conditions of time and place.
The contradictory character of the various religions cannot be dis-
solved, by supposing that a permanent singleness of thought, sub-
jectively vague and abstract enough to fit all, objectively definite and
concrete enough to fit none, was really at the bottom of the whole
matter. Objective differences yield themselves to no such sub-
jective unification. The comparative method, by suppressing differ-
ences, gives us only a composite photograph of religions. The direct
method, by restoring the differences suppressed, furnishes us with
a series of individual photographs, distinct, irreducible. The two
methods must supplement each other, or we shall mistake resem-
blances for identities before we are through with our investigation.
It is more in accord, therefore, with the exigencies of method
and the variety of the historical data, to leave the facts in their
original complexity, than to treat them as instances of the unfold-
ing of one idea, especially as this one idea is a product of com-
parative analysis, and not of direct examination. When left in
their original objective complexity, the facts of the history of
*Page 325.
i 4 THE MEANING OF GOD [Oct.,
religion plainly show that a spontaneous knowledge of God pre-
ceded all attempts at scientific demonstration. Reason was at work,
before reasoning came into play. Historically speaking, apart from
the fact of a primitive revelation, the idea of God seems to have
been due to the activity of all man's powers in concert, reason
playing an active part in its acquisition, through the unnoticed
working of the principle of causality, which, as the author well
says, is " no mere form relating events without an objective counter-
part." Man had a right principle then as now, inherent, undemon-
strated, universal. But he misdirected and misapplied it, owing
largely to the fact that he had as yet no conception of the unity
of Nature as a whole. The result was widespread belief in a num-
ber of superior beings instead of belief in one supreme Reality;
multiplication rather than unity. The facts lend themselves with-
out forcing to this interpretation.
Nor, in accounting for the natural origin of the idea of God,
apart from the fact of its revelation, should we commit the fault
of severing man from his concrete context in the world of things,
and read backward into history, as so many do, a late Cartesian
method and point of view. The inner experience of man, primitive
or modern, should not be divorced from the outer experience which
is its permanent well-spring. The two should go together in theory
as in fact. The latter is a source of the idea of God no less than
the former. We live in a world of things as well as in a world of
persons, and physical nature as distinct from human is a mirror
of the divine. In fact, the idea of being does not come to us in
the first instance as an experience of our own selves severed and
sundered in Cartesian fashion from the world of things about us :
it comes to us from the world of objects and the world of selves in
mutual relationship and reaction. The point of departure for all
our knowledge is the visible world, and this fact should receive rec-
ognition, notwithstanding theories to the contrary. And when it
does, we shall see that priority, if it be anywhere, is here, and
not in the recognition of other selves, or of the Supreme Self
which is God. The order of being is not the order of knowing.
God Who is the first in the order of existence, is not thereby the
first in the order of knowledge. The process of knowing Him is
therefore not a process of gazing directly into the essence of His
Being, but a process of seeing the rational necessity for His exist-
ence, if the world of things is to have an explanation, and the
world of persons a more than human aim and destiny. The in-
1913.] /A r HUMAN EXPERIENCE 15
ability of the world to explain itself, its insufficiency to satisfy
either the mind or the heart of man, these it is, naturally speaking,
which open up the vista of eternity.
The idea of God is thus no flying leap from thought to reality,
but the exact reverse. It is a spontaneous conclusion first, a rea-
soned conclusion afterward, and not a primitive intuition prior
to every other item of experience. Were it the latter, appearing
at the level of sensation rather than at that of reflection, how
could history have been so polytheistic, atheism so recurrent, philos-
ophers so given over to proving the existence of God, and ontol-
ogism so late in making its appearance in learned circles? Ontol-
ogism, even in the history of speculative religious thought, crops
out only in spots since the eleventh century, and has always had
about it the appearance of a belated arrival and suspicious guest.
It is hard to see how the idea of God could have been so intimately
present in human experience, and yet have managed to escape de-
tection by the learned all along, save those latter-day few who
confess to have found it there, though they have to labor more than
one point to uncover its presence; though their discovery of it is
always open to the suspicion that it was suggested by some construc-
tive synthesis in which they were interested, rather than by the
pressure or the disclosures of experience itself. It seems to be a
systematic rather than a spontaneous inspiration, from Anselm's
days to our own, and before.
The author rejects the traditional proofs of God's existence
as yielding " a limited Being, Who is only as great as His world,
only as good, and finally only as real."* This criticism is unde-
served, as the following outline will serve to show. An inquiry into
the nature of things leads inevitably to the Self-Existent as their
causal ground and source. Between the Absolute Being thus
reached and the created world of things no direct resemblance, no
agreement in the possession of the same identical qualities is pos-
sible, and none is asserted. The Absolute cannot be classified or
defined in the sense of being brought into relations of generic or
specific agreement with any objects we know or concepts we frame.
But there is another kind of resemblance which is wholly indirect,
the resemblance of two proportions, or analogy. The relation of
God to His absolute nature must be proportionally the same as that
of creatures to theirs, however infinite the distance in perfection
between the two.
*Page 305.
16 THE MEANING OF GOD [Oct.,
The terms and concepts employed to express this proportional
resemblance are therefore analogical and not univocal. We have to
think God under the relative, dependent features of our experience,
it is true, but no necessity compels us to make the accidental fea-
tures of our knowing the essence of His being. The author's
criticism is wide of the mark, therefore, when he says that " by such
ways we can only reach a being in whom the qualities of experience
are refunded, without change or heightening."* Such are not the
ways which the old proofs follow. A " heightening process," so
far from being absent, is their most conspicuous accompaniment.
This process consists in raising to unlimited significance the objective
perfections discernible in the world of things and selves. In the
light of this applied corrective, we are enabled to attribute to the
Self-Existent Self the perfections manifested in created intelligence,
will, power, purpose, personality, and goodness, without making the
objective content of the idea of God either the human magnified or
a bundle of negations. Consequently, none of the limitations in-
herent in our modes of knowing or objects known are carried over
into the Divine, and refunded there without change. Quite the
contrary.
Most of the modern criticism directed against the traditional
way of proving God's existence is unfair, because of a serious over-
sight. The old rational scheme of proof kept closely in contact
with history; with the average mass of mankind, and with the spon-
taneous idea of God which is acquired long before any reflective
inquiry into its validity is instituted. It is in connection with
this direct, spontaneous, natural, primitive, anticipative concept
of God, gathered from the consideration of Nature and of Self,
that the old proofs sought to elaborate a scientifically reasoned
out and rounded out concept. They were, therefore, no isolated
venture in pure reasoning, but a critical justification of the his-
torical, universal, spontaneous reason of man. To wrench them
out of this empirical setting and historical background, is to do
them gross injustice to make hungry-looking skeletons out of
what really were the expression, not only of man's total reaction
upon his environment during the long course of history, but also,
and more truly, the expression of his total reaction from it and
beyond to the infinite Primal Reality which is its creative source,
sustaining power, and final goal.
None of these proofs intended or pretended to be exhaustive.
*Page 305.
1913.] IN HUMAN EXPERIENCE 17
Any criticism of them from this point of view is delivered in the
air. Each was regarded as manifesting or disclosing some attribute
of Deity, not all. The object of the rational process instituted
was to force up into explicit reason a previous process which had
been spontaneous in character, as is our natural belief in the reality
of an external world. In other words, a deductive process laid
bare the amount of positive information contained in each of
the inductive evidences or proofs. Induction and deduction were
thus made companion processes, and not the divorcees which they
now for the most part are. If we omit from consideration this
spontaneous knowledge which precedes all reflective inquiry into
its validity, but does not precede all knowledge of the visible
surrounding world, we shall naturally be misled to regard the whole
scheme of argumentation as a detached, pure reasoning process in
which experience figures to little or no extent.
This was the misconception into which Kant fell when he wrote
his criticism of the rational scheme of demonstration. He over-
looked the fact that the scheme in question was a file of argu-
ments, each of which " marked time," so to speak, until the others
came up, took their place in the line, and added their contributory
testimony, to elucidate the nature of that Necessary Being whose
existence, reason, heart, and conscience conspired to prove. The
consequence was that the philosopher of Konigsberg rejected this
broad scheme for the narrower one of the moral argument, with
the result that the latter broke down under the undistributed strain
it was thus compelled to bear. Kant thought the question one of
finding a proof that would do all the work unaided; and, not find-
ing in the old series of arguments anything which answered this
description or fulfilled this arbitrary requirement, he declared the
whole affair " a veritable nest of dialectical assumptions."
But it was far from being such in point of fact. The pur-
pose was to conceive a plan of demonstration so large and broad
that no argument should be excluded which offered its testimony
conjointly with the others, and especially with the metaphysical ones
that led the way. Isolation was avoided, cooperation welcomed.
There was always a distinction observed between the theoretical and
the practical, the speculative and the moral reason, but this dis-
tinction was never allowed to amount to an actual separation, as it
did for the first time with Kant, unfortunately for the whole course
of development in subsequent thought. That is why, to the follow-
ers of Aquinas, Kant's argument from the moral conscience is not
VOL. xcvin. 2
i8 THE MEANING OF GOD [Oct.,
conceived as a substitute for those drawn from reason, but as an
addition to them. It is not a case of monopoly, but of friendly
competition.
In fact, not a little of the trouble in the matter of judging
the worth of the rational proofs of God's existence has been due
to the attempt to create an exclusive monopoly of explanation.
Idealists offend in this regard. So do the ontologists, and their
most recent spokesman, Professor Hocking. The Catholic theolo-
gian is not so exclusive in his attitude. He wishes with all his
heart and mind for a constructive synthesis, but he does not wish
for one which deduces all history and all human experience, magi-
cian fashion, out of a single universal idea. History, life, truth,
reality are for him complex and not simple. For him there is no
simple religion, no simple life, no simple truth, no simple world of
ideas, but a complex reality to each and all of these, which cannot
be condensed into a single formula, or reduced to a single experience
of an elusive kind. When he uses the word " experience " he does
so with an adjective attached, the adjective " objective." And
when he speaks of reason, he means the spontaneous reason which
accompanies the work of sense actively, interpenetratingly : he does
not mean " reasoning," which is a distinct and later continuation
of the same process.
In consequence of this attitude, he does not conceive the work
of reason in the natural acquisition of the idea of God as a mere
function of recognizing an experience passively, mystically, or
elusively undergone. He understands it as a distinct power, acting
in and through sense, spontaneously always, reflectively at com-
mand. His technical name for it is " intellect," " the sense of the
real," as the French aptly call it, because it is the power of pene-
trating through sense to objective reality. His position may be
summarized in the statement that the idea of God is a spontaneous
conclusion of reason, capable of scientific demonstration after-
ward by a reasoning process. Of course, in making this statement
he does not mean for a moment to imply that this is the psychological
source of the idea in all minds. That is a matter to be de-
termined in each case by the mental history of the individual. Most
of us acquire the idea of God through positive education. In fact,
according to Catholic teaching, revelation is morally necessary for
the acquisition of the right idea of God by the general run of men.
It is, therefore, of the logical source of the knowledge of God that
we are here speaking, not of the psychological. Man can know God
1913.] IN HUMAN EXPERIENCE 19
with certainty by the constitutional power of reason when the latter
is rightly developed, even though revelation be morally necessary
for the mass of mankind at large, when the difficulties of reach-
ing a prompt, certain, and correct knowledge of God are taken into
account.
We agree, therefore, with Professor Hocking in asserting the
fact that a knowledge of God is not the impossible thing it is said
to be by the moderns. But we disagree with his theory as to the
manner of its acquisition. It is clear to us that the idea of God has
a source more rational and less mystical than the one which he de-
fends, or rather tries to defend, as the only position " true to
the history, the anthropology, of religion." We grew so absorb-
ingly interested in the first part of his volume, at the host of con-
clusions which seemed to sparkle there in advance, that we were
grievously disappointed at the mystic one he finally drew, it was
so much less bright of countenance, and had such a far-away look,
in comparison with others which we would ourselves have chosen.
That is why we presented our choice at such great length in what
precedes. We are for competition; he for monopoly.
But the most serious oversight of all, one which to our mind
voids the whole contention of the book, is neither the forced inter-
pretation of the history of religion, nor the glancing criticism
of the old scheme of rational demonstration: it is the fact that
Professor Hocking does not deal with the idea of God at all, but
with something else which he has mistaken for it and confounded
with it. A few words to substantiate this statement.
It is a fact of experience that we have the idea of being, con-
crete and abstract, universal and individual. The concrete idea of
being comes to us in our earliest perceptions, where objects are
presented as indistinct wholes, total masses, individual unities
the particular parts or contents of which we are compelled to an-
alyze out in detail later by a series of successive acts. And this
idea of being which comes to us first in perception is also the
last notion into which our conceptions resolve, when we think away
the individualizing notes of perceived objects, and find the sub-
limated remainder common to them all. The idea of being may
thus be found at the level of sensation and at the height of reflec-
tion; at the bottom and at the top of all our knowing, through the
entire process of which it runs a bright connecting thread. It is
at the same time idea and sensation, thought and experience, the
first implication of perception and the last product of analytic ab-
20 THE MEANING OF GOD [Oct.,
straction. It survives all our abstracting processes, bare and gaunt
at the end, though solid and substantial at the beginning. A reality
distinct from and independent of us exists, which if we deny we
confess; if we attempt to reason away we imply and presuppose.
So much has been writen by idealists on the internal relations of
human knowledge, that the external relations which are also there
have been forced out of recognition. What creatures of oversight
we are! How could we ever have the idea of external or inde-
pendent reality, unless we also had the experience of it? How, in-
deed! All the theories that attempt to do away with this notion
of independent reality are accounts of its development, mistaken for
explanations of its origin.
The idea of being-in-general is a maximum of indeterminate-
ness, due to a mental process of abstraction which empties concrete
realities of their particular contents, leaving only the commonest
feature in which they one and all agree the bare fact or subject
of existence. The result of this emptying process is the Indefinite
of abstract, in contradistinction to the Definite of concrete, thought.
It is this Indefinite which the agnostic exhibits as the Unknowable
Absolute, the idealist as the World-Ground, and the ontologist as
the very Infinite itself by mortal eyes beholden.
But this universal being, this common ground of unity which all
things have when stripped of their differentiating features, is not
an Individual, nor an Organism, nor a subsisting Reality, nor a
Causal Source: it is a result, and not a source or principle at
all the result, namely, of our viewing things incompletely in
their points of agreement. Consequently we are here in the pres-
ence of the barest, the barrenest, the emptiest of abstractions, and
not at the centre, heart, foundation, and understructure of the
universe. How idle then and beside the point must seem the claim
of the ontologist that in perceiving this indeterminate being we
are perceiving God obscurely, in an implicit manner which re-
flection subsequently heightens to the glory of a mystic's vision.
The problem of the Divine could not be more displaced, nor the
holy, living personal Object of religion and worship more egre-
giously and completely missed. The idea of God is the antipodal
opposite of all this. The God Who is worthy of man's worship,
the Absolute Whom the theist is bent on proving to the captious,
the Holy One into direct communion with Whom the Christian
mystic pines to enter by anticipation, is the actual Infinite of real-
ized perfection, and not the Indefinite either of experience or of
1913.] IN HUMAN EXPERIENCE 21
thought. The All-Perfect is the idea of God, not the All-Imperfect
two polar opposites infinitely distinct and diverse, though often
mistaken for each other in the course of the history of philosophy
from the days of the lonians to our own. No ! It is the Infinite of
perfection for which man craves, and no Indefinite of perfectibility
will ever win the worship of a Western heart, or kindle the sacred
fire of complete self-sacrifice in a Western understanding ! Religion
is made of sterner stuff than a complaisant Abstraction.
Of being-in-general, of the abstract One-in-the-Many, we have,
of course, an intuition in the sense explained. But of the All-
Perfect Infinite, Who is not and cannot be an object among our
other objects, or a concept among our other concepts, have we an
intuitive vision of this? No one can claim that we have any such
vision, unless he regards the Indefinite and the Infinite as synony-
mous, and this we fear is what Professor Hocking has done in the
volume to hand. "As simply as Nature presents itself as objective,"
says the author, " just so simply and directly is the Other Mind
present to me in that objectivity as its actual meaning."*
Regarding the first idea that comes to us in the order of know-
ing as verily the First Being in the order of existence, he de-
clares God to be the primal object known, and claims, in conse-
quence of this identification of the two, that the knowledge which
we have of Nature and of Neighbor is nothing more nor less than an
application in each case of the prior idea of God. It is this identi-
fication of ideas that represent realities worlds apart, which en-
ables the author to make the statement that " God is immediately
known and permanently known as that Other Mind which in creat-
ing Nature is also creating me." Surely, it is not Other Mind or
Other Selves which we first know, but those objects out there, in
knowing which we come to know ourselves as distinct from them,
and Other Selves as distinct from us. The first experienced qual-
ity of our experience is not its sociality. What attempts modern
thought has made, and is still making, to bridge the chasm between
thought and reality, God and man !
The assumption that the idea of universal being and the idea
of God are one and the same makes and mars the whole undercur-
rent of the book, setting at variance the facts of experience and
the ontological interpretation forced upon them. It accounts also
for the strange result that Professor Hocking's presentation of the
idea of God in human experience should be so jejune. The natural
*Page 288.
22 THE MEANING OF GOD [Oct.,
religions figure to greater extent than others, and there is in con-
sequence but meagre mention of the moral qualities of mercy, love,
wisdom, and justice, in which religious experience abounds. The
fullness of the idea of God has indeed suffered diminution in his
eyes, on account of the comparative method, and ontological meta-
physics, all too exclusively employed in its exploration.
The fault of regarding the mystic as the typically religious
person, has also had much to do with the failure of the author to
allow due representation to the constructive as distinct from the
contemplative reason. And yet, notwithstanding an expression here
and there which might be more tempered with the quality of rever-
ence, and a dogmatic assurance that needs considerable toning down,
there is about this book a sincerity which is exceptional, and a
nobility of purpose unusual in these days of patronizing pedantry,
when holy subjects are handled by the uninitiated in a way to
make the judicious grieve. And this nobility of purpose is seen in
the author's search for " an adequate object of worship." Thus is
the burden of his entire theme, pursued with an enthusiasm that
amounts at times to positive literary beauty of expression and
fineness of religious feeling. Has he found this adequate object
capable of winning the worshipful service of man's mind and heart?
Hardly. The Absolute of the philosopher is too pale an abstraction
to be the one true God of religion. Not such as this is it that men
worship and adore.
The historic religions of the world did not grow out of mysti-
cism, or mystic experience. Mysticism in general represents faith
and knowledge going down into experience for further fruitage,
rather than faith and knowledge rising from experience as from an
only source. And this is true, especially so, of Christian mysti-
cism. Ardent souls endeavored to anticipate in this life that union
with God through love and a lover's knowledge, which their faith
had told them was to be theirs in the life to come. This mysti-
cism was consequently not the source of the dogmas of the Christian
religion, but a result. The revelation which is the source of dogma
was no mere interpretation of religious experience by mystic ex-
perimenters, but the manifestation by God to man of concepts either
beyond his mental power to frame, unaided, or beyond the moral
power of mankind at large to reach securely and correctly. It is
plainly then a case of the psychologist's fallacy to derive everything
from the subconscious region of the soul. First a glimmer, and
then the light of reflection ? No ! This is too exclusive, too simple ;
1913.] IN HUMAN EXPERIENCE 23
and neither the author nor anyone else can think out clearly, not to
say consistently, the origination of the idea of God in any such
elusive primitive experience.
Active reason presided over the birth of religion, and its
guiding presence and influences there must be acknowledged. It
was, of course, no solitary faculty acting in splendid isolation from
the rest of man's powers of will, and heart, and feeling, but the
accompanying guide and judge and critic of the outpourings of all
these. Its work did not consist in turning experience into knowl-
edge, as so many now aver. No more pernicious fallacy exists
than that of confounding reason (intuitive) with reasoning (dis-
cursive), or that of regarding reason as acting after sense, instead
of, in, and through it. Simultaneousness saves us here as elsewhere
from the pitfalls of misconception. To find the God of religion,
therefore, the author must drop all divisions and separations between
sense and reason. There is no such thing as " pure reason," or
" pure experience," and consequently no level of sensation at which
reason, spontaneous reason, is not present and at work. It is reason
acting simultaneously with, in, and through sense, to which our
knowledge of objective reality is due. Later the reflective, sys-
tematic, constructive reason works upon this real datum, and out
of it, somewhat after the fashion described in the body of this
review, builds up an analogical concept of God, inadequate and
proportional, if you will, but true and valid, so far as it goes.
More than a new theory of the relation prevailing between
ideas and feelings in consciousness is therefore required to account
for the rationality of religion. To use Professor Hocking's own
words in condemnation of pragmatism, his theory of ideas, radical
as it is, is not radical enough. This courageous knight-errant of
modern idealism, who, tiring of its abstractions, has ridden off
in quest of the Holy Grael of a lost reality, must still be up
and on with his search for Him " Who is not far from everyone of
us." " Quaere super nos" said the flowers to Augustine, when he
asked them, " Are you my God? " And " quaere super me " must
Other Mind answer, when Professor Hocking puts it the same
question. " I am the Shadow of what you seek, and not the Sub-
stance; the Analogy, and not the Reality; the Mirage, and not the
Spring."
THE DESERT TYPE.
BY L. MARCH PHILLIPPS.
N a former article* I undertook to explain the
effect which the influence of the desert has had
upon the Moslem faith. I pointed out that the most
striking and peculiar feature of the faith was a
certain iron immobility which has preserved through
successive ages the original dogmas of the founder. Not that
Islam is not rent by sects and factions, no religion more so, but
these are still more or less superficial. They represent specific
defects and shortcomings in the present faith, they stand for cer-
tain needs which that faith fails to .recognize, and which they
undertake to satisfy. The Shiite sect in particular has taken under
its charge all those emotional and mystical interests for which the
stern philosophy of Mohammed has made no provision what-
soever.
Yet even this division does not cut to the root. Deep be-
neath all outward differences a solid core of orthodoxy continues
to exist, defying time, defying criticism, defying all the varying
demands and expectations of life and thought. It is indeed a
strange unity which prevails in the world of Islam. For it seems
to subsist rather by stunting life's growth and development, than
by adapting itself to life's necessities. It is not a living influence
it has no voice. It cannot interpret, or enlighten or decide. To
this it does not aspire. All it does aspire to is unchanging same-
ness. It is the sanctification of routine.
Strange is the spectacle of so blind an obedience to a dead
force not claimed only, but granted through successive genera-
tions. It has always seemed to me that the cause is to be sought
not in the faith itself, but rather in the environment or circum-
stances within which the faith has operated. It is the desert
which has guarded the unity of Islam, which has made changeless-
ness a virtue, which resents with the strictest intolerance the slightest
inclination towards expansion, or the promulgation of enlarged
decrees. It acts through life, it keeps life itself fixed in a groove.
*See THE CATHOLIC WORLD, August, 1912.
1913.] THE DESERT TYPE 25
Nothing in the desert ever changes. The same sandy solitudes
are exposed to the glare of the sun to-day as were exposed to it
in Mohammed's time; the same brackish water at long intervals
offers the traveler a grudging refreshment; the same occasional
pastures and strips of vegetation among the valleys call the tribes
together in the spring season to enjoy a few weeks respite from
wandering, and an all too brief experience of nature in a kindly
mood; the same mountain chains and Sphinx-like summits survey
from afar the long march and evening camp. No physical feature
has changed, nor, it would seem, has any human idea or thought
changed either. The Bedouin tribesmen to-day are just what they
always have been. They not only do the same things, but they think
the same thoughts, and are moved by the same prejudices and
opinions as their forefathers of a thousand years ago. And it
is because they are thus identical that the Koran suits them still.
Out of desert life thirteen centuries ago Islam was evolved. So
long as the desert can keep this life unaltered, why should Islam
change? What, indeed, is there to change it? Does it
not provide as satisfying an utterance of the life of
the present as it did for the life of the past? Why
should life discard or seek to alter a garment which still fits
it so perfectly?
We, amidst our many inventions, aided and abetted at every
turn by nature's cooperation, seconded by her infinite resources and
all the powers which she places at our command, our minds en-
riched from the same sources which stimulate our industries and
all the avocations of our lives how should we comprehend, or
in any way intelligently appreciate, such a state of life and thought
as the desert maintains ?
As little can the desert appreciate us. Dimly Europe is aware
of the desert's influence as something which has always been in-
imical to her own advance, and always disputed the development
of her own scheme of intellectual progress. More surely still the
desert is aware of Europe as some vast machine, shadowy and
threatening, and terrible through its power of coherent action.
I do not know how the lack of understanding on the side of the
desert can be overcome, but I have always thought that the desert
type of manhood is of such a sort, so consistent, so vivid and
so unique, that it ought to admit of being defined and understood.
In manners and customs, in ideas of what is appropriate and
becoming to a warrior, the heroes depicted in ancient Arab ballads
26 THE DESERT TYPE [Oct.,
are identical with the chiefs who to-day guide their household
caravans across the sandy waste.
"What are the salient features in any one collection of desert
portraits? Undoubtedly the most notable characteristic is the
prominence given to the more virile traits, those which make man
formidable to man. Courage and warlike prowess have ever been
the first of desert virtues, and not without reason, for where there
exist no fixed communities or any established order of society, resort
must be had not to laws for justice or reparation, but to a man's
individual prowess. Hence the desert from end to end has always
seethed with internecine feuds. Every tribesman is born to war as
the sparks fly upward. The only social bond that exists is the
tribal one. In all affairs of honor and revenge the individual
belongs to the tribe, and must come at the tribe's call. But any
individual, too, can call the tribe. His wrong is the wrong of all,
and all must take up arms to redress it. It will readily be under-
stood, when each personal grievance can embroil a whole people,
that a state of war, or at least of mutual reprisals in the shape of
feuds and forages, is in the desert chronic. Further it will be
realized that where such a state of things prevails, courage and
fighting capacity are and always have been the qualities held in
highest repute. A good fighter is an asset to the whole tribe,
and the whole tribe unites to do him honor. Where nothing can be
gained but by force, or kept save on the same terms, he who is
most enterprising in arms will naturally be held a pillar of society.
And opinion on this point has never wavered, for the desert
has always been the cockpit of conflicting interests that it is to-day.
There is nothing in this matter to choose between Arabia and the
even more arid tracts of the Sahara. The same species of anarchy
tempered by the vendetta rules in either, and the same traits, cour-
age, endurance, fierceness, implacable resolution, and an eager
promptitude in rushing to arms, are equally esteemed over both
continents.
This, indeed, we may call the basis of Arab character, for from
this all its other attributes seem to spring. If life under desert
conditions, and among people of so inflammable a disposition, is to
remain possible for a week, a certain measure of self-restraint and
acceptance of a reciprocal decorum evidently becomes a first neces-
sity. The restraint which there are no laws to impose, is to a cer-
tain extent guaranteed by Arab manners and Arab etiquette. It
has been said that, in the days of duelling, when the slightest
1913.] THE DESERT TYPE 27
discourtesy was apt to place a man opposite the point of a rapier,
the manners even of Englishmen were marked by a singular ele-
gance and dignity.
Brave and haughty, the Bedouins of the desert are keen to
note the least cause of offence and prompt to resent it. It follows
that if intercourse is to be carried on, that it must be conducted not
only with the utmost dignity, but with the utmost delicacy. In
truth I have seen nothing in the manners of any other people
that can compare in these respects with the etiquette of
the desert. The sheyk who welcomes the stranger to his tent is
equally conscious of his own worth and of his guest's, and his sense
of both is expressed in his gracious yet grave courtesy. High
strung and excitable as the Arab temperament is, so much so
that on occasions when he gives rein to his passions he seems
in his abandonment of fury more like a demon or Bedlamite broke
loose than a sane mortal, yet as a rule, especially among those
of whose friendship he is in doubt, his mien is of the most
perfect self-possession. It is no doubt owing to his gravity and self-
restraint that the slightest glance, gesture, or turn of the head
often seems so unusually expressive. The writer can call to mind
instances when perhaps without a word spoken, by a movement
of the hand, an inclination of the head, a glance, or a smile, an
effect has been produced, and an emotion expressed in such a
way as to create in his memory an indelible impression.
These are advantages to which all are susceptible. Wherever
men meet singly or in twos or threes, the Arab's figure is one
of almost unquestioned superiority. That self-confident yet self-
contained bearing, that proud step, that grave composure, which
is nevertheless sensitive and responsive to the slightest incentive,
all seem to mark him out as a creature superior to the ordinary
run of mortals. It is so he impresses all observers.
Whether he is met with in his native desert, or in the bazaars
of a city, or among the swamps of the central Soudan herding
his wretched slaves and driving them on their hopeless journey to
the coast, there is always something in the ways of the man
which extorts admiration. Collectively indeed the Arab is totally
ineffective. He is an arrant individualist, a creature of whim
and impulse, careless of principle or any recognized code of laws;
acting always as the passion of the moment dictates, he possesses
no moral or mental standard which can be proposed for universal
acceptance, and be made a bond of unity. Essentially unintel-
28 THE DESERT TYPE [Oct.,
lectual, his plans and ideas never, save under the impetus of his
periodical explosions of religious frenzy, extend beyond his own
immediate circle or the present moment of time. He does not en-
gage in common tasks. He cannot speak for a nation or a com-
munity. The strength of collective action is unknown to him. Hence
whenever it is a question of a people against a people, of dis-
cipline, subordination, a plan of campaign, cooperation, obedience
to orders, and all the precepts which move large bodies of men
with power and effect, the Arab is still a mere savage. Furious
as his energy is, it is so ill-controlled and ill-directed as to be, against
a civilized race, quite ineffective. It will be noticed that these
limitations have always prevailed. The Arab has in no way changed
from what he was a thousand or two thousand years ago. He
has only been formidable to effete and broken civilizations. The
Romans easily hold him confined to his native sands. So do we;
so do the French. It was not till the Empire broke that the Bedouin
dared show his nose outside the desert, and since then it has only
been so long as the European nations have remained themselves in
the barbarian stage that he has remained outside. The power of
collective action, of discipline, and the spirit of organization, in a
word, the gradual prevalence of an intellectual civilization is what
has been detrimental to the Arab, and driven him back once more
upon his own impregnable haunts. He is as brave to-day as
ever he was, and brave in exactly the same way, but his bravery
cannot and never could make headway against an enemy whose
tactics are controlled by a reasoned plan of campaign.
Nevertheless in spite of this collective futility, the individual
prestige remains. Compare an Arab tribesman with an English
tradesman; compare any child of the desert with the usual run of
tourists who haunt the hotels and gardens of Biskra; compare for
matter of that, man to man, Bedouin and Dervish, with English
tommies, asking simply in either case how, as a specimen of man-
hood, do the types compare, and I am bound to say the answer
will seldom be pleasing to European vanity. Insensibly it is
always to the collective capacity of his nation that the Englishman
or Frenchman refers. He will write to the press; he will call
in the police; he will ask a question in parliament; he will put
the law in force. At the back of his mind is the vision of the
huge engine of Western civilization, with its armies and navies
and scientific might and majesty, and stores of knowledge, and
diplomacy and ministers. In these things resides his sense of su-
1913.] THE DESERT TYPE 29
periority, his condescension, and patronizing airs. Short and fat,
habituated to artificial comforts, used to overeating and over-
drinking himself, physically contemptible, shrinking instinctively
from the least fear of personal insecurity, he is none the less aware
of the vast powers of the state which backs him up, of which he is
a member, which is ready to second his weakness with its strength.
On no such support does his rival lean. Trained in the desert
school of hardship and endurance, straight, sinewy, a good mover,
keen-eyed and vigilant, accustomed to danger and to meeting it
alone; self-reliant in the highest degree; brave and haughty, with the
courtesy which is ready to grant to others what it claims for itself
thus richly endowed though he is, the Bedouin can appeal to no
adventitous aids, no strength beyond his own. He stands alone,
a solitary figure but a noble one, gazing at a hostile world with the
stern calmness of one whose life training has made him self-
sufficient.
The reader should have, I think, no difficulty in gauging the
type, even though he may never have been brought into contact with
the Arab people. Let me remind him that it is a universal ideal.
It must be perfectly evident to a visitor or sojourner among Arabs
what the conception of manhood is which commands general
acceptance. It is evident because in this respect there is no diver-
sity of opinion. All are aiming at the same mark. Further, if
we turn back into Arab history, we shall find that this ideal has
never changed or developed in the least particular. Exactly what
all Arabs (genuine Arabs of the desert, I mean) try to be and often
are now r , they tried to be and often were two thousand years ago.
History indeed, properly speaking, the Arabs have none. What
they have in place of it is a collection of romantic and thrilling
.episodes, the adventures and feats of individual heroes, whose
actions are almost invariably inspired by a personal motive. By
far the most vivid portrait of the kind which has been handed down
to us is that drawn by the ballad poets of the great age of Arab
poetry, the age when the desert population was gathering and
bracing itself for that mighty effort of conquest which is still
the most striking event in the history of the world. We may call it
a portrait, because though the figures drawn are many, yet they are
in reality all one. The sentiments they express never vary, the
motives which inspired them remain unchanged. Swift and brave
as eagles everyone of them, invariably courteous and dignified in
bearing, the reader has the impression after turning over a whole
30 THE DESERT TYPE [Oct.,
volume of legends that he has been reviewing the adventures of
one and the same individual. Equally is he struck by the fact
that the individual is identical with the type with which among the
Arab tents of to-day he has become familiar.
Certainly that type has its merits. Its traits are heroic. It
captivates the eye. There might almost seem to be no " stopping
short " implied in such a realization as this. Yet it has always
seemed to the writer, much as he admires it in many respects, that
in no race is the limit of human progress in thought and mental
development so immovably fixed as in the Arab. The very fact
that the ideal he aims at is so palpable and easy to understand,
and that so many approximate to it, makes the stoppage at that
point the more marked. It is not exactly easy to indicate in what
the Arab philosophy is deficient, for the things that it is deficient
in are not of the kind which submit themselves to an exact defini-
tion. It may, however, be pointed out that every race which has,
in matters of thought (whether expressed in philosophy, poetry
or art), attained to that accent which we recognize as of permanent
value, has always definitely abandoned the standpoint at which
the Arab has remained fixed. The virile ideal, as we have called
it, is essentially clear-cut. It signifies one who in such practical
matters as feats of arms and attack and defence is a better man
than his neighbor; who can overbear others; inflict his own will
upon them; assert himself against all opposition; carry his point,
and clear his adversaries from his path. This is the self-assertive
as contrasted with the receptive type of character, and I say that
every race, ere it could really illumine any subject, ere it could,
instead of merely looking at the external aspect, look into the depths
of such a subject, has always, as the preliminary condition of such
insight, been called upon to set this ideal on one side, and has
had to realize that the capacity for efficient thought actually
depends on the development of the very opposite theory, the theory
of self -obliteration and total discard of all merely egotistical claims.
I am not thinking only of moral and religious precepts. What I
am concerned to point out is that, in the intellectual and social
spheres in Western communities, the same considerations prevail.
It is evidently the case that social and communal coherence and
progress are dependent on the aptitude of individual units in
adopting the collective point of view, and considering, in all matters
of national government and local administration, the interests of
society as a whole. Whosoever is in the least familiar with the
1913.] THE DESERT TYPE 31
work done by the town councils of our country towns, will be
aware how universal this communal sense, as I may call it, is in a
country like England. This is where we shine. Take our little
bourgeois whom we supposed in such unequal competition with the
Arab sheyk, and set him to doing social work which necessitates a
ready and sympathetic appreciation of other people's rights and
other people's claims, and the stern suppression of all unduly in-
dividualistic or unduly selfish tendencies, and immediately his su-
periority appears. The entire process of local self-government,
carried out so universally, smoothly, and successfully among what
we call civilized races, would be, and is, to the Arab, an entirely
incomprehensible proceeding. Nothing he has ever seen or heard
of in life in the least resembles it, nor can his imagination picture
such a social condition. The truth is he does not possess in his
own character that instinct of altruism which makes such a view
of life possible. Haughty, proud, and gallant as he is, yet his
individual pride and gallantry are no cement for building up the
social fabric.
In just the same way, in all matters relating to investigation,
scientific discovery, and intellectual research generally, precisely
the same limitation in Arab intelligence is laid down. We are
all very well aware that in such matters the discovery of the truth
depends, as a primary condition, on the disinterestedness of the
inquirer. His mind must be free from prejudice and bias. He
must give himself up to his subject. Self with its personal pre-
dilection must have no influence on his mental attitude, but setting
such personal intrusions wholly on one side, he must be content to
follow, humbly and like a little child, wherever truth may lead
him. Thus, of course, this condition of ail intellectual discovery
and mental progress, is itself but the further exercise, in the in-
tellectual sphere, of what in the moral sphere we call by its various
names of self-denial, self -surrender, self-abnegation, all of which
condition primarily the total abandonment and obliteration of the
egotistical standpoint.
What I would suggest to the reader is that two points of view,
each distinct from or opposed to the other, are indicated by the
facts we have briefly stated. Life may be looked at from the per-
sonal point of view as a matter of individual concern, success in
which is measured by individual energy and self-assertiveness, or it
may be looked at from the altruistic standpoint, which places the
attainment of anything of value, the opening up of what is inward
32 THE DESERT TYPE [Oct.,
and intrinsic in any line of thought, in the completeness with which
just those motives which weigh heaviest in the former case are
obliterated. There is a chasm between these two standpoints.
Their interpretations of life are of a different order. The inter-
pretation of the former, whether moral, intellectual or social, is
superficial and ineffective. It deals with the outsides and appear-
ances of things. Its poetry is rhetoric and bravado; its science
is a blind man's guess; its human ideal is next door to an animal
one; its religious faith remains always in that phase when it can
be adequately maintained by the scimitar. This is the point at
which the Arab advance stops short. If the heroes of desert song,
the captains of the first great Arab exodus and the chiefs and
Mahdis who occasionally to-day arise out of the burning solitudes of
Africa and Arabia to hurl themselves at the nearest manifesta-
tion of discipline and organization, are all as closely similar as
peas in the same pod, the reason is that one and all they adopt and
are satisfied with the virile ideal, the ideal of self-assertion.
The further step forward, the step which means freedom
from self and the power to explore the inner mystery of all
subjects, has been denied to the Arab race. And if the reader
would ask why this is so, and how it comes that by generation
after generation the same point of progress has been regularly at-
tained and never exceeded, I would refer him once more to the
influence of the desert, and to that cast iron rigidity in which life
in the desert is held. The desert life is hard and difficult. There
are no resources on which large settled communities can exist,
and, therefore, they do not exist, and therefore again,
the virtues which settled communities develop are not de-
veloped. Wandering perpetually on the intractable and for-
lorn surface of sand, the Bedouin finds his chief succor in his
own courage; his own constant vigilance; his own physical forti-
tude and endurance. Day by day, and year by year, the appeal to
all those qualities, which belong to the virile side of human nature,
is constant and unremitting. Life itself is conditional on the
cultivation and maintenance of those qualities. He must know
how to right his own wrongs; how to defend his own possessions;
how to endure with ascetic self-control the rigors of that awful
climate, or he will be trodden under and perish.
Is it strange that with all life's opportunities directed to the
cultivation of a certain set of faculties, those faculties should
develop into racial characteristics? There has always been the
1913.] THE DESERT TYPE 33
desert. In the twilight of history the nomad tribes that may faintly
be discerned roaming Arabian sands were the facsimile of those
who roam them to-day. For how many centuries the generations
of that breed have been subject to the handling of the same weird
environment, there is no guessing. But the work done has been
well done. The impress of the desert is indelible. Not only in
physical appearance, in gait and bearing, in the expression of his
face and the proportions of his figure, is the Arab unmistakably the
desert's child, but by all that he reveres and despises in human na-
ture; by his respect for the dominant self-assertive attitude, and con-
tempt for more gentle and receptive, deeper, and in the end stronger,
traits and attributes by this and by the hard superficiality of
thought which results from such a view of life, and which has be-
longed to him in all ages, his parentage is equally declared. I
spoke, to begin with, of the power and the influence -which appeared
to hold the Moslem faith itself in a kind of stony immobility.
That immobility of the orthodox mind does but reflect, however, the
immobility of Arab life and thought. Whence then do Arab life
and thought derive their immobility? As I ask the question a
landscape of burning sand scattered with stones and seamed with
reefs, that changes never, but is to-day what it was ten thousand
years ago, rises to my mind's eye, and the desert gives the answer.
VOL. xcvni. 3
ALL-ALONE JIM.
BY MARY CATHERINE CROWLEY.
T was the end of an October day. Above the dark
pines and chaparral-covered spurs of the foothills,
the purple peaks of the Sierras in the rays of the
setting sun were like pillars of cloud and light sup-
porting the dome of the sky. Over the face of the
cliffs fell an avalanche of flame and gleaming violet; behind them
stretched a sea of amber. After a time white mists touched with
rose rolled up from the gorges in whose depths lie the mining
camps, beside the clear brooks and rivers that now were low for
lack of rain. An hour later the curtain of mist was torn away by
the breeze, showing the colossal mountain walls apparently holding
up a roof of stars.
All-Alone Jim was a plain, rough miner, yet he loved this
view of the evening heavens, as well as the spectacle of the sunset,
to which he could look up, from the door of his shack on the
rocky ledge a short distance from the Divide, where he was sinking
a shaft. Jim had not always been the silent, morose man known
to the recent arrivals at the settlement below in the canon two
lines of cabins forming a single street that led in a zigzag
fashion, but by a short cut, nevertheless, from the smelter to the
saloon.
Once he and his partner, Ned Naulty, had been the most adven-
turous spirits of the gulch. The gold for which they burrowed
like moles in the earth or washed out the placers, they lost as easily
to faro and tanglefoot; but these were their worst shortcomings,
and no man could say they ever deserted a friend or took an unfair
advantage of an enemy. All- Alone Jim was steadier now, since
he and Ned had agreed to go, each his own way. Ned's way
had led him far from the ravine, farther into the heart of the
hills, where he heard there was good prospecting. Jim retained
their old claim on the mountain side, and only went down to the
settlement to exchange small quantities of gold dust for pro-
visions. It was said he and Ned had quarrelled. But no one
knew the cause of the trouble or who was to blame.
That was two years ago. In a mining camp new faces come,
1913.] ALL-ALONE JIM 35
and once familiar faces pass, like the shadows of a day. No news
of Ned came back to the settlement; Jim refused to take another
partner, but he never received a letter from Naulty. Ned's name
was no longer spoken in the canon. He had passed completely out
of its life. Did anyone miss him? Was the hale, practical, hard-
handed Jim lonely to-night as, coming out of his bark-roofed cabin,
he looked up at the sky ?
" The stars make a pretty showing, but all the same thar'll
be rain before long," he said aloud.
His mountain craft was not at fault. Even while he sat on
the tree stump beside his door, the glory of the heavens began to
fade. The breeze, the first for months that had a breath of
moisture in it, blew stronger from the south, gray clouds stole
from crag to crag. To an imaginative mind they might have
seemed the sceptres of men who had lost their lives in the mines,
the wraiths of bandits hanged for horse thieving, or of desperadoes
who had been shot in the gambling dens that made some of the
towns in the valleys reproductions of the Inferno. But Jim feared
no miner, faro dealer, or Mexican greaser, dead or alive, and to
him clouds boded simply rain, wind or snow.
" Nature ain't up to any tomfoolery, she just means business,"
he often said. Now, as the force of the wind increased, he could
hear it breaking like the waves of the sea against the bulwarks of
granite far up in the mountains.
' Yes, the night's goin' ter be wild, and thar'll be plenty
doin'," he continued, communing with himself. " Who knows
what help may come to some fellow who is down on his luck, or
what ruin may be wrought afore morning ! I've seen a big pocket
opened by the up-rooting of a tree, or a year's work lost by the
giving away of a bank; both tricks of a storm."
Entering the cabin, he secured the door, not against possible
human interlopers, but to prevent any wandering bear from taking
him unaware, and as a protection against the cold and the rain
now falling steadily. Throwing a great piece of bark on the fire
that burned smokily in the chimney, he lay down in his bunk,
dressed as he was in flannel working shirt and trousers. Few trav-
elers passed over the Divide at this season, but whenever a tempest
threatened, he held himself ready to render assistance to any chance
wanderer from the trail. It was very dark now, and the blast
shrieked among the giant cliffs, crashed through the ravines and
swept through the pine belt, plucking up great trees as though
36 ALL-ALONE JIM [Oct.,
they were but saplingjs. Several times All-Alone Jim stirred,
fancying he heard a cry above the sounds of the storm. Springing
up, he opened the door and listened, only to decide he must have
dreamed that some one called.
Toward morning the wind died away, and all became strangely
still. At dawn he saw that the day promised to be fair, but the
ledge, the Divide, and the over-towering Sierras were covered with
snow. Here among the foothills, however, the first snowfall was
light. The beautiful, perfect autumn had but donned the white
veil of a novice and stolen away to the cloister of the eternal hills,
whose thousand spires and pinnacles gave back to the rising sun
tints of rose, and blue, and violet as though, like the roof of the
cathedral of Santiago de Chili, it was covered with mother-of-pearl.
The lonely miner turned his eyes from the serrated mountains to
the canon-settlement, whose bark roofs, under the touch of the
snow, were indistinguishable from the floor of the chasm. When
fate or the elements lend their aid to intrench us in our chosen
solitude, how quickly we stretch out our hands to grasp at human
sympathy and companionship!
" I reckon I'll go down for stores to-day," Jim murmured as
if in excuse to himself for the " hankering " he felt for a sight
of the faces of the men in the gorge. " But Jerusalem ! " he added
staring blankly before him, " if thar ain't some one coming up here.
In the town they likely w r ant to know if the wind blew me away.
Halloo!"
Jim's shout ringing down the hillside, reached the ears of the
traveler, who, mounted on a little mustang, was pressing on through
the snow in an effort to climb the Divide. He raised a hand as
a signal that he heard. Both the man and his beast appeared
exhausted.
" No. It is a stranger not used to his bearings. He's been
wandering about all night," exclaimed Jim.
With a sweep of his arm he pointed out the trail. The stranger
understood. After a time he succeeded in gaining it, and came on
with better speed. As he drew nearer, Jim saw he was a " tender-
foot," for he wore conventional city clothes, though he carried a
long rifle across his saddle bow. When he reached the ledge, he
swung himself off his horse, left the animal standing motionless
where he had reined him in, and without a word to the owner of
the shack, entered it and walked up to the fire.
" Dog-gone it, he is near froze to death," muttered the miner,
1913-] ALL-ALONE JIM 37
adding in a louder tone, " keep away from the heat a bit, stranger,
until you get warmed up inside."
He poured for the visitor a draught that would have rendered
even an Indian loquacious. Dumbly the man gulped it down, and
stood back a little, swinging his arms and moving about to restore
the normal circulation. A kettle of hot water hung over the blaze,
for Jim had not yet breakfasted. Without appearing to notice the
silence of his guest, he hastened to prepare a black decoction known
in the camps as coffee, and, having fried a rasher of bacon over
the raked-out embers, presently announced that the meal was served
with the hospitality of an ideal host. The stranger shook his head.
For some moments he had again been wheeling slowly around be-
fore the hearth.
" If he was b'ar's meat, he'd be done to a turn," Jim mentally
soliloquized.
" Ah, I was mighty near my finish," his unexpected companion
at last ejaculated, with the sigh of one who contrasts the comfort
of pleasant surroundings with the privations through which he has
passed.
A mug of the steaming coffee which his host once more pressed
upon him, completed the process of his thawing out.
" They told me at the settlement last night that I would buck
into a storm," he drawled, " but I laughed at them, because the sky
was so thick with stars. I've been astray some ten hours. No,
I did not see the light of your fire shining through the window.
The mist and the falling snow shut it out. In trying to turn back
to the village, I only became more hopelessly confused. I've come
up the Divide in search of one Jim Whitton. When I get lim-
bered out enough to go on, will you direct me to his cabin ? "
" Stranger, you have no call to go farther," replied Jim,
stretching out a rough hand in welcome, " I'm your man. Stay
right whar you are. Your beast has found the shelter of the shed,
trust a mustang for that. I'll look after him."
The miner would have thought it discourteous to betray his
amazement by over-haste in inquiring the object of this surprising
visit. Going out he found the tired broncho under the rude roof
that afforded a protection to his own horse, gave him water and
food, and then returned to the cabin. Seating himself by the
hearth opposite to his guest he said :
" Well, stranger, if you're ready, fire away."
" I'm Hitchens, an attorney from Sacramento," began the
38 ALL-ALONE JIM [Oct.,
other, now sufficiently revived to remember his professional dignity.
' You once had a partner known as Naulty, didn't you Ned
Naulty? It is because of him I am here."
At the mention of a name that until recently had been oftenest
on his lips, All-Alone Jim sat up straight in his chair. Perhaps
it was the firelight that suddenly made his sun-burned face look
a deep coppery red. The next moment, however, his eyes shone
with a pleasant light, and he answered heartily :
" You're right, stranger. Ned and I were partners through
thick and thin for fifteen years. A while back, we had a quarrel.
It don't matter now what 't was about. Maybe I was wrong, and
maybe he was. Neither of us would back down. Id'ots you'll
say? So we were. But the upshot was we parted, vowing we
never wanted to see or speak to each other again."
" And you have not met since? "
" No. But say, stranger, if Ned's got in any trouble and has
sent for me, or you've heard tell that I was his friend, why, thunder
and lightning, I am his friend still, and will help him up to my last
notch or for all I can borrow."
" He is not in any trouble that is ahem, I hope not," replied
the lawyer.
" I might have know'd. Ned was always honest, and peaceable
for the most part," continued Jim proudly. " Is it business diffi-
culties then ? How much will set him on his feet ? He is welcome
to whatever I have. Or, p'haps he thinks he ought to get some-
thing from this claim? He went off so sudden we never settled.
The claim hasn't paid, but I'll check off for you what I've got out
of it, and I'm ready to give him a share. Ned will take my state-
ment without oath, unless he's changed mightily."
" You have not prospered since you separated from Naulty,"
interrupted the lawyer, while his sharp eyes took on a still shrewder
expression.
" No. But there's no use telling that to Ned, 'specially if he's
broke. How much of the dust does he need?"
" Mr. er Whitton, you misunderstand me," said Hitchens.
" Last year Ned Naulty struck a good gravel claim on the Feather.
They had been turning up the river bed and he in fact, he cleared
up a fortune."
A wide smile irradiated Jim's plain face. He stroked his long
mustache and laughed like a boy. " Wall, wall, I'm powerful glad
to hear of Ned's luck for all we are out," he chuckled in unfeigned
1913-] ALL-ALONE JIM 39
delight. " P'haps then he wants to put some more in these dig-
gings. Tell him not to; that is my advice."
" Yes, he struck it rich," the lawyer went on in the same im-
passive tone, " but that did not do him much good. A few weeks
ago a tunnel caved in on him. He was taken down to the hospital
at Sacramento, but it wasn't any use."
Jim started to his feet as if he had been shot. His countenance
changed from its swarthy red to an ashen gray, and his eyes had
in them a look like the piteous appeal of a dumb animal cruelly
wounded, which so resembles the expression of a human being
stricken to the heart.
" You don't mean to say Ned has gone up the shaft," he cried,
"that Ned's dead?"
Kitchens bowed his head.
"I was called to see him the day be fore, yesterday," he said.
" He lived only long enough to place his affairs in my hands.
His will he had drawn up himself, and the signature had been duly
witnessed by two of the hospital nurses."
All-Alone Jim did not hear the attorney's concluding words.
He stepped to the door, threw it open, passed out, and, without coat
or head covering, strode away up the Divide. The air was bitterly
cold, but he was unconscious of its stinging sharpness; the wind
lifted the long locks that hung over his forehead; it beat and
buffeted him as if to force him back. But, heeding it no more than
if it had been a summer zephyr, like an apparition he passed
through the pines to the solitudes beyond the timber belt. An
hour elapsed. At the end of that time, he re-entered the cabin
as silently as he had left it, and stood a moment before the hearth.
Then dragging a bark chair from a corner he set it before the fire.
" That thar was Ned's chair," he said dropping into his own.
The lawyer who had been taking a cursory inventory of his
surroundings, in the absence of his host, resumed his place, leaned
back complacently, put his finger tips together, and continued what
he was saying before the miner had rushed away :
" Naulty's disposition of his fortune is peculiar," he went on.
" There are several legacies, but the residue goes to found a home
for the decrepit mules and mustangs used about the mines where he
was hurt. To three male cousins, who turned up after he struck
pay dirt, however, he bequeaths five thousand dollars each. Also,
as a proof that he had no hard feeling at the last, he gives a like
sum to his former partner, James Whitton."
40 ALL-ALONE JIM [Oct.,
" What! Poor old Ned left me five thousand dollars?" ex-
claimed Jim with an incredulous stare. " Wall I never ! Wish
I'd been thar, just to take him by the hand and tell him our quarrel
was honary foolishness ; that I've been sorry for my part of it many
a time."
" But to these bequests to the cousins and yourself are attached
restrictions and conditions," added Hitchens warningly.
" H'm ! I'm not keen for the money, though I don't say it
mightn't come handy," admitted Jim, glancing down at his rough
clothes, and remembering the practically unlimited credit for stores
and gunpowder the news that he had five thousand dollars in bank
would obtain for him in the canon. " But Ned might have know'd
I'd do anything he chose to ask."
The smooth even voice of the man opposite to him did not
vary.
" According to the directions I received, I made the necessary
arrangements for the postponement of the burial until the day after
to-morrow. I must inform you, nevertheless, that Naulty pos-
tively forbids the beneficiaries of his will to be present."
" I reckon the played-out mules and jackasses will obey," re-
marked Jim with grim humor.
" I mean the legatees," Hitchens explained, betraying the
merest shade of irritation. " If any one of the four men mentioned
attends the funeral or burial, he loses his five thousand dollars."
" Ned didn't want me to go ? " Jim's voice broke, and, to con-
ceal his emotion, he hastily bent over the fire and stirred it with a
chip of the bark.
" No. The words of the will are, 'I've lived lonely, and I
want to be buried lonely.' The funeral will be in Sacramento on
Saturday." The lawyer mentioned the place and the hour, and
then added, " I am bound so to inform the legatees, but the
testator's wish will, of course, be observed. No man will be so
improvident as to throw away five thousand dollars. Well Mr.
er Whitton, since, thanks to your hospitality, I'm again in trim
for travel, and my broncho is rested, I'll ride back to the gulch.
From there I ought to make the next stage for home by sundown."
Whitton went out with him, and helped to saddle the mustang.
The guest mounted; the two men shook hands.
" Good-bye, stranger," said Jim, " Ned was a curious chap, but
his heart was the right kind. Yes, sir ! his heart was just a nugget
of solid gotd."
1913.] ALL-ALONE JIM 41
Two days later there was an almost desolate interment in the
beautiful cemetery of Sacramento. The trappings of wealth were
not wanting, but there was no funeral cortege, no train of relatives
to whisper to one another of the generous acts or virtues of the man
gone from among them. Besides the hirelings in charge, there
were present only the chaplain of the hospital and one mourner,
a lank, loose-jointed miner from the hills, who wept like a child,
and, in his grief, forgot the splendor of his new suit of store clothes,
the discomfort of the high, starched collar that nearly choked him,
and the bright red necktie donned as a special tribute to the taste
of the deceased. Only one mourner, yet who can say that a man
has lived in vain if he has made one faithful friend, left a kindly
record of his words and deeds upon one loyal heart, and still lives
in the thoughts and memory of "one who loved him."
The following morning as Attorney Hitchens sat in his office,
he was surprised by a visit from the man whose guest he had
recently been in the lonely cabin among the foothills.
" Stranger," said All-Alone Jim, twirling the stiff-brimmed
hat whose conventionality clearly taxed his patience, " I've called
to own up to you that I've been to see old Ned sent down on his
last cage."
" What ! " exclaimed the lawyer.
Astonished out of his usual coolness, he lowered his feet,
which had been gracefully poised on his desk, and springing up
confronted the man who so nonchalantly announced that he had
thrown away a horde of the shining gold for which men delved
and struggled and fought, and so often gave up their lives in this
western Eldorado.
" Yes," Jim continued unrepentantly. " You see, when you
left the ledge, after telling me about Ned, I felt so down-hearted,
I just couldn't stand it. Ned was the onliest partner I ever had,
and I missed him mightily. Those words of his, 'I've lived lonely,
and I want to go lonely,' seemed meant for me. Sort of a reproach
for lettin' him go away, you know. I made up my mind to come,
and I did come. Everything was correct at his send off, stranger.
When a miner is strong as a mustang and keen at the diggings,
he don't take thought of much else, but he ain't the fool that says
in his heart there is no God. When Ned and I were working
shares, he made me promise that if anything happened to him I'd
go for a priest first off, if I had to ride to Sacramento for one.
Gosh, how hot it is down here on the plains !" He mopped his fore-
42 ALL-ALONE JIM [Oct.,
head and furtively wiped his eyes with a large white handkerchief,
which he flourished ostentatiously, and then tucked into the breast
pocket of his coat, leaving a corner showing jauntily.
" So you went to the funeral? " repeated the lawyer. With
a cordiality bred of his visit to the cabin when something in his
nature, as well as his stiffened limbs, had been thawed out, he
grasped old Jim's horny hands and wrung them almost boyishly.
li Mr. Whitton, I congratulate you," he went on, and his voice had
a curious ring of excitement.
" Wall, I do feel better, thank you," replied the miner simply.
" Seems as if it would have been mean to skulk coming. I'd have
felt mighty small staying at home and taking my five thousand.
As I came, in spite of poor Ned's orders, you can parcel the money
out between the dumb beasts he was so fond of, and the honary
cousins who did not turn up."
" No. The relatives scurried off to San Francisco to get
distinguished legal counsel and try to break the will," laughed
Kitchens. " But every one of them has missed his chance. Jim,
you have lost five thousand, sure enough, but listen to what I say :
You have gained more than a hundred thousand dollars! Ned
Naulty's will had a sealed codicil, which, according to his instruc-
tions, I did not open until to-day. It gives one hundred thousand
dollars to various charities, and the remainder of the estate to the
one of the four beneficiaries who shall have disobeyed the condition
laid down in the will, or to all of them, in equal shares, if all have
disregarded it. In the event that no one of these four legatees
turns up at the burial, five thousand dollars goes to the Humane
Societies, and the rest augments the charitable fund. As you
came, notwithstanding the prohibition, the residue of the estate,
which amounts to more than one hundred thousand, belongs to you."
Too amazed to speak, or even to collect his thoughts, All-Alone
Jim gazed blankly at the attorney for fully two minutes. Then
his honest eyes grew misty, even while his features relaxed into a
smile of appreciation of his late partner's posthumous jest.
" Wall that's a good one, stranger," he cried, bringing his
closed fist down on the lawyer's desk with a force that shook all
the chairs in the room. " Sure as my name's Jim, old Ned put up
the whole scheme a purpose. 'Cause he know'd I would come."
THE CLERGY AND SOCIAL ACTION IN IRELAND.
BY CHARLES PLATER, S.J.
HEN critics of the Catholic Church and all her ways
are asked for a proof of their favorite contention
that Catholicism is prejudicial to national prosper-
ity, they point triumphantly to Ireland. " Here,"
they cry, " you have a Catholic country dominated
by priests. What is the result? The priests do little or nothing
for the welfare of the people, the population has dwindled to half
its former size, and the people that remain are so destitute and
shiftless that the English Government has constantly to be coming
to their assistance." The smallest acquaintance with the history of
Ireland during the last three centuries, should be enough to close
the mouth of st^h critics.
Not even an outline of that history can be attempted here.*
It will be enough to remark that every attempt of the Catholics of
Ireland to build up a healthy and prosperous social order was for
generations deliberately strangled by the English Government.
Apart from the penal laws which deprived Catholics of their
liberty, apart from the confiscations and exactions by which they
were made to support the religion of their despoilers, deliberate
measures were taken to crush, one after another, the industries
by which the Catholics of Ireland strove to make a livelihood.
" Forbidden to export their cattle to England by the Act of 1665,
the Irish landowners turned their land into sheep walks, and began
on a large scale to manufacture wool."f This woollen trade flour-
ished exceedingly, and was crushed by Parliament in a series of
enactments culminating in 1699. Similar enactments repressed
other manufactures. " In fact," says Dr. O'Riordan, " persons
engaged in any industry in England had only to make known their
actual or impending grievances from a rival industry in Ireland,
and an Act was passed according to their petition."! Agriculture
*Readers may consult Dr. O'Riordan's excellent book on Catholicity and
Progress in Ireland (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., ad ed., 1905)
and Mrs. J. R. Green's The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing (New York :
The Macmillan Co.).
tLecky, Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i., p. 174.
JLoc. cit., p. 152.
44 CLERGY AND SOCIAL ACTION IN IRELAND [Oct.,
became the last resource of the harassed people: but agriculture
had been made impossible, for Catholics had been disabled from
owning land or even from renting it, except on short leases ; indeed,
the tenants were even forbidden by their leases to break or plough
the soil. In merchant industry they were similarly crippled. In
short, we see the Catholics of Ireland for generations courageously
taking up one after another every possible means of making a
living, and being remorselessly driven from it as soon as they
began to succeed.
It is, therefore, quite unjust to tax the Catholic clergy of
Ireland with any responsibility for the economic troubles of that
country. During the penal times the priests could take no public
action on behalf of their people. They had to devote themselves
in secret to the spiritual needs of their flock: and this they did
with an unflinching heroism. Even when Catholic emancipation
came, much political work had to be done before anything like
social progress was possible. The battle of education remained to
be fought. The question of tenure and rent of land remained to
be settled. These and similar questions in the main " affected
religion, charity, and the lives and existence of the people, and
hence through the nineteenth century the Catholic Church took
an active part in politics."* That the clergy should take the lead
in such political action was inevitable. There was no one else
to champion the cause of the people.
Nevertheless even before Ireland was given a chance of work-
ing out her social and economic salvation (her religious salvation
had been secure throughout), we find bishops and their clergy
doing what they could, with their hands tied, to reorganize a shat-
tered social system. Thus eighty years ago we find Archbishop
Murray vigorously urging before a vice-regal commission the adop-
tion of certain measures for the restoration of agriculture and the
relief of destitution in Ireland. His recommendations, endorsed
by the Commission, were swept aside by the British Government,
which imposed on the country a system of its own. This system
proved a deplorable failure, and it is only now that return is being
made to the recommendations of Archbishop Murray.
Now, however, that the disabilities of Catholics in Ireland
have been removed, and security of land tenure provided, the
clergy have for the first time an opportunity of showing whether
*The Practical Application of Christianity to the Lives of the Irish People
To-day, by the Most Rev. Dr. Kelly, Bishop of Ross. Dublin: Catholic Truth
Society, 1906.
1913-] CLERGY AND SOCIAL ACTION IN IRELAND 45
their unselfish interest in the people is limited to the performance
of spiritual duties, or whether it extends to their social welfare.
What use are they making of that opportunity? The clergy of
Ireland to-day are, in proportion as the utility of social work be-
comes evident to them, throwing themselves into that work with
all the energy which characterized their former efforts to secure
religious and civil liberty for their people. This, it is hoped,
will appear from the following pages.
We may begin with agriculture, for it is in this department
of social activity that Ireland has made the most remarkable prog-
ress of late years. The development of agricultural cooperation
in that country is, as Father Thomas Finlay, S.J., wrote ten years
ago,* " a phenomenon which deserves the attention of students
of economics. It confirms the suggestion of Leo XIII. that co-
operation is the resource of the laboring poor, and that by means of
it the claims of labor on the wealth it produces can be peacefully
and effectually asserted." It is a phenomenon which should prove
suggestive to us in England, where fields are deserted and slums
overcrowded. Agricultural prosperity makes for national stability :
it has an intimate bearing on the moral, social, and religious wel-
fare of a people.
The modern cooperative movement in Irish agriculture began
in 1889, when Mr. (afterwards Sir) Horace Plunkett and his
friends set to work to apply the cooperative principle to butter
making, an industry which threatened to become monopolized by
the Danish farmer. A start was made in the south of Ireland,
and farmers were invited to combine in order to erect central
creameries, employing the most scientific methods, which they might
own and work for their own profit and at their own risk.
The difficulties were prodigious, but at the end of five years
thirty creameries had been established, and the number of share-
holders was one thousand five hundred and nine. The turnover
had amounted to 140,780. The milk-supplying farmers gained an
increase of profit from their cows of more than thirty per cent.
In 1894 was founded the Irish Agricultural Organization Society,
with Sir Horace Plunkett as President and Father Finlay as Vice-
President, the activities of which are too well known to need
description.
Now the point which concerns us is this : the cooperative
societies could not have been made a success without the active
*The Messenger, New York, December, 1903.
46 CLERGY AND SOCIAL ACTION IN IRELAND [Oct.,
sympathy of the clergy, and as a matter of fact that sympathy has
been cordially extended to them. No less than six hundred priests
take an active part in the work as chairmen or members of com-
mittees. But perhaps it may bring the work of the Irish clergy
in this matter more vividly before our minds if, instead of mul-
tiplying statistics, we examine a few particular instances in which
a priest has been able to bring prosperity to his people by means
of his social activity.
A case described by Dr. O'Riordan (p. 288) is that of Father
Meehan, who some years ago came to Creevelea, a remote district
among the mountains of Lietrim, several miles from a railway sta-
tion. Living was such a difficult matter at Creevelea that a fifth
of the population had emigrated in fifteen years. Father Meehan
set about to find some means of finding a livelihood for his people.
He decided in favor of poultry, bees, gardening, and the like.
Even then he had first to learn and then to teach his people.
It was not an easy change from science and modern lan-
guages, which he had been teaching with much success for
some years before, to the study of poultry, bees, and the grow-
ing of apples and pears. But he suffered the change for the
sake of his people.
His own proficiency became such that he was accepted as
an expert on poultry and bees by periodicals dealing with these
subjects; and the proficiency of his people was shown by the prizes
which they carried off. The Creevelea Cattle and General Agri-
cultural Show soon became a notable event, and Father Meehan at
his own expense held a stall at the Cork exhibition.
He has also a hall for concerts and plays, which are given
by the young people of the place whom he has trained. Be-
sides these and other local works, such as temperance and
libraries, he takes a leading part in several public organizations
(p. 229).
We must not omit to mention the agricultural credit banks of
the Raiffeisen type, which have proved such a success in Ireland.
Usury has, in the past, been the curse of the Irish farmer. It not
only ruined him, but it demoralized him as well. The credit bank,
on the other hand, both promotes his prosperity and develops his
character. As a recent writer has said :
1913-] CLERGY AND SOCIAL ACTION IN IRELAND 47
It brings together the most social and economical class in
the world, and gives a feeling of solidarity to a number of
scattered individuals : it exerts a splendid moral influence by
its insistence on a good character, on the proper employment
of money, and on punctual repayment, and by the mutual sym-
pathy which it evokes. It has taught the farmer the differ-
ence between borrowing to spend and borrowing to produce,
the finest lesson in the use of credit which could possibly
be learned by a class which has suffered much from dealing on
long and ruinous credit.
Now in this matter again the priests have been to the fore.
Their influence was required to break down the prejudice with which
these banks were at first regarded, and it has been exerted very
generously. We may refer to Dr. O'Riordan's account (p. 211)
of a bank started by Father Dooley in Galway over twenty years
ago.
In cottage gardening, too, the priests have given the lead. We
may instance the splendid success which has attended the efforts
of Canon Doyle in County Wexford. His Technical Instruction
Committee, inaugurated about eight years ago, is not only increas-
ing the resources of the cottagers, but is giving them a notable
capacity for self-help and a pride of ownership. Canon Doyle's
social activities are by no means confined to promoting cottage
gardens. He has worked a veritable revolution in his parish of
Tregoat, and his activities extend to the whole of Wexford. Many
visitors have admired his " town hall," where he holds frequent
meetings of his people, and where he gets them the most skilled
instruction that can be obtained in matters agricultural, etc. A
wonderful change has come over the homes of his people : they are
models of neatness within and without.* The same might be said
of the work done by Father Matthew Maguire, P.P., of Trillick,
County Tyrone. All over the country halls and reading rooms are
springing up, under the guiding influence of the parish priests,
which are doing much to enlighten and educate the masses of the
people, f
Some idea of the immense amount of social and charitable
*A penny pamphlet published at The Irish Messenger office, and entitled The
Reward of Industry, presents in story form a picture, which is absolutely true to
life, of the reforms effected by Canon Doyle at Tregoat.
tSome suggestive remarks on the educational possibilities of these parish
libraries may be found in a pamphlet by the Rev. J. O'Donovan, entitled Village
Libraries, and reprinted from The Irish Homestead.
48 CLERGY AND SOCIAL ACTION IN IRELAND [Oct.,
work that is carried on by the parish clergy and the religious bodies
in Ireland, may be gathered from the Handbook of Catholic Social
and Charitable Works in Ireland.* As our eye skims the index we
come to the conclusion that every imaginable social need is here
provided for. The arresting reference "Piscatorial School" makes
us turn expectantly to page ninety. The school turns out to be
at Baltimore, and the boys " are instructed in fishing industries,
boat building, net and sail-making and mending," etc. There are
one hundred and fifty pupils, and the manager is a priest. The
Vacant Land Cultivation Society (unknown in many English towns
where it is badly needed) is established in Dublin, and the Chair-
man of Committees is a priest. If you wish to join the sewing
classes at Navan, you must apply to the local clergy; if, mentally
afflicted, you seek a refuge at Stillorgan, you must present your-
self to the Father Prior. There are numerous industrial schools
under the Christian Brothers; there is an agricultural college con-
ducted by the Franciscan Brothers at Mount Bellew. And so on
indefinitely.
Besides being, as we have seen, the backbone of the rural
cooperative societies, the priests have identified themselves with
most of the industrial and technical movements which have been
started in the towns.
I know of hardly any industrial work [writes Dr. O'Riordan]
carried on through the country for the benefit of the people in
general, in which priests do not take an active and usually a
leading part in initiating and promoting (p. 228).
He gives us an interesting account! of the work carried on
by Father Maguire in the parish of Dromore, embracing a
village and a country district in the County Tyrone. Father Ma-
guire succeeded in stopping the emigration, which previously had
been appalling. A school of lace, crochet, and similar industries
was started in September, 1901, with the counsel of Father Finlay,
representing the Irish Agricultural Organization Society. Father
Finlay himself has described! how this work was begun.
On a Sunday evening in September I met the parishioners,
after evening devotions, in an open space outside the church.
I explained to them the constitution of a cooperative society,
undertook, if they would form a society, to carry their applica-
*Published at The Irish Messenger office. tPages 213-215.
tThe Struggle for Life in Industrial Ireland: an article in the New York
Messenger, December, 1903.
1913-] CLERGY AND SOCIAL ACTION IN IRELAND 49
tion for teachers to the Department of Agriculture and Tech-
nical Instruction, and to supply them with designs, and provide
a market for their products through a lace agency with which
I was connected. At the close of the meeting two hundred
girls enrolled themselves as shareholders in the new society.
In a month they were at work under skillful teachers. Three
months later they sent their first consignment of lace to the
agency. Its quality was so good that the buyers found it fit
for the London and Paris markets, and sent them a check
for eighty pounds. By the end of the year they had sold lace
to the value of one thousand pounds; this year (1903) their
work will have brought them about three thousand pounds.
Some months since I was invited by this society to attend a
festivity which celebrated the opening of a new workshop
provided by the girls themselves, and capable of accommodating
two hundred workers. They did me the honor of presenting
me with an illuminated address gratifying no doubt as a per-
sonal compliment, but infirr'.ely more gratifying for one state-
ment which it contained, this, to wit : that since the foundation
of the society not one girl had emigrated from the parish.
Previously the parish had furnished a contingent of from fifty
to sixty girls to the bands of emigrants which left the district
about Easter time.
A particularly valuable adjunct to this lace and crochet in-
dustry at Dromore consists of Domestic Economy Classes, which
are held in the same building. Nor is this all. Lectures, however
excellent, require to be supplemented by actual practice in the homes.
In 1904 Father Finlay went to Dromore to inaugurate a scheme by
which a woman should go from house to house, employing the
utensils which each family could afford, and showing how in various
circumstances the teaching imparted in the lectures could be put
into practice.
Turning from lace to bacon, we may quote a typical extract
from the I. A. O. S. report for 1910:
Mr. Welsh gave an interesting account of the foundation
of the bacon factory at Roscrea. He regretted that the Rev.
Father Cunningham was not present to tell the story of a suc-
cessful enterprise in which he (the Reverend gentleman) had so
large a part. The town of Roscrea was a poor dull town, pos-
sessing no industrial business above that of a shop. The coun-
try around was a good pig-raising country. The farmers felt
that they had not been receiving a proper "price for their pigs,
VOL. xcvm. 4
50 CLERGY AND SOCIAL ACTION IN IRELAND [Oct.,
and a bacon factory was suggested by an inspired person.
But money was required to buy pigs, and a factory was re-
quired to deal with the meat. A meeting of the local people
was held, but when money was asked they melted away. But
Father Cunningham, who was the head and front of the busi-
ness, was not discouraged. He said he would canvass his par-
ishioners and those who had been at the meeting. The result
was that he had got four thousand persons to take shares in the
company that started the factory The business was going
ahead Orders were so numerous that they were not able
to fulfill them all.
Strangers seldom appreciate the significance of the Gaelic
League as a social force. They are apt to regard it as a mis-
guided attempt to resuscitate a vanishing native tongue. It is,
as a matter of fact, a much-needed corrective to certain anti-social
forces which threaten Irish life: it recalls to the people their
splendid tradition in art and literature. It brightens their homes,
and lifts their spirits out of the despondency to which centuries of
oppression had reduced them. It is far more truly an educative
force than many institutions which profess to educate.
Here, again, the priests have been the mainspring of the
movement, though they did not initiate it. Dr. Douglas Hyde,
the President of the Gaelic League, has dilated enthusiastically to
the present writer on the cordial and unflagging cooperation of the
Catholic clergy in the work of the League.
One of the most important and successful branches of social
reform promoted by the clergy of Ireland has been the temperance
movement. Here the priests are the chief and almost the sole
workers in the field. The triumphs of Father Mathew have been
repeated by Father Cullen, S.J., who has gathered some two hun-
dred and sixty thousand people into the ranks of his " Pioneers,"
bound to total abstinence, and whose Temperance Catechism has
reached a circulation of three hundred thousand copies. About one-
third of the secular priests and a large percentage of all the religious
orders are total abstainers for life. Some years ago the bishops es-
pecially entrusted to the Capuchin Fathers the task of promoting the
temperance propaganda. This they have done with a zeal and an
energy that are beyond all praise.
Lastly the western bishops, with the Archbishop of Tuam at
their head, inaugurated a movement some years ago for the pro-
motion of temperance in that part of Ireland. Their efforts have
1913-] CLERGY AND SOCIAL ACTION IN IRELAND 51
been so successful (mainly through the medium of temperance
retreats and missions in the various parishes) that drunkenness
has largely disappeared in these parts.
Another need which is beginning to be supplied in Ireland is
that of social education. The Irish Messenger, under the direction
of Father MacDonnell, S.J., has long been publishing useful articles
on domestic economy, cottage gardens, temperance, and the like,
and from the same office, as well as from that of the Irish Catholic
Truth Society, has come a certain number of useful pamphlets on
social subjects. A few books have been published by priests, such
as Father Kelleher's volume on Private Ownership, and Father
O'Laughlin's Elements of Social Science and Political Economy,
translated from Dardano. But on the whole the Irish clergy have
given us singularly little in the way of social literature, as com-
pared with the numerous works by French or German priests.
Of late years there has been an important movement in the
direction of organizing study clubs, and interesting the educated
laity as well as the working classes in social study. Prominent in
this most necessary work stands the " Leo Guild," founded in Dub-
lin in May, 1912, by a group of university laymen. A priest acts
as director of studies, and many of the clergy take an active interest
in this scheme, which promises to give a decided impulse and a right
direction to Catholic social effort in Ireland. The cause of social
reform in Ireland has received many warm expressions of approval
from the bishops, who have encouraged the priests to take part
in it. The Bishop of Ross, in the Inaugural Address delivered at
the Catholic Truth Society Conference of 1905, said :
This movement for agricultural and industrial improvement
and development has reached our own country. The move-
ment is yet in its infancy, but it is struggling to rise from its
cradle, to stand on its feet, and to march steadily over the land.
In many districts the priests have been active and successful
workers. In other districts the priests have held more or less
aloof. A few, perhaps, are still unconvinced of the necessity
or utility of such work. I venture to plead for general activity
along the whole line.
Cardinal Logue at the annual meeting of the Maynooth Union,
June 27, 1912, spoke as follows:
I do not see why we should not do in some way in this coun-
try what has been done in Belgium. In Belgium, I believe,
they pick out a number of priests, and these priests take a special
52 CLERGY AND SOCIAL ACTION IN IRELAND [Oct.,
course in agriculture at the Catholic University at Louvain,
I believe, for the purpose of being able to advise the people
afterwards, and I think it would be a magnificent thing if,
by summer schools or post-graduate courses in the new National
University, there was some opportunity for a number of the
priests to make themselves up in this subject We are
only groping our way, directed simply by common sense, and
without an adequate knowledge of the principles. If the prin-
ciples were thoroughly studied the priests of the country would
be able to advise the people, and, I think, it would do a great
deal towards keeping them correct, and properly safeguarded
against the danger of being carried away by agitators. When
I speak of agitators, I don't mean honest men who are trying
to benefit and improve the people, but there are self-interested
agitators. In future Irish priests must do a great deal for the
direction of the people. I don't mean that they should enter
as much into politics as formerly, but in social questions you
must do a great deal for the direction of the people, and be
possessed of the necessary qualifications to enable you to direct
them wisely and to direct them well.*
Besides Cardinal Logue and the Bishop of Ross (whose work
on Parliamentary Commissions is so highly valued), other mem-
bers of the hierarchy have stood forward prominently in this
movement, and given it special encouragement, as, for instance,
Dr. Foley, the Bishop of Kildare, Dr. Browne of Cloyne, Dr. Shee-
han of Waterford, and Dr. O'Donnell of Raphoe, the last-named
having been for many years a member of the Congested Districts'
Board. This list is by no means exhaustive.
Even this slight sketch of the social activity of the clergy
of Ireland may have made it clear that they have already accom-
plished much. Yet it is hardly necessary to add that more remains
to be done. It is evident that Ireland has the prospect of a great
period of social development, in which the priests are the natural
leaders. Not that it is possible or desirable for them to take the
whole of the work upon their own shoulders, since the cooperation
of the laity is becoming increasingly necessary : but the clergy here
may well be (as, indeed, to a great extent they already are) the
inspiring influence, guiding and encouraging and training the lay
workers, keeping prominently before the minds of the people the
great social principles laid down by the Catholic Church. Per-
haps in no country in the world has Catholicism such a splendid
*From the report in The Freeman's Journal, June 28, 1912.
1913-] THE CONSOLER OF THE AFFLICTED 53
opportunity as in Ireland of establishing a healthy social order,
and of showing to the world an example of that fair and pros-
perous commonwealth for which Leo XIII. would have us strive.
In other lands the issues have been confused, and the minds of large
sections of the people poisoned by irreligion and its accompanying
anti-social tendencies, or else committed to doctrinaire systems which
promote hygiene at the cost of liberty. Hitherto Irish social enter-
prise, as we have seen, has been hampered and crippled. Now it is
getting its opportunity. The Catholic world is watching with sym-
pathy, trusting to see Ireland, inspired by that teaching of which
the clergy are the custodians, display the beauty of a supernatural
faith reflected in a worthy social order.
THE CONSOLER OF THE AFFLICTED.
BY DEBORAH TALLMAN.
LIKE Chryses, who, with priceless gems and gold
As succour for the " dear imprisoned feet
Of his fair daughter," sought the Grecian fleet,
And found that all his pleading left them cold,
His piteous offering spurned, then, sad and old,
Carried his bruised heart to Minerva's shrine,
Pouring his tears as sacrificial wine,
Showed her his wounds and all his sorrow told;
So for my child, with feet more firmly fast,
And pitifully still her lovely hands,
When all my faith in earthly help is past,
No human skill breaking those cruel bands,
Here to the Temple I have come at last
Bringing my grief to Her who understands.
THE WESTMINSTER VERSION OF THE SACRED
SCRIPTURES.
BY JOSEPH KEATING, S.J.
ROM the facts of history, and from the intrinsic nature
of written records, we have ample proof that God's
providence never intended the Bible to be man's sole
external guide to the knowledge of His will and
purpose. It is totally unfitted for such a function.
It needs some living authority to guarantee it, some actual intel-
ligence to explain it. It is the result of the gradual growth of
over twelve hundred years, and lay for many centuries out of the
direct reach of millions of those for whose benefit it was designed.
Moreover, it is equally plain that, in order to fulfill its providential
function, God did not think it necessary that His Word should
come to His creatures immune from all the accidents which trans-
mission by human agency exposed it to; it is colored throughout
by the circumstances of its origin the varied occasions which called
it forth, the different personal aims of its writers, their diverse
mentality and education, the limitations of their literary vehicles
it has not wholly escaped the risks of documents confided to per-
ishable material, and has been preserved through the ages only
by means of the incessant transcription of fallible human copyists;
finally, it reaches the vast majority of its audience merely through
vernacular translations, all more or less faulty as all translations
must be. Even in our Lord's day, the very race which produced
the Old Testament used habitually an early Greek rendering of
the Hebrew, the work of writers imperfectly acquainted with either
language. And St. Augustine assures us that many even of the
earliest Christians read the Apostolic message through the medium
of imperfect Latin translations.*
The event shows, then, that God's purpose in the Bible has
been secured, although we have not got absolutely correct copies
of its original forms, or an absolutely faultless rendering of them.
On the other hand, we are sure that what the Church has preserved
for us represents with substantial accuracy the contents and pur-
port of the divine Message. We are certain, of course, that no
knowledge necessary for salvation has perished through accidents
*De Doct. Christ., II., n.
1913.] THE WESTMINSTER VERSION 55
to which the written Bible has been exposed, and we may further
conclude that none of the uncertainties and obscurities which still
baffle us in Holy Writ has ever actually prevented the access of
any Christian soul to God. It is to His Church, not to His Bible,
that He has entrusted the communication of the fruits of His Life
and Death His copiosa redemptio. The Bible is but one of the
means of grace entrusted to the Church, and, in the exercise of her
trust, according to the varying circumstances of the times, the
Church has given to her children, or withheld from them, free
access to the actual text of Holy Scripture. But never has she de-
prived them of the full measure of that Scripture Truth of which
she alone is the Pillar and the Ground.
However, the need, the expediency, even the possibility, of
disciplinary enactments of that kind have long since passed away.
What was reasonable and advisable in a world mainly Catholic, to
which printing was unknown, became ir.practicable under changed
conditions. Henceforward, the Church's main concern was that
her members should have not only the Bible, but the means of under-
standing it aright. The idea of vernacular translations was not
new, but it had been abused by Wickliffe and other heretics, and
therefore discouraged by authority. Now, although the principle
of private interpretation was sufficiently discredited by the absurdi-
ties to which it led, it was thought the safe course to put into the
hands of all a text provided, where necessary, with authoritative
notes. Certain restrictions still remained, rendered advisable by the
polemics of the day, but gradually the Tridentine legislation be-
came in effect abrogated, as Pope after Pope began to urge the
faithful, long unaccustomed to the practice, to seek direct nour-
ishment for their souls in the fertile pastures of God's authentic
Word. In our own days the present Pontiff and his immediate
predecessor have been especially emphatic in recommending the
Holy Scriptures to the perusal and meditation of Catholics.*
There is no doubt that their exhortations have been heeded,
and an immense stimulus given to the study of the Bible amongst
Catholics in these times. But it may be questioned whether their
words have borne quite adequate fruit in regard to the practice
of private Scripture reading amongst the ordinary faithful. Can
we say, for instance, that the laity show a much more intimate
*For instance : " Let all understand how deeply the Sacred Books should be
esteemed, and with what eagerness (the faithful) should approach this arsenal
of heavenly arms. But this (eager reverence) is impossible unless the Scriptures
are studied and read continuously." Leo XIII. 's Encyclical, Providentissimus Deus
(1893).
56 THE WESTMINSTER VERSION [Oct.,
acquaintance with the New Testament than can be gleaned from
the Sunday Epistles and Gospels ? One may hope so, and the large
and continuous sale of the handy edition of the Gospels issued by
the English Catholic Truth Society bears out the hope.* But if
they do, they do so in face of many practical deterrents. This
brings us to the immediate subject of our paper.
Our current English versions of the Bible are not only uncouth,
inaccurate, and obscure in many places, but, owing to the prevalence
of an unfortunate tradition, are commonly printed unworthily, and
inadequately arranged and edited. They are neither as accurate
or as readable as they might easily, and should properly, be. At-
tempts have often been made to remedy the first of these defects.
The great Bishop Challoner in 1749, some hundred and forty years
after its publication, revised the original " Douay " so drastically
that Newman did not hesitate to call the result a new translation.
As far as intelligibility goes, it was certainly a vast improvement on
the work which it superseded. Once again, several years later, he
revised his own work, whilst, after his death, several independent
revisions, chiefly of the New Testament portion, were executed by
various Irish ecclesiastics, with the result that we have now at least
four distinct varieties of the Douay-Challoner version, substan-
tially alike but differing in many small details, and all more or less
unsatisfactory. Thus the improvements undoubtedly effected in the
original have brought about hindrances of their own.
Dissatisfaction at this result was not confined to the British
Isles, and at last an American prelatef essayed the role of Challoner
and strove to apply a remedy. By a strange fatality, his attempt,
whilst not itself achieving complete success, was partly instrumental
in hindering the production of what would probably have been
the definitive English Catholic translation. For the first time
the story has become generally known through the publication of
Mr. Wilfrid Ward's Life of Cardinal Newman. The second Pro-
vincial Synod of the Province of Westminster, held at Oscott, near
Birmingham, in 1855, passed the following Canon on the subject
of a new vernacular version : "To secure as soon as possible an
accurate rendering of Sacred Scripture from the Latin Vulgate, the
Fathers have decreed that the task of producing it should be com-
mitted to such learned men as the most Eminent Archbishop (Wise-
*The last annual Catholic Truth Society Report, dated April, 1913, states that,
of the four penny Gospels, the aggregate number of one hundred and ninety-nine
thousand has now been issued.
tBishop Francis Kenrick of Philadelphia, afterwards (1851) Archbishop of
Baltimore.
1913.] THE WESTMINSTER VERSION 57
man) should select." It can hardly be doubted that the Synod had
in view a certain " learned man," John Henry Newman to wit,
one fitted beyond all others for the projected work, who was living
at his oratory a few miles from its place of assembly. As a matter
of fact, it was to Newman that the Cardinal did appeal, not indeed
quam primum, as the Synod had ordained, but after the lapse of
two whole years. Newman promptly accepted, and engaged the
services of a large body of translators.
The work was in active progress when, a year later, and with-
out a word of comment, Wiseman sent the editor-in-chief a letter
from the American episcopate, deprecating the English enterprise
on the ground that Archbishop Kenrick of Baltimore was engaged
on a similar task, and, as long ago as 1851, had completed and
published the New Testament. At the same time he forwarded to
Newman a recent resolution of the Baltimore Synod, to the effect
that the English forces should be asked to combine with the Amer-
ican in the production of a single authoritative version. Wiseman,
with whom the decision lay, suggested no way of dealing with
the situation, and Newman, after waiting some time in utter per-
plexity, took the Cardinal's silence as a revocation of his commis-
sion, and disbanded his staff. Two things at least strike us as ex-
traordinary in this narrative. The first is the strange lack of inter-
communication between the Church in England and in the States at
that time, owing to which a representative Synod in England seem-
ingly knew nothing of Archbishop Kenrick's great enterprise,
although it had been before the world for several years.* The
Synod, Newman himself or some one of his collaborators, could
not have failed to take cognizance of the American venture had
more than a very few copies ever crossed the ocean. The second
is the curious apathy and infirmity of purpose displayed by Wiseman
in the whole transaction his delay in starting the work; his lack of
interest in its progress; his practical refusal of financial help;
his shirking the responsibility of an answer to the representations
from America; his final silent withdrawal of his support. Con-
sidering the uniqueness of the opportunity he thus allowed to
lapse, we cannot acquit him of blame, except by laying great stress
on the physical lassitude and mental inconsistency which marked the
last decade of his strenuous career. But the Catholic cause suffered
in consequence. Archbishop Kenrick, it is true, persevered in his
task, and completed the whole Bible in 1860. He called his work
*The " Four Gospels " was published in 1849, the rest of the New Testament
in 1851, and the Psalms in 1857.
58 THE WESTMINSTER VERSION [Oct.,
a '' revision of the Rhemish Version," but it would appear that he
made no scruple, when he thought fit, of deserting the Vulgate and
following the Protestant rendering of the Hebrew. Father Gigot*
tells us that this version never became popular, even in the land of
its origin ; the " Four Gospels " alone reached a second edition.
Such is a brief account of the various attempts made, since the
Reformation, under the authority of the Church, to bring the waters
of God's Word pure and undefiled through the channel of an Eng-
lish translation to the lips of the faithful. We cannot say that the
result has been satisfactory. Whether we regard accuracy or style,
we have been content with the less good. And as for the reform
in material arrangement that is called for, we are where we have
always been. Nay, we have gone back, since the ages of Faith,
when our forefathers lavished all the resources of art on the
embellishment of the Bible. It is sad that the invention of printing,
which has so helped the diffusion of God's Word, should have had
the secondary effect of diminishing the external reverence paid to
it. The cult of cheapness in Bible production is hardly a sign that
the Book is held dear.
Faced, then, with substantially the same question as confronted
our ancestors in persecution times, and our fathers at the dawn
of the " Second Spring," it has been reserved to our own generation
to attempt the solution once again. The initial steps towards satis-
fying our twofold need of a correct rendering, worthily presented,
have at last been taken. Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co., of New
York and London, have recently published in both cities the First
Part of the Third Volume of a new translation of the New Testa-
ment, which from the diocese of its origin has been termed the
" Westminster Version." The projectors of this undertaking,
whilst debating how best to set about it, were advised by a prominent
English bishop not to move for the appointment of an Episcopal
Commission and the establishment of a Board of Editors and
Translators, a process which, while giving a formal and authorita-
tive character to the work, would probably have caused indefinite
discussion and delay. They resolved accordingly to embody their
ideals in a purely tentative effort, which should commit no one but
themselves, and to solicit ecclesiastical approbation for their project
on those lines. This approval was readily granted at the Low-
Week meeting of the English hierarchy, and his Eminence Car-
dinal Bourne graciously accepted the dedication of the whole work.
*See General Introduction to the Study of the Holy Scriptures, ch. xv., where
a luminous account is given of the various vernacular translations.
1913.] THE WESTMINSTER VERSION 59
The first care of the General Editors was to secure the co-
operation of a representative body of Catholic Scripture scholars,
taken, as far as might be, from members of the secular and regular
clergy in England, Ireland, and America. At present only the
New Testament is in hand, and accordingly the number of col-
laborators is not large. American scholarship is represented by
Father Walter Drum, of Woodstock, and it is expected that Father
Gigot will also be a collaborator. It is estimated that the whole New
Testament will be comprised in four octavo volumes, of which the
third is devoted to the Epistles of St. Paul to the Churches. The por-
tion actually published contains the two Epistles to the Thessalo-
nians, which are probably the first of St. Paul's extant writings, and
therefore the earliest Scriptures of the New Testament. The idea
of beginning with St. Paul was suggested by the fact that his writ-
ings admittedly suffer the most from the various imperfections of
the current versions, and by the consideration that the Epistles lend
themselves readily to the experiment of separate publication. The
Thessalonians is intended to serve as a general indication of style
and method; the desired uniformity of treatment will be further
secured by the circumspection of those finally responsible for the
editing.
So much for a general idea of the undertaking as a whole.
Descending now to details, we may show separately how it is
proposed (i) to improve the translation and (2) to reform the
manner of printing it.
The aim, of course, of every translation from one language to
another is to express, as exactly as the inevitable disaccord of
the two allows, the ideas of the one in terms of the other. The
faithful translator wants to say in his own tongue what the writer
has said in his, giving not only the sense but the very phrase by
which the sense was conveyed, so far as the genius of the two lan-
guages permits such approximation. At times some change of
meaning is bound to result from transferring the thought from
one vehicle to the other, and the best translation will be that wherein
the necessary changes are reduced to a minimum. That being so,
the first requisite for the translator is to have an exact copy of what
the author actually wrote. In regard to the Bible, even in its very
latest portion, this is manifestly impossible now; just as the original
autographs of prophet and evangelist, or the scrolls of their aman-
uenses, have long since perished, so the first copies of these docu-
ments are now represented merely by the latest of a long line of
transcripts. We have no Hebrew MS. of the Old Testament, I
60 THE WESTMINSTER VERSION [Oct.,
believe, earlier than the ninth century, nor any Greek text going
back beyond the fourth.* By dint of elaborate collation, by com-
parison with versions earlier than any extant original, by reference
to quotations preserved in the first Christian writings, very much
has been done to eliminate the errors due to the mistakes of scribes,
which, after all, are not of the greatest moment. Speaking even
of the uncorrected MSS., Westcott and Hort are not afraid to say :
" The books of the New Testament, as preserved in extant docu-
ments, assuredly speak to us in every important respect in language
identical with that in which they spoke to those for whom they were
originally written." We cannot, of course, say that the text has
yet been completely restored; a number of late "cursive" MSS., and
some ancient versions, have still to be more thoroughly examined.
But for all practical purposes we may take the Greek text, lately
edited by von Soden, and embodying the results of the close modern
study of New Testament Greek, of the collation of many new
MSS., and of recently discovered Egyptian papyri, profiting, more-
over, by the great classic editions of Tischendorf and Westcott
and Hort, as representing fairly closely the original labors of the
sacred writers. The appearance of this edition would alone justify
the demand for a new version, whereas to wait until the last word
in textual criticism should have been spoken, would postpone the
enterprise indefinitely, and savor more of pedantry than of com-
mon sense.
It will have been understood ere this that the " Westminster
Version " goes back to the original texts, and only uses the Vulgatef
for purposes of reference and comparison. The critical value of the
Vulgate is acknowledged by all scholars. The educated have no
sympathy with the old gibe directed against the Douay Version,
as being " the translation of a translation." The Vulgate, being it-
self largely a revision of the first Latin translations, is based on
Greek and Hebrew texts very much earlier than any now extant.
No translator can afford to neglect its readings, even when they are
not represented by any surviving text. Still, as the Sistine and
*As is well known, the Bible has fared better in this respect than most of the
ancient classics. Our knowledge of Sophocles, for instance, mainly depends on a
single MS. copy written some fourteen hundred years after his death.
tThough the Vulgate is the " Authorized Version " of the Church, officially
guaranteed to contain no doctrinal error, and enjoined for use in all liturgical
functions, there is no law or even custom making it the only basis of vernacular
translations. The chief French version, the " Crampon " Bible, is based entirely
on the originals, and so of many other recent translations, both French and German.
In English, we have Dr. Lingard's " Four Gospels" (1838), praised by Cardinal
Wiseman, and in the States a similar work approved by Cardinal Gibbons, viz.,
the late Father Francis Spencer's "Four Gospels" (1898), both from the originals.
1913-] THE WESTMINSTER VERSION 61
Clementine revisions show, the Vulgate has never been considered
free from errors, and the fact that a Papal commission is at present
engaged on its further correction, makes it still less suitable as
the basis of a new translation. Ceteris paribus, there is more like-
lihood of reaching an author's meaning through the language he
actually used than through another linguistic medium, and, with
the Greek text so far satisfactorily restored, the obvious course
seems to be to use it. The Old Testament opens up other considera-
tions, for which we have at present no leisure.
Given the text, it further remains to decide how it should best
be translated. The Sacred Books themselves were, of course,
originally composed in the literary style current at the dates of
their production; there was presumably no straining after archaic
effects, nor any artistic devices, save such as were called for by
their character and subject. Should they not then be translated into
the current language of our time with an obvious gain to intellig-
ibility ? A modern version can be literary as befits the subject ; why
aim at being strange and old-fashioned ? The answer is that we are
dealing with a literature which is both sacred and historic, and
which on both counts demands a certain aloofness of language.
The sacred writers used the vernacular of their day; it is also true
that they celebrated the sacred mysteries in the dress of the period.
A return to common speech for the clothing of their thoughts,
causes a shock of the same kind, if not of the same intensity, as
would the sight of a priest celebrating Mass in ordinary garb. In
fact, the accident of time has created a sort of Biblical language,
in English at any rate, which, we feel, should not be discarded un-
necessarily. Of course, the first requisite in every translation is
intelligibility; no considerations of beauty or dignity should be
allowed to outweigh that. But intelligibility is not sacrificed by
a diction remote from common speech, unless the words or idioms
used are practically obsolete. And so, without foolishly aiming at
fine writing, or consciously striving to better the English of the
Authorized Version,* as in some quarters seems to be expected,
the " Westminster " writers will endeavor to cultivate a simple,
dignified and harmonious style, according to the possibilities of their
subject-matter.
*It seems not amiss to call attention to the fact that the boasted excellence
of the Authorized Version is very often due to the sheer sublimity of the matter
translated, which even a bare literal rendering cannot destroy. On the other
hand, there are plenty of obscure and uncouth passages in the Authorized Version,
just as the Rheims Version, the producers of which were in no way inferior to
King James' divines in linguistic or literary attainments, is not unfrequently as
lofty and melodious as the other.
62 THE WESTMINSTER VERSION [Oct.,
This suggests a further remark. A conscientious translator
has no mission to improve his author's composition, and what
would be impertinent in regard to a secular writer savors somewhat
of blasphemy in regard to one who is sacred and inspired. Con-
sider the Apostle Paul, who was a difficult writer even in the eyes
of his contemporaries (vide 2 Peter iii. 15, 16) difficult, not only
on account of the depth and strangeness of the truths he proclaimed
facts of revelation far beyond unaided human ken but also on
account of his own mental equipment and training, which made
him use a style quite peculiar to himself highly metaphorical,
allusive, unpolished, and abrupt, fashioned on rabbinical models, and
touched with Hebrew idiom, overcharged at times with the burden
of his lofty conceptions, and often breaking down grammatically
under the strain the style of one who was an orator by nature but
not a rhetorician, one who disdains the studied harmonies of lan-
guage, and whose irrepressible vehemence of utterance repeatedly
obscures his thought. All the translator can do with an author
like this is to give the Apostle's words as accurately as possible,
and indicate their precise bearing in a note. For, on the one hand,
he sees the Scylla of a bald unintelligible literalism, on the other
the Charybdis of a paraphrase. Let the reader in the following
examples contrast these two dangers St. Paul is telling the Corinth-
ians why he failed in his promise to visit them (2 Cor. i. 17-20).
The Twentieth Century New
Rheims New Testament (1^82). ,
Testament (1904).
Whereas then I was thus mind- As this was my plan, where,
ed, did I use lightness? Or the pray, did I show any fickleness
things that I mind, do I mind of purpose ? Or do you think my
according to the flesh, that there plans are formed on mere im-
be with me It is and It is not? pulse so that in the same breath
But God is faithful, because our I say "Yes" and "No?" As
preaching which was to you, there God is true, the Message that we
is not in it, It is and It is not; for brought you does not waver be-
the Son of God, Jesus Christ, tween "Yes" and "No." The
Who by us was preached among Son of God, Christ Jesus, Whom
you, by me and Sylvanus and we Silas, Timothy, and I pro-
Timothy, was not It is and It is claimed among you, never wav-
not, but It is was in Him: for all ered between " Yes " and " No."
the promises of God that are in With Him it has always been
Him // is. " Yes." For many as were the
promises of God, in Christ is the
"Yes" that fulfills them.
1913-] THE WESTMINSTER VERSION 63
In this difficult passage, the Rheims translators have kept
strictly to their declared canon " not to mollify the speech, but to
keep to it word for word " a rule which they made in protest
against non-Catholic license but they have not helped the English
reader much; their rendering would still be " Greek " to the major-
ity. On the other hand, the Twentieth Century translators, whilst
making the sense of the passage admirably clear, practically desert
St. Paul's language altogether and fall back on a paraphrase,* a
fatally tempting and easy thing to do, especially in the case of St.
Paul. Sometimes so very little is needed to remove obscurities
and ambiguities the expansion of an idea only half expressed, the
insertion of a few connectives, disjunctives, etc., to bring out the
structure of the thought, the construction of a logical bridge be-
tween two separate themes, the substitution of a more exact word,
the straightening out of a tangled sentence, t!ie tom'ng down of a
very mixed metaphor that the translator has constantly to be on
his guard against the tendency to improve St. Paul and to give
what the Apostle may have meant, not what he certainly said.
Intelligibility, therefore, fidelity, dignity these notes, we trust,
will characterize the Westminster Version, and whatever other im-
provements may be effected on previous Catholic renderings, its
merits may be expected to lie chiefly in these. But, whilst its
first aim is to remove the mistranslations, clumsy phrases, Latinisms,
*In their preface they deny that their version is a paraphrase, while allowing
that it is more than a mere " verbal translation." The question, of course, is :
To what extent may we abandon an author's phraseology? Only so far, we main-
tain, as is necessary for clearness. However, there have been more obvious para-
phrases than that of the Twentieth Century New Testament, and more thorough
literalists than the Rheims translators. The following specimens may amuse the
reader :
" Pursue love and be emulous of spiritual things, and rather that ye might
prophesy.
" For he speaking in a tongue speaks not to men but to God : (for none
hears: and in the spirit he speakes mysteries).
" And he prophesying speaks to men for building the house, and entreaty and
encouragement.
" And he speaking in a tongue builds himself : and he prophesying builds the
Church" (i Cor. xiv. 1-4).
It was after this fashion that Miss Julia E. Smith, an American lady, thought
it her duty, in 1876, to translate the whole Bible. She may have been provoked
to this desperate literalism by the "liberal" translation issued in 1768 by Dr. E.
Hardwood, who set himself " to cloathe the genuine ideas and doctrines of the
Apostles with that propriety and perspicuity in which they themselves, I apprehend,
would have exhibited them had they now lived and written in our language." This
is how the Doctor begins the story of the Prodigal :
" A gentleman of a splendid family and opulent fortune had two sons.
" One day the younger approached his father and begged him in the most
importunate and soothing terms to make a partition of his effects betwixt himself
and his elder brother. The indulgent father," etc.
64 THE WESTMINSTER VERSION [Oct.,
obsolete and ambiguous' words, etc., that disfigure our current
Scriptures and impede their devout perusal, its second, as before in-
dicated, is hardly less important, viz., to reform our manner of
printing, editing, and publishing the Sacred Books.
It has been well said by Professor Driver that the Bible is
not a book but a library. Moreover, it is a library of very varied
contents. It embodies the literature of at least twelve centuries,
the products of many different minds, alike only in this that they
were all the instruments of the Divine Mind. In the words of
Canon Barry:
All the kinds of literature practised among Orientals of the
Semitic branch are to be found in our Bible. It contains " old
history " handled with freedom, legends and folklore, chronicles
quoted and abridged, genealogies of peoples and settlements of
races according to current views, anecdotes relating the qualities
of heroic men, laws in every stage of growth and decay, prov-
erbs, parables, apocalypses, poems, and speeches. It offers us
biographies viewed under a religious light ; apologues and med-
itative prayers ; and in such books as Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom, St.
Paul's Epistles, St. John's Gospel, the principles of a theology
based on reflection.*
Bearing this in mind, and reflecting on the transcendent im-
portance of the divine Message, the reverence due to it, the desire
that should be ours to understand it, let us glance at our ordinary
editions of the Bible. We find this library packed between the
covers of a single volume! From Genesis to Apocalypse there
is a succession of narrow columns, filled with short numbered sec-
tions, chapter following on chapter, and book upon book, without
even the break of a separate title-page, except it be between the
two Testaments. As far as appearance goes, it might all be one
treatise on a single subject, composed by the same hand in a uni-
form literary medium. And even were it so, what an uncalled-for
tax would be thus put upon the intelligence of the reader by the
meanness and monotony of its presentment. If we suppose a selec-
tion of English literature to be thus translated and offered to the
foreign student, we shall realize better, perhaps, what serious
material obstacles are put in our way when we try to savor the
full meaning of God's Word. Imagine, then, a reader confronted
with a series of selections from Caedmon and Alfred, Chaucer, and
Holinshed, the Elizabethan dramatists, Bacon, Clarendon, the
*The Tradition of Scripture, p. 236.
1913-] THE WESTMINSTER VERSION 65
Statutes at large, Macaulay, Carlyle, Newman, Scott, Keble, and
Tennyson, all translated into French or German of a single period
and printed as prose, or, rather, all chopped up into short numbered
sections, and grouped arbitrarily into chapters to the neglect of the
natural and logical divisions of the matter, and, finally, the whole
sewed up in crowded double-columns and small type would such a
scholar have the heart to pursue his studies? And, if he did, what
would he make of them? Now, our case, when we take up our
Bibles to seek light and consolation, is but little, if anything,
better, and, if our powers of perception had not been blunted by
long-continued use and wont, we should have long ago insisted on a
remedy.
For, from the point of view of the devout reader, this ar-
rangement is wholly arbitrary and unnecessary. It is no conveni-
ence to him (except on the rare occasions when he is changing his
house) to have all the Sacred Books bound in one volume. At any
given moment, he is not likely to need more than a small portion.
It is no advantage, but much the reverse, to have to scan the small
print and turn the thin paper which the compression of so vast a
literature into one book necessitates. It is irritating to a degree
to have the sense obscured by irrational chapter and verse sections ;
to find poetry printed as prose vice versa; to have dialogue
arranged as continuous narration; to be left altogether without
cross-headings, sub-titles, and the usual typographical devices by
which the skillful and artistic printer aims at helping the mind
through the eye.*
Now, the contention of the " Westminster " translators is that
Holy Scripture is at least as interesting and as important as any
heathen classic. Editions of the Greek and Roman classics,
which aim at making their contents easily understood, spare no
pains to smooth away difficulties of every sort, so as to bring the
minds of student and writer into immediate contact. It is the
same with the English classics : what learning is exhausted to make
Shakespeare plain ! What skill and care to make him easy and
pleasant to read ! Once more, it is the same with regard to popular
books of devotion, like the Imitation or the Fioretti, books which
owe all their value to the Bible, and in favor of which the Bible is
neglected. No printer or editor has hitherto thought it worth
*Cf. The Bible as Literature, by Rev. Francis Gigot. Professor Moulton has
reason to say (The Literary Study of the Bible, p. 45): "The Bible is the worst
printed book in the world."
VOL. XCVIII. 5
66 THE WESTMINSTER VERSION [Oct.,
while to make the Scriptures readable, and, if the faithful want
to feed their souls therein, they must put up with editions prepared
for the sole convenience of theologians and preachers, for whom,
indeed, it is imperative to have Bibles arranged for reference. It
is reverence the faithful looks for and in vain.
The new Version, which has been the occasion of this paper,
intends to consult the devout reader first and foremost. In it the
separate books of the Bible will be edited with something of the
care bestowed upon profane classics. As the portion already issued
illustrates, the text will be set up in large clear type, with only
such divisions (into sections and paragraphs) as the sense requires,
with sub-titles to indicate changes of subject, and with explanatory
notes where needed for complete intelligibility. Moreover, in order
to give each separate Scripture its approximate setting, essential
aid to its full understanding, introductions dealing with date, au-
thorship, place, occasion, etc., will be provided, as well as appendices
on different points of dogmatic importance in the text. Finally,
no attempt will be made to combine what are distinct in all their
circumstances, and as many volumes will be occupied as the scale
of the work is found to demand.
Thus it will be seen that the various sources from which have
resulted the defects of our current version have been carefully
eliminated in this. The influence of the Vulgate, in so far as
it affected the quality of the English, will no longer be felt, the
desire to consult primarily the needs of preachers and theologians
is no longer operative.* The cult of cheapness, now pushed to the
extreme with the laudable desire of increasing circulation, is not
recognized in this case (yet the books will vie in price with cur-
rent fiction for which money is found so readily), the various dis-
crepancies produced by the many revisions at the hands of persons
of unequal attainments and different ideals automatically disappear,
and the natural processes of growth, change, and deterioration, to
which language is subject, will be carefully provided against. Is it
too much to hope that the English-speaking members of the Church,
in America and the Colonies, as well as at home, will become
increasingly familiar with the Book which is their birthright, by
means of the " Westminster Version? "
*The needs of students are not neglected, for the old reference numbers arc
given in the margin.
HOW CALDEY CAME HOME.
BY A. H. NANKIVELL.
I.
HE beginning of great events is often found in the
chance events of childhood. One day about thirty
years ago it happened that a boy of twelve years
wandered into his father's library, looking for
something to pass the time. He found there a curious
book, the like of which he had not seen before. It was a work
entitled Monks and Monasteries, by the Rev. S. Fox. He took
it out and read it eagerly. He was immensely interested. He even
began to dream that he would be a Benedictine monk.
Many years after in 1892 a young medical student visited
almost by chance the convent of the (Anglican) Benedictine nuns
at Twickenham. They had been founded at Feltham in 1868,
and we shall find them later at Mailing Abbey near Maidstone, and
later still at St. Bride's, Milford Haven. In God's good providence
they " came home " with Caldey. These women were living accord-
ing to the Rule of St. Benedict with the sanction of Dr. Temple,
who was at that time Bishop of London.
The young student and the twelve-year-old boy were one and
the same person, and his name was Aelred Carlyle. He naturally
asked himself, why, if there were nuns observing the Benedictine
Rule in the National Church, there could not also be monks?
Now the chaplain of the convent was at the same time the
leader of a small group of men, who were already trying to live
according to the Rule of St. Benedict. The young student
was admitted into this band under the name of Brother
Aelred, and there he received his first experience of the
religious life. But the experiment did not last long, for the group
soon broke up. Yet he did not lose courage at this disappointment.
Already he had made the acquaintance of ten young men at Ealing,
who shared his hopes and ambitions. With the cordial approval
of the chaplain, this new group of enthusiasts hired a room where
they met for prayer. And not long after we find them in posses-
sion of a house, where they lived and prayed together, while they
68 HOW CALDEY CAME HOME [Oct.,
continued to work for their living, and also took some part in parish
work.
In the year 1895 Brother Aelred and his companions received
a hearty invitation from the Vicar of the parish of St. John's,
Isle of Dogs, to come and share in the religious life and work
of the parish, and to take yearly vows. The matter was considered
very carefully, but Brother Aelred was the only one who saw his
way to accept the offer. The result was that he separated from
his companions, and came alone to his new home.
During the following months he lived at home, giving part of
his time to his studies, part to parochial work in the Isle of Dogs.
This " island " is really a peninsula on the northern bank of the
river Thames, in the district known as London Docks. It may
easily he imagined that the work in those parts is not attractive
to flesh and blood.
In the Lent of the year 1896 he came to live in this parish,
and gave himself entirely to prayer and good works. The Bishop
of London (Dr. Temple) was informed of his decision, and gave it
his approval, and at Easter the chaplain of the Benedictine nuns
at Mailing received him as a " novice " in the chapel of the Abbey.
In view of the special circumstances of the case, the Bishop per-
mitted him to take vows immediately for one year. It was his own
earnest request that he might do so. A few months later he was
joined by another novice.
At the end of the year 1897, Brother Aelred went to the
Vicar of the parish, and represented to him that the multitude of
his daily duties was hindering him from the attainment of the
end he had in view, which was to live in strict accordance with the
Benedictine Rule. And he added that it seemed to him that the
time was approaching when he might be permitted to make his
profession as a Benedictine monk. The clergyman agreed with
him, and wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, asking him to
grant an interview to Brother Aelred. Bishop Temple had now
become Archbishop of Canterbury, which is the highest office in
the Established Church. He was always interested in the religious
life, and so he gave authorization for his solemn profession as a
monk under the Holy Rule of St. Benedict. This solemn pro-
fession was made in the chapel at Mailing before the same chaplain
who had given him so much support and sympathy on the 2Oth
of February, 1898.
For several months Brother Aelred and his companions vainly
sought a suitable home for their new life. Many weeks were
1913.] HOW CALDEY CAME HOME 69
passed in the London House of the Cowley Fathers, and at last, at
the end of 1899, we find them in a cottage near Milton Abbas
in Dorset, where they remained till their departure to Caldey in
January, 1901.
For those who flee from the godless world, what home can be
more sweet than an island? In the island of Patmos St. John
the Apostle saw the heavens opened. In lona and Lindisfarne St.
Columba and St. Cuthbert obtained the conversion of England by
their unceasing prayers. But a hundred years before St. Columba
came to lona, a certain Abbot Pirus, " an excellent man and a holy
priest," prayed and fasted on the Isle of Caldey. Thither came
St. Iltyd, religious, preacher, and teacher; thither St. David, and
many forgotten saints whose names are written in heaven. Thither
also long afterwards the Normans follower 1 the Celts, and from
1 1 20 till the Tudor outrage the sons of St. Benedict ruled and
prayed in Caldey. Happy island of the furthest west, it was
one great altar of God, guarded on all sides by the unsleeping sea !
Now before the monks of St. Benedict ever came to Caldey,
it pleased God to give the English a wise and holy king. And in
many matters St. Edward the Confessor received from God the
gift of prophecy. So when he lay dying many secret things were
revealed to him in a dream, and chiefly the angel of the Lord
told him of the divine judgments that should fall upon the English
people. And the king wept, and asked him if there were any
remedy. And this is the answer he received, as it is written in
the Golden Legend :
" A green tree cut from his stock shall be divided from his
proper root the space of three furlongs, and without man's hand
shall turn again to his old root, and take again his sap and flour-
isheth and bringeth forth fruit, and when this is done there may
come remedy."
Now whatever may be the true interpretation of the dream,
thus it befell the Church in England. For in the year 1534 the
cruel King Henry VIII. separated the Church by force from the
Holy See and the common life of Christendom, and in 1560 Eliza-
beth finished the destruction of the Catholic religion in England.
Three hundred years later the Catholic revival began with the
famous sermon of Keble on " National Apostasy," preached in the
University pulpit on July 14, 1833. In 1845 tne fi rst batch of
Oxford converts joined the Catholic Church, and in 1850 the
glorious Pontiff Pius IX. restored the hierarchy to England in
spite of the angry protests of the politicians.
70 HOW CALDEY CAME HOME [Oct.,
More than sixty years have passed, and the incoming tide of
Catholicism still rises very slowly. Yet without ceasing it flows,
and silently winds its way into villages and forgotten shrines, where
of old the Mass was offered and the blessed saints wrought miracles
of power and love. And so in the end it has come even to the
lonely Isle of Caldey, by Tenby in South Wales. And this is the
story :
In October, 1900, there was a change in the ownership of
Milton Abbas, and the new landlord wanted the cottage in w r hich the
brothers lived. So they had to find a new home. At the same
time the Rev. W. D. Bushell, who was the owner of Caldey, wrote
to the brethren, and proposed that they should have the use of the
rooms and church of the ancient priory on the island. It was
understood on both sides that the arrangement could not be a lasting
one. The monks accepted the offer. It was with the deepest emo-
tion that they sang Vespers for the first time in the ancient church
on January 10, 1901.
Being without money, the brethren tried to maintain them-
selves by labor in the garden of the monastery. Later on in the
year the owner of Caldey wanted the whole house for other pur-
poses, and for eight weeks the monks had to sleep in tents in
the woods. And it so happened that the weather was unusually
wet and cold that summer. Towards the end of September they
were thankful to find themselves able to return to the sheltering
roof of the house. Early in 1902 they received an invitation from
Lord Halifax to come and live in a convenient house at Painsthorpe,
in Yorkshire, And here we find them in the month of March, 1902,
free from the harassing anxieties of former years. Their num-
ber had risen to nine, and continued to increase. With the approval
of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, they elected Brother
Aelred as their Abbot, and received from the Primate, Archbishop
Temple, the charter of their Community.
In this document the Archbishop gave his sanction to what
they had done, and to their observance of the Rule of St. Benedict.
It seems to us beyond all question that the Archbishop knew
quite well that the monks of Caldey were using the Monastic Brev-
iary. The use of the Breviary with all the Offices of the Saints
under Rule and Episcopal authority, was a strange innovation in
the Protestant Church! But it may be replied, What about the
Anglican nunneries ? The answer is partly that they escape notice,
partly that in most of them is used a form of prayer suitably
adapted for the needs of Protestant persons. But in the matter
1913.] HOW CALDEY CAME HOME 71
of Caldey Archbishop Temple simply refused to anticipate trouble.
He shut his eyes and blessed the monks. And in 1903 he died.
The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Davidson by name, was a
prelate of a different sort. The monks had now taken up their
abode in the Archdiocese of York, and so they did not hesitate to
turn to the Northern Primate (Maclagan), who was now their
diocesan, for such help and guidance as they needed. He was only
a very moderate High Churchman, but was notably free from
the anti-Roman spirit that so disfigures English Christianity. They
represented to him that they were still without any " priest " of
their Order. There were excellent reasons why it was not desirable
that the Abbot should be ordained in English under English laws.
To avoid the red tape of Erastian declarations and obligations,
Archbishop Maclagan sent Abbot Aelred to Bishop Grafton of
Fond-du-lac, who " ordained " him according to the Anglican
Rite.
After a while came the unexpected announcement that their
beloved Caldey was for sale. And hard upon it followed news still
more amazing: it was said the purchaser was going to present it
to the monks of Painsthorpe. At last, about the end of September,
1906, the Community became the legal owner of the whole island.
The brothers said farewell to their beloved home in Painsthorpe on
October i/th. Leaving Painsthorpe, the brothers traveled the
whole night, and reached Tenby in the early morning on the Feast
of St. Luke.
Of the life in Caldey during the six years that follow we
have no written history, save what may be gathered from the
pages of Pax, which the brothers published every quarter.
Their number and influence steadily increased. Many An-
glican clergy and laity visited the Guesthouse from time
to time. It is said that the brochure of the Abbot, entitled Our
Aim and Method, gave much satisfaction to the genuine Bene-
dictines of the Catholic Church. And the " Anglo-Catholics " joy-
fully exclaimed, " There you see what the Church of England can
do! " But during these years a question made itself heard in the
hearts of the Caldey monks that clamored for an answer, " What
are you doing here? Why do you not obey the Head of the
Christian Church? By what authority are you doing what you
do? " Not only to others but even to themselves they seemed to be
" poised between two systems," borrowing Breviary and Missal and
Rule from Rome, and yet at the same time trying to keep their
place in the Church of England.
72 HOW CALDEY CAME HOME [Oct.,
To the problem so stated there is but one answer. Yet these
devoted men did not easily arrive at it. It is said that the ancient
Romans accounted him a hero who refused to despair of the Re-
public. With this in our minds, we may understand the loyalty of
Anglicans to an institution which in no way deserves it. The men
of Caldey found it almost impossible to despair of their Church.
That is the real reason why so many Anglicans who are Catholic
at heart remain in the schism. It was the oft-repeated saying of
a great Anglican, " Spartam nactus es, hanc exornal " It is the
crowning glory of the monks of Caldey that they at last responded
to the heavenly call, in spite of their intense devotion to their
" Sparta."
II.
If the position of Caldey before and during the crisis is
to be at all intelligible to us, it is necessary for us to bear in mind
the extraordinary theory of the history of the Church which is
held by the advanced school in the Church of England. The or-
dinary Protestant holds substantially the same view of the Reforma-
tion as is held by all Catholics. He knows that while the outward
organization of the ancient Church was in the main carefully pre-
served, both in order to confuse the issue, and to preserve a sort of
legal continuity, the actual changes were so great as to destroy the
historic Catholic Church and to substitute a State institution.
The only issue between Catholic and Protestant is whether such
a proceeding was a proper and defensible one or not.
But the "Anglo-Catholic" Party in the Protestant Church
have an entirely different theory of the events of the Reforma-
tion. In their view Protestantism is a true heresy which attacked
the members of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century in
much the same way as Arianism in the fourth century, or Modern-
ism at the present time. On the Continent the result of the epidemic
was the almost total loss of vast districts of the Church. In
England, it is maintained, events took a different course. The
Church bent before the storm and did not break. As in the fourth
and fifth centuries there is said to have been incredible confusion
in the Church, so that sometimes an orthodox bishop, sometimes
a heretic, sometimes a waverer, sometimes a time-server, would
be elected to rule an ancient see, so similarly in England it is ad-
mitted that the orthodox bishops were few, and the general position
ambiguous. The dogmatic teaching of the Church was obscured
1913.] HOW CALDEY CAME HOME 73
by untrue and indefensible traditions. But in spite of all this,
we are told, that there remained a root or a remnant which was
Catholic up to the limits of its opportunity. And when the tide
turned at last, the little group of faithful ones were found wait-
ing, ready to work for the day when the Anglican Church, or rather
the Anglican churches, shall return to the Catholic obedience. In
their own opinion, they are soldiers guarding an outpost in the
enemy's country, till the main army shall arrive and raise the siege.
The weak points in this amazing representation of history are
too many to dally over now. For the moment it may suffice to ob-
serve that taking it at its face value, the fact is undeniable that
the Vicar of Christ has given them a peremptory order to return
to the main body, and that they simply refuse to obey.
Something of this sort was presumably the ordinary view of
the monks of Caldey, when they thought about the matter in the
years 1906-1912, though no doubt they may have eased the strain
of it by dwelling on the apparent growth of the power of the Cen-
tral Government of the Church throughout the ages. In their own
estimation they were real Catholics in an abnormal position, owing
to their unfortunate separation from the Holy See. If it were cer-
tain that the Established Church would never return to the Com-
munion of the Holy See, their duty would have been clear. But,
on the other hand, if the Romeward movement continued and
gathered strength from year to year, and if they themselves by
the mere fact of their existence, to say nothing of their growing
influence, were greatly increasing the strength and speed of it,
might it not be their duty to stay and to finish the work which
lay to their hand ? The fallacy of this argument has been already
sufficiently exposed; it is sufficient to add that we are not per-
mitted to do evil that good may come. " Obedience is better than
sacrifice ! "
In the earlier part of his religious life, Aelred was careful
to obtain the authority of his bishop for all that he did; but after
he left Painsthorpe for Caldey in 1906, he does not seem to have
succeeded in doing this. In the opinion of the Abbot, for which
there was much to be said, the island of Caldey had always been
extra-diocesan and extra-parochial, as it had undoubtedly been by
Papal privilege before the Reformation. At that time the Abbots
of Caldey had received their jurisdiction immediately from the
Pope. But in the present peculiar position of the Church of Eng-
land, it seemed to the new Abbot that he ought to look to the Arch-
bishop of the Province of Canterbury.
74 HOW CALDEY CAME HOME [Oct.,
It is impossible to find a thoroughly satisfactory explanation
of the fact that he did not do this before the year 1911. Prob-
ably he was influenced consciously and unconsciously by a variety
of reasons. In his first letter to Archbishop Davidson, dated
December 13, 1911, he excuses himself by saying that he should
have asked for this permission when he first came to Caldey, but
that he had been strongly advised to wait until it became clear
that the work had passed the experimental stage. The explanation
is not satisfying, and the advice is remarkable and perhaps sig-
nificant. One would like to know who gave it.
It is reasonable to suppose that the Abbot knew instinctively
that he would not find a friend in the new Primate; perhaps he
even had a foreboding of the coming crisis. However it is certain
that Abbot Aelred did not write to the archbishop until it became
practically necessary for him to do so.
In the absence of definite information on the subject, we may
confidently assign to the first of these six years at Caldey the
adoption of some of those customs which precipitated the crisis
of 1913. The course of events is too clear to leave much room for
doubt. Aelred received Anglican Orders from Bishop Grafton of
Fond-du-lac in November, 1904, while the monks were living at
Painsthorpe. Before this date they had no " priest " among them.
Under the friendly but watchful eye of Archbishop Maclagan of
York they would naturally refrain from any course of action which
might involve the loss of his valuable support. But at Caldey,
where they were far from unfriendly critics and free from episcopal
supervision, the conditions of their life and work facilitated the
adopton of " Romish practices " without check or censure. \Ye
cannot fairly blame the Abbot in this matter. Archbishop Temple
had already given them permission to use the Monastic Breviary in
1902, and had practically authorized them to live the lives of Catho-
lic monks. But everybody knows that the Breviary and Missal
are to all intents and purposes two parts of one book. One could
no doubt use the Breviary without the Missal, but it is absurd to
use the Breviary as a companion to the Anglican Book of Common
Prayer. No one knows this better than that increasing body of
Anglican clergy who are in the habit of " saying Office " as a
matter of obligation. The Prayer, the Epistle, and the Gospel,
which are the principal parts of the Proper of the Mass, are also
the principal links between the Mass and the Divine Office. But it
is just here that the Protestant Prayer Book follows a different
arrangement. The discomfort of this must have been intense to
I9I3-] HOW CALDEY CAME HOME 75
devout minds as long as it lasted. But secure in their distance
from the Anglican centre of unity, the monks of Caldey allowed
themselves to take the common-sense view that the use of the
Breviary involved the use of the Missal.
Before we resume our narrative, we must ask whether there
was any other reason, beside those we have discussed, why the
Abbot so suddenly broke the silence of sixty years. It seems that
the answer must be in the affirmative. We find that during the
following Lent a serious crisis occurred at Caldey. In a letter to
the Archbishop written after Easter the Abbot refers to it, and
indeed it was no secret. The danger had then passed; but it had
been very grave. For the Community had spent several weeks in
discussing their duty to the Successor of St. Peter. Someone
had doubts about the Roman question or about the position at
Caldey. The question was inevitably raised by what authority
the Abbot performed his sacerdotal functions. From whom has he
obtained jurisdiction? And Abbot Aelred could never forget that
he was the only Abbot of the Order of St. Benedict who was not in
communion with the Holy See. The Head of Christendom did not
know him. What about Canterbury? At least he ought to ob-
tain formal recognition from the Primate of All England. He
decided to seek it without delay.
The recognition that the Abbot required was not so easy to
obtain. Anglican authorities reck little of jurisdiction, and they
saw no harm in making him wait a little longer. Besides, the Abbot
was trying to shut the door after the horse had quitted the stable.
The discussion about the Papal claims continued at Caldey, and
the Abbot could not stop it; though it was palpably inopportune.
He himself was believed to share the general perplexity. Experts
were summoned to Caldey, and did what they could to reassure
the wavering monks. At last they were successful. Before Easter
they met in council, and resolved unanimously that their duty was
to remain in the National Church, and to pray and work for Chris-
tian unity. For the time the storm had passed by. But it had
been a near thing.
As we have seen, the Abbot opened his correspondence with the
Archbishop of Canterbury in December, 1911. He received a
prompt reply from the private secretary, requiring him to forward
all the documents which bore on the case. In the following Feb-
ruary, Dr. Davidson himself wrote to the Abbot and proposed
an interview, which actually took place on the 6th of March.
The Abbot began by explaining the immediate needs of the Com-
76 HOW CALDEY CAME HOME [Oct.,
munity. In the first place he wished for a license under the
Colonial Clergy Act for officiating in the Province of Canterbury.
Secondly, he asked that certain of the brethren might be ordained
without putting them under the necessity of serving two years
in an ordinary parish. At this time there were only three clergy
in the Community besides himself. Then the Abbot went on to
give a frank explanation of the faith and practice of the Com-
munity, calling attention to the use of the Breviary and Missal
in the Chapels of the Community, and adding that they maintained
the use of the Anglican Prayer Book in the village church of
Caldey. The Archbishop listened attentively, and asked some ques-
tions without making any expression of opinion. Yet he gave the
Abbot the impression that he was anxious, as he said, " to do
what he could for all who were engaged in doing good work within
the large and reasonable limits of the Church of England."
On the 2oth of May he wrote to Abbot Aelred. The letter was
friendly in tone, but cautious and non-committal. He advised the
Community to elect an Episcopal Visitor, and recommended the
Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Gore), who was specially interested in these
matters. And he added that he did not see his way to accede to
the various requests of the Abbot, until that question of the
Visitorship had been satisfactorily arranged.
The monks accepted the proposals of the Archbishop, which
bade fair to give them what they wanted; but the Abbot delayed
writing to Bishop Gore till October 3d, when he asked permis-
sion to elect him as their Episcopal Visitor at the Annual Chapter,
to be held at Pentecost. He expressed the hearty desire of all the
brethren that the Bishop would visit Caldey at the earliest oppor-
tunity, and see for himself what they did, and what were their
special needs and requirements. The Bishop replied somewhat
coldly to the Abbot's invitation. He was good enough to say that
he would consider their proposals carefully; but he thought that
there were a good many preliminaries. He would like to visit
them, but he could not hope to do so that year. He asked them
to send him all their books, and rules and constitutions. And he
gave them his blessing.
It is impossible to read this letter, with the knowledge that the
writer had already taken counsel with the Archbishop, without
asking oneself whether the Anglican authorities had resolved on the
expulsion of Caldey. Certainly no one can study the correspond-
ence from start to finish without seeing plainly the Hand of God,
guiding them slowly but inevitably to the final goal. But an
1913.] HOW CALDEY CAME HOME 77
attentive observer can often discern the play of human free will
seeking its own ends under the overruling providence of the Al-
mighty. It was freely asserted, and not without some measure
of malice, that the men of Caldey had really made up their minds
and set their hearts on the Eternal City, and that they only sought
an opportunity to throw the responsibility on others. That is in-
credible; their acts and words before and after their conversion
alike disprove it. But it is not so easy to satisfy ourselves that the
lengthy diplomatic negotiations which the Anglican authorities
carried on with Caldey, were not calculated with great accuracy
to bring about the result which was in fact attained, without incur-
ring the odium of a frontal attack on Caldey. The only obvious
alternative is to suppose that the Bishops acted with unusual want
of perception, and extraordinary lack of sympathy, for a work
which commanded more enthusiasm among devout churchmen than
any effort of the kind that has hitherto been made.
The Abbot replied on the 2ist of October, expressing
his regret that the Bishop of Oxford could not pay them a visit,
and adding the significant comment that " the life as it actually
exists is the true explanation of our scheme of devotion, which
ought not to be considered altogether apart from its proper
setting." Accordingly he invited the Bishop to send two or three
clergy in whom he has confidence to visit the island, in order to
supply him with accurate information about the mode of life of the
brethren.
In November Dr. Darwell Stone and the Rev. W. B. Trevelyan
came to Caldey, and made a careful investigation and report. They
consulted freely with the Abbot, and courteously sent him a copy
of their letter to the Bishop. On February 8th Dr. Gore sent
his ultimatum to Caldey. It contained four principal points, which
we briefly resume :
1. The Bishop demanded that the whole property should be
legally secured to the Church of England, and not remain private
property, which might belong to any person or persons, regardless
of their relations to the See of Canterbury.
2. The Bishop demanded that the " priests " belonging to the
Community should make the usual oaths and declarations required
of the Anglican clergy. As a result of this the Communion Office
of the Prayer Book would replace the Missal to the complete
exclusion of the latter, and the " priests " would be bound to
recite Morning and Evening Prayer. The Bishop thus deliberately
reversed the policy of the late Archbishop of York, who had sent
78 HOW CALDEY CAME HOME [Oct.,
Abbot Aelred to Bishop Grafton for his ordination precisely in
order that he might not have to make the usual declarations.
3. The Bishop demanded that the doctrine of the Immaculate
Conception and (he should think) the Corporal Assumption should
be "eliminated from the Breviary and Missal!" (Apparently
he had already forgotten that he had just prohibited the use
of the Missal.) He felt sure that these doctrines could only be
justified on " a strictly Papal basis of authority."
4. The Bishop demanded that the Exposition of the Blessed
Sacrament and Benediction given with the Blessed Sacrament
should be abandoned. " The same would probably be true of the
Exposition of Relics and Benediction given with Relics." Finally,
he could not promise that this list would be " exclusive."
Even from a strictly Anglican point of view this letter is
sufficiently astonishing. The writer is the leader and champion
of the so-called " Anglo-Catholics." This is the man, who, to quote
his own confident words, has not hesitated to say, " I want to
find myself, in the Church in England, now in the twentieth cen-
tury, of one mind across the ages with the ancient Christian
Church."* He is so careless about what he says that he " should
think " that he could not tolerate the doctrine of the Immaculate
Conception, and he " probably " cannot permit the veneration of
relics. And finally after these doubts and fears have found suf-
ficient expression, he says that these preliminaries seem to him " to
be obvious, and to lie outside all possibilities of bargaining and con-
cession." After this the end was well in sight.
It was plain to the reader of this letter that the Church of
England had hastened to disown its children. One of the most
" Catholic-minded " of its bishops had been approached, and he had
declined to tolerate for a moment the outward expression of their
faith and devotion. He had clearly shown them that they could
stay only on condition that they stood all the day idle. Or they
might play at the monastic life without the faith and rule which
could alone make it safe or possible. What the Protestant Church
deals out to the laity ought to be good enough for the religious
fragments of the Catholic creed, wreckage of the sacramental
system. The Protestant Church neither knows nor cares about nor
comprehends the needs and dangers of the spiritual life. Without
sympathy, without feeling, without love, it blunders as a politician
might blunder if he found himself in a bishop's chair.
The Abbot of Caldey was a cautious man; he wished to be
*The Body of Christ, p. 216.
I9I3-] HOW CALDEY CAME HOME 79
certain beyond all possibilities of doubt or mistake that the Bishop
meant and stood by what he said. He was going to read the letter
to the brethren on the i6th of February; he knew it would
come as a sentence of death. And so he wrote in haste to the
Bishop, to try and get something from him that might diminish
the violence of the blow. He knew now what the Bishop intended
to forbid; he sought some assurance about what he would allow.
If it could make no real difference to the final result; it might
soften the inward trials of the moment. He reminded the Bishop
that their faith and practice was " identical with that of hundreds
of Church of England people," and asked that he would give
them some assurance in regard to the Real Presence, Invocation
of Saints, and Prayers and Masses for the Dead. The Bishop was
in no mood to take a hint. He replied shortly that he did not intend
to make difficulties about the Objective Presence, or the worship of
our Lord in the Holy Sacrament; and for the rest that he had
rather hold to the method suggested in his letter.
The Monks of Caldey considered the demands of the Bishop on
the following Sunday, with the words of the Antiphon still ringing
in their ears, "Libera nos, Dens Israel, ex omnibus angustiis nostris."
They resolved unanimously that they could not accept conditions
which would make their life under the Benedictine Rule quite im-
possible. Twenty-seven of them signed a letter, saying, " The pre-
liminaries that seem to your lordship so obvious as to lie outside
all possibilities of bargaining and concession, concern matters which
are vital to our conception of the Catholic Faith; and your re-
quirements are so decisive that we are forced to act upon what we
believe to be God's Will for us." The Bishop replied briefly, ask-
ing them to take further time to consider, and requesting them to
withdraw their final reply.
The Abbot wrote on the same day an admirable letter review-
ing the whole situation. He showed that the whole question
had resolved itself into one of authority. Without the clear au-
thority of the Church he could not continue his work. The Bishop
had brought home to them that in the English Church this work
could not be done. They could not give up what they believed;
they could not continue to hold and practice what they had been
asked authoritatively to surrender. The only course left to them
was to accept, in the Bishop's own words, the " strictly Papal basis
of authority." He added that the nuns of St. Bride's, formerly
of Mailing, had come to the same decision.
The last words of the Abbot on this matter are to be found in
8o HOW CALDEY CAME HOME [Oct.,
a letter written by him in the seclusion of the Abbey of Maredsous
on April 26, 1913, and published in the May number of Pax, which
is the quarterly review of the Community. The simple words in
which he records his own conversion are worth recording. " Just
now," he says, "I am not speaking for others, but for myself;
it is a personal spiritual experience, and I can only say that on Feb-
ruary 1 8th the whole position became clear to me, and I was
profoundly convinced that the Divine authority and unity of the
Catholic Church were to be found nowhere else but in union with
the Holy See. In Bishop Gore's own words, " I was thrown back
upon the strictly Papal basis of authority, and I realized, with a
clearness that will never leave me, what the words Unam, Sanctam,
Catholicam et Apostolicam Ecclesiam really meant."
On February 22d, the Feast of the Chair of St.
Peter at Antioch, the Abbot sent a letter to Dom Bede Camm, who
reached Caldey on the tw T enty-fifth. The following Friday, which
was the Feast of the Five Wounds, Dom Camm said the first Mass
at Caldey, and on the 3d of March, Dom Columba Marmion,
the Abbot of Maredsous, arrived, and began a retreat for the
monks. The reception of the Community into the Catholic Church
took place most appropriately on the Feast of St. Aelred, March
5th, the Abbots of Downside, Maredsous, and Caermaria were
present, and the Bishop of Menevia himself received the converts,
and said Mass and gave them Holy Communion.
How tender and how strong is the Mother of saints! How
cheerfully and courageously she goes forth to meet the returning
wanderer, and accepts the gifts he brings, and adapts them to her
own ends ! Some Catholics might be seen shaking their heads over
Caldey, and saying that this sort of thing would never do, and that
the only possible course would be to break up the whole institution
and start afresh. And meanwhile the Abbot of Maredsous receives
both the Communities of Caldey and St. Bride's as Oblates of St.
Benedict, and leaves Dom John Chapman and Dom Bede Camm
in charge of Caldey during the absence of Abbot Aelred, who is
already a novice under Dom Marmion at Maredsous. And no one
will be greatly surprised if in due course the hero of our story
should return, a real monk and a real Abbot, to fulfill the task
which has so long been the one desire of his soul. " Thou hast
given him his heart's desire, and hast not withholden the request
of his lips."
A CONVERT'S VIEW OF CATHOLIC LITERATURE.
BY FREDERICK D. CHESTER.
JNE of the first things that an intellectual convert
must observe upon coming into the world of Catho-
lic truth is his new, and at first unexplained, repug-
nance to the current literature. This will manifest
itself no matter in what direction of thought his mind
may naturally incline. Whether science, politics, philosophy, so-
cial problems, or literature absorb him; or, as is often the case, if he
considers them all together, he will discover that all simultaneously
are " out of drawing " to his critical sense when measured by the
standards of absolute and divine truth. The hand that has for the
first time grasped the hand of a Pasteur, a Windthorst, or a New-
man in any kind of spiritual kinship recoils, instinctively, from a
Huxley, a Bismarck, or a Kingsley. Intimate acquaintance with
Joan of Arc, or Elizabeth of Hungary, makes one fastidious when
it comes to embracing a Mary Eddy or a Dorothy Dix.
The so-called " high class " magazines, such as Harper's
Monthly, The Century, Scribner's, and The Atlantic, appear to
lose caste. Once hailed as acquisitions of our library table,
and the harbingers of correct information, these now take on,
to our altered vision, more or less of a " yellow " look, declasse
and even threatening. Obsessed with this unique misery, like
the loss of a right hand, or our best front teeth, we seek to dis-
cover the cause of it. What is the matter? These journals were
once our intellectual oracles. When they spoke our case was closed.
Now, we are sick of the whole business. " Popular " Science,
New Thought, Socialism, Eugenics the fizzling output seems to
be unworthy. Periodicals like Harper's Weekly or The Inde-
pendent, which we formerly esteemed as educators of the common
people, assume an air of mountebank distortions. Their vulgar
flippancies, their " smart " dogmas, their blasphemous witticisms
at the expense of truth these things have become unbearable to us ;
grotesque and inutile, like Cubist and Futurist designs. The in-
crease of divorce, and the greed of power, conceded by respectable
people to be a menace and disgrace, are, nevertheless, whipped into
flame by such serials as Sir Gilbert Parker's House of Judgment in
VOL. XCVIII. 6
82 A VIEW OF CATHOLIC LITERATURE [Oct.,
Harper's Monthly, or Edith Wharton's tales of social disorders in
The Century.
The vague meanderings of religious doubt and moral weakness
find their dreary expression in Mrs. Humphrey Ward's novels,
while the agnostic, if not anarchistic, Russian Mary Antin is given
the centre of The Atlantic's stage for months. Socialism and cun-
ning crimes fairly deluge our public libraries and news stands, until
their mire and muck threaten to engulf the most unwilling of us all.
Again, and again, since the scales were stripped from our eyes,
have we protested against paying out good money for scandalously
bad reading. Serene in their editorial chairs, the arbiters of our
fate smile ironically, and assure us that they are " giving the people
what they want/' It is a blessed day for us when our emancipa-
tion comes, by way of conversion to the Catholic Church; for like
The Child in the Vatican we can say, humbly enough as God sees,
" I know now things that many do not know." The inconceivable
wealth of the Vatican its art treasures, its history, its spiritual
power all belong, for the first time to us, individually, be we chil-
dren of toil or masters of finance.
It is a stupendous, an almost overwhelming, heritage to come
into by the momentary rite of baptism; and we are very slow in
realizing it. Familiar toys, those gew-gaws of literature, travesties
of art, makeshifts of intellectual and spiritual goods still cling
to our hands like outworn dolls and balls. Bad, and sometimes
nauseating, as those old books and magazines in which we once pas-
tured now seem, our willing holocaust of them leaves a void, which
we are not at first able to fill. We resort to increased prayer
and practical activities. We remind ourselves that we have per-
haps hitherto lived too much in the world of intellectual things,
not careful enough about things spiritual. Yet the ache of a lost
love lingers. Gradually, we learn the names of some current Catho-
lic books and journals, and languidly glance at their contents. The
authors are generally unknown to us, save ,some ecclesiastical lights.
The subjects under discussion, still more the handling of them,
wear at first a foreign or an alien look.
It seems incredible that a priest of whom we had not heard
should really have delivered what is called " the last word " on
biological or seismic science, as a Mendel or a Searle; that the
name of Christopher Columbus should have any other significance
than that of a picturesque mariner, who enabled us to stake out our
own particular claim on this delectable continent. Presently, we
1913-] A VIEW OF CATHOLIC LITERATURE 83
behold such men as Newman and Manning of the Church of Eng-
land from a fresh angle. Formerly regarded as arrant disturbers
of the peace of good, jog-trotting Anglicans and Episcopalians, we
now perceive them to be standard bearers, pathfinders, earth-related
stars of exceeding magnitude. Huxleys and Tyndalls, idols of
popular belief, seem wooden and inarticulate beside the still living
voice of a Pasteur or a Mendel. Impressionists, Cubists, and Fu-
turists, over whom our journals had made us pore in inquisitive
despair, are forgotten in daily intercourse with Michelangelo, Ra-
phael, or Botticelli. Is it possible to love a Cubist because he is
Protestant, or loathe Murillo because he was Catholic? Yet many
readers and observers do thus " reason." Little by little we get
our bearings, groping forward with unexpected ecstatic thrills of
discovery. On we go, through strange Catholic labyrinths of his-
tory, politics, theology, and the arts, amazed at the power and
splendor of the manifestations of all these things. Catholic writers
on such subjects are masters of thought, rarely disappointing, sel-
dom to be disputed.
But one sphere and it may be deemed unimportant seems
defective. When we enter the field of Catholic fiction, we may
be merely surprised, or we may be seriously perturbed, according
to temperament, by its weakness. True, there are encouragements.
A recent article in THE CATHOLIC WORLD, entitled The New Move-
ment in French Literature, tells us that religion and patriotism are
once more dominating the thought of the greatest French men of
letters. Brunetiere and Bazin have been, and still are, higher lights
among academicians than their more materialistic associates. In
a personal note from M. Bazin not long ago, we have his own
words : " Yes, I will keep up the fight. May God aid me ! "
One of the most impressive appeals to patriotism, as well
as to justice and mercy, in M. Bazin's novels, is the scene of the
saluting of the French flag in that wonderful story, The Nun.
We believe that nothing in modern literature surpasses it. Re-
ligion must stir and fertilize the heart before true patriotism can
be born, and one may fancy the solace of our clerical conscripts in
the thought that religious patriotism is worthy of the martyrdom
of even sacerdotal dignity, under such stress of circumstances in
France. If the salvation of country demands the stripping off of
the cassock for the girdling on of the sword-belt, it means, still
always means, that the love of God is greater than the love of
country. Such patriotism, such heart-breaking rendering to Caesar,
84 A VIEW OF CATHOLIC LITERATURE [Oct.,
should forever silence the claims of bigotry that Catholic citizens
are not loyal citizens.
But writers like M. Bazin, or such converts as Mrs. Craigie,
Paul Bourget, and Monsignor Benson, and their kind, may hardly
be accounted writers of fiction in the popular sense. So manifest
is the truth of their moving personages, so poignant their activities,
that one is at a loss to define where reality ends and imagination
begins. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the average
Catholic novel, serial, or short story. On the contrary, weakness
seems to be its strong point. Our missionary reports and convert
confessions contain romances far more enthralling and convincing
than the so-called fiction which too often fails even to deceive.
Such tales as The Curse of a Mixed Marriage, or Nellie's Repent-
ance, are told far more judiciously in the confessional than on the
written page.
A serial now appearing in one of our Catholic magazines
the author, if not the story, being much extolled has all the color,
and let us hope the authoritative value, of a Baedecker guide book.
The scene being laid in Paris and its environs, we are dragged
through street after street, church after church, mart after mart,
fortunate if we can mentally pronounce them all, the sights and
advantages of them being pointed out to us by a kind of automatic
sign-posts, technically called " characters," in the story. One won-
ders what it is all about, and why our good old Baedecker would
not do as well. In our literary novitiate we were instructed that
what is vulgarly called " padding " is a form of commercial dis-
honesty, an imposture on the people who buy and read books.
The hero, though " good," fails utterly to convince us that he is so.
We are sure that the author desires to inspire in us the will to fol-
low his example; yet we would not for the world resemble him,
nor anyone at all like him if we could help ourselves. The hero-
ine embroiders well, and nearly all the time. She is usually found
in the dull but safe company of her brother. There is, however,
a lover, who seizes the loneliness and security of a cell in jail as
his opportunity to declare himself, he being temporarily suspected
of having stolen what would seem to have been a worthless work
of art. There is an aunt very busy about nothing, an angel little
boy, and a dog. Stage properties and supernumeraries entangle us
more and more as we advance, until, quite breathless, we stop to
rest and skip one month's instalment.
True, we have not yet seen them out of their " troubles " and
1913.] A VIEW OF CATHOLIC LITERATURE 85
into their glorification; for we have only followed them through
twenty or thirty chapters, and the conclusion is not yet in sight.
But the point is, we are impatient. The story irritates us. Such
" troubles " do not move us, such virtues do not grip and goad us
to emulation. We feel sure that so much space, so much printer's
ink, so much industry of compositors, is needed for other and
better things.
These " novels " lack the authority of the hour's need. Their
reason for being would appear to be the author's empty purse, or
desire for social and journalistic exploitation. Life does not cry
aloud for them, as it cries ever more and more urgently for such
romances as the Abbot of Caldey's, the Apologia of Newman, and
the Confessions of Monsignor Benson. Justice and mercy do not
demand them as they demand M. Bazin's Coming Harvest and
Davidee Birot. Why can we not be silent until God bids us speak
as when the convert-artist Paul Bourget wrote Divorce and
L'Etape, and Mrs. Craigie The School for Saints?
Like the sacraments of the Church, art demands both matter
and form of the authoritative right quality. When either of these
is defective the desired result is lost. Richard Le Gallienne may give
us in Harper's Monthly words of poetic form, but he leaves us
with a curse, instead of a sacrament of verse, by reason of his
polluted matter.
When Francis Thompson wrote The Hound of Heaven, and
Thomas Daly his Ode to a Thrush, they dipped their pens in sacred
love, and the result has been intimations of immortality. Mrs.
Alice Meynell says in a striking Remembrance of her father,
" He had an exquisite style from which to refrain. The things
he abstained from were all exquisite." One is loath to tamper
with so apparently impressive a statement ; yet it raises the question :
Is it lawful for a man endowed with gifts of the spirit to enfold
them in a napkin of complacency, however " exquisite ? " For
ourselves, we like better the articulate resolve of M. Bazin, " Yes,
I will keep up the fight."
THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE.
BY KATHARINE TYNAN.
CHAPTER I.
THE DOOM.
HEER love of her own country, and a persistent crav-
ing for her own people, had drawn Meg Hildebrand
back to Ireland from Austria, where she had lived in a
luxurious state as English governess and companion
to the daughters of the Archduchess Magda.
She had loved the gracious lady, and the beautiful
girls who were a delight to the eye, and had all the consideration for
a lady in a dependent position that one might have expected from
their breeding.
It hurt her to go: but she had to go. Her heart turned from
the gay court, where she was treated with a deference which almost
hurt her, to the bare bogs, the wild mountains, the clouds, the soft
airs of her own country. Her longing for home positively began to
injure her health. When that fact was represented to the Arch-
duchess by Dr. Buchheim, the Court physician, she withdrew her
opposition to Miss Hildebrand's departure, on condition that Meg's
sister, Pauline, took her place. She hastened her going. Meg left
the Schloss loaded with gifts, covered with caresses. Not soon would
she forget the gracious Archduchess, amid her flock of lovely girls.
They remained in her mind like a group of the Graces, like houris,
better, like angels, as she sped across Europe in the train de luxe by
which the Archduchess had sent her home.
There was not much luxury at Crane's Nest, the out-at-elbows
house where Terence Hildebrand did his best to keep a roof over his
large, healthy family. The roof had a way of flying off in stormy
nights, when the west wind carried portions of it clattering away over
the rocks into the Atlantic. As the repairs were of the cobbling order,
it followed that the upper floor of Crane's Nest was damp and unin-
habitable. But there was plenty of room without it in the big square
mansion with double wings, perched high on its hillside, where it
seemed to catch all the winds and every ray of sun. The sunsets
were splendid from the windows of Crane's Nest. So was the jewelled
sky at night. From many windows you caught a glimpse of the distant
lakes.
" You'll not be leaving us again, Meg? " said Terence Hildebrand,
when he had detached his eldest daughter from the uproarious wel-
1913-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 87
comes of her young brothers and sisters, who clung about her as
though they could never be tired of admiring and caressing her.
" You'll not leave us again ? There's plenty of room at Crane's Nest
for all my children, glory be to goodness. Now that Terry can go
to college, thanks to you, and that we can put Agatha and Kathie
to school, we'll be missing them, with Pauline away too, so you'll have
to stay with us."
Meg said nothing at the moment. She would not talk of going
away when she had hardly arrived: but, after Terry and Agatha
and Katty, there were Dominick and Felix and Brian and little Sheila :
and she was not really needed at Crane's Nest, where now that Pauline
had gone, Terence's favorite sister, Mrs. Creagh, a widow without
encumbrances, was ready to come to take charge.
Mrs. Hildebrand had been a great beauty. Meg was a plainer
image of her. Where the mother's hair had fallen in golden ringlets,
Meg's was brown, with just a shade of red in it. She had no preten-
sion to the exquisite purity of complexion, the correctness of features,
the blueness of eyes so blue as to be almost exaggerated. But there
was a fawn-like grace about Meg a shyness which came suddenly at
the frankest moments. Some people had found that mingled shyness
and candor irresistible. The Archduchess had praised Meg's discre-
tion with a special warmth. It had prevented complications. If she
had only known, Meg's discretion was disinclination. A white and
gold Imperial Hussar had no dazzlement at all for Meg Hildebrand.
There was a picture of the late Mrs. Hildebrand before which
her husband was wont to stand, pointing out its beauties to the daugh-
ter who was most like her in expression and character of all the chil-
dren, although she had neither her eyes nor her hair nor her com-
plexion.
" Look at her, Meg," he would say. " They used to say she was
as like the Empress of the French as though she were her twin. If
your hair wasn't brown and your eyes hazel, and if your color hadn't
a bit of brown in it as well, you'd be the image of her. And to think
when they were all running after her up in Dublin, that she gave
up everything for me, and was just a good little woman, looking after
the house and the children till the day she died! Ah, well, my poor
girl," apostrophizing the picture, " you might have done better for
yourself but you couldn't have been better loved ! "
For a short time Meg gave herself up to the joy of being at home.
She loved every inch of the Irish earth and air ; after her exile she felt
as though she could take every soft-voiced old man or woman she
met with on the road to her heart ; she made friends with every blue-
eyed child, and the fishermen, the urchins driving the cows to and
from the bog, the shepherd with his sheep. All except the little ones
remembered Miss Meg, and were as pleased to have her home as
88 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Oct.,
though it was a personal matter to themselves. She loved the gray and
brown country of stone walls and rocks and bogs. The animals, the
wild, friendly dogs that pawed her all over on the slightest encourage-
ment, the patient little donkeys under the carts, the cattle and sheep
browsing on the scant pasture: everything was full of delight to
her, perhaps the more delightful because she realized that she enjoyed
them only for the time.
" Why would you be going ? " Terence Hildebrand asked in an
aggrieved voice, when after a month or six weeks his daughter talked
of going out on the world again. " Isn't there plenty for you to do at
home? You were always headstrong, Meg, or you'd never have left
us. Not but what you were a good girl to me and the children."
" I'm not going to leave Ireland this time," Meg said. " I'm
too fresh from the pangs of homesickness to have forgotten them.
I'm going up to town next week to my godmother while I look for
something. There won't be so much money but there won't be the
homesickness, and I can run down and see you all if the craving comes
upon me."
She had arrived at her godmother's house in Stephen's Green,
Dublin, one of those baffling houses which look mere slips outside, and
are unexpectedly spacious and stately within. It was the thick of the
Dublin season, and Lady O'Neill was out at an afternoon concert at
the Castle when she arrived, but the servants took charge of her as
though she were the child of the house. She was enjoying a generous
tea by the fire, in the brown oak-panelled room, where, if you lifted a
Persian rug before the fireplace, you saw on the boards the print
of a little child's foot in blood memorial of an unknown tragedy
that not all the soap and scrubbing brushes in the world would wash
out when her godmother arrived.
" I hurried home for you, Meg," she said. " Don't thank me,
child. What with the new music that I can't make head or tail of
give me Mozart and the queer people one meets in society nowadays,
I sacrificed nothing in leaving early. So you want to be at work
again? I hope that young rascal, Master Terry, appreciates his sister.
Why not stay with me till after Easter? I'd like to have a girl to
take out: and I've some old lace spoiling for someone to wear it.
You won't ? Well, you were always obstinate, Meg."
She had to hear all the news of Crane's Nest. Then, having
failed to persuade Meg to stay and dance through a Castle season, she
became suddenly helpful and business-like.
" You wouldn't do it, Meg," she said, " if 1 wasn't a distressed
lady. But since I am, and since Crane's Nest is in the case of the
old woman who lived in the shoe, I'll do my best to help you. As
a matter of fact I've been making inquiries, for I knew your ob-
stinacy, and I've come upon something. The Dowager Turloughmore
1913-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 89
put me on to it, poor old soul. Her daughter-in-law wants a companion.
She must be a lady and accomplished, a good musician and very
discreet, else she'll be making eyes at Lord Erris the only son, who
by all accounts is very handsome, poor boy. I said I thought I might
answer for your discretion. The only thing is it's a shame to send
you there. Castle Eagle is not quite the place I'd select for my
goddaughter, but you're healthy, Meg, and you're of a happy nature.
Very sensible, too, and very kind. Poor Lady Turloughmore, I re-
member her; she was the merriest creature alive. It's no joke to be
always looking out for a curse to fall on the one you love best.
No wonder the son's delicate."
" What is it about the Turloughmores ? There've been tragedies
in the family, I know, but I've been a long time away and I don't
know the story."
" Oh, it's a queer story : I don't suppose there's anything in it.
They are a strange over-strung family, and I suppose they have
got to believe in the doom, as all the rest of Ireland does. The
doom began with a Lord Turloughmore in the time of James the
First. It was a time they were burning witches in England, and
Lord Turloughmore had lived a good deal in England, and had
got a taste for hunting a human quarry. Well, there was an
old woman who was reputed a witch, and she had a plot
of land with a cabin on it right in the middle of the Turloughmore
property, and he had tried to get her out of it it was an eye-sore to
him but she had resisted all his efforts. There doesn't seem to have
been anything in the accusation that she was a witch. She appears
to have been a herbalist, and to have supplied the poor people with
herbal remedies for this and that complaint; and no doubt she was
a bit queer in her head, but a kind creature, devoted to animals and
they to her, even the wild ones.
" Lord Turloughmore would have been glad enough to try her
for witchcraft as he had seen it done in England ; but we had no
witches in Ireland and we burnt none : we left the burning to the next
world if there was burning to be done. Some of the foolish, ignorant
people said that Biddy Pendergast could take the shape of any beast
she liked; and that arose, I suppose, from the fact that animals
were so often seen about her cottage. Lord Turloughmore was hunt-
ing one day when what did the fox do, and the hounds were just
on top of him, but scamper in at the open door of Biddy's cottage,
which was immediately bolted and barred behind him, although the
huntsman swore he had seen Biddy just before the hounds found
her, picking up sticks in a coppice three miles away.
" Lord Turloughmore was up first behind the hounds, and, push-
ing his way through them, he kicked open the door of the cabin.
The hounds rushed- in, and immediately there began the greatest hulla-
90 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Oct.,
baloo you ever heard within, and Lord Turloughmore stood with a
smile on his face, and would allow no one to pass.
" Suddenly a scream came from the house, and it curdled the
blood of those who were standing near. An ancestor of your own,
Sir Dominick Hildebrand, was there, and he shouted that the hounds
were killing the old woman, and he would not stand by to see murder
done. Then someone called out that the fox was sitting up on the
thatch as comfortable as could be, having come up the chimney, so
that it wasn't the fox the hounds were growling and snarling over.
Then Sir Dom Hildebrand closed with Lord Turloughmore, flung him
to one side and rushed into the cabin. There sure enough was poor
old Biddy huddled up in one corner where the hounds had got her
down, and were tearing her to pieces as they tear a fox. There was
the greatest trouble to get the hounds off, but it was too late to save
the poor woman's life. But while a spark of life remained in her, she
put a curse upon the Turloughmores. They said she tried to put a
blessing on your ancestor who had pulled a hound from her throat
with his two hands, and if he wasn't so strong would have been unable
to save himself from the brute. But while she blessed the Hildebrands
the death-rattle was in her throat: she never finished.
" Turloughmore would have it that it was the soul of the witch
that escaped the hounds up the chimney in the shape of a fox. They
say the same fox is hunted to this day, and when they find him it
means a run that leaves the hounds footsore and dejected, and the fox
slipped over the edge of the world. He is know r n by a white star on
his breast."
" And the curse ? " asked Meg.
" Oh, the curse is, of course, that no Earl of Turloughmore dies
in his bed. Oddly, not one has died in his bed, or so they say, since
poor Biddy's curse. They've died in battle, in the hunting-field, in all
sorts of accidents. The last lord but one was killed by the fall of a
tower in his own grounds. The last was lost in the railway accident
at Aberfoyle. The present lord disregards the doom, says that he may
as well have a good run for his money. Poor Flora, with her delicate
son, is to be pitied. Her husband is never at home. He is away
yachting just now. Her heart has been so long in her mouth where
her husband is concerned, that perhaps she grows used to the dread.
A very dear creature is Flora Turloughmore."
" It will be a house with a shadow," said Meg.
" My dear, if you are afraid of it do not go. It is indeed a house
with a shadow. But it is a very beautiful place, and the rule will
be so gentle and sweet. There are not many places I should care to
send my girl to as a companion. You will be safe with Lady Turlough-
more. And the salary is a large one. I wish that need not count
with you, but it must."
1913-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 91
The sound of the knocker upon the hall door reached them where
they sat in the oak-panelled room.
" That will be Flora," Lady O'Neill said hastily. " She said she
would come to-day if she possibly could. How glad I am that you
know all about it ! You will be able to decide now, knowing that you
are asked to go to a house with a shadow. She is so charming a
creature that you are certain to be attracted by her. You will know
if it is worth it ! "
The maid opened the door announcing:
" Lady Turloughmore."
Someone came in who had a fluttering air of youth in the twilight.
It was such a figure as might have belonged to a woman in the late
twenties. The lady came with a soft sound of silken garments, a
delicate breathing of violets. She sat down in a chair facing Meg.
The servant who had ushered her in brought a lamp. Before the shade
was adjusted Meg saw the lady's face.
The dark hair was gray about the temples. The face was fretted
with fine little lines, telling that Lady Turloughmore was not so young
as her figure and carriage pretended. She smiled, and the expression
was brave and sad as winter sunshine, with its pathetic suggestion of
a natural merriment.
" We are very lonely, my boy and I," she said. "I hardly ever
leave him, but I felt I must see you. Dear Lady O'Neill said I might
come. You are better than I hoped for, Miss Hildebrand. I must
always have people about me I can care for. I wonder I wonder
if you could come back with me to-night to Castle Eagle ! "
" She has only just arrived from the west," said Lady O'Neill.
" How inconsiderate I am ! " Lady Turloughmore said, in a soft,
eager apology. " Forgive me, Miss Hildebrand. And, please, when
can you come ? "
Meg glanced at the charming face, and found Lady Turloughmore
irresistible.
" Nothing is unpacked as yet," she said. " I can go with you
to-night. Anything further I require can follow me. And I am so
glad to come."
CHAPTER II.
THE FOXES.
It was about eleven o'clock at night, and pitchy dark, when the
travelers arrived at their destination. In the last stage of it they
had driven for what seemed a long time up a steady ascent, and they
had come within smell and hearing of the sea.
Meg, nodding with fatigue, could see nothing from the carriage
92 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Oct.,
windows but a darkness of stone walls and trees either side the road.
She came suddenly awake when Lady Turloughmore spoke.
" We are nearly there : look yonder and you will see Castle Eagle
through a break in the trees. We shall soon be at the park gates.
How dark it is! When the moon is up it will be as light as day."
Meg, wide awake now, looked from the carriage window, and had
her first glimpse of Castle Eagle, revealed by its many lit windows
against the darkness of sky and trees. It seemed a huge place, stand-
ing up there outlined by its lights.
" Your little boy will be gone to bed," she said. " I shall not
see him till the morning, I suppose?"
" My little boy ! " Lady Turloughmore repeated. " I have no little
boy. Ulick is twenty-seven."
" Oh, of course. How stupid of me ! I remember now that my
godmother said "
Meg pulled up short, remembering what it was that her godmother
had said then stumbled on again.
" She said he was not very strong. Somehow I imagined he was
a boy."
" He is not very strong." There was a note of quiet sorrow in
Lady Turloughmore's voice. " I blame myself for his ill-health. I
would go hunting before he was born, though I was advised not to do it.
His father met with what might have been a fatal accident before my
eyes; we were riding together, and we came to a ravine spanned by
a couple of planks. He took his horse across quite safely. He has a
great power over animals. They trust him. He is so strong and
gentle." She spoke with a proud and tender voice. " He left his
horse on the other side, brought me over, and went back for the little
mare I was riding. She was a sweet creature, very nervous and high-
spirited. She came with him gently enough, and he had got her
more than half-way across, when she caught sight of the depth below
and stood still, trembling and sweating. Seeing the danger many men
would have left her to her fate. My husband is not like that. He
tried to coax her. Suddenly she plunged. The planks turned with her.
I saw both of them fall. My dear it is not a thing I talk about easily.
I don't know why I tell it to you at our first meeting too. The
mare broke her poor pretty back in the fall. My husband, by the
blessing of God, fell on a little ledge half-way down the ravine.
He had to be pulled up by ropes, but till I saw him alive and well I
thought he was dead. Wasn't it terrible ? "
" It was very terrible," said Margaret. " But his being saved was
wonderful. I think I should take it that, as you say, it was the bless-
ing of God."
" That is what I most ardently desire, what I pray for, for my
husband and son, morning, noon, and night. My dear, I have learnt
1913.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 93
to pray well. Even when I am doing other things, talking, or
reading, or walking about, my spirit is on her knees."
" I should feel after that experience," said Meg steadily, and
wondering why he should say it, " I should feel that they had special
protection."
" I suppose I do feel it, in a sense," returned Lady Turloughmore,
" else I should not have one happy hour, and I have many."
While they talked they had passed a lit lodge, where someone held
open the gates. They had left the stone walls behind, and in the
lifting of the obscurity, for the moon had just looked over a distant
wall of mountain, Meg saw that they were in a park with groups of
knotted and twisted trees standing out darkly against the lighter dark-
ness of the grass.
The carriage rolled quickly over the smooth avenue till it stopped
at a pair of gates, which the footman got down to open. Then on
again past the shrubs and flower beds of a lawn. Presently it pulled
up in front of a flight of stone steps, beyond which an open door showed
the lighted hall.
Meg glanced over her shoulders as she followed Lady Turlough-
more from the carriage up the steps. The house was situated on a
high plateau, from which the country fell away in front. There was a
balustrading beyond the flower beds in front of the house revealed by
the light from the house door. Above it the tops of a row of poplars
were revealed. Apparently the front of the house descended by ter-
races to the lower lands.
She followed Lady Turloughmore into an octagonal hall, from
which doors went off between fluted and gilt pillars. The tone
of the hall was gold and cream. In the upper part of the wall portraits
took the place of the doors between the pillars. The hall was warmly
carpeted with red. From a fireplace at one side came a warm glow,
comfortable in the winter night. A red-carpeted stairs ascended in
front of them. Down the stairs .there came a young man walking
slowly, one hand on the banisters.
" Ah, Ulick ! We have got safely home."
" I hope you are not very cold, mother. I am glad you are back."
" Miss Hildebrand, my son, Lord Erris."
Meg bowed. The young man looked at her with quick interest.
In her one glimpse of him, she saw that he was one of those invalids
who ought not to be invalids. He was a big man. He looked as if he
might be powerful. There was something very fine about the shape of
his head. But the voice was languid, the handsome face fretted with
lines of pain, the eyes sadly weary for young eyes.
He looked at Meg with sudden, quick attention.
" Miss Hildebrand ! " he repeated.
Lady Turloughmore put her hand through her son's arm.
94 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Oct.,
" Miss Hildebrand is so kind as to be willing to solace our lonely
life, Ulick," she said. " Ah " a bright-looking, black-haired maid-
servant had just come forward. " You will take the young lady to her
room, Kate. See that she has all she wants. Miss Hildebrand, there
will be some food ready when you come downstairs. Please don't
think of making a toilette."
Meg followed the maid up the stairs, down a corridor, and was
shown into a warm, comfortable room. A fire glowed on the hearth,
and there was a shaded lamp on a little table, which was drawn beside a
comfortable looking chair. The room was lined .with wardrobes and
drawers, with mirrors between as though the occupant of the room
was to have as many dresses as Queen Elizabeth, and to be as vain
of her person. There was just space enough between the wardrobes
and the drawers for a little French bed, prettily curtained in chintz.
In a corner a small door opened, which gave access to a tiny bathroom.
" You'll maybe be likin' a bath before you go to your bed, Miss,"
said Kate. " I'll lave you some warm towels before I go, after I've
unpacked. Here's your trunk now, Miss. Is there anything I could
be gettin' out of it for you? "
Meg had a humorous sense of the incongruity of her solitary
trunk with all the wardrobes.
" I think I'll go down just as I am," she said. " I mustn't keep
Lady Turloughmore waiting."
" Indeed then she wouldn't say one word if you wor to keep
her waitin' itself," said Kate. " Sure there isn't a sweeter nor a pa-
tienter lady in the len'th and breadth of Ireland, an' his young lordship
the same, but the Earl's very hasty, yet that kind o' hastiness you'd
forgive him. It isn't very good for the temper to be always expectin'
somethin' to happen to ye, all on account of an ould villin that did
somethin' wrong hundreds o' years ago. Is it now, Miss ? "
" I suppose it isn't," said Meg, who had untwisted and shaken out
her hair, and was about to coil it up again at the back of her head.
" It's a terrible shame so it is," said Kate, fussing about the room,
" to see the terror in her ladyship's face sometimes. Well ! well !
My mother often told me not to be talkin' so much. What a beautiful
head of hair you have, Miss! What name was it her ladyship said? "
" My name is Hildebrand," Meg answered, putting in the last
hairpin.
" I thought 'twas that her ladyship said," the girl said, looking at
Meg with an intent gaze. " You wouldn't be wan of the Hildebrands ?
Wouldn't it be a quare thing if a Hildebrand of th' ould family was
to come to this house ? "
Meg did not feel at liberty to discuss family skeletons and so said
nothing, but having completed her hair, moved towards the door.
" You wouldn't be thinkin' I was talkin' for talkin's sake," Kate
1913-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 95
said, as though she divined Meg's thoughts. " Tis because I love the
family that my heart lepped up at your name. I thought if a Hilde-
brand was to come it might take the doom off them. There's quare
ould ways in this house, for all it looks so cheerful. I don't know that
I'd care to be in it if it wasn't for the family. There isn't much I
wouldn't do for any of them."
Meg went downstairs to the dining-room. She was healthily
hungry, for she had not eaten anything since her afternoon tea. While
she was enjoying her meal, she gathered from what Lady Turlough-
more was saying that the Earl was on his homeward way.
" With a good wind he might be home some time on Wednesday
morning," she said. " I hope now he will put up the yacht for the
winter. It is very cold. I don't see what pleasure he can find in it."
Lord Erris sighed, a heavy sigh that startled Meg.
" I wish I could be with him," he said.
" Dear Ulick ! after all there is the hunting."
" Yes, there is the hunting."
Presently Meg having finished her meal, went upstairs, leaving the
mother and son together.
" Don't be kept awake by the owls, Miss Hildebrand," said Lady
Turloughmore. " The woods are full of them and the old tower.
You will hear them unless you sleep very well."
" I am sure I shall not hear anything once my head touches the
pillow," Meg replied.
Lord Erris came out into the hall to light her candle for her.
There was something that hurt her heart in the way he walked. He
had a halting and a dragging gait, and yet it suggested a free stride,
somehow hampered and clogged. There must be something wrong with
his foot, she supposed. In the candle light she saw his face clearly
for the first time. It was a handsome face, regular-featured; a very
handsome broad forehead, with a sweep of dark hair across it ; a pair of
fine dark eyes, a sensitive mouth. A masculine face in spite of the lines
of weariness upon it, and something of mist and shadow that lay
over it.
" I am very glad you have come, Miss Hildebrand," he said,
cordially.
Meg flushed with pleasure; and looked down, with one of her
charming, shy glances.
" I am very glad you are glad," she said. " I am very glad to have
come."
" You won't want to go away when you know us better? "
" I am quite sure I shall not."
He watched her go up the stairs before he went back, with his
dragging step, to the dining-room.
Meg slept. The room was warm in firelight. The night was
96 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Oct.,
bitterly cold outside bright moonlight, yet with a haze about the
moon and an ominous bank of cloud away to the southeast. She slept
and dreamt pleasant dreams, in which she was come to Castle Eagle
as a deliverer, and Lord Erris begged her not to go away. In the
dream she had an exaggerated sentiment of tenderness, of aching
pity for him, such as one will have in a dream for a person to whom one
is indifferent in one's waking moments.
She awoke with a start to the bright moonlight in the room, and
a sound of the baying of dogs. She looked about the unfamiliar
room. She had a sleepy wonder as to whether there were kennels
at Castle Eagle. As she lay awake something thin and sharp in the
quality of the baying struck her ears. Those were not hounds. She
knew too- much about fox-hounds to be deceived into believing that
short, sharp yelping to proceed from a pack.
Suddenly the story Lady O'Neill had told her came to mind, and
she was afraid. There was something sinister in the yelping, as though
a pack of spectral hounds were baying. Could it be was it possible
that the hounds who had taken part in the killing of the witch came
back as goblins to Castle Eagle ? Ridiculous ! Was she going to have
nerves already? It would never do to cultivate nerves if she was
to stay at Castle Eagle; and she had said to Lord Erris that she
would stay.
She got out of bed and went to the window. After all, the matter
might be simple enough; capable of a simple natural explanation.
Why should a thin baying have power to frighten her like this?
to set her heart beating? Indeed it sounded like the ghosts of dogs
dead and gone, baying the moon. She said to herself that there was
nothing to be afraid of only fear. She was in the hands of God;
so long as her cowardice did not place her outside that guardianship.
The moon had risen splendidly, and was throwing its hard white
light over the courtyard upon which her window looked. The court-
yard, enclosed by the three sides of the house, was open on the fourth.
The moon high above the mountains to the eastward, poured its full
light without a shadow. The three sides of the quadrangle slept.
Not a light moved in the windows, although Meg would have thought
that the house must be wakened by the din.
She saw a strange sight. The courtyard was full of life. Foxes
were everywhere, standing, sitting, prowling by the walls. Every time
the barking seemed like to die away, one fox in the centre of the
pack, bigger than the others, raised its head and started the yelping,
and the others joined in afresh.
A curious sight! She had never heard of the like. Had the
bitter cold the earth had been frozen now for days sent the foxes
in search of food. While she watched, a fox came into the courtyard,
plainly a tired fox, such as she had often seen at home at Crane's
1913-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 97
Nest, going at a weary trot across the lawns some day the hounds
were out.
Her first fear passed : she was reassured by the fact that obviously
these were real, living foxes. While she looked one sat down, and
very deliberately scratched his ear with his hind leg. She laughed.
Certainly they were not phantoms.
While she stood looking out, absorbed in the curious sight, the
foxes, as though moved by some law of their kind, wheeled about and
trotted out of the courtyard. For the first time she had been de-
ceived by the moonlight she noticed that a light snow had fallen.
The courtyard was under snow : so was the surrounding country and
the distant hills. There was more to come, for the wind rose and
sighed; her windows shook, and somewhere in the house a door
slammed.
It was like Kipling, she said to herself as she dozed asleep, too
tired with her double journey to be kept long awake even by the
strange thing she had seen. It was exactly like a story out of Kipling.
CHAPTER III.
THE HOUSE OF FOXES.
Meg awoke to a red dawn, and Kate standing by her bedside
carrying a tray on which there was the morning cup of tea.
" Good morning, Miss. I hope you slept well," she said, as she
proceeded to light the fire. "I wouldn't get up if I was you not yet,
till the room's warmer. I wonder you do be alive at all, havin' the
windows open like that. It 'ud give any wan a cowld to look at them,
so it would. There's my grandfather alive an' well, an' he a young
man an' courtin' the night o' the Big Wind, an' he never opened his
window, I've heard say, all his life, nor none of his family. I'll tell
you sometime how he lost the first umbrella was ever seen in the
parish that same night. It belonged to Father Pat McCluskey the
parish priest. He'd brought it from London for a great curiosity, an'
he lent it to my grandfather to hold over my grandmother: they'd
been with him about the marriage. 'Twas as big as a tent, an' when
the wind broke on them it very nearly carried them out to say."
The narrative ceased on Kate's stooping her head to make a
bellows of her mouth for the purpose of blowing up the fire.
" I hope there'll be no wind now anyway," she added. " Not
with his lordship on the say. The poor mistress does be heartbroke
till she has him safe."
VOL. XCVIIT. 7
98 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Oct.,
She came and took up the tray.
" Now you've a nice little fire to get up by, Miss Hildebrand,"
she said. " The mistress herself bid me make you comfortable, an' I'd
die for the mistress. She doesn't be lavin' me to the housekeeper for
orders. She knows I'd do more for herself, though Mrs. Burke's
a dacint woman, an' not so strict as some housekeepers I've heard
tell of. I'd better be goin', or she'll be callin' me a chatterbox.
She says it's my one fault."
A bell rang somewhere in the house and Kate fled.
Meg lay awake for a little while before she got up, thinking of
the foxes in the night. She considered whether it might have been a
dream. But she was sure it could not have been. She remembered
the natural attitudes of the foxes. She had never known them to
go in packs and approach dwelling houses before. But she was quite
sure there was nothing of the dream or the vision about it. They were
real foxes : and she had seen them.
She got up and dressed herself. She was first downstairs, and
there was no one in the dining-room when she entered it. There were
no letters for her as yet : but there were the morning papers and some
weekly papers and magazines lying folded on a side table. She
looked about the luxurious room. Her feet sank in the pile of the
carpets. There was beautiful china and silver on the table. Nothing
was new, nothing of yesterday, or the day before. The carpets and
curtains had had time to mellow their tints, as had the walls and the
family portraits.
A beautiful Clumber spaniel, with a coat like grebe, and orange
silk ears, came and thrust a friendly nose in her hands. She stooped
and looked at his collar.
" I am Lord Erris' friend, Prince," was the inscription. The
dog appealed to her. She loved all dogs; but there was something
nobly condescending in the air of this dog as he made friends, which
was a subtle flattery as though some distinguished person had trusted
her. When she patted him he whined, ill at ease about something, and
looked towards the windows. For the first time she noticed the wind-
ows. They were diamond-paned, deep-ledged. In each window there
was a heraldic lozenge. She went a little nearer to inspect them.
In the lower section of the windows the lozenges showed armorial
bearings with the motto " Goddes Way is My Staye." In the upper
lozenges was alternately a fox and a large-winged, grayish-winged bird.
A swan: no, not a swan. She leant nearer to look. It was a wild
goose. Often she had seen them of autumn evenings flying high over
the gray sky across the stubble, in the strange wedge they form
when they are flying.
She wondered if the fox derived from the uncanny story which
had brought the calamity to the family. Calamity! She would not
1913-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 99
believe it. Already her heart cried out passionately against the thought
of calamity to the family of Turloughmore. Why should they suffer,
innocently, for the cruelty and sin of a long-dead man? God would
not permit it. Surely God would not permit it.
The wild geese were more easily explicable. She supposed some
of the family must have been of the Wild Geese, those Irish who
fought for King James against King William, and after the Treaty of
Limerick sailed away from Ireland, and took service in the armies of
France and Spain and Austria.
The dog's evident uneasiness attracted her attention. He wanted
to go out. He was pacing to the last window in the room and back
again, evidently inviting her to a morning walk.
She went with him, her hand on his head. She found that the
last window was in fact a door. It opened on the courtyard sur-
rounded by three sides of the house, on which she had looked last
night. The sun had risen out of the red dawn, and was shining on the
courtyard: no sign of storm yet, but a fine, clear, frosty morning.
She opened the window and went out. The snow had frozen since
last night, and was crisp under her feet. The dog began to move
about, growling to himself. He had come upon the scent of the foxes.
She looked down at the snow. Certainly it had been no dream,
no illusion of the night, no uncanny happening. The track of the
foxes was everywhere, frozen in the snow. She had been right when
she said they were real, living foxes. A spectral pack does not
leave the snow printed all over with its pads.
The dog whined. All of a sudden she was aware that she knew
something she had not known she knew, as the mind will receive an
impression and put it away without looking at it, to discover it later on.
The fox, bigger than the others, who had seemed to be the chief
of the pack, and to lead the chorus of barking, had had a white
star on its breast. In the moonlight it had shone on the red coat like
a star of silver.
She was for a moment in the grip of the preternatural. Then
she pulled herself together sharply. What was she thinking of?
There was nothing very remarkable about a fox being splashed with
white. Why should he not be, any more than a dog?
She went back into the dining-room, the dog following her with a
dejected air. He had barely flung himself, sighing heavily, be-
fore the fire when Lord Erris came in, his lame foot dragging.
" Good morning, Miss Hildebrand," he said, " you are down first.
What a shame there should be no one to bid you welcome on
your first morning ! I daresay my mother is tired after her journey."
" Prince was very kind in making me welcome," Meg said. " He
was a gracious host."
" Ah, I am glad of that. It is a tribute to you. Prince doesn't
ioo THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Oct.,
take notice of everyone. Isn't he perfectly well-bred? I don't mean
in the ordinary sense, but in the sense of good manners."
" He is indeed. He is a very fine gentleman."
" He is out of spirits this morning. Did you hear him howl in
the night? It was very bright moonlight."
" No. I did not hear him."
" You slept well in spite of the owls ? I am glad of that. You
don't look as though your double journey yesterday had fatigued you
over much."
Meg colored and glanced sideways at him with her bewildering
shyness. She had seen her face in the glass, and she knew that in
spite of the disturbance of the night it was fresh and glowing. The
ease and satisfaction of heart which her home-coming had brought
about had taken effect on her health and looks. She felt as though
she would give anything if she could have imparted something of the
healthy zest of life she felt in herself to the weary-looking man
before her, with his sad air of distinction.
" I hope you will be happy at Castle Eagle," he said, wistfully.
" I am sure I shall be very happy," she returned.
" Will you make the tea or shall I ? My mother may not be down
for quite a long time. She wishes us not to wait for her."
She had an idea that it hurt him to stand long on his lame foot.
So she held out her hand for the teapot, without disputing the
question as to who should make the tea. She looked at him frankly,
and again she had the shyness.
" I am considered a very good tea maker," she said ; " for all
that I have lived nearly six years in Austria."
He sat down as though the rest was grateful to him, and watched
her making the tea with a light in his eyes as though he found the sight
pleasant.
" You have been in Austria," he said. " My forbears had a great
deal to do with that country, but I have never been there. I have
not been strong enough to travel."
She understood. It would have been bitter, especially seeing that
he was framed for strength, to drag a maimed foot over the world.
She had a memory of Byron and his bitterness how the club-foot
poisoned his life.
As though he read her thoughts he smiled at her, and the smile
was very attractive. There was something appealing about it. He
had inherited his mother's charming smile.
" My mother is too tender to me," he said. " An only son. She
wraps me in cotton-wool. I have not grown used to my fellow-crea-
tures."
She made his tea, and brought it to him before he could rise
to fetch it for himself. He got up and went to the sideboard to carve
1913.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 101
something for her, explaining that breakfast was always an informal
meal at Castle Eagle.
She took the first thing he offered her. She was healthily hungry,
and quite ready to do credit to some of the good things. She was
unconscious while she was eating that he watched her, toying with
the food on his own plate. He smiled as their eyes met.
" It is nice to see anyone so hungry," he said.
" I've a disgraceful appetite," she confessed laughing.
" I like it. My mother eats nothing, and I have not much of an
appetite. I don't get out enough, except in hunting weather."
" Oh, but you should get out always."
He winced, and she guessed that he did not like to face the world
afoot.
" One can always ride," he said. " By the way, Hildebrand is
not a common name. It is an odd thing that a Hildebrand should be
under this roof. You are a Hildebrand of "
" Crane's Nest in the County Roscommon."
" I wonder"
He did not say what he wondered.
Meg opened her lips. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell
him the curious happenings of the night.
" Crane's Nest," he said : " a pretty name. Birds and beasts
have had much to do with the history of this house. You noticed the
foxes and the wild geese in the window ? You will find the fox all over
this house. Do you see him there in the carving of the mantel-
piece? The newels of the stairs are supported by foxes. It was
dark last night when you came, or you would have seen at the foot
of the steps a pair of foxes carved in stone. The man who built this
house flung defiance perhaps in the face of fate. This used to be
called the House of Foxes. A hundred years ago it was changed to
Castle Eagle. You must read about it in the county history."
It was a curious outburst of confidence, for it was a confidence,
though he seemed to talk in an easy unembarrassed way.
"I wonder if you knew what you were undertaking?" he said.
" A beautiful young girl like you. A Hildebrand. Odd that a Hilde-
brand should come to this house."
She answered him quietly, almost forgetting to be shy.
" I am not afraid of shadows," she said. " We are in the hands
of the good God."
" Ah, you believe that. God allows strange things to happen
sometimes."
" Not if we place ourselves in His hands, I firmly believe. If
we choose to stay outside them, we may be afraid."
" Certain things may be of the devil and not of God. We may
yield too readily to the devil."
102 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Oct.,
" I believe that God is stronger than the devil, as the old people
say."
Their conversation was interrupted by the entrance of Lady Tur-
loughmore, who came making profuse gentle apologies for the late-
ness of her appearance.
The dog went to greet her quietly, and lay down on the edge
of her skirt when she had taken her place at the breakfast table.
" I am so glad it is a beautiful morning for your first morning
here," she said. " No sign of wind. Are you fond of flowers, Miss
Hildebrand? Ulick and I are devoted to flowers. You must see
the houses after breakfast. Such a beautiful, quiet, golden day."
It was as she had said. There was no sign of the fulfillment of
the promise of the wind given by the red dawn.
" The yacht will not make much headway in this calm," she went
on. " We shall not see your father as soon as I hoped."
" We may get a bit of wind about sundown," Lord Erris said.
"Besides because it is windless here, it does not follow that there
is no wind off the southwest coast of England. I think there is a prom-
ise of wind. The sun rose redly."
" But not of storm, Ulick," said Lady Turloughmore with some-
thing of anguish in her voice.
" My dear mother, we are not long without wind on this coast.
I see no indication of a storm."
" I wonder if your father has started."
She turned to Meg with the bright appealing gaze which made
the girl feel as though she would do anything to save or please Lady
Turloughmore. Something of the same feeling she had given the Arch-
duchess Magda, which had made leaving her a tearing-up by the
roots, even though it was for going home.
" You will forgive the preoccupation with our own affairs," she
said. " This is to be my husband's last yachting trip this year. The
beautiful open autumn has made him keep to the yacht. But she will
lie up after this voyage."
A footman came in with a telegram on a salver. For a second
Lady Turloughmore's face whitened as she tore it open.
" The yacht left Falmouth Harbor last night," she said, " with a
good wind. If he is not becalmed he might be in to-morrow. This
frost will put a stop completely to the hunting. While it lasts there
will be nothing for your father to do, Ulick, nor for you."
She was still a little white, though her lips smiled. Obviously
Lady Turloughmore was one of those old-fashioned people to whom
the sight of a telegram brings a pang of dread.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
Boohs,
THE REAL DEMOCRACY. By J. E. F. Mann, N. J. Sievers, and
R. W. T. Cox. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.50
net.
According to the three members of the Rota Club, the disease
of society to-day, so far as it is economic, is the concentration of
ownership in a few hands, and the remedy the diffusion of owner-
ship into as many hands as possible.
Society in its present condition is intolerable for the mass of
men; its economic structure is unhinged, and it is itself socially
degrading, and politically dangerous. Secondly, it is unstable;
it is necessarily in a state of inequilibrium, and must therefore either
end in a revolution, the force and extent of which will grow with
delay, or must else continue to proceed rapidly along the lines
already discernible, and so lose grip of that energy which alone
can save it from degradation. Thirdly, an examination of the
course of history must convince the inquirer that our characteristic
social and economic evils were created and accentuated in precise
correspondence with the continuous and increasingly rapid dispos-
session of the average man, who has been finally left without prop-
erty, and brought into a position of dependence upon the increas-
ingly few people into whose hands ownership has accumulated.
Fourthly, if human liberty is to be restored in any real and lasting
sense; if political life is to be made universally possible, and not
left as a mere leisurely hobby for a few; if production is to be
sanely moulded to men's needs, the life of the average man must
rest on a solid economic basis; in other words, property must be
restored to him. The common man must cease to be a mere
machine to grind out toll for those who condescend to use his
labor. He must become a free man in a free state.
In the chapter entitled " Contemporary Practice," Mr. Mann
attacks bitterly the present wage system, and the mistaken policy of
reform, which he claims is being advocated by the present labor
leaders in England. Of their policy he says : " It will give a man
anything but control; free food but not money to buy food; free
baths but not money to pay for baths ; free libraries but not money
to support libraries ; free medicine but not money to buy medicine ;
free doctors but not money to pay for a doctor; free everything
but no money to buy anything." To prove his point he takes two
104 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
typical examples, the Insurance Act and the Minimum Wage Act,
and tries to show that in each instance the disadvantage is all with
the worker.
The Insurance Act, in his opinion, depletes the economic reserve
of the worker, and weakens the effectiveness of the unions by direct
raids on their funds, and by penalizing strikes. The Minimum
Wage Act gives the mine owners a larger measure of control than
they have possessed for twenty-five years, and reduces the workers
to a condition like that of slave labor and the press gang.
Of the wage system he writes :
Where the wage system prevails, as it necessarily prevails in
the proletariat state, it is never even considered that a man
has a prima facie right to the property and to the control of
the industry. For in the proletariat state the worker has no
property, and therefore cannot withhold his services so as to
enforce his rights. He is indeed often thankful for his wage,
but its amount represents not what was asked for or any
modification of it, but what is requisite to keep him productively
efficient. Consequently such rights are ignored; they are not
represented by the wages paid, and it is, therefore, immaterial
whether the wages are high or low. In fine, wherever the wage
system exists in a community, those who come under its opera-
tion are regarded as not having any inherent right to control
their lives.
The real democrat, therefore, is he who revolts against the
present wage system; strikes that show the workers disapproval
of it are " very hopeful signs."
Our authors advocate what they call the Associative State.
The Representative System of to-day is not democracy, because it
provides no surety that the conduct of civic life shall be the
business of the mass. Real democracy must consist of guilds or
societies of producers under the authority of the State. As the
thesis is stated by Mr. Sievers : " Since material and spiritual inde-
pendence and activity in the individual are conditional upon his
possession and use of economic utilities, property must be kept dis-
tributed. The distribution of property can only be perpetuated con-
sistently with an adequately high standard of productivity, if in-
dustrial undertakings be based upon a cooperative principle." The
only real democracy, therefore, is an industrial democracy, and the
only real industrial democracy is the Associative State.
How the process of repossession is to be brought about is of
1913.] NEW BOOKS 105
course the main problem, but here our reformers are a bit vague.
They plainly reject the three methods open to the collectivist, viz.,
confiscation, direct purchase, and loan. They show, moreover, that
while they agree with the socialist in aiming to deflect property
from the big capitalist, they differ in wishing to deflect it not into
the hands of the State, but into the hands of the citizens, and
of as many of them as possible. To secure the wide distribution
of property which alone can bring about the future real democracy,
they tell us it will be necessary to modify our legal and economic
arrangements in such a fashion that where there is an exchange
of utilities between men whose wealth is disproportionate, we can
counterbalance the superior advantage of the man of greater wealth,
and make the balance of advantage rather tilt up on his side and
weigh down on the other side. Laws must be passed entrenching
the man of small property, so that under no pretense whatever
can the source of family livelihood be subject to seizure or distraint.
Secondly, the conditions of commerce and industry must be so
changed as to make it increasingly difficult for the big man to
attack and undermine the resources of the small man. And, thirdly,
remedial legislation should be framed, to the end of making a radical
alteration in the conditions and customs which govern the creation
of new businesses and of new sources of investment.
The book as a whole is most suggestive, although we think
their picture of present social evils exaggerated, their strictures of
the Representative System unjust, and their proposed remedy
Utopian.
ROUND THE YEAR WITH THE STARS. By Garett P. Serviss.
New York: Harper & Brothers. $1.00 net.
The author of this popular manual maintains that while every-
body may not be a chemist, a geologist, or a mathematician, every-
body may be and ought to be, in a modest personal way, an as-
tronomer. The charts illustrating this book have been drawn
by the writer to meet the special needs of beginners in the study
of astronomy, and therefore everything unessential has been
omitted. In the four circular charts representing the aspect of the
heavens, respectively, at the vernal equinox, the summer solstice,
the autumnal equinox, and the winter solstice, few stars fainter
than the fourth magnitude are included, and not all even of that
magnitude, because the author's sole purpose is to enable the
beginner to recognize the constellations by their characteristic
106 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
groupings of stars, and their relative situations in the sky. The
name of the constellation will be found on the charts, and also
the individual names of the most celebrated stars, but the constella-
tion boundaries are not shown, as the precise limits of the constella-
tion are not important for the novice to know, and any search for
them will simply lead to confusion.
A special chapter is added on the planets, and an appendix
on the names given to the constellations in the seventeenth century,
when the sky was " Christianized."
GUIDE TO THE STUDY AND READING OF AMERICAN
HISTORY. By Professors Channing, Hart, and Turner.
Boston: Ginn & Co. $2.50.
This volume was originally published in 1896 by the two first-
named authors, and has now been revised with the aid of Pro-
fessor Turner. It will prove exceedingly useful to students of
our general history, but even more so, we think, to those who under-
take special research upon a given topic. The sources are sub-
divided and classified in so clear a manner that valuable time is
saved, as the student is enabled to go at once to the article de-
sired. The work is in six parts, and although all three authors as-
sume joint responsibility for the whole, the portions were assigned
with regard to the specialties of each of the collaborators. Dur-
ing the last decade many very important works, native and foreign,
have been issued, and the authors have striven to make this "Guide"
thoroughly complete and reliable.
ST. FRANCIS DE SALES AND HIS FRIENDS. By Hon. Mrs.
Maxwell Scott. St. Louis: B. Herder. $1.35 net
" In publishing the papers collected together in this volume,"
writes the author in her Preface, " my hope is that they may help
to supply a chapter in the history of St. Francis de Sales which
has, of necessity, been curtailed in the different lives of the Saint.
I think many of the readers of the latter will have longed, as I have
done, to know more of the personages alluded to in their pages, and
who were the intimate friends of St. Francis." Mrs. Scott has
indeed succeeded in giving us some charming portraits of the rela-
tives and friends of one who could honestly write : " I have a
tenacious and almost immovable affection for those who give me
the honor of their friendship. He who challenges me in a combat
of friendship must be very strong, for I will not spare him. No
1913.] NEW BOOKS 107
one in this world has a more tender or affectionate heart for his
friends, nor suffers more acutely from separations than I."
In the book before us, which is made up of articles that have
already appeared in The Month, The Messenger, and THE CATHO-
LIC WORLD, we are introduced to the Saint's mother, the two
daughters of St. Jane de Chantal, and two dear friends, Mme.
de la Flechere, and Mme. de Charmoisy, the Philothee of The
Introduction to the Devout Life. On every page of this most de-
lightful volume, we learn to love more and more the gentle, loving
and human mystic, who could direct souls to God so easily and so
perfectly. His motto always was : " Do all by love, nothing by
force." The servants of Mme. de Chantal well express their
sense of his wise guiding, when they remarked that under her
former directors madame prayed four times a day and disturbed
everyone, but that under St. Francis' direction, she prayed continu-
ally, and disturbed no one.
LEADING EVENTS IN THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH.
Written for Schools by the Sisters of Notre Dame. In five
volumes. New York: Benziger Brothers. 40 cents each.
This modest little work, in five separate parts, is well known in
England and highly esteemed; here it will fill a long- felt want; for
although we have excellent books on this subject, the writer knows
of no other suitable for the higher elementary grades and high
school work. It provides a course, adequate in its fullness, stimulat-
ing in its suggestiveness, and yet simple in language, and adapted
to the purpose for which it was designed.
Necessarily, there is much condensation, but a uniformity of
design is evident throughout, and events daily subordinated one
to the other in their degree of importance. By this means a wide
view is given of the varying fortunes of the Church in all places
and in all ages, and it is a matter of surprise how much information
is contained in these pages. Moreover, the writer has seized the
salient features of each event, and in few words has recorded
them. In the arrangement, the chief headings of the chapter are
set off in marginal divisions and clear type, thus impressing the sub-
ject of the paragraph on the pupil. The edition of 1909 is illus-
trated by a wide selection of historical subjects, of eminent persons,
emblems, illuminations, seals, coins, etc. At the end of each part
is a well-chosen list of books, from which more detailed informa-
tion may be obtained; also a historical chronology not over-
io8 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
crowded of the most important events. Any Catholic school in
search of an aid in teaching Church History, cannot do better than
introduce their classes to this work.
Part I. goes as far as A. D. 431 ; Part II. ends with the acces-
sion of Gregory VII., A. D. 1073 ; Part III. leads us to the close
of the fifteenth century; Part IV. to A. D. 1540, while Part V.
covers the period since that date.
THE RELIGIOUS FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES.
Enumerated, Classified, and Described. Returns for 1900 and
1910 compared with the Government Census of 1890. By H.
K. Carroll, LL.D. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
$2.00 net.
Some one has rightly said : " There is no greater liar in the
world than statistics." One feels the truth of this statement while
reading the present volume. The, author calmly gives the number
of Protestant communicants in the United States as 14,180,000, and
of Catholic communicants as 6,257,871. By multiplying the first
number by 3^2 he obtains 49,630,000 Protestant adherents, and
adding 15 per cent to the second, he obtains 7,362,000 Catholic
adherents. He is only about eight million or so out in his reckon-
ing, but never mind. Are not the figures present to prove his point ?
We think his estimate of the Jewish " communicants " (sic.) is also
quite below the mark, for he puts them at only 130,496. He might
surely have made it an even 131,000!
As regards classification, it is absolutely inaccurate to classify
the Russian Orthodox Church, the national Church of Greece, the
Armenian Church (335 members), the Old Catholic Church (665
members), or the Reformed Catholic Church (1,000 members?)
under the general heading, The Catholics.
The brief descriptions of the various denominations of Prot-
estantism is most enlightening to the seeker after truth. One may
be six kinds of an Adventist, twelve kinds of a Mennonite or Pres-
byterian, sixteen kinds of a Lutheran, or seventeen kinds of a
Methodist, but not, pace Mr. Carroll, seven kinds of a Catholic.
Our author is also inaccurate in his prejudiced statement that
" Catholicism in the United States has been most profoundly
affected by Protestantism." He also exaggerates our leakage, and
in mentioning the causes of growth in the Catholic population says
no word of the increase by convert-making, although the rate is
over 33,000 a year.
1913-] NEW BOOKS 109
THE POSTURE OF SCHOOL CHILDREN. By Jessie H. Ban-
croft. New York: The Macmillan Co. $1.50 net.
The importance of physical training has grown into recogni-
tion during the last twenty years, until it holds an acknowledged
position in most school programmes. Owing to various scientific
inquiries, and wide investigation concerning tuberculosis, child
labor, army and navy enlistment, together with a score of other
subjects of vastly different bearing, and, it must be added, neglect
of home discipline and training, the need of some remedy has
become a pressing necessity.
This volume enters very thoroughly into the matter, being the
result of summer lectures at Columbia University, beginning in
1901 and continuing till 1910. The author does not base the
exercises on gymnastic apparatus, but rather upon frequent prac-
tice and vigilant correction of harmful positions. It is therefore
recommended to arouse the interest of the children, without whose
cooperation results cannot be obtained. The sluggishness which
induces and persists in a slouching posture must be combated in
the same way as a distaste for study, and a persevering, devoted
teacher will be rewarded by a great increase of her pupil's powers
for work, energy, and concentration. An erect carriage, pose of
the head, chest, spine, shoulders, etc.; sitting, standing, walking,
stair climbing have each their own special discussion.
The practical part of the work is worthy of much praise, but
the scientific theories propounded will be more than likely to give
pause to judicious or conservative minds. With becoming modesty
the author gives conflicting opinions of eminent medical authorities
without pronouncing upon them, but the same cannot be said con-
cerning science and evolution. The opinions, guesses and wild
statements of popular science are all gravely alluded to as incon-
trovertible conclusions. Such want of discrimination mars the
really useful side of the work, without adding to its value in any
way, and shakes confidence in the author as a scientific guide.
Is the writer totally unacquainted with such open admissions as
the following from The Theory of Evolution in the Light of
Facts, by a Professor of Biology, which ably summarizes the pres-
ent actual findings in the various fields of positive science? This
Professor of Anatomy in the Sorbonne, an eminent evolutionist,
writes : " I admit that no one has ever seen one species arise from
another, or transform itself into another, and that we have no abso-
lutely formal proof of such transformation having taken place."
no NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
In the face of such testimony, it seems somewhat strange that
even a difference of opinion among savants is not noted: and
yet it would seem to be fair and just if nothing more, but possibly
the author and her school of science are not aware that such
difference exists.
UNIFORM SOCIAL LAWS. By W. G. Smith, Esq. Philadel-
phia, Pa. : John J. McVey. 10 cents.
This series of lectures forms a part of the Catholic Summer
School Extension Course. Our Catholic people cannot do better
than read and study the many lectures and pamphlets prepared by
prominent Catholic laymen in various parts of the country. The
one under consideration treats from the Catholic point of view
" The Uniform Marriage Act, Child Labor, Divorce, and Work-
men's Compensation Act." These matters are set forth in lan-
guage so simple and clear as to -enable all to interest themselves
intelligently in the legislation best fitted to the particular needs of
our country.
THE ROAD BEYOND THE TOWN. By Michael Earls, SJ.
New York: Benziger Brothers. $1.25.
Father Earls' " little verses," largely devotional or moralistic,
will not be unfamiliar to magazine readers of the past few years.
They show a very graceful and vivacious fancy, at its best in the
felicities of the Sea Shell or Father Tabb. A lyric called the
Bonnie Prince o' Spring marches miles ahead of most of its com-
panions, perhaps because of its charming freedom from the didactic
note. There is much in this modest but earnest volume to give
present pleasure and to rouse future hopes.
HAPPINESS AND BEAUTY. By Rt. Rev. J. S. Vaughan, D.D.
New York : Longmans, Green & Co. 60 cents net.
Bishop Vaughan, in the first part of these all too brief ser-
monettes, writes eloquently of the old truth, that God Himself has
implanted in our hearts the longing for happiness, and that nothing
whatever can satisfy this longing save the possession of God Him-
self for all eternity. He aptly quotes Carlyle : " Will the whole
finance ministers and upholsterers and confectioners of modern
Europe undertake, in joint stock company, to make one shoeblack
happy? They cannot accomplish it, above an hour or two."
1913-] NEW BOOKS in
Part II. treats of beauty, visible and invisible. Every imagin-
able object bears upon it some faint traces of the Infinitely Beauti-
ful. Whatever sense we appeal to, it will always tell of beauty.
Yet far more beautiful are those forces and principles of activity
which the senses cannot grasp.
The author concludes with a few words on the beauty of
man's soul, and the infinite loveliness of God's adorable counte-
nance.
BEHOLD THE LAMB. A Book for the Little Folks about the
Holy Mass. By Marie St. S. Ellerker. With a Preface by
Rev. Vincent McNabb, O.P. 35 cents net.
A WREATH OF FEASTS FOR THE LITTLE ONES. By Marie
St. S. Ellerker. 35 cents net. New York : Benziger Brothers.
The author of these two little books understands the psychology
of the child-mind, and her simple, devout words make a direct
appeal to young hearts. In the first she initiates little children
into all the mysteries of Holy Mass in a way well calculated to
foster their taste for the Holy of Holies. In the second she weaves
for them an attractive garland of the feasts of the liturgical year.
She quotes for the little ones' benefit some exquisite lyrics of
Father Tabb, tells stories from the Gospel of St. John, and from
the lives of St. Thomas and St. Dominic, and on every page incul-
cates a tender love of our Lord and His Blessed Mother. Most
priests love to talk to children. If they would avoid the mistake
of talking over the heads of little ones, they should read books like
these to learn the art of winning attention.
THE WAY OF THE HEART. Letters of Direction by Monsignor
d'Hulst. Edited, with an Introduction, by Monsignor A.
Baudrillart. Translated from the French by W. H. Mitchell.
New York: Benziger Brothers. $1.50 net.
This volume contains nearly three hundred letters which were
addressed by Monsignor d'Hulst to one of his penitents, whom he
directed without interruption for twenty-two years, 1875-1896.
His biographer, Monsignor Baudrillart, has published all those let-
ters, or portions of letters, which might interest the Christian pub-
lic, without compromising anyone's private affairs. They contain
admirable reflections on all the great feasts of the Church's year;
dogmatic treatises on faith; the salvation of souls outside the or-
ii2 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
dinary channels; true and false mj^sticism; illusions in the spiritual
life; indulgences; purgatory, etc. The letters all seek to give
peace to a mind troubled by the controversies and denials of modern
rationalistic criticism, and to lead a devout soul into the highest
paths of renunciation, recollection, and contemplation.
Monsignor d'Hulst always considered the direction of souls
the work of priests par excellence. He regarded it as the indispen-
sable ransom of his external and beneficent but manifold and over-
whelming occupations. It was the really priestly part of a life
devoted to the rush of business. Men sometimes thought him
cold and distant, but at bottom he had a most tender heart. He
writes : " If I am cold at the outset, so much the worse for those
who are chilled; there are always quite enough who get through
the ice; and if I had to begin my priestly career over again, I
believe I should let still fewer get through it. I have often been
sorry for having been too confiding."
He not only possessed the sound judgment and tact required
in a good director, but he was a master of the science of the saints.
His direction was eminently theological. He used the Exercises
of St. Ignatius as his guide, and followed ever in the footsteps
of the true masters of the contemplative life, St. Teresa, St. John
of the Cross, and St. Francis de Sales.
GROWTH IN THE KNOWLEDGE OF OUR LORD. Being Medi-
itations for every day. Adapted from the French of Abbe
de Brandt by Mother Mary Fidelis. In three volumes. St.
Louis: B. Herder. $6.50 net. _
The title-page does not inform us, but these books must be a
reprint of a highly-honored publication of ascetic literature.
There are two classes of people who practise mental prayer,
those who make use of a book to aid them, and those who do not.
For those who prefer their daily meditation laid out in preludes,
points, colloquy, etc., few books could be more admirable than
these volumes. For devout lay people busy with their avocations,
for religious much occupied in the w r orks of mercy, spiritual or
corporal, they will prove a valuable auxiliary towards mental
prayer. A second advantage is that the whole cycle of the Church's
seasons is covered from the Incarnation to Pentecost, the public
Life of Christ, and the chief devotions. A third advantage is
that time is saved in selection, consecutiveness gained, and the
temptation to fickleness of choice avoided.
1913-] NEW BOOKS 113
To those familiar with these books in either their French or
English dress, they are old and tried friends; they are sure, as
they become more widely known by this re-issue, to win new ones.
After the many commendations bestowed by episcopal au-
thority in England, and by several noted Catholic magazines, among
others The Dublin Review, The Month, and THE CATHOLIC
WORLD, in former years, it would be superfluous to add more. We
gladly welcome this reprint, which is worthy of praise also because
of the typography, binding, and general appearance of the volumes.
THE PRACTICAL CATECHIST. From the German of Rev.
James Nist. Edited by Rev. F. Girardey, C.SS.R. St. Louis :
B. Herder. $1.75.
Father Nist, parish priest of Birkenhoerdt in the Palatinate,
easily surpasses all his predecessors in the mastery of the science
of catechists. He knows how to interest the children and keep
their attention, while at the same time initiating them into the
mysteries of the faith and the practices of the Christian life. We
call special attention to his treatment of the Life and Death of
Christ, the sacrifice of the Mass, and the Sacrament of Penance.
We can recommend this book highly to priests and Sunday-school
teachers.
THE INSIDE OF THE CUP. By Winston Churchill. New York:
The Macmillan Co. $1.50 net.
We took up Mr. Churchill's book to be entertained, but we
must confess we were bored instead. It represents, as he tells
us in his Afterword, many years of experience and reflection, and
sets forth his personal view of religion, so far as he has been
able to work one out. As one of the trained theologians to whom
he appeals for leniency, we regret to state, that his years of study
have been wasted, and that he is guilty of the greatest possible con-
ceit and impertinence in daring to publish so inane and superficial
a work. The novel is a long and tiresome arraignment of dog-
matic Christianity, and a confused medley of undigested Scriptural
criticism, pragmatism, history, theology, and Socialism. Mr. Hod-
der, the Episcopalian rector of a fashionable city church, loses his
faith, because some of his wealthy parishioners are dishonest hypo-
crites, and because he falls in love with the unbelieving daughter
of one of them. We would naturally expect our scrupulously
honest discoverer of a new gospel to resign at once from a Church
VOL. XCVIII. 8
ii 4 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
whose dogmas he rejected. True, he was for a time tempted to
act on the old traditional honesty of his fathers, but the new thought
had, as was natural, begotten a new morality. He " manfully "
resists the temptation, and determines in future " to interpret
the creeds by modern thought, which is closer to the teachings of
Christ than ancient thought." " If," he adds, " I can satisfy my
conscience in repeating the creeds and reading the service, as other
honest men are doing if I am convinced that I have an obvious
work to do in that Church it would be cowardly in me to abandon
that work."
Like the French anticlerical novel, all the orthodox Christians,
clerical or lay, are either immoral, dishonest, or stupid. Mr. Parr,
who finances St. John's and is present at every church convention,
has driven women to prostitution, and men to poverty and suicide;
Mr. Ferguson, the owner of a large department store, pays such
starvation wages to his girl employees that they are forced into
evil ways; the smiling, sleek- faced Mr. Plimpton owns without a
scruple property devoted to immoral purposes; the orthodox min-
ister of Madison is " a putty-faced man with indigestion." Who
would not hate a putty- faced minister? Dr. Annesley of Calvary
has " a rubicund face, which might have been seen at the Council
of Trent, or in a mediaeval fish market ;" and the good Mr. Atter-
bury of course merits our condemnation, for he is " so punctilious
in all observances, so constant at the altar rail, so versed in rubrics
what criminal perversity ritual, canon law, and the Church
fathers."
On the contrary, all who deny such old-fashioned doctrines as
the Trinity, the Divinity of Christ, the Atonement, the Virgin
Birth, sacerdotalism, sacramentalism, the concept of a divine au-
thority, and the like are paragons of virtue. Mr. Bentley, who
never mentioned theology, and who had no faith save a faith in
humanity, was the most charitable man this world of cruelties, dis-
illusionments, lies, and cheats ever knew; the Scotch curate, Mr.
McCrae, whose enlivening sermons had never once in any way re-
ferred to doctrine or dogma, is a superlatively true man of God;
the old bishop, on the verge of the grave, who wishes him Godspeed
in his denial of every Christian dogma, is a noble soul, who would
deny Christ himself if he were only younger; Alison, his sweet-
heart, " whose perfect sympathy voiced his thought," is willing to
sacrifice all her father's wealth because it is ill-gotten, etc.
I suppose we must dub Hodder's and of course Churchill's
1913.] NEW BOOKS 115
new religion the religion of humanity, although we remember
to have heard of this novelty before, both in France and in Eng-
land. There is no longer a divine teaching authority to speak
the message of a divine revelation to mankind; there is no divine
Teacher, Christ Jesus, to command us under penalty of sin to believe
His Gospel and to obey His commands, but " the new religion is
to lie in Personality." Instead of an Apostolic Succession, the
truth has been revealed to the world by Personalities notice the
capital P Augustine, Dante, Francis of Assisi, Luther, Shakes-
peare, Milton, and our own Lincoln and Phillips Brooks, and
last but not least the inimitable novelist Churchill, who combines
all the good qualities of his illustrious forbears. We beg him to
remember the old adage : Ne sutor ultra crepidam.
THE "SUMMA THEOLOGICA" OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS.
Part III. Translated by the Fathers of the English Domin-
ican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers. $2.00 net.
The English Dominicans are succeeding admirably in produc-
ing an accurate and readable translation of the Summa of St.
Thomas. Many a non-Catholic student, who has fought shy of
the original text for years, will welcome this English version.
The present volume on the Incarnation is even more perfect than
its predecessors. A non-Catholic professor, well acquainted with
the teaching of the Summa a rare accomplishment to-day once
said that it was impossible to translate the work of a mediaeval
Latinist into good, idiomatic English. If that be so, the English
Dominicans have worked the miracle, and we are grateful to
them for it.
AN AVERAGE MAN. By Robert Hugh Benson. New York:
P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $1.35 net.
Monsignor Benson has, we are afraid, become infected with a
disease said to be peculiar to Americans speed. His latest book,
An Average Man, was conceived and written in a hurry. One asks
himself after reading it what purpose will it serve, and he is com-
pelled to answer : no serious purpose at all. The reader would
not, or might not justly, ask himself this question had not
the author written for a purpose. His purpose is to show that
wealth may lead a man away from religion, but that is a truth
known of all men, and this book will not bring it home more closely
to anyone's soul.
Monsignor Benson writes as usual with rare facility and
ii6 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
gracefulness. His sense of humor is keen and frequent. His
drawing of character sharp and clear. More than once there are
short, splendid passages on the worth of Catholic faith, on the new
life that it gives to the soul. It is because Monsignor Benson
can do these things unusually well that we venture to complain now,
not because he has done them badly, but because he could do them
with more thought and care in a far greater and more effective way.
Percy, " an average man," is a low-salaried clerk in London,
who has little to stir his soul. Through a friend he is led to hear
a sermon by a Catholic priest. Immensely impressed, he leaves
the church " converted." He has the courage to tell his
father and mother of his determination to become a Catholic; to
meet his vicar and defy an ex-priest, who is brought to argue
against the claims of Rome. He goes faithfully to his instructions.
Suddenly a fortune is left to his family, and he of course will suc-
ceed to it. He has fallen in love with a woman who is divorced, but
his love ceases because he meets another woman who wins his heart.
Using Catholic teaching as a pretext, he heartlessly abandons the
woman to whom he is engaged, and immediately becomes engaged
to a bigoted Protestant. Of course he gives up his instructions
with the Catholic priest.
The average man of to-day, while he might possibly read the
story because it is quick in action and admirable in diction, would
throw the book aside if he once looked upon it as apologetic.
THE FUNDAMENTALS OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE. By Rev.
J. P. M. Schleuter, S.J. New York: Benziger Brothers.
60 cents net.
Father Schleuter, S.J., has rendered a great service by trans-
lating this little volume. The writer's name is forgotten ; he really
lives in his work, which though short expounds remarkably well
the first principles of the religious life. It consists of eight parts :
the Religious Life; Conduct towards God; the Order; Self; Su-
periors; the Members of the Community; Inferiors; the World.
Its quaintness; its brevity; its directness; its clearness, and
methodical arrangement will make it a constant companion
for those so happy as to make its acquaintance. It takes
for granted the good will of those who have embraced the religious
state, and its message, " This is the way, walk ye in it," will be an
incentive to souls consecrated to God. The use of it, part by
part, for the monthly retreats, customary in many religious com-
munities, would be found a useful aid to fervor in our busy days.
1913-] NEW BOOKS 117
THIRTY WAYS OF HEARING MASS. Compiled by the Rev.
G. Stebbing, C.SS.R. St. Louis : B. Herder. 75 cents.
The number of books concerning the Blessed Sacrament, now
issuing from the press, attests the devotion of the faithful to that
sum and centre of the life of the Church. Jesus in the Mass, in
Holy Communion, hidden in the tabernacle, commands all our love,
drawing our hearts to Himself. This collection of methods for
assisting at the Holy Sacrifice, will be esteemed as soon as it is
known, providing, as it does, for all tastes and ages and conditions
of soul. " The Mass binds us all round the throne of God, united
in one great act of worship, but it leaves a remarkable width of
scope to the worshipper," says the devout author. A list of these
thirty ways would show forth the universality of the Church in all
ages, beginning with the Mass of the Apostolic Constitutions of
the fourth century, through the Middle Ages, with the prayers
of St. Gertrude and her saintly sister, and of St. Thomas Aquinas'
hymns, the " Lay Folks' Mass Book," the prayers used by our per-
secuted forefathers in Penal Days, of the venerated Bishops Chal-
loner, Hay, and Milner, to those of holy men in our own days.
We recommend highly this valuable little book to those who
reverence the prayers that have fallen from the lips of the centuries,
that have won grace and mercy for the faithful of past ages.
THE TEARS OF THE ROYAL PROPHET. St. Louis: B.
Herder. 60 cents net.
The seven Penitential Psalms are probably the most familiar
portions of the Psalter to the Catholic laity. For three thousand
years have they remained the most perfect expression of contrition
and grief; and unnumbered times have hearts, broken with sor-
row, poured out their repentance in these hallowed words. These
meditations are yet another tribute to their power of expressing
the emotions of our human nature, contrite and humbled before
God.
TT is with pleasure that we note the appearance of a series of
* new books by Irish writers, calling itself the lona Series.
It is published in this country by B. Herder in St. Louis ; the books
are priced at thirty-five cents. Only ten are as yet upon the list,
but others are promised at a very near date. Among the ten we
notice particularly a story by Mrs. Thomas Concannon, called
The Sorrow of Lycadoon. Its setting is Ireland, and for the most
uS NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
part Dublin, under the persecutions of Henry VIII. Its hero is
Diarmuid, later Archbishop O'Hurley. The apostasy of his sister,
Honora, through her love for Walter Ball, the priest-hunter, and
later the Mayor of Dublin, and her misguided efforts to win over
her brother to the King, form the other half of the story. Just
as Monsignor Benson has shown us the heroism of English Catholics
under the oppression of Reformation times, so the author of this
tale shows that of Irish Catholics. And shows it dramatically
and unforgettably, although we regret the compression and the
omissions which have been necessary in the editing.
Another of these books is a biography of Cardinal Wiseman,
written by Joseph E. Canavan, S.J. It is not lengthy, but com-
plete, and is made very interesting. Each phase of the Cardinal's
varied activities is described, and each side of his character por-
trayed. His restoration and management of the hierarchy, his
literary achievements, his revival of Catholic architecture and Cath-
olic ceremonial, his love of children, and even of children's books
all are made vivid to us.
AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY has lately published
Hygiene for the Worker, by William Tolman, Ph.D., and
Adelaide Guthrie. Edited by C. Ward Crampton, M.D. (50 cents.)
It treats of the daily routine of a worker's life, and practical appli-
cation of the safeguards to physical well being. It should be
of material benefit to workers young and old. - Hannah of Ken-
tucky, by James Otis (35 cents), tells the story in simple girl lan-
guage of the blazing of the Wilderness Road, the building of
Boonesborough, and the Indian conspiracies. The book is espe-
cially adapted for use in schools. - Seth of Colorado, by James
Otis (35 cents), is a story of the settlement of Denver, giving
the history of that western city in a manner attractive to both
young and old. - Reeve's Physical Laboratory Guide, by Fred-
erick C. Reeve (60 cents), is a carefully-prepared volume for use
especially in a physical laboratory. The principles of physics are
concisely stated, and apparatus are well illustrated by diagram.
H^HE idea of the Kenedy Popular Edition of stories by Catholic
writers is deserving of much praise. It offers well-known
favorites, and others that ought to be well-known favorites, in
very satisfactory binding and print, for the small price of fifty
cents, and thus bids fair to popularize some of our best Catholic
1913-] NEW BOOKS 119
fiction. The list includes Fabiola and Callista, the stories of Isabel
Williams, Mary Catherine Crowley, Rose Mulholland, and Mrs.
Anna Hanson Dorsey. Among the less popular but no less deserv-
ing novels by Mrs. Dorsey, is Tears on the Diadem. It is an
unusually good specimen of the historical novel, its sweet, pathetic
heroine being the unfortunate Elizabeth Woodville, Queen of Ed-
ward IV. and mother of the two fair princes murdered in the
Tower. Another splendid historical novel on the list is called
Faith, Hope and Charity, and is by an anonymous author. Its
setting is the French Revolution, those wild and horrible, yet fas-
cinating scenes that have formed already the background for so
many works of fiction. This one is particularly vivid, with a
plot that would have been melodramatic in the most peaceful times.
The fervor of the style well suits the material. Incidentally, it
contains a fine character study of Robespierre.
A BOOK of practical value, written in easy and simple style, is
^ the Manual of Self -Knowledge and Christian Perfection,
compiled by Rev. John Henry, C.SS.R. (New York: Benziger
Brothers. Paper, 20 cents net; cloth, 40 cents net.) The title is
much larger than the book; but what the book holds will do much
to set the reader on the road to perfection. It is particularly suited
for those who have the spiritual care and direction of others.
A BOOK that will be of particular helpfulness to members of the
** League of the Sacred Heart is Meditations on the Sacred
Heart, by the Rev. Joseph McDonnell, SJ. (New York:
Benziger Brothers. 90 cents.) The volume includes three series
of meditations, and an appendix that gives the history of the
" Holy Hour " and methods of making it.
DATHER LASANCE, compiler of My Prayer Book, has just
given us another work entitled Blessed Sacrament Book.
(New York: Benziger Brothers. Cloth, $1.50; leather, $2.00 and
upwards.) It is an almost inexhaustible collection of prayers
and devotions, done with indefatigable zeal. It includes the old
as well as the new, and all " in good measure, and pressed down
and shaken together and running over." There is no one who will
not find here many of his old favorites, and no one who will not
make new favorites. It is an unusually exhaustive treasury, and
aims, in the words of the zealous author, " to cultivate the spirit
120 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
of the contemplative life," that is, the spirit of prayer and penance
and sacrifice; for the interests of our Holy Mother the Church;
for the sanctification and salvation of souls; for the spread of
Christ's kingdom among the nations of the world.
'PHE MAKING OF A TRADE SCHOOL, by Mary Schenck
* Woolman (Boston: Whitcomb & Barrows. 50 cents net),
treats of the development, the organization, equipment, financial
standing, and problems of the Manhattan Trade School. Since its
establishment in 1902, it has grown rapidly in its several depart-
ments, and the methods of its progress are of much interest.
'THE FIFTH BOOK OF THE AMERICAN NORMAL READ-
-* ERS, by May Louise Harvey (Silver, Burdett & Co. 60
cents net), is, as its name implies, the fifth of a series. The whole
series recommends itself for its intelligent pedagogical plan.
TN THE TEMPLES OF THE ETERNAL (New York: Chris-
* tian Press Association. $1.00 net), the Rev. James L. Meagher
gives us an exposition of the mystical interpretation of the sacri-
fices of the Old Law, the fittings of the temple, and the vestments
of the High Priest, as they foreshadowed the symbolism of the
ceremonies and liturgy of the Church, particularly of the Sacrifice
of the Mass. Christian symbolism is treated in a detailed and
interesting manner.
^THROUGH REFINING FIRES, by Marie Haultmont (St.
* Louis: B. Herder. $1.60), is not a novel of any exceptional
merit, we must say to our regret. The plot is commonplace, the
characters second-rate, and the style throughout is colloquial. Four
hundred closely-printed pages are wasted in the development of a
story which could easily have been condensed into one-fourth of
the space. The author would do well to make quality her object
rather than quantity.
HTHE Franciscan Fathers of the Province of the Holy Name have
-* issued the St. Anthony's Almanac for the year 1914.
''PHE Reverend Thomas S. McGrath has written a booklet of
sixty-three pages, in which he carefully and devoutly reviews
the life and work of St. Rita of Cascia (New York: Loughlin
Brothers. 25 cents). We wish the little booklet success in its
mission.
I9I3-] NEW BOOKS 121
FOREIGN PUBLICATIONS.
IN Immanence, by Joseph de Tonquedec (Paris: G. Beauchesne) we have
a most complete and detailed critique of the philosophy of Maurice Blondel,
one of the most obscure and abstruse writers in France to-day. He has often
complained during the controversies of late years that he has been judged,
not by what he really said, but by what his opponents imagined he had said.
To meet this objection our author cites continually the most important pas-
sages of his works under discussion, and permits the reader at once to judge
of his loyalty and fairness. The errors of Blondel are denounced on every
page, and in an appendix he endeavors to prove that they were condemned
in the Encyclical Pascendi. Lethielleux of Paris sends us an account of
the French section of the International Eucharistic Congress of Vienna. It
treats particularly of frequent communion and the communion of children.
Some of the most striking discourses are Blessed Jeanne d'Arc and the
Eucharist, The Ideal of Piety, The Ideal of Love, Lourdes and the Eucharist,
and the closing sermon of the Archbishop of Paris. Father Lahitton in his
Sacerdotal Vocation (Paris: G. Beauchesne.. 5/r.y.) sets forth the Church's
doctrine of the formal divine call to the priesthood, against those who exag-
gerated the interior call of the Holy Ghost. The Pope has approved the teach-
ing of our author that the bishop need not regard at all the fact of an
interior call, though he may suppose its existence in the candidate for the
priesthood. All he is bound in conscience to demand is evidence of good
moral character and intellectual fitness. Lethielleux of Paris also publishes a
most charming life of St. Agnes, by Father Jubaru, SJ. This is a simple story
intended for children, and devoid of the critical erudition that characterized
the author's former book, St. Agnes, Virgin and Martyr of the Via Nomentana,
published by the same firm. The same house also publishes Louis Veuillot,
by G Lecigne. (3 frs. 50.) Canon Lecigne, Professor of French Literature at
the University of Lille, gives us a perfect portrait of the famous editor of
L'Univers one of the most ardent defenders of the Church in France during
the nineteenth century. The book is a panegyric from start to finish, and
to our mind does not give due credit to his opponents in the Catholic camp,
such as Montalembert, de Falloux, Bishop Dupanloup, Ozanam, Father Gratry,
and others. As a poet and a novelist he really did not rank very high,
despite the author's encomiums, but as a newspaper controversialist he
holds the first rank. The writer sketches for us his early years, his first
work as a journalist, his conversion from infidelity, and his great fight for
Catholic principles against a host of hostile anti-Christian foes. He has been
called the bulldog of the Pope, an illiberal fanatic, a hater of the Jew, a Catholic
more ultramontane than the Pope, but in his letters we see him revealed as
the most tender of men, forced by the circumstances of the times into bitter
controversies, while he longed for the quiet of his home. La Jeunesse de
Wesley, by Augustin Leger (Paris: Hachette & Cie.), is a biography of John
Wesley which takes us up to the days of the early preaching of Methodism.
Especially interesting are the chapters which treat of the status of an Anglican
parish in the eighteenth century, the Anglican Methodism of Oxford which
began in 1729, John Wesley's love affair with Sophy Hopkey in Georgia, which
culminated in his arrest and the abandonment of his American mission as an
absolute failure, and the Moravian influence of Bohler and Count Zinzendorf,
which begot the "conversion" idea of the new sect. A. Tralin, Paris, pub-
ishes a life of Ozanam, by Charles Calippe. "The life of Ozanam," writes
122 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
the Abbe Calippe in his Preface, "is the greatest possible proof of the social
vitality of Catholicism He was social because he was a Christian and a
Catholic. And he was on many points more social than others, because he was
more of a Christian and more of a Catholic than they; he was more true to
his own faith, more logical and more heroic." The three men that influenced
him in his social studies were Charles de Coux, the Abbe Gerbert, and Monta-
lembert. De Coux, whose Course of Political Economy Ozanam followed most
carefully, was one of the first Catholics in France who tried to free the
science from the anti-Christian materialism which then (A. D. 1832) enveloped
it. The Abbe Gerbert in his lectures insisted on " religious men becoming the
defenders, the moderators, and the guides of the interests of the masses,"
and spoke eloquently of " the new career of charity which was opening up
before the priesthood, or rather before every Christian, for every Christian is a
priest to accomplish the sacrifice of charity." At Montalembert's home every
Sunday evening the elite of France met to discuss " literature, history, the inter-
ests of the poor, and the progress of civilization." In fact Ozanam at these
meetings discovered that the great problem of the day was the social problem
of the betterment of the laboring classes. We find Ozanam writing as early as
1834 : " We are too young to accomplish much in the social struggle of our time.
But are we therefore to remain inactive in the midst of a world that suffers
and mourns? By no means. I se'e a preliminary way open. Before
we attempt any work of public moment, we can try to do some good to a
few individuals ; before we endeavor to regenerate France, we can help some
of France's poor. Moreover, I am most anxious to have all young men of
intelligence and feeling unite in charitable work, and form throughout the
country a vast association devoted to the helping of the poor." This was the
spirit that prompted the foundation of the Conferences of St. Vincent de Paul,
which are still carrying on the world over the work he inaugurated. The Abbe
Calippe then discusses the social bearing of Ozanam's earliest writings, of his
course of commercial law at Lyons (1839-1840), and of his historical lectures.
He shows how he always denounced the two extremes of individualism and
socialism, and insisted on the duties both of justice and of charity.
G. Beauchesne, Paris, also publishes a volume entitled, Ozanam: Livre du
Centenaire, by G. Goyau, L. de Lanzac de Laborie, H. Cochin, E. Jordan,
E. Duthoit, and A. Baudrillart. The Ozanam Centenary volume is written by
specialists, who discuss Ozanam as scholar, historian, man of letters, sociologist,
apologist, and founder of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. All these writers
portray for us one of the most saintly and lovable scholars that ever devoted
his life for the defence of the Church and its poor. Ozanam's oratorical
temperament prevented his being a great historian, and his conservative mind
made him too credulous of the legendary content of the Middle Ages. But
we must remember the progress made in historical criticism since his time, and
give due credit to his lack of critical training. He never had a perfect
grasp of the scholastic philosophy, for his first teacher, the Abbe Noirot,
was a disciple of Descartes. But as an apologist of the Church, he holds the
first rank, his honesty, earnestness, and persuasiveness winning all hearts.
periodicals*
The Teaching of the French Seminaries on Military Service.
By Monsignor Touchet. A journal called Homme Libre
(The Free Man) in its issue of July 2<d contained an attack on the
bishops of France, written by M. Albert Bayet, charging them
with an anti-military spirit, and with teaching that seminarians
need not give the military service now required of them by the
law of France. The author said : " In all the French seminaries
it is taught that non-submission is blameless, and that Frenchmen
have the moral right to desert."
This article by Monsignor Touchet is an effective answer to the
attack. Monsignor Touchet says that M. Bayet has taken fiction
for fact. Tanquerey, whose work is used as a text-book in seventy-
five out of the eighty-seven seminaries of France, says : " In time of
a just war the officers and soldiers are bound to serve their country,
even at the peril of their lives, because the public good demands it.
Whence it follows that they cannot desert, and if they have done so,
they are bound to return to the army." Clermont, Mare, and Gury,
other moralists whose works are used in the seminaries, hold the
same opinion. Mare asks the question : " Are deserters bound to
return to the army?" and answers, "Yes, in virtue of obedience
and legal justice." When M. Bayet tries to blame the Church for
the seventy-six thousand seven hundred and twenty-three men who
refuse service or desert, he trifles with the truth. Revue du Clerge
Franqais, August 15.
Pius IX., Leo XIII., and Pius X. By J. Bricout. The def-
inition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the loss of the
temporal power, the " Syllabus," and the Vatican Council were
the four great events of Pius IX. 's memorable reign.
On December 8, 1869, the Council was declared open by
Pius IX. Four permanent Congregations were appointed. The
most important, that on Faith, included among its members Man-
ning, Pie, Dechamps, and the Bishop of Padeborn, Conrad Martin.
The Schema de fide Catholica was adopted on the I2th of April.
In the meanwhile four hundred and eighty bishops had signed a
petition urging the necessity of the definition of Infallibility.
124 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Oct.,
Other bishops, a minority, in a counter-petition, urged its inadvis-
ability. The battle waged fiercely, especially in Germany. D61-
linger especially wrote several virulent articles, and roused Germany
to a high state of religious excitement. In France, too, the battle
waged furiously. Montalembert himself, from a sick bed, wrote
a letter siding with the opponents of Infallibility. The letter
wounded Pius IX. deeply, and caused a sensation in Roman circles.
Pius IX. answered it indirectly in a letter to the learned Benedic-
tine, Dom Gueranger.
The great discussion began in the Council on the I3th of May,
1870. Fourteen sessions were allowed for debate, in which over
sixty speakers took part. The most remarkable speeches were those
of Monsignor Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, and Monsignor Man-
ning, Archbishop of Westminster, the former against, the latter for,
the Schema. On the i8th of July was ended the greatest work of
the Vatican Council the definition of The Infallibility of the Su-
preme Pontiff. Revue du Clerge Francois, August 15.
The Social and Religions Laws of Deuteronomy. By J. Tou-
zard. The author first reviews the history of the discovery of the
Book of Deuteronomy as related in 2 Kings xxi. To see that
justice was rendered to all men in every phase of human relation-
ships, was the great purpose of the legislation. The Deuteronomic
law was superior in many respects to other codes of antiquity.
Revue Pratique d'Apologetique, August 15.
The Tablet (August 9) : The Holy See and Mixed Choirs:
An article stating the exact position of the Holy See. Owing to
various circumstances, two decrees were issued in 1908 permitting
mixed choirs of men and women, provided they be kept wholly
separated. The Diocesan Commissions for the approval of Church
music are untouched, so that the theatrical tendency may be guarded
against. The decrees are printed in full in Latin.
(August 16) : Catholics and Crime in the Reign of George II.:
Father Thurston, S.J., in a two-part article, cites prison records
showing just where Catholics stood as regards crimes committed
in the early eighteenth century. Their crimes were not of the
grosser nature, but mostly crimes of stealing committed by a down-
trodden class in the larger cities. The article consists largely of
examples. Literary Notes comments on the question of a Gaelic
translation of the Bible as desired by the Gaelic League. While
I9I3-] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 125
the work presents great difficulties, notably the one that there will
be a lack of sufficient laborers competent for such a task, there is a
hope that an effort will be made to produce a good translation.
(August 23) : Greek Atrocities: Cardinal Bourne has received
a report from Catholic missionaries of Greek outrages in Mace-
donia. Details of date, place, and persons are given. Villages
have been pillaged, priests murdered, convents destroyed, fathers
of families imprisoned, women and girls violated and burned, and
Catholic churches profaned. One typical example is detailed.
The Great Sacrament, by Father McNabb, O.P. The nineteenth
century is responsible " for secularizing and uncrowning a social
rite which has its roots far beyond the Christian era." " There
is hardly a people, civilized or uncivilized, that has not surrounded
the wedding of their young with a wealth of ceremony." The
Church of Christ preserved all that was best in pre-Christian wed-
lock, the clear water of the " natural love," and " dyed it into
wine by the spilt blood of Jesus crucified " after the manner of the
miracle at Cana. " The chief change made by the Cnurch " was to
link the "wedding ceremony .... with the mystic offering of Christ's
death." Tertullian (200 A. D.) and the ancient Leonine, Gelasian,
and Gregorian Sacramentaries testify to the early existence of the
Nuptial Mass. The Council of Trent gave the marriage rite its
present authoritative setting, safeguarding the essential elements,
and leaving to local church custom the form of the ceremony.
" As it stands the whole wedding ceremony is one calculated to
stir up those feelings which should be the accompaniment of a
mutual love covenant stronger than death." " The whole atmos-
phere of human love is charged during the Holy Sacrifice with that
uncreated love which carried self-sacrifice to self-immolation."
" Marriage becomes not a mere mating of two chance acquaintances,
but the tragedy of two hearts daring to promise each an eternity
of love." " In these days of denial, we priests of truth should
make it part of our duty to surround Catholic wedlock with all the
pomp and ceremony of the Holy Sacrifice. The Castellane-
Gould nullity suit is the subject of comment under Notes. First,
the statement is made that the recent pronouncement of the Rota
is not a final decision ; second, that the entire judgment is printed
in the Acta Apostolica Sedis of July 7th, showing that no " hole-
and-corner decision " is intended ; third, that the evidence presented
warranted such a decision. The case is very unique, in that the
former Miss Gould seems to have entered the contract most re-
126 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Oct.,
luctantly, and to have been very anxious to safeguard her rights
of divorce.
(August 30) : Catholic Social Action in Holland: " Catholic
Action " is an organization in Holland which unifies the various
Catholic labor bodies which have risen since the Encyclical Rent in
Novarum (1891). It aims at the "gradual solution of social
problems by the application of Catholic principles." The work
has the cordial support of bishops and clergy. The One Scottish
Cardinal, by Rev. H. G. Graham, M.A. An appreciation of Car-
dinal Beaton based on the researches of Rev. Dr. Herkless and Mr.
R. K. Hannay, as recounted in their fourth volume of The Arch-
bishops of St. Andrew's. " The Cardinal stands forth as an eccle-
siastical statesman of the first rank, and as an illustrious patriot,
who by his commanding genius overcame Henry VIII. at every
turn, and staved off the Reformation till the hand of an assassin
put an end to him." Cardinal Beaton has been regarded as a
"monster of debauchery and a fiendish persecutor without one
redeeming virtue," but State papers prove him the opposite.
Revue des Deux Mondes (August i): Count d'Hausson-
ville was most fortunate that his Eight Days in London should
have covered the important time of the Leicester election, the
affair of Lloyd-George and the Marconi Company, President Poin-
care's visit, etc. His point of view as an impartial foreigner is very
interesting. He lays particular stress on his conviction that Eng-
land's fortune is on the wane. In A Neiv Lyric, M. Andre
Beaunier analyzes Le Caur Innombrable by Mme. de Noailles,
which he considers typical of modern French poetry. The War
of 1870 and The Progress of the Defence of the Coasts of Germany,
betrays the prevalent anxiety and excitement of the French people
in regard to their powerful neighbor.
IRecent Events.
A General Election for the Chamber of
France. Deputies will be held next spring, and this
gives a certain degree of interest to the elec-
tion which has recently taken place of the Councils-General of
the French Departments, serving as it does in some degree as an
indication of the trend of public opinion. The extreme Radicals in
the present Chamber have opposed the Army Bill, Proportional
Representation, and other measures of the present Ministry, and of
its two predecessors, measures which were supported by the various
parties of the Right Conservatives, Action Liberate, and Progress-
ists. The indications given by the Departmental elections show that
there is a distinct movement of opinion away from the Right to-
wards the various shades of Radical Republicans and Socialists.
The former lost fifty-seven seats, while the latter, including the So-
cialists, gained the same number. Local interests, however, have to
be taken into account, thereby rendering it impossible to look upon
these elections as a decisive indication of the political character
of the next Chamber.
Times have changed in Paris since the people lived in dread
of the army: it is now rather the army that lives in dread of
the people. Of late there have been a succession of military tattoos,
which have proved very obnoxious to a number of the Parisians;
these combined together to render them impossible. The conse-
quence was a succession of riots, which led to the Republican Guard
being called out. No great importance, however, need be attached
to the matter, except as an indication of the anti-militarist feeling
which exists among certain classes of the population. The number
of those who share this feeling it is impossible to estimate.
While these riots show the existence of a disorderly class ready
to take every means to overturn existing conditions, it is gratifying
to be able to chronicle the existence of a movement in the opposite
direction. Hitherto the Confederation Generate du Travail has
been the source of the many efforts that have been made to revolu-
tionize modern France. Anti-patriotism, anti-militarism, the Mal-
thusian theory, the right to steal, and other political and theoretical
questions have been the subjects to which it has directed its
128 RECENT EVENTS [Oct.,
attention. At a Congress recently held, however, all these sub-
jects were in abeyance; the discussions which were held were con-
cerned with practical matters concerning the hours of labor, the
wages of the working man, and similar matters. In particular, the
efforts of the Confederation, in the immediate future, are to be
directed to securing for France what is called the English Week,
that is to say, a week of five days and a half. The Weekly Rest
Law passed eight years ago, securing one day's cessation from work
in every seven, has had a very beneficial effect. Before that the
laboring classes had no day of rest. The recognition of this bene-
ficial effect has led to the Confederation taking action to secure
a further extension; and the fact that this is to be done by means
of political pressure on the government, and not by strikes, whether
general or local, shows the greater moderation of the counsels that
now prevail. It is not, however, to be concluded that the Con-
federation has repented of all its old ways. The most that can
be said is that they have for the time being been put upon the
shelf.
The new army law is now being put into effect, and the readi-
ness to enlist shows that anti-militarism has not affected the mass
of the French people. It was with a certain degree of anxiety
that the proposal to enlist young men of twenty years of age was
adopted, as it was feared that they would be immature and unfitted
to endure the hardships of military service. So far, however, the
medical boards have found that by far the larger proportion have
been able to pass the examination.
The death of M. Emile Ollivier, at the age of eighty-nine,
removes from the scene the statesman who, " with a light heart,"
declared war against Prussia. He has since explained that by a
light heart he meant a clear conscience and confidence in a just
cause, and not a want of recognition of the gravity of his action.
The last years of his life have been devoted to the vindication
of his reputation from the attacks made upon it. This was done
by his work, L'Emplre Liberal, the sixteenth volume of which ap-
peared a few months before his death, nor was he able to bring it
to completion.
The Krupp trial caused a great deal of
Germany. comment throughout Germany. The fact
that military officials, not actually officers
indeed, but holding officers' rank, had been convicted of receiving
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 129
payment for surrendering secrets entrusted to them, some of them
affecting the national defence, created, especially in military and
Conservative circles, strong feelings of disgust. The Court of
Law itself declared that the reputation of the army had suffered
from the disclosures, and that its prestige had been shaken. The
downward path had been entered upon, and this for the sake of
insignificant sums. On the other hand, the Socialists, through
whom the disclosures were made, failed to prove the existence of
any far-reaching corruption. The culprits acted without thought
or due care, with no intention to betray their country, and in an
innocent belief that the Krupp firm might be looked upon as a
branch of the government.
In the course of the celebrations of the War of Liberation
which are now taking place throughout the Empire, the Kaiser
ventured upon a visit to the Province of Posen. The Poles are
somewhat agitated at the present time by the effort which is being
made to enforce the expropriation law passed a few years ago.
The Emperor made a conciliatory speech, in which he expressed
the hope that the inhabitants of the Province, of whatever national-
ity and creed, would be closely bound by the ties of loyalty to
their King and Fatherland, and would make the achievements of
German culture their own, and rejoice in its blessings. The Polish
nobility gave the Emperor a most friendly reception. The attitude
of the people, however, was not so encouraging. Some windows
of Polish houses which had been decorated were smashed, and
a crowd jeered at the nobles as they returned from the banquet.
In the streets the Emperor's reception was friendly, but the cheers
which greeted his majesty came from the German Leagues. The
Press as a whole declared that there could be no reconciliation
so long as the expropriation policy was pursued, and in this respect
the Emperor made no sign of being willing to make any concession.
If such signs show a want of perfect harmony within the
Prussian dominions, a great manifestation has been made else-
where of the unity which exists between the various States which
make up the German Empire. At Kelheim on the Danube, at the
invitation of the Prince Regent of Bavaria, there met an assembly
of the Sovereign Princes of Germany and the representatives of
free towns, which is said to have been one of the most imposing in
the history of the Empire. It took place in the Temple of Libera-
tion, dedicated by King Ludwig I. to the memory of the war
against Napoleon. Three hundred and seventy-five persons were
VOL. XCVIII. 9
130 RECENT EVENTS [Oct.,
present, representing the four kingdoms of the Empire, its free
towns, and nearly all its duchies, grand duchies, and principalities.
The Prince Regent of Bavaria made a speech emphasizing the part
that Bavaria had taken in promoting the union of the Empire, and
declaring that any one abroad who should ever count upon a
lack of unity or a feeling of jealousy among the members of the
Empire, would find his calculation bitterly disappointed. It was
the evident intention of the present ruler of Bavaria to emphasize
the strong desire now felt in that kingdom to work in perfect
harmony with the Prussian and the other constituent elements of
the Empire.
For something like a third of the people of Germany, the
death of Herr August Bebel will be looked upon as a great loss;
while those who feel bound to condemn many of the principles
he advocated, and even of the objects for which he worked, cannot
leave without notice the passing away of a great force in the
history of the German people. He was wont to claim that he
was an advocate of the union of the various States of Germany
at a time when the Hohenzollerns and the Junkers, including
Bismarck himself, were its strong opponents. When he first took
part in the Social Democratic movement, there was only one Social
Democrat in the Reichstag; at his death there were under his
leadership one hundred and nine, representing more than four
millions of electors. He was the founder of the organized Social
Democracy of which the influence has been so great, perhaps even
greater in other countries than in that of its birth, and its leader
for two generations. Bebel was a great parliamentary tactician, and
had to spend nearly five years in the prisons to which he was sent
for his opposition to Bismarck. He knew how to appeal to the
new Germany which has grown up before our eyes the industrial
Germany which is supplanting the feudalism of the past. To him
in some degree the fall of Prince Bismarck was due, for the
refusal of the Reichstag to renew his anti-socialistic legislation
was the occasion of that fall. It remains to be seen what effect
his death will have upon his party. There are those who already
see signs that the movement has reached the crest of the wave.
Its last official annual report shows that the increase in member-
ship was only 12,748, of which 10,744 were women. The party
is now engaged in choosing a successor to the leader who has
just died.
1913-] RECENT EVENTS 131
The Emperor Francis Joseph has been cele-
Austria-Hungary. brating his eighty-third birthday. It ought
to have been with no merely conventional re-
joicings that the day was kept, for there is no doubt that during
the year just past he has saved his dominions from a war which
might have resulted in the most disastrous consequences. Notwith-
standing his great age and the many anxieties with which his years
have been laden, his majesty's health remains unimpaired.
Every effort is now being made to recover from the effects
of the prolonged crisis from which the Dual Monarchy has been
suffering during the recent wars in the Balkans. Recruits are
being sent to their homes before their terms of service have ex-
pired. This, however, will prove only a temporary relief, for it
has been decided that the annual levy of recruits is to be increased,
after the year 1914, by thirty-six thousand men. These proposals
will, however, have to come before the Austrian and Hungarian
Chambers, and may meet with no little opposition, especially on
financial grounds. The peoples of Austria and of Hungary will not
easily be induced to take fresh burdens on their shoulders.
The Premier of Hungary, Count Stephen Tisza, distinguished
himself as President of the Chambers by the drastic methods by
which he maintained order in that house. The use of the police,
and even of soldiers, became the normal methods by which the par-
liamentary opposition was brought to reason. In private life, too,
he is showing his addiction to violent methods. Within the present
year he has fought no fewer than three duels. Such is the char-
acter of Magyar civilization.
Austria-Hungary and Italy acted in close
Italy. conjunction during the Balkan war. To
their joint efforts was mainly due the form-
ation of the new State of Albania. But just as the second war
ended, an incident occurred which caused great excitement in the
Italian Press, and threatened a revival of the Irredentist agitation.
The Governor of the Province of Trieste issued a decree dismis-
sing all foreigners employed by the municipality of Trieste. This
chiefly affected Italians, and was denounced by the Nationalist
Association as an iniquitous and vexatious action against Italian
citizens, and as the culmination of a series. It does not appear,
however, that the decree represents any deliberate action of the
132 RECENT EVENTS [Oct.,
Austrian government. It was due to the inconsiderateness of the
local governor, who only meant to carry into effect a law already
in existence. It is expected that a way will be found to settle the
difficulty.
Notwithstanding the fact that the Treaty of Lausanne was
supposed to have put an end to the war between Italy and Turkey,
reports come to hand from time to time that fighting is still taking
place in Tripoli. The conclusion has been drawn that the task
of pacifying the annexed provinces may prove protracted, and even
that the Italians may find it beyond their power to penetrate into
the interior. Well-informed correspondents, however, declare that
the greater part of Italy's new possession is already effectively
occupied. The opposition which is being encountered is confined
to the eastern half of the Cyrenaican plateau. It is the Arab tribes
that are offering resistance, although they are said to be inspired by
two Deputies of the Ottoman Parliament. These succeeded in es-
tablishing a Berber kingdom. Energetic action, however, on the
part of the Italians has reduced this kingdom to extremities. As-
sertions have been made that Turkish regular soldiers have been
found taking part along with the Arabs, but for this there seems
to be no foundation.
The Treaty of Bukarest, by which an end
The Balkan States, was put to the conflict between Rumania,
Servia, and Greece on the one part, and
Bulgaria on the other, was signed on the loth of August, and
has since been ratified. That it cannot be looked upon as a final
settlement is almost certain, when all the circumstances are taken
into account. In fact such is the present state of unsettlement
that little trust can be placed in any treaty, however just it may be
in itself, and however freely and solemnly made. Austria-Hun-
gary, by her annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in violation of
the Treaty of Berlin, led the way. Italy trod shortly afterwards
on the same road by making an unjust war upon Turkey. Servia,
by entering upon the recent war, broke a treaty with Bulgaria
which had been made scarcely a year. And more recently Turkey,
by marching upon Adrianople, has broken the Treaty of London
when it had been in existence only a few weeks.
The Treaty of Bukarest, however, is considered by many so
harsh and unjust in its treatment of Bulgaria, that it cannot pos-
sibly be made a permanent part of the public law of Europe. It
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 133
is recognized by all that while both Servia and Greece did well in
the war with Turkey, its success was mainly due to the efforts
and sacrifices of Bulgaria. The treaty, however, strips her of the
main object which she had in view the protection of the Bul-
garians who are settled in Macedonia. The districts in which
these dwell have been allotted to Servia, while Salonika, the chief
seaport, has been given to Greece. In fact, no place fit for sea-
borne commerce upon the ^gean has been given to Bulgaria,
every effort which was made to secure Kavala for that purpose
having failed. While to Rumania, a state which did not do a thing
to help in the war against Turkey, the Treaty of Bukarest gives a
part of Bulgaria's territory, and requires the dismantlement of
fortresses on the frontier, thereby giving a military advantage to
a potential enemy. The seizure of Adrianople by the Turks and
of the territory around it, has deprived Bulgaria of so large a
part of what was left to her by the Treaty of Bukarest, that the
extension of her territory is insignificant. That Bulgaria will not
accept this as a permanent settlement, may be looked upon as quite
certain. In fact, King Ferdinand, in his address to the troops, said
as much. What the future, therefore, has in store is another war
as soon as Bulgaria feels herself strong enough to secure a just
settlement.
While all agree that the treaty is harsh in the terms
imposed on Bulgaria, opinions differ as to her conduct towards
Greece, and especially towards Servia. In insisting on the strict
observance of the treaty made with the latter State before the war
with Turkey was entered upon, Bulgaria acted no doubt within her
rights, but it would have been more generous to have given con-
sideration to the sacrifice which the Powers had imposed upon
Servia by forming the new State of Albania out of territory
which Servia had won from the Turks. To this fact no equitable
consideration was given. Then again there are charges, which
rest upon what seems the best of evidence, of the commission by
the Bulgarians of outrages similar to those perpetrated by the low-
est savages. On this point judgment, however, should be sus-
pended until the International Commission which has been ap-
pointed to investigate the matter has made its report. It is to be
hoped that it may be proved that these charges are unfounded.
In the maze of contradictory statements which have been made,
it is impossible to form a sound opinion. Whatever virtues the
dwellers in the Balkans may have, truth-telling is not one of them.
134 RECENT EVENTS [Oct.,
It is almost as common among them to invent a false statement as
to deny a true one.
The conclusion of the treaty caused a slight coolness between
Austria-Hungary and Germany. Austria was on the point of in-
sisting that the treaty should be submitted to revision. For Aus-
tria is a chronic enemy of Servia, and for the time being friendly
to Bulgaria. The German Emperor, however, was a supporter
of Rumania, to the efforts of which State the treaty is chiefly due,
and sent its King a telegram in which the treaty was declared to
be a final settlement. This made it clear that revision w r ould not
meet with the support of Germany, and as the demand for revision
required unanimity on the part of the Powers in order that it
should be entertained, the proposal fell through. The German
Emperor, however, took the opportunity of the celebration of the
Emperor Francis Joseph's eighty-third birthday to assure the world
that the Triple Alliance was in no way impaired.
Between France and Russia, too, the same treaty caused a
slight divergence of views. Russia warmly supported the claims
of Bulgaria to the possession of Kavala, while French opinion was
in favor of its being given to Greece. Charges also were made in
Russia that France was a party to furnishing the funds which
enabled Turkey to go to Adrianople. The latter charge seems
to be without foundation, while the former is not of sufficient
importance to affect the alliance between the two countries.
That the war between the Great Powers was averted which
for long years was looked upon as certain in the event of the col-
lapse of Turkish dominion in Europe, is due, of course, to several
reasons. It is worth noting, however, that a potent agent in
leading to this result was the fact that the Ambassadors of all
the great Powers throughout the whole period kept holding con-
ferences, in which all points of difference as they arose were dis-
cussed. The Ambassadors had no authority to settle any ques-
tion, and had to refer everything to their respective governments.
This fact, however, precluded hasty individual action, and on two
or three most critical moments, when war seemed on the point of
breaking out, this calamity was by this means averted.
It was at this conference that the boundaries of the new
State of Albania were settled. Its northern and eastern boundary
was made several months ago: that at the south has now been
laid down approximately. The claims of Greece, too, to have this
southern boundary pushed a long distance towards the north, were
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 135
resisted by Italy, as the security of its own coasts would have been
imperilled. Greece has been induced to accept this arrangement
in the hope that all the yEgean Islands, which are now in the pos-
session of Italy, will be allowed to her.
The Constitution of Albania remains to be settled, and this
settlement is not likely to prove an easy matter. Some of the
Albanian tribes are as wild as the prehistoric races. For reasons
of its own, the Turkish government had left them practically
independent. No taxes at all have ever been paid by several tribes.
The attempt to take away their privileges was one of the mistakes
made by the Young Turks. Moreover, there are included within
the boundaries just mapped out a considerable number of Greeks,
who have already taken up arms to resist incorporation into an
alien State. On the other hand, some of the Albanian tribes that
have been allotted to Montenegro have refused to accept the de-
cision.
The most pressing question, if it may still be called a ques-
tion, is who is to be the possessor of Adrianople? The Powers made
a collective representation to the Porte, calling upon it to respect
the terms of the Treaty of London, and to withdraw within the
Enos-Midia line. This the Porte politely refused to do. It then
became evident that the use of force would be necessary. The
Powers were unable to unite for this purpose, or even to delegate
any one of their number to act on their behalf. A shameful
reason for this inability was soon disclosed. The Emperors and
Kings of Christendom were suitors at the Turkish Court for
the grant to their subjects of industrial and commercial privileges
in the remaining provinces of the Turkish Empire. This involved
the abandonment of Bulgaria, an abandonment all the more un-
justifiable, as the Treaty of London had been imposed upon Bul-
garia by the Powers themselves at the time when it was at least
probable that Bulgaria might have taken Constantinople. Bul-
garia was now powerless, as under the terms of the Treaty of
Bukarest she was obliged to demobilize her troops. In fact, the
troops were too exhausted to be willing, or, if willing, able to
wage a second war with Turkey, the Turks having more than
three hundred thousand men in Adrianople. It was even probable
that this army would invade Bulgaria. This, however, was more
than some of the Powers would allow. Turkey received a firm
intimation from Russia that this would involve a war between
Turkey and Russia. Even Austria-Hungary gave to Turkey a
136 RECENT EVENTS [Oct.,
plain warning that such an invasion would not be permitted. Bul-
garia has been obliged to enter into direct negotiations with Tur-
key. It has yielded, as the starting point of these negotiations,
the line of the Maritza, including Adrianople. The Turks, how-
ever, claim a very large area west of the Maritza in order to
render themselves secure in the possession of that city.
Not many years ago it was the boast of
The Palace of Peace, many Americans that they took no interest
in the effete countries of the Old World.
Since that time our policy has broadened, and the gift by an
American citizen of the Court House for the Permanent Court of
Arbitration just opened at The Hague shows how great is the
change. The new building is declared to be worthy in every respect
of the object for which it is erected, and of the state buildings by
which it is surrounded. While its cost was defrayed by
Mr. Carnegie, the chief nations of the world contributed
to its embellishment by gifts of various kinds. The only definite
symbol of religion came from the Argentine Republic a bronze
statue of Christ.
The opening ceremonies took place in the presence of the
Queen of the Netherlands, and the representatives of the forty-two
States affiliated to the Permanent Court of Arbitration. The
speeches delivered dwelt upon the blessings of international arbitra-
tion, and described the measure of success already achieved. No
extreme confidence was shown that the opening of the Palace of
Peace marked the conclusion of the era of warfare. No one en-
tertained such an illusion. But the Palace was a symbol of the feel-
ing widely cherished in favor of the discussion of international
difficulties, and as in the words of Mr. Elihu Root, " the matters in
dispute between the nations are nothing ; the spirit which deals with
them is everything," the Palace would be both an evidence of the
existence of the right spirit and a means of its further propagation.
The foundation stone of the Palace bears the inscription : " Pad
Jitstitia firmandcc Hanc ^Edem Andrea Carnegii Munificentia Dedi-
cavit"
With Our Readers.
IN the September issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD we spoke of the
prurient discussions that occupy the pages of many of our so-called
popular magazines. We wish to insist further on our statements
of last month, and to plead earnestly with our readers that by personal
example, by public protest, by every means in their power, they fight
this great and growing evil. An unhappy sign for those who would
promote innocence and virtue is the alarming indifference of many to
the widespread propaganda of indecent and evil things. Can they
be so dense as to not recognize it, or so short-sighted in the matter of
Christian responsibility as not to see that they are obliged to prevent
an evil in so far as they can ? To advertise in a magazine that deliber-
ately cultivates immorality ; to purchase it ; to read, it is sinful coopera-
tion in sinful work.
And lest any of our readers think that we are over severe or too
scrupulous in the matter, we wish to lay before them a plain state-
ment. We spent some valuable time last month in reading carefully
through one of these " popular " magazines, which boasts a very large
circulation. This is what we found: There were illustrations of
nudes, and of a woman that would have appeared more decent had
she been nude. One story told of a shipwrecked sailor who sees
a woman " unbelievably lovely " coming out of the sea. He desires
her at once, and at the end, even when he believes he is about to die,
knows no thought but of sin with her. The language of this tale
goes beyond the limits of even the gross indecency ordinarily found
in these magazines. Another story tells of a husband who becomes
an " angel " to a girl of the stage chorus. His wife " has set her
face like a flint against having children." She is jealous of the chorus
girl, not from love of her husband, but because of her love for another
man whom she thinks the chorus girl will win. There is much plain
talk of filthy things.
Another. story is of the Peck's Bad Boy variety. Still another
depicts drunkenness, brutality, prostitution, and bohemianism. An-
other is saturated with the atmosphere of loose sex relations. It too has
the " angel " and the chorus girl ; and this tale is advertised as " very
helpful." Another story is of a jealous woman who " nags " her
husband, and it ends with the pleasing sentence, " And I know that
in all our married life he had never been faithful to me in thought,
word, or deed."
Now it must be evident to all that in such a Niagara of filth, there
WITH OUR READERS [Oct.,
can be no other purpose than to allure the reader by the appeal to
things forbidden, things that arouse the animal passions, and thus
make the magazine sell. No sensible person would even pretend
that this was literature; that there was art here; that any of these
writers aimed honestly to express an honest soul. Black will always
be black, and white, white. And the necessity of championing what
is white is becoming more and more urgent, because unprincipled men,
with money at their command, are sowing through the alluring pages
of the cheap magazines the seeds of hell upon earth.
THE matter of sex hygiene instruction in the public schools is
still being vigorously pushed by many. It is a happy sign, how-
ever, that even some of the radicals are abandoning the extreme atti-
tude which they first assumed. The rapidity of life nowadays, and
the driving power of money, have this advantage, that they make
clear in short order the disastrous consequences of a bad start. Pub-
licity, the keynote of the radical sex hygiene campaign, is arousing
the public not to approval, but to protest. The reading matter served
up in the cheap magazines and in the costlier ones, too; the free
exhibitions held in our large cities; the rotten plays exhibited in our
theatres; the prominence given to the question in illustrations and
bold face type in our daily newspapers, have sobered to some extent
the champions of " knowledge itself is virtue."
* * * *
TO these we may add what we think is the most effective factor
of all, the intelligent explanation and defence of Catholic teaching
and Catholic doctrine on the question. There is no educator, worthy
of the name, who, though he may not believe in her claims, will not
listen at least to the voice of her who has brought the world from
paganism to the ideals of Christian society, and who has studied for
centuries how she can save and protect the young. So great are the
absurdities, so endless the wild theories championed by many to-day,
that one is tempted to make them the target of shafts of easy ridicule,
or else to abandon the world that professes them.
But it is for us always to leaven the world with the wisdom of
sympathy, of consideration, of love and of light that has been given
to us by Holy Church. Ridicule may subdue, but it does not convince.
Contempt may hurt and wound, but it does not win. Silence may show
our disapproval, but it does not make disciples.
* * * *
r PHE intelligent declaration of Catholic principles, with an equally
J- intelligent view of all sides of the question, if it does not always
win the day, will at least do much good. And in this respect we
1913-] WITH OUR READERS 139
feel that words of gratitude and of praise are due to the Rev.
Richard H. Tierney, S.J., for his courageous and capable work
at the Fourth International Congress on School Hygiene held
recently in Buffalo. The effect of his words has already been far-
reaching. Journals that champion an altogether different school of
thought, have been compelled to consider his paper; and more than
one, not in any way Catholic, have given him warm words of praise.
Such work is blessed and hopeful. Imitation of this intelligent
and apostolic spirit, particularly in many of our Catholic papers, would
do much for the advancement of Catholic truth.
* * * *
T7ATHER TIERNEY showed clearly that the question of sex hygiene
is not merely pedagogical. It is essentially moral, and resolves
itself into the abolition of sexual sin. Detailed instruction in the
schools does not make for such an abolition; it may contribute to the
very opposite. For the main effect of instruction will be information,
not will power. The emphasis, therefore, is put in the wrong place.
Information cannot keep a man upright before God, cannot cleanse a
heart or keep it clean. From a thorough course of sex hygiene we
might have a race of hygienists, but never a race of saints. Father
Tierney dwelt upon the evil effects of the indiscriminate presentation
to the minds of the young of these questions of sex.
" At the ages of ten and twelve, and even of eighteen and nineteen years,
the faculties are untrained and to a large extent undisciplined. The imagination
is flighty and irresponsible, and extremely susceptible to sensuous images.
These images impress themselves on the phantasy, and notably influence the
actions and often the whole life of the youth. Moreover, the will of child
and youth is weak and vacillating, and subject to the allurement of pleasure
in whatever form it may appear. Now the sex passion is for the most part
aroused through the imagination. As a rule the first impulse is not physio-
logical. It is psychological. It almost invariably begins in the phantasy.
" A vivid and sensuous image occupies the phantasy. Sensible pleasure
is then experienced, and there is no force to combat it effectively. The will
is weak, untrained. It appreciates a good, and either falls to it forthwith
or delays its poor resistance till the soul is aflame with the fire of concupiscence.
The detailed teaching of sex hygiene especially if it be done through book and
chart will make a strong impression on the young imagination. Sensuous
images will crowd the faculty as bats crowd a deserted house. The condition
already described will follow, viz., sinful thoughts, sinful desires, sinful con-
versation, preludes to other crimes which we prefer to pass over in silence."
* * * *
THE truths brought out by Father Tierney were brought again
before the public in an article by Professor Miinsterberg of
Harvard, published in the New York Times. Editorally the Times
itself said that the movement for promoting morality by widespread
knowledge of sexual questions was a mistaken one. " The movement
WITH OUR READERS [Oct.,
has had bad results, and now the need to check it is generally recog-
nized by intelligent persons. The obvious evils have not been re-
moved, and will never be lessened by discussion."
WE will give but one quotation from the article by Professor Miin-
sterberg, and we regret that our space does not permit us to
quote more. Following Father Tierney, he shows that instruction
may not be a deterrent but an incentive to sin.
" The sex information may also have as one of its results a certain theor-
etical willingness to avoid social dangers. But the far stronger immediate
effect is the psycho-physiological reverberation in the whole youthful organism,
with strong reactions on its blood vessels and on its nerves.
" The cleanest boy and girl cannot give theoretical attention to the thoughts
concerning sexuality, without the whole mechanism for reenforcement auto-
matically entering into action. We may instruct with the best intention to
suppress, and yet our instruction itself must become a source of stimulation,
which unnecessarily creates the desire for improper conduct. The policy of
silence showed an instinctive understanding of this fundamental situation.
Even if that traditional policy had had no positive purpose, its negative
function, its leaving at rest the explosive sexual system of the youth, must
be acknowledged as one of those wonderful instinctive procedures by which
society protects itself."
* * * *
AND while we are on the subject, we wish to mention another happy
evidence of healthier public opinion on the matter, a strong
and definite championing of fundamental Christian truth in the cur-
rent Nineteenth Century, by Canon Lyttelton. At the close of his
article he writes:
" Nature tells us in tones now of menace and heart-rending appeal, now
of gentlest persuasion, that truths planted in the earliest years of life are the
truths that live and bear fruit, and that the planter is the parent, whose responsi-
bility cannot be given to another without loss. It may be, in short, the
truest eugenics to revive in every class of society the meaning of home, as
the place where the seeds of physical, moral, and spiritual life are sown."
HOW The Field Afar, the organ of the Catholic Foreign Mission
Society of America, can sustain its great spirit of cheerfulness
and hope is a mystery to the faint-hearted and the pessimistic. Surely
Father Walsh must have unusually heavy burdens on his hands,
and ample reason to complain of the indifference and the parsimony
of many who ought to assist him, and who do not, but never once,
in the pages of his journal, does he weep over the terrible conditions
of the day or mourn in sorrow the failure of men.
He has brought to perfection the personal touch of an attractive
editor bound to win with his readers. His voice is gentle and em-
1913.] WITH OUR READERS 141
phatic enough. His smile is always pleasant, a Christian smile that
tells of a soul that believes strongly in the next world, and does not
by any means despair of this one. A leader who fights in this spirit
will surely give to his followers the same spirit, and rally many to
his standards. If he who fights in the heat of the sun can be cheer-
ful, hopeful, confident, we surely can afford to be so. We recommend
Father Walsh's example to editors, and even to editors who need not
solicit funds for extraneous work.
When Father Walsh asks for a cow, he fills the reader with a
desire to go out and buy one, and ship it to Maryknoll, that it may
support those who give through The Field Afar that other milk
of kindness and of hope of which there is so little in the world.
CORRESPONDENCE.
WESTCHESTER, NEW YORK, August 7, 1913.
To THE EDITOR OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
DEAR SIR: Will you permit me to reply to some criticisms of my lately
published Life and Letters of John Paul Jones, which appeared in a recent
number of your valued publication? Your critic, while admitting that I have
written the best life of Jones ; that I have contributed much " independent in-
vestigation to the subject;" that I am "honest" and do not garble facts;
bases his somewhat contradictory opinion of my inability to write biography
on the advisability of the introduction of certain " doubtful " material in my
history of Jones' career, more particularly that contained in the narrative of
one of Jones' seamen, a certain Thomas Chase. In June, 1773, Paul Jones
having killed a mutinous sailor at Tobago, in the absence of a proper tribunal,
was compelled to abandon his ship and take to flight. From this date until
the autumn of 1775, there is no information vouchsafed in any of the biog-
raphies written before mine, or any documentary evidence in official archives,
to indicate his whereabouts or occupation. The narrative of Thomas Chase
contains information regarding these lost months in Jones' life ; orally dictated
to his grandson, and privately printed. It was transcribed by his great-
granddaughter, a writer of considerable distinction, and of perfectly reliable
character, and offered to me. It contained several errors, and in the portion
which related to the Ranger cruise was inaccurate, as I have stated, because
the writer was at that time locked up in Mill prison in England, and was not
an eyewitness of the events. The narrative of Jones' descent upon Martha's
Vineyard in 1773 was, however, a part of his own personal recollections ;
as was also his account of the engagement between the Bon Homme Richard
and the Serapis, and contained no material which seemed to falsify his
veracity or cast doubt upon the general truth of his extraordinary story. His
narrative contained in fact so invaluable a body of truth, and was so
unique and illuminating a document, that I considered myself not only
privileged but obligated to present the portions above referred to. Your
critic asks me to explain why Thomas Chase is stated in my text to have
fought in the battle on the Alliance, when the narrative would indicate that
142 WITH OUR READERS [Oct.,
he was on the Bon Homme Richard. As a witness of the engagement in
which the Alliance took part, as one of the ships which belonged to Jones'
squadron, Chase was in a position to comment upon the battle. Mrs. Akers
drew the not unnatural conclusion that he was on the Bon Homme Richard
itself. I stated that he was on the Alliance, for the reason that his name is
found on the roster of that vessel ; but as records were lost when the Bon
Homme Richard went down, it is not impossible that he was first on the
former ship, and transferred to the Alliance after the battle. I did not think
it possible for me to alter Mrs. Akers' transcription of the narrative of Chase
to suit my wider knowledge of the subject. Your critic presumes to doubt
the credibility of Colonel Wharton Green, who wrote me a letter in which he
quoted Major Knox, who has known Jones personally, in the latter's repetition
of a remark which he had heard from the lips of Jones himself. The remark
was made by Jones in the house of his benefactors, to whom he confessed
the fact that he had in truth served for a time in the sort of ship which
Thomas Chase described. This remark, so strongly corroborative of Chase's
narrative, was not only repeated through but one sole intermediary, but con-
tained certain details, incomprehensible to Colonel Green, which proved incon-
testably the verbal accuracy of the remark as it came from Jones. Colonel
Green, although an old man when he wrote to me, was in perfect possession
of his faculties, a historical writer in regard to the war of the rebellion
in which he was an officer, and a member of Congress. His credibility as a
witness is further attested by the Honorable Junius Davis, a well-known lawyer
in Wilmington, North Carolina, and son of George Davis, Secretary of War
for Jefferson Davis. I make no apologies for introducing Colonel Green's
testimony. Official corroboration that Jones did visit Martha's Vineyard is
found in the fact that the widow of one of the sailors who first visited the island
on the ship in question, a resident and native of the place, received her share
of her husband's prize money from his subsequent service with Chase, under
Jones, as is recorded at Washington. An eight years' search in the libraries,
private collections, and archives of Europe and America has possibly rendered
me a better judge of the historicity of the material I have presented than
your critic, who has only perceived that there was some alloy in the gold
of the material that I was fortunate enough to discover.
The government of our country has been pleased to order my book upon
the ships, and that within a month of its publication.
While not a "naval expert," careful study of the battles of Paul Jones
has enabled me to write a book which has as yet received nothing but praise
from the naval journals, as well as from officials in the Navy Department
and the Congressional Library, who, with a full knowledge of its aims, have
been pleased to consider those aims successfully accomplished.
Your critic, I fear, is not as honest as he admits me to be, when he
claims that I am responsible for the statement that Paul Jones was the son
of George Paul, as I definitely stated that this, while a possible hypothesis,
was not one susceptible of positive proof.
Very sincerely yours,
ANNA F. DE KOVEX.
The question is whether Mrs. de Koven was justified in saying Jones
was a pirate, when her only evidence was Chase's narrative coming to her
third-hand, and Major Knox's indefinite statement coming to her second-hand.
Knox is hardly worth considering, I think, and Chase is so palpably incorrect
I9I3-] WITH OUR READERS 143
in several particulars that his whole narrative must stand discredited. (Note,
for example, his remarks about Jones' "clipper-built" ship in 1773, at least
fifty years before clippers were built!) I do not say that Jones was not a
pirate ; I say that Mrs. de Koven has given as proof that he was, evidence
which is worthless.
I wish I could apologize for fastening upon her the responsibility for
the discovery that George Paul, the putative uncle of Paul Jones, was really
Jones' father, but I will be judged by this, her statement:
"The statement of Jones' fellow-lodger that Jones had told him he
was the son of Lord Selkirk's gardener, coupled with the knowledge of George
Paul's descendants, that although of doubtful parentage Jones was a Paul
would point to the identification of George Paul, gardener of Lord Selkirk,
as the actual father of Paul Jones."
In my review I gave these two examples of Mrs. de Koven's methods.
Let me add another:
Among Jones' female correspondents in France were two sisters. Mrs.
de Koven says he intended to marry one of them, so as to legitimatize the
child she had had. Her reasons for saying this are found in two passages
of a letter Jones wrote to the sister. One passage reads:
"She [the mother of his correspondent] was a tried friend, and more
than a mother to you. She would have been a mother to me also had she
lived."
The other:
" Present my best respects to your sister. You did not mention her in
your letter, but I persuade myself she will continue her share of her sweet
godson, and that you will cover him all over with kisses from me. They
come warm to you both from my heart."
" It is impossible," says Mrs. de Koven, " to come to any other conclusion
than that the 'sweet godson' whom Jones wished Madame T. to 'cover all over
with kisses from him' was his son."
Now, no one can read far in Jones' letters without seeing that he was,
especially when he wrote to women, a very sentimental letter-writer, who
nearly always wrote in an exaggerated vein; and I say it is monstrous to base
such an accusation as Mrs. de Koven has made upon this letter alone. If she
be correct she has shirked her duty towards Jones, for she tells us nothing
more of this episode. She leaves us free to believe that Jones abandoned
his son. He never spoke of him ; he did not marry the mother ; although he
left some property, he left none to this child.
I wish I could say more for this book than that it is the best of the lives
of Jones, for that is saying very little. Sherburne's life is an incomplete
compilation ; there are several boys' biographies which have little merit, and
several old, prejudiced books and pamphlets on Jones, written when the material
was scant, and when biography and truth-telling had very slight relationship
to each other. Besides these there is Buell's two-volume work published in 1906
a false book, full of reckless fiction, capping the climax of its crimes by putting
forth as Jones' a manufactured spurious letter. I recall with pleasure read-
ing Mrs. de Koven's able exposure of the fraud printed in the New York Times
several years ago.
THE REVIEWER.
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THE
CATHOLIC WORLD,
VOL. XCVIII. NOVEMBER, 1913. No. 584.
THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY.
BY HILAIRE BELLOC.
I.
URING the celebration of Ozanam's centenary, with
which so many Catholic pens have been occupied
this year, one topic has perpetually returned because
it was the chief interest of Ozanam's own life:
and that topic is the relation between what is called
democracy in modern France and the Catholic Church.
The great majority of those who deal with this topic use in
connection with it (and with Ozanam's own work) such phrases as
" the reconciliation between the Church and democracy," or " the
antagonism between the Church and the Revolution in France."
In other words, they take for granted a conflict more or less
inevitable, and more or less acute, between the Catholic Church in
France and what is called modern French democracy. Some think
this conflict to be artificial, others regard it as fundamental and
inherent to the nature of the two things. But all who make
even the most superficial examination of the state of religion in
France, recognize the existence of such a conflict, and most of
those who write upon French Catholicism find themselves compelled
to deal with that conflict in the course of their study.
It is the object of these few articles to explain, so far as my
own experience and reading enable me to do so, the nature of this
Copyright. 1913. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
VOL. XCVIII. IO
146 THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Nov.,
antagonism, its historical causes, and the future that probably
awaits it.
Unless a man be personally acquainted both with French
society to-day and with its history in the past, his first difficulty
in the matter is to understand why any conflict should exist at all.
The word " democracy " signifies a form of civil government
in which the mass of the citizens cooperate to administer the
State, regard its magistrates as their servants removable at will,
and initiate and obey only those laws which are the product of
their general will. Every community of men which is small,
original, and untrammelled (for instance, a group of half a dozen
young men going out upon a walking tour together) recognizes this
ideal of government as natural and satisfactory to the human
appetite for justice that we should confer with our fellows upon
what we should all do in common, and only agree to regard as
binding such laws as we had come to by association and common
agreement.
Of the difficulties in realizing such an ideal where many men
and many interests are concerned (not to speak of a mass of in-
herited custom and right), I will say nothing: but at any rate
democracy, whether we like it or dislike it, whether we think it
feasible in our own nation or Utopian, is a recognized form of
human government, and, in its mere definition, a just and simple
form consonant to the nature of man.
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, is not a theory but
a thing; it is not a political ideal, it is an institution. All those
who have even an elementary acquaintance with it, and who care
to think lucidly about it, know very well what that institution is.
It is an organized body of men incorporated under certain officers,
and possesssed of certain modes of action, which body, through
its officers and through their modes of action, professes to know
and to teach the truth in those matters which concern the ultimate
destiny of man.
It would seem self-evident that no conflict could arise be-
tween a body of this kind and any particular doctrine of political
government, and this self-evident truth is expressed by the Church
herself in the quite obvious doctrine that the Church is indifferent
to the various forms which human government may assume, so
long as her right to exist and to practise is not interfered with.
All this has nothing to do with whether the Church is right
or wrong in her claim. It has nothing to do with the truth
I9I3-] THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY 147
or error of the religious dogmas which she propounds for accept-
ance. You may be the most humble of believers in those doctrines,
or the most skeptical of disbelievers, but it must be clear to you
that if there is a society which will give you an answer to, let us
say, the question whether man is immortal, or to the question
whether the universe has behind it an intelligent Creator, that
society will answer you " yes " or " no " with equal ease under
a despotism, an oligarchy, or a democracy. It is equally evident
that, to turn from the doctrines to the practice of the Church,
a democracy might set out to kill people who went to Mass (if
the populace thought going to Mass a crime) just as much as might
a despotism or an oligarchy: the form of government would
have no essential connection with such persecution. The plain man,
therefore, if he knows something of the Catholic Church, and can
define it, and who is acquainted with the meaning of the English
word " democracy," and can define it, cannot see what there is
in the two definitions which can possibly lead to antagonism be-
tween them. And I am convinced that foreign observers, espe-
cially if they are not European, are always puzzled at the outset
by this existing conflict in the particular case we are considering
the case of France since the Revolution, and of the whole of Euro-
pean society which France has influenced. My object, then, is to
try and show how and why in that particular case conflict has arisen
and still exists.
Now the first point to recognize is that the foreign observer's
difficulty here is primarily due to the fact that abstract words,
when they are used with regard to concrete human affairs, convey
very little of reality.
Thus, if I tell a man that the English polity is a " monarchy,"
while the polity of the United States is not a monarchy, I am
still leaving him ignorant of two essential facts in the living, con-
crete organism which we call, respectively, England and the
United States: the essential fact that the strongest political thing
in England is a comparatively small group of rich men, and the
strongest political thing in the United States one supreme officer
called the President, who can actually veto laws passed by a repre-
sentative assembly, and who has it for a traditional and solemn
duty to issue to those whom he administrates a personal message
of counsel and policy. Of course I am leaving out a great deal
more than that ; in thus merely using the abstract word " mon-
archy " I am saying nothing of the thousand differences in the
148 THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Nov.,
distribution of property, the deposit of custom, and all the rest
of it which may differentiate the two societies.
Again, if I say that a public force of armed men has been
sent into a disturbed district " to protect the rights of property,"
the meaning of the phrase is wholly different according to whether
the property protected is the property of a few against whom the
mass of their dispossessed fellow-citizens has arisen, or well-divided
property which some criminal man already possessed of property
was setting out to steal.
When troops fire upon a proletarian mob which is marching
to destroy the wealth of a dishonest monopolist, what they are doing
is a world asunder from the same troops defending a body of
farmers who own their land against a raid upon their crops
undertaken by savages, or an attempt to dispossess them made by
the servants of some unjust, insolent, and powerful neighbor. The
two actions are not only a world asunder, they are directly contradic-
tory. The troops defending well-divided property against aggres-
sion are doing that which would prevent a State from becoming cap-
italist; the troops defending a single capitalist from thousands of
his dispossessed fellow-citizens are establishing and confirming cap-
italism. Yet each of these contradictory actions may be rightly
described in the abstract terms " a defence of property by the armed
forces of the State."
If, to the contradiction in essence between these two actions,
we add all the complexity of the different history, psychology,
customs and speech, inherited prejudices and enthusiasms, geo-
graphical situation and comparative prosperity of the capitalist
society on the one hand, and the society of free farmers on the
other, there would be not only a contradiction which can be
intellectually denned, but a revelation of two totally different
worlds, each a reality, and a reality which a man must know before
he can understand so much as the meaning of the phrase " rights
of property " in the one or the other.
If you were to say to one of that community of farmers, who
had never heard of a capitalist State or dreamed of it, " a mob
was marching to destroy the barns and stores of Mr. Smith," the
farmer would certainly answer, " What was the State about to
allow such a thing ? The authorities ought to have used force at once
to prevent such injustice ! " That reply would be due to the fact
that the farmer was thinking of a Mr. Smith owning property
like any other one of his fellow-citizens in a society where the
1913-] THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY 149
ownership of property was normal to citizenship. But if you were
to say to people in a capitalist State, who had never experienced
well-divided property or even heard of it, " the troops were called
in to defend the property of such and such a farmer," a member
of that proletariat would probably reply to you : " It was a gross
injustice, and the farmer by his pretended ownership of this prop-
erty was refusing bread to his fellow-citizens."
It is, I repeat, a difficulty of this kind which leads to the
grossly erroneous judgments passed upon the conflict between the
democracy of the French Revolution and the Church; a conflict
which (I also repeat) was not confined to France has indeed
probably passed its worst phase in France but covers the whole
field of European politics. To understand the matter, it is first
essential for us to understand not only the intellectual formulas
governing the two things, but the two things themselves.
I shall in my succeeding papers emphasize the case of France
in particular, because through it one can understand the atmosphere
of conflict between " democracy " and the Church, which has radi-
ated from France throughout Europe. I will attempt to discover to
the reader, both by contemporary observation and by an inquiry
into the past, what appetites, habits, suspicions, and the rest grew
into the body of that political effort in France, whose ideal was
and still is however imperfectly realized a democratic constitu-
tion of political society. That done I can show how the conflict
arose.
In order to aid the reader to a just comprehension of this,
I will take for my starting point in history the death of Louis
XIV. (in 1715), and as my starting point in contemporary observa-
tion the society of one of those French provincial towns which
are the essential units of the French polity. I can thus describe
how in the process of two hundred years that unit has come to be
what it is. When these two processes are combined I think that the
cause of the quarrel between the Church and the Revolution, the
remaining acuteness of that quarrel, and the probable fate which
awaits it in the future, can be more rationally conceived.
Before undertaking this task, however, I would like to warn
my readers (most, and perhaps all, of whom will be living in a
society predominantly non-Catholic) of a factor in human effort
which is constantly neglected : I may call it the factor of direction
of force or potential.
Men tend to forget, when they seek to explain or to forecast
150 THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Nov.,
any human effort, that it makes all the difference in the world
whether they are dealing with action facing in one direction or
in the opposite direction: to put it briefly in a mathematical
metaphor, whether they are dealing with a potential positive or
negative. For instance, ten years ago thousands of newspapers
and public speakers were discussing whether Japan or Russia were
the " stronger " power, whether Japan could " win " against
Russia or Russia against Japan. But most of them forgot that the
question could not be put in those terms alone, because those terms
as they stand exclude the factor of direction. If the direction of
the Russian effort were towards the occupation and retention of
Korea by Russia on the one hand, and the prevention of it by
Japan upon the other, the result was doubtful. But if the direc-
tion of the Japanese effort had been towards the reduction of
Russia, the occupation of any of he_r European territory and the
retention of it, it was certain that Russia would be victorious.
Take another question whether a man should be content upon
a certain income refers to two totally different things, according to
whether we are considering a diminution or an increase. Many
a man has broken his heart because his income has suddenly fallen
to a level which, had it been risen to by another poorer man, would
have been taken by that poorer man as a proof of success. When
you say, " You will find Jones thoroughly content, he is getting
three thousand dollars a year," the statement will be a reasonable
one if Jones is a small clerk who has just received promotion to
that comfortable salary, but it would be an extremely foolish
statement if you made it of a man who for years had owned a
large and prosperous business, bringing him in fifty thousand dol-
lars a year, which business had suddenly collapsed, leaving him
with three thousand dollars a year paid him as salary by some
friend after his misfortune.
Now we find this factor of direction or potential of the utmost
importance in approaching any historical phenomenon, and in the
particular case of a conflict between the Catholic Church and an
ideal of civil government, we must take account of that factor of
direction if we hope to come to any just conclusion. The position
of the Catholic Church in a country (like Portugal) where it was
once supreme and has slowly declined, is necessarily totally different
from its position in a country (like Scotland) whether it was once
virtually unknown, and is now rapidly increasing in numbers. The
force and meaning of " democracy " is one thing in a country
1913.] THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY 151
like, say Norway, which has been democratic for centuries; it is
quite another thing in a society which attempts with violence and
at great risk an experiment in democracy, having for many genera-
tions lacked any experience therein. And what may be meant by
the phrase " the Catholic Church in its relation to democracy " will
radically differ according to what the combination of these various
factors of direction may be.
We are only too familiar with the confusion a neglect of this
factor of direction introduces when, for instance, the word tolera-
tion is discussed. Applied to a body of thought novel and increas-
ing in vigor, it has a totally different meaning from what it has
when applied to a body of thought long familiar but declining in
vigor. The " toleration " which the Roman Empire long refused to
the Catholic Church is quite different from the " toleration " of
Christian doctrine in Prussia or England to-day. Again, it makes
all the difference in the world to that one word " toleration "
whether it applies to something about which most men are in-
different, or about which most men feel keenly. The " toleration "
of sexual wrong by the modern world is in quite another category
from the " toleration " of cannibalism. Again it makes all the
difference in the world whether we apply it to the establishment
of an institution, or to the propagation of an idea: an idea out of
which an institution may indeed ultimately arise, but which has
not yet given birth to one. Thus, a society upon the whole theistic
(that is, believing in God) may choose to tolerate ideas and speeches
which attempt to disprove the existence of God, but the same
society would not in the same mood tolerate for a moment a body
of men organized to live their lives and to affect those of their
fellow-beings upon the assumption that morals had no sanction,
that an oath was valueless, etc. Or again, a society which will
freely permit argument for and against Christian marriage, will
(and has) put down by force of arms a distinct body in its midst
which shall practise organized polygamy.
I say all this at such a length because this prime factor
of direction will be found to color all our conclusions upon the
subject I have in hand.
France is and has been for at least fourteen hundred years a
Catholic country. The direction of French activity in this matter
is positive and not negative. A French bishop is not one of the
" clergy of all denominations " to which amiable Freemasons offer
toasts at public dinners. He is, and has been for centuries, a
152 THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Nov.,
ruling power. The French Huguenot is not a Frenchman just
like any other, one who happens to differ from his fellows on minor
points of opinion; still less is he the normal type of citizens among
his fellows. He is a man of a peculiar cast, commonly in fortune,
nearly always in temperament ; he proceeds historically from a body
which was at one time acutely at issue with the State and in league
with foreign enemies; a body wealthy out of all proportion to
its numbers, and yet a body whose numbers are and have been
for a long time past diminishing.
Similiarly, the anti-Catholic forces in France do not as they
do in a Protestant country, constitute a general, circumambient
atmosphere, as it were, against and through which the Church
pierces as against and through a resistant medium: they are a
compact and organized special array attacking a Catholicism which
is older, more rational, more diffused, much larger, usually less
conscious than its adversaries.
From this preliminary I shall proceed in my next paper to
describe how the religious question would strike a traveler who
should for the first time (but intelligently) observe some typical
portion of French society to-day; and I will take for my typical
example so observed that which is most typical of France, historical
and contemporary, a provincial town, the capital of its province,
such as are Tours, Toulouse, Rheims, and some fifty others.
A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM.
BY JOHN AYSCOUGH.
I.
AILHAM is not an ugly place, but its beauty is of a
sort not commonly admitted. The country round is
mostly flat, though a long shallow hill hides it from
Market Railham, four miles away, " and better,"
says Stephen Drub the carrier, " and worse," says
his cinnamon-colored horse with one wall eye and one pinkish.
Besides being flat, the country is, not to mince matters, bleak :
fenny, and with very few trees. What trees there are have never
grown tall, and they have a lop-sided look, for their tops are all
blown landwards by persistent winds from the cold North Sea.
People in loose clothing are apt to have the same landward-blown
look on two out of three days in every autumn, spring, and winter,
for there is mostly a hard wind, and it mostly comes from the
northeast.
The Railham we talk of is Railham Maris, but it is not on
the sea: there are three flat miles between the long sandy shore
and it. But there is no village on the coast nearer than Orpham,
five miles off; and Railham is Railham Maris "Morris" half
the folks call it, some indeed pretending that Morris, or Maurice,
was the name of a family once powerful hereabouts, and that of
the originals of certain crusading-looking figures on defaced tombs
in the church. Whatever name was inscribed upon them once,
none is legible now.
It is a fine church, big enough to accommodate double the
whole population, even if three-fourths of them did not go to
chapel. It stands on a mound that seems quite a hill here, and
can be seen for miles; it has a plain, but beautiful, square tower,
gray and mellow with the grayness and mellowness that centuries
can give. In the churchyard are half a dozen yew trees not much
younger than the church.
Opposite is a fine old house, that looks like a Manor House,
and is a farmhouse, and should be the vicarage; but the clergy-
man, who is also rector of Railham Stephens, two miles north-
154 A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Nov.,
ward, lives at the latter, and clearly cannot live in two places
at once. He is very old, but his son is also a clergyman, and it is he
who comes over to take the Sunday service: on one Sunday in
the morning and on the next in the afternoon.
Nearly all the houses and cottages in Railham are old, and even
the ugly ones are picturesque: some are far from being ugly; and
the Star Inn is both big and attractive. It was once the real Manor
House.
It must be confessed that Railham Street is long and windy,
straggling too, but only captious and dull critics could call it ugly.
Nor does it look mean, or even poor : there are three farmhouses
in it, besides the vicarage farm opposite the church, and well-
to-do farmers live in all four.
The real doctor lives at Railham Stephens, like the rector;
but his assistant, who is young and not unpleasant, lives in Monk-
house, a queer-shaped, comfortable, roomy house that turns its
best face away from the street into a delightful garden where
Miss Trimp, the doctor's sister, works as hard as two farm laborers,
for love of flowers and her brother Valentine.
The beauties of Railham have not, I confess, been proved,
but if you saw it at sunset you would never again ask for proof.
Nowhere could there be more gorgeous sunsets. Your hilly, thick-
wooded places have so little sky ; and at Railham there is sky every-
where: on days of rain and wind, when skyless places are dull
enough, it is grand here. The rainy gleams upon the flats; the
ragged, heltering clouds, with great blue spaces between; the huge
wide stretches of empty lands, not of a dull monotone, but flecked
with fifty shades of light and color and blackness all this is worth
a dozen " landscapes."
Nevertheless Railham is asleep. If she be a beauty, in the
eyes that can see it, she is like the Sleeping Beauty waiting for
her prince to come and bid her wake. And the prince came;
in a fashion that took all Railham aback. It happened in this wise :
Stephen Drub was jogging home from Market Railham, conscious
of an extra glass or so, for it was Thursday, as well as " carrier-
day," and market-day of course.
Mrs. Drub was chapel-bred, and attended Arannah: Stephen
had no objection it kept a certain hold on his chapel-going con-
temporaries, who might else have conceived the monstrous notion of
a rival chapel-going carrier ; but Mr. Drub clave to the church. That
is to say, he never escorted his better-half to Arannah, except when
1913.] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 155
there was a magic lantern entertainment and tea there. On Sun-
days he read the police news, and, when service was in the after-
noon, occasionally betook himself to church, especially if he and
Mrs. Drub had a new pledge of their conjugal affection to be
christened. One thing Mr. Drub held out against, and that was
" teetotalation :" which he held to be a sign of dissent, and incom-
patible with true, if broad-minded, devotion to the Establishment.
" Miriam was chapel-born and chapel-bred," he argued, " let
her stick to it. All the Drubs has been church folk, and aren't I
Church Warden? Let them teetotal as belongs where it belongs,
and that's Arannah."
Mr. Drub was jogging home then ; and Mrs. Yest, the baker's
wife, was seated beside him, and Mrs. Sheen, the butcher's mother,
was next her; and they were discussing measles which Tommy
Yest had not had (though he'd most had everything), and his
mother was thanking her patience for it.
" Well, and you've no call," opined Mrs. Sheen. " 'Tis best to
get 'em over. If children's ordained to have 'em, let 'em have 'em,
and be done with it, says I. They'll have 'em, praps, when grown
women else like Liza Parkis, as died of 'em at thirty-four."
"Whatever in life's that?" cried Mrs. Yest, with as much
animation as she ever exhibited.
Her remark or exclamation was addressed to Stephen Drub
as likely to know all about vans, and she alluded not to measles,
but to a very peculiar vehicle that had dashed by.
Mr. Drub did not know, but he would not say so.
" Conveyances aren't what they was," he replied, sticking to
general principles.
" That's true enough," agreed Mrs. Sheen. " Since the motors
come up them above us knows, for we don't, what sort o' things
ye'll see on the road next. Good meat don't want no ingine to
drag it. That's what I say."
" Nor bread as is bread either. When it's half alum folks
mun have it brought to the door in motor vans to regoncile
'em to digest it. Was that a furniture van, think you, Mr. Drub? "
" It had partly the look of it. But this road goes only
to Rellum Morris, and no one ain't flitted, un yet no one ain't
furnishing there. Deuce is in it, says I."
A horrible misgiving struck him that it might be some new
(diabolical) species of carrier van.
" Like enough," agreed Mrs. Yest, a polite woman, with a
156 A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Nov.,
mealy disinclination to contradict anyone. " But who elst I won-
der?"
" There was two gentlemen i' front," called out a lad from
the back of the van, who had been peeping out of the tilt behind.
" The gentry's up to anything now," said Mrs. Sheen, " i'stead
o' riding a Christian horse, they goes scrammin' through the coun-
try, dressed like the Lord knows what, with a strup-strup-strupping
thing under their backses, as might as well be a machine knocker."
" Gentry ! " scoffed Mr. Drub, " Bill calls them two gentle-
men ! Parcel deliv'ry, more like."
The cinnamon-colored horse saw Railham close ahead, and
mended his pace. Presently the carrier was nearing the first
house for which he had a parcel. But before you reach the first
house, there is a plot of waste ground where once a circus pitched
itself for four days.
" Lor' ! " cried Mrs. Sheen, " there it is ! As large as life."
" Twice the size," said Stephen, severely.
There it was, true enough. A longish van, on high wheels,
and two gentlemen were standing near it.
" Does this bit of ground," one of them called out, " belong
to anyone in particular ? "
" It belongs," said Mr. Drub, who was used to answering ques-
tions, whether he knew the answer or no, " to the County Council."
" Well I never ! " said Mrs. Yest admiringly. " 'Tis where
the lads plays football as has no place else."
" 'Tis where the tramp was found froze to death," added Mrs.
Sheen, " in the great frost year."
" Well," said one of the strange gentlemen, " it is not freezing
now "
("That's true, too," said Mrs. Yest: being August, and
rather sultry, she felt sure of contradicting nobody.)
" Can we quarter our motor chapel here ? " asked the strange
gentleman.
" Certainly," said Mr. Drub with sudden urbanity. Evidently
the two gentlemen were gentlemen, and clearly the odd-looking
vehicle was not a rival carrier van. How it could be a chapel he
could not understand, for, though the ministers belonging to chapels
were often, as he reminded himself, locomotive preachers, he had
never heard of a locomotive chapel. Still, if it was a chapel, he felt
that it behooved him to show a brother-in-law ful interest in it.
" Certainly," he said. " Nobody won't say nothing to ye, sir."
1913.] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 157
" Thank you, Mr. Drub, we're much obliged," said the second
gentleman.
" There now ! " whispered Mrs. Yest to Mrs. Sheen, much im-
pressed.
Mr. Drub was flattered. It showed he was a public character.
It did not strike him that the strange gentleman had been reading
the little board over the fore- wheel on which was painted, " Stephen '
Drub, Carrier and Haulier, Coal Merchant and Briquettes"
" Is there such a thing as a butcher here ? " the first gentleman
inquired casually.
" Certainly," spake up Mrs. Yest, with friendly recommenda-
tion, " a good urt. 'Jacob Sheen, Purveyor,' o'er the window front;
you can't miss it, sir. Opposite the Star."
"And a baker?"
Mrs. Yest held modest silence, and Mrs. Sheen did as she had
been done by.
" A first-rate baker, sir. 'Simon Yest, and French and Fancy
Bread;' first shop before you come to the post office. Nobody
could miss it."
Mrs. Yest bowed a conscious acknowledgment.
" There'll be a service here to-night at eight o'clock," said
the second gentleman. " A sermon and some hymns ; and answers
to questions."
" I hope you'll come, Mrs. Sheen," observed the first gentle-
man to that lady.
" Look there ! " murmured Mrs. Yest, more impressed than
ever.
" And you, too, Mrs. Yest," said the other gentleman, address-
ing himself to her.
" Well, I never ! " exclaimed Mrs. Sheen under her breath.
The cinnamon-colored horse, to whom nothing had been said,
tired of the conversation and moved on.
" They knowed us by our names as pat ! " cried Mrs. Yest.
" 'T would ha' been nature for 'im to think as I was Mrs.
Sheen, if anything, and you Mrs. Yest well I shall go, and
Simon too."
" Well, and I don't say but what I'll come ; Jacob bein' as
he is a young man and a bachelor, I can't answer for'n."
" I told 'ee they was gentlemen," the lad at the back called
out, not without triumph.
" And so they be," Mrs. Yest agreed.
158 A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Nov.,
" If my eyes growed in the back o' the van I'd ha' told you"
said Mr. Drub, sourly, over his shoulder.
" But the dark one is the handsome one," declared Mrs.
Sheen, who, unlike Mrs. Yest, was apt to cast her remarks into an
argumentative form. " Don't tell me as he's not handsomer nor
Sir Reginald. A sight handsomer say I."
" But Sir Reginald's not a preacher," mildly protested Mrs.
Yest, without controverting the general position.
" Rather the contrary," observed Mr. Drub, darkly.
" These aren't preachers nether," said Mrs. Sheen. " I knows
a preacher when I sees un. Two lodged wi' my sister Fells,
one last year, and one i' the year o' the blight, and they were
none like these. These talks like the regular gentry free and
jolly like."
" I'll come if Miriam comes," declared Mr. Drub. " They'll
have a collection, mark my words else, and I'd like to see how
they doos it. There's different ways at Arannah they makes
them full different from my way in church. I never looks when
folks puts anything in; I judges by the sound. That's the church
way; and more well-bredder than givin' a shake o' the soup plate,
like Seth Brawn at Arannah, and fixen your eyes on the coppers."
" I often wish," said Mrs. Yest, " as bakers could mek a
rule o' no change, like in church. 'Twould mek the profits quicker."
II.
At eight o'clock there was a larger assembly on the waste
plot than it had seen since the circus went away.
" Lor' it minds me o' the lion comin' here agin," observed
Mrs. Sheen. " I doubt he had the gapes, same as chickens does.
He niver left off yawning whilst the man went round namin'
the beastes, and which was amphlibious and which carnivrious.
There's the handsome one."
The elder folk and the young women kept together, pretty
near the van; the lads hung on the fringe of the company, and
tried not to look sheepish by nudging each other and making
easy jokes. Mr. Drub, with the carrier half-sunk in the Church
Warden, frowned at them, and said " Sst " between his teeth.
He had on carrier shorts and leggings, but a dark coat, and he had a
sixpence he wasn't sure of in his pocket for the collection.
The hinder end of the van was open, and a sort of staircase
1913-] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 159
ran up to it. Inside, at the other end, was, as Mr. Drub noted,
with approval, " a Communion Table." But it was not exactly like
the one in Railham church, for it had a crucifix, and pictures, and
also candlesticks.
Mrs. Drub was not pleased to see them, but her husband (as
though he had been a Prime Minister) merely advised her to
wait a bit. It slightly mollified her that the two gentlemen were
dressed in coats and trousers, and wore no surplices. She pointed
out the circumstance, but Stephen only said, " wait a bit," again,
as if he believed that the surplices were tucked away inside, and
would ultimately arrive.
The van was brightly lighted up, though it was not dark
outside yet; and presently the elder of the two gentlemen went up
and sat down, easily, on the top step.
" That," Mrs. Sheen explained in a stage whisper to Jacob,
who had accompanied her, " is not the handsome one."
" Very true," remarked the gentleman seated on the top step,
cheerfully, " that's my friend."
The friend was leaning against the back of the van, in a
week-day attitude, and merely said, " Cut along."
" I daresay," said the gentleman, whom Mrs. Sheen did not
call the handsome one, " you are wondering who we are, and what
we have come for. It doesn't matter much who we are : the point is
what we are, and what brings us. So I'll out with it."
("Like the burglar with the jemmy," said a voice from the
skirts of the crowd.)
Mr. Drub was personally affronted by this remark, which pro-
ceeded from a journeyman plumber, not native to Railham.
" Ush ! " he cried. " Let's 'ear the gentleman. Them as
knows so much about burglars had better stick to the company
where they feels most at 'ome."
The neatness of this repartee was so highly appreciated
that the young plumber set off in dudgeon towards the coast, as
though about to embark for Norway, and unable, to linger a moment
longer.
The gentleman on the top step smiled and nodded, and went on.
" Well, then, ladies and gentlemen "
(Mr. Drub was not certain that " ladies and gentlemen " was
" parliamentary at a sermon;" but Mrs. Drub liked it, and adjusted
her cape to a more fashionable angle.)
" Ladies and gentlemen, I'll tell you at once what we are.
160 A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Nov.,
My friend and I are priests, Catholic priests, and that's what
matters most about us. If, however, you would like to know our
names I have no objection to telling you. My friend's name is
Doctor Catesby and mine is Father Longcliff."
(" He's fully young for a Doctor, poor thing," murmured
Mrs. Yest plaintively. The only Doctor of Divinity she knew of
was Dr. Pross, who used to keep a school at Market Railham, and
might then be about ninety.
" Longcloth," whispered Mrs. Tick, who kept the post office
and a small shop, " is what the white shirts is made of. Maybe
he's Lancashire bred."
" Like enough," agreed Mrs. Yest.)
" But," Father Longcliff went on, " our names are not the
point. The point is that we are Catholic priests, and what brings
us here is to tell you what being a Catholic means, what the Catho-
lic religion is; what it is for; what it teaches, and why there are
more Christians belonging to it than to any other religion that
professes belief in Christ. That is what we want to tell you; and
we want to explain all this because we do not think it likely that
anyone ever has explained it. We know that in this our dear
country of England, there are millions of our dear fellow-country-
men who are quite ignorant on this subject. It is not their fault;
they do not wish to believe evil of people who have never injured
them; but they have been taught very little about Catholics, and
of that little most is untrue, and so they have wrong ideas about
them, and many of those ideas are unjust and unfair.
"If the people living in towns far away from Railham, people
who had never lived here, or been here in their lives, people who
really knew nothing about you all, were to go about saying that
Railham was a bad place; that it was famous for dishonesty and
immorality ; that it was sunk in black ignorance, and loved cruelty,
and worshipped idols, and was ignorant of God all this might
be said without your hearing a word of it; but if you did hear, you
would not like it. No one would expect you to like it. No one
could expect you to put up with it if you saw any way of putting
a stop to it.
" Perhaps you would say that such lies must be sheer malice,
that someone was putting them about who had a bitter spite
against Railham, or against some of them who lived here; and
that might be the real explanation as to the beginning of the lies
and lies you would feel them; but it would only be a part of the
1913.] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 161
explanation, for the lies might be repeated would be sure to
be repeated by other people ; not the people who invented them at
first, but well-meaning folks who only told other folks what they had
been told themselves, and who supposed it must all be true simply
because it had been told them. It might get into the newspapers,
and be read by thousands of strangers who had never even heard
of Railham before, but who would conclude it must be a bad sort
of place.
" Well, then, suppose some of you really loved your own place,
and were truly grieved to find that the decent, honest, respectable
place that was your birthplace and home had falsely got a wicked
character; grieved that your neighbors, whom you knew well to be
good-living, sober, industrious people, kind-hearted, and by no
means cruel, not immoral but good husbands and wives, loving
fathers, and tender mothers, and dutiful children that all these
neighbors of yours were held up to shame and scorn; and sup-
pose some of you had the power to go away and tell the truth,
and destroy the fables spoken against you and your home, would you
not go ? Would it not be an honest thing to do, even though it cost
some pains, and a good deal of trouble, and some risk of your being
laughed at?
" You might say, I know, let those who love to tell lies go
on telling them : Railham is not a bad and wicked place, whoever
says so. It is not an atom worse, in fact, because ignorant or
spiteful strangers talk nonsense about it. Of course it isn't. It
is just what God knows it to be, not an atom better, and not an
atom worse. But I do think you would, if you loved your home,
and loved truth and justice too, be glad if some of your own people,
who knew exactly what Railham was like, could and would go off,
not minding the trouble, or the worry, and at least try to speak up
for the good name of your well-beloved home. And, what is more,
some of those who had helped to spread the lies, not knowing them
to be lies, but only out of ignorance, would be glad too. Some
would not, for some people are malicious and spiteful, and many
are jealous, and some who have once told a lie will stick to it like
glue "
("He mun be thinking o' Robert Barker," whispered Mrs.
Sheen. ' Tis won'erful how they do seem to know all about
Rellum: an' names and all so pat.")
" Well, my dear people," Father Longcliff went on, " that's
the sort of business my friend and I are come about. The Catho-
VOL. xcvin. ii
162 A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Nov.,
lie Church is our home, and we love her. We know the truth about
her. Because she is our home, and we have lived all our lives
in her. We know what she is really like just as you know better
than any stranger what Railham is like. We know what she is:
just as you know what Railham is. A stranger who had seen a
picture of Railham might think he knew just what it looked like,
and talk as if he did; and another stranger might believe his ac-
count of the place, and really know uncommon little about it,
after all"
(" Miss Pallot as stopped wi' Miss Trimp drawed a picture
of Rellum street," murmured Mrs. Tick, " and there was no lamp
o'er the post office, and on'y two steps up to our door.")
" We know what the Catholic Church teaches, for she taught
us," said Father Longcliff. " We know what she makes Catholics
worship, for she made us. We know what she tries to make her
children do, and what she won't let them do, if she can stop them
because we know what it is she has tried and is trying all the
while to make us do, and what she will not let us do. We know
what sort of people Catholics are, because we know what we are
ourselves, and we are Catholics, and because we know all sorts
of other Catholics for we had Catholic fathers and mothers
and brothers and sisters; our playfellows, when we were
little children, were Catholics; our schoolfellows, when we were
boys, were Catholics; our oldest friends are Catholics; and, now
we are men, we mix with other Catholic men and women and so
we must know what sort of people Catholics are; and we should
be idiots if we didn't know better than people who never knew a
Catholic child, or a Catholic boy, or a Catholic man, or a Catholic
woman. I daresay there's not a single Catholic in all Railham "
" That's right," said Mr. Drub aloud. " So there isn't, only
Percy Byrne the ragman, and he's a widower."
Doctor Catesby and Father Longcliff laughed, which Mr. Drub
again suspected to be unparliamentary.
" Well, it seems there's only one," Father Longcliff continued.
" There's two at Market Rellum," the postman called out,
" in the 'sylum."
The two priests laughed again, and Father Longcliff went on.
" Thank you ! I wonder how many lunatics there are in the
asylum altogether "
" Better than three hundred, 'tis the county 'sylum," said the
postman, whose talent was statistical.
1913-] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 163
" Well, I'm glad that out of three hundred lunatics," observed
the priest, " only two are Catholics. Evidently you're not more
likely to go off your head in my religion than in some others. But
it seems to me that, under the circumstances, you are not likely
to have heard very much about my religion. The population of
Railham is over seven hundred ; and, even if Mr. Byrne was a very
learned Catholic, and had nothing to do but go about and explain
the Catholic religion, he would have his work cut out."
" He goes about," the young butcher called out, " buying bones
and rags and that."
(" I'm glad you spek up," whispered his mother approvingly.
" There's no call for Mr. Drub and postman to do all the ex-
plainin'; your father was Church Warden afore Stephen Drub
was breeched, and postman's teks weekly wage, as you and your
father niver did."
" Well, they bought four pound o' loin chops," observed
Jacob, " and the truth's the truth as I can speak to so well as
'er a carrier, or a postman as learns French by post."
" That's what I say ; but hark the gentleman's agoin' on. And
he's bowin' to ye, Jake. Move to him, will 'ee.")
" Thank you," said Father Longcliff again he was used to
much less friendly interruptions. " Thank you. Mr. Byrne, in
the pursuit of his blameless calling, has evidently but little leisure
for explanation. There is all the more for my friend and me to do.
I shall let him begin. I am sure you will listen to him in the same
friendly way in which you have listened to me. If he says any-
thing you cannot follow, just say so. We have not come here to
muzzle you, but to tell you the truth, and what we want is that
you should understand it.
' The glory of some speeches in public places is that nobody
does understand them. The speaker does not mind that. At
elections the great point often is that no one should quite under-
stand what the gentleman means, except that he means to get into
Parliament, and that you had better help him to get there. He
does not exactly want to make you understand all he may have to
do when he does get there. It suits him just as well that you
should not. So he talks a lot, and he is not a bit annoyed if no-
body's a penny the wiser.
" Now that sort of thing would not be in our line at all.
If we stayed here a fortnight, and talked all the time, and you
knew no more about the Catholic religion at the end than you know
164 A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Nov.,
now, we might as well have stopped away. We're not going into
Parliament; we have no desire to, and we've no chance if we did
desire it. We want to go to heaven, and we want you to, and it isn't
the best way to tell lies about other people, even if the lies have
been told you first by someone else ; so we would like you to know
the whole truth, and the best way is not by puzzling you. If any-
thing I say, or anything my friend says, does puzzle you, speak up
and say so, and we'll try to explain. Don't mind interrupting.
It's not manners to interrupt the preacher in church "
(" Hear, hear! " said Mr. Drub.)
" But we're not in church, and you can interrupt as much
as you like. All we want is that you should find out from us
exactly what the truth about Catholics and their religion is, be-
cause we believe you are straightforward and kind-hearted, who
would not wish to go on believing evil, or speaking evil, of people
who never injured you, of people whom God created as He created
you, and whom God will judge as He will judge you. If there's
any harm in that you can say so, and we can go away as easily
as we came; and see if other people in some other place care more
to learn the plain truth about a thing we know."
III.
As Father Longcliff paused, there was a mild stir through-
out his audience. They were quite willing to go on listening,
and equally ready to hear either gentleman, but as the one gentle-
man had begun they would have thought it more natural that he
should go on; they did not quite perceive how a sermon could be
preached by two different people. Perhaps Mr. Longcliff was only
chairman, and it was his business merely to introduce the speaker
of the evening, in which case this must be a meeting and not a
service at all.
(" Depend," said Mr. Drub behind his hand, " it is a meeting,
and that's why they wears no gownds assicks, they calls 'em
nowadays nor yet surplusses."
" Like enough," assented Mrs. Yest, who would have agreed
just as readily had she been informed it was a choral festival.
" Mark my words, Drub," said that gentleman's better-half,
" there's more sincerity in coats and trousers than in all your
assicks and surplusses. The truth don't need to be buttoned up
in a narrow petticoat wi' a row o' little buttons "
1913.] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 165
" Ush; it'll be the collection now, you'll see else.")
But the pause was not utilized as Mr. Drub expected.
" My friend," said Father Longcliff, " will sing a hymn : and
if you will join in, all the better."
In the chapel was a small harmonium, and the two priests
drew it forward ; then Dr. Catesby distributed large cards, on which
some prayers and hymns were printed, while Father Longcliff
played through the hymn they were to sing. It was one that no-
body in that audience had ever heard, and there was a vague curios-
ity and readiness to be astonished ; that Catholics should have hymns
at all was odd enough, but no one could in the least guess what a
Catholic hymn would be about. That it proved to be about the
Good Shepherd was at first almost felt as an anticlimax; but the
words were of such a homely simplicity, and the air so kindly and
attractive, that long before the last of the many verses was finished,
a good part of the audience was joining in.
The priest, whom his friend called Dr. Catesby, did not stand
by the harmonium, up in the little chapel, but among the people,
and that made it easier to join him. Jake Sheen, a strapping, stal-
wart, young fellow of two or three and twenty, was next him,
and Jake had a good voice, clear and true, full, and with a pleasant
tone in it. He was reckoned the best looking young man in Rail-
ham, and he knew it, but he knew that the priest by his side was
much handsomer than himself, and he could not help admiring his
well-knit, graceful figure. He imagined that there was not more
than four or five years difference in their ages, though in reality
there was more than a dozen. He knew very well that the priest
was well-born, it seemed to him stamped on face and figure alike;
and he could not help thinking how strange it was that such a
gentleman, with all the world to choose from, as it seemed to him,
should choose to give his time to such a task as this. " He might
be anything he liked a cavalry officer like young Squire Henham,
or a guards officer like Sir Reginald and instead he goes about
just trying to let folks know the truth about his religion."
Had Father Catesby been thinking of himself, as Jake was
thinking of him, the young butcher would have been aware of it
instantly. But he saw, as plainly as he saw his neighbor's face,
that it was not so ; and he saw, what appealed just as much to him,
that the singer put on no sanctimonious air, struck no attitude, and
had none of that queer in-church look, the seeing of which in
church was one of the reasons why Jake was not fond of going there.
166 A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Nov.,
I was wandering and weary,
When my Savior came unto me;
For the ways of sin grew dreary,
And the world had ceased to woo me;
And I thought I heard Him say,
As He came along His way:
" O silly souls come near Me,
My sheep should never fear Me,
I am the Shepherd true."
That first verse the young priest for he looked very young,
as he looked very manly sang alone. He had a voice singularly
pure and liquid, and every syllable was heard : simpler words could
hardly be, but it was a simple audience, and many were touched
when the singer's tone altered to match the pleading gentleness
of the last three lines.
Jake had not taken a card when Father Longcliff handed
them round, and as he was singing those final lines of the verse,
Father Catesby, quite naturally, without the least fuss, but with the
briefest gesture of invitation, half -turned to the young man, and
their eyes met. The priest gave a little smile, and held the card
nearer Jake, with a finger pointing to the next verse. He knew the
words by heart himself, and, as soon as Jake had the card in his
hand, Father Catesby let it go altogether. Jake liked singing, and
he had the air in his head already, but there were dozens of other
young fellows there who knew all about him : he was not the pat-
tern young man of Railham by any means. He wouldn't have
sung if he could have helped it. But he could not help it.
" Sing," said the priest quietly, and immediately began the
next verse. No one was more surprised than Jake's mother to
hear his voice joined with that of Father Catesby.
At first I would not hearken,
And put off till the morrow;
But life began to darken,
And I was sick with sorrow ;
And now at least twenty voices joined in the refrain :
And I thought I heard Him say,
As He came along His way:
" O silly souls come near Me,
My sheep should never fear Me,
I am the Shepherd true."
1913.] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 167
Stephen Drub's was one : he considered that he sang " second "
and it was at least that. Mrs. Drub had a penetrating treble,
not unlike a canary's, but she liked the hymn, and liked singing
it; and so did 'Melia Swipp, whose father kept the Star; so also
did Roob Capper, the young gamekeeper from Henham, who had
really walked over to see her. And Roob was not ecclesiastically
minded, alleging that it was not possible for gamekeepers to at-
tend divine service " alonger poachers." Jake Sheen was not sorry
to hear so many others joining in, though he had experienced a
sort of exaltation in singing the first four lines of that verse alone
with Father Catesby.
In the last verse nearly everyone joined, but it was not hard
to pick out the voices of the young priest and of the young butcher:
they were well matched in strength and clearness, though the ad-
vantage in tone and quality was, as Jake knew very well, not on
his side.
I thought His love would weaken,
As more and more He knew me;
But it burneth like a beacon,
And its light and heat go through me ;
And I ever hear Him say,
As He goes along His way :
" O silly souls come near Me,
It was deep dusk now, and the lights in the little chapel on
wheels seemed to shine much more brightly. A few stars were
visible in the darkening sky, and from far away over the flats,
landward, came the weird call of a corn crake in the standing corn.
A dog bayed in a lonely cottage half-way to the sea. When the
hymn ceased, there was no other sound except the rustle of the
little crowd as it settled itself to listen. Father Catesby had gone
a step or two forward and turned, so that he stood leaning against
the open end of the van-chapel.
" I shall not begin to-night," he said, " to try and tell you
anything about the things which my religion teaches and yours
does not. I want you who listen to listen as friends, if you will
let it be so, and so I would not care to begin with things about which,
perhaps, we differ. However we may end, let us begin in agree-
ment. You have sung that hymn with us because we are all of us,
you and we, strangers, silly sheep, and the same tender and
kind Shepherd is looking for us all, and calling us all.
" Who is He, and what right has He ? It is a great thing to
168 A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Nov.,
do to call all men silly who will not hear Him; to claim every
lad and girl, every old tired man and woman, every stalwart busy
man, of every nation for His own sheep : to make Himself the
Shepherd of a fold whose limit is the big world and all who dwell
in it. No one else ever dared to ask so much; how dare He?
" Kings have claimed much ; in old times they claimed a great
deal more: absolute obedience and hard service. Did any king
ever claim what this Shepherd with the quiet voice asks? You
know what He asks yourselves. Not obedience only, or service
only. He only claims them as proof that you are His, you your-
selves: that He is Master, not just of your outward acts, but of
your thoughts. Does any other king claim that? Has any other
master demanded not only service but perfect love? He does.
The Pharisees in the Bible gave the outward service, and He turned
from them, because they kept their hearts for themselves, to do what
they liked with. I do not want to make as little as possible of His
claims for fear you should refuse and turn away : I want you to re-
member fully how much it is He does claim. He claims all you
have to give, and the most astounding claim of all is that He asks
the gift of yourselves.
" Though in His name you moved mountains ; though you
called to yonder far-off sea in His name and bade it come hither,
and it obeyed; though you sold every little thing you have, your
clothes, the things that make up your homes, and gave the money
to the poor; though you let them who deny His name take your
bodies and burn them, He would not be content if you held back one
thing, one coin in all this great price ; just the one thing every man
wants to keep himself : his heart, his own dear secret will. This
Shepherd, with the gentlest voice ever heard on earth, asks that, all
that, and will take no less. How dare He?
" It is not my business to pretend that the claim is little :
it is enormous; it would be monstrous; it would be the most awful,
terrific insolence ever heard of but for one thing. Listen: I
stand here knowing that He is hearing, and to your faces and to
His I dare say that to make such a claim proves Him to be one of
three things. Jesus Christ is His Name. You know it well, you
have heard it all your lives. Do you know Him? Do you know
Who He is? If not, I do not wonder if there be some here who
have never given in to His claim.
" Listen, as He is listening. If He makes those claims, and
He does make them He has been making them for nineteen hun-
1913.] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 169
dred years well, then, He Who lays such a claim to every human
heart and every human life : to yours, and yours, and yours, and
mine; to every king's life, and every beggar's heart, He must be one
of three things : an impostor, or a maniac, or God. There is no
alternative; no other way out of it. If you say He was the holiest
man that ever walked this world of ours, it is nothing to the point.
If you call Him God's greatest prophet, it has nothing to do with it.
If you admit His teaching is better and nobler than what any
other man ever taught, but no more, then I say that is no excuse.
No saint, no holy man, no prophet, no teacher, could make a claim
like His upon the whole race of men, and escape man's just re-
bellion. For man belongs to God, and to no one less ; if there were
no God then man would be his own, and belong to himself and
miserable despair. But there is God, and you know it. So Jesus
Christ is God, or He has no right to make a claim like His.
" You know His life. It was your earliest lesson. You know
His language and His acts. Were they the speech and deeds
of an impostor, a cheat, of one who came to embezzle the heart of
mankind ? Were they the words and acts of an impostor ? Was His
teaching insane on the one hand, or hollow and insincere on the
other? Were His acts the deeds of a madman, or the deeds of a
cheat? If so you are right, all men are right who ignore His
claims and brush them aside as a folly or an impertinence. But, if
not, then He is God.
" Never forget that He claimed to be God. Only God is eter-
nal, and He claimed to be eternal; and in claiming to be eternal
He used of Himself the Name that His hearers knew belonged
to God alone. 'Before Abraham was made I am,' He said, and
the Jews knew that He was calling Himself God, so they sought
to stone Him. But He not only said that He was God Himself,
He taught others that they should say it. He asked His Apostles
what men called Him, Who it was they made Him out to be,
and they told Him how some said He was one of the old prophets
risen from the dead, and others that He was a new prophet greater
than any that had come before Him; but that He would not have.
'But Whom do you say that I am ?' He asked. And there was only
one even of the Apostles who could answer. Simon, whom they
called Peter, that is Rock, answered : 'Thou art the Christ the Son
of the Living God.' If Christ had not willed that men should
call Him God, then would Peter have been rebuked. But Christ
said to him: 'Blessed art thou, Simon, son of John, for flesh and
i/o A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Nov.,
blood hath not revealed it to thee, but My Father Who is in
heaven.' And He gave him a great reward, because he first had
called and acknowledged Him God. Thou art Peter,' He said, 'the
Rock, and on this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell
shall not prevail against it : and to thee will I give the keys of the
kingdom of heaven, and what thou shalt bind on earth shall be
bound in heaven, and what thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed
in heaven.' Thus we see that He called Himself God, and that
He gave a unique blessing and a unique office to him also who first
called Him God.
" But He did more : that He was right, and that Peter was
right, He proved by doing what none but God can do. He not
only commanded angry waves and they obeyed Him; He not only
healed incurable diseases, but He raised those already dead to
life, and among them Himself. After they had killed Him and
buried Him, He Who had called Death to Himself as a master
calls a servant, and had made the frightened servant do its work
even on Him while the day turned black with fear and horror
He, I say, called Life, His other servant, and bade it come back
to Himself though He was dead. He had died because He chose,
and when He chose to live again, He lived. No one could do
that unless He were God.
" And that is why He has a right to make the claim He does
make. There could be no other excuse or justification for it.
Are you men? Are you creatures, or a race of gods uncreated?
If you are creatures, He created you; for there is only one Creator,
God, and He is God. If you are His creatures the claim is on you
too : on each of you. He does not claim one here and another
there, passing some by; He does not merely call the human race
as a whole to come to Him; He comes to each, and to each
separately He puts forward the same claim. He wants each of
you; each of your hearts; the whole thing that makes yourself in
each of you. Has He got it? Have you listened, have you
obeyed? He is your Master: whose servants are you? I ask
you that, not for you to answer me, but for you to answer Him; do
not tell me, but tell yourself. Are you the servant of Jesus Christ
or whose ? There are other masters : He is not the only one.
Is one of them your real master? As little children you learned
of the world, and the flesh, and the devil : and the three names
meant nothing to you. You could not understand them. Do you
understand them yet? Perhaps you say: 'Eh the world! The
1913-] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 171
world has not much to do with me. The world is not for poor
folks.' That is true. The world has not done very much for you;
and most likely it never will. The less reason you should do
much for it. But though the world is not for you, are you all for the
world? Can poor folks never be worldly, or greedy, or selfish, or
grasping, or cheating, or cruel, or unjust?
" It is not always the busy masters that get best served.
There are mean servants who will do ten times more for a hard
and selfish master than they will do for a master who does only
too much for them. The more he does for them the less they
make of him. Is Jesus Christ or the world the best master, think
you?
" What did you know of the flesh when you were a child ?
You know now. Is it your master? The flesh does not pick his
servants among the rich and great only. One need not be a
fine gentleman to be a scamp; if there be broken hearts and ruined
lives, and women that were sinless girl-babies once, and now are
rotting down into death and hell common men and lads, working
fellows, have done their share of the foul accursed business it
has not all been done by the fine fellows of the big cities; no,
country lads and farm hands have done their share. In villages
that look all peace and purity the flesh has its servants, willing and
laughing: it sows seed up and down the country, not in towns
only his rotten harvest is everywhere. Of the flesh shall be
reaped corruption, and it is being reaped every day in a million
souls and bodies that belong to Jesus Christ.
11 The devil ! When you were children you thought of him as
a bogey and were frightened; now, perhaps, he seems a sort of
joke. But in reality he is a friend. You never thought when
you were a little child of such a horrible friend ; but how is it now ?
It is our friends we like to please, and our friends who please us :
which do you like to please, Jesus Christ or the devil? Which
pleases you, Jesus Christ or the devil? You know very well how
you can please Jesus Christ, and you know best whether you try.
You know well what things please you, are they His things or the
devil's?
" Friends who love each other, and keep together, grow like
one another, because they love the same sort of things, and do
the same sort of things, and talk of the same sort of things, and
think of the same sort of things. Are you grown like Jesus Christ,
or are you growing like the devil? You can judge by your habits;
172 A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Nov.,
by the things you do, or want to do ; the talk you love ; the thoughts
you love. Well, are they the sort of habits, the sort of deeds done
or longed for, the sort of talk that Jesus Christ loves, or the sort
the devil likes? Tell yourself, do not tell me; you need not tell
God for He knows, and you need not tell the devil for he sees
and hears. Who is your Friend? What are you growing like? "
They all thought the priest was going on a long while yet ; they
expected a rounding off and a summing up. But he stopped
abruptly. And so it was that his last brief question went on ask-
ing itself in the minds of some of them long after he had ceased.
Another hymn was sung: " Sweet Savior, Bless Us Ere We Go;"
there were a few very short and simple prayers, and the first
" meeting " was over.
" It w r as suttingly a meetin'," Mr. Drub maintained on his
way home, " ther'd ha' bin a collection else. 'Tweren't a service."
" And meetin's are a far deal better nor services," said Mrs.
Drub. " Times I could a'most ha' fencied me'sel in Arannah."
She meant nothing but praise, however, and was resolved
to go again. Many did. Some were pretty sure they would not.
"Who is your friend? What are you growing like?" is not a
question everybody, even in a simple place like Railham, cares to
be forced to answer.
Jake Sheen answered it, and answered it with an honesty
that was part of his by no means perfect character, and he knew
very well he should go again. He was not at all desirous yet
of changing masters ; but he knew he could not keep away. Father
Catesby had fascinated him in an odd, half -human fashion. If
the priest had announced a course of addresses on Euclid, or the
Differential Calculus, he would have attended them all, for the sake
of looking at him and hearing his voice. But he knew, uneasily,
that the priest would conquer him, and, though he did not welcome
the idea, he could not prevent its realization by simply staying away.
He was one of the first to slip off when the " meeting " broke
up, though he would have liked to linger, and presently an intimate
friend overtook him, and inquired with flippant intimacy what he
was growing like.
" If you want to go on looking like yourself you'd better
hold your jaw," Jake retorted grimly. " If you go on, I'll make
you look as different as no one i' Rellum 'd know who you was
meant for."
[TO BE CONCLUDED.]
THE DISINTEGRATION OF SOCIALISM.
BY HENRY SOMERVILLE.
HAT is Socialism? The question is often asked by
its less intelligent adherents, and in answer they
offer a neat little definition which is supposed to
clear the word of all charges of ambiguity. Or the
question is similarly asked the less intelligent critics,
who scoff at Socialism because the statements of its advocates are
so vague, and so rich in inconsistencies. But the question is also
asked honestly and earnestly by the student who really wants to
know, who realizes that a thing may be true though it can only
be stated vaguely; but who nevertheless cannot be content as long
as there is vagueness, for he knows that though vagueness means
sometimes an obscure truth, it more often implies some hidden error.
Socialist controversial literature is full of complaints of misrepre-
sentation, and though these complaints are often justified, the oppo-
nents have much excuse for their mistakes, for it is a matter
of the extremest difficulty to ascertain what is the representative,
I won't say the authoritative, teaching of Socialism, as distinct
from the views of individual advocates.
Perhaps the present writer will be pardoned if he relates a
personal experience. I was one of three men who as students at
Ruskin College, Oxford, were eagerly interested in Socialism. We
were each workingmen who had gained scholarships for the col-
lege, and when we first went there we had, as we thought; our
minds made up on the question of Socialism. I was an opponent,
my two friends were very enthusiastic advocates. We did not dis-
pute as to the meaning of Socialism; we considered it accurately
and adequately defined as the collective ownership and control of
the means of production, distribution, and exchange. In our final
year at college we were preparing for the examination for the Ox-
ford Diploma in Economics and Political Science, and all three of
us chose Socialism as our special subject in the examination. As a
consequence, we were obliged to acquire a first-hand knowledge
of the chief exponents of Socialist doctrine. We all studied as-
siduously, and were rewarded by gaining the diploma; but at the
end of the course none of us could say what Socialism was! My
two friends (who had distinguished themselves in the examination)
174 THE DISINTEGRATION OF SOCIALISM [Nov.,
admitted as readily as I did the impossibility of giving a positive
definition of Socialism. Yet they still remain sincere believers in
Socialism, and ardent workers in the Socialist movement; and I
remain an active, though I hope a sympathetic, opponent. This
little story illustrates what almost every inquirer feels : that there
is something very strong and something very weak in Socialism.
The man who succeeds in showing clearly what is this strength
and what is this weakness, will make an important contribution to
human knowledge.
There is one characteristic which is common to every historical
and contemporary form of Socialism. Socialism always represents
a revolt against the system called capitalism. And capitalism means
this : That the natural resources and the instruments necessary for
the production of wealth are owned and controlled by one section
of the community, whilst the rest of the population, having no
property, are compelled to gain a livelihood by hiring themselves out
as laborers to the owning class. The terms of hire, or wages,
are determined in this system not according to any ethical standard
of what is just, but according to the "forces of demand and supply,"
that is to say, the employer gives as little as he can, and the laborer
takes as much as he can. This is capitalism in its essential nature.
The system prevails to-day, with some modifications, in all industrial
countries ; it is of quite recent origin, and was practically unknown
to the world until the latter half of the eighteenth century. In its
early stages, before it had fully asserted itself as an accomplished
fact, capitalism was regarded as an ideal economic system by the
classical economists of the early nineteenth century. A century's
experience of the working of capitalism has taught us that under
that system the laborer is normally the weaker party in the wage
bargain, and thus one of the incidents of capitalism has ever been
the evil of sweating. The philosophic defenders of capitalism
were humane men, and would have deplored oppression of labor, but
they believed that the natural working of the capitalistic system
would ultimately bring to labor a greater share of wealth than it
could possibly attain under any other system.
Socialism, I say, in all its forms, has represented a protest
against the capitalism above defined. This is about the only point
which all the historical forms of Socialism have in common. Par-
enthetically it may be observed that, though this is a position com-
mon to Socialists, it is not peculiar to them. Other opponents of
capitalistic theory and practice have been conservative idealists,
as Coleridge and Southey; humanitarian teachers, as Carlyle and
1913.] THE DISINTEGRATION OF SOCIALISM 175
Ruskin; and the whole school of Catholic economists, notably
Pope Leo XIII.
Since the time of SS. Simon and Fourier, Socialism has gone
further, and one of its characteristics has been hostility to all
individual ownership of productive wealth. Except on these nega-
tive points, Socialism shows endless variations. There is not a
single positive proposal, which can be said to be distinctively
socialist, on which Socialists are agreed. Socialism is spoken of
by Mr. H. G. Wells as " a developing doctrine," but this is con-
tradicted by the whole history of the movement of Socialist theory.
The history of Socialism divides itself into three stages: the
Utopian stage, the " scientific " or Marxian stage, and the present
revisionist or reformist stage. Utopianism crashed to pieces as
soon as it came in contact with human realities for corroboration
of this verdict see Marx or any Socialist handbook written since his
day. The " scientific " Socialism of Marx, based as it was upon
a rigid theory of economic determinism, succeeded and superseded
Utopianism, but it was a negation of, not a development from, its
predecessor. There is about as much relationship between Utopian-
ism and Marxism as between the utilitarianism of Bentham and
the idealism of Thomas Hill Green. Of course they are akin in
some respects; but so are all the most alien systems of thought.
The third stage of Socialism, reformism, is the outcome of the
bankruptcy of Marxism. We shall not waste time discussing the
barren question whether Mr. Wells and Mr. Sidney Webb and Mr.
Ramsay Macdonald have developed the doctrines of Marx, or
whether they have not entirely repudiated them. It is sufficient
to say that " scientific " Socialism is utterly exploded. Of all
Marx's predictions of the necessary course of capitalistic develop-
ment, only one, that with reference to the concentration of industry,
has been even partially verified by events. As a consequence, the
policy of the prevailing Socialism is no longer shaped according to
the Marxian theories.
What is Socialism to-day? We do not expect that all Social-
ists should agree on the methods of realizing their aims, or on the
details of the Socialist State. But have Socialists any distinctive
general principles to which they all assent ? The latest re-statement
of Socialism is Mr. Philip Snowden's book just published under the
title Socialism and Syndicalism. Mr. Snowden quotes the defini-
tion of Socialism given by Mr. Balfour in 1907:
Socialism has one meaning only. Socialism means and can
mean nothing else than that the community or the State is to
i;6 THE DISINTEGRATION OF SOCIALISM [Nov.,
take all the means of production into its own hands, that pri-
vate property and private enterprise are to come to an end,
and all that private property and private enterprise carry with
them. That is Socialism and nothing else is Socialism.
Read now Mr. Snowden's objection to Mr. Balfour's definition :
That definition is not an accurate and precise statement of
the aims of present-day Socialism. Socialism not only can
mean, but does mean something else than that the community
is to take over all the means of production, and that private
property and private enterprise are to come to an end. So-
cialism only proposes to make such of the means of production
into public property as can be conveniently and advantageously
oivned and controlled by the community.
The italics in the last sentence are mine. The obvious com-
ment on that sentence is that if Socialism " only proposes " so much,
then indeed Sir William Harcourt's celebrated dictum, " We, are all
Socialists now," is literally true, and not only are we all Socialists
now, but we have all been Socialists always. Herbert Spencer,
Mr. Sidney Webb, and Lord Rothschild could equally well sub-
scribe to Mr. Snowden's proposition; but though they agreed on
the general principle, they might differ about its application, as to
which particular industries could " conveniently and advantageously
be owned and controlled " by the community. Mr. Snowden simply
reduces the issue to a question of the comparative efficiency of
public and private enterprise in particular cases. After admitting,
as Mr. Snowden does, that " if private enterprise can carry on any
productive works, or conduct any public service better than the
community can do it, a Socialist State might certainly be trusted
to encourage that form of enterprise which would bring the best
results to the community," it shows mere confusion of thought
to say on the next page that the Socialist State would not allow
capital to be employed for the purpose of appropriating profit or
surplus-value. To prohibit the employment of private capital for
profit, is practically to prohibit its employment absolutely.
Socialism is equally meaningless according to the definitions
of other of its acknowledged leaders, as, for example, Mr. Ramsay
Macdonald and Edward Bernstein, chief of Revisionists. The
latter defines Socialism as " the movement towards, or the state of
an order of society based on, the principle of association." But
as " the principle of association " is implied in the very idea of
1913.] THE DISINTEGRATION OF SOCIALISM 177
society, it is impossible to conceive of a society that would not be
Socialist according to Bernstein's definition. Of course it would be
possible to quote many definitions from other Socialist writers that
do express a distinctive doctrine. For example, the official pro-
grammes of Socialist organizations, as the Fabian Society and the
Independent Labor Party in England, and the Socialist Party and
the Socialist Labor Party in America, give definitions which, though
expressed in very general terms, it would be pedantic to quarrel with
for insufficient precision. My point is that Socialist leaders do not
all hold to these relatively precise statements, and, therefore,
they cannot be taken to express principles considered as essential
by all Socialists. What we want, and what no one has yet given
us, is a definition of Socialism which can be accepted as expressing
a creed held by all Socialists and only by Socialists. All the cur-
rent definitions are either so narrow that they would exclude the
most influential Socialist in England, Mr. Sidney Webb, or else
they are so wide that they would admit a high Tory like Lord Hugh
Cecil. Indeed, some recent definitions are comprehensive enough
to stamp the whole peerage and all Wall Street as Socialist.
The qualifications which are being introduced in modern
re-statements of Socialist theory, would be of little importance if it
were not for the fact that they correspond with certain changes
in the actual policy of the Socialist movement in all countries
where it has reached an advanced stage, as France, Belgium, Ger-
many, England. I do not include the United States, because the
Socialist movement there is as yet young. It is full of enthusiasm
and vigor and hope, as the young should be. But it has also other
characteristics of youth : it is undeveloped, and it has yet to ex-
perience power and responsibility. When American Socialism has
passed the stage of mere propaganda, when the Socialist Party be-
gins to take a responsible share in the actual work of national
legislation and administration, then we shall see whether the char-
acter of Socialism is not metamorphosized in the States as it has
been in the older countries. The two great facts that strike the
student of the contemporary Socialist movement in Europe are
these : first, that Socialism as a political force is ceasing to contend
seriously for the transfer of the means of production from private
to public hands; second, that the proletarian discontent which has
hitherto supplied the Socialist movement with its driving force, is
now turning in an anti-socialistic direction.
I shall speak of the second fact first, as its significance is the
VOL. XCVIII. 12
1 78 THE DISINTEGRATION OF SOCIALISM [Nov.,
more readily apparent. The most recent movement of the pro-
letariat is the Syndicalist movement; and Syndicalism is essentially
a revolt from Socialism. It may be objected that Syndicalism is no-
\vhere very strong, except in the Latin countries, and also that
Syndicalism is not opposed to Socialism in its fundamental aims,
but only in its methods of realizing those aims. It may be urged
that Socialism and Syndicalism are at one in aiming at the aboli-
tion of capitalism, but whereas Socialism trusts to political methods,
Syndicalism relies only on economic action. It is true that Socialism
and Syndicalism agree in their hostility to capitalism, but there their
agreement ends. On questions of positive methods and aims, they
are not only different but antagonistic. If anything at all can be
said about Socialism as a positive doctrine, it is that it places great
trust in the State ; it proposes a great extension of State action and
a great increase of State power. Now it is incontrovertible that
Syndicalism has as its most essential characteristic a strong dis-
like and fear of State action, and it most resolutely opposes the
increase of State power. And this opposition to the State is not
merely instinctive, nor is it merely directed against the present
class administration. The writings of French Syndicalists abound
in subtle analyses of the working of State machinery and of the
State mind, and on grounds both of economics and psychology they
are anti-political. This difference between Socialism and Syndical-
ism is absolutely vital ; and such irreconcilable opposition on positive
doctrine is far more important than their agreement on the nega-
tive point of hostility to capitalism. This interpretation of Syn-
dicalism as a revolt against Socialism is confirmed by the fact that
the Syndicalist forces in France are recruited mainly from the
ranks of the State employees, the railway workers, the post office
servants, and the school teachers !
Even if it were true that Syndicalism is strong only in France,
its strength there would be very significant, for France is the
country where political Socialism has made the most progress.
German Socialists can boast of a greater number of voters, but as
Germany is not governed by the Reichstag, the German Socialists
have had little real power. In France every government since 1906
has been more or less dependent for its existence on Socialist sup-
port, and two Socialists, M. Vivian and M. Briand, have been Prime
Ministers. Yet as French Socialism advances in political power, it
rouses more and more proletarian opposition. Nor is the phenom-
ena of Syndicalism seen only in France. The number of English
1913-] THE DISINTEGRATION OF SOCIALISM 179
workers consciously holding Syndicalist theories is very small, but
in practice the English labor movement has been profoundly Syn-
dicalist during the last three years. It has exhibited a growing
zest for " direct action," and a growing indifference to political
action. The years 1911-1913 have been years of almost unpar-
alleled labor unrest. Strikes have been extraordinarily numerous,
and of record extent. In Marxian language, there has been a period
of very acute class-consciousness and class-war. But it is remark-
able that in this exciting period the political Labor and Socialist
movement has been stagnant, if not actually declining. The labor
candidates have been at the bottom of the poll in every by-election
contested. At Hanley and at Bow and Bromley they lost seats that
they had previously held. During the same period the trade unions
increased their membership enormously, but the membership of
Socialist organizations remained stationary.
Having said so much of the proletarian drift from Socialism,
I now come to discuss the other aspect of Socialist disintegration,
the fact that Socialist parties are ceasing to aim at the abolition
of capitalistic ownership, and are working to establish such owner-
ship on a basis even firmer than exists at present. This is seen
clearly in the agrarian policy of continental Socialist parties, and
it is seen also, though less palpably, in the social reform measures
proposed and supported by Socialists in all countries. Agrarian
Socialism means that peasant proprietors are to be helped to main-
tain their position as owners of the land they cultivate. The
early Marxians confidently predicted that the peasantry would dis-
appear before the progress of capitalistic, large-scale production in
agriculture as in industry. But the peasants have not disappeared ;
they have more than held their own against their bigger competitors,
and, more important, they present a solid anti-Socialist voting force.
Socialists have therefore tried to placate the peasants. Says Mr.
R. C. K. Ensor, one of the most scholarly of English Socialist
writers :
The nearest approach to a volte-face which Socialists have
attempted since Marx, has been in relation to agrarianism.
We have noted how largely the resistance to Socialism on the
Continent depends, electorally speaking, on the peasants. Marx
thought that the advantage of concentrating capital would be
felt in agriculture as in other industries ; but in spite of a tem-
porary confirmation of this view by the mammoth farms which
sprang up in Western Australia, it now appears very doubtful.
180 THE DISINTEGRATION OF SOCIALISM [Nov.,
Figures for or against the persistence of peasantry are con-
flicting ; but at any rate great numbers of peasants remain
Reformists have substituted a policy of actively assisting the
peasants for the orthodox policy of leaving them to succumb
to capitalism.*
As Mr. Ensor goes on to say, the policy of championing the
peasant has important supporters in France and Germany, though
not the acknowledged party policy in either. Socialists like Kaut-
sky are favorable to the protection of the peasant, though they do
not all go as far as Dr. Edouard David, the Revisionist leader who
strongly supports peasant proprietorship.
Agrarian Socialism quite openly admits and confirms private
ownership of capital. Reformist Socialism generally admits and
confirms private capitalism, practically if not professedly, by the
policy it pursues with regard to social reforms. This point has
been brought out most forcibly by Mr. Hilaire Belloc in The
Servile State. The chief argument of that book is this : that you
cannot possibly establish Socialism except by confiscating the prop-
erty of the capitalists. It is a mere confusion of thought to sup-
pose Socialism can be brought about if you give the capitalists com-
pensation. Now there has not been any confiscation of capital
effected. Socialist parties are not even demanding confiscation,
they are giving and offering compensation; and accordingly they
are not advancing one step towards Socialism. Socialism involves
a transfer of the means of production from private owners to the
State. If the State, in taking over any particular undertaking,
gives the owners less than the full value, then there is confiscation.
If the State does give the full value, then the private owners lose
none of their capital, and the State gains none. So there is no
transfer of property from capitalist to State! Hypothetically the
State might give full compensation, and still gain capital if by more
economical working or some other cause the capital which it
acquired subsequently rose in value above its purchase price. Con-
versely, the State would lose if the capital subsequently fell below
its purchase price in value. In either case the wholesale change
required by Socialism is hardly to be expected from such fluctua-
tions.
Socialization by compensation is more than impracticable; it is
inconceivable. Socialism by confiscation is at least conceivable, but
the difficulties against it in practice are so great that Socialist pol-
*Modern Socialism, by R. C. K. Ensor.
1913-] THE DISINTEGRATION OF SOCIALISM 181
iticians do not dare to propose it. Accordingly the Socialists are
contenting themselves with a policy for merely regulating capital-
ism. They will establish labor exchanges to adjust the supply
of labor to the demand for it, and thus regularize employment;
they will establish wage boards and courts of arbitration to settle
the lowest wages which an employer will be permitted to give, and
the terms at which the worker will be compelled to work ; they will
establish a great many more compulsory things, like State insurance,
all for regulating the relation between capitalistic employer and
proletarian wage-earner, but still they will leave the one a cap-
italist and the other proletarian. All this is beautifully evident
in England, where the Socialist Labor Party works so harmoniously
with the Liberal Party. Perhaps the solution is the best possible
one; but it is not the solution that Socialist theory demanded until
a short time ago. And as I have already indicated, the rise of
Syndicalism seems to show that the solution is not giving universal
satisfaction.
In this article we have seen something of the obscureness of
Socialist theory, of the despairing compromises of Socialist policy,
and of the Syndicalist revolt against both theory and policy. How-
ever we regard contemporary Socialism, it is plainly in a process
of disintegration. A Socialist deputy in the French Chamber
recently designated his party " un parti sans doctrine" and bitterly
criticized the contradictions between its principles and its actions.
He attributed the defect to a neglect of theoretical studies by
French Socialists. An able critic, M. Lemozin, writing in the
Mouvement Social of January, 1912, offered a different explanation.
He asked : " Is not Socialism finding itself opposed by experience,
by life itself, which rejects it as an inassimilable element?" The
same writer concludes :
Socialism is now hardly more than an electioneering spring-
board ; as a body of principles it is in course of dissolution not
only in France, but in all countries; its dogmas die one after
the other; it will survive only by constant adaptations and
transformations in unceasing " revisions," and this revisionism
will be its disintegration. For the mass of the workers it is
neither a doctrine nor a Utopia of the future; it is merely a
collection of immediate demands. As sociology, it has but
superficial roots in the popular mind. Syndicalism is gaining
to Socialism's loss.
SAINTS ROUND THE ALTAR.
BY EMILY HICKEY.
OH, they throng, the countless Hallows, round the altar where He lies,
Whom we see by Faith's high vision, Whom they see with open eyes.
These, the glorious Saints of Jesus, women and men who held on high
Fast the standard of the Lamb through all their sharpest agony.
These, the lovely Saints of Jesus, women and men whose lives confest
Through the good of God's bestowing the perfection of His best.
These, the darling baby Hallows, crowned with golden crowns that
press
No whit heavier than the daisy wreaths of childly happiness.
Oh, the whiteness of their raiment, raiment washed in priceless Blood !
Oh, the brightness of their faces, blest in Love's beatitude!
Saints of Jesus, Saints of Jesus, who your blest reward have won,
At His altar we are kneeling, in your sweet communion.
We the erring, we the feeble, we by storm-winds tossed and driven,
We the conquered in the battles where so faintly we had striven.
We with sordid spirit meanly who look down and thus deny
To our eyes the unuttered grandeur of God's generosity.
We who grovel, seeking, searching we, the children of the King
Soiled possessions, worthless havings, with a muck-rake gathering.
Pray for us, O happy Hallows, ye who bring to this high place
Honour folded in His honour, grace reflexion of His grace.
Pray for us all weak and needing, yet who say in faith serene,
This your Monarch is our Brother, and our Mother is your Queen !
THE OBERAMMERGAU OF CALIFORNIA.
BY C. STUART MADDKN.
|HE true pageant play, the object of which is to por-
tray the early history of a people or community in
an inspiring light, has been eagerly sought after in
America, but found very difficult of attainment, in
that the tableaux that constituted it, however splen-
did, appealed only to the imagination of the spectators, and failed
to reach their hearts. A further difficulty has been due to the
fact that, generally speaking, our nation lacks a past and romantic
ruins for a background ; that her beginnings are comparatively new ;
that we have not sufficient perspective as yet to permit of a haze
of romance and historic poetry; that we have no ancient heritage.
But there is one chapter in American history, well suited for
such a purpose, that has hitherto been overlooked, namely, the old
mission days of California. Everyone knows in a general way of
the California Missions, and has admired their picturesque struc-
ture; but their vast importance in the history of California is not
yet fully appreciated. Our present California is the superstructure
built upon the work of these missions as a foundation. The im-
pression prevails with some that, because the mission buildings have
fallen to decay, the work itself was a failure; but it must be re-
membered that the buildings and the material wealth possessed
were but the exterior evidences of an interior spiritual work. The
buildings have decayed, but the real work and object of the mission
Fathers the planting of religion and of true wisdom remain, for
neither earthquakes, conflagrations, nor commercialism can obliter-
ate them.
The Franciscan Friars, who joyfully undertook the great and
glorious, though highly dangerous, task of Christianizing and thus
civilizing California, led a life rigorous in the extreme, quite devoid
of carnal desire for self-indulgence or gain of any sort for them-
selves. They had very few comforts, and their privations were
ofttimes tragic. Yet the stage on which their lives were set
supplies such a wealth of color, action, and grandeur, that it yields
rich and ample material for a spectacular, historic drama, such as
is now wrought into the first American production of this character
ever successfully offered to the public " The Mission Play."
1 84 THE OBERAMMERGAU OF CALIFORNIA [Nov.,
To John Steven McGroarty, already prominent in literary
circles in California as one of its foremost historians, as well as a
talented poet, belongs the honor of this brilliant triumph. So great
an achievement could only be possible to a soul deeply imbued with
sympathy for the work and longings of these devout men of in-
domitable purpose, and restless, unquenchable zeal. Mr. McGroarty
has, with consummate art, depicted the various types of human
beings that were a feature in the lives of these loved and loving
Fathers, of their many responsibilities, emergencies, and difficulties,
as well as the various innocent pastimes upon which they benignly
smiled. The incidents of the play are entirely true to historical
facts.
This project was accompanied by the appropriate idea of build-
ing for the play a theatre on mission soil, in the immediate vicinity
of San Gabriel Mission, which was founded in 1771 under the
direction of, and visited very many times by, the saintly Father
Junipero Serra. Though now scarred and worn, it has escaped
destruction. The ground on which the playhouse stands is his-
toric, having been donated by the parish for the purpose. On this
spot the Indian neophytes, under the direction of the padres, made
the stone and brick with which they built San Gabriel Mission.
Two gigantic pepper trees, planted by Father Junipero himself dur-
ing the last years of his life, grace the entrance to the theatre
grounds. Most of the stage properties, and many of the costumes,
are historical relics, loaned by enthusiastic Calif ornians. Every
performer in the cast of three hundred is a native of California,
and so great is their pride in the play that many are serving with-
out pay. Thus we have here a combination of perfect conditions
for a truly great pageant play historic ground and appointments,
also community enthusiasm.
The decoration of the theatre has been most appropriately and
attractively arranged by Mr. Henry Kabierske, a well-known di-
rector of pageants. Like the missions of old, it is surrounded by
a stockade, leaving a broad promenade all around the theatre build-
ing. The promenade is a miniature of El Camino Real " The
King's Highway " of the old days inasmuch as along it are built
tiny facsimiles of the entire twenty-one missions, the spaces be-
tween which represent the rough mountainous country. The little
missions are true reproductions, about two feet high, having tiled
roofs, plastered walls, and are complete with patios, arches, towers,
belfries, and bells, even to lights in the windows. An excellent
idea is thus formed of the comparative style and extent of the
1913-] THE OBERAMMERGAU OF CALIFORNIA 185
different missions. In the days of their great work, they were
so established along the King's Highway that each was one day's
journey on foot from its neighbor, and any traveler of whatever
race or faith was warmly welcomed and gratuitously entertained as
long as he wished to remain.
The interior of the theatre is artistically simple, arranged to
reproduce the atmosphere of the old missions laboriously built
by the Indian neophytes. This is most successfully accomplished
by the use of rough, heavy rafters, windows with tiny panes of
colored glass, great altar candles, mission lamps, and on the walls
large paintings and skins. The orchestra is cunningly concealed
under a latticework of vines and flowers.
The chime of the sweet-toned, eloquent bells of the old mis-
sion announce that the play is about to commence. A three-foot
band of ornamental gilt work around the stage gives it the effect
of a picture in a frame.
The curtain is withdrawn, revealing picturesque San Diego
Bay, the " Harbor of the Sun," with the great purple promontory
of Point Loma on the right, and moored in the clear waters of the
bay the quaint Spanish ship San Carlos, which brought to this land
part of the first expedition to colonize Upper or Alta California
that had ever been attempted. The other part, headed by the saintly
Franciscan Father, Junipero Serra, in charge of religious affairs,
and the pious, energetic Don Caspar de Portola, Governor, repre-
senting the military interests, made the journey on foot. The
expedition had been sent out from Mexico as the result of the
earnest efforts of Don Jose de Galvez, Visitor General, the fondest
desire of whose heart was to bring the California Indians into the
fold of the Church. Two more enthusiastic and energetic leaders
he could not have chosen. Great was the joy when the two divi-
sions met at the beautiful, sunny port of San Diego. They num-
bered in all one hundred and thirty souls, padres, Indian neophytes
from Mexico, a physician, soldiers, and muleteers. The journey
had been long and hard, and many of their number fell ill and died.
Galvez had promised to send a ship with provisions within a month,
but, though it was now nine months since their arrival in San Diego,
the ship had not appeared, and great was the consequent suffering.
The little band was on the point of starvation, nearly all were ill,
and scarcely a day passed without one of their number being taken
by death.
On the stage are visible some of the tule huts erected by the
little company. In the foreground, three Catalonian soldiers and
1 86 THE OBERAMMERGAU OF CALIFORNIA [Nov.,
their corporal are on guard, discussing the situation. They com-
plain of their hunger, regret having come to California, and deplore
the sickness and suffering in the camp. The California Indians
they pronounce to be quite hopeless, as being too dirty, too de-
graded, and too bestial to be attracted to baptism by even the
loving kindness of Father Junipero, whom, no matter what they
may say of anyone else, they greatly revere.
True it was that, in spite of all the efforts and zeal of the
Fathers and the Indians from Mexico, they had not, during their
nine months' stay, succeeded in making one convert among these
Indians.
The soldiers also discuss how, two weeks after their arrival
here, sixty of their number, led by Don Caspar Portola, had set out
on an expedition to find Monterey Bay, and, as they have not yet re-
turned, grave fears are entertained as to their fate. Father Juni-
pero has spent all the day in fasting and prayer for the safe return
of Portola and his men. This holy man now appears, pale and
worn, but with a spiritual calm illumining his face. At his request
the soldiers go to the top of the hill to look once more for their
missing companions ere evening falls.
Junipero now sends for Vincenzo, his most reliable neophyte
worker among the Indians. Beautiful is the Father's manner to-
ward this Indian; beautiful, too, is the ardent love shining in the
dark face of Vincenzo, as he reports no success, and eagerly an-
nounces his willingness to go forth again, even now to endeavor to
bring just one child for baptism before the day shall close. He de-
parts, taking bright-colored pieces of cloth and beads as presents
for the Indians. Junipero falls upon his knees, and prays, with all
the fervor of his earnest, loving heart, that their efforts at Chris-
tianizing the natives may have even some little fruit.
While he is at prayer, the soldiers rush in, shouting wildly that
Portola and his men are very near. All the members of the little
band, who are able, joyously assemble and go forth to meet them.
Shortly, they all swarm in upon the stage in excited clamor, but
it is a sorry cavalcade of wounded, half-starved, exhausted men,
some of whom are carried on rude litters. The poor creatures
pass on to their quarters, leaving Portola and the Friars to talk with
the reverend Father. Portola, in the now bedraggled costume of
a Spanish captain, announces, to Father Junipero's consternation,
that the fort of Monterey has not been found; and that the many
months of hardship have wrought great havoc among his men.
Portola, in turn, is shocked and deeply disappointed to learn that
1913.] THE OBERAMMERGAU OF CALIFORNIA 187
the promised ship has not arrived, and no Indians have yet been
converted, for these hopes had been his greatest strength in his
recent struggles.
Portola has one piece of news, however, namely, that, led by
some of his hunters, they had climbed a steep hill, when their
amazed eyes beheld a great arm of the sea, extending far inland,
forming a port grander, more noble than any the European ships
had ever entered the grandest harbor in all the world. Father
Junipero's spiritual face glows with enthusiasm as he joyfully as-
sures the staunch old Governor that his journey has by no means
been in vain, nor a failure, for it is surely St. Francis himself who
has led him to discover this great and glorious harbor, which
Junipero now declares shall be named San Francisco, and a mission
founded there. He calls Don Caspar's attention to how richly
God has blessed him by bestowing upon him this honor. Portola,
however, is of a practical turn of mind, and cannot see that the
discovery is of any real avail, when they are all starving. His
decision is quickly made, and he announces that to-night, with the
turn of the tide, they will return to Mexico and happiness. Father
Serra is dismayed, and pleads with all his soul against the abandon-
ment, but Portola is firm.
Just here a strong note of contrast is struck. The indefatigable
Vincenzo appears, followed by some half dozen native Indians, one
carrying a baby brought for baptism. Their brown bodies, dec-
orated with many strings of bright beads, but naked except for fox
skins hung from their shoulders, and their highly-painted faces,
give a striking effect. Father Junipero is greatly impressed by
this early answer to his prayer. The other members of the band
are summoned. All is ready for the ceremony of baptism, and
Father Junipero, after a fervent prayer of gratitude, carefully takes
the child from the half-unwilling Indian, and reads the service.
The Indians, however, stand tiger-like, ready to spring upon him
if aught should go wrong, their brown muscles taut, and eyes
sharp as eagles'. At the first touch of the holy water the Indians
spring, snatch the baby, and rush angrily away. Poor Father
Junipero, in tragic anguish of soul, construes the unfortunate occur-
rence as a punishment upon himself, because he had allowed pride
to enter his heart. Portola declares it is useless to try to make
any impression upon these scarcely human savages, but the devout
padre replies that their condition only shows how great an oppor-
tunity there is for mission work.
1 88 THE OBERAMMERGAU OF CALIFORNIA [Nov.,
At the repeated assertion of Don Caspar, that they will sail to-
night, the assembled people are overjoyed, but Father Serra im-
pressively declares that " if we abandon California, God will aban-
don us," adding that he will remain alone. At his earnest pleading,
Portola grants him one more day just one. Junipero throws him-
self into an agony of prayer, pathetic in the extreme. The sun
sets, and the violet of twilight falls upon the awe-struck group ; the
moon appears, and the waves of the rolling sea are crested with its
silver gleam. Suddenly Vincenzo shouts: "A sail! A sail!"
True enough, at that moment a Spanish galleon rounds Point
Loma, and glides toward them on the moonlit water. The group
is wild with excitement, but the remorseful Father at prayer seems
not to hear, or know of the relief at hand. The act closes.
The dominant character of the play is presented by Ben Horn-
ing, an actor of wide experience. Mr. Horning is so fervid in his
impersonation of Father Junipero Serra, that he carries his audience
with him, too absorbed and impressed to applaud. No greater
compliment can be paid an actor. The prayers and religious cere-
monies do not appeal to one as being strange upon a stage, but
seem entirely appropriate; the hearts of the spectators are thrilled,
for the act is a magnificent triumph of patriotic and religious emo-
tion, and is so vivid that we seem really to live in the past; the
actual Father Junipero and other celebrities are before us they
command, exhort, pray, and work.
The beginning of the second act is announced by the oldest
mission bell in California, suspended from the ceiling. The curtain
disappears, and we are confronted by the patio of the beautiful
Mission of San Carlos at Carmel, near Monterey. This was the
civil and military, as well as religious, headquarters of all the mis-
sions, and the home of Junipero, the Father President. The calm
blue waters of Carmel Bay are visible beyond the series of mission
arches in the rear. At the right is the chapel, and at one side of
the patio a large pepper tree. Near the chapel stands a tall wooden
cross.
It is a gray dawn; a mocking bird trills a joyous, rollicking
song. The acolytes and brown-robed Franciscans appear, singing
in rich voices the morning hymn. Scores of Indians of the mission
follow, as well as Spanish men and women, all joining in the melo-
dious chorus, and reverently kneeling at the great cross as they
pass. The music grows faint, and the tones of the Mass can be
heard in the chapel, with the hymns and the occasional sound of
i9i 3-] THE OBERAMMERGAU OF CALIFORNIA 189
the chapel bell. In the patio are the same Catalonian soldiers whom
we previously saw, but they look much older, and we glean from
their conversation that it is fifteen years since their painful expe-
riences at San Diego. We also derive the information that this
is to be a great day at San Carlos, for the Superiors of all the nine
missions now established are here to make a report of their progress
to the Father President, after which there is to be a general
holiday, with many visitors from other missions.
They discuss Father Junipero, who, though now seventy years
old, and always suffering from a wound in his leg, received in
Mexico, and which never healed, still journeys on foot from the
" Harbor of the Sun " to the " Valley of the Seven Moons." He
sleeps only upon a bare board or on the ground.
Conditions have changed greatly in these fifteen years. The
missions are in a high state of prosperity, and thousands of Indians
have been baptized by the loving Fathers. The patios are thronged
with dusky faces, lit with a mystic joy, for the neophytes have been
shown a new life, have been taught many useful arts, and are a
very happy people.
The Mass is ended, and the procession of padres and their
people reappears, zealously singing the recessional. The padres
gather about their President, now grown very old and white, to
report the results of their efforts in the nine missions. They tell
of thousands of converted Indians, as well as enormous numbers
of sheep, cattle, and horses, and great quantities of grain. These
Indians are all well clothed, are able to speak and read Spanish,
sing the music of the Mass, and are masters of many trades. Sev-
eral stone churches have been built by them ; the San Gabriel Indians
have built and launched a ship; the San Luis Obispo Indians have
become proficient in the making of curved tile for roofing. Father
Junipero speaks very touchingly of his great love for California,
from San Diego, where the first palm and olive tree were planted,
and " the roses are so like the roses in Castile," to the boundary
on the north, the grandest harbor in all the world. It is an im-
pressive speech, one to arouse in us all a greater patriotism.
A highly dramatic touch is here introduced. Captain Rivera,
Commandante of all the King's soldiers in California, arrives from
San Francisco for the purpose of obtaining a beautiful half-breed
girl belonging to the mission. He is in all his fine array of scarlet
cloak and gold-trimmed velvet suit, and effectively presents the
vivid contrast of the worldling to the brown-robed, sandaled padres.
190 THE OBERAMMERGAU OF CALIFORNIA [Nov.,
In spite of his proud demands, reinforced by an attempted show
of authority, the calm Father is obdurate in the refusal. The
calm Father knows that he is right. Rivera, quivering with anger
at being thwarted in his purpose, even attempts to use force, but
Junipero, with a commanding dignity, assures him that, " were
he ten times the Commandante, he would not fear him nor yield
to him," eloquently threatening him with the curse of the Church
should he touch the girl. Rivera cringes under these lashing
words, then, furious and defeated, storms out of the patio. The air
is tense with righteous indignation, and then the situation is re-
lieved in a most pleasing manner. A tiny Indian girl, perhaps four
years old, clad in a little buckskin dress, fringed and beaded, races
upon the stage with a bunch of flowers for " Padrecito." He is
lost in thought, and does not see her. She tugs vigorously at his
robe, for none but the evildoer has need to fear him. His anger
is immediately gone, as he lovingly clasps the " dear little daughter
of the Gentiles " in his arms, asks her if she loves God, and talks
very tenderly to her.
Capatejeno, chief of the San Carlos Indians, clad in a hand-
some buckskin suit, proudly brings his people to show the visiting
padres specimens of the handiwork they have been taught by
Father Junipero. They exhibit woven baskets, tile, carved altar-
pieces, bridle bits, horseshoes, chairs, lamps, dressed buckskin, and
embroidery work, which speak eloquently of the miracles that
have been wrought in the fifteen years the missionaries have been
among them. Father Serra warmly commends the chief, lovingly
calling him " brother," and assuring him that his ability to hold
his people so well in hand is because he himself is such a good
Christian.
The mission bells call the Indians and the visitors to their
festivities, and through the mission arches they come in merry
groups. The wealth of color, the various costumes, historically
correct for the different classes, creates a most striking scene, for
nearly two hundred Spaniards, soldiers, padres, Indians, and mule-
teers are assembled. With keen enjoyment and hearty applause
they watch the Indian Sun Dance, the participants in which are
in their old-time savage costume of only the fox skins hung from
their shoulders. The little kettle drums of sheepskin furnish a
weird accompaniment. An Indian recites the Sun Prayer. A
charming Spanish duet, " La Playeria," is rendered. Four Span-
ish youths and maidens give the sombrero dance, and a sefiorita,
1913.] THE OBERAMMERGAU OF CALIFORNIA 191
in yellow satin and black lace, executes a most graceful dance with
castanets. At length, the games and dancing over, the crowd dis-
perses and twilight gathers. In the distance the evening hymn
can be heard, sung by many voices. Father Junipero wanders
alone in the patio, fondly listening to this well-beloved sound. As
it draws to a close, he kneels at the cross, praying yearningly that
" all the wild Gentiles of the hills and plains may come to the
cross of Christ."
The curtain closes, leaving him praying alone in the deepening
twilight, a solitary, symbolic figure.
Though his death occurred soon after the events here portrayed,
the name of Father Junipero is to-day the best known and loved
of any in California.
This act is a masterpiece in its variety of types of people
and emotions forcefully depicted, showing as it does almost every
phase of the life of those glorious days. It brings the work and
spirit of the self-denying padres very near to us, and helps us to
realize what a priceless heritage to our present commonwealth are
the missions. How deep and vast the influence effected by the
Holy Cross of the Missions. Mr. Homing's impersonation of the
Franciscan Fathers is masterly and satisfying in every way. He
mirrors well the voice, the exaltation and spiritual purpose, the dig-
nity of bearing, the benign smile ever ready for his beloved children,
of the great missionary Friar.
In the third act we have an entire change, for forty
years have passed, and we are brought nearly to modern times.
The mission glory is gone. The scene is the patio of San Juan
Capistrano, strewn with straw, and used for a stable by the Amer-
icanos who have bought it. The once beautiful edifice is in decay,
and the Indians, to whom it rightfully belongs, have been driven
away into the hills. A senora, who has known the missions in the
days of their prosperity, visits the sacred ground. She tells of
the freedom of Mexico from Spain, and the commercialism which
quickly followed the rich Indian lands seized by the government
and sold to eager Americanos. She relates to the aged Spanish
guard, who was baptized by Father Junipero, how the other mission
lands have been sold, resulting in desolation for their once happy
occupants. After a touching farewell to the dear old mission with
its wrecked hopes, the senora takes her leave.
Out of the gathering darkness a tall, glowing cross appears in
one of the mission arches, and the curtain closes.
THE OTHER LOVE.
BY ELEANOR THRSE DOWNING.
LOVE came to me with gold-dust on his hair,
In white and purple raiment meetly drest,
With lip vermeil and laughter debonnair,
And blossoms in his hands and on his breast.
Love came to me and claimed me for his bride;
" Thou art my king," I spake, " for thou art Love."
Love raised his two white arms and flung them wide,
And caught me in the ivory flash thereof.
" And who art thou who standest there beside,
With ashen cloak and features covered,
Say, who art thou, and who art thou," I cried,
" With dust and thorns upon thy hooded head ? "
" I am the Other Love that calls to thee ;
Unloose this love and come away with me."
Love took my rosy hands between his own,
I twined my supple fingers round his wrist
Like the curled petals of a rose down-blown
On fountain-rim of marble silver-kist.
Love held my hands and lo ! where warmth had leapt,
And where my palms had clung and found it sweet,
Like twilight wind a sudden coldness crept
Between the pulsing of each blue-veined beat.
" And what is this that like a steel-bright blade,
Cuts through my heart and chills the coursing blood,
Ah ! what is this, and what is this," I said,
"Thou sad intruder in the cowled hood?"
" The lethargy Remorse that shall entwine
And slay love's passion if thou be not mine."
Love bowed him down ; I looked within his eyes,
And lost and steeped my being in their light;
In silence spake we, as when deep replies
To star-gemmed deep, or height to dawn-flushed height ;
Love's glance met mine, and seven-circled hell,
Heaven and earth, and life and death waved dim
Within that look when lo ! a shadow fell
Between mine eyes and the dear eyes of him.
" And what is this that drops like curtained cloud,
So that each other's eyes we may not find?
Grim guest what may this be," I mourned aloud,
" That to my lover's soul my soul grows blind ? "
" This is the night shall fold thee utterly
If thou heed not, nor come away with me."
1913-] THE OTHER LOVE 193
Love kissed me, and the flower of my lips
To the red flame of his was rendered up,
As when the passionate gold sunbeam sips
The honied dew-drop from the primrose-cup ;
Love kissed me, and the sweetness of his mouth
Grew sudden rife with fever-flame and gall,
Scorching my lips as winds from desert-south
Before whose wilting feet red blossoms fall.
"And why is this- my lover's lips are fraught
With searing poison I did not guess?
Thou fearsome shape, so tell me," I besought,
" Whence springs the well of so much bitterness ? "
"Yea, even from the draught of passion's wine
Thy lips are tasting, for those lips are mine."
Love bade me close mine eyes and shut mine ears.
" Thou art no bride," he spake, " for such as he,
Whose speech is silence, and whose food is tears,
Whose sweetest service is captivity.
Come thou with me where we shall roam at will
In fountained courts of gold he dreams not of,
Girt in by rose-starred grove and purple hill "-
But I drew free and cast aside my Love.
Trembling, I wept, "Then, since it must be so,
Tell me, Sad Heart, hast thou not anything,
Girdle, nor starry gem, nor crown to show;
Stretch forth thy hands, let shine thine offering :
Lo! If I leave my Love and follow thee,
Hast thou no bribe wherewith to solace me ? "
" I am the Love that comes with empty hands,
My staff Humility, my path Disdain ;
I am the Love that no man understands
Till he has worshipped scorn and courted pain.
No treasure in my bosom do I bear
As need wherewith to tempt the worldling's loss ;
My mantle Poverty ; my comfort Care ;
Mine only gifts, the thorn-crown and the cross."
" But when I cast aside my pilgrim-gown,
And on my breast I hold thee consecrate,
My love shall be thy jewel and thy crown,
And I thine own reward exceeding great.
I am the Sacred Love that calls for thine :
Spurn thou and fly all lesser loves for Mine."
VOL. xcvin. 13
THE SQUIRE OF SAINT LOUIS.
(A CHRONICLE OF THE SIXTH CRUSADE.)
BY JOSEPH MILLS HANSON.
GIVE you to know that this is a tale set forth touch-
ing a certain matter of the love of a knight and a
maid, by a chronicler of olden time who followed
good King Louis the Ninth may God rest his soul !
the saint of the royal house of France, when that
the latter made crusade against the Saracens for the redemption
of Jerusalem in the year of our Lord 1249.
Now the spring of that year being come, the army of King
Louis set sail from the isle of Cyprus, where the winter had been
passed; the great lords, vassals to the crown, Robert of Artois,
Charles of Anjou, the Counts of Melun and Jaffa, Baldwin of
Rheims, and many others with their trains, as also the Knights
Templar and the Knights Hospitaler. Nigh eighteen hundred
vessels there were, large and small, and so vast an array they made
that the sea was darkened beneath their sails, and the spread of their
banners was like leaves in the forests of Auvergne. Their course
was shaped for the city of Damietta, at the mouth of the river
Nile in Egypt, since there the King believed that so sore a blow
might be struck the infidels as would force them to yield up the
road to Jerusalem. But adverse seas and heavy gales made such
head against the ships, that numbers of them were scattered, and
many days passed until the coasts of Egypt lay spread before the
eyes of the crusaders.
On the King's ship, the Mount joy, there sailed with him his
virtuous and lovely Queen, Marguerite of Provence, who had sworn
a vow, when her spouse took the cross, that she would never part
from him however great the hardships might be in Eastern lands.
Now in the retinue of the Queen was a young gentlewoman of
Provence, named Eleanor, daughter of a powerful lord of those
parts, who was loved tenderly by her royal mistress, both for her
nimbleness of mind and her much learning, though by men she
was yet more highly esteemed by reason of the great beauty of her
person. So fair she was, indeed, that nobles from the uttermost
1913.] THE SQUIRE OF SAINT LOUIS 195
parts of France had sued for her hand, but of late they had given
over a vain pursuit, since she had been betrothed at her father's
desire to Sir Bertrand de Chargny, a nobleman of large estates who
was now following King Louis into the crusade, the better that he
might command the royal favor.
But the Lady Eleanor's heart was not in the betrothal, for
Sir Bertrand was of a rough and overbearing nature, more famous
for brawling and roistering than for minding the duties of knight
and vassal. Moreover, it was whispered among the other gentle-
women in attendance upon the Queen, that a certain young squire
of the King's retinue held the happiness of the Lady Eleanor in his
keeping; howbeit, this youth, by name Gauvain, though of worthy
blood, being without either lands or title, could by no presumption
aspire to the hand of such an one as the Lady Eleanor. Never-
theless, on the voyage from Cyprus, both being on the King's ship,
they held frequent conversation together, and gave proof by their
demeanor that unhappiness was their portion, for they spoke to-
gether in all innocency, knowing that such a dream of love could not
come true. All of which the good King marked with sorrow,
after his habit of concerning himself with everything, both great
and small, touching the welfare of those around him. But by
reason of knowing the cause of it, he gave no sign.
After many days of exceeding rough weather there came a
morning, which was the Thursday after Pentecost, when the fleet
lay at rest off the shore of Damietta, and the crusaders saw before
them the town, wherein a great confusion reigned by reason of
their appearance. Now King Louis bade signal be made to the
other galleys that the principal chiefs should assemble on the
Mount joy. With them came Sir Bertrand, but when he met the
Lady Eleanor, who came right loyally as in duty bound to greet
him, he faced her coldly, for well he guessed what feelings lay be-
tween her and Gauvain. Albeit, he held his peace at that time,
which was not his wont.
When all the paladins were come together, the King took
counsel with them as to what should be done about disembarking.
As always, there was much dissension of opinion, some holding
that they should wait until the ships scattered by the tempest might
rejoin them, and others being favorable to immediate action. While
the talk was at its height, one count who was of them stood out
for biding only until next day, making reason that the sea, which
was exceeding high, might go down with the falling wind and
196 THE SQUIRE OF SAINT LOUIS [Nov.,
let the landing be easier. At that Sir Bertrand strode forth and
cried in a loud voice :
" My lord seemeth to shrink from the fling of salt water on
his hauberk. Can it not be dried in yonder town ? I say, plunge in
at once and put the infidel curs to rout; they dare not stand be-
fore good Christian arms ! "
Then many of the council looked one at the other and frowned,
knowing that he spoke as a wild youth having no knowledge of the
valor of the Saracens, and the count he had bearded would have
drawn sword upon him had not the King interposed. But Sir
Bertrand grew still more wroth, and vowed he would go on shore
alone. Then the Lady Eleanor, not yet witting how far his
speech was prone to outrun his acts, stepped before him and be-
sought him, as became his plighted bride, not to chance so great
a risk. But Sir Bertrand straightway flung her hand aside, and
before all the company cried right harshly:
" How now, my lady, thou wouldst prate to me of care for
my safety; thou who hast accepted the caresses of a low-born churl
at dead of night? Go whine thy woman's cajoleries to him; I
take no commands from thee."
All stood aghast that such words could be in presence of the
King, and for the space of a minute there was none to speak, while
the Lady Eleanor, whose face was crimson with shame at so unjust
a calumny, retired from the circle. The young Gauvain was by,
and he would have thrown himself upon Sir Bertrand, but King
Louis laid hand upon his shoulder and stepped before him. With
all the dignity which ever was his, the King addressed Sir
Bertrand :
" My lord, by such words as thou didst utter but now, foul
wrong is done to four persons : that virtuous maiden, who has done
naught to merit them; my faithful squire, who is as innocent as she;
myself, thy liege lord, who have held them ever under my watchful
care; but most of all, thou dost wrong thyself. Thinkest thou, Sir
Bertrand, that we who are come to rescue the place of the Redeemer
from profane hands can deserve the blessing of God, if, at the very
spot where first we shall need His help, there be displayed among
us such bitter uncharity and such carnal rage? Bethink thee what
the spirit of a Christian knight should be and how far thou hast
fallen from it? Nay, speak not, but reflect; thou art given over-
much to speaking. When thy thoughts have cooled and crystallized
there will be time enough for words, sobeit words can in any wise
1913-] THE SQUIRE OF SAINT LOUIS 197
amend those thou hast already uttered. The poison of speech, Sir
Bertrand, can seldom be cured by its balm."
Then, turning once more to the discussion of plans, he left
Sir Bertrand in no lightsome mood. Presently the King settled
himself to a conclusion, and thus made speech to the company:
" Friends and followers, we are unconquerable if we are
undivided. The Divine Will has brought us hither; let us land,
be the enemy's forces what it may. It is not I that am King of
France, not I that am Holy Church; it is you yourselves, united,
that are Church and King. In us Christ shall triumph, giv-
ing glory, honor, and blessing not to us, but to His own Holy
Name."
It then remained only to make the land, so the chiefs dis-
persed to their several vessels, and when the time was come the fleet
moved in toward the beach. And afar off across the sands could be
discerned clouds of dust and many horsemen moving. At the
prow of his ship, clad all in armor and full of pious ardor, stood
King Louis, and Queen Marguerite by his side. But she was sore
perturbed lest in his zeal he should put himself into harm, and
for all the great matters he had in hand, he yet found time to
comfort her right tenderly.
Among the King's attendants stood Gauvain, who leaned upon
his sword, and gazed toward the shore with such light in his eyes
as was in none others there, save the King's alone. In truth, so
enraptured seemed his face that when they were drawn close to
the beach, the Lady Eleanor could not forbear in her emotion to
pluck him by the sleeve and whisper him, saying :
" Good Gauvain, thou dost gaze upon yonder land as thou
beholdest there the gates of Paradise and angels walking. I pray
thee, I pray thee, run not heedlessly into danger."
Then he turned his face toward her and answered:
" Dear lady, I do, in sooth, see yonder the gates of Paradise,
for if I fall there my spirit shall go where pain comes not to the
heart, and if I fall not but bear myself worthily, I may perchance
win to the honor of serving the Master in the ranks of the Knights
of the Temple. Right well thou knowest, lady, that neither my
heart nor my reason can bid me hope for other joy in this world.
Wherefore, should I not welcome the combat which promises so
much?"
But the Lady Eleanor could not answer for that, her voice was
shaken, so she left him. But as she went she laid in his hand a
i 9 8 THE SQUIRE OF SAINT LOUIS [Nov.,
knot of ribbon from her hair, the which he took right tenderly
and bestowed within the breast of his shirt of mail.
Now arose there among the people on the King's galley a great
noise and shouting:
"The banner of St. Denis is on the shore ! Follow ! Follow !"
When the King heard the shout he rushed to the side, and
beheld in truth the royal standard on the beach. Then naught
could restrain him, not even the protests of the Pope's legate,
who stood beside him on the deck. As others of his people were
doing, he leapt into the water, which came nigh up to his armpits,
and struggled toward the shore, notwithstanding that his armor and
the shield hung about his neck sorely weighed him down. But
Gauvain and sundry more, seeing him thus, leapt in after him and
supported him to the beach. Here already were assembled many
crusaders from the other ships, Lord Baldwin of Rheims, and the
Count of Jaffa, and John, Lord of Joinville, among others, and
through them the King made his way to the foot of the oriflamme.
Then first he paused to look about. Across the sands he beheld
many men approaching, some of them being on foot, but most on
horseback. A brave show they made, and a dreadful noise with
Arabian horns and kettledrums. When he beheld them, the King
asked :
"What folk are those?"
There answered him a knight who had followed the Earl of
Cornwall nine years before, and who well knew :
" Those be the Saracens, my liege."
When he heard that, the King became as one distraught. Call-
ing loudly for his horse, when it was brought him, he flung himself
into the saddle, and set his shield and lance in rest, and would have
charged alone upon the infidels. But his knights caught hold of the
bridle, whereat he was sore displeased until they had at length
dissuaded him.
But meantime on a part of the beach, not far distant, the
battle had already begun, for there a body of the Saracens, more
boldly advancing than the rest, fell upon the Christians who had
landed from several ships. The infidels pricked forward right
valorously, and the crusaders, who were yet crowded together,
having had no time for putting themselves in proper array, gave
back for a space in disorder. Among them when they were assailed
was Sir Bertrand de Chargny, still fuming because of the reproach
of the King. Now it chanced that Sir Bertrand bore with him for
1913.] THE SQUIRE OF SAINT LOUIS 199
his own standard a banner belonging to a certain church in his
dominions, which was held in great love and reverence by all
the army, because that it had gone into Jerusalem with Godefroy de
Bouillon on that morning long ago when the Holy City was taken
by the army of the Lord. Sir Bertrand, when he saw the Saracens
engaging those in front, little witting the vigor of their arms, and
thinking only to win a cheap and easy glory, seized the banner
from the hands of its bearer and, surrounded by a half-score of his
followers, charged headlong into the midst of the infidels. Such
speed did they make that they were carried some way into the
press ere they could check their course. But the Saracens did not
yield them before the rush of a Christian, as Sir Bertrand had made
avowal they would. Instead, they stood their ground right stoutly,
and belabored his heavy armor with their curved blades. Then did
Sir Bertrand an act which no true valorous knight ere would do.
Albeit he was but a short way beyond the front ranks of the
Christians, and they were moving steadily on, he flung from him
the banner of sacred memory, and fled shamelessly back toward the
shore.
At once there rose from all the army of the crusaders a howl
of rage and grief. The Saracens leapt upon the fallen banner,
which they waved with cries of derision and bore away, while their
bands, emboldened by this success, pressed forward more closely
upon the Christians. When King Louis, afar off, beheld the dis-
aster, he was deeply moved, and spurred toward the thick of the
fight, crying :
" Rescue for the banner of St. Sepulcre ! Rescue ! "
He placed his lance in rest, and again would he have attacked
the foe had he not been restrained. Still with the utmost vehemence
he called up his mighty men, exhorting them by every symbol and
promise of the faith, to win back the deserted standard. But the
Saracens had come between in such numbers and bore themselves
withal so boldly, that the knights held back from so great a hazard,
even Count Robert of Artois, than whom never was a paladin more
fearless.
But now, while they were yet hesitating, crowded round about
the King, there rushed by them the riderless horse of some knight
who had been overthrown. As he came past, a man near them who
bore neither lance nor shield, but only a simple long sword, put out
a strong arm and seized him by the bit. Leaping nimbly into the
saddle, he gathered the steed upon its haunches and then, ere there
200 THE SQUIRE OF SAINT LOUIS [Nov.,
was time even for any to mark who he was, he launched forth in
full career straight into the midst of the Saracens, swinging his
mighty sword left and right with terrible swiftness. The banner
of St. Sepulcre waved a full cross-bow shot away behind the host
of foemen, and it seemed not in the power of man to save it. Over
all the army a silence of wonder fell as they beheld the unknown
champion rush on, and even the Saracens who stood not in his
very path made pause in amaze to look on him. As for those
before him, they threw themselves upon him with fury, seeking
to cut him down, or to break his career by sheer weight of numbers.
But the steed he bestrode was a mighty gelding of the North, barbed
with breast and neck plates of steel, and before his stride the light
horses of the Saracens went down like sheep, while the hissing
sword of him who rode clove through turban and scimitar as it had
been the lightning of the Lord. Ere those who watched him had
let their lungs take breath again, he had ridden full half the distance
toward the banner of St. Sepulcre. Then did the King find his
voice.
" Surely," cried he, " St. Peter doth ride with him and ward
the blows from his body, for such a career never was ridden by
knight before."
Then once again he couched his spear, none hindering him,
and pricked his steed to the gallop, shouting :
" Forward ! Let not the savior of the banner of St. Sepulcre
be lost!"
And all the army of the Christians, as if broken of a spell,
surged forward like a sea, with a great roar of voices. Before their
resistless sweep the infidels gave way, and they rushed on, the King
and his household knights pressing ever in advance. Far in front
the fearless champion still held his course. But as he won to the
very spot where the captured banner was held, he had, perforce,
to check his career that he might seize the relic. Those who held
the banner fought desperately against him, and he was seen to reel
beneath a storm of blows, whereat King Louis, maddening, urged
his horse to topmost speed, leaving all others behind. But ere he,
even, could come up, the unknown warrior tore the banner from
its captor's hands and smote him down in gore, and then, still
firmly grasping it, went prostrate to the ground, as his gallant horse
sunk under him, pierced by a mortal wound. Howbeit none could
touch him, for the King and a score of knights were upon them,
and the King himself sprang to the earth and knelt, lifting upon
1913.] THE SQUIRE OF SAINT LOUIS 201
his knee the head of the fallen man. Blood was flowing upon the
face of the latter from a wound in his forehead, but the King
had no more than commenced to wipe it away than he started in
amaze, crying:
"Gauvain! Isitthou?"
And he who lay made answer:
" It is I, my liege. Is the banner safe ? "
" Aye, safe," said the king. " Thou hast done such service to
Christendom this day, Gauvain, as it is given to few knights to
perform, yet thou art not a knight. But, good friend, thou art
sorely hurt, I fear ? "
" Nay, my liege, I am but bruised by blows and the fall,"
Gauvain made reply. " My wounds are naught."
Thereupon in very truth he rose lightly to his feet, to the
much surprise and satisfaction of all, but most of the King, who
in his joy, embraced him. Then, grasping the staff of the banner
of St. Sepulcre, and turning to his followers, who could stand
at ease since the Saracens now were all flying over the sands toward
Damietta pursued by the Christian army, King Louis said :
" Can any tell who he was that first in such foolhardy mad-
ness, and after in such coward panic, did let this sacred emblem fall
to the infidels ? "
And many voices answered at once :
" Bertrand de Chargny ! "
On hearing this such a look of sternness came upon the face
of the good King as was not often there.
" It was even as I thought," said he. "Those who boast much,
of a truth most commonly perform little. Let him come forth."
" He is not among us," said some, looking about, and others
added, " He is still at the beach."
" There let him bide," said the King. " His punishment shall
be that he go no further with us, but be divested of the sign of the
cross, and return to France until such time as reflection and remorse
shall teach him the meanings of manhood and knighthood. As for
you, Gauvain, my faithful squire, kneel ! "
In wonder the young soldier did as he was bid. The King
drew his sword, and with the flat of the blade struck him thrice
across the shoulders, saying:
" In the name of God, St. Michael and St. George, I dub
thee knight. Be valiant, bold, and loyal. Rise up, Sir Gauvain ! "
Scarce witting whether he dreamed or no, but with joy and
202 THE SQUIRE OF SAINT LOUIS [Nov.,
amaze in his face, the warrior came to his feet again. Then
pursued the King:
" For this day's service to Christendom, Sir Gauvain, I endow
thee in fief with the chateau and all the lands round about Grand
Montfort, eastward to the river Indre and westward to the river
Cruse. And thou hold them as faithfully and justly as thou hast
to-day held thy Christian and martial duty, no regret shall ever
come to me for having given them into thy keeping."
But, despite the gratitude born w r ithin him by all this sudden
good fortune, a shade of sadness passed over Sir Gauvain's face
as he looked into the eyes of his lord. Nor was the King slow to
mark it, nor to say :
" Is it not enough, Gauvain? Is aught more I could give thee?"
" Nay, my liege. Already thou hast given me more than ere
I dreamed."
" What, then, canst thou wish?"
Gauvain looked about upon the company, and in a low voice
that none but the King might hear, he said :
" That which I wish, my liege, it is not even in thy power to
give."
Then came upon King Louis' face the shadow of a smile.
" And I wit what thou thinkest of," said he, " truly thou
sayest I cannot give it thee. But I have given thee the wherewithal
to win it. Him who an hour ago stood in thy path, hath forfeited
all claims to consideration of man or maid. For the rest, if thou
be the true knight in all things that thou hast shown thyself in
arms, why, thou knowest where the Lady Eleanor bides."
Then did the cast of sadness pass from the young knight's face,
and a great happiness shone thereon instead. But ere he could say
more a messenger came up to the King in haste, dispatched by one of
the counts who were in pursuit of the foe. The word he bore was
that the Christian host was well nigh up to the streets of Damietta,
which the infidels were making haste to abandon, setting fire to
many houses as they went. But the bridge of boats across the
Nile they had not been able to destroy, so the army might march
thereby straight into the town.
When the King had heard the messenger, he stretched out his
arms toward heaven, as ever was his wont whether in thanks-
giving or in supplication, and cried:
" Most fair God, for this, Thy great mercy to my people, I
thank Thee!"
1913.] ERIN'S RESURRECTION 203
And then he gave instruction to another messenger to go back
to the ships and summon the Papal legate and all the prelates and the
women, for that the army would sing the Te Deum by the gates of
Damietta. Which same was done, so that very evening Sir Gauvain
did again meet the Lady Eleanor, whereupon their troth was
plighted. And though thereafter there fell much bloody warfare,
and the Christian arms suffered many sore losses whereby brave
knights without number won their way to Paradise, Sir Gauvain
was spared scatheless, and he and his spouse came back at last safely
to France, where they lived such long lives of piety and Christian
grace as brought great peace and contentment to all who owed them
liege duty, and great joy to their sovereign lord, the saintly King
Louis.
I give all men to know that the foregoing is a true account
of the happenings set down therein which befell in the year of our
Lord 1249, and of the reign of King Louis the Ninth of France,
the twenty-third.
ERIN'S RESURRECTION.
BY P. J. COLEMAN.
THEY bruised thy palms, they pierced thy feet,
They smote thee with revilings rude ;
They stripped thee bare, a virgin sweet,
Before a ribald multitude.
They deemed thee crucified and dead
Upon their hatred's Golgotha ;
The world went by and wagged its head
And cried its cold derisive " Vah ! "
With frenzied malice born of hell
Their blasphemy at thee they hurled,
And set thee for a spectacle
Unto an unbelieving world.
204 ERIN'S RESURRECTION [Nov.
They wreaked on thee their ghoulish spite,
Then went their way without remorse,
And deemed thee buried out of sight,
Where they had cast thy mangled corse.
Forgot of men and lost to fame
They thought thee whom their hatred slew,
Then rolled their centuries of shame
To hide thee from the nations' view.
But God the Just the record kept,
Who renders Truth's eternal law,
With strictest scrutiny, nor slept
But every foul injustice saw.
And, biding patiently His hour,
With bright reversal of thy doom
He sent His angel full of power
To rend the portals of thy tomb.
Thy beauty to reanimate,
To quicken thee with vital breath,
To crush the venomous head of Hate
And set thee victor over death.
Yea, in His love He clothed thee round
With glory of His Paschal morn,
And sceptred thee with joy, and crowned
The victim of their brutal scorn.
Inscrutable is God's design
Past mortal ken, but this we know :
The blossoms of His love divine
Shall in their season surely blow.
Nor aught His justice hath decreed
Shall fall amiss; His mercy's flower
Shall hear His whisper in the seed
And burgeon in its punctual hour.
And who would share His Olivet,
In meek obedience to His law,
With crimson of His Passion wet
Must bear His Cross up Golgotha.
GENOA THE SUPERB.
BY JOSEPH FRANCIS WICKHAM.
HE Mediterranean coast is a never- failing enchantment
for those who are wearied of the workaday world,
the plots and contrivings of a prose age, the long
endless hum of busy money-getting, the eternal rush
and roar of metropolitan streets. The Italian Riv-
iera, that long stretch of wave-loved beauty from Bordighera to
Spezia, is a gift than which God has given no better to man. Orange
groves, vineyards, olives, palms, camellias, oleanders loveliness
flowers all the way, adorning the tufted green slopes, bordering
the splendid roads, peeping from behind the legended stones of
ruined castles, blooming in sunlit precious gardens ; and all the time
there is the lulling music of the old sea, blithely glad in the
opalescent light of evening, dancing happily in the dazzling white-
ness of the morning wave. Midway in these miles and miles of sea-
fringing grandeur, lies the old-time proudest town of Italy, the
sunny city of Genoa.
Genova la Superba and as she stands upon the hillsides at
the foot of the wide-circling Apennines, one may not deny her the
title. From the water's edge the city rises gradually up the slopes,
with terrace after terrace of mansions and ancient palaces, gleaming
white in the sunlight, and fashioning majestic jewels for the dark-
green raiment of the wooded hills. Everything is soft and tender
the caressing fingers of the sea, the song of the children, the odor
of the blossoms, the placid joy of the blue sky. Why should not
Genoa be proud ?
And if she is, it is not alone for her superb setting on the
hillside over the bay, for she glories, too, in being the greatest port
on the Mediterranean. Her splendid harbor welcomes the ships of
the world as it did six centuries ago, and speeds them forth with the
calm serenity which it has had since the days of the crusades.
Almost alone among her sister cities in Italy, Genoa of the Middle
Ages let no interest rival attention with her maritime ventures.
Where are her painters, her poets, her goldsmiths, her architects?
Why do we find her pictures painted by Rubens and Van Dyck and
206 GENOA THE SUPERB [Nov.,
Ribera, and her lovely Renaissance palaces erected by a son of
Perugia? Genoa knows, and knowing the secret, smiles. Her
story is not of the golden laurel, or the waiting mould, or the
color-laden palette, but of the sea wave and the galley, and the
snow-white sail tugging in the good west wind.
When you visit the beautiful Duomo, you will read there that
Janus, a Trojan prince, founded Genoa, but it may be that the
fourteenth-century historian confused him with the old gate-deity
of the same name. For surely Genoa is a gateway, the northern
gateway to the heart of Italy. At all events Genoa is an old, old
city. It is chronicled in her records that the Carthaginians under
Mago sacked the town in the year 205 before Christ. But not
long after the end of the second Punic War, Genoa became a Roman
municipium, as, at one time or another, did so many of the towns
of Italy. The city was the scene of successful Christian mis-
sionary labors in the earlier half of the first century. Loyal to
her bishops, Genoa lived on quietly in her daily life until the Lom-
bard invasion. Then came Charlemagne, and Genoa was a part
of the Holy Roman Empire. After this perhaps no very important
event entered her history until the Saracens burned the city in the
tenth century, and took half o f her citizens captive.
Soon after the town had adopted the organization of a com-
mune in the middle of the eleventh century, the splendid fire of the
crusades swept over Europe. Godfrey de Bouillon had been in-
sulted near the door of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; Peter
the Hermit was earnestly urging the Christian soldiers toward
Palestine; Urban the Second was listening to the call of Christen-
dom, the appealing cry of " Dieu le veuli " was in the air. The
Pope gave the word for action, and the mighty movement was
under way. The Genoese acted a noble part in the crusade,
setting sail in the year 1097. The city's knights fought right
valiantly at Antioch; and two years later, with much song and
cheering, under Embriaco's leadership, they scaled the walls of the
Holy City, and would have made Godfrey king. But the good
knight refused to wear the golden crown his Lord had never worn,
so he was proclaimed, instead, Defender of the Holy Sepulchre.
By the end of the crusade, in addition to having rendered
the expedition signal service in Palestine, Genoa had won posses-
sions for herself in Jaffa, Jerusalem, Antioch, Acre, Tyre, and
elsewhere, and was displaying the cross of St. George as her arms,
conferred by the grace of the Pope. So, indeed, her trade, her
1913.] GENOA THE SUPERB 207
shipping, her wealth received the great impetus. Then she forged
ahead until Pisa became jealous, and war came. Pisa finally went
down before Oberto Doria at the sea fight at Meloria, the famous
Count Ugolino playing the feminine role of Cleopatra sailing
away with never a blow. Genoa next defeated Venice, and her
supremacy was secure, until at last in the year 1381 at the battle
of Chioggia, Venice won the day.
In the meantime the great families of the nobility the Avo-
cato, Spinola, and Doria, as Ghibellines, on one side, the Castelli,
Fieschi and Grimaldi, as Guelphs, on the other were becoming the
leaders of the city. Since the year 1052 the city had been governed
by the Podesta and the consuls ; two hundred years later the govern-
ment was divided between the Podesta and a Captain of the
people. But in 1339 Genoa overthrew the ascendancy of the nobles
and elected a doge, and from this time until 1797, except when
foreign rulers were in command, a doge, usually chosen from one
of the principal families, was at the helm. France was often over-
lord in the city, and Milan was, too, and in the year 1522 took place
the famous sacking of the town by Pescara, the general of Charles
the Fifth. Then the French returned, and would have stayed, per-
haps, had not Andrea Doria sided with the emperor and overthrown
them in 1528. He then reigned as oligarch, and peace was in
Genoa. He died in 1560, and his death seemed to mark the eclipse
of Genoa's splendor. She had been losing her grip on her colonies,
and five years after Doria was gone her Eastern possessions were
only memories. Still everything went tranquilly in the city itself,
until the bombardment by the fleet of Louis the Fourteenth in
1684. In 1797 a democratic republic was set up under the patron-
age of the French. In 1800 the city endured a terrible siege at the
hands of the English and Austrians. In 1805 the Duchy was
annexed to France, and in 1815 to the kingdom of Sardinia. A
varied life Genoa has lived, a full sharer in all the light and
shadow of the centuries.
Such is Genoa's history and as one walks about the city, the
monuments of her material greatness are not hard to find. Most
symbolic of her old financial importance is the ancient palace of
Guglielmo Boccanegra, the Captain of the city, a structure erected
in 1260, and in 1407 occupied by the old bank of San Giorgio.
This institution was the model of the Bank of England and other
noted banks throughout Europe. Adorning the principal portal are
three Venetian lions' heads, reminiscent of the ancient hatred for the
2o8 GENOA THE SUPERB [Nov.,
city on the Adriatic. Indeed the palace itself was originally built
of stones taken from the Venetian fortress at Constantinople that
Michael Palaeologus, the Byzantine emperor, had given the Geno-
ese. The Great Hall within is adorned with the statues of
Genoa's most generous benefactors from the fourteenth to the
seventeenth century.
Genoa is nothing if not a city of palaces. Whole streets of them,
all splendid, some more strikingly elegant than their fellows, are
waiting for the visitor to pass and admire; or they invite him to
enter and leisurely examine the halls where mediaeval nobility
dreamed of greatness, and war, and the wealth of the picturesque
caravels of the blue seas. Near the Piazza, delle Fontane Morose
is the Palazzo della Casa, a fifteenth century structure, originally
the Palazzo Spinola, where dwelt the oldest Genoese family.
From the Piazza extend the Via Garibaldi and the Via Balbi; and
on these all the splendor of the palace-city may be seen in superb
fullness. The first street, despite its modern name, is of the six-
teenth century, and the older of the two ; practically all the palaces
here were designed by Galeazzo Alessi. The Via Balbi dates from
the seventeenth century, and, with its fine palaces, is a monument
to Bartolommeo Bianco.
On the Via Garibaldi, in olden days known as the Via Nuova,
stands the Palazzo Rosso, which was formerly the residence of the
Brignole-Sale family. The Duchess of Galliera, the last member
of the family, presented it to the city in 1874, so now one may visit
all of its halls and galleries. Of the art works here there is little
of surpassing worth, unless we except the portraits of Marchese
Antonio Giulio Brignole-Sale and Marchese Paola, which Van
Dyck rode down from Antwerp to paint. As we look upon them,
we remember how Genoa, with no worthy art school of her own,
welcomed the northerner to her heart. And we remember, too,
that it was Italy, in the person of Titian, that really taught Van
Dyck, freed him from the barbarisms too often found in the Flemish
school, and gave him just that touch of Latin refinement which
made him immortal.
More strikingly splendid, perhaps, than the Via Garibaldi, is
the Via Balbi. The Palazzo Durazzo-Pallavicini, standing close
to the Piazza dell' Annunziata, is one of the most notable of all
the palaces on this street. Among its other details of magnificence
is an excellent collection of pictures, the most famous of which is
the " Boy in White Satin," one of Van Dyck's finest creations in
1913.] GENOA THE SUPERB 209
Italy. Opposite this palace is the Palazzo Balbi. It is here one
must come to see the loveliest cortile in the whole city. The court
is inclosed by three-fold rows of exquisitely beautiful columns,
and has an orange garden which glows refreshingly in the green
and gold colors of nature. In the Great Hall is a fine collection
of pictures, among them Van Dyck's portrait of Philip the Second
of Spain. The members of the old family still occupy the splendid
residence, but in kindly courtesy allow the stranger to visit the
rich apartments of their fathers.
It is on the same street that you may see one of the most mag-
nificent things in Genoa, Bianco's grand lion-guarded staircase of
the Palazzo dell' Universita, the old college of the Jesuits in Genoa
At the avenue's end, in the Piazza. Acquaverde, rises the great
marble statue of Columbus, emerging proudly from the shading
palms, within easy view of the sea that called the mariner ever
westward across the Atlantic paths to glory.
There are beautiful churches, too, in Genoa. One will wish to
visit the cathedral of San Lorenzo, founded in the year 985, but re-
built in the Gothic manner in the early part of the fourteenth cen-
tury. The facade presents a most striking appearance in the alter-
nate courses of white and black marble, an effect not unusual in a
great many of the noted buildings of Genoa. The dome was con-
structed by Galeazzo Alessi in 1567. Within, the church is shad-
owy, and the twilight is intensified, perhaps, by the dark marble
pillars which divide the long-sweeping nave from the aisles. Half-
way up the left aisle one may turn to the Cappella San Giovanni
Battista, beautifully decorated with statues by Matteo Civitale and
others.
Close to the Duomo stands the church of San Matteo, built in
the Gothic style in the year 1278, of black and white marble. The
illustrious Doria family is commemorated in this church. The fa-
c,ade is covered with inscriptions telling the glories and prowess
of the noted house, of battle, of conquest, of noble death. In a
crypt within the edifice rests the tomb of Andrea Doria, and many
memorials of the family collected from various places.
Many another interesting building there is in Genoa: the
Palazzo Doria, with its celebrated fountain ; the Palazzo Municipale,
which contains Peganini's long-silent Stradivarius; the house in
which the peerless violinist was born; the house in which Daniel
O'Connell died after his lifetime of battle against his country's op-
pressor; the grim old tower of the Embriaci; the early home of
VOL. XCVIII. 14
210 GENOA THE SUPERB [Nov.,
the world's great sailor; the beautiful church of Santissima Annun-
ziata, with its lofty columns of red marble; and Alessi's domed
church of Santa Maria crowning the heights of Carignano.
Perhaps the most wonderful single thing in the entire city is
the Campo Santo, the beauteous place of rest of Genoa's dead. Set
in a lovely valley with high mountains encircling, it seems indeed
a fitting place for peaceful sleep after the fever of life. Before you
reach the portals, you can see the ghostly death-city lying low in
the plain, the white marble of the tombs contrasting vividly with
the dark green masses of the hills. Down the long colonnades of
the quadrangle the visitor wanders, beholding exquisite repre-
sentations chiseled out of the pure stone from the Carrara slopes.
There are to be seen here noble examples of first-rate modern
sculpture, depicting in life-like realism sorrow's pathetic coming to
the loving home. Sometimes the monuments may appear too gran-
diloquent for souls that played but humbler parts in life's stirring
drama, but no one will wish to question the taste of the mourners
of well-beloved relatives and revered friends. No burial place in
Europe can rival the magnificence and splendor of Genoa's Campo
Santo.
Before leaving Genoa one should not omit to visit the walls,
from which an excellent view of many miles of land and sea may
be obtained. It was here that the people gathered in those far-
away, dream-like knighthood days of the crusades, to watch the
thousands of Christian soldiers march into the city, or slowly
sail into the harbor. The crusades will probably never be under-
taken again; men have grown too practical, too sordid, too selfish,
and have lost the old ardor that fired the chivalry of the Middle
Ages. Still, dreamer or sage though you be, as you watch from the
old ramparts to-day, it is not hard for you to see in imagination the
long lines of cross-blazoned knights, moving into the city's streets,
with pennons flying and lances glistening in the flashing of the sun ;
rulers of fair earldoms and sons of kings, a prince of Saxony, a
count of Flanders, a duke of Acquitaine, a lord of Lombardy, gal-
lant knights come from the sorrowed cities of the north and east,
all confident and puissant on their noble, shining chargers ; and full
many a thousand of valiant fighting men following in the paths
of the doughty leaders. And one can behold bearing in from
the open sea the white-winged ships, with decks crowded close
with the ranks of hundreds of stout-hearted enthusiasts gathered
about the dauntless person of their liege lord, and every man,
1913.] GENOA THE SUPERB 211
from leader to humblest camp-follower, eager to reach port to
prepare for the voyage to the East.
A right glorious spectacle it must have been all this great
white squadron majestically blowing landward from the unvisited
cities of the far countries, all these gray and grizzled old warrior-
heroes of many a field, all these glad, buoyant, maiden knights
with shields unscarred and swords never drawn. Even now, as
you look toward the water's edge, you can see the mighty throng
quickly disembarking on the welcoming quays, amid the salvos
that echo back from the green hills. Joyously they would unite
with the forces that had come overland, and in a few days the
great host of Christian soldiers, with many a holy monk and many
an ambitious adventurer, would sail forth in the galleys Genoa had
fitted out, amid the prayers and farewells of the cheering city.
And if it should be the third crusade, down at Messina a Richard
Cceur de Lion would join a Philip Augustus with England's flower
of knighthood. The fleet of the lion-hearted Genoa had also
made ready; and in characteristic compliment of courtesy, Britain's
monarch linked Genoa and England in everlasting association by
choosing as his ensign the Genoese emblem of St. George.
You like to think of all those pageants of noble chivalry as you
stand by the old ramparts. But as you give free play to your
imagination, another scene comes flitting before you, beautiful, too,
in its way, but mingling with its charm a pathos which asks your
tears. For you are thinking now of the seven thousand children
of France and Germany who arrived in Genoa in 1212, with a Ven-
dome shepherd boy and a youth from Cologne as their leaders, all
seeking the paths to Palestine in the superb and child-like ecstasy
of the new-found battle-cry. They never reached the far-off coun-
tries where Saracen crescent was waving over splendid camp fields ;
they never returned to the hills and valleys that they once knew.
Slavery became the lot of throngs of the fair children, and starva-
tion claimed the others for its cruel share.
You hesitate to leave the old ramparts ; land and sea have too
much to tell you, and ask you to stay and listen. As still you linger
and find yourself fascinated with a large, full-rigged sloop in the
harbor, you wonder if it were not right here that the people of
Genoa watched their admiral come back home, with victory pennons
flying from the mastheads of his swift ships, and trying to signal
the news of Lepanto. For that great battle had been fought, and
was a thing of history. In 1571, under Don Juan of Austria, the
212 GENOA THE SUPERB [Nov.,
Spanish, Venetian, Papal, and Genoese fleets met their Turkish
foes, and defeated them in a decisive engagement. Not only did
the allies take two hundred of the enemy's war vessels, but they
liberated no less than fourteen thousand Christians whom the Turks
had consigned to a life of slavery at the galley oars.
All this was a long time ago, and yet what is time when one is
dwelling on the noble and soul-stirring things of yesterday? The
years roll aside most marvelously, when we bid them go ; they thrust
themselves before us as a barrier only when we suffer their presence.
So it ,is very easy to imagine the fearless voyager, Columbus, dream-
ing here on the city walls ; dreaming, as a little boy, when he would
watch a tiny speck on the red horizon grow large and come into
port a full-panoplied ship ; dreaming, as a youth, and wondering how
far the ocean rushed on before it washed the sweet-odored shores
of India; wondering if someone would not some day sail westward
to that eastern land; wondering, perhaps, if that someone might
not be he.
Columbus made not discovery for his beloved Genoa, as he
would well have wished; Genoa was a little too fatally practical to
fall captive to his dreams. To Spain he gave the new lands of the
West.
To-day as you stand near Genoa's long piers, you may see
a great ship from that western land of Columbus slowly steam in
from the open sea. There will be a cheer from home-come
Genoese; there will be the scurrying of many little boats
about the lordly steamer, with the flowers and the fruits of Italy's
soil; there will be the gay lilting of mandolins and the songs of
sweet- voiced maidens; and the sun will be shining, and the water
dancing, and the sky blue, so blue, with never a cloud large as a
baby's hand upon its lovely face. And if a friend walks down the
spacious pier, you will greet him right gladly, and take him away
to the cool of some palace-inn high up among the shadows of the
olive and the pomegranate, and bid him speak of ships and seas
and the loving days at home. But if no one comes, you will still
stand near the sea and look upon the friendly smiling of stranger
faces from the west-land, and be happy in their joy, and glad in the
benediction that will fall upon them from the bounty of the fair
Italian skies.
SOLDIER SONGS OF A SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER.
BY MYRTLE M. CAVEY.
UT of the abundance of the heart, even if it is a
prosaic one, the mouth speaks; and if it is a poet's
heart, the speech readily turns to impassioned song.
So trite an observation needs no enlargement. An
acquaintance with, or even a casual reading of, any
volume of poetry will suffice to show how, from the treasure-
house of his heart, the poet coins his magical words and phrases.
And a closer reading will lead to the observation that there are
favorite moods and predominant colors and facile symbols with
which the poet likes best to invest his thought word-raiment, as it
were which he employs frequently to set off his optimistic yearn-
ings, or, alas, his pessimistic negations.
But here at the very outset, in regard to some citations that
we intend to make from the poems .of Miss Louise Imogen Guiney,
we must have it clearly understood that her poetry is not clothed
in one or two monotonous colors. Her harp of song is not a slender
thing of one string; rather is it one of harmonious chords reaching
wide in many octaves. And, therefore, to note some of her ex-
quisite thought that has been phrased in martial metaphors, wearing
a warrior's armor, is not to cast out from appreciative recognition
her marvelous achievements in other themes or the habiliments
that they wear. Any reader of Miss Guiney's poems knows well the
diverse realms she has visited in song: the academic sonnets of
Oxford and London; Fifteen Epitaphs, in a spirit so exquisitely
exotic that the author felt constrained to say of them in a note,
" It may be well to state (as these have often been taken for
translations) that they are only pseudo- Alexandrian ;" her motifs
out of classic Greek and Latin ; her true rendering of Irish moods,
showing how deeply she has felt the Celtic pulse ; Five Carols for
Christmastide, as if breathing from some perfect mediaeval manu-
script; these and various other themes and loci poetici, not merely
in lyrical but in narrative and dramatic form as well ; one example,
and that of conclusive evidence, being The Martyr's Idyl.
But with these departments of Miss Guiney's poetry we have
no concern here : our present purpose is to notice some fragments
214 SOLDIER SONGS OF A SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER [Nov.,
of her work wherein the military atmosphere breathes through the
phraseology. And the warfare that she pictures is not of the
kind that has to do with the smell of powder and the booming of
cannon, nor with the sack of towns, nor with the slaughter of
men in a word, with the species of war that Sherman defined in
three sharp monosyllables. Hers is rather the atmosphere and en-
tourage of chivalry and of the methods of knighthood, romantic
but real, and of the steadfast pursuit of honor, and of a goal that
is beatitude. Of such does she sing in The Knight Errant (though
in a sub-title we find suggested Donatello's Saint George) :
Spirits of old that bore me,
And set me, meek of mind,
Between great dreams before me,
And deeds as great behind,
Knowing humanity my star
As first abroad I ride,
Shall help me wear with every scar
Honour at eventide.
Let claws of lightning clutch me
From summer's groaning cloud,
Or ever malice touch me,
And glory make me proud.
Oh, give my youth, my faith, my sword,
Choice of the heart's desire:
A short life in the saddle, Lord!
Not long life by the fire.
Forethought and recollection
Rivet mine armour gay!
The passion for perfection
Redeem my failing way!
The arrows of the upper slope
From sudden ambush cast,
Rain quick and true, with one to ope
My Paradise at last!
This " passion " for the pursuit of honor, for " the better
things," to which the mind and heart of man aspire, is a recurring
theme; and it will be well to quote, even entirely, another of Miss
Guiney's songs upon that subject : The Colour-Bearer.
I9I3-] SOLDIER SONGS OF A SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER 215
Thy charge was : " Hold My banner
Against our hidden foe;
To war where sounds no manner
Of glorious music, go ! "
And like Thy word my answer all joyless :
" Be it so."
Ah, not to brave Thy censure
But win Thy smile of light,
My heart of misadventure
Will end in the losing fight,
And lie out yonder, wattled with wounds from
left to right.
The day will pass of torment,
The even fall be sweet
When I shall wear for garment
The nakedness of defeat.
But when afield Thou comest, and look's! in
vain to meet.
That eagle of the wartime,
That oriflamme, outrolled
With strength of staff aforetime,
With cleanly and costly fold
Ride on, ride on! and seek me with lanthorns
through the cold.
And take from me (turned donor
That night on blood-soaked sand),
The stick and rag of Honour
There safe in a stiffened hand,
Not left, not lost, nor ever a spoil in the
victor's land.
The sources from which comes the inspiration for these songs
are patent to the general reader : Miss Guiney voices in her unique
manner the aspirations that all other people have who follow the
Christian ideal. Yet, on the supposition that every person may
apply to himself, and have applied to him, that line of Tennyson
upon Ulysses, " I am a part of all that I have met," it will be to
good purpose to adduce a notable association (if we so call her
father's life in her regard), one that was an influential part of
216 SOLDIER SONGS OF A SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER [Nov.,
the poet's life the career of her own father, soldier and chevalier,
General Guiney.
We will preface our remarks with a poem that Miss Guiney
contributed to The Ave Maria, and in which the abundance of her
heart spoke and gave living testimony to the enduring inspiration
of the " Unforgotten Soldier Mine."
THE WOUNDED PLAYMATE.
Half the dreams my spirit hath
Urge me back on thy lost path,
Looking for love's aftermath ;
Aye with some fond gift to share,
Some light trouble soon o'erthrown;
Some old outburst, frank as air,
Transient as a bugle tone.
Angels best can understand
How I sometimes miss thy hand
Yet; and in this indecision
For thy footfall pause and pine,
Beautiful quick-going vision,
Unforgotten Soldier mine!
One who knew not pain was dire,
Trampling out that boyish fire,
Spurred thy hope with zest entire ;
Ours what stealth of bow and bat,
What rash truant oars at sea,
Games to last forever, that
Brake betwixt the child and thee;
Many a grudged adventure vast
Under orchard branches cast;
And at winter's slow dispersal
(On thy shoulder my hushed mouth),
Scarce allowed, adored rehearsal
Of the battle-tented South.
Well it was that Heaven did give
To a joy so fugitive
Soul, all others to outlive!
Though to final risks begun
Early exhortation cling;
Though a sudden deed, ere done,
1913.] SOLDIER SONGS OF A SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER 217
Lean on thee for sanctioning;
Though thy knighthood me constrain
Through age, death, and life again,
Father, most thy memory guiding
Is a song and star of May:
And the land of thine abiding
Always Childhood, always Play.
The minutiae of a biographical record need not be detailed here;
and such items as shall be given may fortunately be selected from
notes made by his daughter's hand, which, therefore, are' not merely
accurate, but the expression of a devoted memory as well.
General Patrick Robert Guiney was born in Parkstown, Tip-
perary, in 1835. " He came of curiously mixed blood, and belonged
to an adventurous and early-dying family : people always breaking
away from their pleasant fields and putting forth to sea, or 'to
the warres.' ' He died in Boston on the afternoon of March 21,
1877. " Crossing the square toward his house, he had sudden
warning by a slight spurt of blood to the lips. He took off his hat
and knelt down by a tree : his loyal and instinctive way of meeting
his Lord. A child playing near, who knew him, was the first to
reach his side; but already he was no more." And of the years
between these two dates his school life, the Civil War, and the
subsequent career in the legal profession a few notes will suffice
to show that General Guiney held towards " the higher things,"
and that his unwearied service in the pursuit of them is worthy
to have for carved epitaphs his daughter's words in praise
of chivalry and the quest of honor. " General Guiney's I regard
as a very perfect character," said Father Robert Fulton, S J., in the
funeral oration. " He conformed himself not only to what is law-
ful, but to what is great and fitting. He tamed and attached to
himself the severer ideal."
The first notable period of his life began in 1854, when he
matriculated at Holy Cross, " owing that fulfilling of his own and
his father's hope rather to his instinct for the best books, than to
any graded technical preparation." Circumstances arose to pre-
vent him from completing his collegiate course. But he managed
to make a private course in law under Judge Walton in Portland,
and was subsequently admitted to the bar. Then " as an intellectual
pastime, as well as a minor duty," he acted as sub-editor of the
Lewiston Advocate. Later he wrote regularly for the Boston Times.
218 SOLDIER SONGS OF A SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER [Nov.,
" These early journalistic skirmishes hardly indicate the very great,
though undisciplined talent for letters, which clung to him all his
life. His verse was somewhat Byronic and super-romantic, as all
verse of les jeunes was at any time between 1830 and 1860; but
his little prose sketches, some of them written, like Winthrop's, on
the march, are capital reading: terse, vital, and graceful." Always
keenly interested in the philosophy of public life, and an ardent
supporter of reforms that unquestionably merit the name, he ex-
hibited a steadfast loyalty to his ideals in that great (if some-
times much-abused) science of politics.
Then came the Civil War. It meant domestic sacrifice to him,
and the sure breaking up of his chosen career, and that ever-hover-
ing possibility of the battlefield, death; but these he compared not
with the jeopardy of the Union which he loved. He enlisted as a
private, but Governor Andrew made him Lieutenant of the infan-
try regiment organized as the Ninth Massachusetts, but recruited
as the Thirteenth. General Guiney led this regiment more than
thirty times to battle; its most heroic achievement being at Games'
Mill. He was promoted to the Brevet Brigadier Generalship
with the endorsement of Charles Sumner, of Adjutant-General
Schouler, and of others equally famous. In May of 1864, at the
Wilderness, he received the wound which eventually caused his
death.
He returned to Boston after the war. " And now again at
home in the little house with the big fragrant garden, with his old
mental landmarks swept away, with his fine constitution shattered,
his spirited beauty ruined by the loss of his left eye and the deep
scar in the cheek, with only his courage and his wife's never-failing
care to sustain him, he patched up, in a measure, his civic existence
as Assistant District Attorney, and as expert counsel in many cele-
brated cases." He had just rounded his forty-second year when
death came to him, a parallel in age to the Knight of whom his
daughter sings:
Oh, give my youth, my faith, my sword,
Choice of the heart's desire:
A short life in the saddle, Lord !
Not long life by the fire.
And finally (to quote again the pen of her who calls herself
" his young Amazon "), " Those who know him knew that he was
in all processes of noble growth when he died. His thirteen years
1913-] SOLDIER SONGS OF A SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER 219
of pain, the life 'hidden with Christ in God,' a strange exchange for
the outlook of his masterful youth, he endured not without thanks-
giving and a certain ultimate satisfaction His friends, his
books, and the open air (where his later attitude was that of a
quiet but not uncompensated spectator, as he drilled at Green Hill a
company composed of martial small boys and his own young
Amazon) were his refuge and delight."
From this epitome of General Guiney's life, we may without
any far stretch at inference, see an influence that could and may
have entered into the making of his daughter's poetry. His was
a career that was a reality to her, not an imagination. And close
to her experience, an intimate one indeed, was a personal history
that could inspire her metaphors and similes. If, as her note said,
General Guiney wrote prose, " like Winthrop's, on the march,"
notice with what perfection in the imitation of the sound of a
galloping cavalry troop she sings The Wild Ride.
I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses
All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses,
All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.
* * * *
The trial is through dolour and dread, over crags and morasses;
There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice
us;
What odds? We are Knights of the Grail, we are vowed to the
riding.
Thought's self is a vanishing wing, and joy is a cobweb,
And friendship a flower in the dust, and glory a sunbeam:
Not here is our prize, nor, alas ! after these our pursuing.
A dipping of plumes, a tear, a shake of the bridle,
A passing salute to this world and her pitiful beauty:
We hurry with never a word in the track of our fathers.
* * * *
We spur to a land of no name, out-racing the storm-wind;
We leap to the infinite dark like sparks from the anvil.
Thou leadest, O God! All's well with Thy troopers that follow.
And it is of no mere spasmodic warfare, nor of an occasional
tourney on certain days of consolation that this poet sings. Her
ideal must endure to the bitterest end, in all the magnificence of
220 SOLDIER SONGS OF A SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER [Nov.,
great perseverance. " Back to the ranks ! " she commands the de-
jected soul who wants to quit under the feelings of desolation that
beset him.
Though out of the past they gather,
Mind's Doubt, and Bodily Pain,
And pallid Thirst of the Spirit
That is kin to the other twain,
And Grief, in a cloud of banners,
And ringletted Vain Desires,
And Vice, with the spoils upon him
Of thee and thy beaten sires.
While Kings of eternal evil
Yet darken the hills about,
Thy part is with broken sabre
To rise on the last redoubt;
To fear not sensible failure,
Nor covet the game at all,
But fighting, fighting, fighting,
Die, driven against the wall.
These few excerpts, not by any means all that might be culled
from Miss Guiney's volumes of exquisite poetry, make manifest
one of the themes that her gift of song has enriched. Her devo-
tion to her own Ideal in Character rings clear, as a bugle call from
the battlements. She is conversant, from her historical studies,
with the purposes and manner of those ages when knighthood was
in flower; and, as we have been able to observe from a cursory
glance at her father's life, she had the good fortune to be of the
household of one who was, in her own words, " the good knight of
Boston town, who was my father."
THE PERSONNEL OF THE INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS
COMMISSION.
BY JOHN A. RYAN, D.D.
OW that the Federal Commission on Industrial Rela-
tions has become, through the recent confirmatory
action of the Senate, a living reality, an attempt to
estimate its competence and efficiency may not be
without some interest.
Two or three facts should be kept in mind as fundamentally
important. The first is that the Commission is instructed to in-
vestigate the general condition of labor, but especially to seek
methods of ensuring more satisfactory and peaceful relations be-
tween employers and employed. So much is stated in the text
of the law. Second, there is implicit in the law what was ex-
plicit in the minds of its promoters, the conviction that labor is
not on the whole receiving completely just treatment, nor its fair
share of the product of industry. Third, the law recognizes the
normality of labor unions, inasmuch as it requires that at least three
members of the Commission should be representatives of organized
labor.
i. The Representatives of the General Public. The Chair-
man of the Commission, Mr. Frank P. Walsh of Kansas City, has
been active in movements for general social improvement, for better
wages to underpaid women, and for industrial arbitration. In
all of these he has shown himself an intelligent promoter of wider
social justice. His proficiency in the law should be of consider-
able value to a body that will have to determine how far present
unsatisfactory conditions may be remedied by legislation. As com-
pared with Senator Sutherland, who was named for the same posi-
tion by President Taft, he is the exponent of the progressive as
contrasted with the " standpat " view of political and industrial
conditions. Mr. Walsh is a Catholic.
Professor John R. Commons is undoubtedly the best-equipped
and most-valuable member of the Commission. He has probably
a wider, more concrete, and more scientific knowledge of labor
conditions and employment relations than any other person in
the United States. His large experience as an industrial expert
222 THE PERSONNEL OF THE [Nov.,
will be most helpful in organizing and carrying on investigations,
while his achievements as legislative adviser, and as administrator
of new and difficult labor laws, indicate great constructive ability
exercised along sane lines. He will be par excellence the scientific
member of the Commission. Over the best of President Taft's
nominees in this division, Mr. Barrett, his superiority is easily
conspicuous.
The activities of Mrs. Harriman in connection with the Na-
tional Civic Federation and elsewhere, show that she is aware that
permanent industrial peace is attainable only on condition that
the workers shall receive a larger measure of industrial justice.
At the very least, she is a more promising member of the Com-
mission than President Taft's third choice to represent the general
public, Mr. Chandler of Connecticut.
2. The Representatives of the Employers. Mr. F. A. Delano,
who was also on President Taft's list, is apparently well fitted by
knowledge and experience to represent the interests of the railroads,
while his cordial relations with trade union leaders suggest that he
is at least open-minded on the question of labor organizations.
Mr. S. Thurston Ballard, although very prominent in the Man-
ufacturers' Association of Louisville, has been an efficient promoter
of child labor legislation in his own State. He is said to have a
deep sense of the employer's obligations toward his employees.
Whatever may be his attitude toward unionism, it is probably less
objectionable than that of Mr. F. C. Schwedtman, who was nomin-
ated by President Taft. Mr. Schwedtman's part, as described by
Colonel Mulhall, in the pernicious campaign of the National Asso-
ciation of Manufacturers against humane labor legislation, and
against trade unionism, indicates a viewpoint that has become so-
cially impossible. For the sake of team work, conservation of
energy and time, and obedience to the spirit which created the Com-
mission, its members should take for granted the propositions that
labor unions are legitimate, and protective labor legislation neces-
sary. The presence on the Commission of any person who ques-
tions either of these postulates would be anomalous and obstructive.
Whether Mr. Harris Weinstock is better qualified, either by
knowledge or ideals, than Mr. Adolph Lewisohn, I do not know.
He was entrusted with important labor investigations by two kinds
of Governors of California, and acquitted himself well in both
instances. After reading his report on labor conditions and the
operation of the minimum wage in Australasia, I am glad to find
1913-] INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS COMMISSION 223
that he is a member of the Commission. He will undoubtedly rep-
resent the enlightened and humane employers rather than the other
sort.
3. The Representatives of Labor. Mr. Austin B. Garretson
is excellently qualified to take care of the interests of the railway
unions. Messrs. O'Connell and Lennon are equally satisfactory
representatives of the other craft unions. All three have to their
credit a record of honest, intelligent, and sane achievement. Mr.
O'Connell is a Catholic, but Mr. Lennon is not.
Nevertheless the labor members do not reflect, as well as
those in the other two groups, all the elements and views that
should be represented. The condition and interests of our eight
million women workers are sufficiently distinct and peculiar to
require representation by one of themselves. It is they and not
women in general, or the public, that should have the woman rep-
resentative. A man can care for the general interests of the female
population more successfully than for the special interests of the
female wage-earners.
Again, the principle of organization by industries, rather than
by crafts, should have been given expression in the make up of the
Commission. In the first place, there is a considerable and steadily
increasing section of the American Federation of Labor which be-
lieves in this principle; in the second place, it seems probable that
only an insignificant fraction of the unskilled workers can ever be
effectively organized into craft unions. If organization is neces-
sary and normal, the kind of organization that is likely to be most
effective among the millions who are still unorganized, and whose
grievances are greater than those of the men already in unions,
ought to receive full and impartial consideration from the Com-
mission. A man like John Mitchell, who is favorable to the indus-
trial union idea, and yet is not a narrow partisan, would have met
the needs of the situation admirably. On the other hand, he would
have helped Mr. Garretson defend the craft union principle in its
proper field.
The Socialist element has no place on the Commission. This
seems entirely logical and sensible; for the work of the Commission
is based on the theory that the wage system is to endure, at least
for that part of the future with which the Commission will have
any practical concern. It is to strive for industrial peace between
employers and employed, while the Socialists do not believe that
such peace is desirable or possible, nor that any satisfactory arrange-
224 THE HOUSEWIFE'S PRAYER [Nov.,
ments will be obtained until the wage system is abolished. A So-
cialist member would be merely a time-killer on the Commission.
His presence would be quite as anomalous as that of an anti-union
employer.
On the whole, the personnel of the Commission is such that the
country may well feel satisfied and hopeful. Its superiority over the
old Industrial Commission of fourteen years ago, and even over the
group nominated by President Taft less than a year ago, is concrete
and eloquent testimony to the advance that has been made toward
social and industrial justice in the last few years. May its achieve-
ments be productive of still more rapid progress in the near future !
THE HOUSEWIFE'S PRAYER.
*v
BY BLANCHE KELLY.
LADY, who with tender ward
Didst keep the house of Christ the Lord,
Who didst set forth the bread and wine
Before the living Wheat and Vine,
Reverently didst make the bed
Whereon was laid the Holy Head
That such a cruel pillow prest
For our behoof on Calvary's crest,
Be beside me while I go
About my labors to and fro.
Speed the wheel and speed the loom,
Guide the needle and the broom,
Make my bread rise sweet and light,
Make my cheese come foamy white,
Yellow may my butter be
As cowslips blowing on the lea.
Homely though my tasks and small,
Be beside me at them all;
Then, when I shall stand to face
Jesu in the judgment place,
To me thy gracious help afford,
Who art the Handmaid of the Lord.
THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE.
BY KATHARINE TYNAN.
CHAPTER IV.
" IT WOULDN'T BE THE FOXES."
Y noon the heat of the sun had somewhat thawed the
roads, and Lord Erris and Lady Turloughmore went
out riding. Meg felt glad that Lord Erris was not too
much of an invalid to ride. She had the sympathy
to absent herself while he mounted, but, coming to the
door to receive a message from Lady Turloughmore,
she saw Lord Erris already in the saddle. On horseback his weakness
and disabilities vanished. She seemed to see already what manner
of man he ought to be, doing the things his fellowmen did.
After they had ridden away she went up to the little room at the
end of an upper corridor, where old Julia, who had been Lord Tur-
loughmore's nurse and his son's, sat, spectacles on nose, darning and
mending.
Lady Turloughmore had explained to Meg about Julia, how she
was very old, yet liked to think herself of importance in the house,
so did such sewing and mending as her eyes permitted her.
The message was concerned with some of the preparations for
Lord Turloughmore's home-coming. When Meg reached the room
which was sacred to Julia and her sewing there was an inner room
leading off it in which Julia slept there was linen airing before
the fire, and the room was full of the warm, sweet smell of it.
" Indeed her ladyship ought to ha' trusted me," Julia said with
some offence. " I'm not that ould nor bothered in my head, though
I've my good days and my bad days, that I'd forget the damask towels
for his lordship. 'Tisn't likely that I wouldn't give my best to him
that was the child at my breast."
"Is that a rent I see in your skirt, Miss?" she asked, distracted
by her professional interest from her little grievance. " Sit down
there, Miss Hildreth, if that's your name, an' I'll put a stitch in for
you. Her ladyship calls this room 'The Sign of the Stitch in Time/
Her ladyship's very pleasant. I'm not sayin' I always know what
she's laughin' about. But why wouldn't she laugh while she can?"
" Why not, indeed ? " responded Meg, sitting down obediently
in the low basket chair made of twisted straw ropes, while the old
VOL. xcvm. 15
226 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Nov.,
woman lifted up the skirt which must have caught in something or
other during Meg's garden progress, and been torn unknown to her.
The light was very strong in the room, which was as warm as
a hothouse because of the sun beating on the window panes. There
were three windows to the room, which projected in a bow at the end of
the corridor, and the sun in its mid-day strength was on two of the
windows.
She could see the innumerable fine lines of age in the old face
as Julia leant nearer to her darning the rent in the skirt. The kind-
ness in Meg's eyes, the compassion, was charming to see.
" What a beautiful warm room you have, Julia," she said. " And
what a beautiful view from the windows! I'd no idea the sea was
so near."
" I wouldn't care if it wasn't. I don't like the same say," said
Julia. " It drowns many mothers' sons. An' I don't like the look
of it to-day, though I wouldn't say it to her ladyship for the world.
Tis frettin' me so it is to see thim cat's paws on the water an' his
lordship comin' home. I never seen them yet that they didn't be-
token a storm."
" There was a red dawn," said Meg.
" There was so, and 'tis always red for wind," Julia said, in a queer
monotonous tone, "but I never seen it as red as the mornin' of the day
the hooker from Galway was lost, and his lordship's father's body was
washed in on the next tide. I ought to know about wind and the signs
of it. Why wouldn't I ? Didnlt I lose my own man and my three fine
sons by that same treacherous baste of a say, that's lyin' out there now
purrin' and shovin' out her claws like a cat in the sun? Och, indeed,
if I didn't know, who would ? "
" His lordship's father! You mean the last Lord Turloughmore ?"
"Who else, alanna? I was nursin' his present lordship then, and
havin' the finest of everything. These rooms were the nurseries.
I used to turn from the good food, fond and all as I was of the
baby, thinkin* of my own child that I was robbin' for him. Her lady-
ship her old ladyship, I mean sent for Michael at last, fearin' the
frettin' would injure her baby. Michael never grudged his lord-
ship anything. Poor Michael, he was lost the time the ferry went
down between here and the islands. Deary me, I've had a long life,
child! I'll be seventy-nine years of age come Michaelmas. Many's
the fine man and woman I've seen down: an' sometimes whin I'm
here by myself I can't tell whether 'tis the last lord is in it or the
present lord. They brought the ould lord not that he was ould
then no oulder than his lordship is now an' they laid him just
there on the rug at your feet. They carried him along the passage
in a sail, an' they brought him here because it was a summer mornin'
an' the fires all low, but there was a beautiful fire burnin' here, and
1913.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 227
the blankets and sheets airin' for his bed, just the same as they
are now for his son's."
She looked up at Meg, still holding the skirt between her fingers,
and her gaze was very far away, as though the old wits were wan-
dering.
" There do be times," she said, " whin I hear the drippin' of
the water from the sail an' the feet of the men comin' along the
passage to this room. An' I do see the drowned man lyin' stretched
out just at your feet where they put him down. We couldn't bring
him to for all we tried."
Margaret started and looked down, almost as though she could
see the drowned Lord Turloughmore lying at her feet.
"Am I frightenin' ye, dear?" the old woman asked, with lin-
gering tenderness. " Sure, I wouldn't do that, not for anything
you could give me. But isn't it a terrible thing to live in a house
where you can't be happy for one minnit for fear of what'll happen?
Isn't it awful for the happy to die? Look at her ladyship! she was
young an' lively, an' so much in love wid his lordship that she wint agin
everyone to marry him. God help her, isn't the joy crushed out of
her for fear of what'll happen? An' her beautiful son that ought to
be a fine man by rights, look at him! Tisn't only the poor lame
foot. It's the doom of the family that's lyin' upon him, for all her
ladyship blames herself for his misfortune. I wish his lordship was
safe home."
" So do I," said Meg. " But all the same, Julia," she put her
hand on the old woman's arm kindly. " I can't believe all this story
of a doom. God is stronger than the devil. We are all in the hands
of God. I can't believe that it is He Who goes on punishing innocent
people for one cruel and wicked action done hundreds of years ago.
If the Earls of Turloughmore have died as they have died, it is
because they have taken more risks than other men. Everyone knows
how brave and adventurous they were ""
" God help you ! You won't be long in this house till you change
your mind."
Meg began to feel creepy in spite of herself, but she refused to
be frightened by these vain fears and shadows.
" It might be," she said, " that because they were expecting the
doom it came upon them. Who can say now but that the memory of
the doom paralyzed a drowning man who might else have made a
brave fight for his life. I believe these old stories are nothing but
superstition. I should refuse to believe them in the Name of God."
Julia bowed her head with an air of resignation.
" God forbid, Miss Hildreth, that there's anything I'd tell you
not to believe in that Name. Indeed, why would I be makin' you
sorrowful? Didn't I feel the minnit I laid eyes on you that you wor
228 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Nov.,
come to this house for its good? It isn't me that 'ud be frightenin'
you out of it: I said to myself when I seen you, that you had the
bravest lookin' face I ever seen."
Meg's heart lifted oddly at the old woman's praise. She blushed as
she stood up. The rent in her skirt was mended and mended neatly.
" Thank you very much, Julia," she said. " It's beautifully done.
I'm so glad you have a good opinion of me. Look at the sun shining
on those hills and the Thousand Isles far away. I can't believe that
God put all that brightness into the world to leave us to the powers
of darkness."
" Say it to her ladyship, Miss Hildreth. Say it to her ladyship.
Often she wants the heart in her lifted up."
" I shall do my best, Julia, you may be sure of that. But my
name is not Hildreth. It is Hildebrand, Margaret Hildebrand."
"Eh?"
Julia leant a little nearer eagerly.
" You said Hildebran', did you ? Sure that was the name of
the other gentleman the one that done what he could to save ould
Biddy Pendergast from the dogs."
" Hildebrand is my name," she said. " As a matter of fact, Sir
Dominick Hildebrand was an ancestor of mine."
" An' ye prospered, dear, ye prospered ? Ould Biddy's blessin'
was as good for you as her curse was bad for the Earls of Turlough-
more."
" We're happy and healthy," Meg answered. " If money is a
blessing we haven't got that. We're poor."
"So is the best in Ireland. The dirty money is as often a curse
as a blessin'. You're good and lovesome and bonny, an' your head's
as right as your heart. You've come, a Hildebran', into the house
of the Rosses of Turloughmore."
Meg was looking out over the expanse of waters shining in the
sun. The sea had a turbidly gray tinge, and the long ripples Julia had
called " cat's paws " crept over its surface.
" I saw something very strange last night," she said. " I was
awakened by barking."
" It would be the hounds. Their kennels are down in the hollow,
out of sight of the windows. I hope they didn't disturb you, Miss."
" I thought they were dogs," Margaret said, " but they were not.
I went and lifted the blind and looked out. The courtyard was full
of foxes."
" Glory be to God ! What are you sayin' at all, at all ? "
The words rang out in a scream of mortal, terror. The old
woman was staring with an expression of terrible fear and anguish.
" You don't know what you're sayin' at all, child," she said. " Is
it foxes? Sure it wasn't foxes? Ye only dhramed it. Ye might well
1913.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 229
dhrame it, for aren't the foxes all over the house? Ye wor dead-
tired last night, an' in the mornin' ye woke up an' ye thought ye saw
the foxes whin ye wor only dhramin'."
The old woman's agitation was extreme. Great tears began to
roll down her cheeks.
" It wasn't foxes," she whimpered. " Sure it 'ud kill her lady-
ship if ye wor to tell her ye seen the foxes. Ye'll hould your tongue
about it for the love of God. What 'ud bring the like into the court-
yard by night at all ? "
" I'm very sorry," said Meg, frightened herself, she hardly knew
of what. " I wish I hadn't seen them. They were really foxes, and I
did see them. I found their tracks in the snow this morning when
I went out."
" I heard the dogs meself. They wor barkin' terrible hard about
three o'clock. Why would you see the foxes, a stranger, that doesn't
belong to the family at all? A Hildebran'! Ye'd have no right to
see them."
" Perhaps," said Meg, more and more frightened at the effect she
had produced. " Perhaps, after all, it was only a dream. But why
should you be so alarmed about the foxes, if they were real foxes and
not ghostly ones ? They couldn't do any harm."
She remembered the fox with the star on its breast, and how it
had lifted its head and barked towards the window.
" It might be possible," she went on, " that the foxes might be
driven to the habitations of men by excessive cold or starvation,
and it has been cold. Why should they frighten you? They are
harmless beasts enough, except to the hen-roosts."
The old woman sat rocking herself to and fro, the tears still
flowing.
" It would be the greatest of bad luck," she said, " that brought ye
to Castle Eagle if you was to see the foxes. But how could ye see
them, barrin' ye wor wan o' the family an' you're not that? Ye
dhramed it, I tell you. I wouldn't be sayin' a word about it to
her ladyship if I was you ! "
Her voice was suddenly wheedling.
" I won't say there's anything in the foxes," she went on. " Sure
it might be that they'd be dhruv in, it bein' a hard winter, an' the
ground froze as gray as a stone. 'Tisn't as if they wor seen by wan o'
the family. God help her, she has enough to bear without being
bothered by dhrames."
" I won't say a word about it. I'm so sorry I said anything to
you, Julia."
" So am I. I'll be shakin' like an ould leaf in an autumn wind till
the Earl's safe home."
She got up and began to fold the sheets with shaking hands.
230 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Nov.,
" Ye gev me a fright, Miss Hildebran', wid them ould foxes,"
she said, with a piteous air of offence, " but I've thrown it off, for it
couldn't be the foxes, you bein' a stranger. The night the hooker
from Galway wint down the wild geese was flyin' agin the windows of
the house, batin' wid their wings fit to break them into smithereens. I
heard them myself ; an' there was a terrible desolation in their cries.
His lordship was very kind to bird and baste. There's more than
Christians fed from Castle Eagle in the hard weather, whin ye couldn't
break the ice on the ponds, and the say itself is frozen. Why wouldn't
they lament him? And wasn't Earl Patrick wan o' the Wild Geese
an' the greatest. It might be their spirits that was in it that night."
In many and many a night to come Meg heard the crying of the
wild geese as they swept over the stubble fields, bare as your hand
and frozen hard, an eerie sound in the night.
CHAPTER V.
THE TOWER.
The evening of that first day the sun went down in pale splendor
behind the hills. The sky was orange and amber. There was going
to be a sharp frost Meg thought as she stood by the balustrading of the
terrace, looking out over the wide expanse of country, dotted with little
roofs and church-towers stretching away to the mountains. At the
other side of the house, Castle Eagle on its precipitous cliffs overlooked
the sea. It was a frosty evening already. The frosty stars were
visible in the sky, hard as steel, and the twigs and grass-blades crackled
under foot. There was a strange stillness on the evening where one
little cloud, the shape of a porpoise, floated in the serene expanse of sky.
While she looked Lord Erris came to her side.
" You will be cold, Miss Hildebrand," he said.
" Not I," Meg replied. " I have been walking, and I am tingling
with heat."
" I am always cold," he said, and shivered in his heavy coat.
" I can hardly believe that other people are not cold too in this
bitter weather/'
" Feel ! " she said, and laid one warm hand over his.
She was dismayed at the result of her simple action. He with-
drew his hand as though hers stung him. The blood rushed to his
face, then ebbed away. His eyes, looking out at the expanse of sky,
took on a cold and forlorn expression, as though they reflected the
chilly grayness of November.
" You should not mock me with your health and strength," he
said, as though the words had been wrung from him with bitterness.
1913-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 231
" I am so sorry. I never thought of such a thing." Tears rushed
to her eyes. " I only wanted to prove to you that I was warm. I beg
your pardon."
" I ought to beg yours. I am like a sick wasp ; I must sting what
touches me. Forgive me, Miss Hildebrand. Do you see that cloud
over there?" with an air of changing the subject "what do you
suppose it means ? "
" I have been thinking how odd it looks floating so darkly on the
gold. I daresay it will drift away and be lost. See how bright
the stars are ! "
" I'm afraid it will not drift away. It will call companions to it.
It is for wind. The glass is going up rapidly too rapidly. I fear we
shall have a storm. My poor mother ! I wish the yacht was safely in."
They turned and walked towards the house. The sun had
dropped now behind the mountains, and Castle Eagle stood up darkly
against the sky. At one end of it was a square tower or bastion.
Through the arrow-slits in the second story they could see from where
they were standing the light from the arrow-slits on the other side.
" How strong and dark the tower looks against the sky ! " Meg
said. ''Would you think there was a light in it?"
" It is the lit sky on the other side showing through the arrow-
slits. See the after-glow ! We are going to have a sky of wonderful
rose leaves as we have it here sometimes."
The sun had sunk indeed, but there was a mighty conflagration
going on somewhere out of sight. Ridge upon ridge of rosy fire
began to tremble and burn in the west. It spread upwards and up-
wards. It broke into delicate flying feathers of rose that might
have been lost from the wings of angels. The soft, wild, rosy fire
burned and throbbed all over heaven. The sea reflected it. Every
pool of bog water in the country at their feet was on fire. The east
had caught the glory and bloomed like a rose garden.
" Did I not tell you ? " said Lord Erris. " They are scattering
rose leaves in heaven. Let us look while we may. It will die out
suddenly, leaving a grayness behind."
" It is splendid ! " Meg said, drawing a deep breath. " It is like
seeing heaven opened. I remember such skies sometimes not often
so splendid as this. Look at the tower ! Wouldn't you think someone
had lit a fire in it. How strong it looks! how mysterious! You
remember :
" 'What in the midst lay but the tower itself,
The round squat tower, blind as the fool's heart,
In the whole world without a counterpart ?' "
In her excitement she forgot to be shy, and looked at him with a
glowing face.
232 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Nov.,
" I remember. There is always something splendid in a strong
tower against a lit sky ! "
He blinked, looking at her as though she dazzled like the sky.
" What is that in there ? Who could be warming his hands
against those fires? Isn't the delusion of a fire perfect?" Meg said,
pointing to the tower, where the arrow-slits were filled as with the
reflected glow of a great fire.
" Unless it might be Conal M'Garvey."
"Conal M'Garvey?"
She looked her inquiry.
" You won't be frightened if I tell you. No ? It was another
pretty deed of one of my ancestors. Oh, we have had our share of
sins, to be expiated by a later generation. It is time the Rosses
should cease. There is a far-away young cousin in a counting-house
in England he has the Rosse blood so much diluted that he might
escape the sins of the fathers who would succeed. He is coming to
stay with us this summer, so you shall see him, Miss Hilde-
brand, if you do not fly away from us before then. A very proper
jolly young Englishman is Algy Rosse. He should know something
of finance, perhaps, which no Rosse on this side ever did."
He had forgotten about Conal M'Garvey. While he spoke the
conflagration in the heavens died as suddenly as it had begun. There
were only dead ashes for roses. The armies of the night seemed
to advance from every side. The tower was in darkness, the arrow-
slits showing no light.
" Conal M'Garvey's fire has gone out," Meg said gravely.
They walked into the house, where the fire-lit hall sent out a warm
breath to greet them. Prince who had been standing by them as
they talked outside went in with them: there were a medley of dogs
lying about before the roaring fire of coal and driftwood, some of
whom came and fawned on them, while others thumped a lazy tail by
way of recognition. There was no one in the hall, but a tea table was
set just within the screen, and a kettle sang over the lit spirit lamp.
" Tell me about Conal M'Garvey," she said. She had no idea
how her furs became her. She had thrown off her coat, leaving it
lying on the back of the tall chair in which she sat down. The golden
brown of the fur seemed to throw up with a subtle flattery her white
neck, her warm color, the golds and browns of her shy eyes and her
hair.
"You are sure you will not be frightened?" he said, looking at
her and then looking away.
" I am not nervous. There were oubliettes at the Schloss where
I was with the Archduchess Magda. We spent our summers there.
A river ran under the Schloss and then away to the Danube. It was
supposed to carry the poor things dropped through the oubliettes away
1913.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 233
to the Danube and the sea. As a matter of fact skeletons were
found there in the hot summer when the river was low."
" Ah, I see you have been in training for Castle Eagle." A gleam
of humor came into his sad eyes. " Conal M'Garvey was rather worse
than the oubliettes. He was an Irish chieftan, who originally owned
the tower and the lands on which this house is built. An obliging
early ancestor of mine, a Norman brigand, wanted M'Garvey's tower
and lands, and since M'Garvey didn't quite see it, he took the abomin-
able course of building him up in his tower. If you inspect the tower
by daylight, you will see where the arch was filled in. The Rosse
of that day was a great church builder. He knew all about masonry.
He built up Conal M'Garvey so substantially that the filling of the
arch will last as long as the tower itself. The tower keeps its secret."
Meg listened, trying to shake off a strange feeling which was
coming over her. Was Castle Eagle bewitching her? The beautiful
fire-lit room, the sensitive worn face of Lord Erris, the sleeping dogs
all the warm familiar things seemed to pass away. She was in a
dream, an enchantment. She saw Conal M'Garvey in his saffron coat,
haggard, wolf-hungry, perishing of hunger and thirst in the impreg-
nable tower. She saw the famine in his eyes, the hollow misery of
his cheeks. She heard a voice at her ears Lord Erris was speaking
to her in a tone of tender compassion and self-reproach.
" I am so sorry. I frightened you after all. You are not going
to faint? Ah, that is better! You frightened me."
" I don't know what came over me," she said, and tears stood
in her eyes. " Perhaps it was that I realize Conal M'Garvey more
than the prisoners of the Schloss."
Lady Turloughmore came down the stairs into the hall, and
shivered as she sat down in the warmest seat within the screen.
" I hope your father will not be becalmed," she said to her son.
" He will not have enough wind to carry him home. I think
there will be some wind before morning."
" But not a storm, Ulick, not a storm," she said, as she had
said last night.
He answered her again as he had answered her, and with a tender
patience.
" My dear mother, did I say a storm? The yacht must have some
wind else she cannot get home. I think there will be some wind."
Lady Turloughmore's face assumed the expression which Meg
came to know well later. She gained peace on her knees. Sometimes
she lost it in a sudden terror, but it would come back to her face, a
wonderfully young, smooth face though it was so sad like the waves
of the sea, filling her quiet eyes and composing her to a great tran-
quillity. Now she drew a little frame towards her on which she was
making point lace, and put in a few stitches.
234 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Nov.,
" You have been out for a walk," she said to Meg. " I saw you
go from my window. I hope it was a nice walk."
" It was lovely. The ground rang under my feet with frost as I
walked."
" Prince went with her, mother," put in Lord Erris. " Did you
ever know such a quick capitulation ? "
" Prince is slow to make friends. You should be gratified, my
dear."
" So I am," Meg replied. " There is something beautiful about
Prince. You feel so flattered, as if a great and distinguished per-
son had offered you friendship. His eyes are so beautiful when he
wants to go and gobble up some yapping cur and you forbid it. He
has an air of conceding it to you because he loves you."
" I've been promising Miss Hildebrand that, if she will only stay
with us, she shall have the privilege of making Algy Rosse's ac-
quaintance this summer."
A little cloud fell over Lady Turloughmore's face.
" Why 'privilege,' Ulick ? " she asked. " Surely the privilege
would be the other way."
" Algy would be the first to accept that," Lord Erris said suavely.
The kettle began to fling itself into convulsions, dancing a St.
Virus' dance on the spirit stove.
" I wonder if you would be so good as to make the tea, Miss
Hildebrand ? " said Lady Turloughmore, as though she asked a great
favor.
Meg flushed again, as she took the silver teapot and warmed it.
She was very impulsive, too impulsive Terence Hildebrand said, he
having transmitted more of himself to Meg than any other child he had.
" I love to do it, Lady Turloughmore," she said. " I wish you
would give me lots of things to do, hard things."
Lady Turloughmore looked at her very kindly.
" These are early days, my dear child. You will find that I can
be very exacting. You are going to take all sorts of things off my
hands when Lord Turloughmore comes home."
As she said it a little clap of wind sighed in the chimney and
rattled the doors; then subsided as suddenly as it had come.
" Julia is very bad to-night," Lady Turloughmore said, turning to
her son. " I don't know when I have seen her so bad. She keeps
talking about the hooker from Galway and the night your grandfather
was drowned. She is very old, poor Julia."
" It is a doom to live to be very old," Lord Erris said, and it
was as though the room was suddenly cold: as though some shadow
glided by the warm hearth and froze the blood in their veins.
The storm, if there was to be a storm, delayed in coming. There
was a calm over the evening that could almost be felt. On her way
1913.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 235
up to bed, after she had sung through her ballads she had a small,
soft and tuneful voice, and she sang with such a tender expression as
befitted the Irish ballads she chose to sing Meg opened the hall
door, still unbarred, unbolted, and stepped out into the night. The
air was milder, and there was a magnificent galaxy of stars. She
gazed up at the sky in delight. There was Orion; there were the
Plough and the Great Bear. The Milky Way was a road of broken
stars across the heavens. She said to herself that the frost was
breaking up. Yet the stars were extraordinarily brilliant, though
not with the hard twinkling brilliancy they had had earlier. Rather
it was as though they leant near earth.
She was about to go back again into the house when she was
arrested by the strange appearance of the tower. The moon was
rising at the side. It hung in the east, and a ray had penetrated the
tower, giving again an impression of a light within. The illusion was
extraordinary.
" Conal.M'Garvey is lighting up," said Lord Erris at her elbow.
She started to find him there. " If you will brave the winter night to
see him light up, at least you had better have something more about
your shoulders than that flimsy scarf."
While he spoke he laid a warm wrap carefully about her.
" Come round the other side of the tower," he said, " it is splendid
over the sea on a great night of stars like this."
They went round by the side of the tower, and stood on a terrace
overlooking the cliffs and the sea. There was a track of shimmering
light on the dark water, which reflected, broken up, the millions of
stars. They went back again into the house, where he lit her candle,
and stood looking after her as she went up the stairs.
They were very kind, she thought, wonderfully kind, as she
stood in her comfortable room, rosy in firelight, and noted the luxury
of it. An essentially modern room fitted up and made luxuriously
comfortable ages after the house was built. She was not sure that
she altogether liked the luxury. She had a love for bareness and
space, and great stretches of air to breathe in. The many wardrobes,
the deep carpet, the pretty lace-hung bed, were for the daughters of
the rich not for Meg Hildebrand, a poor gentleman's daughter.
The windows were carefully closed, blinded and shuttered. She
unfastened the bolts of the shutters, and folded them back in their
places. She pulled up the blinds and flung wide the windows. The
courtyard itself was in gloom, but it framed a square of sea silver
in moonlight, and the sound of the sea came to her ears. She leant
out into the cool salt air to catch another glimpse of the firmament
full of stars, and had a revelation. The other side of her bedroom
wall was the tower, the tower itself. They were close neighbors, she
and the grisly secret hidden in the tower.
236 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Nov.,
CHAPTER VI.
THE DOVE.
The storm broke in the night with a great screaming of wind and
roaring of the sea. It whistled and shrieked about Meg's window,
tearing loose the blind and sending it streaming and wildly flapping
into the room. The wind had come up from the southeast. The
courtyard was sheltered. Even so the rain that came with the wind,
drenched her as she tried to capture the blind and shut the window.
She understood now why the long ranges of outside windows were
fitted with storm shutters. Castle Eagle sat high in the wind, a-top of
the cliffs, open to the Atlantic. She was not going to sleep through
the storm, for her heart was troubled for her hosts. What a night
for Lord Turloughmore to be on the sea!
Though the room was light and bright, she was suddenly seized
with fear. What evil web were they spinning, those victims of the
cruelty of the Turloughmores long ago before the world had emerged
from its days of darkness? Surely God and not the devil ruled the
storm. He said to the winds, " Be still." The winds were the mes-
sengers of God, leashed by Him, and ready at His command to come
fawning upon Him. Would He remember to-night the need of all
creatures on the sea, or was it that He took His own way with the
world, recovering to Himself the souls He had lent to the world
what way He would? She prayed for all those in peril on the sea.
In the midst of her prayers there came a knocking at her door. She
got up from her knees and opened it, to find old Julia outside, her
gray hair about her shoulders, her teeth chattering with cold.
" The hooker's gone on the rocks," she said. " I daren't tell her
ladyship. You didn't see the foxes for nothing. For the love of
God don't tell her about the foxes. Let her be in the hands of God, not
in the hands of the divil."
" Go back to bed, Julia," Meg said. " It is bitterly cold. You
are dreaming. It is fifty years ago since the hooker was lost. I
don't believe Lord Turloughmore is at sea to-night. He would see
the wind coming and run for shelter."
Julia looked at her in a dazed way.
" I'd be goin' to her ladyship if I was you. She'll want comfort
this sorrowful night," she said. " But for the love of God don't
tell her about the foxes. Let her think she's in the hands of God."
"You'll go back to bed?"
" I'll be lightin' up the fire and puttin' the blankets to it to air.
They'll be wanted to-night surely, if it's only for the dead. Heard
ye ever such a wind, Miss ? "
The screaming of the wind had indeed increased. There was
an incessant rattling of hail and sand against the windows that made
1913.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 237
the din almost deafening. Closely shuttered as the room was, the
carpet was rising in waves under their feet.
" I'll come with you and see you into bed. Be sure the yacht's run
for shelter. You must say your prayers. Remember God is stronger
than the devil."
" I'm not sayin' He isn't strong an' good. He has His own ways.
He left me widout a husband or child in my own age : an' He's dealt
hard wid the Turloughmores. Haven't they wiped it out? They're
good to the poor. Aren't they famous the country over for their
dalin's wid their own people? If all the gentry was like the Turlough-
mores, there'd be little trouble ! The Lord has dealt hard with them,
blessed be His name ! "
" Come, I'll see you into bed."
Meg had been hastily donning some clothing while the old woman
talked.
"You'll go to her. ladyship?"
" When I'm sure you're in bed. Come ! "
She got Julia to her own room and into bed. The din of the storm
was momentarily growing more terrifying. It was added to by some
of the outside shutters, which had become loose and were banging
about in the gale. The noise deafened her. She had a feeling that if
it was to become much greater, she could not endure it. She heaped
all the clothes she could find on to Julia's bed. While she did it,
she was surprised and touched to find her hand caught and kissed by
dry old lips.
" There now, you are quite comfortable," she said. " The storm
must soon spend itself."
" Honey, did ye say ye wor a Hildebran' ? " asked Julia, clutching
Meg's sleeve in her eagerness. " Did ye say ye wor a Hildebran,' or
did I only dhrame it ? "
" I am Margaret Hildebrand. You did not dream it."
" Then ye must have come for good. A Hildebran' couldn't
have come for anything but good to this house. Maybe the Lord
sees it's time to give us the luck an' the blessin' after the years of
affliction."
" Oh, I hope I am come for good ! " cried Meg fervently, and
the tears were in her eyes.
Having left the old woman lying with closed eyes and breathing
quietly, Meg went down through the corridors where the feet fell
soundless always on a deep carpet, although to-night any lesser sound
than the screaming of the wind could hardly be heard. She paused
by Lady Turloughmore's door, her head inclined in the act of listening.
While she stood there, she began to be aware that other people in
the house were about as well as herself. The lights had been turned
on in the corridor. She heard the slamming of the door that led to
238 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Nov.,
the servants' part of the house. Prince suddenly pushed an insinuating
nose into her hand. She turned and saw Lord Erris.
" I was coming to my mother," he said. " She will not sleep
through this storm. You had the same kind thought."
The door opened, and Lady Turloughmore appeared on the thresh-
old, fully dressed.
" Ulick ! " she said, " I thought I heard voices through this wind.
I wasn't sure. The wind is full of voices."
" We met at your door, mother. We both came to see if you
wanted anything."
" Go back to bed, Ulick. Miss Hildebrand will stay with me, if
she will be so kind. There is no sleep possible on such a night. Are
the servants about ? "
" I think so. You had better ring for some tea."
He came into the room, rang the bell, and went out again.
" I have a good son, haven't I ? " Lady Turloughmore asked,
smiling. She was very pale. Her prie-dieu by the fire had a cruci-
fix upon it. Meg felt sure she had been praying.
A dishevelled maid answered the bell, and was told to bring tea
and some coal.
" What an ark this house feels in a storm like this ! " Lady Tur-
loughmore said, looking about the bright room in lamplight and fire-
light. "If only the ark might hold all that one loved to-night!"
" The yacht will have run for shelter somewhere. The storm
has not come suddenly. There have been abundant warnings."
" I am glad you have come to help me through the night. I have
prayed myself quiet; but I have felt that the wind must get into
my head as it does into Julia's. We can do nothing with her in these
winter storms. She seems to go clean off her head."
" I know. She has been with me, and I have got her safely to bed.
I was on my way back to my room when Lord Erris and I met at
your door."
" You were not coming to me then ? "
" I was, as a matter of fact, listening at the door for any move-
ment that should tell me you were awake."
" That was kind. I am so grateful to Lady O'Neill for giving
me you. It was a thousand chances to one against finding a girl
like you. You fit in as I could not have hoped you would. We are
a very solitary pair, Ulick and I, when Lord Turloughmore is away.
He is restless and is often away, often enough to keep my heart in my
mouth. My heart returns for such very short periods to its proper
position," she smiled her faint bright smile, " that if I die suddenly
I think the verdict will be, 'Died through misadventure from always
having her heart in her mouth.' "
Meg did not smile.
1913- ] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 239
" I think superstition the crudest thing in the world," she said.
" Faith is to live in the sun. Superstition is to sit in darkness. Dear
Lady Turloughmore, why do you, living in the sun, choose to sit in the
darkness? "
She blushed for her own temerity as she said it, and an apology
was on her lips.
" If I could only take strong hold on what you say," said Lady
Turloughmore apparently finding nothing amiss. " You seem so sure.
My dear, I was as brave as you once. But superstition ! You know
the history of the Rosses ? "
" I know. I am like the scientist who finds cause and effect
for everything."
" You don't know what it is to see the shadow of the doom,
superstition, whatever you call it, creeping over those you love best.
I was as brave as you. I laughed at the doom when I married my hus-
band. I could not know that it is in their blood to accept and believe
it. I have come to accept and believe it myself. I wish I had had a
household of children. They might have banished the shadows of
which this house is full. My husband loves it and keeps away from it.
My son shuns the society of his kind, being sensitive. We play a
part to each other; but each sees through the other. What do you
mean by cause and effect ? "
" I will tell you a story an anecdote to explain what I mean. A
fortune teller at a bazaar wickedly and foolishly told a certain Mr.
Dick Burke, who is a friend of my people, that he would die within the
year of drowning. Well, everyone laughed, because Dick Burke is as
much at home in the water as on dry land. You might as well
be trying to drown a Newfoundland dog. Well, it happened he was
staying at a French bathing place. There were dangerous currents in
which people were drowned every year. Dick knew all about currents.
There were plenty about Loughfinn. He got into a current one day;
and finding it rather strong for him, let himself go with it a bit, never
doubting that they would see his plight from the shore and launch a
boat. He drifted out. He wasn't at all afraid. He felt that he
could keep himself going in the current till the boat came. They were
always on the lookout for accidents to bathers there. The water
was very warm. He felt quite comfortable, when, suddenly, as though
the sun had gone down behind a great black cloud, the memory came
to him of what the fortune teller had promised him death by drowning
within the year. Terror seized him. The boat was not coming. He
was in the fatal current. He began to struggle. He threw up his
hands. Fine swimmer as he was he'd have drowned to a certainty
if in the nick of time the boat had not arrived. He is married now,
and the father of six children. He is death upon fortune telling,
because it once nearly drowned him."
240 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Nov.,
" I see," Lady Turloughmore said slowly. " You think the doom
comes because the doom is expected. Child, if you could make my
son think so ! I will not speak for his father. He runs into all sorts
of dangers. I don't know if he is fleeing from the fear. It is easy
to be brave when it is not one's life and heart. For nearly three
hundred years not one Lord Turloughmore has died in his bed."
"Did she not care for the doom?" Meg asked herself the ques-
tion, wondering. And if she did care, why should she, beyond the
common human sympathy? She did not give herself away easily.
She loved her father and her own people, and all the dear people
and creatures about Crane's Nest. In another way she loved the
Archduchess and her lovely flock. But she had never been one for
foolish and unconsidered friendships. Yet here was she, who had not
known these Rosses of Turloughmore a week ago, feeling that there
was nothing she would not do to fight their phantoms, to lift from
them the shadow of doom which so long had lain over them. Was
it possible that her world must be dark if the shadow did not lift
from theirs ?
" With your hair behind your ears like that," said Lady Tur-
loughmore, " you look like the St. George of Donatello."
" I wish I might slay some dragons," Meg answered, shyly yet
with a tightening of her lips that made her soft face almost stern.
She had a sudden thought.
" Julia seemed to be comforted," she said, " with the thought that
a Hildebrand was come to the house of the Rosses."
" Is the wind lulling? " asked Lady Turloughmore, listening.
The wind had dropped certainly. It had been dying away since
the storm broke, only to renew itself and spring upon the world
with a greater fury. In the momentary lull something thudded against
the window.
" It is the wild geese," said Lady Turloughmore with a loud cry.
Meg ran to the window and opened it, hoping to shut it again
before another blast of wind. She hardly heard Lady Turloughmore
moaning to herself that the wild geese were crying about the house
as they always did for a death. Everything blew about the room with
the opening of the window, and the lamp went out. Something had
come in, driving against Meg's breast, into her arms, with a soft thud-
ding force. The fire shot up into a flame as she closed the window again,
and picked up the thing which lay on the floor, its wings extended. It
was a pigeon, beaten and battered by the storm, not dead, but spent.
" See," she said, drawing down Lady Turloughmore's hands from
before her eyes. " There are no wild geese. It is a dove. The dove
has flown into the ark."
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
flew Boohs.
THE NEW FRANCE. By Wm. S. Lilly. St. Louis : B. Herder.
$2.25 net.
The purpose of these papers, Mr. Lilly tells us, is " to assist
ingenuous and inquiring minds towards a right judgment upon
New France to help them to discern the true character of the
relations between the revolutionary spirit and religion ; to seize the
real significance of the careers of some representative men; to
appreciate rightly the existing condition, moral and intellectual,
of the Third Republic." In Chapter I. he shows clearly that the
fundamental principles of 1789 are neither great truths nor serv-
iceable fictions, but palpable lies fraught with the most terrible
mischief ; neutralizing what there is of good in the famous Declara-
tion in which they are authoritatively embodied, and rendering it
what Burke pronounced it to be " a sort of institute or digest of
anarchy." He does not deny that there is much in the Declaration
that is unquestionably good; for example, its proclamation of
equality before the law; its statement that government exists for
the benefit of the governed, and that rulers are responsible to the
ruled; its police regulations presenting so favorable a contrast
to the savage criminal jurisprudence which it superseded, and,
lastly, its vindication, as admirable as inoperative, of the sacred-
ness and inviolability of property. But he shows that the whole
declaration is founded on the false principles of Rousseau, as
we find them in the Preamble and the first three articles. They may
be summed up in the two following propositions : First, that the
true conception of mankind is that of a mass of sovereign human
units, by nature free, equal in rights, and virtuous. Second, that
civil society rests upon a compact entered into by these sovereign
units.
As a matter of a fact, man is born in a state of more entire
subjection than any other animal. Again, that men exist in a quite
startling inequality, whether of natural or adventitious endowments,
is one of the things which first force themselves upon the wonder-
ing observation of a child; and, certainly, as we go on in life,
experience does but deepen our apprehension of that inequality, and
of the difference in rights resulting from it, as necessary constit-
uents in the world's order. Not a shred of evidence is adducible
in support of the doctrine of the unalloyed goodness of human na-
ture. It is certainly not true of man as we find him, at his best, in
VOL. xcvm. 16
242 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
any period of the world's history of which we have knowledge, and
under the conditions of life most favorable to the culture and
practice of virtue. The conception of Rousseau as to the contract-
ual nature of civil society is also historically false. There is
no instance on record, in any age, or in any country, of a number
of men saying to one another, " Let us enter into a social contract
and found a state." Civil society is a normal state of men and not
the result of convention.
The principles of 1789 are fatal to liberty. They make the
individual nominally free and a king, but in fact they mean the
unchecked domination of the State. We can see this in the France
of to-day, which still boasts of the principles of 1789. In no
country, not even in Russia, is there less individual freedom. The
state is as ubiquitous and as autocratic as under the worst of
Bourbon or Oriental despots. Nowhere is its hand so heavy upon
the subject in every department of human life. Nowhere is the
negation of the value and the right of personal independence more
absolute, more complete, and more effective.
Chapters II. and III. treat of the French Revolution and the
Catholic Church. Our author gives us a very sad picture of the
evils in Church and State under the old regime. Feudalism, which
had ceased to be a political institution, cumbered the ground as
a civil and social institution. The huge possessions of the nobility
were augmented by profuse pensions, and the money used in their
profligate expenditure was wrung from the underfed and over-
worked poor. The Church being intimately related with that
system, for its prelates were mostly all from the privileged caste,
shared in the popular hatred.
Mr. Lilly describes the origin and progress of the Revolution,
and shows that its supreme end was to eradicate the Catholic religion
from France. The Legislative and Constituent Assemblies set up
a schismatic church, requiring adhesion to it under penalties.
The Convention did not want any church at all. Chaumette,
in November, 1793, set up the mistress of the Printer Momoro as
the goddess of reason in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The next
year Robespierre sent Chaumette to the guillotine, and recommended
the Assembly to recall men to the pure worship of the Eire-
Supreme. At the death of Robespierre, a third religion was in-
vented, called Theophilanthropy, by Haiiy. This sect lasted, in
spite of ridicule, until the decree of the Consuls in October, 1801.
legislated it out of existence.
1913-] NEW BOOKS 243
Mr. Lilly's description of the persecution of the French clergy
is taken from M. Eire's Le Clerge de France pendant la Revolution.
He calls to account Thiers, Mignet, Louis Blanc, Lamartine, and
Michelet for their ignoring or travestying the history of the crusade
against Christianity.
Chapters IV. and V. treat of Fouche and Talleyrand. He
sums up Fouche as
a devout Oratorian; a violent apostle of atheism; a bitter
persecutor of those whose faith he had professed and shared;
a profaner of churches, and steeped in all kinds of sacrilege; a
missionary of Communism ; a murderer not only of his sover-
eign, but of thousands of guiltless people; a multimillionaire
by means of secret speculations, and scarcely avowable profits ;
the creature of Barras and Sieyes, one of whom he betrayed on
the eve, and the other on the morrow, of Brumaire; a Napo-
leonic minister and Duke, and a traitor to the Emperor, and
now Secretary of State to the most Christian king; the hope,
the great resource of capitalists; the friend of dignified eccle-
siastics; the favored guest at aristocratic houses, and the hus-
band of a lady of great personal charms who belonged to one of
the noblest of them.
He was certainly the most vile of all the canaille, who have been
called most unjustly the giants of 1793.
Mr. Lilly's sketch of Talleyrand is the sketch of a grand
seigneur of the ancien regime. A thorough Voltairian, cold,
skeptical and elegant, a man dominated by love of women and the
lust of lucre. His marriage with Mme. Grand was never recog-
nized by the Church, although Napoleon announced in the Moniteur
that the brief of Pius VII. restored Talleyrand to the secular and
lay life. Rome protested in vain against this cheat, but no French
journal was allowed to reproduce the protest.
Chapter VI. treats of Chateaubriand, whom our author styles
a Paladin of the Restoration. He shows how the Genie du Chris-
tianisme brought back into French life and literature what may be
called the Christian note; how it repaired, and set flowing anew,
fountains of emotion, which had been supposed to be ruined for-
ever. No one reads it now except professed men of letters, but it
had a wonderful effect upon the generation for which it was written.
Lilly gives a just tribute to Chateaubriand's unswerving loyalty to
his convictions ; his refusal to sacrifice one jot or tittle of them to
his personal interests; his elevated conception of public duty; the
244
NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
amplitude and the presence of his political vision, while at the
same time admitting the immorality of his private life.
The last chapter discusses the greatest novelist of contemporary
France, Paul Bourget. Mr. Lilly analyzes two of his novels, Le
Fantome and Le Disciple, and shows how their every page is marked
by sagacity and subtlety; by depth of feeling and delicacy of touch;
by intellectual distinction and by wide culture. Bourget has much
in common with Balzac. Both possess the singular faculty of de-
scription by minute delineation of details, which, so to speak, makes
us see with our own eyes what they picture. Both have, in common
that curious gift of fascination which commands the reader's at-
tention in spite of himself. Both have that wonderful psychological
power which enables them to lay bare the innermost secrets of the
human soul. But while Balzac's psychology is that of the seer,
Bourget's is that of the moral anatomist. Balzac is the great in-
quisitor of human nature; Bourget is the accomplished analyist
of human passions.
GRACECHURCH. By John Ayscough. New York : Longmans,
Green & Co. $1.75.
We might say of this book what the author himself says of
his conversion it is the best thing that he ever did. These papers
were not written, as we at first suspected, to embody the story of
the author's conversion to the Catholic Church, although now and
again he records an incident which plainly shows that his heart
was naturally Catholic. He himself writes in his Dedication :
The thread on which these Gracechurch papers are strung
together is stronger than any of consecutive narrative working
towards the climax of a plot, for it is a simple and indestructible
one of love for the dear old place, and the kind, dear people
who live there. It was for the sake of being again in their
quaint company that the small episodes were called up out of
childish and boyish memories: and that is why there is as little
autobiography as possible, and why the total exclusion of any-
thing autobiographical was impossible.
These essays give us a perfect picture of a small, commonplace
English village near the Welsh border. The characters, mostly
women, are drawn to the life. There was plenty of bigotry, which
tolerated the most extreme High Churchism, but could not stomach
the Pope; plenty of snobbery, which prevented one's " mixing with
the shopfolk;" plenty of kindliness, which lavished pots of jam
1913.] NEW BOOKS 245
on Master John, and invited the poor child to play with the
wealthy children of Graceehurch House; plenty of goodness, for
one of his teachers, " though it would have astounded her to hear it,
was in fact cut out for a contemplative nun." Our author has a
happy faculty of seeing, or shall we say inventing, the humorous
side of life. He tells us of the brewer who had retired from the
manufacture of beer to consume it. He writes of Llewelyn " who
proved the absurdity of the dictum that it is not possible to do
absolutely nothing." He speaks of Zerubabel Pott, the small solic-
itous clerk with damp hands and oily skin, who visited Miss Mild-
stone and her five thousand pounds four times a year, and was
thought to propose to her at every visit. He describes the one
thousand nine hundred and forty-seven yellow roses and the one
thousand one hundred and twenty buds on the wall paper, which
an indefatigable old maid painted out with Chinese white first, and
painted in again with crimson to go with the cherries in the
chintz.
Our author occasionally ceases to be reminiscent, and draws
upon his novelist's imagination to give dramatic effect to his nar-
rative. Some of the best stories of this kind in the book are
Miss Snollett's Ring, Matty Kickstone, Counting Handkerchiefs,
and Primpley.
There are many passages worthy of quotation. I will cite
one which tells us what first led our author to consider the claims
of Catholicism!
Honestly I must confess that the first attraction of the
Catholic Church itself lay for me in the glamor that lay around
it as a great, wonderful thing belonging to the old, noble past,
when all the world was gilded with a light since faded from
sea and land. I only mention this because I think it has been
so with many others; that, at first, they drew near with rever-
ent step, to do homage to an incomparable relic, appealing to
them with all the poignant force of pathos and immemorial,
sacred, but monumental beauty: and presently found that
the relic was more, that the Corpo Santo for which they had
brought only wistful sighs and tears was alive; that it spoke
still, and with a living voice a voice still heard in many lands,
still obeyed by folk of many rival aims over all the world,
still wording the same Physician's same prescription for sick
and sorry men, always teaching the One undying hope, never
falling old, because eternal ; a voice that cannot be heard with-
out the perception of irresistible invitation.
246 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
A HOSTING OF HEROES, AND OTHER POEMS. By Eleanor
R. Cox. Dublin : Sealy, Bryers, & Walker.
Some months ago more, indeed, than a penitent reviewer
cares to remember there came to THE CATHOLIC WORLD a very
small volume of verses on Irish themes. Now it might be difficult
for anyone not connected with this office to realize just how many
little volumes, by new poets and on Irish themes, do drift into the
reviewer's hands in the course of a year. And so it chanced that
only very recently were the pages of A Hosting of Heroes critically
opened ; but let it be understood, immediately, they were not quickly
closed again!
A quite uncommon rush of music, a splendid vitality of con-
cept, and a fire of beauty with something of Celtic mystery and
Celtic magic at its heart, confronted the weary reviewer. Here
were the Ulster legends of Cuchulain, the tragic romance of Diar-
muid and Grainne, the dreams of Angus Og, retold with a new
melody and a passion nowise old from the passing centuries. A
fragment from the flight of Grainne and her hero-lover will illus-
trate.
Stars lingered yet in the lap of the night,
Waiting their pleasure and wooing them on,
Yet for a moment they paused in their flight,
Hand touching hand in the sweet-scented dawn.
Lip pressed to lip in a virginal, new
Rapture that sped like white fire down each vein,
While in that Love's first communion they grew
Wise as the Gods are of Bliss and of Pain.
There is a second half of Miss Cox's volume, given over to
lyrics on various themes, all the way from Psyche to the Hudson
Palisades. They have charm always, and delicacy of fashioning;
but they lack the brave inspiration of the Celtic poems which, she
tells us, were the fruit of an Irish visit in 1910.
Some few months back one of our ablest Catholic contempor-
aries (The Rosary Magazine) published an excellent study, by
Eleanor Cox, upon Irish poetry in general. Let us hope she may
continue to speed the work of one Irish poet in particular yet
always and only " as the spirit listeth." For so must the work of
all true poets be achieved.
A Hosting of Heroes is but a slender little book, scarcely more
1913-] NEW BOOKS 247
than half a hundred pages, bound together with much taste and
but slight expense. It should find its way to every lover of Celtic
lore.
PIONEERS OF THE CROSS IN CANADA. By Dean Harris.
St. Louis: B. Herder. $1.50.
In a form that is neither too long, nor too dryly historical for
popular reading, we get the story of the march of Christianity
in Canada, and of the standard bearers of the missionary armies,
in the new volume by Dean Harris, the author of Days and Nights
in the Tropics. Under the title Pioneers of the Cross in Canada,
the author gives us the chronicle of the attempts, repulses, and
achievements of the mission Fathers, Franciscans and Jesuits,
among the Canadian Indians of the seventeenth century. Such a
chronicle is, of course, already in existence in so far as the Jesuit
missionaries are concerned, in the letters, the Relations of the
Jesuits, but in too lengthy a form for ordinary use, and Dean
Harris' volume should prove very serviceable. It deals largely
with the missions to the Hurons, under the heroic Father Jogues
and his heroic companions. A chapter at the end, however, is de-
voted to the coming of the Sulpicians. The subject of the book
is one that would touch with fire the dullest pen, which is not that
of Dean Harris. He has given us descriptions as picturesque as
Carlyle, and tales as vivid.
THE IRISH CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICA'S INDEPEND-
ENCE. By T. H. Maginniss, Jr. Philadelphia: The Doire
Publishing Co. $1.00.
Throughout this interesting volume, Mr. Maginniss denounces
that pernicious falsehood promulgated by pro-English writers, that
America owes her liberty, her benevolent government and even her
prosperity to her English forefathers and her Anglo-Saxon blood.
He shows conclusively that the American people derived their char-
acter more from the Celt than from the Anglo-Saxon. He shows
that more than one-third of the officers, and a large proportion
of the soldiers, of the Continental army in the American Revolu-
tion, were of Irish birth or parentage, and that the Irish were an
important element in American colonial history.
Many Americans are not aware of the following facts, viz.,
that eleven signers of the Declaration of Independence were of
Irish descent; that of the total amounts subscribed to supply the
248 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
Continental army, 315,000, 112,000 were subscribed by members
of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick and the Hibernian Society.
That nineteen generals of the Continental army were Irishmen;
that one hundred and thirty-five Irish names were on the rolls
of the Minute Men of Lexington and Concord; and that two hun-
dred and twenty-eight Irish officers and soldiers fought at the battle
of Bunker Hill.
THE MOTHER OF JESUS IN HOLY SCRIPTURE. Biblical-
Theological Addresses by the Rt. Rev. Dr. Alois Schaefer,
Bishop of Dresden, Saxony. Translated from the second
edition by the Very Rev. Ferdinand Brossart. New York:
Frederick Pustet & Co. $2.00 net.
The substance of this book was delivered in a series of lectures
at the University of Muenster in Westphalia during the winter of
1885 and 1886. They contain a wealth of Scriptural material
concerning the Blessed Virgin under the chapters of The Mother of
God, the Virginity of Mary, Mother of the Redeemer, Mary the
Mediatrix, etc. They were published with the view of offering
a systematic exposition based on an accurate interpretation of the
Scriptural references to the Blessed Virgin. The translator has
done his work well. We are certain it will be appreciated not only
by the Catholic public, but by our non-Catholic brethren, who have
vague and inaccurate notions regarding the place of Mary in the
Divine plan, and the clear testimony given by the Sacred Scriptures
to her many prerogatives.
HOLY LAND AND HOLY WRIT. By Rev. J. T. Durward.
Baraboo, Wisconsin : The Pilgrim Publishing Co. $4.00.
Non-Catholics have done more for Holy Land exploration and
literature than we have. But the most conscientious of them
are often unsatisfactory, because they often sneer at Catholic
dogma, misunderstand Catholic devotion, and set aside without
reason the traditional spots sacred to Catholic sentiment. Hence
the crying need of a book which shall treat the Holy Land from the
standpoint of Catholic faith and tradition.
Father Durward, in the volume before us, has interpreted the
Holy Land for Catholics as William Thompson, over thirty years
ago, interpreted it for non-Catholics in his well-known work,
The Land and the Book. He explains adequately the interrela-
tionship of Palestine and the Bible ; he explains the Catholic's rever-
1913-] NEW BOOKS 249
ence towards the holy places; he gives a clear insight into the
meaning of the Old and New Testaments as interpreted by Catholic
authority and tradition ; he shows plainly how the Holy Land proves
the essential identity of the Catholic faith of to-day with the
Gospel of the Savior.
The book is written in a pleasing style, and the many beautiful
illustrations help greatly in the elucidation of the text.
BODILY HEALTH AND SPIRITUAL VIGOUR. By Wm. J.
Lockington, S.J. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. 90
cents net.
Although the material for Father Lockington's book on Bodily
Health and Spiritual Vigour was selected from lectures given to
members of the Jesuit Order, and although it specifies itself as in-
tended for preachers and teachers, yet one cannot help believing it
to be of great assistance and inspiration to laymen as well. There
are really only four chapters that can apply only to clerics; the
remainder of the treatise will lend itself to general usage. In
beginning his subject, the author discusses the opinions, teachings,
and practice of St. Ignatius with regard to the training of the
body. The Saint considered frailty a sure impediment to entrance
into the Order, looked carefully after the health, exercise, and
leisure of his followers, and, from the military experience of
his earlier days, brought stern and sensible theories to bear upon
their physical welfare. " An unhealthy religious," he is quoted
as saying, " bears much the same relation to the Order of which he
is a member that a badly knit or dislocated bone does to the physical
body."
Next Father Lockington gives us a similar review of the
beliefs of St. Teresa. That most wonderful and most human of
saints, who was distinguished for her common sense and her
humor, as well as for holiness of life and splendid achievements,
had ideas that we fondly believe the product of our own
twentieth century. The interdependence of soul and body, the
efficacy of fresh air and sunshine, the need for hours of relaxation
these are among the so-called modern theories that we find ad-
vanced again and again by St. Teresa. In the matter of mortifica-
tion, moreover, she always advocates obedience and a sane re-
straint. " Never forget," she cautions, " that mortification should
serve for spiritual advancement only. Sleep well, eat well. It
is infinitely more pleasing to God to see a convent of quiet and
250 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
healthy children who do what they are told, than a mob of hys-
terical young women who fancy themselves privileged."
Father Lockington, in the course of his treatise, considers
the moral effects of body training, and the diseases, or at best the
deficiencies, that result from its neglect. He devotes a chapter to
food, its quantity and quality, and the varieties suited to men of
different pursuits. Then in eight or nine chapters he takes up the
subject of exercise, giving detailed and illustrated directions for
many kinds, and stating their purposes and results.
The book will prove of especial interest to teachers, both lay
and clerical. It deserves the heartiest recommendation.
SOCIAL RENEWAL. By George Sandeman. London : William
Heineman.
There is but one way in which Mr. Sandeman's volume might
be satisfactorily presented to our readers, namely, by reprinting it;
beyond question, as has already been said by a distinguished writer,
the book would speak for itself in THE CATHOLIC WORLD, or
anywhere. By way of substitution for that adequate but impossible
kind of review, we shall begin with saying that this small book
is full of concentrated, practical wisdom, is very pertinent in its
bearing on present needs, and rather startles one by the success
with which it focusses light upon commonly discussed social ques-
tions. One is almost troubled at the simplicity and the obvious
finality of its proposed means of social renewal nothing more nor
less than general and consistent Christianity.
This comment sounds very trite indeed, a fact which goes to
confirm what was said above about the advisability of allowing the
book to speak for itself. There is no question, however, that its
pages do wonderfully demonstrate certain truths that we have all
been aware of previously in a cloudy sort of way, and that it leaves
us convinced men will be only tinkering at the problem of social
readjustment until they can persuade themselves and other men to
think and act like Christians.
To illustrate the fashion in which the author conceives and
exposes his subject, we shall set down here a few extracts :
The ways in which we go wrong are many and specious
It is a mistake to recognize only immediate causes and immediate
effects The reformers accept the insecurity of in-
dustry as if it were ultimate and without any cause behind
it, and proceed to alleviate its effects The reformers, with
1913.] NEW BOOKS 251
the best intentions, alleviate distress at the cost of confirming
the conditions of distress
It is a mistake to float with the current of opinion of our
time or province Now the modern world (that is to say,
the general consent of well-meaning, instructed and respectable
people) considers that theoretic errors of that kind, and con-
sequently mistaken policies, have been inevitable in the past;
but it considers also that its own views and methods of to-day
are free from any such nefarious illusions. Both of these as-
sumptions are, however, unfounded. Its present methods are as
false and baneful as any in the past; but neither they nor any
which have preceded them have been at all inevitable
It is a mistake to put the wrong thing first Let us here
take as an example the place which is given to the industrial
system That system, which is largely the creation of
avarice and hardness of heart, is not yet four generations old,
and is plainly going to its ruin ; yet we defer to it as though it
went back to Abraham, and would go forward to the consum-
mation of the world. Industry has got out of hand and
yet we continue to put it first. Instead of subordinating indus-
try to the needs of mankind, and to the needs of social cohesion,
we continue to break down social bonds, and to violate the rights
of human beings in order to serve the ends of industry.
It is a mistake to take a partial view of the social question
It is futile to imagine that the troubles of our country
are due to this or that particular cause. It is false to ascribe
them principally to slackness of trade; or to foreign competi-
tion; or to monopoly of land; or to want of education; or to
marriages of the weak in body or mind; or to lack of good
houses; or to excessive drinking; or to any other partial cause
whatsoever. And in the same way it is a delusion to suppose
that they can be removed, or even considerably alleviated, by
any partial measure whatsoever, whether of legislation or of
voluntary effort and organization
It is a mistake to take a low or narrow view of human
beings and their needs They need a long way more
than comfort and respectability ; more than economic security,
more than amusement. Comfort, hygiene, leisure, and intellect-
uality, such as constitute the senile ideal of the socialist, might
conceivably be achieved for all, and yet the state of the people
be more miserable than it has ever been. They need the things
of youth far more than they need these senile things. They
need labor, fatigue, the open air, the country, sport, adventure,
jollity. They need hardness and the preparation for war.
They need work in which they can take a pride, institutions in
J5-' NEIV BOOKS [Nov.,
which they can lose themselves altogether, services in which
it is worth while to suffer and to die. They need strong co-
hesion with many, home and hospitality, to love and to be
loved. They need the color and the drama of life. They need
responsibility, obedience, and command, swift choices, the play
of manhood. They need hope and liberty. In a word, they
need life Shall we not err greatly if our social reforms
have principally the effect of diminishing the life of the people ?
If, for instance, comfort should be assured at the cost of liberty?
It is necessary, the author argues, to realize that society is an
affair of nature, and not of convenience or arrangement. It is
humanity itself, and it is much more than a number of individuals,
as a tower is more than a heap of stones. This suggests methods
of reform different from those which are in common use to-day. It
suggests that we must work with nature, instead of elaborating
artificial expedients in disregard of her. And it leads us step by
step to the conclusion that the best way in which the individual
can consistently work for the reform of society is by the conscien-
tious performance of the duties involved in his station of life. The
force making for cohesion in the social structure is good will, and
this is in effect real old-fashioned charity, unselfish regard for the
welfare of our neighbor.
To serve rather than seek to be served, to look upon labor
with respect, to foster simplicity of life in different chapters the
author indicates how these are essential in any attempt at social
renewal. And his conclusions are summed up in the affirmation
that the utter failure of attempts thus far made, is due to the fact
that we have failed to realize charity throughout the whole texture
of life. Obviously he puts little hope in anything but Christianity
to bring about such a consummation.
THE DOMINICAN ORDER AND CONVOCATION. A Study of
the Growth of Representation in the Church during the Thir-
teenth Century. By Ernest Barker, M.A. New York: Ox-
ford University Press. $1.00 net.
Mr. Barker in his preface declares that he owes a large debt
of gratitude to an old pupil of his, the Dominican Father Bede
Jarrett. He says : " When we were once discussing together the
development of representation, and I was urging the point I have
urged here, that the Church supplied both the idea of representation
and its rules of procedure, he suggested to me the influence of his
1913.] AT^ BOOKS 253
own Order must have been considerable within the Church, and he
gave me my first knowledge of the organization of his Order."
The Church of the thirteenth century shows a marked develop-
ment of the principle and practice of representation. Representa-
tives appear in all the three great Councils of the Church then held.
Instead of the provincial synods being composed of bishops and
abbots as formerly, representatives, first of the cathedral clergy,
and then in England of the diocesan clergy, begin to appear. In
the same century representation begins also to appear in the State.
A representative parliament comes into being about the middle of
the century, and is fully grown at its end. In the present volume
the author does not seek to trace the history of the various phases
of this movement, but confines his research to an account of
the organization of the Dominican Order which offers the most
finished model of representative institutions, and to a study of
that development of the provincial synod in England which led to
the inclusion of clerical proctors. He discusses the possible eccle-
siastical sources of Dominican organization in the Hospitalers,
the Templars, and the Franciscans, and the possible secular sources
in the Spanish Cortes, and the town representation in Languedoc
of the twelfth century. He shows how the English synod devel-
oped on somewhat different lines from those of other countries,
and how far the composition and procedure of that synod acted as
a model or precedent for the English Parliament. He says in con-
clusion : " The study of the institutional development of the Middle
Ages is an organic whole. We cannot isolate Church and State;
not only do they develop side by side, but they intersect in their
development."
COMPENDIUM THEOLOGIZE DOGMATICS. Auctore Chris-
tiano Pesch, SJ. Tomus I. De Christo Legato Divino
De Ecclesia Christi De Fontibus Theologicis. St. Louis:
B. Herder. $1.50.
Father Pesch, whose nine volumes of Pralectiones Dogmatics
are well known, has, he tells us in his preface, yielded to the en-
treaties of his friends by publishing a compendium of dogmatic
theology in four small volumes. The first volume treats of Reve-
lation, Jesus Christ, the Church, and de locis. He uses the scholas-
tic method throughout, though we are glad to see that he does not
neglect to set forth the problems and results of positive theology.
He writes : " The scholastic method of treatment which I have
254 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
adopted will certainly displease all those who detest the scholastic
method of defining, proving, and discussing. I have, therefore, not
written for them, but for the benefit of those who think that a
method used for so many centuries may be most helpful to-day in
the study of dogmatic theology." We see no reason for such
warmth. The scholastic method is certainly a good method, but
not the only one. The good teacher will use every possible method,
old or new, to bring home the truths of the faith to the minds of
his pupils.
LACORDAIRE. By Count d'Haussonville. Translated by A. W.
Evans. St. Louis: B. Herder. $1.00.
In his preface the author gives three reasons why the life of
Lacordaire should be of interest. First, that he was the greatest
pulpit orator France ever produced with the exception of Bossuet;
then the ideal character of the man himself, and, finally, as one of
the precursors and authors of that Catholic renaissance of which
our contemporaries to-day are the surprised witnesses. Indeed,
among all the questions that engage and divide us to-day, we will
scarcely find one that was not debated and anticipated by Lacor-
daire.
Those who have read the Abbe Chocarne's Inner Life of
Lacordaire, or Foisset's biography, will discover little that is new
in the present volume. We have a brief sketch of Lacordaire's
childhood and youth; his seminary days; the story of the Avenir
and his rupture with Lamennais; the Stanislas lectures, and the
Sermons of Notre Dame; and the restoration of the Order of St.
Dominic in France.
Lacordaire's letters to Montalembert at the time of the Avenir
difficulty show an almost incredible ardor; they are among the
finest and most touching that the love of souls has ever inspired.
In 1845 Lacordaire was the Lenten preacher at Lyons. There,
where religious ardor has always shown itself so keen, his success
outstripped anything he had obtained before. It was a veritable
delirium. One evening, when his sermon had called forth par-
ticular enthusiasm, he did not appear at dinner. Someone went
to look for him, and found him pale and in tears at the foot of
a crucifix. "What is the matter, Father?" he asked. "I am
afraid," was the answer. " Afraid of what? " " Of success," he
replied. Many a time he prepared for his sermon by scourging
himself in the privacy of his cell.
1913-] A^* 7 BOOKS 255
Harsh to himself, he was always gentle to others. He knew
how to show to weak souls the consideration they needed, and to
lead them along easy paths. Still direction, properly so-called, did
not hold the principal place in his life, which was rather militant
and aggressive. Some of his enemies have said that he never
converted anybody, but we know, on the contrary, that he influenced
countless souls for God, both clerical and lay. It was Lacordaire's
winning personality that won Father Jandel to the Dominican
Order, and led, therefore, indirectly to its great reform and revival
in the nineteenth century.
He was indefatigable in writing letters. Every day he devoted
several hours to them. At least eight volumes of his letters have
been published. He unburdens himself with quite a filial confidence
to that illustrious convert, Madame Swetchine; he speaks of the
things of God to his penitent, the Baroness de Frailly; he writes
vigorous letters to the Bishop of Paris, Monsignor de Quelen, to
prove the hollo wness of the complaints that had been made against
his preaching; he writes most touching letters to Lamennais.
As a pulpit orator, Lacordaire was in the highest degree an
improvisator. Not that he ever dared enter the pulpit of Notre
Dame without having prepared his discourse, but his preparation
was the fruit of his meditations the evening before, and sometimes
of that very morning. From these meditations nothing written
ever resulted, except a very short sketch. The one written sermon
that he wrote out word for word was almost a perfect failure.
His plan alone was determined upon in advance, but only in its broad
outlines, never in detail. He always trusted to the inspiration of
the moment for the literary form. He was often a bit rhetorical;
his metaphors were occasionally incoherent, and he took pleasure
in using doubtful and dangerous arguments. Still withal no one
appealed as he did to the people of Paris; no one ever seemed to
dive down so deeply into the hearts of his hearers. We cannot
judge him by the written records of his sermons, which are not
in the slightest degree remarkable. The translation is well done.
AN OUTLINE OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT SINCE KANT. By
Edward Caldwell Moore, Parkman Professor of Theology
in Harvard University. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons.
75 cents net.
This volume might equally well have been styled the History of
Rationalism since Kant. We wondered at first why certain names
256 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
were entirely ignored, or at best merely given a passing notice.
The author gives us the explanation on p. 212. He writes:
In so far as the Oxford Movement or the Catholic revival
was a movement of life, ecclesiastical, social, and political as
well, its history falls outside the purpose of this book. We
proposed to deal with the history of thought. Reactionary
movements have frequently got on without much thought. They
have left little deposit of their own in the realm of ideas.
Their avowed principle has been that of recurrence to that
which has already been thought, of fidelity to ideas which have
long prevailed. This is the reason why the conservatives have
not a large place in such a sketch as this. It is not that their
writings have not often been full of high learning and of the
subtlest of reasoning. It is only that the ideas about which they
reason do not belong to the history of the nineteenth century.
They belong, on the earnest contention of the conservatives
themselves those of Protestants to the history of the Ref-
ormation, and of Catholics, both Anglican (sic.) and Roman,
to the history of the early or mediaeval Church.
Our author evidently does not possess the mental acumen neces-
sary to understand Cardinal Newman's Grammar of Assent. For
he says of it : " The whole book is pervaded by the intensest philo-
sophical skepticism. Skepticism supplies its motives, determines
its problems, necessitates its distinctions, rules over the succession
and gradation of its arguments." Admirers of Newman will open
their eyes when they read the astounding statement, put out with all
the dogmatic assertiveness which characterizes our author's every
utterance : " The whole aim of the work is to draw religion, and
the proofs of it, from the region of reason into the realm of con-
science and imagination, where the arguments which reign may
satisfy personal experience without alleging objective validity or
being able to bear the criticism which tests it."
We thought the words, " pervaded by the intensest philosoph-
ical skepticism," had a very familiar ring. On referring to Ward's
Life of Cardinal Newman, we read in a footnote to p. 305 of Vol.
II. the self-same words taken from an article of Dr. Fairbairn in
the Contemporary Review, May, 1885. Cardinal Newman an-
swered this false accusation in the October number of the same
magazine, and Dr. William Barry also took up the cudgels on his
behalf.
Again Mr. Moore wonders " if Newman found in the infallible
1913-] NEW BOOKS 257
Church the peace which he so earnestly sought." There is no occa-
sion for him to wonder, unless he questions the words of the
Cardinal himself.
The book as a whole is superficial, incomplete, and full of
improved ipse dixits. The writer seems to realize this himself,
for he says in a prefatory note : " It is to be hoped that this
book may serve as an outline for a larger work, in which the
judgments here expressed may be supported in detail."
NEW GRANGE (BRUGH NA BOINNE) AND OTHER INCISED
TUMULI IN IRELAND. By George Coffey, Keeper of Irish
Antiquities in the National Museum, Dublin. Dublin : Hodges,
Figgis & Co. 6 s. net.
George Coffey, the Curator of Irish Antiquities in the National
Museum of Dublin, has written an accurate account of his explora-
tions of various pre-Christian tombs and cemeteries in Ireland.
Five miles west of Drogheda, and thence extending about three
miles along the northern bank of the Boyne towards Slane, are
three tumuli at Dowth, Knowth, and New Grange which have
attracted the attention of archaeologists ever since they were first
noticed in 1699. These tumuli are grouped in cemeteries, and im-
ply a more or less settled state of society ; they appear to have been
respected till the coming of the Danes who plundered them. After
mentioning the previous accounts of former antiquaries, Lhwyd
(1699), Molyneux (1725), and Pownall (1770), and citing all the
references to the Brugh in the ancient literature of Ireland, the
author discusses the origin and the meaning of the incised mark-
ings on the various stones that remain. The most frequent mark-
ings are the lozenge and the spiral. He compares them with the
spirals found in the shaft-graves of Mycense; on the pottery of
Egypt, Crete, and Cyprus; on the bronze sword-hilts of Scandi-
navia, etc. They are supposed to have some reference to the sun
worship, which was the most widely-spread cult in prehistoric
Europe, but this is mere conjecture. The author also treats briefly
the markings on other tumuli at Knockmany, Seskilgreen, and
Clover Hill.
It may be safely held that the spiral reached the Baltic first,
whether by sea or land, and then filtered down by the north of
Scotland to Ireland, where it made its most permanent lodgment.
An adventurous seafaring population developed early about the is-
lands of the Baltic, and formed a rival focus to the yEgean in the
VOL. xcvm. 17
258 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
early Bronze Age. This population probably, as in later times,
came down upon the Scotch and Irish coasts in small parties,
seeking objects by trade or raid, and thus possibly met adven-
turers from the Mediterranean. The absence of the spiral on
metal objects in Ireland proves its entrance there in an early period
of the Bronze Age.
THE GERMAN CENTRE PARTY. By M. Erzberger. Amster-
dam, Holland : International Catholic Publishing Co. 50
cents.
This interesting brochure describes the origin of the Centre
Party of Germany; its programme; its political work; its financial
policy; its relation to Church politics; its activity in the field of
economics, and its method of organization. In view of the fact
that our American papers continually insist upon the German
Centre Party being considered a Catholic party, it may be well
to quote Windthorst's words on this very subject:
The Centre Party to which I belong is not a confessional
one. Its programme is public. We have always admitted every-
one who has subscribed to it, and we still welcome all those who
admit its principles, no matter what religion they profess. If as
a matter of fact the fundamental principles of government,
which my friends and I think the right ones, find a greater
number of Catholic adherents than of others, the reason is that
Catholics in dealing with political questions start from more
humane premises than their opponents. It is, however, abso-
lutely untrue that the principles of the Centre Party are only
approved of by Catholics. There is a very large number of
Protestants, far larger than you may believe, who are strongly
in favor of these principles, and time will show that they have
not been mistaken.
The pamphlet is full of misprints and grammatical mistakes.
A LITTLE SISTER. From the French of the Rev. M. Landrieux,
V.G., of Rheiins, by L. L. Yorke Smith. St. Louis: B.
Herder. $1.50.
Is there a single need of her children for which their tender
Mother the Church has not provided ? Through the ages the sick,
the wounded, a-nd the dying; the foundling, the orphan, and the aged;
the outcast, the abandoned, and the leper; the prisoner, the captive,
and the galley slave have each felt her sweet influence; but it has
IQI3-] W^ BOOKS 259
been reserved for our own day to witness that loving efflorescence of
her charity, the Little Sisters of the Assumption, or as the for-
mula of their dedication itself describes them, " sick nurses to the
poor in their own homes."
This book, crowned by the French Academy, purports to be
more than the life of Sister Lucie; it is a detailed and realistic
picture of what a Little Sister should be. Born in 1877, Sister
Lucie joined the Congregation in 1895, and closed her short life in
1897, being permitted to make her vows on her deathbed. But the
ardor which she evinced during the period of her religious train-
ing bore rich fruit, and anyone perusing this book will quickly
perceive that she indeed fulfilled a long course in the few days
of earthly life granted to her. If, however, she was not permitted
to labor in her chosen apostleship, her saintly life will be the
seed of numerous vocations, for the young and the ardent will be
fired with zeal wherever this devoted and beautiful soul becomes
known. The charming and exquisite simplicity with which the
" Little Sisters " perform their acts of heroic charity fascinates the
reader, while the experiences recounted on page 117 and the fol-
lowing read like those from the Lives of the Saints. But so hidden
are these " Apostle Sisters " that not even the family name of
Mile. Lucie is given she is but one of many whose lives are
hidden with Christ in God.
DAILY PRAISE. By Olive Katharine Parr. New York: Ben-
ziger Brothers. 30 cents net.
Father Faber in All for Jesus has some beautiful words about
praise, which shame our selfish souls at times. The daily needs,
the daily sins, compel our petitions, our cry for mercy, but alas ! we
too often, like the thankless nine, take our gifts and go our ways,
forgetting the thanksgiving due, and much more the duty of
praise, which is in truth sharing the angels' song. We trust this
little book will help to swell the earthly chorus which the Angel
of Prayer bears ever to the throne of God.
THE SPIRIT OF OUR LADY'S LITANY. By Abbot Smith,
O.S.B. The Abbey Press, Ampleforth Abbey, Malton, York-
shire, England. I s.
It is told of an aged sacristan of our Lady of Loretto that
while lighting the candles around her shrine, his tender devotion
found vent in all the loving titles he could think of : " Holy Mother,
26o NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
Clement Lady, Faithful Virgin," he cried, while the faithful who
knelt around responded : " Ora Pro Nobis." And so Her Litany
grew till the Church approved of it as one of her authorized devo-
tions. And here we have short considerations and devout collo-
quies on these same titles, suitable for our Mother's Month of May,
as well as other times, to renew our devotion towards the Mother
of God.
GOOD FRIDAY TO EASTER SUNDAY. By Rev. Robert Kane,
S. J. New York : Longmans, Green & Co. 90 cents net.
Dedicated to those who mourn, these Sermons on the Seven
Words on the Cross, and the Dolors of Mary, uplift the heart of
the suffering and sorrowful to their great refuge and comfort.
As they realize the things that Christ and His Mother suffered,
their hearts will re-echo our Lord's own words : " Ought not Christ
to have suffered these things and so to enter into His glory,"
and strength and courage will flow into their lacerated souls. The
volume is suitable for spiritual reading during the last weeks of
Lent, both for those who weep on their own account and for those
who would fain bear Christ company during these sorrowful days.
THE MANTILLA. By Richard Aumerle. St. Louis : B. Herder.
80 cents.
A story of the Cuban Revolution, in which a young American
hero manifests a large capacity for getting into trouble, and an
almost phenomenal luck for getting out. After a foolish college
boy's prank, visited with an ill-considered and hasty expulsion, he
joins a squad of strike-breakers bound for Havana, where he
meets the half-Irish, half- Spanish heroine, and aids her in rescuing
her father from the consequences of his participation in the plots
of the insurrectos. There are loose ends in the story, the Eng-
lish is journalistic and careless, while some constructions are odd,
as : " Too, he had escaped," and " Too, she had expected." The
hero is most natural in the Midnight Mass scene, where he shows
himself to be, first of all, a simple earnest Catholic intent on fulfill-
ing his duty as such.
^PHE old school has not yet surrendered entirely to the new. We
have with us to-day occasional samples of the old type of the
melodramatic and sentimental novel, and for it much may be said.
It holds our interest steadily, adheres to the conventional ideas
I9I3-] NEW BOOKS 261
of morality and justice, which are undoubtedly those of true phil-
osophy, and remains after all a better example of the story-teller's
art than its more pretentious third cousins, the problem or the
character novels. Of this type is Corinne of Corr all's Bluff, by
Marion Miller Knowles. (Melbourne: Wm. P. Linehan. 2 s.
6 d. ) The scene is laid for the most part in Australia, and the plot
that of the good old-fashioned love-story, with the pleasure of an
unexpected ending. The author, who, by the way, is a Catholic,
has succeeded in retaining all the merits with but few of the faults
of sentimental fiction.
117 E take pleasure in calling the attention of school directors and
teachers to the series of eight volumes entitled Standard
Catholic Readers by Grades. The work is edited by Mary E.
Doyle, and published by The American Book Company. It covers
the entire eight years. The books are intelligently graded, and the
selections made with judgment and taste. The volumes are well
printed, and beautifully illustrated.
ANE of the most useful of the new office books published since
^' the revised order of the divine office became obligatory upon
clerics, is the Diurnale Parvum, published by Fr. Pustet & Co.
The volume may be used for Lauds and all the Hours on almost all
the days of the year. It is accurately composed; of small size;
fairly large type, and excellently printed and bound. The price is
$1.25.
FOREIGN PUBLICATIONS.
Les Entravees, by Noel Frances (Paris: Bloud et Cie). A charming story
which brings out clearly the Catholic principles involved in the feminist
movement. Due emphasis is laid upon the debt of womankind to the teach-
ings of the Gospel.
Man Filleul au Jardin d'Enfants Comment II s'eleve, by Felix Klein.
(Paris: Librairie Armand Colin. 3frs. 50.) In his second volume on kin-
dergarten work, the Abbe Klein tells us of the principles of education which
are being applied in the best French schools. He treats in detail of the train-
ing of the imagination, the educative value of story-telling and the games
the children play; the nature of internal discipline; the use of rewards and
punishments; the limits of authority; the fostering of self-activity, etc. A
final chapter calls upon all mothers to acquaint themselves with the results
of the best kindergarten training, so that the old-fashioned prejudice against
them will soon disappear. There is nothing in this treatise that we did
not know before, but it is written in so charming a style that we were well
rewarded for reading every word. We noticed a few misprints, pp. x, 42,
and 198.
262 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
La Vocation Ecclesiastique, by Abbe Henri Le Camus. (Paris: Pierre
Tequi. I fr.) This little brochure is written to urge priests to do their
utmost to foster priestly vocations in France. The various chapters treat
of the nature and evidences of vocation ; the method of developing vocations ;
the duties of a seminarian in summer time, etc. The appendices contain a
brief account of the famous controversy waged by the Abbe Lahitton on the
nature of priestly vocation, and the regulations issued lately by the Holy
See for the seminaries of Italy.
Les Blasts, by Marcel Rogniat. (Paris: Eugene Figuiere et Cit. sfrs. 50.)
This novel is a picture of modern degeneracy which only a Frenchman of
Zola's school could write. No American publisher would dare translate it.
Commentarii in Psalmos, auctore Josepho Knabenbauer, SJ. (Paris: P.
Lethielleux. io/ry.) Father Knabenbauer, who died last November, was one
of the most generous contributors to the Cursus Sacra Scripture?, which the
German Jesuits have been publishing the past thirty years. He wrote on the
Major and Minor Prophets, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiasticus, and Machabees. His
last work, a commentary of the Psalms, has been published since his death,
Father Hagen, S.J., seeing it through the press. It does not deal with intro-
ductory questions as a rule, most of his readers having in their hands The
Special Introduction to the Old Testament, the well-known work of his con-
frere, Father Comely. He does, however, discuss the value of the titles of many
of the Psalms, and the nature of the metrical system used by the Jews.
The style of the book is most labored and obscure, although one is ready to
pardon this in a book which shows so great a grasp of ancient and modern
commentators. Now that the Psalter is given its rightful place in the daily
office, the study of the Psalms becomes all the more imperative.
Hors de I'Eglise pas de Salut, by J. V. Bainvel. (Paris: G. Beauchesne.
o/r. 75.) This is a scholarly little brochure by the Abbe Bainvel on the
axiom "Outside the Church no Salvation." The learned professor of the Catholic
Institute of Paris discusses in turn the various explanations given by Catholic
theologians of this dogma. He rejects as inadequate and false the theories
based on the distinction drawn between the body and soul of the Church,
the visible and invisible Church, and the necessity of means and precept. He
declares : " One must indeed belong to the Church in order to be saved ;
it is not necessary, however, to belong to it in fact, re, but one may belong
to it in desire, voto. Such a one believes all the truths he knows, and wishes
sincerely to know God's will and to fulfill it. He, therefore, implicitly desires
to belong to the body of the Church, and would do so at once if he were
aware of her claims. God alone sees the heart, and can alone judge whether the
man outside the Church's fold possesses that combination of faith and charity
which suffices for salvation.
Initiatives Feminines, by Max Turmann. (Paris: Librairie Lecoffre. 3frs.
50.) In this volume Max Turmann, the well-known professor of the University
of Fribourg, gives us a complete and accurate account of the origin and de-
velopment of the feminist movement, particularly in France. He distinguishes
carefully revolutionary and anti-Christian feminism from the political, eco-
nomic, and legal demands which Christian women are everywhere insisting
upon. Most of the book, which has now reached a fifth edition, deals with the
activities of Catholic women in France, Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland.
He describes the schools of household management, the cooperative societies,
the purchasers' leagues, the founding of working-girls' homes, restaurants,
nurseries, and dispensaries, the international society against the white slave
traffic, etc. This book deserves an English translation.
1913-] NEW BOOKS 263
Vers la Vie pleine, by Aclrienne Goutay. (Paris: Pierre Tequi. 3frs. 50.)
This book consists entirely of extracts from the works of the Abbe Gratry.
The chief volumes uoted are his Commentary on the Gospel of St. Matthew,
Souvenirs of My Youth, The Knowledge of God, and The Philosophy of the
Credo. The author has compiled a most excellent book of spiritual reading,
although we are confident it will appeal only to an elite few.
Nord-Sud, by Rene Bazin. (Paris: Calmann-Levy.) The travelogues of
Rene Bazin are always a delight. Those of us who have read his sketches of
Italy, Spain, Sicily, and France will read with pleasure this account of his
late visits to the United States, Canada, England, and Norway. He gives us
brief sketches of New York and Washington; of Montreal, Quebec, and the
homes of some of the wealthy habitants; of life on a large English estate;
of Corsican devotion in Holy Week, and of the rugged scenery of the Norway
coast. He is always kindly in his appreciations, always the artist in his
descriptions, whether of land or sea or mountain, always Catholic to the core.
Les Sept Sacraments de I'Eglise, by A. D. Sertillanges. (Paris: P.
Lethielleux. i/r.) The well-known professor of the Catholic Institute of
Paris has written a popular little volume on the Sacraments. Its aim is to show
how the supernatural life is given us by our Savior's institution, and to answer
in a brief way the common objections of the day. We are glad to see that
some of the best scholars in France to-day are devoting themselves to the writing
of popular manuals for the people.
Le Mystere de la Tres Sainte Trinite, by Edouard Hugon, O.P. (Paris:
Pierre Tequi. sfrs. 50.) This is a complete treatise on the Blessed Trinity.
The author discusses in turn the proofs from Scripture, the teaching of the
Church, the various heresies, and the province of the reason in the study of the
mysteries of Christianity. We know of no better volume on the subject in the
vernacular.
Pages d'Art Chretien, by Abel Fabre. Three volumes, with two hundred
and nine illustrations. In these three volumes, M. Fabre gives us a brief
sketch of Christian art from the days of the catacombs. Volume I. treats of
Christian iconography, viz., the images of Christ, the Crucifix, the Madonnas,
the Magi ; Volume II. of religious painting, viz., from Giotto to Raphael, Fra
Angelico, the Madonnas of Raphael, Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel, the
legend of St. Ursula by Memling and Carpaccio ; Volume III. of Gothic Archi-
tecture, viz., Notre Dame of Paris, St. Peter's of Rome, Neo-Gothic, Southern
Gothic, etc.
L'Unite' de I'Eglise et le Schisme Grec, by M. 1'Abbe Joseph Bousquet.
(Paris: G. Beauchesne. 4frs.) The late Vice-Rector of the Catholic In-
stitute of Paris delivered these lectures during the winter of 1912. In them
he traces the origins of the Greek schism, and shows how it was effected through
the ambition of the patriarchs of Constantinople, the constant interference of the
Eastern emperors in matters of faith, and the bitter hatred of East and West
fostered by the French alliance with the Papacy, and the crimes of the am-
bitious crusaders. The book is remarkable for its kindly tone, and its
absolute fairness. He discusses the possibility of reunion, and though by no
means ignoring the difficulties in the way, is hopeful for the future.
foreign iperiobicais.
Where Are We in Pentatenchal Criticism? By Rev. Hugh
Pope, O.P. The decision of the Biblical Commission in 1907 on
the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, did not define the Mosaic
authorship, but merely decided that the contrary was not proven.
It allowed the claim that Moses may have used documents, and
that there may be in the Pentateuch portions posterior to Moses.
But what does "higher criticism " do? It attempts, upon the basis
of the different names applied to the Deity, to distinguish the dif-
ferent documents in the Pentateuch, and to date them. It must
depend for this on " lower " or textual criticism. But " higher "
critics argue solely from the Massoretic Hebrew text, of which the
oldest existing manuscript dates from only the tenth century.
This text is the result of a revision or series of revisions based
upon principles of which we are ignorant, and the Septuagint man-
uscripts prove the existence in the two centuries before Christ of a
Hebrew text current in Egypt very different from the present one.
The same situation obtained when St. Jerome made his careful
translation from the Hebrew at the close of the fourth century of
our era. How do we know but that the Hebrew scribes from the
Restoration downwards did not " edit " the text of the Law, as the
Massoretes of the Christian era " edited " the text to suit their own
purposes ? We know that they " edited " the Psalter. At any rate,
valid higher criticism cannot neglect the Septuagint and the Vulgate.
The Irish Theological Quarterly, October.
A Great French Bishop. By F. Delerne. Monsignor Du-
pont des Loges, Bishop of Metz from 1843 to 1886, was, with Car-
dinals Pie, Guibert, and Lavigerie, Monsignor Dupanloup and Mon-
signor Freppel, one of the ornaments of the French hierarchy of the
last century. He prevented the fatal Guizot education proposal of
1844, and hailed with joy the law of 1850, from which so many
blessings to Catholic schools later came. He unmasked the Em-
peror's alliance with Cavour, which led to the loss of the Papal
States; he sounded the alarm against the atheistic and Masonic
Education League, founded by Jean Mace in 1866. In the war
with Germany, Monsignor des Loges showed himself ever the pa-
triot; in later distresses the pastor and tender friend. He ad-
vised the German Emperor to abandon the Kulturkampf and to
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 265
come to terms with Leo XIII. Revue Clerge Frangais, Sep-
tember 15.
Sociological Morality in the Primary School. By Leon Desers.
M. Emile Durkheim, in his new course at the Sorbonne, announces
that he will treat of the teaching of the new sociological morality in
the primary school. His earliest productions in 1892 were received
with scorn, but leaped into favor as " scientific " after the Dreyfus
affair united former opponents in a common hatred of Catholic tra-
ditions. For M. Durkheim God is only society transfigured, and
the moral law bids us do what society is doing, in a word, what
is legal. It is not difficult to foresee the results if we preach
to primary school children to do what they see being done around
them. For their elders society can, if it will, make legal, and,
therefore, moral, drunkenness, gambling, and all sins of the flesh.
Revue Pratique d'Apologetique, October i.
German Catholic Congress. By Joseph Boubee. August i /th
to 2 ist marked the Sixtieth General Assembly of Catholics at Metz,
Germany. For the convenience of those attending from the Alsa-
tian-Lorraine State, a special section was set aside where the
French language was spoken entirely. The chief presiding officer
was Prince Aloys de Loewenstein. The Holy Father sent a special
letter, which was read to his assembled children. In the past these
Congresses have been dedicated to men like Ketteler, Windthorst,
foremost in the van fighting for their beloved faith, and this year
it was dedicated to Kolping, the Father of Workers. The first and
chief address was delivered by the Bishop of Spires, on the liberty
granted to the Church by Constantine. The Bishop contrasted it
with conditions existing in Germany to-day under what remains
of the Kulturkampf the prohibiting of the Jesuits, Lazarists and
Madames of the Sacred Heart from performing their special work
in the empire.
Count Frederic de Galen, Deputy at the Reichstag, also de-
livered a stirring address against this law of exception. Monsignor
Schweizer delivered a panegyric on Kolping, reviewing his life and
his work. Many other addresses were made dealing with the
social works of the Catholics of Germany. Etudes, September 20.
A Missionary Congress. By Benoit Emonet. From August
27th until September 4th of this year was held the second session
266 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Nov.,
of a Congress of Missionaries at Louvain. Last year it had a
humble beginning, but this year it took on an international aspect,
numbering delegates from Austria, Holland, Germany, France,
England, Italy, and other countries. The delegates were chiefly
missionaries who had spent years in labor among heathen peoples,
but were now mostly engaged in training others to enter that field
at a future date. The religions of these various heathen people
were viewed from a psychological and theological standpoint, and
all the allied sciences were called into play for a better understand-
ing of all that was peculiar to these various religions. The
religions treated this year were mostly of the East and Africa. The
Congress closed on September 4th. It will meet again in two years
in Germany. Etudes, September 20.
The Tablet (September 20) : The Catacombs at Grotta-F er-
rata: These catacombs have remained hidden from the fourth cen-
tury, and, therefore, all the bodies laid in the loculi still repose be-
neath their sealed slabs. The article deals with the inscriptions
and frescoes thus far uncovered since Lanciani in 1905 drew atten-
tion to the spot. Excavations continue. Continuity: Bishop
Vaughan writes the editor that the Anglicans support their " con-
tinuity " theory not by facts, since even Protestant historians ad-
mit the facts prove non-continuity, but because, as the Anglican
Canon M. MacCall wrote, " Concede that the Church of England
starts from the reign of Henry VIII. and of Elizabeth, and you
surrender the whole ground of controversy with Rome." Re-
ported Cures at Lourdes: An account of the cures of the deafness
of two Irish priests, Fathers Lynch and Kearnan. Other cures are
noted with fewer details. Distress Among Catholic Albanians:
Winter is corning on, and the Catholics of this country are in dire
need of clothing and food. Their lands were devastated by the
recent Balkan War, and hence they are without means. Father
Greggio, S.J., submits a missionary's report of the Kevango Mission,
wherein it is stated that if the birth rate and infantile mortality rate
continue, the negroes in contact with the whites must eventually
die out. One of the reasons for this is "the abrupt overthrow of
native customs and moral standards caused by intercourse with the
whites." Commenting on an article discussing the advisability
of suicide published in the organ of the German " Monist " So-
ciety, the writer calls attention to the statistics of Father Krose on
the subject published seven years ago in two supplements of
1913-] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 267
the Stimmcn aus Maria-Loach. The areas of the greater prevalence
of the evil are limited almost entirely to Protestant districts.
The Truth About Beatifications: A statement was made in the
Southern Daily Echo to the effect that apparently no Englishmen or
Americans have been beatified or canonized in the last four hun-
dred years, although four hundred and sixteen persons have been
accorded this title within that time. The editor publishes a letter
showing that sixty-three Englishmen have been beatified, the cause
of two hundred and fifty-three English martyrs has been introduced,
and St. Rose of Lima was canonized in 1671. A New Apprecia-
tion of Mattheiv Paris and Bishop Grossetestc, by Father Thurston,
S.J. Among other things discussed in a recently-published series
of lectures by Mr. A. L. Smith, Fellow of Balliol, dealing with the
good and evil of England's connection with Rome, is the reliability
of Matthew Paris, the mediaeval chronicler.
(September 27) : France and the Holy See: The politicians of
France are beginning to realize that diplomatic relations with the
Holy See must be resumed not only for the sake of internal peace,
but also to preserve prestige abroad, especially in the East. There
France owes her influence to the protectorate which she exercises
over all Christians. This Italy and Germany are very eager to
take from her, and probably will do so if France does not change
her policy. Where Strikes are not Allowed: Statement of the
laws of various countries in reference to permission of strikes and
lockouts. No comment is made as to the success or failure of
any.
The Month (October): " Souperism" in Ireland: Father
Keating exposes the traffic in souls through sham philanthropy in
Ireland. He describes how " souperism," " so-called from the
practice of giving doles of soup to the starving inhabitants of
Ireland during the great famine, in some cases on condition of
their profession of Protestantism," has been and is now being prac-
tised by Protestant societies which are financed by the wealth of
bigots. He traces the history of this form of bribery through the
early days of State control of education and charity to the present
time in " the private 'souper' institutions that flourish in Ireland."
" Great as were the efforts made in these distant days," he writes,
after citing some figures from the report of the Irish Church Mis-
sions in 1878, " we are assured that never, at any rate in Dublin,
were more children in danger of losing their faith than at present."
268 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Nov.,
He concludes with a warm indorsement of the Catholic Protection
and Rescue Society, founded recently to combat this evil, and shows
that its work must lie in the economic as well as the religious field,
since the most efficacious cure would be the elimination of the condi-
tions which make "souperism" possible. Jottings About Cardinal
Newman, by E. Belasis. "Writing by the way," as Mr. Belasis terms
the manner of his paper, he gives us intimate glimpses of Newman's
very various intellectual and emotional attitudes. His taste in fic-
tion ; his " downright " trust in St. Anthony of Padua ; his attach-
ment to his friends' portraits and letters. The Anti-Irish Riots
of 1736, by Herbert Thurston, S.J. A history of the anti-Irish
riots which occurred in England in 1736, and which were due to
the employers and farmers hiring Irish labor, which, owing to the
poverty of Ireland, could be employed at lower wages than English.
This led to a feeling of discontent among the native laborers, and
culminated in several serious outbreaks of lawlessness. The riots
were of short duration, and were quickly put down by the author-
ities, but, as Father Thurston remarks, " were kindled into flame
once more by Lord George Gordon in the riots of 1780, which
Dickens has immortalized in Barnaby RudgeJ" He analyzes the
prejudices that led to the riots, and the economic causes which
made Irish labor cheaper to hire than English.
The Irish Theological Quarterly (October) : Rev. J. Byrne
O'Connell, Ph.D., contributes an article on philosophic idealism,
giving some of the reasons which have led to its present popularity,
and some general lines of defence for scholastic realism. Rev.
Francis Rota, S.J., under the heading A Modern Mysticism, de-
scribes theosophy as presented by Mrs. Annie Besant, and shows its
resemblances to Modernism.
The Irish Ecclesiastical Record (October) : Rev. P. Coffey,
Ph.D., announces the plan and hoped-for results of the National
Catholic Total Abstinence Congress to be held in Dublin next
summer. False Christs, by Rev. George L. Hitchcock, D.D.
Since the year A. D. 30, when our Lord foretold the coming of false
Christs, seven men have appeared, each claiming to be the Messiah.
These form a strange series: Barcochba, A. D. 132; the Cretan
Moses, 427; Serenus, 720; David Alroy, 1160; Abubafia, 1284,
and Shabbethai Zebhi, 1666. The life of the last was far the most
romantic. Certainly the popular notions of a false Christ are little
1913-] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 269
justified by such instances, but then they have absorbed other ele-
ments, for example, from the Apocalypse. A sect of Sabbatians
was formed by the followers of the last named, which is not ex-
tinct even at the present day. Rev. Father Alfred, O.S.F.C.,
describes the oratory of Bossuet and Bourdaloue, particularly as re-
gards their court sermons. In Bossuet the most sublime eloquence
was joined to a master mind. The beauty and strength of Bourda-
loue's preaching reflected his religious life. Both reverenced the
king, yet rebuked his vices ; both were worthy bearers of the divine
message, ready to do as well as to preach. Rev. Stanislaus M.
Hogan, O.P., attacks the article in the Catholic Encyclopedia on
Savonarola, contributed by Monsignor Johann P. Kirsch. It is
not by any means an impartial summary of the question. It is un-
satisfactory and incomplete, and is not written in the light of recent
evidence. Father Hogan asserts that Savonarola was not dis-
obedient ; he did not " set about calling a Council in opposition to
the Pope ;" that he did not " refuse obedience " to the Brief of
November 7, 1496, that the sentence of excommunication which he
was declared to have incurred on account of his disobedience to that
Brief, was consequently null and void, and that no writings of the
friar have been placed on the Index as being heretical or as savoring
of heresy, a conclusion which any reader of the Encyclopedia
article might legitimately infer. Concerning Confessions of
Converts, by Rev. W. B. O'Dowd. What is the value of these
" confessions of converts? " It shows that converts are not always
led to the faith by a methodical way; by argument cunningly fitted
into argument ; that much must be taken on faith, and that we can-
not expect an exhaustive solution of all religious problems before
giving our assent to the Church's claims; that the final impulse is
brought about not only in unexpected ways, but often in ways
which are, to human seeming, grotesquely inapposite. Mr. Cecil
Chesterton had for his first pedagogue in the faith Professor Hux-
ley. His brother was brought at least to Christianity by Huxley,
Spencer, and Bradlaugh, and Miss Anstice Baker says : " People
little thought, who lent me bitter books against Catholicism, how
much they were helping me to become a Catholic."
Le Correspondant (September 25) : Pierre de Quirielle pre-
sents a study of M. fimile Ollivier, who has recently died after fin-
ishing seventeen volumes of the history of the Liberal Empire.
They include a defence of his action as Cabinet Minister when
2/o FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Nov.,
France declared war in 1870 against Germany. C. Looten de-
scribes the Princess de Robecq (1729-1760) and her hatred for the
Encyclopaedists, Diderot and d'Alembert. After Louis XV. with-
drew his patronage from their work and caused its material ruin,
she induced Palissot to produce a drama, " The Philosophers,"
which covered them with ridicule. Revenge, not religion, was her
motive, though religion profited by her act. The Gardens of the
Chateau of Choisy-Le-Roi, which came into the possession of Louis
XV. in 1739, and were magnificently arranged by him, are described
by Jean Monval. The castle valued at 1,140,800 livres in 1791,
was sold with the park in 1797 for 701,000 francs, showing the
effects of the Revolution.
Revue Pratique d'Apologetique (September 15) : Galileo and
the Inquisition, by A. Villien, is a review of the Galileo case, with
particular mention of two valuable books which have recently been
published dealing with this subject: L' Inquisition et I'Heresie,
a propos de I'affaire Galilee, by Abbe Leon Garzend, and in Italy
Galileo e I'Inquisizione, by A. Tavaro, who by special favor has had
access to the documents on Galileo preserved in the archives of the
Holy Office. Rationalist Preaching, by L. Cl. Pillion. An ex-
amination of rationalist sermons reveals numerous contraditions.
In theory the preachers reject the Fourth Gospel, the Epistle of St.
James, etc., but in practice they use them just as the other Apostolic
writings. They are much more Christian than they wish to avow.
" Preaching liberal Christianity " is easy to say, but it is a contradic-
tion in terms.
(October i) : M. de Gailhard-Bancel points out many gaps in
the report published by M. Brival-Gaillard, in La Revue of last
July ist, on the question of the attendance at Sunday Mass. The
compiler overlooked many Masses, many chapels. He included, as
if members of a parish, the non-Catholics within its limits, who of
course do not attend Mass. He overlooked the fact that some
20,000 persons are, according to a census taken in 1902, prevented
by the nature of their work from attending Mass on Sunday. He
gave as the total number of practical Catholics in Paris 118,600, or
one out of twenty-three, whereas the most recent official figures
for the Easter season give a total of 314,000 Easter communions
in fifty-eight out of the seventy-eight parishes. Many others attach
themselves to the Church in the great crises of life, and so can-
not be rigorously excluded from the number of Catholics.
1913-] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 271
Revue du Clerge Frangais (September 15) : Max Turmann
describes the social efforts of French Catholics for the working
youth. Playgrounds for the children, with catechism classes after
exercise, offer an opportunity for capable directors to influence the
plastic minds for good ; the Sunday society, into which the Thurs-
day classes are graduated on becoming apprentices, continues,
after Mass, this healthful exercise. Conferences are given during
the day, and a religious ceremony reunites all at the close. The
library facilities thus far are not generally adapted to the class
that would use them. St. Vincent de Paul societies, savings funds
and benefit organizations as protection against death are special
features. The writer favors the " declared " or incorporated form
where the society can hold property and defend its rights as a moral
person. Charles Calippe describes the " community " life of
three secular priests in the diocese of Versailles, who live together
and care for nine parishes. Each cares especially for three par-
ishes, the other two assist; preaching missions, entertainments, all
activity, are thus the object of interest for all three priests. Mon-
signor Touchet, Bishop of Orleans, delivered a eulogy, here quoted,
of " The Missionary and the French Soldiers in Africa," in con-
nection with a proposal to erect a church at Dakar as a cathedral of
the vicariate-apostolic, and a monument to the dead sons of France.
(October i): The teaching of catechism should, says C. F.
Fournier, be, as far as possible, apologetic and persuasive. Children
must be taught through stories as our Lord taught by means of par-
ables, but they must be made to see the insufficiency of any images to
represent the greatness of the reality. On the other hand, abstract
and difficult terms should be avoided with equal care. In the ar-
rangement of the matter, we should adopt the plan of standard
theologians, for example, Tanquerey, with slight changes.
Etudes (September 20) : Salvation, by Xavier-Marie le Bach-
elet. This is the first installment of an article on the salvation of
the infidel, as the result of a recent work on the subject by Louis
Caperan, professor in the Grand Seminary of Agen. This has.
been a live question in every age, and the writer shows the methods
in use at various stages in the Church's history for meeting this
problem, in the early or infant Church, and also during the schol-
astic age, and since the latter period, citing quotations from the
leading theologians and apologists of the different ages.
IRecent Events*
The President has been making what may
France. be called a progress through the Limousin
district, and has been received with en-
thusiasm by both the town and country people. He was accom-
panied by so large a number of friends and supporters that the
train of motor cars in which they traveled was something like five
miles in length. It ought to be stated, however, that for the sake
of avoiding the dust, five hundred yards was placed between each
car. At Limoges the butchers of the city claimed the privilege of
receiving the President, on the ground that the reception of
the Kings of France had been granted to their guild by Louis VIII.
in the thirteenth century. The only people who showed the Presi-
dent the least discourtesy were the Socialists. They refused in any
way to recognize him. This, however, has not prevented the good
effect produced by the President's visit.
The Republic has recently taken a step which involves some
slight recognition of the Christian religion. In the event of a war-
ship being in a foreign port on Good Friday, it is to recognize the
day in the usual official way. The reason for this is, however,
merely political. France claims to be the protector of Catholics in
Syria, and it seemed to the rest of the world somewhat incongruous,
to say the least, that this claim should be made by a nation that
was giving every mark of having abjured that religion. That this
was the case, was made clear by what took place at the port of
Athens last Good Friday. Several warships of different nationali-
ties happened to be in that port; everyone of them, with the excep-
tion of the French, paid the usual marks of honor to the day. This
omission was brought forth as an argument against the French
claim. Hence the new order. It is, however, expressly provided
that it does not apply to ships when in French ports. France
officially, in its own ports, is to remain purely pagan. The Radicals,
however, are greatly displeased, and are going to bring up the ques-
tion at the reassembling of Parliament.
The understanding with Great Britain is now so cordial, that
the project of making a tunnel to connect the two countries has
been revived. Some years ago it was definitely rejected by the
British government. Then, however, France and England were
1913-] RECENT EVENTS 273
far from being on good terms. It is very doubtful, however,
whether England will give up its insularity.
The visit of the President to Spain is looked upon as marking
a new era in the relations between the two countries. French action
in Morocco had produced a coolness in these relations, and some-
thing more than a coolness. No secret is made of the political
character of the President's visit. Cooperation in Morocco be-
tween the two Powers will, it is thought, be one of the results.
Spain has for some months been engaged in endeavoring to sup-
press the uprising of the tribes dwelling in the zone assigned to her.
To bring these to an end the military cooperation of France is
desirable. Alterations in the tariff are another subject of discus-
sion. There are some who think that even the entry of Spain into
the concert of the Great Powers may be brought about.
Great mortification was felt in Germany on
Germany. account of the utter collapse of the Turkish
troops in the conflict with Bulgaria. For
many years the army had been drilled and organized by German
officers under the chief control of Marshal von der Goltz. Hence
the defeat of Turkey was regarded as almost a defeat of Ger-
many. Correspondingly great was the satisfaction felt when the
King of the Hellenes, in the course of his recent visit to Berlin,
declared that next to the heroic courage and self-sacrifice of his
own troops, the great successes were due to the well-
tested Prussian principles of the conduct of war. This tribute to
the excellence of German military training produced feelings almost
of resentment in France, for the Greek army, for some two years
before the outbreak of the war, had been trained by French officers
under the command of -General Eydoux. This resentment went
so far as to render it possible that the French government might
recall the French officers from Greece. Nor did the visit subse-
quently made by King Constantine to Paris, and his speech upon
that occasion, altogether remove the impression of disappointment.
Some little satisfaction, however, was given to the feelings of
the French by the expression by a Cabinet Minister of Turkey of
the deep gratitude felt by the Ottoman Empire for the financial
support it had received from France. It was now Germany's
turn to take umbrage, and it went so far as to make representations,
through its Ambassador at Constantinople, of the regret caused in
Germany by utterances so favorable to France. The fact that in
VOL. xcvin. 18
274 RECENT EVENTS [Nov.,
both France and Germany the legislative bodies are not in session,
is doubtless the reason why so much notice has been taken of these
trivialities.
The same reason may account, at least in some measure, for
the attention attracted by the Socialist Congress which has been held
this year at Jena, as very little was accomplished at that Congress.
It was unable to find a leader to take the place of the late August
Bebel. On this account Herr Ebert and Herr Hasse were elected
Presidents with equal rights. The proceedings were mainly occupied
with the internal dissensions which have become characteristic of
Socialism. There is an extreme party which does not wish to
make use of any of the established institutions of the country, even
were it possible by these means to accomplish its common aims.
The more moderate party, on the other hand, thinks it expedient to
adopt any and every feasible means. In fact, in the last Reichstag,
the Socialists supported the government's proposals for raising
money for the army because in their view they were of a socialist
character, even though this support involved at least a condonation
of militarism. This procedure was much discussed at the Congress,
and by a vote of three hundred and thirty-six to one hundred and
forty the extremists were defeated in their effort to have it con-
demned. This was also the fate of the proposal of a general strike
as a means of securing a reform of the Prussian franchise. The
latter was defeated by one hundred and ninety-one votes.
There are those who think that German Socialism has arrived at a
very critical stage in its history. Notwithstanding the fact that
it is by far the largest single party in the Reichstag, it has no in-
fluence upon legislation commensurate with its numerical strength.
Dissatisfaction with want of result is becoming widely felt. Now
that it is left without a leader, the outlook is made still more un-
certain.
The opposite pole of organized German opinion is repre-
sented by the Pan-German League. This association has been
holding a meeting at Breslau, at which Major-General Keim, Presi-
dent of the Defence League, stated that it was a grave delusion to
suppose that the recent army bill was the last word of Germany's
military policy. He gave utterance to the somewhat paradoxical
opinion that the more correct were the relations of the German
Empire with other countries, the smaller was its prestige. The
improvement in the relations with England gave the Major-General
no real ground for satisfaction. Self-renunciation was too much
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 275
the characteristic of the government's policy. Enormous sacrifices
were being exacted for the sake of the army and navy, with no
defined object. This ought to be changed. Germany must demand
her share in Asiatic Turkey, should partition come about, and must
never waive her rights to a share of the Portuguese colonies. The
national antagonism of the Boer race to the British must be
fostered and kept alive, and for this purpose the maintenance of
German feeling among the Boers was a vital necessity. There is
no reason to think that these opinions are shared by any very large
number of Germans. The outlook for the future would be dark
indeed if such were the case.
The Liberal Ministry, of which Count Ro-
Spain. manones is the head, still retains office, but
its power is very much limited by the dis-
sensions which exist among the members of the party. Senor
Garcia Prieto, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, is credited with
the desire to supplant the present Premier as leader. The differences
are, however, more fundamental a real disagreement in policy.
Senor Prieto disapproves of the very arbitrary course taken by
Count Romanones in closing the sittings of Parliament for prac-
tically the whole of the year, thereby abolishing the constitutional
system and setting up a dictatorship. The methods which have
been adopted in Morocco, in the effort to suppress the rising of the
tribes, are also condemned by the Foreign Ministers. More con-
ciliatory measures than the systematic destruction of Moorish vil-
lages would be at once more civilized in character, and more
efficacious in result. This is proved by the success with which has
resulted from the methods adopted by the French.
It is still doubtful which of the two leaders will secure the
support of the party. If Senor Prieto were called upon to form a
government, it is his intention to bring into the Cabinet certain
Republican elements represented by Senors Azcarate and Mel-
quiades Alvarez, these having of late shown an inclination to the
Monarchy.
The state of unrest still continues in Por-
Portugal. tugal. It is not, however, so much due to the
Monarchists, as to those who are at the other
extreme. The Syndicalists find their position worse under the rule
of the Republic than it would have been under that of a King.
276 RECENT EVENTS [Nov.,
They have accordingly made an attempt upon the life of the
Premier Senhor Costa. He who once caused others to live in fear
of their lives, is now meeting with the same fate. The extreme
pettiness of the Republican method of government is shown by the
fact that a present to the ex-King, on the occasion of his marriage,
was detained in Lisbon because it had upon it the inscription, " To
the King of Portugal from his subjects in Lisbon."
A mitigation of the harsh treatment accorded to the Roy-
alists has been conceded, but it by no means satisfies the demands
made by the English Committee which has taken the matter in hand.
The African natives in the islands of Sao Thome and Prin-
cipe have for many years been subjected to what is virtually a
state of slavery. Repeated protests have been made on their be-
half, with very little result until recently. On February 8th of the
present year, a decree was issued by which many thousands have
been emancipated. It is now officially stated that this decree will
be scrupulously carried out, that it will remedy all injustices, and will
close with a key of gold the long series of remedial measures
which have been taken.
Turkey retains the possession of Adrian-
The Balkans. ople; and not only of Adrianople, but of
Kirk Kilisse and Dimotika, as well as of the
large district looked upon as necessary for the easier defence of
those towns. Bulgaria is left in the possession of a stretch of
coast on the ygean, with the port of Dedeagatch, but the railway
communication with this port will for some time have to be
through the district which has again become Turkish. In fact,
while Greece has doubled her territory as a result of the war, and
Servia has added seventy-five per cent, Bulgaria's gain amounts to
only ten per cent. This is the situation as settled by the treaty
made between Turkey and Bulgaria on the 2Qth of September. The
Treaty of London, by which the Enos-Midia line was made the
boundary of Turkey in Europe, is declared by the new treaty to be
binding on both parties, except in so far as express changes have
been made.
Before, however, the new treaty was signed, what was called in
Constantinople the third war of the Balkans had broken out. The
Albanians included in the district assigned to Servia rose against
their new overlords, whom they hate far more than they did the
Turks. Several towns were seized, the Servians being driven out.
1913-] RECENT EVENTS 277
The rising was so formidable and so widespread that Servia was
compelled to mobilize a large part of her army. Danger of com-
plications arose from the doubt whether the trouble was not mainly
due to the Albanians included in the new State. In that event any
attempt of Servia to carry the war into Albania would have brought
Austria, and perhaps Italy, into the field. Thereupon there would
have been renewed the danger of a general war. Servia's action,
however, was so prompt, and her policy at the same time so prudent,
that there is reason to hope that these complications may be
avoided. So far she seems to have become master of the situation
within her own borders, and to be unwilling to go beyond them.
The third war, therefore, has been averted.
But for what may be yet another war, insurance policies
are being taken out in London. Turkey and Greece have not
yet been able to make a treaty of peace. In this case it is the
possession of the ^Egean Islands that is the chief point at issue.
So successful has Turkey been in securing the possession of
Adrianople, that she is now encouraged to claim the yEgean Islands
which border on Asia, although she had renounced the possession
of them by the Treaty of London. The situation became so threat-
ening that King Constantine, who had just begun a holiday in
England, had to hasten back to join his army. Turkish forces were
being massed on the seacoast of Asia. One of the surprising fea-
tures of the new situation was the apprehension felt by the Greeks
that Bulgaria had entered into an alliance with Turkey, and that
the new conflict would be waged with her former ally and her
former enemy in combination. No surprise, however, need be felt
at the renewal at any time of a conflict in the Balkans. The
settlement is so little of a settlement that anything may be expected.
In fact it is only the exhaustion brought about by the wars that
have recently been brought to an end, that has led to the cessation
of hostilities. As soon as any one of these States feels itself
strong enough to change the situation, the attempt will be made.
For hundreds of years Serbs, Greeks, and Bulgarians have been
on the very worst of terms, murdering and massacring each other
in turn; changing even their religion, such as it is, for the sake
of an ultimate enlargement of territory and with the object of se-
curing, each for itself, a district inhabited exclusively by its own
race. And what is the result so far attained? In the district
allotted to Greece by the Treaty of Bukarest there are 250,000
Bulgarians; in that allotted to Servia, while there are only 50,000
278 RECENT EVENTS [Nov.,
Serbs, the Bulgarians number 467,000, and the Albanians 400,000 ;
while Rumania deprived Bulgaria of some 300,000 Bulgarians.
At the beginning of the war the fact that religious services
were frequently performed with great solemnity, the whole of the
armies and the people taking part in them, seemed to indicate a deep-
seated reverence for God, and a desire both to secure His blessing,
and to make themselves worthy of it. The atrocities, however,
which have been committed as the war proceeded, and even after
its conclusion, make it clear that the Eastern identification of
Church and State has not led to any real change of the barbarous
primeval instincts. " Things have been done worse than have
ever taken place since the time of Christ," are the words of a
Greek soldier, occasioned by the deeds of his fellow-soldiers which
he had seen with his own eyes. Denials have been made as com-
plete as have been the accusations, but truthfulness is not a conspic-
uous characteristic of these races, and these denials have not been
believed. A Commission, however, is investigating the whole mat-
ter, and its report will, it is to be hoped, settle the question.
An International Commission has taken over the administra-
tion of affairs in Albania. This Commission is, in the first place, to
establish order in this the latest offspring of European statecraft;
after order is established it is to hand over its powers to the Prince
who is to be appointed by the Great Powers. This will be no
easy task, for order is not loved by any of the many tribes of
Albanians. These tribes value nothing so much as their independ-
ence, which they have kept from the remotest time, their subjection
to Turkey being only in name. They are as much divided among
themselves as from the rest of the world, and are as jealous of
each other. In religion, ninety-two per cent are Moslems, the
descendants of ancestors who abandoned the Christian faith. To
them was entrusted the defence of the Sultan's person. For this
service it was that they were left in the possession of the freedom
of which they are so fond, and which they are not likely to renounce
for the sake of any International Commission or Prince whom
Europe may appoint to rule over them.
The successful effort made by Turkey,
Turkey. which resulted in the recovery of Adrianople,
was due to the Committee of Union and
Progress. Its power had for sometime been waning, but, as noth-
ing succeeds like success, the destinies of the Ottoman Empire
1913-] RECENT EVENTS 279
are now in its keeping, although they are the men to whom the loss
of Macedonia is due. Many who profess to have at heart the wel-
fare of Turkey, doubt the wisdom of the attempt now being made by
the Turks to continue to maintain their place in Europe. More
wise, it is thought, would they be if they were to devote themselves
to the consolidation of their dominion in Asia, and to the carrying
out of the many reforms there necessary. They had, in fact, just
before the more recent events, proposed a plan for the decen-
tralization of these Provinces, and a scheme of reform had been
prepared. British advisers even had been appointed to carry the
scheme into effect. Nothing, however, has of late been heard of the
complete execution of the scheme. It is, in fact, entirely alien to
the spirit of those who are now in power, who glory in the all-
sufficiency and supreme excellence of the Ottoman State.
The experience which the Young Turks have had of the fu-
tility of the efforts made by the Concert of the Powers to drive
them out of Adrianople, gives them good reason to glory. The
most the Concert had been able to do is to keep its members from
making war with each other. The only thing besides this has been
the making of the new State of Albania, and this has already been
the cause of great evils, and promises to be the cause of still more.
Instead of being able to inflict upon Turkey the chastisement she
deserved for breaking the Treaty of London, all the Powers are
now, with the possible exception of Russia, suing for privileges and
concessions at her hands. France, in return for certain railway
concessions, is ready to advance a loan of something like a hundred
millions to promote the rehabilitation of the Turkish finances;
Italy has obtained concessions in Asia Minor; Germany's interest
in the Baghdad Railway makes her anxious for Turkey's good
will, and Great Britain, as the greatest Mussulman Power, is afraid
to excite the ill-will of her own subjects in India.
So little has been heard, since the breaking out of the Balkan
War, of the Parliament that used to sit at Constantinople, that it
might as well have been abolished. It seems, however, that such is
not to be its fate. It is proposed, however, that it is only to sit for
four months of each year, and that the Sultan's power of dissolu-
tion is to be increased. The Heir-Apparent to the throne, in a
published interview, gave expression to some principles of govern-
ment which were very shocking to the ears of orthodox Turks.
Princes, he said, were for the people, not the people for princes.
The country should not be the domain of the princes. The Mus-
28o RECENT EVENTS [Nov.,
sulman religion, he declared, was based on democracy, and does not
accept aristocratic exclusiveness. The special position of the
princes should be recognized, but they must at all times have con-
tact with the people. The Parliamentary system can never injure
the prestige of the sovereign, and the strengthening of the democ-
racy cannot result in the weakening of the aristocracy. The pub-
lication of these sentiments was so obnoxious to those in authority,
that the newspaper in which they appeared was suspended, and the
functionary responsible for the publication dismissed.
A few months ago so desperate was the
Persia. state of Persia, that well-informed writers
declared that that ancient kingdom was on
its deathbed. Of late, however, things have taken a turn for
the better. The Regent has returned, and has taken upon himself
the exercise of those duties which for some fifteen months he
has been neglecting. The Cabinet Ministers who had gone abroad
have imitated the example of their ruler. The Cabinet has been
re-constituted. Elections for a new Mejliss are being held, al-
though the experience of the past holds out little hope of the use-
fulness of such a step. It is, however, proposed that to the new
Mejliss very little power will be entrusted. The brother of the
ex-Shah, Salar-ed-Dowleh, has given over his efforts to secure the
throne, and for a consideration has definitely retired into exile.
Most important of all, the revenues are proving sufficient, not only
to pay administrative expenses, but for the service of the loans
already issued. It is even thought that Persia is now in a position
to justify the issue of the large loan which is declared to be neces-
sary for the maintenance of order.
A fair measure of success has attended the efforts of the
gendarmerie, under the command of Swedish officers, to suppress
the brigandage which has for so long a time rendered trade almost
impossible. Several projects for building railways for the develop-
ment of the country are being actively promoted. The chief source
of anxiety is the continued occupation of the North by Russian
troops whether it is the fixed policy of the Imperial Government
that they should remain with a view to its absorption of this dis-
trict into the Russian Empire. The loyalty of this district is some-
what doubtful. But, on the whole, it may be said that there is
ground for hope for at least the prolonged existence of almost the
most ancient of the world's kingdoms.
1913-] RECENT EVENTS 281
The Chinese Republic has at last secured a
China. definite status. A President has been
elected, the new form of government has
been recognized by the Powers. The Consortium which has hitherto
restricted China's independent action as to finance has been abol-
ished. The rebellion has been suppressed, at least, for the time
being. At one moment there was imminent danger of that foreign
intervention which has been so much dreaded, as sure to lead to the
break-up of the country, and to a scramble of the Powers for the
fragments.
In the course of the capture of Nanking, the soldiers of the
Republic shot without any justification three natives of Japan.
This so incensed the Japanese people that they forced their govern-
ment to make demands for reparation, which were very distasteful
to the Chinese. For a time it appeared probable that no satisfaction
would be given, the more so because China had grave reason to com-
plain of the Japanese, perhaps more reason than had the Japanese
to complain of China. Indeed, there is no doubt that the rebellion
of the South met with the open sympathy, and even received the
support, not merely of Japanese citizens, but also of its consular
agents in China. China, however, was powerless, and on the
appearance of ten warships in the Yangtsze, complied with most of
the conditions laid down by Japan, thereby securing the integrity
of the country. For if Japan had seized upon any part of Chinese
territory, it would have been the signal for other Powers taking
similar action, and perhaps of a war between them for the division
of the spoils. It is, indeed, not yet quite certain that the danger
is completely averted.
That there is among the four hundred millions of Chinese only
one man who is recognized as fit to be President, shows the degree
of degradation to which that once mighty Empire has been reduced.
For Yuan Shih-kai has not been chosen because of the high regard
in which he is held, nor of his devotion to the Republic. He was,
in fact, opposed to its establishment, and publicly declared that
he did not look upon its people as sufficiently educated, or at all
prepared for self-government. His conduct since he has been the
provisional President, has showed that his conviction has not
changed. He has, in fact, acted more like a dictator than as the
representative of the people. The office has not been thrust
upon him; on the contrary, he has sought the office, and
by methods which will not bear close examination. In short
282 RECENT EVENTS [Nov.,
Yuan Shih-kai is the first President of the Republic of China be-
cause there was no serious alternative candidate, and because he
was in a position to exercise force over the National Assembly.
The loan recently obtained was largely influential, not merely
in his election, but in the suppression of the recent rebellion. For
great as is the power of money in other countries, there is none
in which it is so great as among the disciples of Confucius. In the
recent rebellion, the navy openly offered its services to the highest
bidder.
Well-informed authorities say that the recent rebellion had no
definite political aims. There was, indeed, a great deal of talk about
the rights of the people and the forms of constitutional government,
but the real aims of the soldiers on both sides were the gains that
could be made. There was no such thing as either loyalty or dis-
loyalty. The rebels in one of the towns were paid six-
teen dollars apiece for surrendering their arms. Those bought
off in one place proceeded to another with the expectation of re-
ceiving similar treatment.* When there was no money with which
they could be appeased, the country people were made to suffer;
for the soldiers, whether regulars or rebels, proceeded to whole-
sale looting. This has become so common that it may be con-
sidered at present the normal state of China. Even in the
highest ranks no limit is to be placed to the dishonesty that exists.
It was partly for this reason that the Six Powers united for the
purpose of securing some control over the issue of loans. China
was ever ready to borrow, and to make all kinds of promises, but
took not the least pains to keep these promises. In fact, the con-
ditions under which the most recent loan were made have been
already violated. The Consortium has now been broken up, so
far as regards the main object, and China is at liberty to make her
own terms with nations singly or with individuals. It remains
to be seen which will suffer most, China or its creditors.
With Our Readers.
OUR readers have no doubt read with regret of the death of Canon
Patrick Sheehan at Doneraile, Ireland, on October 6th.
Through his Triumph of Failure and My New Curate, Canon Sheehan
had long since won for himself a permanently high place in English
letters. We believe that his worthiness to occupy an exceptionally
high place, will be more and more appreciated as time goes on. Canon
Sheehan was a frequent contributor to the pages of THE CATHOLIC
WORLD, and his story Lisheen ran as a serial in its pages.
sermon preached in St. Patrick's Cathedral on Labor Day by
A Rt. Rev. Monsignor D. J. McMahon, which received uncommon
notice next morning from the influential newspapers of New York,
is now published in the form of a small pamphlet, and will doubtless be
extensively read. The subject selected fitted the important occasion.
The title of the pamphlet is The Dignity and Conditions of Labor.
The predominant idea throughout, as was to be expected, is that men
and nations in their endeavor to right economic wrongs, and in par-
ticular to better the laborer's condition, must work in the light of our
Lord's teaching, and keep a receptive ear for the living voice of His
ever-watchful Church. A few apposite introductory sentences, fol-
lowed by paragraphs on the duty and on the dignity of labor, lead up
very naturally to the great and difficult discussion of the relations
that should by right obtain between the employed and their employers.
The vague, though profoundly true, principle that every man's rightful
wage is precisely his own part in the production of wealth, is not dwelt
upon, but the preacher addresses himself to a solution of the knotty
problem of determining the conditions which ought to preside over
the fair distribution of the riches obtained by the joint labors of many,
so as to give each his proper share. The prevailing principles of
present-day economic science, which looks on " human labor simply
as a commodity to be purchased and sold," must be superseded by
the adoption of Christian truths, recognizing the labor of a man as
essentially different from that of a machine.
In confirmation of this radical proposition, the great name and
luminous teaching of the late Pope Leo are invoked. In emphasizing
the right and bounden duty of the State to control wisely the condi-
tions which govern capital and labor, production and the sharing of
the general product, Monsignor McMahon is emphatic in conditioning
284 WITH OUR READERS [Nov.,
governmental action upon due recognition of Christian principles. The
hard case of the unemployed thousands willing to work is stated, ac-
companied by facts and figures, and the solemn truth affirmed that
every man is born into this world endowed with the inalienable right
to live by the labor of his own hands and brain. Rejecting inadmis-
sible theories and untenable socialistic programmes, this pamphlet un-
equivocally calls for a remedy that will set right the unquestionable
wrong of a world system which denies to so many a fair opportunity
of earning bread by the sweat of their brow, though the preacher
perforce confesses his own inability to provide a satisfactory solution
of a problem so pressing. Meanwhile he earnestly recommends pray-
erful patience to believers, who recognize that " here they have no
abiding city."
THE fallacy underlying the present eugenics fad is that its champions
work in the wrong direction. They work from the outside in
instead of from the inside out. One of our reviewers gives in this
issue of the magazine a telling review of a book that deals radically
with the right welfare of human society. It is entitled Social Renewal,
and the enthusiastic words of our reviewer lead us to say that we wish
everyone would take it as his textbook.
The radical eugenists are working on the assumption that the
man physically and mentally fit is the best man. To quote but one
source of evidence we will say that the records of every criminal
court in history show such an assumption to be absolutely false.
" It is a mistake," says the author, " to put the wrong thing first
It is futile to imagine that the troubles of our country are due to this
or that particular cause. It is false to ascribe them principally to
slackness of trade or to want of education; or to marriages of
the weak in body or mind ; or to lack of good houses ; or to excessive
drinking, or to any partial cause whatsoever."
* * * *
THE evils to which the fad has already given rise are arousing the
medical profession of the country. The New York Medical
Journal lately said :
The untimely expression of so-called " practical " eugenics in terms of
statutes by legislators who know little or nothing of the subject, even though
inspired by breeders' associations, statisticians, and enthusiasts, is bound to
awaken a reaction among those who habitually consider all sides of a subject,
particularly when hardships are to be inflicted upon human society, good as the
motive may be.
Suggestive in this connection are the remarks of Prof. Benson at the
recent international congress, and which fortunately have been widely dis-
seminated through the lay press: "I should be sorry," said this distinguished
1913-] WITH OUR READERS 285
investigator, " to see adopted the violent methods put to use in some parts
of the United States. It is one thing to check the reproduction of hopeless
defectives, but another to organize wholesale tampering with the structure of
the population, such as will follow if any marriage not regarded by officials
as eugenic is liable to prohibition."
A T a meeting of the American Society for Sanitary and Moral
*!. Prophylaxis, held in New York recently, Dr. Richard C. Cabot
stated that sanitation may lead to immorality, while morality in its turn
may produce insanitation. He added : " I believe in sanitation just so
far as it does not interfere with morality, but many people believe
in morality only just so far as it does not interfere with sanitation."
A S we go to press the second Missionary Congress, held under the
<* ~*- auspices of the Catholic Church Extension Society of the United
States, opens in Boston. Its proceedings will be followed with interest
by every Catholic; and they will, we believe, bear much fruit for in-
creased missionary activity both at home and abroad.
SOME years ago a few of the secular journals, and some few also
of the Protestant press, were laying great stress on the magnitude
of the " Los von Rome " movement in Germany. In their descriptions
and their statistics, wishes were often the father of figures. Apropos
of those statements, it is interesting to note here an account given
in The Christian Work and Evangelist of Protestant Decay in Ger-
many and Catholic Growth. The article is unsigned, and The Christian
Work informs us that the writer is " a German correspondent in
whom everybody has the greatest confidence." It is more than evident
that the writer has no love for the Catholic Church, nor does he under-
stand the reason of her growth. We simply wish to call attention to
the fact that unwilling witness as he is, he testifies to that growth.
The correspondent of The Christian Work opens with a letter
that he " recently received from one of the best known Protestant
pastors in Germany :"
" 'In my old age I grow concerned about the future of our beloved
Church. I know that vital religion is ebbing from among us, and every
detail of statistics proves to me that we are receding. The pill is
made all the more bitter by the undoubted fact that ultramontanism is
growing in our midst, and that the grave symptoms of decay or stagna-
tion whichever you like to call them which affect us are not af-
fecting Rome!'
" This is unquestionably true. Wherever we turn we find visible
286 WITH OUR READERS [Nov.,
proof of the activity and living growth of German Catholicism. A
fortnight ago at Metz, in Lorraine, the Clerical Ultramontanes held
their annual congress, and never before was there so much en-
thusiasm displayed, or were such glowing accounts rendered of pro-
gress all along the line of the Church's efforts. Prince and peasant,
cardinal and deacon, rich and poor, were alike filled with a zeal
and a belief in the destiny of their Church wholly unknown in Prot-
estant Germany. When we turn to the outward and visible signs of
progress, to numbers and results, what do we find? A few details
will make clear the reasons which lie at the bottom of Catholic hope-
fulness and Protestant depression. Taking the entire population of
the empire, the census returns show that Catholicism is growing more
rapidly than Protestantism, that the faith of Rome absorbs a greater
share of the increasing population than the faith of Luther. In the
great Catholic fastness of Bavaria and the Rhenish provinces, Luther-
anism has failed in its attacks on Rome, while in the hitherto ex-
clusively Protestant regions, like Pomerania, Mecklenburg, and Brand-
enburg, we find the proportion of Catholics steadily mounting.
" There are only imperfect statistics available for the past two
years with regard to the birth rate, but they all point in the di-
rection of larger Catholic families. In Berlin and other large towns
the general decline in the birth rate has become so remarkable that
social reformers are at their wits' end to account for it; but when
this phenomenon is more narrowly examined, we find that the de-
creasing birth rate is almost altogether confined to Protestant families.
In the important Catholic provinces, where a majority of the popula-
tion is of Slavic blood, families, in fact, are increasing in number.
The Catholic priests take care that their people marry early, that they
respect their marriage vows, and that they eschew the suicidal two-
children system. The celebration of marriages within the churches
is decreasing in Protestant Germany, the registry office taking the place
of the church ceremony. Protestants in greater number than ever
confine themselves to the civil function, which in all cases is com-
pulsory. It is rare for a Catholic to neglect the offices of his priest
in marriage. The same principle holds good at burials. More and
more the Protestant, especially among the working classes, declines to
ask the services of his pastor at the graveside. To a Catholic this
would be impossible. The number of confirmations among Protestants
does not keep pace with the increase in population. Among Catholics
it does. Finally, we have the test of participation in the communion.
Here there is a distinct decline in the Protestant churches. In Berlin
and other huge centres of population this decline begins to be at a
calamitous rate. There are big Berlin churches where it is rare
for a man to be seen at communion, churches where during the past
I9I3-] WITH OUR READERS 287
ten years the number of male communicants has sunk fifty and sixty
per cent. In Catholic churches, on the contrary, the number of com-
municants of both sexes is well maintained, and the priests have no
complaints to make of decreasing numbers."
IN the same journal, The Christian Work, in a later issue, is an article
entitled, What We All Hold in Common. It is written in a kindly
spirit, and its aim is certainly laudable to have Christians understand
one another. Of the Holy Mass it asks : " Is Christ really there in
that blaze of light, before that Roman Catholic Altar?" And it
answers : " Yes, He is there." But when The Christian Work con-
tinues and states that Christ is just as truly present in the unpretentious
meeting house, where there is no priest and no altar, and where two
or three together eat bread in His name, it is stating something so
untrue that the honest Protestant will deny it at once. The sixteenth
century reformers denied the Mass, denied the Real Presence of Christ
upon the Altar, termed it idolatry; hounded the priest to death, and
broke the altar into pieces. The story of their work in England is
effectively presented in a recent pamphlet, What the Mass Cost,
by Abbot Gasquet, published by the Catholic Truth Society of England.
And as Mr. Birrell said lately in speaking of the Catholic position,
" It is the Mass that matters." There is a world, and a heaven, too,
of difference between the Mass, wherein our Lord really and truly
offers Himself again as the Savior of the world between our Lord
really and truly present in His own Body and Blood, His Soul and His
Divinity upon our altar and in our tabernacle and the simple eating
of bread in His name. In the one case it is God with us as truly as
God is in heaven: the God-made Man, Christ our Savior. In the
other it is at best only His empty shadow. Perhaps because it is
His shadow, and when done in sincere memory of Him, He, forgiving
the pain that its perverted origin causes His heart, will bring forth
light that will lead to an acceptance of His words and His truth.
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THE
CATHOLIC WORLD,
VOL. XCVIII. DECEMBER, 1913.
No. 585.
ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM.
BY WILLIAM J. KERBY, PH.D.
T is to be expected that both the friends and the
enemies of Socialism will disagree in defining it, in
explaining it, and in judging the relative value of its
elements. A fundamental movement like Socialism
is not easily reduced to a definition, nor can one
judgment be formulated which will take due account of the ins and
outs of its varied activity and beliefs. Undoubtedly, some are
made Socialists by reasoning. But hope and idealism, protest,
hate, association, and temperament play their role in the develop-
ment of the movement. It is scarcely to be denied that different
Socialists get very different results out of their Socialism. They
seek different things when they go into it. One whose mind refuses
to take large and uncritical views of history and of the future,
will not become a Socialist. One whose sympathies are narrow,
and whose heart is untouched by the wider ethical feelings of one's
time, is beyond the reach of Socialism. A man whose mental
humility hinders him from inspecting the foundations of the social
order without adequate preparation for the task, will scarcely be-
come a Socialist. It is well, therefore, to take account of the per-
sonal equipment of those who accept Socialism. I would not for
a moment underrate either the scholarship or the power of So-
cialist thinkers. Nor would I overlook the fact that what is here
said concerning the acceptance or non-acceptance of Socialism,
may be said with equal truth concerning the acceptance or rejection
Copyright. 1913. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
VOL. XCVIII. 19
290 07V CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM [Dec.,
of representative government, of a political party or of any
fundamental view of life. The aim is merely to call attention to
certain general phases which enter into the development of any
popular movement that appeals to large numbers for endorsement.
Just because these things are true in other circles, they are true in
the case of Socialism. It may be helpful to show, in part, wherein
this is the case.
I.
Popular movements reveal the deeper feelings of the race.
We find on their turbulent surface parties, campaigns, vociferation,
complaint, platforms, literature, and impassioned appeals. These
are impressive in themselves, but they will be judged rightly only
when we take them as symptoms of deeper moral energies which
have been released into new activity, and seek the lines along
which to flow. Fundamental moral intuitions have tremendous
power. They master men. Men do not master them. Humanity
tends ordinarily with irresistible force to obey them. It sees slowly,
confusedly, and at times helplessly. But once its slow brain has
worked out a fundamental moral concept, the masses hold to it
until that one is replaced by another which is deeper still. When
institutions and established ethical standards are in conflict with
these judgments, processes are set in motion which will in the long
run compel obedience. Unless institutions, in one way or in an-
other, absorb and express and satisfy the clarified moral instincts
of a people, the pathway to revolution is opened. Humanity does
not back up. If it ever returns to a starting-point, the return is
made by way of a circle, which permits the journey without the
appearance of surrender.
The power of new popular movements lies primarily in the fact
that these interpret life experience to the average man more satis-
factorily than any other interpretation with which he is in touch.
To the extent to which existing parties, organizations, institutions,
and leaders express fundamental popular judgments, the action of
the people will be conservative and orderly. We should not under-
rate the enduring power of popular moral feeling, even when it is
set over against the currently accepted judgments of society. It
has been observed before to-day that the great policies of the world
have been suggested by unsophisticated men. The political life of
society does not express its whole moral energy. The state is, after
all, only a function of society. The reforms of an age rarely satisfy
I9I3-] ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM 291
its discontent. Even when new measures originate in the direct in-
terests of the people, and in the beginning express well its stern
demands, by the time reforms are securely established, they are so
reduced in scope and diminished in efficiency as to fail to bring
assurance or contentment. Conservatism always takes over the
demonstrated judgments of radicalism and makes them its own,
while radicalism is driven to the foot of the hill to commence again
its weary ascent. Attitudes survive in the minds of the masses long
after their demands have been granted. These surviving attitudes
serve to perpetuate the sense of injustice by which the people are
easily touched into action. Life changes constantly. The narrow-
ing of opportunity, technical progress, new machinery of social
control, widening vision, change of social pressure, improved meth-
ods of communication and travel, new planes of conflict among
social interests are constantly testing established institutions at new
points, and leading many to new complaint and more far-reaching
demands.
New social movements which spring out of the hearts of the
people, perform a role of fundamental social and political impor-
tance. They are prophetic because they point unerringly in the
direction in which reform must go. They are of great present
value, because they force upon the imagination of leaders the
picture of very definite wrongs, and compel the retarded and
often reluctant attention of statesmen. They are of great educa-
tional value to society as a whole, because with all of their mis-
takes they sharpen the social conscience and quicken the sense of
justice.
Statesmanship, if it is to be relevant, would obtain a new
perspective on these dynamic currents ; would find out the wants
they express, and the energies they contain; would shape and
direct and guide them. For unions and trusts, sects, clubs, and
voluntary associations stand for actual needs. The size of their
following, the intensity of their demands, is a fair index of
what the statesman must think about. No lawyer created a
trust though he drew up its charter; no logician made the
labor movement or the feminist agitation. If you ask for what
political purpose a nation is, a practical answer would be : it is
its " movements." They are the social life. So far as the fu-
ture is man-made, it is made of them. They show their real
vitality by a relentless growth in spite of all the little offences
and obstacles that foolish politicians devise.*
*The Changing Focus in Politics, by Walter Lippman. '1 he Forum, March, 1913.
292 CW CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM [Dec.,
The first condition to the timely wisdom of statesmanship is
that it recognize the inevitable tendency of all parties and in-
stitutions to lag behind actual social needs, just as an electrician
must figure on the lag in the current with which he deals. No party
which believes its own wisdom to be final can be wise at all, because
no merely human institution can be final. Willingness to change
policies, to revise institutions, and to pay proper deference to new
and heretofore uncatalogued popular movements, must be found in
the heart of a genuine statesman. There is, of course, great danger
in unsettling the foundations of the social order. Consummate skill
is necessary to discover that compromise in social conflict between
what is old and what is new, which will neither purchase stability
at the awful price of justice, nor attempt to bargain for justice
at the price of safety. The statesman will recognize also that there
will be no time under popular government when some genuine new
ethical need of society will not arise and seek to create its own
expression. In our recent history, the Greenback Party, Labor
Parties, the Populist Party, Farmers' Alliances, and Socialism rep-
resent fundamental moral intuitions which existing parties and
policies could not satisfy, and which, therefore, humanity insisted
on expressing in its own blundering way.
Socialism in one form or another is found in literature as far
back as the time of Plato. Phases of it recur down through the
Christian centuries. There is a continuity of tradition, of ideal,
and of ethical intuition, between Louis Blanc who entered the
French Parliament in 1848, and Victor Berger who entered our
House of Representatives in 1911. Socialism is fundamental and
powerful, because it has gathered up and expressed a whole series
of fundamental moral judgments concerning issues in which the
interest of humanity is vital. It is not the work of demagogues,
though, like all movements, it has its demagogues. It is a world
movement, and yet it is neither too learned nor too remote, too
abstract or academic, to come to the threshold of the average work-
ing man, and interpret to him, in terms which he understands, the
mystery of life and its injustice. Paradoxical as it may seem,
Socialism does threaten individualism as its adversaries claim, and
yet its appeal to the individual man or woman is more intimate,
more personal and more idealizing, than that of any other party
which asks for popular support. It touches big emotions into
quickened life in the simplest hearts. It feeds natural vanity
and latent egotism by making the individual feel supremely impor-
1913-] ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM 293
tant, whereas the experience of life depresses him into a negligible
atom. We praise a book, we applaud a speaker, we love a painting,
when one or the other of them touches some spring of secret life
within us, or awakens a slumbering memory of long-departed joy.
May we wonder, then, at the power of Socialism when it reaches so
far into the individual's life, and tells him so many things about
himself? Socialism's voice calls soothingly when current political
parties are compelled to preach a discipline which is unwelcome,
a philosophy which is severe, and a code of morality in which
patience, deferred hope, and uninterrupted industry are the funda-
mentals.
Brownson claims that " No age ever comprehends itself, and
the people following its dominant spirit can never give an account
of their own principles." If this be true, and it was a conservative
man who said it, may we not say that Socialism represents one ex-
planation at which the age has arrived in attempting to understand
itself? If the age has failed to understand itself through its learn-
ing, through its culture, through its political parties, and social
institutions, through the wisdom of its accepted leadership, and
the interpretations of its philosophers, can it be that it is attempting
to understand itself in the light of new fundamental moral intuitions
of the masses. Is Socialism a new interpretation of social life in
which humanity is making an effort to combine the vision of its
moral sense, the insight of its philosophy, its interpretations of his-
tory, and its philosophy of government? We may ask the ques-
tion and seek an answer, without for a moment forgetting or ignor-
ing all of the moral ugliness, all of the gratuitous hate, and all of
the ignoble aims that are associated with it.
In any case, there is something marvelously impressive about
it. Our most gifted orators, our keenest logic, and our ripest
scholarship are baffled by the simplest laboring man into whose heart
the spirit of Socialism has entered. Something very profound
in the movement is making Socialists in spite of us. I doubt if
we are hindering, by the force of our arguments, any large number
from entering Socialism. I refer, of course, to those who are tem-
peramentally inclined toward it, because those who are tempera-
mentally opposed to it have no need of our argument. Socialism
is rapidly filtering into our trade unions in spite of the settled
opposition of union authorities. And this opposition does not
rest on the arguments which we employ, but on a simple utilitarian
judgment to the effect that the policies of organized labor seem to
294 ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM [Dec.,
promise more in the terms of human comfort than does Socialism.
It is not philosophy; it is not knowledge of history; it is not psy-
chology; it is not principles of ethics that hold organized labor back
from Socialism. It is simply a practical judgment of a practical
situation. Society would be much poorer if it were to lose the
ethical insight by force of which Socialism is vitalized. Society
would gain infinitely if that healthy moral sentiment might find
what we conservatives call a saner and safer social expression. Not
until our institutions, our parties, and our policies absorb the
ethical sentiment alluded to, and win the sympathy of the masses,
may we hope to put an end to the dangers toward which Socialism
moves.
If conservatism has a divinely-appointed mission to protect the
tradition of civilization, it must have the resources and the capacity
to absorb and translate into institutions most of the healthy awak-
ened moral sentiment of a nation. There are few who would claim
that our conservatism has done this. Shall we not, then, take the
growth of Socialism to be in a way the measure of our sin? Can
it be that Socialism takes its place as the only vehicle by which
certain awakened moral instincts of the nation come to satisfactory
expression? If Socialism, with all of its mistaken idealism; with
its lack of reverence for the past and its frequent denunciation of
religion; with its clouded vision of the limitations of humanity,
its mistaken views of sin, and its confused understanding of social
and historical processes, can succeed in hiding all these deformities
from the eyes of its partisans, conservatism will have no little ac-
count to render for its failure to have resisted its rise with more
encouraging success.
The statement of the case after this manner is somewhat mis-
leading. As a matter of fact, Socialism as a movement fails also to
express this fundamental moral intuition of the people. They get
more comfort, that is those who believe in Socialism, out of it than
out of any other vehicle of social expression. But one cannot paint
a soul. One cannot place the whole moral consciousness of a
multitude into any institution. Sentiment, even when it is a pro-
foundly ethical thing, must be free and boundless as the imagination
itself. Institutions limit, hamper, misinterpret. Thus it is that
all institutions are disappointing, and victory in establishing them
is the prelude to a sense of failure. The " International Workers
of the World " represents, in the main, Socialists who are dis-
satisfied with Socialism.
1913-] ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM 295
It is the function of literature, of eloquence, of poetry in par-
ticular, to voice the unlimited aspirations of humanity. The more
profound the poet, the less is he conscious of the limitations of time
or of place, of institution or of civilization. One might say, were
one inclined to jest, that Providence denies to poets practical ability
in the conduct of affairs, lest they mistake their mission, and fail to
confine themselves to their prophetic duties. Again, one" might
say that Providence leads practical men to dislike poetry and great
literature, lest they take ideals too seriously, and endeavor to in-
corporate them too literally into institutions. Socialism as an ab-
stract interest of humanity, as an assemblage of emotions, aspira-
tions, and moral longings of the race, will remain for all time.
But as the programme of a political party, it must be a failure and
disappointment. Socialism is really poetry that has left its own
yard, and has gone over to play with politics, and has suffered
severely as a consequence of the escapade. We hear much of the
close relations between literature and life. It is well to hinder them
from excessive intimacy. When literature comes too near to life,
only crude realism results. When life conies too near to literature,
a helpless idealism results. Like other mirrors, literature should
inspire and reveal us, but it may not write our politics.
II.
We are face to face with certain fundamental facts in society
which it is easy to overlook, because they are fundamental. The
masses have acquired the habit of inspecting the foundations of
the social order, and of having definite opinions concerning them.
They think in the terms of sentiments, and not in the terms of
institutions : in those of impression and not of definition. When
men and women who have had little training, who have no scholar-
ship, who lack standards of comparison, who are neither sobered
by responsibility nor guided by historical sense, form and utter
freely fundamental judgments concerning our institutions and the
principles on which they rest, they take over the role of philos-
ophers. In fact, all men are become social philosophers. The in-
sight of the masses makes them reckless not cautious. They judge
institutions through their personal, individual experience of life,
and not through historical perspective. If we ask a scholar or a
statesman how to put an end to child labor, how to protect the
modern home against disintegration, how to establish a minimum
296 ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM [Dec.,
wage, or how to shift the incidence of industrial risk from the
laborer to the public, he will study, seek advice, make investiga-
tions, interpret facts, institute comparisons, start experiments, and
then make answer, which is hesitating, conditional, speculative, and
disappointing. If we ask a Socialist or an average laboring man,
his answer will be fearless, direct, definite, and, to him, satisfying.
Socialism is really a popular, definite, satisfying, and funda-
mental answer to fundamental questions which are as common-
place among the masses .as is the discussion of the weather or of
baseball.
Alarm and fear lodge in the upper classes. The masses, how-
ever, feel and think freely, unhampered by the restraints of respon-
sibility and unfearing of the risks of action. If the average man
of limited education were afraid to form fundamental judgments
concerning the social order, Socialism would be impossible. If the
masses retained unquestioning confidence in the leadership of the
upper classes, Socialism would be impossible. If the parties, the
institutions, and the policies that are central and supreme in our
present civilization absorbed and expressed the ethical insight of
the multitude, Socialism would be impossible. If our processes
of education had been right in their direction, and approved in their
standards, and had reached successfully the children and the youth
of the past three generations, Socialism would have been impossible.
But none of these conditions have been realized. And Socialism
became inevitable. Never before has government meant so much
to each of us as it does to-day. Hence attitudes towards institu-
tions are personal and stern. George Eliot remarks somewhere
that simple people can associate unimpeachable feelings with very
false ideas. They have done so in Socialism. She tells us else-
where that simple and inclusive views appeal to popular imagination,
and impel toward action. This, too, has happened in the case of
Socialism.
In these our days the masses " will to believe " certain funda-
mental views. They " will to believe " that social justice is prac-
tically attainable; that poverty with all of its horrible implications
may be eliminated; that opportunity for the joy of life, for develop-
ment, and social peace may be literally and definitely assured to
every child born into the world; that political democracy is not
democracy at all, and that true democracy involves to a great extent
democracy in industry, that is, control of the processes of produc-
tion and of distribution by the people and for them. Men in in-
1913-] ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM 297
creasing numbers " will to believe," that we may be happy without
the self-discipline which is traditionally supposed to be the con-
dition to happiness. As Dryden says it, "All would be happy at
the cheapest rate." These views and the discussions of them enter
into the average life of very large numbers of the people. The
better wisdom of some may enable them to see the truth and the
falsehood that are in such views. Our sympathies, could we trust
them, might lead us to like beliefs, but judgment sternly holds us
back. Not until we succeed in correcting the popular imagination ;
not until we awaken a critical habit in the minds of people, shall
we save them from the colossal mistakes to which they are inclined,
mistakes of which Socialism is probably the most appalling. So-
cialism is a symptom. We should not confine ourselves to the
treatment of it. We must go down into the heart of the people, and
correct and direct that great heart before we can succeed in re-
deeming them from this pitiably mistaken course.
We do not reckon sufficiently with the mental slant caused
by profound impressions. When anyone or any number develop
profound impressions which take on personal color, these tyrannize
with marked power over all mental life. God throws His showers
with even grace over the face of the earth, but the mountain ranges
and elevations determine their later course. The key to the history
of surface-flowing waters is in the watershed. Now the funda-
mental impressions to which reference has just been made, give us
the key to the mental operations of those who become Socialists.
There are only two directions in which facts can be handled in a
Socialist's mind. They either confirm the Socialist view of life
or they are not true. Thus it is that a subtle magic arrests the
syllogisms which we hurl at the Socialist in order to confuse him,
and they fall harmless at his feet.
The habit of forming judgments concerning the foundations of
the social order would, of itself, work little harm for the masses.
The erroneous fundamental views just referred to, could not far
mislead people if those attitudes were merely speculative, and if
they expressed hope rather than a working conviction. But a third
element enters into the situation, which gives both these exceptional
significance. The working class has come into power, and it is
conscious of that power and of its sanctions. Its members pro-
ceed, therefore, to assert these fundamental attitudes as practical
social policies, and to proclaim their fundamental views as prin-
ciples of governmental action. Labor unions and labor parties,
298 ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM [Dec.,
reform movements which originate in the masses, and various
forms of Socialism, taking it as either the inspiration of literature
or the programme of a party, or the philosophy of a school, are
nothing other than the direct outcome of the combination of these
three factors in the consciousness of the great and mighty laboring
class. This class trusts its own ethical instincts more profoundly
than it trusts the ethical judgment of our leaders. Thomas Went-
worth Higginson gives to the people credit for much more acute
moral intuitions than he gives to those in higher social circles.
In the light of our recent political history, and of the current criti-
cism of our institutions, there is some excuse for agreeing with
this view.
There are three other elements which may be described as
entering into the situation as it is here presented. We compel the
masses which have attained to social power to live in presence of
rugged and indefensible contrasts, which appear to confirm their
interpretations of life and their sense of injury. Wealth and
poverty, culture and degradation, exalted sin and neglected virtue,
shameful extravagance and pitiable want, gaze into one another's
faces every day. The usurpations of capital in the industrial, the
social and the cultural organization of life serve to convince the
masses that government no longer serves their interests, but rather
the interests of a small privileged class.
The second element is the partial loss of control of govern-
mental machinery. No one has it to-day: not even the wealthy
and powerful. Technicalities, delays, hairsplitting, conflict of
policies in the conservative classes; the breakdown of criminal
law; the social inefficiency of civil law in many fundamental as-
pects; the irrepressible survival of antiquated phrases which ham-
per courts which are honorable, and tempt courts which are venal;
ignorance among legislators; the patent failure of laws to develop
the strength, the sureness of procedure, and the nimbleness of
adaptation which problems of industrial power imperatively de-
mand, all tend to show us that the mastery of government is, to a
considerable extent, lost. Nowadays, it is extremely difficult, and,
when possible, of doubtful success, for the State to do what even
it itself wills to do. We cannot expand our narrow and antiquated
definitions, under which the action of the law is limited, into suf-
ficient scope to do the things for which all government is instituted.
It is really a calumny for the masses to claim that government
serves capital nowadays unfairly. That it sometimes does so is
1913-] ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM 299
beyond question, but not all the power, nor all the resources, nor
all the cunning of capital can master the modern state when it is
hampered as it is by these hindrances to undisturbed deliberate
activity.
The third factor referred to may be called the obstructive
power of the individual in modern government. One senator, the
chairman of a single committee, a speaker, an executive, a judge can
obstruct the progress of the nation. This condition paralyzes gov-
ernment even when its will is good, when its instincts are sure and
its purposes are noble. It is true that this factor works in two
directions. It has more than once proved itself to be mighty in
blocking the progress of nefarious legislation, but, without a doubt,
it has also proved itself mighty in blocking the advance of humane
legislation. This enhanced power of the exceptional man is the
more conspicuous when it is viewed in contrast with the diminished
power of the average man. Nothing is more pathetic or lonely
than the " new " member of Congress.
The violent lady suffragist who is engaging international at-
tention during these days, appeals constantly to the action of our
colonists in breaking away from the mother country in order to
justify her tactics in promoting the interests of suffrage. There
is some logic in her attitude. One might write a perfect paraphrase
of the Declaration of Independence, and fit the fundamental con-
tentions of Socialism into it. One might begin by stating funda-
mental moral judgments concerning human rights, just as the
Declaration of Independence does it. One might then state the
aims of human government, and the definition of the rights for
the protection of which government exists. One might then enu-
merate the long series of grievances which the people feel, the
experience of which appears to justify them in the extremes to
which they go. One might then draw a conclusion expressed in
the terms of industrial democracy which Socialism is, just as the
colonists drew conclusions which led to the political democracy at
which they aimed. Socialism must be regarded as more than a
symptom. Our attempts to deal with it as a symptom have resulted,
and are resulting, in comparative failure. We must get behind
Socialism and beneath it if we would undermine it. We must
take over the moral judgments which Socialism has appropriated,
and give them satisfactory expression before that movement will
be crushed.
300 ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM [Dec.,
III.
One might be inclined to say that the Catholic Church furnishes
a vehicle through which the fundamental moral sentiment of the
people ought to find satisfactory expression. One might claim, too,
that the programme of social reform sanctioned by the Catholic
Church, notably in Europe, ought to satisfy every reasonable de-
mand that can be made with due regard to recognized limitations.
As a Catholic, I would say that this ought to be the case, but I
believe that it is not the case. There are many outside of the
Church who have great admiration for it, and for its work in the
world. But we must remember that the Catholic Church presents
itself to believers as a discipline on thinking, as a discipline on
action, as a discipline on policies which touch the fundamentals of
the moral order. The Church does not get its authority from the
masses, nor does it aim to express the mind of the masses. Its
mission is to express the mind of God as far as God has
revealed it, and to promulgate and enforce, with spiritual sanctions,
the laws of conduct contained in that revelation. Beyond that, but
subject to it, it has to carry on its ministry of mercy, of consolation,
of encouragement, of direction, of assistance and assurance. The
Catholic who seriously inclines toward Socialism is apt to misun-
derstand this fundamental character of his Church. In as far as
current discontent proclaims social crime, and institutions incor-
porate and sanction social injustice, we will find that the mind of the
masses and the mind of the Church will be largely one. But the
Church must carry in her teaching the message of patience, of
order, of self-reliance, of personal individual responsibility for sin.
It must maintain the authority of the divine sanctions, and it must
interpret, as far as truth requires it, social wrong and injustice in
the terms of sin.
This, I think, is the most beneficent and merciful ministry
that is offered to humanity to-day in the universe. Progress out of
our industrial and social jungle must be made through the pathway
of discipline, renunciation, and patience, but the masses are now
in a temper to demand that the way out be along the path of vin-
dication, concession, and relaxed restraint. To quote Dryden again,
" A down-hill reformation grows apace." That is the type which
the world prefers. The Church offers an up-hill reformation,
which is not quite welcome.
There is undeniable conflict between the Church and much that
1913-] ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM 301
is in Socialism. It is unnecessary to enter into the details now.
No better summary might be offered than that found in an answer
made recently to a Catholic priest by an Italian shoemaker. The
latter was asked, " Are you a Catholic? " He answered: " No, I
am a Socialist."
There are different mental planes in Socialism which should
not be overlooked. There are many who are not conservative who
remain in the conservative camp. They are conscious of no serious
opposition to Socialism, but they do not know what is to be done.
There are many who believe that the present social order has worked
as badly as possible. There are conservative men who admit that
radical changes are necessary. A representative daily paper re-
cently referred to Mr. Debs as a very useful American citizen.
Possibly a majority of the newspaper and periodical press of the
United States will not hesitate to admit contributions, or even
solicit them, which formally and by intention promote the interests
of Socialism. There are many who are speculatively convinced
that Socialism is the only way out, but they lack the initiative or
energy to join the party or proclaim the view. I know of a num-
ber of representative Americans, in rather exalted station, who ad-
mit in their hearts and declare in confidence that the misfit between
our institutions and the conditions of life is fundamentally unjust
and dangerous and indefensible.
The National Civic Federation is about to undertake the work
of discovering and proclaiming reasons for hope. It aims to call
to the attention of the American imagination the real progress that
has been accomplished in the direction of social justice. The plan
is sensible and in every way praiseworthy. It may be doubted,
however, if the most imposing statement that can be made will serve
to call back a single Socialist who has placed his hopes in that
cause.
We must distinguish among Socialists. There is the individ-
ual who is a Socialist, but who has nothing to do with Socialism.
He remains isolated, busy with the every-day affairs of life, with
his work, with his family, and with his worries. Then there is
the collective consciousness of Socialism as a whole, into which
the minds of Socialists are fused, and from which they draw
their inspiration, enthusiasm, and power. Class consciousness, class
experience, class emancipation, class injustice, class aspirations, hold
the movement together with unyielding power. Dissensions as to
party, policy, philosophy, candidates for office, while disturbing,
302 ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM [Dec.,
on the whole will fail to rend the collective consciousness of the
movement to any important extent.
Going back to the fundamental moral judgments of the masses
which are coming to expression through the movement that we
call Socialism, we discover in them the deeper unity and sternness
of purpose which is the basis of its cohesion. Fluctuations in the
Socialist vote have little meaning. The deeper movement met no
setback when the Milwaukee administration failed, because the vote
in that city represented supreme disgust with the old parties rather
than conviction that Socialism has any permanent value in the ad-
ministration of any city. Dissensions as to policy or philosophy are
not fatal to Socialism, any more than they are fatal to other move-
ments in which many men aim to come together to discover the
fundamental points of agreement. Socialism will continue to thrive
just so long as people in increasing numbers believe that it ex-
presses the fundamental moral judgments of the masses in a manner
more satisfying than that of any other party through which it can
come to expression. Only when our conservative leadership can go
down to the multitude and correct its way of thinking and feeling;
only when it regains confidence, restores the sense of moral respon-
sibility, and re-asserts the essential individualism on which social
life depends, may we look for the conquest of Socialism.
IV.
Argument affirms revolution. It does not bring it on. Reas-
oning plays a minor role when the masses seek social and political
truth or justice, but it plays a greater role in protecting and affirming
views which they reach through instinct and feeling. Possibly
Chesterton's estimate of Macaulay may be applied to the multitude.
He was wrong when he was rational. He was right when he was
romantic.
In our work against Socialism we are inclined to depend on
reasoning. We hold, for instance, that Socialism is impossible ; that
it is ridiculous; that it rests on economic heresy; that it is ig-
norant of history; that it is a philosophy of failure; that it threatens
liberty, and that it is rank materialism. Arguments of this kind are
undoubtedly impressive to those who have no sympathy with So-
cialism, and feel no inclination toward it. We know from experi-
ence that they are of little avail in winning back those who have
become Socialists. They are probably not very powerful with those
whose allegiance to the conservative view is shattered, and whose
IQI3-] ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM 303
minds have entered upon the search for an all-inclusive solution of
our problems. Our battlefield lies here.
As a matter of fact, Socialism is impossible. But who is
judge of the possible in human institutions? Do not all social in-
stitutions attempt the impossible, and do they not appear to fail?
Was not American democracy declared impossible? Are not our
legislators attempting every day reforms that are now impossible?
Has it not been declared impossible to control the trusts, to clean
out the slums, to stamp out tuberculosis, to guarantee living wages ?
Is it not impossible to find a satisfactory standard of justice accept-
able to employers and to laborers? Is it not impossible to compel
all members of the Catholic Church to go to the Sacraments, and
to hold all adults faithful to the Sunday Mass? Probably most of
the progress of humanity has resulted from its genuinely-honest
efforts at impossible things. Does not history teach us that to-day's
impossible is the probable of to-morrow and the commonplace of
the day after? Do we not aim to beguile our children into believ-
ing in the impossible and in attempting it? Do we not stimulate
their ambition, and hold out great ideals for them in the same
way? Do we not, in point of fact, agree with Meredith in the
thought that " The impossible is wings to the imagination? "
Might not the argument of the impossible be urged against
Christianity itself ? Human nature is not capable of the perfection
which Christianity offers to it, and yet Christianity has accomplished
miracles in the moral and spiritual order, the like of which the world
has not seen elsewhere. This is the view which Newman urged
on his nephew, Mr. Mosley. I do not, of course, forget the essen-
tial difference that lies between Christianity, which is of divine
origin, and which offers the assistance of divine grace to the striv-
ings after betterment of the human heart, and Socialism or similar
movements which are of natural origin, and whose aims are within
the natural order. We meet occasionally non-Catholics who claim,
as an excuse for not becoming Catholics, that the Church is too
exacting; that it is impossible to live up to the standards of life
which it presents. Thank God, there are not many who hold
this mistaken view in good faith. I do not aim here to refute
this or any other argument which is employed against Socialism.
I venture only to suggest limitations on its value in combatting
Socialism as a popular movement. In fact, Socialism has done a real
service in forcing us to study the impossible and to become familiar
with it, because thereby we have been protected against it. This
304 ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM [Dec.,
conflict, as if often remarked, has revealed new possibles to human-
ity, and our leaders have been scourged into action by that vision.
It is alleged, as a phase of this argument, that it is impossible
for Socialism to tell us how it would direct and regulate life were it
to be victorious. This consideration again has really but little
value in hindering certain types of men from accepting Socialism.
It is an experience of our statesmen that they cannot predict a
month ahead the consequences of much of the legislation which they
enact. Were not our statesmen surprised recently, within forty-
eight hours after they enacted the tariff law, to find unexpected
complications in the five per cent exemption clause as applied to
shipping? Rousseau is quoted as having claimed in his own day
that " No code can foresee future details." Possibly the following
from a brief of the Solicitor-General of the United States, presented
to the Supreme Court in its October term, 1912, will serve to
show us how futile this argument is against Socialism, by showing
us how true it is concerning ourselves.
Nothing is better known than that many, very many, statutes
are drawn and passed with the most obvious evidences of haste,
casual consideration, lack of knowledge of constitutional prin-
ciples, ignorance of many of the facts to which the statute will
apply, or of the consequences which will flow from its operation
in quarters its makers never knew existed.
If, therefore, the language used in a statute were always
given its plain, simple, obvious meaning, and so applied to all
the facts to which it was applicable, one or more of three
results would frequently follow, to wit: Either it would be un-
constitutional, or it would amount to nothing and accomplish
nothing, or it would achieve results so absurd or burdensome
as to demonstrate that no such intention could have prompted its
passage. And so long as our laws are passed in the hasty and
unconsidered way that they are, just so long will one of the
most difficult tasks of our courts be to construe them, and
thereby to give some effect to them without transgressing con-
stitutional restrictions, and yet accomplish as near as may be
that which its authors intended.
It is no easy task. It is never easy to know what another
intended save by the language used; and yet if that language
implies the exercise of a power not possessed, or leads to re-
sults so absurd or unreasonable as to create the belief that no
such effect was intended, it becomes the duty of the court
not to adhere to the letter and destroy the spirit, nor, on the
1913-] ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM 305
other hand, to reject it all as meaningless or violative of con-
stitutional restrictions, but to strive as best it may to give such
a meaning as can fairly and reasonably be done without sub-
stituting its own will for that of the authors, and yet give
effect to the instrument.
We claim that Socialism is ridiculous and childish. It is
ridiculous. But ridicule has furnished the baptismal waters for
many of the great movements by which humanity has been lifted.
H. G. Wells shrewdly suggests in one of his novels that social in-
stitutions ought to begin in confusion and be welcomed by ridicule.
Ridicule failed to hinder the growth of the early Church. It has
failed to hinder inventions. It has failed to stifle the splendid
imagination that has led to revolutionary discoveries. The men
whom nature intends for pioneers are equipped with an insensibility
to ridicule, which protects the beginnings of their work.
Socialism is accused of economic heresy. It is full of it. But
who is judge of economic orthodoxy? Did not Marx himself de-
rive the fundamental principle of his Socialism from most orthodox
economic principles ? The multitude does not worry about economic
heresy. It cares nothing for the metaphysics of value, or theories
of currency, or the medium of exchange. What it demands is
the orthodoxy of justice as against the orthodoxy of a thinker.
Hence the charge of economic error exercises no discouraging in-
fluence on those who have packed their belongings, and started on
the easy march to the camp of Socialism.
One of our distinguished American economists declared some
years ago that Socialism is the philosophy of failure. He said,
" Just to the extent that the Socialists insist on their inability to
accumulate as much wealth as others under existing conditions,
they are unconsciously advertising their own inefficiency. They
clamor for a philosophy of failure, for a system in which they
shall be relieved from the inevitable results of their inferiority in
obtaining the material means which they regard as essential to their
idealistic ends." The title " philosophy of failure " was intended
as an epithet. It is in fact a title.
The impressive feature of Socialism is that our institutions
have produced failures of such quality and of such quantity as
to make it possible to build up that movement as a philosophy of
failure. If we may test any civilization by its failures, and we may,
Socialism writes a very horrible indictment of our social system.
To-day it is the strong and mighty, the successful and leading social
VOL. xcvm. 20
306 ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM [Dec.,
classes, that are causing the greatest menace to our institutions.
The fights that our legislators are compelled to make, are struggles
to curb the mighty in the interests of the weaker classes. As a
philosophy of failure, Socialism is undoubtedly a marked success.
The reading of history shows that dangers have always come to
institutions from the haunts of the mighty, and not from the hovels
of the weak. One reads with some little surprise the essay of
Thomas Wentworth Higginson on the Cowardice of Culture, in
which he says : " There never was a period in our history since
the American nation was independent, when it would not have
been a calamity to have it controlled by its highly educated men
alone." At any rate, if our civilization has need of a philosophy
of failure which will scourge it into action, no other could serve
the purpose any better than the Socialism which we know.
The argument that Socialism threatens popular liberty, appears
to have little influence on those who think that they have not and
have not had any liberty at all. It is significant that the orthodox
labor movement, which is quite opposed to Socialism, constantly
speaks about " emancipating " the laboring class. It uses the vo-
cabulary of war and the tactics of military campaigning. If the
masses are in quest of liberty, and are convinced that they have not
yet secured it, it will be no easy task to convince them that So-
cialism is a menace. There was far-reaching insight in the cry that
resounded over the civilized world in 1848 from the Communist
Manifesto, " Working men of the world unite. You have nothing
to lose but your chains."
V.
Socialism must be explained not so much by itself as by the
constitution of humanity acting in our present historical conditions.
It must be resisted not primarily by acting upon it, but by acting
upon humanity itself. Many of the flaws in our institutions are
flaws in life itself. " The fault is not politics," said the Hon.
Peter Sterling, " it is in humanity." If Socialism carries within
itself a series of fundamental moral judgments, and definite social
aspirations which cannot find expression through any existing
conservative agency, these must be dealt with fairly. The strange
power of the movement is shown in a remarkable way by the manner
in which Socialism advances in spite of its hideous affinities. It is
beyond question that Socialism displays an affinity for atheism,
for loose views on marriage, and distressing policies concerning the
1913-] ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM 307
family, and for materialism in philosophy. These affinities alone
should have slaughtered Socialism long since, but they have not
done so. Atheism is in quite good form. Society at large no
longer believes in the homely, honest, old-fashioned Christian mar-
riage. The views of Socialism on marriage at their worst are no
worse than the views incorporated into our modern legislation.
The materialism that asserts itself in Socialism, ugly as it is, is
little worse than the actual materialism which Matthew Arnold
scourged as the curse of his time. When we attempt to argue with
a laboring man who is disposed in a kindly way toward Socialism,
and we tell him that Socialism is allied to atheism, and to free love
and materialism, he simply denies it. He persists in telling us that
he is merely an economic Socialist, and that his Socialism contains
no danger whatever to either his faith or his philosophy. It is easy
to find many who have argued this way, and who have in the final
outcome lost their faith and their Christian philosophy too. This
would seem to show, in as far as it is the case, that a subtle process
seizes the very soul of this type of man, and so controls his mental
processes as to blind him. Then when he ceases to care, the loss
of his faith does not alarm him. Why is it that our words appear
to have so little force when we, who are versed in philosophy and
trained in argument, are unable to best the simple and uneducated
man who has heard the call of Socialism and has turned his heart
toward it in answer ?
One of the features of the situation which is distressing, is
that by a trick of feeling and imagination a man succeeds in getting
into his mind attitudes which are beyond him, and views which he
cannot control. It requires neither skill nor learning to " get "
pneumonia, but both are necessary in order to get rid of it. Not
all of the wisdom of man can take away from a sinner the knowl-
edge, the abandon, the weakness of his first gross sin. Minds are,
in a sense, like bodies. They vary in capacity, temperament, habits,
immunities, and tendencies. Prevailing habits of thought govern
the thinking of the individual, whether or not he will it. If it is
customary to take fundamental attitudes, men will take them. If
it is customary to inspect the foundations of the social order, and
pass opinions, and translate opinions into principles of action, men
will do so. There are cosmic minds equipped with splendid harbors
into which philosophies, like mighty ships, may sail in perfect
security, certain of finding the anchorage for which their propor-
tions call. There are provincial and shallow minds into which such
308 ON CERTAIN PHASES OF SOCIALISM [Dec.,
ships may enter only at their peril. Now, when we find cosmic
thinking in provincial minds, only confusion, disturbed judgment,
loss of standards, faulty sense of proportions, and mistaken valua-
tions will result. Socialism rests on cosmic thinking or, if one will,
cosmic feeling. When immature minds engage themselves with it,
confusion results.
Helmholtz devised a set of resonators so constructed that
each of them admits sound waves of only one length. Minds
should be equipped with similar resonators, so adjusted to capacity
and outlook that neither views nor doubts nor questions nor anx-
ieties nor attitudes be admitted, except in as far as these are pro-
portioned to it. Pope undoubtedly had this thought in view when
he spoke of man's knowledge " measured to his state and place."
Very many Socialists, after accepting Socialism, are unable to
undertake the studies or do the reasoning that might call them back
from their mistaken way. In addition, they will have lost the
faculty of confidence in their leaders, who might be trusted to think
for them.
I believe that an inspection of our methods of combatting
Socialism would be timely. An earnest endeavor to explore the
Socialist mind should be made, with a view to discover the ethical
content, to which approval should in justice and truth be given.
Possibly a test of the working value of our standard arguments
might be made, in order to show whether or not they are as convinc-
ing to the Socialist or the prospective Socialist as they are to the
conservative. Some such course of action might lead us to the
conclusion, that the way out is to be found ultimately through our
schools. A practical, easily understood philosophy of life ought
to be introduced at a point in our educational system when the
maturity of the youth will permit it, teaching the views of life and
of history, of justice and of idealism, which might work in two
directions. On the one hand, it might awaken, inform, and inspire
our future industrial, political, and social leaders in a way to pre-
vent them from the dreadful excesses of neglect, error, and selfish-
ness of our more recent past. On the other, it might protect the
unsuspecting and honest masses from the false views which they
now accept with unsuspecting simplicity. Such teaching, together
with more serious effort to satisfy the demands of elementary jus-
tice in reforms now under way, might point the way to the industrial
and social peace for which all of us are longing, a condition, the
vision of which has heretofore, in our day at least, been denied.
THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY.
BY HILAIRE BELLOC.
II.
SAID in my last paper that I would begin my exposi-
tion of the conflict between French democracy and
the Church by supposing my reader first to observe
the matter from the standpoint of a French provin-
cial town, because that standpoint is the most central,
and that from which he will get a juster view of the business than
from any other.
You may go into one of those French provincial towns (which
are by the way the most steadfast and enduring of all European
institutions), and in a short survey of the streets and buildings, in
a few conversations with representative men, find something like
this:
A great building, the product of elaborate and long-continued
effort, and the chief external expression of history in the place,
will first strike you. It is the cathedral. The strength and the
variety of it merely as an artistic result will, if you are new to
such things, amaze you. There will probably be nothing in the town
comparable to it for magnificence and effect. You will find that
it is dedicated to some great missionary who founded the faith
there at least seventeen centuries ago. If you will have the patience
to remain within the building from a summer Sunday sunrise to
about ten o'clock, you may note a continual succession of not very
large groups, in most of which the majority will be of women
coming in to hear the corresponding succession of Low Masses
which are said throughout the morning at the various altars. You
will, if you know something of the Catholic Church in other coun-
tries, remark the very large proportion of communicants at each
Mass; you will further be struck by the absence of any apparent
poverty or negligence in the dress and toilet of these small but
successively numerous congregations, and if you know something
of the French world, you will further be struck by the complete mix-
ture of classes. Though the proportion of men to women is smaller
than it would be in Italy or in Ireland, yet the representation of
310 THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Dec.,
every class out of a society still divided into many ranks corre-
sponding to varieties in wealth and profession will, or should, strike
you very forcibly.
At about ten o'clock you will see a great procession of clergy,
acolytes, and clerical folk in general, including probably many sem-
inarists, file into the choir. Meanwhile a congregation will assemble
in the nave, which congregation will seem to you, unless it is one
of the great feasts of the year, small for the principal Mass in
such a town and in such a building. In the High Mass that fol-
lows, you will observe certain points peculiar to the French Church,
many of them of immense antiquity, and all in succession exem-
plifying the history of religion in the country. The arms above
the bishop's throne will date perhaps from the Crusades ; the chant
to which the Nicene Creed is set (and which is still universally
used throughout the country) is of the same date. At one moment
in the service great baskets, full of pieces of bread or cake, will be
brought up to the altar for a blessing, and then distributed among
the congregation. If there is a sermon, it is more than likely that
this sermon will deal with the struggle of the Church against the
skepticism of the modern world, but you will be astonished to note
an absence of any direct political allusion. You will notice how
more than one woman, usually taken from the wealthier families
of the district, accompanies the priest during the two or three
collections that are made for various objects after the Gospel.
This High Mass over, you will again notice that the usual
chant at the end for a benediction upon the government, such as
one hears in every other country, is omitted. If you will wait
until midday or thereabouts, you will be surprised to find a con-
gregation, considerably larger than that which was present at the
High Mass, attending a late Low Mass at which no communions
are given, and you will further note in this late and largest con-
gregation a larger proportion of men. You will also probably be
disturbed by a few comic tourists who will be standing in the aisles.
As you go out of the cathedral to lunch at your hotel after
this rather arduous experiment in foreign discovery, you will see
a large solemn building near the cathedral with a great garden
attached to it, probably dating from the eighteenth century, and
bearing the arms of the See sculptured upon it. This building,
which was once the bishop's palace, will now bear the word musee,
that is museum, newly gilt upon its principal porch. The old
square outside the cathedral will be called say the Place Zola,
1913-] THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY 311
and the main street which leads you home will perhaps be called
Gambetta Street : Zola was a pornographer of doubtful ancestry,
chiefly remarkable for his anti-Catholic violence in the religious
struggle between the Church and her opponents called " the Dreyfus
case." Gambetta, a political adventurer of great energy, who was
chiefly responsible for the beginnings of modern anti-Catholic legis-
lation in France, and whose name is also and better remembered
in connection with the National Defence in 1870. So much for
your first introduction to the problem.
In the afternoon, as you saunter round the town, you will
find most of the shops still open, and it may interest you to be
told that there is a law which strictly compels them to be closed,
and which no one dreams of obeying: for parliament is quite dis-
credited in France, and laws which have not a popular respect are
disregarded. Not a few of these shops will be doing a very brisk
trade in every kind of pious objects, and to-day particularly in small
statues of the Blessed Joan of Arc, who, by the way, usually carries
a tricolor flag : note that.
You will perhaps pick up in a cafe the local paper, and there
another surprise awaits you. Ten to one the leading article will be
theological.
I know how surprised many of my readers will be at this
last sentence, but it is strictly true. The leading article of a local
French newspaper, and very often of a Parisian one too, will be
theological, because the French people are proving their vitality in
nothing more than the fact that they are to-day more interested in
theology than any other people in Europe.
When we are looking into the heart of a matter, we must
particularly guard ourselves against slovenliness of language, with
its consequent confusion of thought. A lively interest in theology
does not mean unanimity in religion, nor does it mean orthodoxy
in religion. It means an intense direction of the mind towards the
ultimate problems of human destiny and of human origins. This
may exist where religious opinion is unanimous, as in the schools
where St. Thomas taught ; or it may exist, and perhaps more natur-
ally exists, where there is doubt and division, as in the great struggles
of the fourth and of the sixteenth centuries. But whether there is
unanimity or not, and whether that unanimity is orthodox
or not, does not concern my point. I say that the French
are now the most theological people in Europe, because nowhere do
you get anything like the intensity of conviction and discussion upon
312 THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Dec.,
the ultimate problem of mankind that you do in France : hardly any-
one can there touch public affairs without declaring for or against
the faith.
It is exceedingly important to appreciate this in our study of the
modern French problem. France is a battlefield. It is an arena in
which is being fought out the great conflict of our time, and men who
congratulate themselves upon the somnolence or indifference or sen-
timental shirking of true issues which are so common elsewhere, are
in a grave historical error. The future is to the men who fight,
who know what they want, and are prepared to obtain it, and in
France to-day the number of those who have made up their mind,
and who are determined to convince their fellows, is larger, and their
activities are more violent, than in any other country. One of the
two sides must ultimately win, and on which side wins in that
particular field depends the future character of all civilization.
I will give a few examples in proof of this before returning
to my description, and to the matter of the newspaper at which I
began this digression. Concrete examples of the sort are very use-
ful in judgment.
Ten years ago I stopped in the house of a hospitable, kind old
man who lived all by himself in some mountains, and who put me
up after I had lost my way in a walk of many miles. He was very
poor, but he had one ramshackle cart and a lean horse, and as I had
lamed myself, he drove me to a station a few miles away. As he
drove me, this old Frenchman, who had been a private soldier and
had now his tiny farm in the hills, talked of nothing but his hatred
of the clergy, and of the abasement of the mind, and of the loss of
freedom which had come through the influence of the Catholic
Church. He had a perfectly clear theology of his own. He
believed in God as the Creator and Father of men. He denied the
Incarnation and all its consequences. He thought the morality of
the Gospel good. He did not admit miracles. And he talked of
nothing but that religious interest of his! That is the point. You
do not get much of that outside France.
On another occasion, in a political meeting, I saw a man get
up and ask the candidate this question : " Are you a Freemason ? "
The question was repeated in a sort of bombardment from every
quarter of the hall. The candidate answered : " I am not a Free-
mason, but I agree with the Masonic effort which is directed to-
wards the dissipation of those superstitious errors which have en-
slaved the human mind," whereupon there was at once in that
1913-] THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY 313
French meeting as violent a hubbub as there would have been in an
English meeting during the Boer War, or in an American meeting,
I suppose, between the two parties just before the outbreak of the
Civil War.
You see the same thing in French apologetics. The war in
France is carried vigorously into the enemy's camp by those who
defend the Church. They attack persons; they look up private
records; they are as keen to prove their case, and to destroy the
personal status of an opponent, as they would be in an economic
discussion in countries where trades are thought more important
than general philosophy. The whole country is alive with dis-
cussion upon the ultimate problems which men must face.
How ridiculous this statement will sound to a man who has
lived in the easy and happy life of French civilization I know
well, but let him note that no considerable emotion has been aroused
in France for a generation upon any question without that question
being sooner or later a question of religion.
Well, then, to return to what I was saying about the news-
papers. My hypothetical observer or traveler will look at the local
newspaper, and find the leading article to be an attack upon or a
defence of the Catholic Church in some aspect. It may be the
question of the schools, or of order and authority in the army,
or in the State, or it may be upon the matter of property, but what-
ever the pivot upon which the article turns, religion will be the matter
of it. The negation of God, or the affirmation of His existence,
a challenge to the Catholic Church or a defence of it, will come
into the writer's exposition.
But the traveler will note another point. The best-informed
paper, and that which has the largest circulation, will nearly always
be, outside Paris, opposed to the Catholic Church. Take, for ex-
ample, the town of Toulouse and the great district over which its
press radiates. It is too far from Paris to receive the Paris papers
until their news is stale. It has, therefore, organs of its own, the
principal of which is the Dep&che. This paper has as definite a
theological line as an American paper will have a definite tariff
line, or an Irish paper will have a definite Home Rule or Unionist
line. The whole note and assence of the Depdche in Toulouse is its
antagonism to the Christian Church.
Interested and I hope illuminated by his perusal of the local
sheet, and his discovery of this peculiar French character in jour-
nalism, the traveler will, let me suppose, make friends with a few
THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Dec.,
men in the cafe, and they will take him to their club in the after-
noon. Here he will find that club to be a branch of the local
Masonic organization. He will discover that their conversation
turns upon the necessity of opposing and breaking the power of the
Catholic Church, and that with the definite object in view which
they call " enlightenment " and " progress," and, in general, " the
good of humanity." And in this society he would find very few
young men. The backbone of such provincial Masonic organiza-
tions is the men of a generation now passing away, old men or men
of middle age, who remember what they call a "clerical domination."
He will also be interested to find that these men are (I speak of
some towns, not of all and the number is increasing) almost
identical with the local caucus which selects and nominates the
local deputy to the national parliament and the local mayor to his
municipal council. In general they will still be found controlling
the " machine " which governs elections of all sorts in all countries
enjoying representative institutions.
If he asks questions about the workaday of that " machine," he
will note the paradox that while the younger men who count,
fight rather shy of the old Masonic organization, which is still
in power though declining, yet that organization relies upon catch-
ing the votes of the younger men more than they do upon those
of the older men in the rank and file.
Every man over twenty-one who has not shirked his military
service has a vote, and were the vote restricted to married men
or to men of a certain age, the caucus would, he understands,
be in more peril even than it already is.
Perhaps if he has letters of introduction, the traveler will be
asked to dine at some great house in the neighborhood. Here he
will come upon yet another aspect of French society, which he will
do well to study closely. He will find his rich host and the guests
deploring the evil of the times, saying that society is godless, and
that democracy is the root of all the evil. If he cares later to
make inquiry, he will further discover that this rather isolated
wealthy class is composed of men who do not always practise their
religion, and includes many men who are at heart very much op-
posed to the Catholic Church. He will rightly conclude that it is a
political or social fashion which leads them to adopt this attitude,
and he will further note a lack at once of constructive ability and
determined energy in them. They confine themselves to regret and
to negation. And yet it is among such men that he is most likely
1913-] THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY 315
to meet or was until quite recently most likely to meet the most
sincere and devoted among those who defend the Church, including
perhaps some notable member of her hierarchy.
All this experience crowded into one day will impress the
mind at first with a hopeless confusion. What solution can be
discovered, what common key unlocks the door? What reasonable
explanation can be afforded him of a state of affairs such as he
has come across? Here is Catholicism evidently informing
the whole of society, its architecture, its morals, its daily habits.
Here also is a powerful organization still in the saddle directing all
active political life against Catholicism. Here is a segregation
of the wealthier class, coupled with a greater practical sense of
equality than you will find in any other community. Here is a
placid, wealthy, and eminently efficient social organization, which
is none the less at issue with itself upon the very heart of human
things, and upon doctrines which must ultimately determine society
in one of two opposite and violently antagonistic directions.
The more a man learns of such a provincial centre of French
life, the more the riddle will puzzle him, and, as a matter of fact,
I have discovered chance travelers in France, however intelligent
and eager to solve that problem, fixed at last in one of two special
points of view, which every Frenchman will regard as grossly in-
sufficient. He either takes sides straightforwardly against the
Catholic Church, and regards everything in French life as divided
into progressive, modern, and healthy elements on the one hand, and
more or less disturbing, moribund elements derived from a dying
past on the other ; or he sees France as a society in which the Holy
Catholic Church, represented by certain members of the hierarchy
whom he has met, and a few wealthy men with whom he associates,
is strangely persecuted for no particular reason save the spite and
wickedness of the enemies of religion, who have somehow or other
he never can explain how captured political machinery and
deluded the people.
Now I say that those two points of view which the outsider
tends to adopt are narrow, false, and, in the judgment of those
who know France, almost puerile.
To understand that provincial town, and therefore to know
what battle is being waged, and how, and why, and with what
forces, it is necessary first of all to know the history lying behind
the business.
When we know that, we can see not only where the various
316 THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Dec.,
lines of cleavage run in French society, or rather in French opinion,
but also, what is more important, what modification they are now
suffering, and what the future of the complex struggle is likely to be.
We shall see when we have followed the historical development,
how and why certain forces, which have nothing to do with what
is to us the main issue of the Church and its enemies, have been
enlisted upon either side; how of these alliances some are natural
and some unnatural; which of them therefore are now waning,
and which waxing; and, in general, we shall be able to grasp the
meaning of that organic and highly complex engagement which
distinguishes modern France, and makes those who understand
modern Europe call France, as I have called it, the " arena," in
which the fate of Western civilization is being fought out.
I shall, therefore, in my next article, begin a survey of the his-
torical development which in the last three hundred years has led
up to the present situation, and from which modern France has
inherited the various forces at issue. I must premise in this his-
torical survey that the issue is not local, but general to the whole
of European thought, and that though it was the particular acci-
dents of French history which determined modern France, yet upon
what modern France decides will depend immediately the decision
of Europe. And Europe is the world, for Europe is only the
modern name for Rome.
A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM.
BY JOHN AYSCOUGH.
IV.
HERE were not, in general, many topics at once local
and novel for Railham to discuss, so that the advent
of the van chapel, as they preferred to call it, was
an extraordinary boon that way. The first meeting
was talked about till everybody went to bed, and the
subject was resumed when everybody got up in the morning.
Mr. Lome of the South Farm, who was Vicar's Church
Warden, had not attended, and was of opinion that Mr. Drub, his
colleague, had better have stayed away. He was a childless wid-
ower, of a leaden demeanor and complexion, and his niece, Miss
Floralia Lome, kept house for him. Floralia had gone to the meet-
ing, and intended to go again. Her life was nearly as gray and
leaden as her uncle's long, sheep-like face, and something like a
ray of light and warmth had seemed to creep into it as she listened
to the strange priest. For over ten years she had done her duty
as mistress of the South Farm, and she frankly told herself that
in this matter she had a right to do as she liked, and was old enough
to decide for herself.
Simon Vest, the baker, who always smelt of new bread, and
had eyes like the two currants on a ginger-bread rabbit, talked
about the meeting at every door as he handed in the loaves.
He was a dissenter, an accident frequent among bakers, and of
a bilious habit. It was his opinion that the arrival of these strange
preachers was " ordained," and might be intended as a scourge
presumably of the Establishment as represented in Railham. He
had nothing to say against the " Reverend Catesby," nor yet
against his discourse : nothing. He did not wonder that the
church folks should have been struck there was not much to strike
the unawakened in Railham church by what he could judge on club
days and that. Only folks should not forget as figs don't grow on
thistles and the shake of his head implied a considerable mis-
giving as to the thistliness of " these Reverends."
Mrs. Tick, who had wept a little last night, could not deny that
318 A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Dec.,
it seemed strange as a Roman Catholic should preach " all about
the Lord," when it would have been so clearly in character for him
to have studiously avoided the subject, and dealt rather with images.
The word suggested two she had nearly bought at the door of a
peddler, representing Mr. Chamberlain and Lady Jane Grey.
The schoolmaster, stepping in to buy a postal order for sixpence
(for a competition), casually remarked that Father Catesby was
probably descended from the Gunpowder Plot, and urbanely advised
Mrs. Tick to keep a sharp lookout, lest she might be projected
heavenward more suddenly than she bargained for. But the school-
master was merely of a sardonic humor, and had every intention
of attending the meetings himself.
Stephen Drub halted between rather more than two opinions.
He had listened with keen attention, and was sure that all he
had heard was good perhaps too good. The carrier trade was, he
argued, " pecoolyer ; some f olks'd aggie to get a big bundle, con-
taining half a dozen passels from different shops i' Market Rellum,
made up in one, brought home for tuppence: weren't it natur as
folks should pay themselves their doos outer the change when there
was the chanst? " Stephen could not but perceive a risk to business
in exposing that tender plant, his conscience, to Father Catesby's
rather uncompromising directness of appeal. And then Miriam
urged him somewhat too hotly to continue his attendance.
" If a brand's plucked from the burnin','' she argued, " it
can't be a black 'and as does it. And I must say it to your
face, Steve, as I says it behindst your back in wrestlin' for 'ee,
as you're tough, Steve. I did think last Lantern night, as Sister
Pawkins had moved 'ee, speakin' o' Jericho : and arterwards you
stuck to it as it was no more'n the fidgets you'd got, through a
nutshell you was sittin' on as you thought was a stud gone down
your back."
Mr. and Mrs. Dubb were an attached couple, but Stephen
thought his wife more didactic than was suitable towards a People's
Church Warden with thirty acres of his own, considering she
had been in service, and had brought nothing to the common stock
except four Windsor chairs, the chest of drawers, and the set of pic-
tures of the history of the Good Samaritan, in one of which the
priest going by on the other side was clearly a dignitary of the
Establishment, a Rural Dean probably, and in another the Sa-
maritan was pouring sherry out of a cut-glass decanter into a flesh
wound on the shoulder of the unlucky traveler.
1913-] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 319
On the other hand, it was duly reported to the carrier that
Farmer Lome had criticized his attendance at the meeting, and
criticism from that quarter was particularly obnoxious. Weren't
they both Church Wardens, " and what call had 'Mr.' Lome (whose
grandfather had took wage of Stephen's granduncle at Felham
Mill) to set himself up, and pooh-pooh his (Stephen's) suggestions
concerning the noo cemetery ? " Everybody knew that John Lome
paid rent for every acre he fanned (though he had " Esquire "
on his "onvelups") whereas Drub paid rent to no man. The land was
his own, and the house was his own ("vrando to it or no") : what if
his father did drink hisself to death in it? If a chap couldn't drink
hisself to death in his own house, where could he? Squire Malham
drank his self to death at Malham Court that belonged to the Mai-
hams time unknown, and all the county rode in their brooms at the
funeral that showed : Farmer Lome was so " near " he drank
naught but toast-water, that's all payin' rent did for he.
Stephen was now quite decided that he would attend the
meetings as for the world, if Father Catesby meant the Sunday
World, he'd as lief take the Sunday Briton, since the World had
gone over to the nationalization of land, and put stars in just as
you was thinking you'd got to the prime bits in the court news:
when Mr. Drub thought of court news he was not alluding to in-
telligence concerning royalty, but to the trials the reporting of which
is considered in England so peculiarly appropriate to papers in-
tended for Sunday reading.
Mrs. Sheen was already half-jealous of Jake's undisguised
devotion to Father Catesby. Had Father Catesby weaned him
and there never was a child that gave more trouble in the weaning?
It was Father Catesby, she supposed, as had nussed him through
the scarlet-fever, and when he broke his leg
Mrs. Vest was rather alarmed by such vigorous irony, and
did not quite know whether by denial or assent to express agree-
ment. She was aware that Jake was dissipated, and could not
help thinking that anything which took him within range of a
series of sermons might do him good : but she never dreamt of
hinting such a thing she was a well-bred woman in her rather
flaccid fashion.
Mr. Swipp of the Star spoke with a patronizing approval
of the Van Gents, for they were his " guesses," and he almost
hinted that to him their coming was no surprise. Mr. Swipp seldom
condescended to be surprised : had a revolution occurred he would
320 A BEGINNING AT RA1LHAM [Dec.,
have let you gather that he had known it was impending for several
weeks. Not that his sympathies were at all revolutionary : it is as
natural for a licensed victualler to be a Tory as for a cobbler to
be a Radical, or a baker to be a Wesleyan. And Mr. Swipp had
been a footman (he pretended it was a butler) in what he called
a titled 'ouse. He knew the aristocracy at sight, and passed his
word that Messrs. Catesby and Longcliff belonged to it. They had,
he said, the " hair " of it. Indeed he remembered a Sir Rupert
Catesby coming to stay at the Awl : also an Honorable Mrs. Long-
cliff with a mole on her neck like enough Father Longcliff had
a mole on his neck, only he wore his collar too high. Mr. Swipp
said the two Van Gents were as jolly as anything, and he knew
about Catholics and was none surprised, for the still-room maid at
the Awl had married a Catholic, and died in her First Communion,
with a funeral fit for an angel. He did not precisely attend the
meetings himself, but he approved of Melia's doing so and Melia
took her mother the second night.
Mrs. Swipp was a large, easy creature, with a tendency to
tears and sentiment, and she was beginning to cry when they
sang " Our Fathers Chained in Prisons Dark," but restrained her-
self, with some presence of mind, lest people should suspect that
anyone belonging to her had been transported. She never went to
church herself, being averse to the exertion of forcing herself into
her black velveteen, but liked her " gal " to go, and considered it
would bring a blessing. It was the novelty of taking part in
religious exercises in week-day clothing that allured her, in the
first instance, to attend the meetings on Tidd's Piece.
" Why is it called Tidd's Piece? " Father Loncliff asked her.
" Well, sir, 'tis but a low reason. Tidd was the idiot the
Railham idiot and he used to live on it in a hut."
"In a hut?"
" Yes. A hut made of a few boards and bits of old oilcloth.
Some said he was a gypsy ; but some said there never was a gypsy
idiot. He mended almost anything, unless it was his clothes."
Mrs. Swipp liked both the priests, and ventured to inquire
if they were orphans a slipshod curiosity was her most energetic
characteristic.
" No. Why ? Anything but orphans. I've had two mothers,"
replied Father Longcliff, laughing.
" Two mothers ! Dear laws ! " cried Mrs. Swipp, much inter-
ested.
1913-] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 321
" Yes. My own mother died when I was six, and my father's
second wife has been a first-rate mother to me: why should we
be orphans ? "
" Well, sir, it did seem to me as your ma's wouldn't like you
goin' about wi' ne'er a soul to look to you if you fell ill or that."
" We never do fall ill ; we've no time. Father Catesby's
mother comes and hears him sometimes."
" Don't that make 'ee shy, sir? "
" Not particularly," Father Catesby confessed.
" He's about as shy," said his friend, " as a brass tea-kettle."
" I never had a brass tea-kettle," said Mrs. Swipp. " We've
a brass skillet, and sometimes I wish we hadn't; neighbors wants
to borry it so in the jam season; it's hard to say no, and sure as
you say yes, you find fruit o' your own as wants preservin'. Swipp's
very good-natur'd, though he seems high to some, and he'd lend
the nose off his face: Mrs. Chook has sent across for the loan of
a leg o' mutton (and her gal passin' Sheen's where there was two)
times and again, though she niver paid back but a shoulder once,
and a neck twice, and Swipp would do it again to-morrow.
Be neighborly 3 s his motto, and I hope them above will not overlook
it. And there was publicans in the Bible, and niver an exciseman as
I can remember of. So I do hope, Mr. Catesby, you'll not speak too
bad of the beer in your sermons, I'd better stay at home else:
for there's no other but Swipp in the public line in Railham, and
ivery word you said'd be put down to him. And he don't encour-
age them as would tek too much. 'A cheerful glass, says I,' says he.
'But who iver read of a cheerful bucket?' '
Jake Sheen was not the only young man who had listened
with keen attention, and meant to listen again: there were many
of very varying sorts. There was Mr. David Brail, one of the two
sons of Mr. Samuel Brail of the Church Farm, and much the
steadier, though he was the younger of the two. There were Tom
and Bill, the two sons of Seth Hallam, the cow doctor, who
were always together, and were esteemed as " likely " young fellows
as any in Railham ; their father was a hard-bitten, foxy old scamp,
remarkable chiefly for his profanity, and his capacity for not getting
drunk no matter how much he drank ; but Tom and Bill were sober,
clean-mouthed young men, generally popular and respected. As
they both did a bit of horse-coping, their character for honesty
was the more to their credit.
In marked contrast to the smart, well-set-up brothers was
VOL. XCVIII. 21
322 A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Dec.,
Enoch Pound, a weak-legged, narrow-chested assistant in Mrs.
Tick's shop at the post office, who had looked quite old when
he came there at fifteen, and looked scarcely a man now he was
four and twenty. He spent most of his wages on books and none
on beer: yet he was not a teetotaller, and attended neither of the
chapels, nor did he go to church; and Mrs. Tick whispered, not
without a respectful awe, that, for all he looked so duddled-like,
he believed nothing, not even in the Ten Commandments, and
thou shalt not marry thy grandmother. Mrs. Tick supposed the
latter to be the sequel or second edition of the former, for the
boards, on which they were painted in gilt letters, balanced each
other on the front of the gallery, with the lion and the unicorn
fighting for the crown between. Railham church was very old-
fashioned, and had never been restored: the font was still filled
with hats during the time of divine service, except at Christmas,
when it was stuffed up with holly and mistletoe.
Enoch Pound went to the first meeting, and intended to go
to them all : in spite of his weak legs and defective shoulders
he was more intelligent than half the young men in Railham,
and if he did not, in fact, believe much, he did not disbelieve
either. He went neither to church nor chapel, chiefly because he was
shut up in a small and stuffy shop all the week, and lay late in bed
on Sunday mornings; and when he was dressed, had a habit of
going off on long solitary walks with a book in his pocket. He
was born in the workhouse, and had no one belonging to him; his
wages were small, and they were mostly spent in books. He had
no particular thoughts of " getting on," but was continually think-
ing how to learn more He had not Jake Sheen's half -chivalrous,
half -shame faced admiration of Father Catesby, but he perceived
that the priest was well-educated and clever, and could teach him
all about the Catholic Church, of which he knew scarcely anything:
he wanted to know about as many things as possible, and the Catho-
lic Church, he was well aware, belonged to history, and was a big
institution. He would have attended as willingly if the subject
to be learned had been the Chinese Empire.
Nevertheless his somewhat chilled heart had been warmed,
not disagreeably, by Father Catesby's first address. Nothing was
more present to his self -consciousness than the habitual thought
that, except to himself, his existence mattered no whit to anybody.
Plain and ungainly as he was, there were indeed young women in
Railham who would not have refused to " walk out " with him :
and he was quite shrewd enough to know it. Once he had tried.
1913-] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 323
But that once was enough. He had wanted to discuss arithmetic
on first principles not denying in terms that two and two are
four, but wishing to know why, and Jane Trott had been unable
to rise beyond the thesis that one and one should, in due time, and
after three several callings in church, make one still. Lonely as
he felt, Enoch preferred his loneliness to Jane Trott, and his solitary
walks had been resumed with a considerable sensation of relief.
A man, however, may strongly prefer his own company to that
which he finds worse than his own, and be very conscious of isola-
tion all the same. Enoch did not want to be loved by Jane Trott,
but he had a heart in his narrow chest, and it also could be hungry.
As he listened to Father Catesby, a glimmering at least of the
truth crept into him. No one had listened with a closer atten-
tion, and his intelligence could outstep that of most of the priest's
hearers. Even before the next address, he had a half-sense at least
of what was coming. That address we cannot give here, but
Enoch's instinct told him what it would convey. Christ being
God had a right to the claim He made : and the claim was to the
possession of every human life; but why should Christ, being God,
care about it ? Why should He want to rule in every man's heart ?
There could only be one answer, and the answer came, as Enoch
knew it would, in Father Catesby's second address. As he listened
he believed, quite sincerely, that he had forestalled every word in his
own mind. Christ, God, desired the love of the men that He
had made. They had nothing else to give Him, except mere sub-
mission and obedience, and they were valueless except as proofs
of love.
Enoch, though not a chapel goer, had been at times to chapel :
and he had before now heard of the love of Christ for men;
but the hearing had not then attracted him. The Divine Love,
as he had heard it set forth, was too patronizing and too crushing:
and it repelled him. It seemed to him that it was crammed down
on humanity too inexorably, as if God would not hear of receiving
anything, and only insisted on giving everything, like a too wealthy
patron who forces gifts on poor folk, and will not condescend to
be given anything at all. Besides, the idea of Christ Himself, con-
veyed then, had repelled him rather than attracted. Enoch, per-
haps quite unfairly, had gathered the idea that the preacher's
ideal of Christ was of a man a good deal resembling himself : and
the preacher had not at all fascinated him. He had not the smallest
desire to love an elderly, unctuous, obviously complacent, self-
satisfied person, with a rather tedious flow of oily superiority. When
324 A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Dec.,
he spoke of miserable sinners the preacher patted his own breast,
but without conviction, as Enoch sourly surmised, and he certainly
spoke as though sins were the only things of which God took the
least cognizance in His creatures. Enoch did not believe himself
sinless; with all his crude conceit he was too sincere; but he could
not conceive how his puny failings could render him interesting to
anybody : he felt an intuitive conviction that they would not interest
even the preacher in him.
And the preacher had never presented Christ as God: only
as " the Lamb," and Enoch knew as little about lambs as any
lad born in the country could. Evangelical Christianity, as rep-
resented in chapel, had only struck poor Enoch as an ansemic, vapid,
somewhat knock-kneed appeal to a sentiment of morbid guiltiness
that he happened not to feel. It was odd that, while the preacher
never seemed to dream of presenting Christ as anything but a man,
he should wholly fail in presenting Him really as a man. Poor
Enoch was a red-eyed, bottle-shouldered creature himself; but, like
many such, he was keenly alive to manhood, and the preacher's
ideal man seemed to him scarcely a man at all. It is not, I do
hope it will be understood, intended here to defend a callow youth's
conception of a great theme not greatly represented to him: it
is only set out with such sincerity as is possible. Even the chapel
preacher may have received scant justice at his hands, for mere
sincerity would not have disarmed his alert criticism. Enoch was
not disposed to yield himself to what seemed to him heat without
light : it did not strike him that the preacher at Arannah knew much
more than himself, and, from a phrase or an allusion here and there,
he suspected him of knowing in some things less.
It was different with Dr. Catesby and Father Longcliff: he
could realize that they were men with all the education and knowl-
edge he envied, though they both rather concealed their education
than paraded it. He could see, with his shrewd pale eyes, that
they were men to whom it would have been really easier to address
an audience far more cultivated. Yet they were not in the least
affected in their simplicity ; nor was there in either the smallest show
of speaking down to intellects beneath them: that would have put
up Enoch's weak back at once.
After the second meeting, it did come home to him that the
emptiness of his desolate, mean life would be strangely transformed
if it were filled by a great love. The thought of a great human
love had simply never entered into his calculation of life : he was
too dryly practical ; he had a certain lean conceit because he knew
1913-] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 325
things that other young men, the only young men he met, were
ignorant of: but it was not at all of the comfortable, complacent
sort that could blind him to what he was. People worth loving
would never care much for an uncomely, tallow-faced fellow like
him, with a long back and bent legs, thin dirt-colored hair, and a
mouth not unlike a monkey's: the dull drudge of a small village
shop, workhouse born, and not even gifted with a pleasant temper.
Nor did he think it likely he should ever meet anyone whom
he would at all want to worship even had the idea of loving
without being loved appealed to him, which it did not in
the least. But, if no human being wanted to be loved by him, now
there came the strange realization that God did: on those terms
he could, he thought, learn to love God, and learn to rejoice in the
thought that God loved him. It had not touched him to hear that
God loved him, when it* merely seemed to him that God was supposed
to insist on loving him whether he loved God or no; the preacher
at Arannah had almost seemed to gloat over the thought of human
sinfulness, as if sin were the only link between God and man, the
only meeting ground. The plain truth was that to Enoch it had
appeared that the Arannah idea was that God would do nothing but
patronize him on account of his sins. As there was nothing divine
in the idea, it gave him no real idea of God at all.
From the first sermons he heard from Father Catesby, Enoch,
as it happened, gathered his first conception of Christ as a real,
though perfect, Man, and as God too. Afterwards he read through
the whole life of our Lord as given in the Gospels; the mere fact
of such a reading, trivial as it may seem, marked a difference be-
tween Enoch and the other villagers : it would never have occurred
to them to read the Bible straight on like that; a chapter was the
proper thing, and to hurry on from one to another till the end of
the whole book, would have seemed to them almost like treating
the Bible as common reading. Enoch, in his mean lodging, read
on through the four Gospels, with a greedy attention, and for the
first time he recognized the truth that Jesus Christ did in fact claim
to be God; and the sublimity of His teaching struck him with a
more powerful appeal because it was almost new to him. He was
not in the habit of hearing the Bible read in church, and he had
never read it for himself. Enoch Pound was not a genius, his
intelligence was only above the average of his surroundings; that
it was so one instance of appreciation may illustrate. When the
Sadducees, who said there was no resurrection, came to Christ
with entrapping questions, Enoch read eagerly His answers. For
326 KEEPING IN GIVING [Dec.,
these Sadducees were evidently Jews, not atheists : they clearly
thought it possible to believe in the God of Abraham without be-
lieving that man after death should live again, or be alive still.
" But, as touching the resurrection of the dead," Enoch read of
Christ answering, " Have you not read that which was spoken unto
you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of
Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead,
but of the living." Probably not another reader in Railham would
have perceived the force of Christ's reply : Enoch, with one crooked
nail bent on the place to keep it, looked up with a quick jerk of
admiration; his sallow, ugly face lighted with a pale glow of
absolute pleasure.
" That's splendid," he said aloud to himself. He knew nothing
about philosophy, but he saw that the saying held a deep philosophy,
and that, like all great sayings, it was profoundly simple.
[TO BE CONCLUDED.]
KEEPING IN GIVING.
BY EMILY HICKEY.
WE lay our hand upon our dearest thing,
And take it to the altar, as we say,
" Lord, here we come Thy calling to obey,
Who would not keep back aught from Thee, our King.
Lo, this our fairest, choicest offering
Before Thy feet with willing heart we lay :
Accept the sacrifice we make to-day,
Accept the best beloved gift we bring."
But let us well beware lest thought should seek
Out that near thicket, craving some device
Whereby the joy of keeping might be won.
O God, have mercy on Thy children weak,
Who think to offer perfect sacrifice,
Yet crave redemption for the only son.
THE VISITOR OF CHRISTMAS EVE.
BY ANNIE JOLLIFFE.
HIS be Christmas Eve, Joe."
" I know 'tis."
" Well it's forty years ago since our Kitty went
away."
" So it be, so it be," said the old man, " and a
bitter cold day 'twas. I mind as well as if 'twas yesterday how
you set down by the fire, as it might be now, and you had a good
cry, you did."
" Yes, and you just went on smoking your pipe as if nothing
had happened, but I knowed you'd a been glad to a cried too, only
you was ashamed."
The old man chuckled feebly, " That's just the difference,
Sally," he said, "women cries when they be in trouble; men
smokes."
" I believe I heard somebody outside," she said, going towards
the door.
" Nonsense, woman, who should be coming here, you're always
full of fancies."
Sally drew aside the red twill curtain which covered the
window. " 'Tis bitter cold," she said, "and a thick fog; that's
all I can see. I suppose I may as well begin to get our bit of
supper, though 'tis early yet, these winter evenings be so long."
The little wooden cottage stood in a narrow lane, far from
the village, and no other houses were within sight. In front was
a large extent of common, and at the back of the garden fields and
copses, one after the other, till the distant blue hills closed the view.
The narrow rutty lane led from the village past the cottage to a
footpath through a wood. In summer evenings, when the old
people were sitting together in the little rose-covered porch, they
were often cheered by the sight of people passing; for the wood
was a lovely spot, and a favorite walk, especially for lovers. But
in bad weather the lane was inaccessible at the end near the wood, so
the old people in the cottage never expected to have visitors in
winter yet all the time Sally was getting the supper ready she
fancied she heard footsteps round the house: now it seemed to
328 THE VISITOR OF CHRISTMAS EVE [Dec.,
her they were in the little garden at the back, and again at the
front. " You do be hard of hearing, Joe, if you can't make out
there's somebody about; I can't stand it any longer."
A stream of damp, cold air poured into the room, causing the
old man to shiver, as she stepped outside, calling :
" Be anybody there ? " A voice from the darkness answered,
" Yes."
" Come here, do, whoever you be, 'tis bitter cold out there."
In answer to her invitation a woman came forward into the light
of the doorway.
" Step inside, and shut the door before we hear what you've
got to say," the old man called out, " this here cold air ain't the
best thing for my rheumatics."
She did step inside, and Sally hastily closed the door after
her. For a moment she seemed dazed by the light and warmth
of the room, and gazed vacantly from one to the other of the old
people. They in turn looked at her. She was a sad- faced,
old woman, slightly bent, almost toothless, with very spare gray
hair neatly brushed back from her face. She wore a shabby black
cloak which nearly covered her ; on her head was a small sailor hat,
more suitable for a young girl than an old woman. In her hand
she carried a small paper parcel; the damp had burst the paper,
showing that it contained a comb and brush and some small articles
of clothing.
" Respectable woman," Sally said to herself ; " tramps don't
carry hair brushes about with 'em."
The old man broke the silence. " I should like to know how
you came here this sort o' night, missis ? "
" Lost your way ? " asked Sally.
" Yes," she answered hesitatingly.
" Well, come near the fire and set down, mum, and tell us
all about it."
Sally gave her a friendly push towards the fire. " You're
dripping wet," she said; " let me take your cloak."
She carried it out of the room, and soon returned with an old
pair of shoes.
" There, now, take off them wet boots, and I'll make you a cup
a tea. We was just agoing to have a bit a supper, and there's
nothing like a cup a tea to hearten you up and warm you."
" Walked far ? " asked the old man.
" Yes, a goodish bit."
1913.] THE VISITOR OF CHRISTMAS EVE 329
" Where do ye come from ? "
" From London."
" From London," echoed Sally, " why that's miles and miles
away; whatever brought you here?"
" Do you know London? " asked the stranger, taking no notice
of her question.
" Knows it by hearsay ; the young folks about go gadding off
sometimes in the summer when there's cheap trains. I ain't ever
bin, nor Joe neither, nor we don't want to go."
The old man was not to be put off. " Got friends in these
parts ? " he asked.
" I thought I had," she answered sadly. " I came to look
for them."
"Haven't found 'em?"
" No."
" Dead and gone most likely," put in Sally. " Is it long since
you was round here before? "
" Oh, many years."
"Been to abroad?"
" Yes."
"What part?"
" I lived in America many years."
" Well, now, did you really ? " exclaimed Sally with great ex-
citement, as she put the old black teapot on the hob to " draw "
the tea. " Then you may have come across our daughter, our
Kitty, Mrs. Jones her name is now."
The stranger started, and asked, " America is a large place ;
what part is she in ? "
" I think 'twas Canada, kinder next door to America ; but
come now, draw up to the table for I'm sure you must be famished."
The old couple, with kindly thought for the stranger, forbode
to talk much during the meal, but all the time the old man was
watching her closely.
" No common sort of tramp that," he whispered to his wife,
as she gave him his tea, then aloud to the woman, " Guess you've
come down, haven't you? "
" Come down? " she asked.
" My man means as you've bin better off."
" Oh, yes, I was quite rich once."
" Thought so, thought so," chuckled the old man, " you can't
deceive me. Now how is it you've come here afoot?"
330 THE VISITOR OF CHRISTMAS EVE [Dec.,
The stranger appeared not to hear. Turning to Sally she
asked, "Can't I help you to wash up these things, missis?"
" Adamson, mum, Sarah Adamson is my name ; and what
might yourn be ? "
" You can call me Mary if you please."
" And a good name, too, the best of names. No, no, don't
get up, I can talk and work too; and when I've done we can sit
down comfortable and have a chat."
" Well, as I said, Mary is a beautiful name. Our Kitty took
that at her confirmation, Catherine Mary she is."
" Your daughter I suppose."
" Yes, the only daughter we ever had. I did have two sons,
but they're both dead now."
"Where is your Kitty now?" asked the woman, looking
eagerly at Sally.
" Somewheres abroad; I don't rightly know where. I was
just saying to my old man, it's forty years ago to-day since she
went away, and she just twenty, and the beauti fullest girl you ever
saw in your life, she was that strong and tall the tallest girl in
these parts she was."
" Why did she leave you ? "
" Well, you see she went out to service, and always had good
places, but people told her she ought to better herself, I s'pose; any-
how she suddenly made up her mind to go to London. She heard
of a good place there; so off she went on a cold, snowy Christmas
Eve."
" You haven't seen her since? "
" No, never. After that she went to abroad to be married
as I understand. Well off, too, for she wrote and said she was
quite a grand lady. Once she sent us five pounds, all at once;
so she must be well off to do that. Funny thing when I heard
you out there in the fog, I thought of Kit. Not when I see you
though; she'd make two of you. Her head nearly come up to the
top of the door post, and her hair ! my, how lovely it is, stands out
all round her head like a sort of glory. Yes, yes, she's a beauty
is our fine lady daughter, and we're a bit proud to think on her,
ain't we, Joe ? "
The old man only grunted in reply.
" Dozing off he is, mostly does of an evening well, now
I've done; so you and me can have a chat. 'Tis a shame to go
to bed and leave this fire."
1913.] THE VISITOR OF CHRISTMAS EVE 331
" Do you mind letting me stay for the night? "
" Bless you, no. You didn't think I was agoing to turn you
out such a night as this. You can sleep in Kitty's bed. I always
keeps it aired; I'm that frightened of damp beds."
" So am I. I once slept in a damp bed, and that's how I
got crippled with rheumatism. I was a tall woman before I
was ill."
" Law now, you don't say so. I should a thought you'd
always bin a little 'un, but we do stoop a bit as we gets old. I doubt
you be most as old as I am ; I be over eighty, and my man's a good
bit older."
" I'm not quite as old as I look, but I've gone through a good
bit of trouble in my time."
" And there's nothing like trouble to age a body, poor old
soul; and now you can't find your friends. I wonder if they
lived in this parish; I might know 'em."
" Oh, no, miles off from here."
" I can't think how you got here ; strangers never expect to
find a house down this lane."
" Oh, I was wandering about tired and hungry, and I saw
a friendly light through your red curtain; it looked so cheerful
I made for it."
" There ! that just shows what I say, do you hear that, Joe ?
I will have red twill for a curtain because it looks so nice out
adoors, and red's cheerful indoors too."
" Have you lived here long ? " asked the stranger, seeing that
Sally was about to question her again.
" Always; ever since I married, and Joe had lived here before
that."
" You wouldn't like to leave it now ? "
" No, nor we shan't till we're carried out ; that's settled for
us, thank the Lord."
"How is that?"
" Well, you see it was like this : Joe's a laboring man, and
he'd worked on one farm for many years. He was pretty steady
too; but then he got ill, and was laid up for near a twelvemonth.
The boys was out o' work, and we had nothing but what I earnt
doing a bit awashing. Then I took ill, too; it was a hard winter,
and I could hardly get food for us to eat, let alone firing. This
house belonged to old Squire Hill in the next parish. He didn't
ever come near us himself, but his agent was a hard sort of man.
332 THE VISITOR OF CHRISTMAS EVE [Dec.,
He did let us get a bit behindhand with the rent, being as we always
had paid regular, but when weeks went on and we couldn't pay,
he threatened to turn us out. I knew that would break my man's
heart ; there'd be nowhere for us to go but the work'us. He took on
terrible he did. His family had always bin respectable, and none
of 'em ever had bin on the parish, so he begged of the man to wait
just a little longer till he could get to work again. But things
didn't get better in a week or two, and I'd sold what I could for
food, and there was no chance of getting the back rent for some-
time.
" So I says to Joe one day, 'Let's go to Squire Hill himself,
I believe he'll trust us; there's nothing like going to the fountain
head.' So I put on my things, and off I tramped. I tell you I
shook a bit when the servant showed me into the room. The gentle-
man was asitting in his great chair by the fire, and his son, his only
child, was standing there smoking. He was very kind spoken,
was the squire, and when I'd told him all about it, he said certainly
he'd wait; he'd speak about it, and we shouldn't be worried any
more till master got to work. He knowed how respectable we'd
always bin. Thank you many times, sir,' I says, 'and I am glad
to see you've got your son back again.'
" 'Yes he has come home to settle at last,' says he.
" 'Nine years you've bin away, sir,' I says to the young
squire.
" 'Why how is it you remember so exactly, Mrs. Adamson ?'
he said.
' 'It was just the time my Kitty went away to London to better
herself. I heard your lady took on terrible because her son was
gone off to foreign parts, and I sort a felt for her.'
" They two looked at one another, and spoke a few words
in some tongue I didn't understand, and I was afraid I'd been
making too free, but the old gentleman said kindly enough, 'Good-
day, Mrs. Adamson, don't you worry any more about the rent.
I know you'll pay it when you can.'
" Well things got a bit better after that, but it was a long time
before I could save anything towards the back rent, and my heart
turned over in me one day when I see the squire coming up to the
door. A shilling was all I had in the world, but I got it in my hand
ready for him.
" 'Morning, Mrs. Adamson,' he says, 'won't you let me come
in?'
1913.] THE VISITOR OF CHRISTMAS EVE 333
" Tm sure I'd be proud, sir; will you take a chair?'
" He looked all round, and then he says : 'Is there anything
wants doing to the cottage?'
" 'Well, sir, I says, 'as you asks me, I make bold to say
there's lots o' things might be bettered, but we don't mind so long
as you'll let us stop, and wait a bit longer; this is all I'm able
to pay as yet,' and I offered him the shilling.
" 'Put it away, my good woman,' he says, 'I've just come to tell
you that me and my son's agreed to make over this cottage rent
free to you and your husband as long as you live.'
" I was that took aback I couldn't believe my ears. 'What
did you say, sir,' I says. He said it again so there was no mistake,
and would you believe it, I could do nothing but cry.
" 'There, there, my good woman, that's enough,' he says.
'Now show me what wants doing in the house, and I'll send a man
to look after it/
" I tried hard to thank him, but he wouldn't listen, and he
muttered to himself something about owing it to us. 'Beg
pardon, sir,' I says, 'I don't understand you don't owe me any-
thing.'
"'Don't try to understand, my good woman,' he said; 'take
my offer, it's all right, and you can tell your husband he may have
as much wood as he likes to pick up in the park.' '
" And so you've had it rent free ever since ? "
" Yes, for when squire died, he left it in his will as we were
to have it, and five shillings a week besides."
" So you are quite comfortable? "
" Yes, and thankful for it we be, a nice home, a warm bit
o' fire, plenty of vegetables in the garden, and five shillings a week
besides. Joe is able to do little jobs for the neighbors in fine
weather, and I earns a trifle now and again apicking poultry; so
we've nothing to trouble us."
" What has become of Geoffrey Hill now? "
" He's dead, too ; did I tell you his name was Geoffrey ? I
don't seem to remember saying it, but I do run on so. Yes; he
died afore his father, and strangers has the old place now, but
they're nice people, too, and kind to us; so, as I says, we've got
nothing to trouble us, Kitty doing so well, too."
" Tell me more about her if you don't mind," said the stranger,
" I am much interested."
" Well as I said she wrote and told us she was going to abroad
334 THE VISITOR OF CHRISTMAS EVE [Dec.,
(she was a wonderful scholar she was, always got the prizes at
school, and wrote letters like a printed book). She sent us two
pounds in that letter, and gave us an address to write to. One
of the boys was alive then, and I made him sit down the Sunday
afternoon and write a letter. 'Are you married or going to be?'
I made him say, 'and are you well off? cause if anything is wrong
just say so,' for I was a bit anxious you see about her going to
them outlandish places alone.
" She didn't write for a long time, and then she said of course
she was all right; 'Indeed, I'm getting quite a rich woman now,
mother,' she says, 'and I shall soon be able to send you some more
money, but at present I have so many expenses.' I was hurt that
she didn't tell me anything about her wedding or her husband,
howsomever, she said she was writing in a hurry. Then we didn't
hear of her for some years, and the next letter she said she'd
bin ill, but 'I was not to fret, she was doing well;' as I says it's
nice to think of her being so well off, but I sometimes wish we
knowed more about her."
" When did you hear last? "
" 'Bout ten years ago, p'haps more."
" And was she still well and happy ? "
" Oh, yes, she said she was moving about, and she couldn't give
no address, 'but never mind, mother,' she says, 'you know your
Kitty will never forget you, and as long as you don't hear, you
may know I'm doing well.' So that's how I takes it. You see, I
think if she was in trouble she'd be sure to let us know; seems
to me most people is ready enough to fly to their friends when things
goes wrong with 'em."
" Don't you want to see her again ? "
" Used to ; for years after she went away I'd lay awake a
nights, wishing she'd come back, but not now."
"You would not be glad to see her if she came?"
" I don't say that, no, no; I'd like to see her, but you under-
stand. We be old now and easy upset, and Kitty, she's bin used
to things so different, and we're quite comfortable as 'tis, but our
ways wouldn't suit her, so altogether p'haps it's as well as 'tis, and
I love to think of her in her finery among grand people. If my
Kitty had a fault it was being too fond of dress, but there! she
was born to be a lady, so 'twas natural to her. Why when she
was quite little and went to school, people (ladies and gentlemen
I mean) used to ask if it could be true she was only a cottage
1913.] THE VISITOR OF CHRISTMAS EVE 335
child, so clever and ladylike she was, and such a little beauty.
Why bless you her lessons was no trouble; she took all the prizes;
yes, yes, I'm sure she's better off where she be."
" But I wonder she does not want to hear from you."
" Well, you see, she knows we can't write, and I couldn't read
when she went away, no more could my man, but I set to work
and learnt to read a bit, so's I could spell out her letters. I read
'em down on Sundays till I knowed 'em by heart, but I can't
write a letter. After the last of my boys died, I used to get our
old priest to read out her letters to me first, and then he'd answer
them, but he's dead now, and I shouldn't like to ask a stranger.
You see Father Edwards had knowed Kitty, so that's the difference.
I don't speak to the neighbors much about Kitty; there ain't many
left that knowed her, and they always was a bit sniffy about her,
and said nasty things, jealous I guess."
The strange woman made no reply, and Sally went on : " Don't
think as I don't care for my Kitty, bless her ! there isn't a night or
morning this forty years as I've ever forgotten to pray for her.
Dear me, I call her to mind at this minute as she used to sit just
where you're sitting now, with her nice rosy cheeks, and her light
hair and blue eyes. She was a wonderful girl to laugh, was Kitty ;
she'd laugh and show all her beautiful white teeth. She took after
her father's family; they was all good looking; my man was
handsome when he was young."
" To be sure he was," answered the stranger.
" Well, I should hardly a thought you could a seen that now.
He be on his last legs, poor old chap; I'm afraid the rheumatics
have doubled him up so. Yes, I see my Kitty now in her nice
home; however grand it be, she becomes it well she do."
A deep sigh, which might almost have been a sob from the
woman, revealed to Sally her duties as hostess.
" What am I adoing, running on about my girl when you're
so tired you ought to be abed? Well, as I said, 'tis a treat for
me, for I can't often talk about her except to my old man. But
come, now, I'll take you to your room before I wake the master.
It's a bit of a bother to get him up them little stairs, now he's
so crippled, and he's apt to be touchy. Yes, this is Kitty's room,
and this one is mine. Kit was born in this room. Well, I must
go now; we've got to get up early in the morning to go to Mass,
so it'll be rather late afore we get breakfast; I s'pose you wouldn't
like to go with us. Be you a Catholic? "
336 THE VISITOR OF CHRISTMAS EVE [Dec.,
" I was once."
" You was baptized and brought up a Catholic? "
" Oh, yes."
" Well, thank God, you've got it to come back to, that's some-
thing, and you will come back. Oh, it's a blessing to feel you've
been born in the faith."
"I wonder how it is with your Kitty; I wonder if she has
ever lost her faith ? "
" I don't think it's likely," said the old woman thoughtfully,
" yet I'm sometimes afraid when I recollect how careless she was
at times, but I always pray she may be kept true, or else brought
back, and now I shall always say a prayer for Mary as well. So
good-night, and I hope you'll find the bed comfortable."
Left alone in the little room, the woman seemed in no hurry
to get to bed. She examined every article of furniture, every print
and photograph on the wall ; one, a group of children, she took down
and looked at for a long time; it was so faded, the faces of the
children were scarcely discernible, but it seemed to interest her.
Gently she opened the drawers of the old chest which stood in the
window, and rummaged among the contents, but evidently she did
not find what she was seeking, for she carefully replaced the
things and shut the drawers.
A cupboard in the wall attracted her attention ; here she found
apparently what she wanted. From the back of the cupboard
she extracted a small box; it had once been gay with a bright pic-
ture on the top, now dirty, dim, and faded.
With trembling fingers she opened the lid, and a sound almost
like a cry of joy escaped her as she drew forth the object of her
search. It was a small blessed medal, now so blackened by age that
what it represented was undiscernible. The woman was satisfied.
She replaced the box in the cupboard, and looking round the room
again she found a piece of string on the table. She threaded the
medal on this, and placed it round her neck. Then, fearful of
disturbing the old people who had now come up to their room, she
put out the light and hurried into bed, but not to sleep. Long did
she lie there with the past vivid before her, and she wept as she
had never thought to weep again. In the early hours of the morn-
ing she sank into the sleep of utter exhaustion. She awoke to find
it broad daylight, the wintry sun streaming in at the little window,
and Sally opening the door.
" Morning, Mary," she said, " the breakfast will be ready in
1913-] THE VISITOR OF CHRISTMAS EVE 337
five minutes, and you'll find some water and a towel in the back
kitchen if you'd like a wash."
" I'm sorry to be so late," said Mary, when they were sitting at
breakfast. " I meant to get up and light your fire before you came
back."
" Don't name it," answered Sally, " I'm glad you slept so
well. Wasn't my girl's bed comfortable, eh? "
" Yes, indeed, it was."
" Maybe you'd like to stop another night or two, mum. If so,
be as you would, you'd be welcome," said Joe.
" You're very kind, but I am anxious to get back to London,
and I think I'd better start soon."
" Not before dinner," exclaimed Sally, " you must stop and
eat a bit o' Christmas dinner with us. It's all in the house, a nice
little bit o' beef, tender as anything, and a plum pudding, given to
us by a kind lady, and nice potatoes and greens out of the garden,
so you must wait and help us eat it."
" How be you agoing to get back to London ? " asked
Joe.
" Oh, I shall make my way there by degrees ; there's always
the workhouse to sleep in."
" And how far do you count to get to-day ? "
" I thought perhaps I might get as far as Husbridge."
" Well, that's six miles," put in Sally, " so if we has dinner
early, you'll get there in good time. You can't miss the road if
'tis dark, and it ain't a bit lonely, there's lots of houses."
When dinner was over, the woman put on her boots and the
shabby old cloak, and prepared to depart.
" Wait a minute," called Sally from her bedroom, and coming
down she wrapped a knitted shawl round Mary's neck.
" That cloak ain't warm enough," she said. " I don't want
the old shawl, so you may as well have it in remembrance of me, but,
bless me, woman, how ill you look. Now I see you in this bright
light, I never noticed it afore; you ain't fit to tramp it I'm sure.
Won't you have a shilling to help you on the way? We could
spare it."
" No, thank you, you're too good to me ; I don't know how
to thank you. I should like to kiss you both ; it's nice to have some-
one to kiss on Christmas day."
The old man endured the embrace, muttering something about
" not being partial to kissing." But Sally heartily returned the
VOL. XCVIII. 22
338 THE VISITOR OF CHRISTMAS EVE [Dec.,
kiss, and whispered, " Don't forget your prayers, my dear, and
you'll come back to your faith, won't you ? "
She accompanied her visitor to the door, " Well, good-bye,
and if you ever should be this way again, just give us a call, and see
if we're this side of the grave."
" I'm afraid that's not likely, but I'll never forget you."
The old couple both stood at the door, watching her as she
crossed the road, opened the gate, and slowly began to walk over
the path through the common. There had been a slight fall of
snow in the night, and the wanderer's figure stood out black against
the white landscape. As she came to the high ground of the com-
mon, she turned once more to look at the cottage. The old people
still stood at the open door, Sally waving a large red handkerchief
at her. Mary waved her hand in return, then began to descend
the hill, and the cottage was hidden from her sight.
" Seems kinder lonesome now, don't it, Joe ? " asked Sally, as
they settled themselves by the fire. " I wonder who she was, poor
old soul. I guess she hain't been no better'n she should be in her
time, but I don't grudge her what she had here."
" No," said the old man, " more do I. But we be better alone."
But the stranger, toiling painfully along the frozen paths,
pressed the little medal to her heart, and murmured, " Now to the
workhouse infirmary to die, and, oh, thank God! they will never
know."
THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC.
/. THE LESSON OF THE PAST.
BY THOMAS J. GERRARD.
S truly as the spirit of an individual or a nation ex-
presses itself in the music of its choice, so truly does
the music of every age voice its time-spirit. Hence
in the modern music we find the same exaggerated
subjectivism which we have observed in the other
spheres of experience. The intellectuality of the old masters is
treated with contempt, and mere animal instinct made the principle
of selection. Some new and beautiful sensations have been un-
doubtedly produced, but the real principle of variety and unity has
been sacrificed.
Even in music, apostasy from intellect leads away from devo-
tion to true art and towards the cult of the hideous. The fact that
influence is implicit and subconscious, makes it all the more danger-
ous. Not that we contend for mere intellectualism in music. Comic
operas, musical plays, dreamy waltzes all may have their proper
function as a moderate indulgence of the senses, and a means of
intellectual relaxation. Yet, even so, music can and should be un-
der intellectual control. A music-hall song can be made both
popular and good.
Having declared our musical faith, we next inquire wherein
lies the intellectuality of music. Obviously music is less apt
than either literature or painting for the conveyance of ideas.
Dinner-time, by convention, may be sounded on a gong or on a
bugle. But I cannot invite my friend to dinner through the
medium of a fugue or a sonata. Yet a sonata can convey ideas.
It can tell me that the composer has had joy, sorrow, peace, cour-
age, merriment, hope, despair. It can cause similar feelings in me,
and my mind reflecting thereon can compare my experiences with
those of the composer, or of my neighbor who listens with me.
Now whereas the language of literature is made up almost
entirely of conventional signs called words and idioms, the lan-
guage of music is made up almost entirely of natural signs. When
a composer wishes to express an idea, he must design a combination
340 THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC [Dec.,
of sounds which have some natural affinity with the thought he
wishes to express. This design is a musical idea. Then just as
ideas may be compounded to make sentences, paragraphs, chapters,
and books, so themes may be compounded and built up into fugues,
sonatas, and symphonies. Thus there are two chief activities of the
intellect in music. The first and most important is the working out
of design. The second is the choosing of an idea to be expressed
by the design.
This need of some sort of an idea for a design is the bond,
more or less close, between the language of music and the language
of words. In so far as music is able to speak for itself without
the aid of words, it is regarded as an independent art, and is called
" pure " music. In so far as it is allied to words, whether to help
them or to be helped by them, it is called " mixed " or " impure "
music.
In pure music the choice of ideas is very limited. Neverthe-
less, although the available ideas may be few, in many cases they
may be more effectually expressed in music than in any other art.
Nature is the source of ideas. Ideas may be associated with
the external sounds of nature, such as the rippling of a stream or the
singing of a bird. Or they may be abstracted from man's inward
emotions or states of feeling. The greatest musicians have used
both sources. The consensus of musical judgment, however, seems
to be that the outward sounds are only reproduced by the great
masters for the purpose of exciting in others the same inward
emotions excited in them. Realism, therefore, is used very spar-
ingly. The idealized sound is the normal artistic mean of expres-
sion.
Mixed music has a wider range of available ideas. Here
the ideas are expressed by the words, the function of the music
being rather to illustrate and impress them. To combine a series
of sounds which shall both express and impress a given idea, with
its corresponding emotion, calls forth the highest activities of the
human intelligence. This is the process which we have called de-
sign. The actual sound or combination of sounds is a concrete
reality, it is particular and not universal. Yet it can be the founda-
tion of a universal. The mind can turn itself on the sensation
produced and abstract from it an idea. A leitmotif, for instance,
is a concrete reality when it blazes forth from the trombone. But
it can also be a universal, since we can speak of the leitmotif
in general and define it.
1913-] THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC 341
So, too, with form. We can have Palestrina form, Wagnerian
form, fugue form, sonata form. These again are concrete realities
in their production ; but as such they provide foundations for ideas.
When the ideas have been abstracted by the mind, they form part
of the science of music.
Again, all music proceeds on certain laws ; the laws of sound,
timbre, and pitch; the laws of the scale, such as the relations of
octaves, thirds, and fifths; the laws of harmony and modulation;
the laws of rhythm and construction; the laws of contrapuntal and
fugal composition. Considered in their concrete working, these
laws are so many concrete things, that is, manners or ways in which
nature acts beautifully. But then these concrete relations, varied,
subtle, and hidden, as many of them are, are perceived by the in-
tellect. They are abstracted by the mind, and become objects of
mental contemplation. Now when these laws are artistically
evolved, when they appeal by their depth and subtlety to the appre-
ciation of the intellect, we say that the design is intellectual, learned,
and advanced. In their respective spheres the greatest geniuses
of design were Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner.
The development of design constitutes the history of music.
The growth and coordination of its manifold and intricate prin-
ciples have been a very slow and painful process. Music is so
intimately bound up with the faculty of sense, that only with great
difficulty could it be brought under control of the intellect.
If we observe the growth of design, we shall be able the better
to appraise the modernist revolt against it. Its history shows it to
have been a progress from that which is merely animal to that
which is highly spiritual. The development is seen to be due to the
labor of geniuses who utilized the work of their forbears, who
gathered up the judgments of all who had contributed to the thought
of the subject, and who corrected their own eccentricities by refer-
ence to the collective musical judgment.
Hence degeneration is seen to consist in a revolt from these
high standards, in an assertion of the composer's self-sufficiency
and self -perfectibility, in a fall from intellectual to sensual methods,
in a substitution of animal impulse for spiritual illumination.
We have defined art as the translation of thought into work.
So is it with the art of music. In music the medium by which the
thought is expressed is a combination and succession of sounds.
The artist who conceives a great and moving idea, seeks for the most
apt means of expressing it. The idea must be made intelligible
342 THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC [Dec.,
to others. But in order to make an idea intelligible by means
of music, the various sounds must be intelligently combined.
In real music, then, even as in painting and in sculpture, there
must be a fact value and a spirit value. Mere design is not art.
There must be expression as well. Here enters in the personality
and soul of the artist. If one has nothing to say, he ought not
to say it. The modernist Mahler may be quoted as one who had no
excuse for speaking.
Some enthusiasts for " pure " music claim that it differs from
all other branches of art in this, that it should have no idea. The
other arts, it is contended, take their ideas from life or from nature,
they have a substance which represents real occurrences idealized
or copies of nature idealized, whereas the works of pure instru-
mental music have no such substance.
But this is simply not true. In the most pure music that exists,
there are definite ideas of the composer which characterize the
whole piece and the various parts of the piece. In a sonata by
Beethoven there is always the allegro, the adagio, and the scherzo.
The scherzo in turn has its component ideas, an allegretto, a trio,
and a rondo, for instance. The beauty and impressiveness of pure
music depends to some extent on the charm of the principal themes
which are the foundation and groundwork of the composition, but
infinitely more on the working out.
The principal themes of the great symphonies of the old
masters are in themselves simple, yet are wonderfully fertilized by
the soul, the intelligence, the imagination of the composer. Out
of a very simple theme Beethoven in his Lenora, Number Three,
makes the greatest overture ever written.
From the beginning of the history of music, we find that the
savage could express his fighting or love-making emotions with such
an intensity as to excite his hearers to a state of frenzy. The
savage was an acute impressionist. He combined singing with danc-
ing, thus welding melody and rhythm. In proportion as the figures
lost their native impulsiveness and vagueness, they lost their power
of expressing and exciting animal instinct. As they attained recog-
nized complex forms, they gave more and more artistic pleasure.
Yet with the development of design, there still remains the ten-
dency to fall back towards the animal instincts. Even in the high-
est forms of the modern sonata, we find a tendency to the singing
instinct in the adagio and to the dancing instinct in the scherzo. To
minimize this tendency and enhance the idealism of the movement,
1913-] THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC 343
Beethoven substituted the scherzo for the minuet. The latest
American freak dances, for example, are nothing less than a rever-
sion to primitive animality. How to control these instincts within
the bounds of reason, how to utilize them without destroying them,
how to make them minister to musical beauty and thereby to human
happiness, that is the problem of music.
Too much reiteration either of the melodic element or of the
rhythmic element, will produce fatigue. Hence the first require-
ment in musical composition is variety and contrast. But, on
the other hand, mere change of sound or a mere succession of dis-
connected contrasts, produces fatigue also. Hence the second re-
quirement in musical composition is unity.
The evolution of music, in its respective branches, has been
marked by an ever increasing tendency towards abstract beauty of
design. This culminated in Palestrina as representing polyphonic
music, in Bach as representing contrapuntal music, and in Beethoven
as representing harmonic music.
The first step in the intellectualizing of music was the fixing of
the pitch. There could be no chance of a common language until
each sound had some definite relationship to each other. So a
scale had to be formed. But this was a matter of time. It re-
quired a thousand years for the harmonic scale which is now used
for European music to evolve from its first accepted nucleus. The
intervals of the fourth and fifth were the first to be generally ac-
cepted, the other notes came in by degrees.
Melody was for a long time the only kind of music. The early
Christians used the Greek music, but at first there was much con-
fusion. To put things in order, St. Ambrose of Milan and St.
Gregory of Rome utilized the Greek modes. Ambrose chose four
tones which he named the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixoly-
dian, though these did not correspond exactly with the Greek modes.
These four were called "authentic." Then Gregory, by rearranging
the component notes of Ambrose, made another four modes. These
were called plagal. Later a further series of four was added.
Soon after this harmony began to make its appearance. The
first harmonies of music consisted of a series of music of con-
secutive fifths. The one interval which, above all others, the be-
ginner of to-day is taught to avoid. As for the major third, it
took hundreds of years to become acceptable as a concord. Let
us take special notice of these facts, for they have an important
bearing on the vagaries of the modern time-spirit.
344 THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC [Dec.,
The reason why the mediaeval folk did not feel the ugliness of
consecutive fifths so acutely as we do, was because their minds were
fixed on the melody rather than on the harmony. They were
experimenting. Later to overcome dissonance, a system of sharps
and flats was introduced. The earliest harmony, therefore, con-
sisted of an interchange of fifths, fourths, and octaves.
The monotony of singing that was merely contrapuntal, led
men to think of greater possibilities of harmony. As yet, however,
even the great masters did not acknowledge the contrast between
tonic and dominant centres as the basis of design, nor yet had they
arrived at such a definite tonality, or sense of key, as to be able to
make tonal contrasts a principle of design. The intricacies of
counterpoint was their chief resource.
The period of this development lasted from the beginning of
the ninth to the end of the fourteenth century. Thenceforward, to
the beginning of the seventeenth century, occurred the brilliant epoch
of purely choral music. The English composer Dunstable may be
said to have started it. He was the first to give to music something
of definite design. Great masters succeeded him, and carried his
work to higher perfection. The Flemish composers, with Josquin
de Pres as chief, were the most distinctive; the Italians, with
Palestrina at their head, were the most finished in form ; whilst the
English, with Byrd and Gibbons as leaders, were characterized by
a happy combination of lustre and form.
By the end of this period, musicians were fairly agreed as to
the relative artistic value of the notes. The tonic was admitted to
be the natural starting point and resting place, the dominant the
centre of contrast, whilst the mediant served to define the major
or minor mode.
Here we may pause to emphasize a point very pertinent to the
modern situation. The Church in laying down the basis of the
Gregorian modes, in enforcing them with her authority, in fostering
the consequent developments of harmony, secured for the European
system of music an advance of about eight centuries over all other
systems.
The history of folk-music during this period, shows that it
passed through a process similar to that of ecclesiastical music,
namely, the gradual groping for design, and the struggle of intelli-
gence for the mastery over sense.
At this juncture we meet the question: What about Monte-
verde? Well, what about him? Obviously the polyphonic music,
1913-] THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC 345
so carefully fostered by the Church, could not adequately respond
to the needs of the secular drama. It was the most perfectly
developed music in existence. Time had brought it to maturity.
To give it a new orientation, suitable for the secular stage, more
time would be required. But the time-spirit, as ever, was impatient.
It wanted a short cut to its new destination. Hence the rebellion,
led by Cavaliere, Caccini, Galilei, and Peri, and completed by Monte-
verde.
These reformers would have no more of the restrictions of ec-
clesiasticism. They would set aside the polyphonic system, and they
would speculate. They would sing sonnets and poems with simple
chords on the lute and the harpsichord. The soloist should assert
himself, and sing just what he wanted to sing in a form of recitative
analogous to spoken declamation.
The result was a fiasco. The principle of unity having been
flung aside, the music became characterized by incoherence. Nay,
the very expression and color which the reformers sought to attain
by their freedom from conventions soon became barren. Anti-in-
tellectualism destroyed not only the principle of unity, but also
the principle of variety. Monteverde's genius was for dramatic
situations, not for elaborate beauty of design. The milieu created
by his predecessors was just what his venturesome soul wanted.
So he began to feel his way back to the old foundations. All his
later work shows a definite tendency towards unity of design and
precision of contrast.
The need of going back directly to the old style was first
clearly realized by Giovanni Gabrieli of Venice. He was not afraid
of experiment, but his experiments were based on the old types.
He had a famous pupil^ Schiitz, who carried his message to Ger-
many, and thus continued the tradition descended from Palestrina
and the polyphonic school, and passed it on to its logical issue in
Bach and Beethoven. Carissimi carried on an analogous propa-
ganda in Italy.
Thus choral music sprang up again. But now it was a true
development. It had the note of conservative action with its past
it carried on the principles of design. It had also the note of power
of assimilation it took from the debris of the rebellion the element
of dramatic feeling.
Henceforward the struggle was to be for preeminence between
dramatic feeling and musical design. As yet the resources of
musical design were not adequate to the demands of the drama.
346 THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC [Dec.,
Scarlatti did much to develop these resources. The violin makers
Stradivari, Guarnerius, the Amatis, and Bergonzi, who could also
play, practically founded the scheme of the modern sonata. The
work of Corelli fixed the definite acceptance of musical design as a
medium of expression apart from words. Organ music seems to
have been foremost in the progress towards high intellectuality.
It took about fifty years of experimenting to find out how
to adapt the old melodic modes and contrapuntal methods to mod-
ern tonality and harmonic form. Then, as the manufacture of
instruments was improved, choral and instrumental music were
combined. The ripest fruit of this period of development is seen
in the oratorios of Handel and the " Passions " of Bach. Both
masters assimilated and synthetized the work of their predecessors.
But each qualified it with a different personality and experience.
Handel was a public man, and excelled in that branch of
descriptive music which represents outward situations. Bach, on
the contrary, was a recluse, and excelled rather in that branch of
descriptive music which represents inward states. He was ever
catholic, in the sense that he went to all musical sources for sug-
gestions, and corrected his own ideas by reference to the collective
judgment.
Bach contributed largely to that period of development which
was the preparation for the great work of Beethoven. Bach died
in 1750, Beethoven was born in 1770, and so the period may be
roughly counted as the eighteenth century. The development went
hand in hand with the improvement of instruments, and pure
music grew out of the limitations and capabilities of instruments.
Necessity was the mother of invention. Bach began with a
plain organ. With hardly any variety of stops, and so no color,
he must have recourse to elaborate structure.
Hayden felt the same limitations with the orchestra as Bach
with the organ. Hence, in his symphonies, the use of elaborate
counterpoint and fugue.
With Mozart the development of form proceeded step by step
with the development of the orchestra and the harpsichord. His
finest work is in the six wonderful symphonies written just before
his death.
Moreover, the improvement of instruments facilitated the pro-
gress of the harmonic principle as distinguished from the contra-
puntal principle. Up to the time of Handel and Bach, in the
struggle between these principles, the contrapuntal, more or less,
1913.] THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC 347
steadily maintained the supremacy. But when the intellectual help
of words was abandoned, composers were forced to enlarge their
range of design by a more extensive use of the harmonic principle,
and the future sonata began to assume shape.
Beethoven, born in 1770, had the good fortune to make his
appearance when every preparation had been made for him. He
began with a good orchestra, and with the first real pianoforte.
He began with a tremendous supply of the elements of rich design.
His genius alone was wanted to organize the material, and to pro-
duce the greatest masterpieces of musical art. With understanding,
knowledge, and wisdom he summarized the whole history of musical
experience, using the form already prepared for him, the sonata.
From the beginning to the end of his work he kept the musical
elements under intellectual control, and intelligently wove of them
the fabric of beauty.
Nor did Beethoven merely repeat the principles of his great
predecessors. He clothed them with his own personality. In his
strong hands the sonata was wrought into its highest perfection.
Had he been tainted by the vice of modern subjectivism, he might
have struck out into some other form which nobody had heard of,
to be handed down to posterity as the over-ripe fruit of his sub-
jective exigencies.
There are three periods in his life. The first, say to his
thirty-fourth year, reveals him as merely laying hold on principles,
with just an occasional outburst of genius. The second, say to his
fortieth year, is conspicuous for its brilliance, that claritas, or lustre,
which St. Thomas counts as the third essential element of beauty.
After his fortieth year, personal troubles came upon him and mel-
lowed his nature. Thenceforward his work is more universal. A
wider range of feeling needed for its adequate expression a wider
range of design.
This development is recognized best in the last movement of
the sonata, where the old minuet gives place to the scherzo. Here
was a protest against sentimentalism, a declaration that a movement,
vital, quick, and pregnant with reality, could also be intellectual.
The scherzo movement, unhampered by the triple time of the minuet,
could explore the whole gamut of human experiences, and suggest
them through the recognizable and recognized forms of the sonata
movements. No educated person needs to ask what he means.
He is never in the same category as the modern charlatan, who
must step down and tell us what he is driving at. His work shows
348 THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC [Dec.,
the elements of beauty in their highest development integrity or
perfection, due proportion or consonance, and daritas, lustre, or
distinction.*
As to the ideas which he translated into music, they were
neither those of merely subjective moods, nor yet those of merely
objective pictures. They were the reproduction of subjective emo-
tions and reflections derived from intimate contact with the objec-
tive world. The Eroica Symphony was designed to express Bee-
thoven's interpretation of Napoleon. The Lebewohl Sonata was
designed to express Beethoven's understanding of parting, absence,
and return of friends. The Pastoral Symphony was his idealiza-
tion of life in the fields and woods.
The lesson of the past, then, having special regard to the genius
of Palestrina, Bach, and Beethoven would seem to be as follows:
True musical development must always have a great respect
for the work of the past. Only thus can the collective experience
be consulted. And if enhancement of life and promotion of well-
being are the aim of musical development, collective experience
must be held to contain greater riches than individual experience.
The individual, therefore, must perfect himself by reference to
the collective judgment.
But judgment is a function of the intellect. True musical
development, therefore, must have logical sequence. The logic may
be implicit in the mind of the composer and in his work. But it
must be able to stand the test of analysis. Posterity may require
time to make this analysis. It has taken over a hundred years to
understand Bach and Beethoven. But in the effort it has found no
persistent fallacies. Hence their work is even more vital to-day
than when it was first written.
Lastly, true musical development must not be characterized by
mere logical sequence. As it grows old it must consequently renew
its youth. It must put forth a power of assimilation. If it carries
down the heritage of the past wherewith to endow the time-spirit,
it must also be willing to learn from the time-spirit. It must clothe
itself with the feeling of the age in which it lives.
To apply this lesson to the modern situation, will be the purpose
of our next study.
*Summa, pars ia, qu XXXIX., art. viii.
NEARLY TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO.
BY GEORGE WOODRUFF JOHNSTON.
I.
|T was night and the trees were asleep. The stars
sparkled icily in a deep purple sky, and the air
cracked with frost. But the cold was nothing to
them these sturdy firs. They were very comfort-
able, clustered closely together; their roots tucked
away warmly in the snow-covered ground. Yet they were sad.
The gloom, the silence, the loneliness of the North weighed heavily
upon them; memories of an unhappy past brooded over them.
Presently, the wind began to blow, and the trees awoke and talked
softly with one another.
" Why is it, mother," whispered a young fir, " why is it that
at this time of year, always at this time, when the snow glistens
in the sun, and the shiny icicles hang from our arms, and the North
Wind laughs and sings and tells us stories, that men come and chop
us down and carry us away? They don't hurt the other trees;
why not? Why is it only us firs, and only us little fellows that
they take? I heard their axes to-day, and I'm afraid."
" It's a long story," answered the young fir's mother, " and
I don't believe you could understand it. You are scarcely ten
years old, you know."
"Please tell me; please tell me," begged the little tree.
" Well, then," began the mother, gently : " Once upon a time,
in a country almost at the other end of the world, there lived
a little Boy with His father and mother. His father was a car-
penter, and had a shop with a workbench in it, and on the floor
of this shop were piles of chips and shavings in which the little
Boy used to play. By and by, the child grew old enough and
strong enough to help His father. He became a carpenter, too;
and of all the woods in His father's shop, He liked best that
of the fir tree. Its chips and shavings were sweet to smell;
it was soft and easy to work; and out of it He made many needful
things, some of which, so far as I know, may be found in that
far country to this very day. Our people, living on the hillsides
350 NEARLY TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO [Dec.,
round about, often spoke of His work, and were proud of it. For
it is better when you are a hundred years old or so, and the sap
still runs strong in your body, to be turned by skillful and loving
hands into something useful that will be taken care of as long as
you live better, far better, than to wither away from old age, to
be twisted and torn by fierce winds, to stagger from weakness,
until at last on a stormy winter's night you topple over with a help-
less cry, to smother and rot under dead leaves in some damp gully."
" But about the little Boy," exclaimed the young fir, im-
patiently.
"Yes; yes; about the little Boy," sighed the mother tree.
" One day in that distant land a terrible thing happened. A noisy
crowd came out from a city to a place where many of our people
lived, and in the midst of them was the little Boy, now grown to be
a Man. Some of the crowd had axes, and they cut down one of
us, and stripping off his limbs laid his body on the Man's shoulders,
and with whips and curses made Him drag it away. It was a cruel
thing to do, for He was already weak and trembling, and there
were drops of blood on His forehead. Sorrowfully, our people
watched Him tottering under His heavy burden until he was out of
sight. But they could do nothing. That was an awful day. The
earth rocked; the air turned black, and our people stood helpless
while the poor Man was tortured to death on the same tree which
He, Himself, had been made to bear on His bruised and quivering
shoulders."
"But, why was that? Why was He killed?" asked the
little fir, in a frightened whisper.
" As old as we are, and as wise as we are, that we do not
know," the mother replied. " But our forefathers never forgot
the horror of those dark hours, nor can we forget the everlasting
shame they brought upon our race. From that day to this our
voices have never been raised above a mournful sigh. From that
day to this, whilst other trees in the spring and autumn of the year
clothe themselves in the gayest of colors, we never change from
year's end to year's end our own sombre garments. All that our
grandsires could do was to leave the land where this disgrace fell
upon them, and though they loved it, this they did, scattering their
seeds from generation to generation always to the North, always
to the North, until ages passed, and we now live close to the edge of
the eternal ice, and the dwellers in that parched country long for
our cool shadows in vain."
1913-] NEARLY TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO 351
" But, mother, what has all this to do with the men who come
every year at this time and take us little fellows away from our
fathers and mothers? " inquired the young fir, anxiously.
"It has a great deal to do with it," answered the old tree;
"a great deal to do with it. This poor Man I have just told
you about, in the midst of His own sorrows and sufferings, remem-
bered the sorrows and sufferings of others. He forgave those
who had so cruelly tortured Him. He forgave everyone. He
forgot no one, not even us; nor that the shame which we had ever-
more to bear had come upon us through no fault of our own.
He thought of this and pitied us, and out of His pity for us
He brought it about that of all the trees that grow, we are the
ones chosen to keep His memory fresh and green in the -hearts
of those who love Him not the memory of Him as he hung torn
and bleeding on the tree, but when as a little baby He first looked
up laughing and cooing into His mother's eyes. To-morrow is His
birthday. It is a children's day, and we are always there in the
midst of them our little ones amongst the other children for
of all things in the world, He loved little children best."
And before the dawn broke, the wise old mother had told her
son the whole sad, beautiful story.
II.
Next day the adventures of the young fir began. As soon as
the sun lay red on the snow, a man came trudging over the wintry
fields, and after eyeing the little tree carefully from top to toe,
brought it tumbling down with two strokes of his axe, and carried
it off on his shoulder. He laughed and sang on his homeward
way, and he was still laughing and singing when he set the tree
upright in a room where a red-cheeked little woman sat by the
fire, thinking. He covered the tree with silver and gold and all
sorts of shining things, and fixed tiny candles upon its branches,
humming cheerily while he worked.
" Behold ! " he cried, gaily, when all was done. " Behold !
little woman, our first Christmas tree ! " Whereupon, he took her
in his arms and hugged her tight and kissed her. " To-night, we
will light the candles. Won't it be pretty ? But what is the matter,
little woman? What is the matter? What are you thinking about?
And there are tears in your eyes, too, I believe, of all days in the
year when one should be jolly."
352 NEARLY TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO [Dec.,
The little woman twined her arms about her husband's neck,
and hid her face in his breast.
" When I saw you come in with the tree it was such a sur-
prise, such a loving surprise, dear Tom when I saw you come in
with the tree, I began to think I began to think," said the little
woman, her voice very shaky and far away. " I began to think
of that other night so many hundreds of years ago. She had
nowhere to lay her head, Tom, dear, only in a stable. And I I
have everything! Think of it, Tom; think of it!"
" Why, I declare, little woman, I believe you are crying, actu-
ally crying. I never heard of such a thing; never in all my life;
never ! " At which Tom laughed, this time so heartily, that for a
moment his jolly face looked worried and old.
Many strange things happened that day in the house in which
Tom and the little woman lived things that the young fir could
not in the least understand. There was much coming and going
on tip-toe, and whispering behind doors on the part of Tom and
a pretty old lady, and a great deal of puffing and wrinkling of the
forehead and pursing of the lips on the part of a stout little gentle-
man, who seemed to be in temporary command of Tom, the little
woman, the pretty old lady, and everybody else. Then, toward
evening, the stout little gentleman went away, chuckling to himself
and wagging his head, and the pretty old lady went away, chuckling
to herself and wagging her head, and such a sudden quiet fell
upon the house that the young fir, shut up in a room all by himself,
felt very sad and lonely in spite of his pink candles and gold and
silver finery.
The clock ticked, and the hours crept by, and the little tree
felt more lonely still as the night came on very lonely, indeed,
in the dark, strange room. He thought of his father and mother,
and of his brothers and sisters snuggled close to each other under
the sparkling stars, their feet covered by the warm snow. " What
are they talking of ? Are they talking of me ? Do they miss me ? "
he asked himself. He felt very mournful, too, did the young fir,
thinking of the story his mother had told him ; and he had already
sighed twice most dismally, when, suddenly, a door opened and
Tom appeared in a dressing gown and a big pair of slippers, and
without more ado picked up the young tree and carried it into the
next room. Here everything was as silent as on the snowy hillside
where the little chap had lived. But Tom began to laugh what
a happy fellow Tom was, to be sure ! now so gently, however,
1913-] NEARLY TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO 353
that no one save the young fir could possibly have heard him,
and he moved about the room softly, softly, as if he were afraid
of waking somebody up.
And then the most wonderful thing that could happen did
happen the most wonderful thing by far in that long day of sur-
prises. Tom, treading as if on eggs, lit the tiny candles one by one,
until the young fir blazed and glittered, and was very proud of
himself, indeed. He looked about. There was Tom sitting on the
edge of a bed and patting the hand of his little woman, whose
cheeks, instead of being red, were now quite white, and whose
eyes were closed. Presently she opened her eyes such heavy,
weary looking eyes and saw the little tree in all his glory ; and then
she smiled such a tired, but such a happy little smile and drew
closer to her breast a tiny pink bundle lying in the hollow of her
arm.
" Think of it, Tom," she breathed. " Nearly two thousand
years ago to-night, and she had nowhere to lay her head! Dear
Tom, He loved little children so I hope I hope He will love our
little boy."
A mist came over Tom's eyes so that he could not see his
little woman at all, and such a lump rose in his throat that he could
not answer her. But the young fir was listening, and remembering
the story his mother had told him, he whispered :
" I hope so, little woman. Indeed, I know He will."
" Nearly two thousand years ago to-night," murmured the
little woman, dropping off to sleep. " And I came near forgetting
the true meaning of it all would have forgotten it but for the
little Christmas tree. Tom, we will always will always keep
the little tree and take care of it, won't we, Tom won't we ?"
You may be sure that the young fir was listening this time,
and that he agreed with her most heartily.
" Indeed, indeed, I hope so, little woman," said he, fervently.
VOL. xcvin. 23
THE CATHOLIC MAORI AT HOME.
BY M. H.
HESE children of Mary," said my little guide, point-
ing with modest pride to the three Maori women
squatting under a big tree beside the road. They
were the ordinary type with which I had become
familiar in a week's tour through the native districts
of New Zealand : dark-eyed, with hair hanging in great black silken
plaits, dressed in long full European skirts, and unbelted blouses
which hung in straight lines to their hips. Was I then to hail
these dark-skinned daughters of an alien race as my sisters in the
world-wide confraternity of Mary Immaculate? The idea seemed
grotesque enough, though I had come to Waihi as a Catholic
anxious to make acquaintance with my Maori co-religionists.
Armed with an introduction from his lordship the Bishop of
Auckland, I had penetrated by means of two days' arduous coach-
ing to the shores of Lake Taupo, the very heart of the North Island
of New Zealand. Then, after a five o'clock breakfast, and a cold
and early drive of some miles to the Taupo wharf, came a sensa-
tional enough transit of the stormy lake. This left me at Tokaanu
a singularly dingy and disreputable European settlement: a town-
ship of wooden huts and weird thermal phenomena. These latter,
however, are rarely of fascination sufficient to detain the stray tour-
ist, who almost invariably goes straight from the steamer to the
coach to take the main railway. A European visitor in Tokaanu
was therefore a sensation; but a European visitor to the tiny Pa or
native village of Waihi, some miles beyond, was nothing less than
an event.
Waihi is an entirely Catholic settlement, inhabited by a sub-
tribe of the Ngatituwharetoa, one of the finest tribes of Maori an-
tiquity. The resident chief, who rejoices in the high-sounding
name of Tureiti te Heu-Heu Tukino, is the ancestral high chief
of the whole Taupo district, and therefore one of the bluest-blooded
princes of the land. For centuries there has been a Heu-Heu at
Taupo; and indeed the present bearer of the name traces his descent
a clear forty generations back, to the time of the original coming
of the Maori from Hawaiki. This, among the Maori, is as if one
should point to a family tree, the originator of which " came over "
I9I3-] THE CATHOLIC MAORI AT HOME 355
with the Conqueror. With the thirty odd families that comprise
the village, dwell a resident priest, and three Sisters of the Austra-
lian Order of St. Joseph, who were founded specially for mission
and back-block work in Australia and New Zealand. The five-
roomed cottage that goes by the name of the convent, the priest's
little hut, and the native church, are all the handiwork of the
priest himself, aided by the desultory labor of some of his flock.
Outside these four Europeans, a white face is very rarely seen
in the Pa.
My arrival had been definitely fixed by letter a week before;
but, alas for country mail-systems ! I encountered on the Tokaanu
wharf the little native girl whom the nuns had sent for their mail ;
and, somewhat to my embarrassment, and the intense excitement of
the little girl, the letter and I arrived together. She knew just
enough English to understand my request to be guided from Toka-
anu to Waihi : I know just enough Maori to salute the very large
and frankly-interested gathering of natives in the Tokaanu store,
who all insisted on shaking hands with the pakeha (foreign) girl,
who could give them good-day in their own language. After a
quarter of an hour or so during which my guide was quite evi-
dently discussing my probable status and intentions with the two
dozen or so men, women, and children collected in the store, we
took the road, or rather the grass track, to Waihi. The little bare,
brown feet pattered along noiselessly beside me ; and occasionally I
saw the great, liquid, brown eyes observing me cautiously in silence.
Silence was indeed imperative on both of us, as we had exhausted
our limited knowledge of each other's language. On the right
hand stretched the lake, calm enough now, though an hour ago it
had tossed me so unmercifully; on the left rose the hills, steeply
green with their luxuriant dark foliage, through which curled up
at intervals the misty white jets of steam that betrayed one of the
puia, or boiling springs, with which the district was honeycombed.
From the neighborhood of these same springs, fifty years ago,
came the terrible land-slip that in the dead of night overwhelmed
the Heu-Heu of that time with his sleeping village. The survivors
of this awful catastrophe could be numbered on the fingers of one
hand; and since then the village has been rebuilt farther along the
shore. The little Maori children rove at will in the thick bush
round the boiling springs, and miraculously escape scatheless.
The path turns and reveals just beyond a collection of gray
thatched huts straggling up the steep hillside. They are fenced in by
crazy-looking poles, from which ferocious carved heads grin down
356 THE CATHOLIC MAORI AT HOME [Dec.,
upon us. This was evidently Waihi ; and the little wooden church
and great white wooden cross firmly planted on the lake shore
proclaimed its Catholicity. Rapidly was I led up the steep ascent
to the convent. Loose pebbles rolled beneath our hastening feet,
for the acute excitement of my guide at having brought home a
strange European girl would admit of no delay till I had been dis-
played to the nuns. The welcome I received at the convent was as
Irish in its hearty hospitality as were the good nuns themselves;
and within an hour of my arrival they had made me completely at
home in the community room, with a stretcher installed in a corner
and primitive washing arrangements spread out on the community
table. Their one regret was that the house did not contain even a
vestige of looking-glass ; they " not being used to visitors," as
they pathetically put it. Fortunately I was accustomed to staying
about at convents here and there; and could relieve the troubled
minds of my kind hostesses by producing an inch-square pocket
mirror, which I assured them would serve all my needs. But in-
deed I think I could cheerfully have agreed to sleep on the floor,
when I had taken my first glance from the open door of my room,
which looked straight down on the bush, the hills, the Pa below,
and the great lake lying placid and calm in the noon-day sun. It
was a scene of ideal beauty, and the countless interesting possi-
bilities in the way of primitive life that lay before me added un-
speakably to its charm.
It was not that Nature had spread o'er the scene
Her purest of crystal and brightest of green.
It was something " more exquisite still " that attracted me : the
mediaeval simplicity of this place far off the track of tourists
and tourist-spoiled natives. Most of the families in Waihi have
been Catholic for three generations; and they add the faith and
devotion of model Catholics to the natural virtues and many attrac-
tive qualities of the best type of Maori : bravery, straightforward-
ness, and a certain rare and delicate courtesy, which heaped kind-
nesses and attentions on me during my stay in Waihi.
Those were wonderful days. At half-past six, on a perfect
summer morning, the church bell from below would rouse me from
sleep, and as I dressed I drank in with eyes and mind and heart the
early-morning loveliness of the hillsides all hung with dim gray
mists, and the lake glimmering through the haze with the sparkle
of early sunbeams. All through the night my door stood open
to the summer air, framing a marvelous moonlight scene of silent
1913-] THE CATHOLIC MAORI AT HOME 357
lake and shore. Now a canoe glided in from an early fishing expe-
dition, and down in the hollow water the merry brown youngsters
splashed and played. Soon there is another peal of the church bell,
and from every house in the Pa the villagers stream out to morning
prayers. Generally it is to Mass; but the priest is absent just
now, on a parochial tour through the wild district he serves.
Hastily snatching up a Maori prayer book and rosary, I hurry down
the breakneck descent into the Pa, and join the congregation on
the church steps. The church is adorned with quaint Maori carving,
chiefly scroll-work in red and black and white; and round the
sanctuary runs the legend, " Hatu-Hatu-Hatu," the Maori equiva-
lent of " Sanctus." Within all is silence and reverent suspense.
To the right kneel the old men, venerable figures with white
hair and dignified, noble faces ; then the young men and lads, and in
the front benches the tiny boys, barelegged and a little restless.
The other side is occupied by the women : old crones first, then
the matrons, almost all with babies on their backs, and in front
the little schoolgirls. I slip into the bench reserved for the young
maidens of the tribe, and find a place among them. Round each
dusky head is draped a scarf, after the fashion of a Spanish lady's
mantilla, but in no such sober coloring. Crimsons and blues, pinks
and vivid yellows, are the favorite tints; but the effect is not
unpleasing when each bright draping covers a head as black as
night, and shadows a dark-skinned face and two great full dark
eyes, serious now, and bent in prayer. From the catechists' bench
at the back comes the chanted Sign of the Cross, in a swift, musical
monotone, " Ki to ingoa o te Matua, me te Tamaiti, me te Wairua
Tapu, Amene." And in a moment the church echoes to the morn-
ing prayers, chanted by the entire congregation in perfect accord
on that one rather high note, and spoken with a fervor and intensity
bearing very favorable comparison with the half -apologetic murmur
of a white congregation at its prayers.
From behind me come the women's voices, resonant and tire-
less, with a certain metallic ring in them that is not unpleasant.
There are no stops : when a voice temporarily ceases for lack of
breath, another, fresh and unwearied, takes its place in the unceasing
chorus. Again and again comes the fresh impetus in the volume of
sound, as voice after voice rests for a moment and then takes up
the tone again. At first, however, this non-stop system is very con-
fusing to the stranger. I had the prayers (printed in Belgium) be-
fore me ; and I was familiar enough with the pronunciation to read
Maori correctly : yet for some time I was absolutely at a loss how
358 THE CATHOLIC MAORI AT HOME [Dec.,
to find and keep my place. Presently, however, the system dawned
upon me, and I chanted as enthusiastically as the rest, pausing for
breath when necessary, and starting again a phrase or two further
on. The prayers ended with the Angelus, said standing, while
a little boy slipped out to the porch and pealed the church bell
lustily. How the tone must have reverberated across the still
lake, telling the Maoris and whites of dreary Tokaanu that the vil-
lage of Waihi was at its morning prayer.
We poured out into the bright sunshine, and I went slowly up
the steep incline to the convent, passing on my way the remnants
of an historic landmark the food storehouse, or " pataka," of Te
Heu-Heu the Great. Here stood his carven wood treasury, raised
from the ground on its four massive round pillars, and in his time
kept constantly filled with preserved pigeon and tui, fish, and fern-
root; that the far-famed hospitality of the Ngatituwharetoa might
never fail the hungry traveler. Now the carved beams lie here
and there in the lush grass of summer time; and the blackberries
climb over the deep-set pillars.
Breakfast over, I left the Sisters to the labors of the school-
room, where they instructed all the children of Pa, from toddlers
of five and six to great strapping youths of eighteen and nineteen.
Sometimes I climbed through the steep bush at the back of the
convent, and came out on the clear brow of the hill, where the sun
poured down in all his strength, and a sun-worshipper like myself
could lie and bask in his kindliness, and look down on the tiny Pa
below with its antlike inhabitants, and across the lake all shimmer-
ing in a pale-blue heat haze to where the Waikato Delta lay. It
was a good place in which to dream dreams of the past centuries
when this was the mountain stronghold of the people among whom
I dwelt; when the exquisite beauty of this scene of mountain
and lake had inspired them with myths and legends, the poetry of
which is only now coming into its own. Was it when the ancient
Maori poet looked across at some such scene of misty, haze-en-
veloped loveliness that he produced that legend of the coming of the
first woman the offspring of the elusive Mirage and the equally
elusive Echo ? Yet they were fierce and warlike enough, the men of
this untutored, poetic race. Not a hundred years ago the ancestors
of the girls I knelt beside that morning had danced the wild haka
on the shore below ere they went forth to battle ; and, coming back
victorious, had consummated their triumph by banqueting on the
flesh of their slain enemies.
A little beyond the village there is a silver thread that pierces
1913.] THE CATHOLIC MAORI AT HOME 359
the dark green of the bush : a waterfall that makes its impetuous
way to the lake in three great leaps from the heights above, and
then over the stones into the lake. This fact is known to every
tourist who crosses Lake Taupo, and the silver thread is pointed
out to him from the steamer's deck. But I wonder how many know
of the existence of one of nature's temples, as beautiful, surely, as
any she ever hewed from stone, just where the fall takes its last
leap. Turn away from the lake with me along this bank, covered
with thick grass and rambling blackberries, till we come to the brown
still pool below the fall. Then, if you wish to enter the sanctuary
of the great rock cathedral, wade barefoot through the clear sun-
warmed water to that smooth rock in the centre, and gaze at
this marvel of nature's fashioning. Around you is the steep,
straight semi-circle of moss-grown walls, hemming in the water
with cool shade. Below lies the smooth transparent crystal floor:
opposite is that cascade of foaming white water, leaping down from
immeasurable heights, so it seems, to this secret, still, brown
pool. The air is filled with the incessant rush and thunder of the
cataract; and there rises an invisible, intangible incense of spray
that bathes the very air in its cool, fairy showers. Invisible did I
say? Invisible only till the sun shines upon it; and then it glistens
with a very profusion of jewels through the shadowed atmosphere,
like the golden rays from clerestory windows lying athwart the
dusk of a Gothic cathedral. Only stay long enough in this remote
woodland temple, utterly silent as it is save for the ceaseless fall
of waters, and all your thrilling soul shall reverberate to the mighty
music of this organ praising the Most High with majestic voice.
Nor shall its harmonies soon die away. Pausing an instant, I can
even now hear again the great voice of those far-distant waters.
The hilltop and the waterfall were joys tasted in solitude, and
to be recalled frequently by " that inward eye which is the bliss
of solitude." But when the weather was fine and the lake calm, one
of the canoes was placed at my service, to take me anywhere I
wished to go. Two of the girls constituted themselves my cicerones ;
and they would pack themselves, me, and a native kit of provisions,
generally bread and butter and watermelon, into the canoe, and
paddle me for miles on the still bosom of the lake. Tourists who
view the New Zealand lakes from the seats of a puffing, snorting,
and odorous oil or steam launch, are sadly defrauded. To appre-
ciate the beauties of these lakes they should be seen as I saw them,
half-sitting, half-lying in the Maori fashion on the rough wooden
bottom of a dugout canoe. At the prow stands a Maori girl, pro-
36o THE CATHOLIC MAORI AT HOME [Dec.,
pelling the little craft with graceful twirlings and balancings of
her paddle. Sitting behind is another Maori woman, looking out
upon the loveliness of the summer lake with the dark, liquid, melan-
choly eyes of her race. There is silence, except for an occasional
murmured word in the soft Maori tongue. Silently the narrow
canoe slips through the water, now in the hot sunlight, now hugging
the shore in the grateful shade of the rock cliffs. Far, far away
in the mist stretches the opposite shore, and for many miles beyond
there is nothing that could possibly remind one of this bustling
twentieth century.
The canoe is gliding along in the shadow of the steep cliffs;
and my guides tell me in their low, musical voices the histories
and traditions that cling about the caves above us. One they told
me was the sepulchre of a slave woman whose remains would have
been thought to desecrate the ancient tribal cemetery : a great cave
that we had passed further down the lake. I looked eagerly at the
orifice scarcely twenty feet above us; and with a quick intuitive
knowledge of my unspoken wish, the nose of the canoe was thrust
inshore, and we clambered out on the rocks.
" Perhaps we see something," said one of the girls, " perhaps,
nothing; I do not know."
Up the cliff we scrambled -by the aid of the tough creepers, and,
courteously holding back, my companions yielded me the first view
into the cave. I lifted my head to the cave-mouth and looked.
Just below me there lay a small, perfect, woman's skull, with a lock
of rusty brown hair upon it: and other bones lay scattered on a
rough, brown mat on the floor of the cave. " Ai-ee," came a long-
drawn exclamation of wonder from the girls ; as together we gazed
upon the century-old relic of the slave of their ancestors. Under
the regime of the tohungas, the priests of the Maori religion, it
was defilement to approach the remains of the dead, and excom-
munication to touch them. Knowing this, I looked somewhat ap-
prehensively at my companions. But their Christianity stood them
in good stead, and they showed no trace of superstitious terror.
Indeed their attitude towards the heathen traditions of their race
seemed to me an ideal one. They were never reluctant to speak
about them, and when they did recount the legends, which often
possessed extreme poetic beauty, it was with a half-tender, half-
humorous attitude of mind as of a man who speaks of the beliefs
and thoughts of his childhood. " When I was a child I spoke as
a child, I understood as a child, but now I have put off the things
of childhood." That summed up exactly the attitude of these
1913-] THE CATHOLIC MAORI AT HOME 361
Christian natives. One could question them freely about the be-
liefs and practices of pagan days, and they answered just as freely.
It was from the lips of one of the children of Mary that I
learned the past history of a great hollow rock on the shore. It was,
so she said, the ancient home of the Taniwha,a dreadful sea monster,
which glided forth at night in the form of a star, and brought
death to any who set eyes on him. No, he was never seen now, she
told me with a humorous twinkle in her brown eyes, " perhaps,
though, when he know you here he come out to see you." And
before me lies a letter in her careful copper-plate, learned in the
Sisters' school : " As for the Taniwha it hasn't come yet. I think
he's still waiting for your next return, as he knew that you were
very anxious to see his coming." But when they were let alone,
and asked no questions, it was not the old pagan legends that came
naturally to their lips : it was legends of the Saints. Lying on the
brow of a hill with my Maori girl friends, I have heard in their
soft-toned, hesitating English the stories of St. Tarcisius, St. Eliza-
beth of Hungary, St. Francis, and many others of far off days :
and, listening, I have reflected on the Church Catholic, and on all
she means to her children.
In New Zealand one is too often apt to look upon his dark-
skinned neighbors with unreflecting contempt. And it gave me
many a moment of silent enjoyment to think of the horror and
disgust which would have been imprinted on the visages of some of
my stiff-necked acquaintances could they have seen my doings at
Waihi. A day spent in canoeing on the lake with the native girls,
picnicking in the bush with them, or sitting talking to them in their
own houses, was closed by night prayers in the little church; and
more often than not, by choir practice, in which the whole village
joined. After the prayers were concluded, the congregation stood,
while one of the girls went to the little American organ in the
corner and played hymn after hymn. These were generally sung in
four parts by the villagers, old and young; and the harmony was
supplied by ear, and was invariably correct. The Maori words
were sung either to an English hymn tune, or an old native air, or to
an air which one of the choristers would sit down and compose,
and then teach to the rest of the choir (they thought nothing of
this).
One evening at practice, it was shortly before Easter, they were
singing a Maori version of "O Filii et Filiae" to their own air. Hav-
ing mastered their melody, I told them I knew another; and playing
362 THE CATHOLIC MAORI AT HOME [Dec.,
the old Gregorian air over once, I found it was quite strange to them.
I sang the first verse of the hymn to them in Maori, whereupon the
entire village sang the remaining verses to my accompaniment, and
perfectly correctly. If their musical gifts would be an acquisition
to any white choir, so, too, would their earnestness and reverence.
Never an idle or frivolous word was spoken by man, woman or
child throughout the practice, and it was concluded by a devoutly-
uttered prayer said on their knees before they dispersed.
When we left the church, I w r as always guided up the steep
mountain-track to the convent by two girls, one taking each arm,
and left in safety at my own door with courteous good wishes for
my night's repose. But even then my pleasant day was not yet
over, for I found " community recreation " in full swing when I
came back from prayers. We four, the three Sisters and myself,
sat in the tiny front parlor, where there was hardly room to move
without knocking over something, and for an hour the room echoed
to our merriment. Jokes about the little brown school children,
about the children of a larger growth down in the Pa, about the
extraordinary collection of white people at Tokaanu : I heard more
good stories in that little front parlor at Waihi than ever I have
heard anywhere else in the same space of time.
There was the old woman whom they had christened " the
hatrack," because she would sit in the aisle of the church instead
of in a seat, and her husband, sitting decorously at the end of his
seat, would use the head just below him to hang his hat on for safe-
keeping. There was the old man who complained to one of the
Sisters of failing eyesight, and was in the seventh heaven when
she successfully tested his eyes, and got him a suitable pair of spec-
tacles from the nearest town. A month or so later he waylaid
her in the Pa, opening his mouth wide to show his toothless gums.
" Pakeha eyes kapai (very good)," he said. " You get me pakeha
teeth too." It was the same old man who nearly reduced a French
visiting Sister to hysterics, by taking her ample veil and wrapping
it many times round his grizzled head : all as a token of his extreme
respect. There was also the tale of the visitor to Waihi who sought
the village with a letter of introduction to the German pastor; and
accosted a workman in dungarees whom he found erecting the
church. The workman referred him to the convent for informa-
tion as to the priest's whereabouts, and just as the nuns were racking
their brains as to what Father L expected them to tell the man,
the aforesaid workman reappeared, smiling in a clerical suit of black,
1913.] THE CATHOLIC MAORI AT HOME 363
to take his guest home to dinner. The priest willingly makes his
house a depositary for the treasures of any of his flock. But, so
said the Sisters, he did draw the line when one of the children of
Mary took to walking into his house, and hanging up her precious
blue cloak among his clothes for safe-keeping !
Cut off from civilization, and from all communication with
other white women; and deprived even of the services of a priest
for many months in the year, these three nuns were no less light-
hearted than nuns in general the world over. Perched up in their
little cottage above the lake, exposed to all the inclemencies of
the weather, keeping house, clothing themselves, conducting a
school, and nursing the sick of the Pa on the princely sum of
sixty pounds a year, the three Sisters radiated the conviction that
life was very well worth living. The nearest town was two days
away by coach or steamer, so in hot weather fresh meat was out
of the question; the fowls refused to lay for months at a time, and
the commissariat department was palpably hampered for lack of
funds; but the poverty that prevailed was an attractive species,
reminiscent of the pages of the Fioretti. And when the clock
struck nine, and I retired next door to my stretcher, the low murmur
of prayer that lulled me to sleep through the thin partition seemed
to strike the true keynote of the day.
The time came when I must leave Waihi, and journey back to
the daily bustle of town life. Silently the laden canoe slid through
the calm water, weighted down by myself and my modest piece of
luggage, one of my kind hostesses, and my two faithful Maori girls,
who were paddling me across the lake to meet the coach at Tokaanu.
Gradually, as we drew away from the shore, the panorama of the
little village straggling up the steep, green hillside grew more pictur-
esque and enticing. Sadly I watched the score or so of native huts,
in and out of which I had wandered a welcome guest; the church
where I had prayed with my brown brethren; the dear, poor, little
cottage convent which had housed me, and the rushing waterfall I
had loved so much. Then, shrill and faint, came the tangi, the wail
of the women, who stood on their thresholds waving to the departing
canoe. " They say their hearts are full of love to you, and of
sorrow because you go away," interpreted one of the girls softly.
Not more full than was my heart, as I watched the familiar brown
faces disappear in the distance, while the speed of five
good horses carried me away from them and back to civilization.
THE ONE IDEAL.
BY W. E. CAMPBELL.
ROYCE has written an important book
on The Problem of Christianity.* For many gen-
erations books of this kind have dealt too exclu-
sively with the spiritual needs of the individual. Our
author has enlarged the scope of the problem. He is
concerned not only with the spiritual needs of the individual, but
also with those of the community. It is a great thing to see religion
thus set forth as a bond between individual and social life. So
long as people were so absorbed in the religious problem of the indi-
vidual, they were only too apt to separate religion and public life.
Until quite lately we were always told " that a man's religion was
his own affair," as if it had nothing to do with the community at
large. Consequent on this presumption, religion and business were
almost severed, or at best were united by a bond of " healthy "
cynicism. This was very injurious to both. At any rate religion
ceased to be the strong leaven in public life that it once had been.
With a view to the remedy of this disastrous condition of
affairs, Professor Royce comes forward with a thesis something
like the following: A spiritual ideal must now be sought for,
which is valid alike for public and private life one which will unite
and inspire them both.
An ideal is something which supplies an urgently-felt spiritual
need. In discussing the problem, then, we must ask ourselves:
1. Is there an urgently felt spiritual need?
2. Is there an ideal which will meet this need?
No ordinary man, in his senses, has ever believed himself to be
perfect Each one of us knows himself as a being full of human
weaknesses defects of body and soul, of memory, affection and
will; our actions fall short of what W T C should wish them to be, and
this quite apart from our sense of actual wrong-doing. In a word,
the common sense of mankind accepts the Christian doctrine of
Original Sin. Such, I understand, is Professor Royce's conclu-
*The Problem of Christianity. Lectures delivered at The Lowell Institute in
Boston, and at Manchester College, Oxford, by Josiah Royce, Professor of the
History of Philosophy in Harvard University. New York : The Macmillan Co.
2 Vols. $3.50 net.
1913.] THE ONE IDEAL 365
sion. In a similar manner the Christian doctrine of actual sin
is also acceptable to enlightened common sense. Quite apart from
his original weakness, every human being is conscious that know-
ing what was right, he has only too often deliberately chosen to do
what was wrong. To sum up, quite colloquially, these two genera-
ally-accepted facts of the spiritual life, every man is conscious that
he did not start at scratch with his ideal; he is also conscious that
he has often, quite willfully, turned his back upon his ideal, and run
in pursuit of some false will-o-the-wisp.
Something must now be said about ideals themselves. .While
every man quite evidently falls short of his own ideal, his con-
sciousness of this shortcoming will depend for its intensity upon
the nature of the ideal itself. It may be a poor ideal, one that is
only a little better than his own actual life. In such a case his sense
of failure will be slight, his purpose of amendment will be feeble, his
rate of improvement will be slow. A good man, on the other hand,
will have a vivid and continuous sense of his own shortcoming,
because his ideal rises far and high above the level of his daily
life; it will be illuminated by a good conscience; it will show him
very clearly the distance that lies between him and it; he will be
filled at one and the same time with humility and courage; he will
make haste to be good.
At this point, however, we must discriminate between ideals
that are all good in themselves. We want to choose and follow the
very best, that one, indeed, which is far and away the best. There
is, I know, a school of religious conviction which teaches that every
individual should make or choose or change his ideal just when
and how and where he pleases it is a matter for the " private judg-
ment " of each individual being. " There are as many ideals as
men," this school would appear to teach, " indeed, there must be
more, since many people prefer to change and choose afresh several
times."
Ordinary common sense can hardly approve of such teaching
as this. Life is so short, and man himself is so changeable, that he
needs, whether in business or religion, an ideal that he can stick to
through life. In business it is often chosen for him; in religion,
however, he must choose it for himself, even if it is put before him
by his parents or religious teachers. He must choose it for him-
self, and, with the grace of God, he must follow it of his own free
will. The question is, What ideal will he choose? Life, as I say,
being so short, and, furthermore, a period of probation for another
366 THE ONE IDEAL [Dec.,
life far more important in every sense; human nature, too, being
in such perilous need of some great and constant ideal to lift
and balance it, it seems more than likely that such an ideal has been
provided. It seems probable, because so reasonable, that the God
Who has made all men, has also made an Ideal which all men
may follow, if they so choose.*
If this is really so, it is the first duty of everyone to look out
for this great God-given Ideal ; to find it, to choose it, and to follow
it till death. Show me this Ideal when I am very young. Let me
choose it before I choose my trade or my profession, or my wife or
a school for my children ; let me choose it as I choose my mother
who has also chosen me for it is the only thing in all the world that
is more important than mother or father or family or success or
trade or property or honor or life or death. Let me choose it
early, and let me follow it always; through childhood when reason
is weak; through youth when passion is strong; through manhood
when pride may even be stronger; in old age when friends pass
away; until death, when the poor actual will pass away, too, when
the Ideal will be realized at last and for evermore.
But such an Ideal as this is no mere creation of man. A really
great and serviceable ideal must have two points about it; first,
it must be human; and, secondly, it must be high. It is easy enough
to make an ideal which is high and inhuman aristocratic in the bad
sense of the word ; or again, it is easy to make an ideal that is human
and low democratic in the bad sense of that word. But to find,
to choose, and to follow that one great Ideal which lifts the weak-
est of men above their weaknesses and leaves the wisest beneath its
wisdom is to find, to choose, and to follow what God alone could
make, what God alone has made, " for us men and our salvation."
In speaking of this Ideal, we must remember that it is a thing
independent of the mind of man. Man did not create it any more
than he created himself; God created it (the God Who created
man), and He created it for man. We cannot comprehend its
origin, for that is a thing beyond us in time and experience ; even had
we been present at its beginning we could not have comprehended
it it is a thing both morally and mentally too high for human
comprehension. We can see it, we can know it, we can love it, we
can follow it, but we cannot comprehend it. As St. Paul said,
" It is a mystery I speak of Christ and the Church."
It should not, however, distress us when the great and wise
*Notice that the " choice " of the Ideal is one thing, the " following " of the
Ideal quite another ; but both are " free."
1913-] THE ONE IDEAL 367
find that the Christian ideal is beyond their comprehension. On the
contrary, if it were not beyond their comprehension we might well
be distressed, for then it would stand confessed as a merely human
ideal, and one quite powerless to raise humanity above itself.
Professor Royce proceeds to the examination of certain of the
more principal Christian doctrines. Every one of these is the key to
some mystery in human nature, and every one is examined with
especial reference to its social use and power. It would be diffi-
cult, for instance, to find anything more inspiring than the chapter
on " Atonement." The human rather than the divine aspect of the
doctrine is dealt with, but with essential Tightness, and in thought
of simple grandeur. Our author is, of course, thinking of it all
in terms of the here and now; but he is thinking of it in a pro-
foundly spiritual way. He is full of compassion for needy human
nature, and he would lift our eyes to the heights of hope and vision.
Professor Royce appears to believe in many of the great Chris-
tian doctrines, but he does not believe them to be part of a divine
revelation. The Catholic, though in all sympathy, is bound to con-
sider such a position unreasonable, for they who accept it,
appropriating a part of the Christian ideal, declare it to be wholly
human, and so deprive themselves of the power of God unto
salvation.
What then do we mean by this phrase " the power of God unto
salvation?" It means the Catholic Church through which (as
through a channel which God himself has appointed) grace and
truth are given to the world.
The Christian Ideal would be of no use to human nature unless
it were wholly true to human nature; and it could not be wholly
true to human nature unless the same God Who had created human
nature had made it so. Again, the Christian Ideal could not be
pursued by the men who chose to pursue it, unless the Grace of
God assisted their willingness in this arduous pursuit. From this
it will be clear that the Catholic Church claims to be the beloved
community which Professor Royce is so zealously in search of.
The members of the Catholic Church are united together by their
love of a high and human ideal, whose truth is divinely guaranteed.
They are kept in this love by the Grace of God.
Every community, like every individual, needs an ideal.
" Where there is no vision the people perish." There can be no
persistent social stability and no persistent social development with-
out it. But, in point of fact, our author tells us very little about
368 THE ONE IDEAL [Dec.,
the nature of such an ideal, though he dwells at length upon its
urgent importance. He cannot tell us what his ideal is, or where it
is to come from, or how it is to be maintained for the common
good. " Interpretation " is an excellent thing, but all he has to
say about it seems inconclusive, until he can tell us what is to be
interpreted, and who is fitted for the post of interpreter. St. Paul
(to whom Professor Royce attributes so many opinions expressed
in this book) was much more definite about all these things. When
St. Paul wrote to the Galatians, he rebuked them for their fickle
taste in ideals. " I wonder," he says to them, " that you are so soon
removed to another gospel." And then he goes on, " But though
we, or an angel from heaven preach a gospel to you besides that
which we have preached to you, let him be anathema." Why, then,
was it so foolish of the Galatians to change their ideal?
St. Paul answers this question very directly. " I give you to
understand, brethren, that the Gospel which was preached by me
is not according to man." As if he should have said, " You Gala-
tians must learn, once and for all, to distinguish between the one
God-given Ideal of life, and the many ideals which are of human
origin. These latter, just because of their merely human origin,
are bound to be defective in range and power. But what I have
preached to you comes straight from God, the Creator of man.
It is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth ; it is the
one Ideal which will suit all men, for all time, and for all eternity.
If you stick to this, God, Who has given it to you, will also
give you the grace to follow it. And this again no merely human
ideal can provide. Do you not see, then, how foolish you would
be to turn from it ? For it is the only way in which you can attain
to your fullest possible development. Only so can you grow to
the full stature of your spiritual manhood. You are at liberty, of
course, to refuse this divinely-guaranteed Ideal; you are also at
liberty to reject the grace which would follow its acceptance for
God has endowed you with free will. But if you do refuse this
divine truth, if you do reject this divine grace, you are bound to
fall short of your destiny; you will remain destitute and unspiritual
creatures in this life, and in the life to come you will be separated
from God for ever."
But what, after all, is the social value of the whole Christian
Ideal? Its value is that of the leaven in the lump, of the savor
in the salt, of the light amid darkness, of the spirit in the flesh,
of the Church in the world.
1913-] THE ONE IDEAL 369
A large and national illustration may be given in support of
this truth. Let us go back to past time and hear the historical
witness of a man who was not a Catholic, and was in no way
prejudiced in favor of the Catholic Church.
Down to the Reformation of the sixteenth century [writes
Mr. J. A. Froude], the beliefs and habits of the English nation
were formed by the Catholic Church. Men and women of all
ranks were brought up on the hypothesis that their business in
this world was not to grow rich, but to do their duties in that
state of life to which they had been called. Their time on earth
was short. In the eternity which lay beyond, their condition
would wholly depend upon the way in which it had been spent.
On this principle society was constructed, and the conduct,
public and private, of the great body of the people was gov-
erned by the supposition that the principle was literally true
It was then that in every parish arose a church, on which piety
lavished every ornament which skill could command, and then
and thus was formed the English nation. . . .
Mr. Froude is careful to admit that after the Reformation
there was a rapid change for the worse in social virtue. Those
Catholic convictions, which had previously afforded an impregnable
criterion of business morality, dwindled down to opinions, and lost
their hold upon the national conscience, for the simple reason that
Englishmen had forgotten the divine sanctions which had pre-
viously given them their strength. As with the Galatians in St.
Paul's time, so with the Englishmen of the post-Reformation
period, " another gospel," another ideal, had " bewitched " them,
and they forgot the one Ideal which had come from God, Who
cannot lie.
All modern industrial communities suffer terribly, and indeed
principally, from a lack of business conscience. How can this
humane business conscience be re-awakened, re-enlightened, and
re-inspired? By a process of idealistic re-interpretation, says Pro-
fessor Royce. This is excellent so far as it goes, but it goes a very
little way. The man or group of men who are to save the nations
by solely human agency, have a big task before them. They have
not only to interpret the Protean multitude of man-made ideals, but
they have to select and arrange these ideals in a wholesome human
scheme. And suppose this done; suppose they can unfold before
men an idealistic scheme just suited for all, poor and rich, intelligent
VOL. xcvm. 24
370 THE ONE IDEAL [Dec.,
and ignorant, employer and employed alike, how then are they to
persuade humankind to leave all other ideals and idealistic schemes,
and to follow this alone? No human power is equal to such a
business. The whole Christian Ideal has this advantage at any
rate. It has been tried on a large scale, and over great periods of
time, and has been found successful. It has been tried and found
to work wherever the free-will of individuals or of communities
has given it a fair chance. Too many modern reformers imagine
they can save men by forbidding them the use of free-will. No man
was ever made spiritual in this way; a servile state of soul is even
more horrible then a servile state of body. Professor Royce by
refusing to accept the whole Christian Ideal, with all its accom-
panying truth and grace, challenges the impossible. Short of the
Catholic faith, he will not be able to find the right and complete
scheme of social salvation; he will not be equal to the interpreta-
tion of what he finds ; nor will he be able to persuade such as accept
his partial scheme to leave all and follow it along the high and
difficult way of practical virtue. Why should men be too proud
to believe that God, Who created them, has left for their guidance
a true scheme of right living? The answer is that they imagine
that if such a scheme were in existence, it would enlighten the eyes
of all. They forget, Profesor Royce himself forgets, that there
is a taint of original and actual blindness in every human intellect.
This fact should be considered in all its bearings, and in a proper
frame of personal humility. The scheme of highest possible man-
hood is there before the eyes of all. Whatever fault there is must
lie with the moral vision of men.
THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE.
BY KATHARINE TYNAN.
CHAPTER VII.
THE MORNING AFTER.
HE morning broke quietly enough after the lulling of the
storm. There were signs of it in trees down and slates
off and storm shutters broken. The landscape pre-
sented a more desolate appearance than usual, so many
gaps in the trees, those remaining bent over by the force
of the wind. Everything had a tattered and beaten ap-
pearance. But in the little conservatory opening off the octagon room
which Lady Turloughmore kept for her private sitting-room, the dove
blown in by last night's storm cooed and flashed his irised head and
breast in the fleeting sunrays as though no storm had ever been. The
coming of the dove had given her ladyship great hope and comfort.
She could not make enough of the pretty creature, which was very tame,
and allowed itself to be approached and even stroked after a while.
She had taken its coming as a sign that all was well with the yacht.
Lord Erris went forth after breakfast to a meet of the hounds.
Although the excitement of hunting was apt to be followed by violent
headaches and languor, yet he took these things as in the day's work,
and did not miss his hunting because of them.
" My son looks well on horseback," Lady Turloughmore said, as
they watched Lord Erris ride away from the house.
" He looks very well," Meg assented. " Man and horse look as
though they were a part of each other."
" That is how a good rider ought to look," said Lady Turlough-
more, turning about to enter the house. " I wonder how soon there
will be news of the yacht. My husband always remembers that I am
anxious, and sends me news as often as it is possible. I hope you
will see him soon, Miss Hildebrand. That is a picture of him when
we were married."
She indicated the portrait of a very handsome young man in uni-
form, which hung above one of the doors in the hall. Through the
open hall door a ray of sun shone, slanting upwards on the face of the
picture. It was a charming face, looking sideways, a straight nose,
a mouth the sweetness of which was not altogether hidden by the
mustache, very fine gray eyes under dark brows, the hair parted in the
372 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Dec.,
middle, thick and with a waving sweep behind the ears. There was a
touch of wistfulness in the face which did nothing to mar its mascu-
linity.
" He is very handsome," Meg said with a sigh of which she was
unconscious, because the face was like and unlike Lord Erris', being
so much more debonair, more full of the joy of youth.
" Many girls would have taken the chances," Lady Turloughmore
said, with an answering sigh. " I have never repented my marriage."
The newspapers and letters had just arrived. Lady Turlough-
more selected her letters, and, before retiring with them to her own
room, remembered something she wanted Meg to do.
" Would you walk over to Carrick ? " she asked, " it is about two
and a quarter miles from here. The way is quite easy to find, and
you can't mistake the house which stands by itself on a hill. You can
see it from the upper windows. Ask for Miss Roche, Miss Anastasia,
as the people call her, and say I sent to inquire for her, and hope the
house did not suffer in the storm. Carrick is not as strongly built as
Castle Eagle. There is sure to be some damage done. Say also,
please, that if she will come over for lunch, I will drive her back in
the afternoon. You can take all the dogs; Anastasia will not mind,
and it will be a kindness to them. And, please, before you go, will
you take my orders to Mrs. Browne for the day. Perhaps you will
kindly write some notes for me in the afternoon. But they can wait."
Meg gave the orders to the housekeeper. Then she went on
upstairs, passing on her way the open door of a bedroom which she
took to be the one making ready for Lord Turloughmore, since a fire
was lit, and the bed was heaped with linen and blankets ready to be
made. She went on to the end of the corridor, thinking that she would
see how Julia was after the disturbance of the night. The old woman
was not in the outer room ; but she could be heard stirring in the inner
room where Meg found her. The inner room still bore traces of the
days when it was a nursery. Julia's head was buried in a cupboard,
where she was doing something or other; she emerged at the sound
of Meg's voice.
" I'm just tidying the play-cupboard," she said. " Maybe you'd
like a look?"
Meg looked, and was conscious of the most intense sadness,
enveloping her like a thing that could be felt. The cupboard, a deep
and wide one, was full of toys and games in its lower shelves. The
upper were heaped with books, the gaily bound books of the nursery.
" I do be tidyin' it out now and again," Julia said, " but never
when her ladyship's about. She bid me give the things away long
ago, but I hadn't the heart to do it. Maybe there'd be another child
in the place yet. Sure why wouldn't Lord Erris marry ? "
1913.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 373
" Whose were the dolls and the doll's house and the doll's peram-
bulator?" Meg asked. "Was there a little girl here once?"
" Whisht! " said Julia. " Never let her ladyship hear you talkin'
of her. She'll talk of everything if she likes you, except Miss Cicely.
If she ever spakes of Miss Cicely to you, you'll know you've got at her
heart. Miss Cicely died at thirteen years old of the meningitis. I've
often thought the light of the house went out with her."
" That is Miss Cicely's picture in her ladyship's room, with her
hair on top of her head tied up with a blue ribbon, and the string of
corals about her neck. That is Miss Cicely. A painter-gentleman
that stayed here one summer painted that picture. She did be callin'
me whin I went up an' down the stairs to see the likeness Mr. Morgan
was makin' of her. He had his hands full to keep her quiet, an' whin
he got cranky with her, she was so pretty in her ways that he found
it easier to forgive her than himself."
Meg went away with the greatest feeling of desolation, because
anything so beautiful as Cicely had been lost out of the world. She
had a moment, while Lady Turloughmore was looking out a letter to
be answered, to glance again at the picture. The soft-lifted childish
profile, the beauty of color, the roguish gaiety of the expression; oh,
it set her heart to bleed in her breast because so much beauty was
dead and gone. There were tears in her eyes when Lady Turlough-
more turned and spoke to her, where she stood caressing the dove
that had flown in last night. Lady Turloughmore came and put a
kind hand on her shoulder, with something of anxiety in her expression.
" You are not homesick, my dear, are you ? " she said, with the
sweetest kindness.
Meg's look reassured her before the words.
" I have not been homesick for one second since I came," she
said. " Yet, it is a malady of mine. I had to leave Austria because
of it."
She had it on her lips to say that the house had folded her in as
though she belonged to it in a warm embrace ; this house of a shadow
that had chilled other people had gathered her like a daughter, but
she drove the words back, remembering that she was still a stranger.
" I am glad of that," Lady Turloughmore said. " There are not
many people, not many girls, who would fit into the life of a house
like this. If I had not known Lady O'Neill I confess I should have
doubted the wisdom. As it is I have been more than justified already.
I could not have believed it."
She had a wondering look as she touched Meg's cheek with her
finger.
" It had to be a friend or nothing," she said as though to her-
self, " and Meg is one in a thousand, one in a thousand."
THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Dec.,
Meg went off to execute her errand for Lady Turloughmore, being
very glad to get out into the fresh beautiful morning. The dogs
had accepted her, and while Prince walked sedately by her side, Mick,
the Irish terrier, and Rob, the Highland terrier, and Playboy, the pug,
and half a dozen little dogs rushed ahead and came back to paw her
riotously, making the morning joyous with sound.
She could see Carrick ahead of her for quite a long way, till she
dipped into a hollow full of dead leaves of autumn, and lost it. She
climbed out of her hollow again, wondering at the desolation of that bit
of country, for she had not passed a cottage. Beyond her, closing
the long straight road, she saw a pair of entrance gates which were
those of Carrick. She walked very briskly, and was approaching
the gates when she heard a shrill barking of dogs at some little distance,
and the sound of the huntman's horn. She stopped at a gap in the
hedge to look in the direction of the sound, and saw the hunt stream-
ing like a colored ribbon down one hill and up another, coming towards
her.
The story of Biddy Pendergast, who had brought the misfortune
on the Turloughmore family, flashed into her mind. She looked down
at the dogs, who were showing great excitement. Would the hounds
tear them to pieces as they tore the fox in the excitement of the chase ?
Calling the dogs to her, she ran for the heavy floriated iron gates that
were still a considerable way off. Carrick House stood in a park,
surrounded by stone walls, as Irish houses of its kind usually are.
The gates of Carrick such gates as in England would hardly
belong to a ducal residence, while in Ireland they are to be seen on
every hand were locked. There was a gate lodge inside, but although
Meg shook the gate vigorously, there was no response from within.
The dogs were in a frightful state of excitement by this time. Mick
had scampered clean away. The yelping of the hounds, and the shout-
ing of the huntsmen, came nearer and nearer. Prince pressed closer
to her side, looking up at her with his beautiful red-brown eyes with
a look that said eloquently that he would lay aside all his prejudices in
favor of hunting in order to guard her.
Deliberately she picked up a stone from a heap that lay at hand
ready for road-mending, and smashed the lock. Just in time. She
had hardly got her dogs safely inside when a little red beast went by
down the road in a flash, with a string of black and white following.
The hounds had no leisure to think of the prisoners beyond the bars,
who were rushing up and down wildly, seeking for an exit so that
they too might hunt. Even Prince had forgotten, and was barking his
deepest, and hurling himself against the gates in the passion for hunt-
ing.
A confused mass of red coats, dark habits and sleek-coated horses
1913.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 375
pressed on down the road in the direction the fox had taken. One
rider detached himself from the mass, and came over to where Meg
was standing within the gates. It was Lord Erris. He was looking
remarkably well, with the unwonted flush in his cheek and light in his
eye. It was not easy to realize that he was the sickly young man of
everyday life.
" You are not in distress ? " he asked, leaning down in his saddle
to speak to Meg, and smiling at her while his voice was very soft.
"Have those rascally dogs been giving you trouble? Even Prince
may forget his good behavior on a hunting day. I generally keep
them shut up if the hounds are likely to take this way."
" They are quite all right," she said, " all except Mick. I've lost
Mick. I do hope he won't come to any harm from the hounds."
" I shouldn't bother about Mick," he said easily. " Mick often
goes away for a day or two, and then comes back with a bloody
mouth. It's lucky I haven't many neighbors for Mick to embroil me
with. He'd never do in England. Neither would you, Miss Hilde-
brand. Have you been breaking Anastasia's lock ? "
" I had to. It was the only way I could get the dogs into safety.
How are you to get in if you don't break the lock ? "
" There are plenty of gaps in the wall if you take the trouble
to look for them. I acknowledge there isn't one here. I'll make
one for you if you like, that is if I can induce the mare not to clear
the wall. She may not understand that I want her to bring it down.
Perhaps on the whole we'd better ask Anastasia to give employment
to someone by breaking down the wall, so that people who think to
enter by the gate need not break the law with the padlock."
Was it possible this was the man of a few hours ago? His
voice was slow as he jested, and his lips and eyes humorous. It seemed
to lift the situation and her heart amazingly.
" You had better go on," she said, " or you will lose a day's hunt-
ing. And I shall be late with my message to Miss Roche, which
includes an invitation to lunch."
He looked as though he would have liked to stay; but he thought
better of it.
" Well, good-bye, Miss Hildebrand," he said cheerfully, turning
the chestnut mare about. " I wish you were hunting too. It is a glor-
ious morning. Give my love to Miss Roche, and look after my mother."
Meg, unconscious that she was still holding the broken padlock
in her hand, went up the long drive that wound like a ribbon through
the park, between its stunted thorn-trees, past its few grazing cattle.
The dogs followed her, sedately enough now, whining to themselves
now and again as they mused darkly on the lost delights of the hunt.
The drive climbed a hill. It ended at a long, low gate that had once
376 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Dec.,
been white. Beyond it was a tangled lawn. Beyond the overgrowth a
house built in the classical manner, with fluted pillars and porticoes
like a temple, revealed itself. The windows were blank. The place
had a neglected, uncared-for look.
The gate was open, and hung loose on its hinges ; she had to lift
it in order to open it. She was used to such things at Crane's Nest,
or she might not have understood how to do it. The grass had grown
up through the gravel of the path, and it was not easy to see where
that began and what had once been flower beds ended. A gossamer
hung over the bushes of bay and Portugal laurels. Looking before
her to the house, which had been a warm cream color, and yet bore
traces of gilding in the pilasters, plainly a house of great pretensions in
its time, she saw how some of the stucco headings to the pilasters
had fallen away ; how the hall door was blistered with the sun of many
summers, and the walls streaked with the tears of many winters, the
green tears of rain. A curiously depressing place. She was very glad
of the comfortable society of the dogs. Turning about on the door-
step she saw that Mick had come back. A feather or two clung to
his shining black nose. Apparently his quarry had been the domestic
fowl.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE PORTRAIT.
Meg knocked and rang. She turned about and surveyed the very
fine prospect that lay below the house front of Carrick; turned back
to survey the wide double doors set in a glass screen of elaborate device.
Above it was a beautiful fanlight with the figure of a horse inside it.
Every house of a certain period in Ireland boasts a fanlight and a horse,
with a glass screen either side the doors. Not a sound came in answer
to her knocking. She had plenty of time to note the architectural
beauty of the house, to come to the conclusion that if it was new
painted, and kept in order, it would be a beautiful house: the deep
eighteenth-century windows, headed with an arch, suggested quiet rich
rooms beyond, with brass basket grates and books behind lattices of
brass, with doors and mantels of old Spanish mahogany. Now, one
or two broken panes gave the lost note of dreary desolation to the
house. She knocked and rang again. She heard the bell jangle down
the empty passages ; but no one came. She began to feel it eerie, and
was more grateful than ever for the company of the dogs.
At last she made up her mind that if she was going to gain ad-
mittance, she would have to find another way than by the hall door.
1913-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 377
She tried getting round the house, and was stopped by what seemed
the wall of a garden, with a postern gate in it, all overhung with
a thick tangle of bushes.
At the back of the house she came upon a great range of out-
buildings. The grass was everywhere and craved wary walking,
since tons of old iron lay about which had once been the newest stable
fittings, garden implements, machinery, all exposed to the wind and
the weather till they were beyond usefulness. She made her way
through an opening into an inner courtyard. Fowl were clucking
about in it, ducks were quacking; a spotless flock of geese hissed at
her and fled before the dogs.
Suddenly she discovered that there was someone besides herself
in the yard, something human, an old woman, to judge by the huddled-
up figure, swathed in miserable rags of clothing ; the face was invisible,
for the woman was bending over a pot, apparently mixing a mess of
oatmeal and greens for the fowl. Apparently the woman had not
seen Meg. Having emptied the pot she picked it up, and made for
the door leading into the kitchen part of the house. Meg followed
her, overtaking her just as she was about to close the door.
" If you please," she began.
"No; I haven't any eggs to sell. Not yet. The hard winter has
put the hens off laying, and Deegan in the village gives me tuppence
for every egg I can give him. A wicked price, isn't it? It would be
eating money. Eh, what did you say ? You don't want eggs. What
do you want? Come in, or those hens will be in the house. Leave
your dogs outside. I've a sick dog inside that won't like to see them."
She closed and latched the door upon the dogs. They were in a
damp-smelling, narrow passage, ill-lit. Meg felt the chill of the flagged
flooring under her feet, as she followed the aged woman, along the
passage. She expected to be led into one of the kitchens; but her
guide went on past door after door, revealing a yawning and vault-
cold emptiness beyond, till she came to a stairfoot. She went up,
Meg following her. By a door at the head of the stairs she emerged
into what looked like a back hall double doors of mahogany, with
a great fanlight above, closing it in.
" Well, now, your business," said the old woman. " Are you the
young woman from the Department about the Plymouth Rocks?"
" No ; I'm not the young woman from the Department," Meg said.
" I came from Lady Turloughmore to see if Miss Roche was at home,
and to bring her back to lunch with me. Lady Turloughmore hoped
no damage was done by the storm."
" If you want to see Miss Roche," she said, " you'd better come
to the drawing-room."
She opened the door as she spoke, revealing a very finp hall, with
THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Dec.,
frescoed walls and carving. Then through a door at the side of this
handsome hall, the old woman led Meg into a long, stately room lit by
six long, narrow windows, originally decorated in white and gold.
It still kept much of its ancient beauty. With its wonderful setting
it was still imposing and dignified.
Having ushered Meg into it, the old woman withdrew, saying
something which Meg understood to be that she would let Miss Roche
know. Plainly the room did not share in the neglect that had fallen
on the rest of the house. There was plenty to occupy anyone who
waited there. Meg's attention was drawn at once to a couple of pic-
tures either side the fireplace, oval portraits of a youth and a girl.
The girl's hung immediately above a harp which stood lonely,
with only one or two strings remaining obviously the harp the girl
in the picture played, which there had all its strings. She was in white
satin. She had the long throat, the oval face, the delicate tapering
hands of the Book of Beauty. There was a lace fichu drawn about the
drooping shoulders, held by a rose. There was a rose in the knot
of dark ringlets lifted, and then allowed to droop either side the face,
just revealing the little ears. A goddess-like creature to look back at
from the strenuous days of twentieth-century womanhood. Such a
creature must always be clad in satins and have milk-white fingers, and
show a lovely arm under falling frills of fine lace, while she swept
the strings of a gilded harp.
Meg's eye went on to the portrait of the young man, plainly the
girl's brother. He was in a soldier's dress, with a high military stock,
bushy, dark hair, a little whisker carefully trained either side his
handsome, richly-colored face. She glanced at the young man, and
went back to the scrutiny of the girl's portrait. It made her sorrowful.
In this room the girl had danced, and played, and worked in Berlin
wool and painted niggling water colors, all the blameless occupations
of the early Victorian age. The youth might have been killed in one
of the wars with the Afghans, perhaps in the Crimea. The girl
Meg wondered what had become of the girl. She was so charming
that she must have had many lovers.
Meg was still looking up at the beautiful face of the girl in the
picture, when the old woman came to her side. Meg turned in startled
amazement. The rags had disappeared. Before her she saw a little
old lady rather mad, or maddish-looking. The ivory face was scored
by innumerable fine lines, which were so plainly visible through the
heavy lace veil as to make it evident that the face had not been suf-
ficiently washed. The eyes were singularly bright. The little old
lady was wearing a very wide feathered hat, tied up, so to speak,
with the big lace veil. She wore a dress frilled to the waist of black
and white striped silk. She had a black lace scarf about her shoulders,
1913-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 379
and where it was caught a pink monthly rose nestled. Belled sleeves
fell over white gloves of one button length. A parasol, with a folding
handle, was held under one arm. So might elegance have gone to a
garden party in the days of Napoleon the Little.
" I have left old Rattler quite comfortable," she said. " He will
take no harm till I come back at four to give him his beef tea. I
couldn't leave him if he fretted. He doesn't fret. He's sleeping his
life away. Any time at all I shall come and find him dead and stiff.
He shouldn't have lived to be so old by rights. He was the best
hound the Muskerrys ever had."
Meg looked at her in amazement.
" You are Miss Roche? " she said.
" Anastasia Roche, at your service. I could see you thought I
was an old hen-wife. No wonder I do my own chores as they say
in America. I'd half a mind to get some fun out of you by talking
about myself in the character of the hen-wife, but it wouldn't be fair.
What use have I for a servant, and I as poor as a church mouse. Now
if you're ready "
Meg stood staring at the old lady. She tried to say that she should
have recognized Miss Roche for a lady by her speech.
" I don't blame you, I don't blame you at all," said Miss Anastasia.
" I wonder what the men who used to dance with me, who were
in love with me a lot of ghosts now would think if they could see
me feeding the hens and doing my own chores. Anybody at all about
here would tell you I'm a bit gone in the upper story, especially when
there's a high wind. Maybe I'm not as mad as they think me."
Even yet Meg was not altogether enlightened.
" Who is that lovely girl ? " she asked, looking up at the picture.
" She is so beautiful that I can scarcely withdraw my eyes from her.
And the young man ? They are brother and sister, I suppose by their
looks."
" They are so," said Miss Roche, with emphasis. The girl's me.
What, didn't you know? Some people see a likeness even yet."
CHAPTER IX.
EXORCISM.
Meg was to become much better acquainted with Miss Roche,
and to reconsider her first verdict as to the lady's madness. The day
went on, calm and quiet.
" To-morrow we may look for the yacht," said Lady Turlough-
more as she went up to bed in the evening, carrying the dove on her
380 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Dec.,
outstretched palm. Plainly the creature was a pet. Its bright fear-
less gaze told that it had never regarded man as an enemy or anything
but a friend.
" God help her ladyship," said Kate, who had constituted her-
self lady's maid to Meg in addition to her other duties. " God help
her, she takin' great comfort out of the little bird. She'll need all the
comfort she can get, or my name's not Kate Maguire."
Meg, who had been taking comfort herself, felt almost angry
with what she feared must follow.
" You mustn't be superstitious, Kate," she said. " Why shouldn't
Lord Turloughmore be perfectly safe? It isn't likely he, an experi-
enced yachtsman, would put out in the teeth of the gale."
" If he had to he'd do it," said Kate obstinately. " Tisn't for the
Turloughmores to pick and choose when their time comes. If you
knew as much about the family as I know, you'd know that every
wan o' them died through the foolishest sort of an accident. It always
was so, an' it always will be so. Moreover, wasn't the yacht runnin'
into the storm ? The fishermen do be sayin' she would be off Mount's
Bay when the storm struck her; an' that's as cruel a coast as there
is in the Three Kingdoms. 'Tis foundered on the Manacles she'll be,
an' the news comin' fast to the poor mistress."
Something in Meg's heart cried out in acute protest against the
cruelty of this superstition. The calm acceptance of the inevitable
in Kate's manner oppressed her with a weight of fear and terror.
" I can't understand it," she said helplessly. " Here are all you
people believing in God and serving Him. Yet you believe that an
old curse can go on blighting the lives of innocent people, centuries
after the wrongdoing is over. I can't understand it. Are not the Tur-
loughmores good ? "
" None better," assented Kate, a little sullenly. " There isn't
a better family in Ireland to their own people an' the poor. But
isn't it in the Bible, 'The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the
children?' You can't get beyond that, Miss."
" That refers to a natural law, not to the will and the mercy
of God."
" My grandfather was a Presbyterian an' was great on the Bible,"
said Kate. " I suppose it's in my bones to believe it. Besides "
her glance at Margaret was furtive " they say the foxes was seen.
I didn't see them myself, but there were them that did."
" Because they were driven in by the hard weather and starva-
tion," said Meg hotly, but her voice shook, though she tried to speak
with conviction. " You know the frost was the hardest for fifty
years. The foxes were in search of food."
" You seen them, Miss ? "
1913-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 381
Meg was taken aback. For a second she hesitated.
" No, no," she said, " I was only explaining their appearance, if
they were seen."
Where she sat facing the glass, while Kate brushed her long hair,
handling it as though she loved it, she could see the stubborn disbelief
in the girl's face, and it made her angry because she was frightened.
" You call yourselves Christians," she said. " If I believed so
little in the power and goodness of God as to accept all those super-
stitions, I should call myself a devil worshipper."
" God forgive you, Miss," said Kate. " Doesn't the best blood in
Ireland aye an' the best-livin' people believe in it? It isn't exactly
the work of the divil ayther. Tis some power that lies between them
that's nayther God nor divil."
Kate finished plaiting the thick silkly hair. There was nothing
more she could do, so, after moving about the room for a little while,
doing perfectly unnecessary things while sending anxious and pro-
pitiatory glances towards Meg's back, she went away sighing, but
not at all shaken in her beliefs.
Next day passed without any news of the yacht. It would be
lying up somewhere becalmed, said Lady Turloughmore, and took
to starting at every sound in the house, and looking round with the
expectancy fading away to a dreadful disappointment every time the
door was opened.
Lord Erris was laid up with one of his recurring headaches, and
kept his room till evening. The stillness as the afternoon wore on
became oppressive. It seemed to brood upon the earth, lying down on
it like a weight. The air, breathing, not blowing, from the west, was
as warm as though it blew from a great fire. Not a leaf moved. The
corridors of Castle Eagle, which usually were full of the wind, had a
stillness in them disconcerting after the noises. The sky was colorless,
a dark gray, except where beyond the mountains it was suffused with
a stormy yellow.
Lord Erris looked tired and dispirited at dinner. It could hardly
be otherwise, seeing how his mother listened through all the conversa-
tion for the messenger that delayed. To see her turn over the letters
when they came in with a tense expectancy, changing as she did not
find the one she wanted to a dejection dreadfully apparent, was against
all cheerfulness.
Meg went through the oppressed meal not knowing what she ate
or drank, making despairing efforts to keep up the semblance of
conversation, and receiving so little help from the others that she
gradually relapsed into shy silence. She had a great deal of natural
shyness it was one of her peculiar charms, the sudden shyness that
looked and looked away again. Now while she tried to make conversa-
382 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Dec.,
tion, the futility of it was borne in upon her. Was she not torturing
them by her well-meant trivialities ? At the thought she was suddenly
shy, and colored as she relapsed into silence, looking down at her plate.
Lady Turloughmore had put too great a strain upon her own endur-
ance, for she suddenly stood up, and asking in a stifling voice to be
excused, she went away, leaving the others at table. Meg looked
up at the young man with an appealing glance, and her eyes were full
of tears.
" It is too dreadful," she said, half under her breath.
Lord Erris, with the closing of the door, had laid down his
knife and fork, and rested his forehead in his hand. His face in shadow
was very pale. He lifted his head to answer her.
" It is dreadful," he said, " but you must bear with us, till our
suspense is relieved. I assure you we can be really merry at times.
You should hear my mother's laughter. It is irresistible. It is very
sad when the time comes that she cannot laugh."
" To-morrow or next day she will laugh again," said Meg. " I do
so want to hear her. I know by her face how she could laugh."
Phelim, the old butler, came in and removed the cloth from the
long, polished table before setting out the fruit. It was an old-
fashioned custom still adhered to at Castle Eagle. The fire burned
brightly on the hearth. It was a charming interior. The stately
beautiful room, the shaded candles, the shining silver and glass, the
colors of the fruit and wine against the rich darkness of the wood;
the beautiful girl and the young man sitting facing each other, while
the silver-haired servant moved about quietly. If someone had made
a picture of it he would hardly, unless his feeling was for the macabre,
see a skeleton by the hearth. Yet there was one there. Grim tragedy
waited for them in the firelit room. The dogs lying on the rug before
the fireplace were aware of it, and sighed disconsolately. Meg toyed
with her fruit, feeling that she could not have swallowed a morsel.
Lord Erris lifted his glass of wine and put it away untasted.
" Will you sing for me ? " he asked, standing up and going towards
the door.
"If you wish," she replied, with a startled air. She had a mo-
mentary feeling as though she had been asked to sing while a dead man
lay in the house. She put away the grue from her determinedly. She
simply would not believe in the hereditary doom. As she preceded
Lord Erris into the drawing-room she was always glad to precede
him so that she should not seem aware of his dragging gait it came
to her that if one person in that house refused to believe the super-
stition it might be set at naught.
He stood by the hearth watching her while she sang. After
a while he came and turned the leaves of her music. She sang for
1913-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 383
him what he asked her, with a catching of her breath like a sob now
and again because of the trouble in the house. Her voice had a soft
sadness always. The great charm of her singing was in its expression.
She sang Gounod's " Ave Maria," feeling as though she pleaded for
help for the poor woman upstairs. Her voice was full of tears.
With the last bar she let her hands lie on the keys. She had
beautiful hands, tapering imaginative fingers, yet wide palms, benefi-
cent hands, not too white but warmly colored, showing dimples where
other hands show bones. Lord Erris had a thought that they would be
good hands to rest on a man's head in forgiveness and benediction,
to tend a child.
" I suppose I ought not to go to her," she said, looking back at
him, with what he called a divine pity in his thoughts.
" Better not. She has her own way of finding comfort on her
knees. It is a comfort I envy you women."
She left the piano and stood by the hearth. Her eyes fell shyly
before his and lifted again.
" There will be good news to-morrow," she said.
" Possibly. It will be only a postponement, at best, with our
history. Why did you come? It is an unhappy house."
Again her eyes fell and were lifted to his.
" I don't believe there is any doom," she said. " The terrible
thing to me is that you should go on believing it."
" History is against you," he said grimly. Then, with a change
of countenance : " We are not always discussing such unpleasant sub-
jects, I assure you, Miss Hildebrand. Usually we are too, shall I say,
civilized, to encourage the family skeleton to walk. You might have
been here for a long time, for months, and found us quite cheerful,
normal people. It is the misfortune of your coming at a moment
when the yacht is overdue, or may be overdue. My poor mother is
unnecessarily anxious. I dare say there will be news to-morrow."
The wind sprang up as though to answer, shook all the windows,
cried in the chimney, whistled in the keyhole, and dropped as though
it had never been.
" Another Atlantic cyclone approaching," he said quietly ; " it has
been a winter of storms."
She looked at him again, wondering if she could follow him, or
ought to follow him, in the lightness of his tone; but there was no
lightness in his sombre face.
" I will tell you a story," she said ; and the color rushed over her
face and neck as she said it. Her eyes were down, or she might
have been perturbed by the expression in his as they watched her.
" It is about an experience of mine ; and the application of it is so
presumptuous that I should not dare to apply it."
384 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Dec.,
" Yes ; go on," he said, turning away and dropping into a chair,
where he sat staring into the fire.
" It is only of one time when some people who were staying at a
house in Paris where I was visiting a schoolfellow, were practising
what they called White Magic. I was only a schoolgirl at the time.
They were poets, writers, artists, philosophers all manner of things
interesting Madame Desanges, Claire's mother, had a famous salon.
Someone had discovered I was likely to make a medium. They got
me to a seance rather against my will. Even then I thought it all
folly, and a bad folly, for it was playing with the preternatural if it
was not worse. I had the oddest feeling as I sat in the dark room
among those people, something like a wind in my hair, on my face, all
about me, that I must resist, lest something should take possession of
me, and I no longer have control of myself. I said in my heart: 'I
belong to the good God: if I cease to belong to Him for one instant
I do not know what may befall me. I will not.' Presently a young
poet at the table fell into a sort of convulsion. It was horrible to
hear his struggles in the dark. He spoke or something spoke in him :
'There is one here resisting us. Send her away.' I was very glad
to confess and be banished. I was never required again as a medium."
" I am glad you resisted," he said quietly, " and the application ? "
She looked at him imploringly. Would he not see it ? Suddenly
he looked up at her. Then leaning forward he took a fold of her skirt
and kissed it.
" You should never have come here," he said, " for your own sake.
I hope we will not drive you away with our evil spirits, for yours are
all good, good enough to banish ours, to exorcise them."
CHAPTER X.
THE RETURN.
The next day did not bring good news, nor the next, nor the next.
They had ascertained that Lord Turloughmore had sailed with his
yacht from Falmouth on the day before the big storm. There had
been successive storms after that; the stormiest February the old
people ever remembered. Days grew into weeks, and there was no news
of the yacht. At first it was hoped that she might have been only
blown out of her course, and that there would be news of her presently.
After a time hope changed to fear, fear to certainty. Paragraphs be-
gan to appear in the newspapers about the disappearance of the yacht.
The unfortunate fate which attached to the family was recalled. It
was accepted that the vessel had gone down with all hands.
1913-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 385
The deepest gloom lay upon Castle Eagle. Lady Turloughmore
took her grief in a heart-breaking way. She neither ate nor slept
unless under the influence of drugs. She turned away from all con-
solation.
" My husband has gone the way of his fathers," she said. " My
son will follow him. He is right when he says that no woman through
him shall suffer as his mother has suffered. Better let the Rosses
of Turloughmore disappear, and some happier people take their place."
It was a dark morning of early March when Meg awoke in the
very darkness of morning to a noise somewhere close at hand. Some-
thing had fallen with a tremendous crash. The noise went on after
she had awakened, or she would have thought it a nightmare. It
sounded as though something enormously heavy were being dragged
over a stone floor. She sat up in bed, only half-awake, listening, and
suddenly the sound ceased.
She dozed off again. In the morning she remembered the noise.
She remembered that some trees near the house, which had been in
a dangerous state since the storm, were to be felled that day. Perhaps
they had begun the work in the dark of the morning. Anyhow when
she went to look later in the day the trees were gone, so she thought
no more about the matter.
That day Kate whispered to her that a dead sailor had come into
the bay, flung upon the sands. The poor body, headless, had been
buried hastily. Only a few rags of clothing remained on it. Impos-
sible to say if he belonged to the yacht, although Kate shook her head
gloomily, and said that they were beginning to come home. Some of
the men on the yacht had belonged to the fishing village. It was no
use telling her ladyship the horror. God help her, she had enough to
bear.
The first day that Lady Turloughmore got up and dressed herself
in black was terrible for all of them. They were six weeks now with-
out news of the yacht; and following the dead sailor some wreckage
had come in. It might or might not be from the yacht ; but the morn-
ing after it had come in Lady Turloughmore dressed herself in black.
Wearing her black dress she made her appearance in the room where
Julia sat darning the house linen ; and the old woman screamed.
" Go an' take it off o' you," she said. " He's not dead I tell you
he's not dead. Wouldn't I feel it in my breast if he was dead, the
child I nursed? The hooker's only held back by the storm, an' he'll
be comin' home from school an' right glad to be home. Why would
ye be sendin' him to them English schools, the one son ye have?
Couldn't ye have his schoolin' done in the house? "
Lady Turloughmore stared at her as though she was frightened,
and then burst into tears, the first tears she had shed. Meg following
VOL. xcvm. 25
386 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Dec.,
her hastily into what had been the nurseries, was just in time to lead
her away, holding her hands, while the old woman muttered that the
hooker might come any hour ; and her darling child would be wanting
his warm clothes, for the hooker was very apt to be swept by seas in
the stormy weather.
" Her mind has gone back to the time my husband was a boy,"
said Lady Turloughmore, trembling and sobbing. " She confuses me
with the Dowager, as she often does."
That day Meg heard another piece of news. The fox which had
so long eluded the hounds the old vixen with the white star on her
breast had had her last run.
Miss Roche, coming backwards and forwards to the house of
mourning, brought something sane and cheerful with her. It was she
who lifted Lady Turloughmore out of her apathy.
" You're killing yourself, Shelagh," she said, " and as for that
poor boy of yours, he suffers more every day. You must brace your-
self up, my woman, and as a first step to it I'm going to take you away."
Lady Turloughmore protested, but -protested in vain. Miss Roche
showed the stuff she was made of. Castle Eagle was in a bustle of
preparation for departure. They were going to Switzerland. There
had been a question of the Riviera, but Miss Roche had brushed the
suggestion aside. Not the sea. They had all had enough of the sea.
" 'Tis too lonesome we are," she said, " and it upsets our nerves,
so that we see visions and dream dreams. If I were you, Ulick, I'd
leave Castle Eagle to the rats and mice for a bit, and take a house
near Dublin. Maybe we'd be all more sensible if we saw more of our
fellow-creatures."
A spasm crossed Lord Erris' face at the suggestion. He was Lord
Erris still. Many and many a day would pass before he would ask
leave to presume his father's death and take the title.
" I am very well content at Castle Eagle," he answered.
" You creature ! " Miss Roche said, with a curious tenderness.
" Sure I'm taking you out of it for your good."
The Dowager Lady Turloughmore was coming to take charge at
Castle Eagle. Meg was to have a holiday after seeing her installed.
The Dowager did not arrive for a few days after the others had de-
parted, having waited to see them in Dublin: so Meg had two days
alone except for the dogs.
The household had embarked on a tremendous spring-cleaning
between the departure of the travelers and the arrival of the Dowager.
Windows were open everywhere ; there was a bright clear light, a fresh
April air that might well blow away all the shadows from Castle
Eagle. It came to the last day. Everything was in order, clean and
sweet. There were wallflowers and narcissi in all the rooms; clean
1913.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 387
curtains up at the windows ; everything had been scrubbed and polished
and furbished, and the whole house smelt of cleanliness.
The Dowager arrived about five o'clock, with her maid. After
she had had a cup of tea and rested, she was going round the gardens,
leaning on Meg's arm, her other hand helping her progress by means
of an ebony cane. She had taken a great fancy to Meg, having heard
good reports of her from Lady Turloughmore.
" I can never thank you enough, my dear," she said, looking at
Meg out of her kind, faded old eyes. " Poor Shelagh has had so much
to bear. If she had had her little daughter now, what a comfort it
would have been ! She said that nothing could exceed your sweetness
with her. How few girls could be what you have been ! "
After the progress round the garden she was tired, and sat down
on a seat in the sun, while the flowers smelt in the heat, and a myriad
bees buzzed in and out the flower buds.
" Poor Ulick," she said, " I wish he would marry. He dreads
afflicting any woman with his ill-health and his family sorrows. I
wish we could persuade him to see a specialist about his poor foot.
One is shorter than the other, you know. They tortured him in child-
hood with their stupid methods burnt him at one time, froze him at
another, till he got rheumatism into his very bones. He was so patient
always. Shelagh said it broke her heart to see his patience."
She looked up with a sudden briskness.
" I got a curious idea, my dear," she said, " that Ulick's patience
was breaking up when I saw him in Dublin. I don't know what has
been happening to him. There was a change. I wonder his mother
did not see it. I think if he was stronger, freer from pain, he would
be better able to fight shadows, to fight shadows."
Meg looked at her eagerly, coloring after her fashion. So she
had not been wrong in thinking that the face, despite its weariness
of age, had an unusual spirit and courage. She felt as though she
had obtained an unexpected ally.
" Yes, that is it," she said. " There are too many shadows in
this house."
" You are not afraid of them? " the old lady asked, looking at her
with an odd intentness, then looking away.
" I am not afraid."
" My dear," the Dowager went on in quite a different voice. " I
want you to tell me about your father. I knew him when he was a
little boy, a very charming little boy, with eyes at once brave and
dreamy. I know from my friend Mary O'Neill that he was happy in
his married life till your mother died. I hope he is happy now. Tell
me something about your home life and yourself. You were in
Austria, were you not ? "
388 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Dec.,
They sat and talked, till her ladyship's maid came with a reminder
that it was time to be within doors, for one who was yet an invalid.
The Dowager, who seemed very submissive to her maid's will, agreed
to going to bed early after a light meal. So Meg had her evening alone.
She was happier than she had been since she came. Doubtless
the beautiful weather and the glory and fragrance round about her
helped to uplift her spirits. She had a curious sense, for nothing had
happened to make her feel it, of being embarked on a great enterprise.
A strange moment for such high courage, with the horror and calamity
of the Earl's disappearance still lying upon the house. She looked out
over the sea, rippled with the southwest wind, broken into a million
glittering lights and facets. Was the Earl's body tossing out there
unburied ?
While she thought it, standing in the courtyard, the beds of which
were filled with forget-me-nots and wallflowers, with clove carnations
and pansies, something touched her foot. It was the dove which had
flown in the night of the storm, and was as much at home in the house
as any of the inmates. It was a handsome male pigeon with a green
head and breast, of a quite uncommon insolence and courage for one
of its kind. It had taken possession of the fenders during the cold
weather, and was quite prepared to tackle dogs or anything else that
disputed its right to be there. Now it had hopped out into the sun,
and, bent on attracting her attention, was pecking at her foot.
She had said she was not superstitious, but the bird flying in
out of the storm had uplifted her. So did Julia's steady denial, even
when she had her lucid intervals, of Lord Turloughmore's death. A
lot was there to lean on, she told herself with stern rebuke a lost
pigeon and a mad old woman. There could be no doubt that Lord
Turloughmore and all his men had been lost in the yacht. They must
have been lost, else what had become of them? The next morning
her irrational hope was dashed to earth. A stove-in boat was drifted
up on the beach, battered to pieces almost by the wind and weather,
bearing on its stern the name Clytie, by which Lord Turloughmore had
called his yacht.
" Little by little," said the fishermen, " the wreck of the yacht is
coming home."
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
IRew Books*
THE LIFE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON. By Everard Meynell.
London : Burns & Gates. 1 5 s. net.
Genius, like saintship, is incomprehensible to " the average
man " it runs athwart all accepted conventions on social life, on
success, and even on conduct. Rarely has this truth come home
to one more forcibly than in laying down the long-expected Life
of Francis Thompson. Superficially judged, the career of our
great Catholic poet was absolutely disconcerting. He was amaz-
ingly irresponsible and inefficient in everyday life; quite unfit for
any regular occupation, constitutionally incapable of doing anything
up to time; of keeping any appointment; of fulfilling any set task.
He never sent his " copy " in time. He simply failed to do all the
ordinary things he ought to have done. For two tragic years he
lived literally on the London streets, sleeping under railway arches
and in common lodging-houses, earning odd halfpence selling news-
papers and calling cabs. Worst of all, he was, for most of his life,
addicted to opium. And yet, he was both poet and mystic, the
author of odes as magnificent as any in the English language, of
" poems which St. John of the Cross might have addressed to St.
Teresa;" of verses on childhood of a haunting loveliness. And
his life in true essentials remained one of childlike innocence, and
of a deep, unwavering faith in Catholic truth.
There is little fundamentally new in Mr. Meynell's biography,
though several disputed points in the poet's career are for the first
time authoritatively cleared up. Thus we learn, through a letter
from the President of Ushaw to his parents, that Francis' failure
to continue his studies for the priesthood was due to his " strong
nervous timidity," and his " natural indolence." There is a vivid
account of the first glimpse that, after long search, Mr. Wilfrid
Meynell had of the unknown contributor to Merry England whom
he was to befriend so generously : " more ragged and unkempt than
the average beggar, with no shirt beneath his coat and bare feet in
broken shoes." Yet, that the degradation was only external, that
the poet's soul passed unscathed through a trial so searching, we
know from his own oft-quoted lines, " In no strange land," from
the exquisite tenderness with which in Sister Songs, a poem for
girlhood, he describes the charity offered him one " tardy dawn "
390 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
in the streets, and finally, in more prosaic fashion, in Mrs. Meynell's
testimony written in the Dublin Rez'iew in order to silence calumny,
" during many years of friendship, and almost daily companion-
ship, it was evident to solicitous eyes that he was one of the most
innocent of men." In point of fact, in the doctors' opinion, the
opium which was Thompson's worst enemy served to counteract
and retard the ravages of the consumption that killed him in the
end. His whole life was a pathetic struggle against acute ill-health.
Unlike Coleridge, his Muse was never served by opiates; all his
work was done, at immeasureable cost to himself, in his months
of abstinence. There is a characteristic sentence in a letter from
Pantasaph, perhaps the happiest of his temporary homes, where he
writes :
" I made myself ill with over-study, and have been obliged to
give my head three weeks' entire rest. But I am much better again
now. Inwardly I suffer like old Nick; but the blessed mountain
air keeps up my body, and for the rest my Lady Pain and I are
au mieux."
Of his marvelous poetic gift, which to his deep sorrow left
him for the last ten years of his life, he refers with the modesty of
true genius:
" I, too, have been 'all in a tremble' because I had written noth-
ing of late. I am constantly expecting to wake up some morning
and find that my Daemon has abandoned me. I hardly think I
could be very vain of my literary gift; for I so keenly feel that it is
beyond my power to command, and may at any moment be taken
from me."
It were idle to pretend that this official " life " is wholly sat-
isfactory; it lacks form and construction, and the language is fre-
quently involved and somewhat pretentious. It is kindly and gos-
sipy, but one is tempted to believe that the deeper aspects of the
poet's nature wholly escaped the understanding of his young friend.
Taken together, however, the two lives that we now possess of the
poet, that in French by Mr. K. Rooker, and that under review, tell
us all that the most ardent Thompson-lover needs to know. Mr.
Rooker gives us a careful, methodical and appreciative study of
the poet as poet. Mr. Everard Meynell adds a host of vivid touches
that only an intimate friend can supply. Our gratitude is due to
him in that he has preserved for us the light, familiar aspects of the
poet's nature his laughter, his kindliness of heart, his devotion
to childhood all the things that rendered him, despite his failings,
1913-] NEW BOOKS 391
so lovable to his friends, aspects which might so easily have been
lost altogether in the case of one whose personality, all through life,
was
Girt with a thirsty solitude of soul.
The volume is admirably produced, in the same style as the
three volumes of the collected edition of the works.
MERRILIE DAWES. By Frank H. Spearman. Illustrated by
Arthur E. Becher. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
$1.35 net.
Mr. Spearman writes a bright clever novel of true love. John
Adrane, the hero, is engaged to a vapid girl who loves him for
his money alone. Merrilie, a multi-millionaire, proves her great
love for John by secretly supporting him with her millions during
a great financial crisis in Wall Street. To all appearances both
are ruined, he by the dishonesty of his business associates, and she
by her frantic effort to save him even at the cost of selling her
old New York home. Of course on hearing of his supposed
failure, the girl who loved him for his money alone breaks the
engagement, " so as not to be a burden upon him," while the heroine,
loving him for himself, gives him promptly her heart and her hand.
Wonderful to relate the reports of both failures prove untrue,
and the course of true love again runs smoothly with hundreds of
millions to help it in the running. The panic in the street is very
well described, although the theme is a bit threadbare. Altogether
it is a clean story that holds one's interest throughout.
MARSH LIGHTS. By Helen Huntington. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons. $1.35 net.
This is a crude, tiresome story of an inane, heartless, and
immoral New York society girl, who marries a stupid, sentimental,
and incompetent business man, who finally deserts her, not so much
for her unfaithfulness as to be free to run away with a hare-
brained, gushing widow with a past. The author regales us with
a lot of high-sounding but immoral phrases ; of marriage being the
means of personal development; of divorce being the greatest rem-
edy for marital evils; of the individual being above all law of
Church and state, and the like.
From beginning to end there is hardly one character in the
story which an intelligent, much less a religious, man would invite
392 NEIV BOOKS [Dec.,
into his home. The wonderful dreams of Naomi we found com-
monplace in the extreme, and the author's intellectual culture goes
no further than the mere mention of the Hibbert Journal and the
philosophy of Rudolph Eucken.
THE HONOR OF THE HOUSE. By Mrs. Hugh Fraser and J. I
Stahlman. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. $1.30 net.
Mrs. Fraser and her co-worker have written a rather thrilling
Italian story of villainy and true love, somewhat in the style of
her brother's famous novels. The sinister and cruel Prince, Bor-
delacqua, murders, like a Roman father of pagandom, his unfaith-
ful wife. To save himself from the consequences of this crime,
he lays the burden of the crime upon his son, Gracinto, a boy of
fourteen, and, unquestioned by the credulous Pope of the period,
imprisons him for years as insane, to save, forsooth, " the honor
of the house."
The seventeen-year old wife of Gracinto they were married
when she was ten discovers her husband's place of imprisonment,
and with the aid of her own faithful nurse, and her husband's faith-
ful retainer, manages to set Gracinto free. The interest of the story
centres in their escape, both from the clutches of the rascally father,
and of the profligate Charles IV. of Mantua.
The novel is dramatic, and the setting brilliantly descriptive,
although the wonderful exploits of the heroine are rather improb-
able and far fetched.
THE HONOURABLE MR. TAWNISH. By Jeffery Farnol. With
illustrations by Chester E. Brock. Boston: Little, Brown &
Co. $1.00 net.
Sir John Chester, a choleric old English country gentleman, is
most indignant at the idea of his daughter's marriage to the Honour-
able Mr. Tawnish, whom he despises heartily as an effeminate dandy
and a sentimental poet. As he puts it, " I wish my daughter to
marry a man, and not a clothes-horse or a dancing master."
Sir John and his two friends, Sir Richard Eden and Mr.
Bentley, determine to test our hero's bravery by asking him to per-
form three most difficult tasks. First, he must accomplish some
feat which all three agree to be beyond them ; second, he must make
a public laughing stock of the much-disliked and deadly duelist,
Sir Harry Raikes, and, third, he must place all three of them to-
gether and, at the same time, at a disadvantage. Mr. Tawnish
1913-] NEW BOOKS 393
proves equal to every test imposed, and as a brave -man and ex-
cellent gentleman, wins Sir John's beloved daughter Penelope.
The story is written in a most rapid, fascinating style, and is
full of the most quaint humor and most tender sentiment. Mr.
Brock's excellent illustrations in pastel are perfect in every detail.
LITTLE PILATE, AND OTHER SPANISH STORIES. By Rev.
Luis Coloma, S.J. Translated by E. M. Brooks. New York :
P. J. Kenedy & Sons. 80 cents.
In these six interesting tales, the well-known writer, Father
Coloma, gives us an insight into the vices of the Spanish youth of
to-day. The first story, Little Pilate, is perhaps the best, although
we were rather astonished at the sudden fall of the pious graduate
of a Jesuit College, who, in the space of one short day, runs the
whole gamut of pride, anger, human respect* and gross immorality.
Again we open our eyes with wonder as we read of the Baroness
Ines, who has Midnight Mass in her private oratory as part of a
Christmas entertainment. The most thrilling story of the volume
is Cain, which shows the havoc wrought in Spain by the teaching
of unbelieving Socialism.
The book is a bit crude at times in its plain speaking, and
though its tone is devout and Catholic, it will not be welcomed
over enthusiastically by our American boys. We doubt the wis-
dom of translating it.
QUOTATIONS IN POETRY AND PROSE. By Mrs. Elizabeth
Murrin. Baltimore: John Murphy Co. $1.00 net.
Mrs. Elizabeth Murrin had a plentiful source to draw from
when she began to collect quotations from Irish and Irish-Amer-
ican authors. Who can begin to measure the richness and extent
of that stream of oratory that has gone forth from Erin's sons?
But the author limits herself to twelve hundred selections on many
topics. They are well selected, cover a very wide range, and will,
we hope, lead those who read them to a fuller knowledge of many
of the authors quoted.
REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION FOR
THE YEAR ENDED JUNE 30, 1912. Washington: Gov-
ernment Printing Office.
We read with considerable interest the last report of the United
State Commissioner of Education, P. P. Claxton. In his Intro-
394 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
duction, he gives statistics of the increase of pupils and teachers,
of professional, normal, and summer schools, and of the decrease
in the number of illiterates in the various States. He calls special
attention to the general criticism, both intelligent and superficial,
of the public schools voiced during the year at public meetings and
in the public press The first chapter, Survey of Education During
1911-12, by W. Carson Ryan, treats in detail of the current criti-
cisms of the public schools in regard to purpose, organization, ad-
ministration, curriculum, teaching methods, and results. With re-
gard to purpose, some maintain that the public school of to-day does
not equip the pupils directly for the kind of life, economic and
social, that they will lead when they will leave school.
The four criticisms of organization are : that the period of
elementary education is too long; that the school year is too short;
that there is not the proper correlation between the elementary and
the high school ; that the classes are too large. The curriculum is
criticized because it is considerably behind in its provision for voca-
tional subjects, while others declare either that the subjects are not
adapted in content to current demands, or that the multiplicity of
subjects tends to the neglect of the three R's.
It is admitted that the teaching standard is unquestionably
lower in many parts of the United States than in certain other
countries, and that the supply of teachers for our schools is
most inadequate. Indeed in many parts of the United States the
average education of the teachers is not above seventh grade!
There is a pronounced tendency to move away from the strict ad-
herence to written examinations as the final test of school work,
and home work, especially for young children, is rightly censured
on the ground of health. Special attention has been called to
the low attendance record, and the premature dropping out of many
pupils from school. Business men have complained of the product
of the elementary school as it came to them, and college teachers
have called attention to the inaccurate work of the high school
students.
Some have charged the public high school with being undem-
ocratic, inculcating a distaste for labor by which is usually meant
physical labor. W. H. Smith tells of the high-school teacher who,
when asked whether her girl students " would be willing to marry
men who got their hands dirty from work," replied indignantly:
" Well, I should hope not ; I hope we've taught them better than
that."
I9I3-] NEW BOOKS 395
The movement for vocational training in the public schools
is not making much headway. Some seem to think that it involves
a sort of social cleavage that is alien to the fundamental purpose
of American education and American life, while others think that
the vocational appeal is to selfish instincts. The Montessori Method
is being examined sympathetically all over the country with a view
of enriching our own educational practice, even in the face of many
more or less unfavorable reports brought by later investigators of
the Italian schools that employ it.
There are many other interesting monographs in the present
volume, viz., Educational Legislation in 1912 by J. C. Boykin;
Higher Education by K. C. Babcock; City School Systems by W.
Hood; Rural Education by A. C. Monahan; Roman Catholic
Schools by H. F. Wright; Recent Movements in Negro Education
by T. J. Jones; a Review of Agricultural Education by F. B. Jenks ;
Typical Health-teaching Agencies in the United States by F. B.
Dresslar; Recent Aspects of Library Development by J. D. Wolcott,
and a number of short notices of Foreign Educational Systems by
A. T. Smith.
Why Mr. Groszmann of the Plainfield school should have been
chosen to write even five pages on " The Progress of the Movement
for the Benefit of the Exceptional Child," when we have scores of
men and women in the United States who are eminently his super-
iors in this special branch, we are utterly at a loss to discover.
When he argued in favor of custodial institutions, we expected in
the next line to read an advertisement of the Plainfield school in
which he is himself interested. When again he set aside, with a
wave of his hand, the rights of parents in order to make the state
paramount, he seemed to forget that we have in this country a
different idea of liberty.
We would call attention to a few misstatements, which are
rather unworthy a report undertaken under such auspices as the
United States Government. For instance, it is stated without the
slightest evidence, " that denominational prejudices seriously affect
the progress of education in Belgium." This is simply not true.
The compiler of the incomplete and superficial report of Foreign
Education seems also to have no grasp of the justice of the claim to
state support which other countries than our own recognize on
principle. With regard to Spain, it is stated that sixty-three per
cent of the population were illiterate, according to the census of
1900. Is it not rather unfair to omit the important fact that
396 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
whereas we start our classification of illiterates after ten years
of age, the Spanish census includes all under the age of ten?
As there are 4,274,109 children in Spain under ten, we must in all
fairness deduct that number from the sum total of illiterates, if we
wish to compare Spain with the United States. On this basis Spain
had 6,435,991 illiterates in 1900. Our census in 1900 reported
5,500,000 illiterates, and if we add to that number 14,000,000
children under ten years of age, we have a total of 19,500,000
illiterates ! Why did not our compiler mention the fact that Spain
is lessening every year her percentage of illiterates, just as Mr.
Claxton says in his report that we are doing? Why, again, was
not the census of 1910 taken into account? It added nearly three
millions to the census list of 1900.
The second volume contains the statistics of the common-school
systems for the year ending June, 1911, and of other educational
institutions for the year ending June, 1912. The total school and
college enrollment for 1911 aggregated 20,879,908, 835,882 of
which include miscellaneous schools and institutions, which gave
only estimates.
THE MAID OF SPINGES. A Tale of Napoleon's Invasion of the
Tyrol in 1 797. By Mrs. Edward Wayne. New York : Ben-
ziger Brothers. 35 cents.
The heroine of this tale, Katharina Lang, is no fictitious char-
acter. She fought heroically at the battle of Spinges against the
French invaders of 1797, and the grateful Tyrolese have erected
a memorial tablet to her in the churchyard of St. Vigil. We do
not know whether the story of her forgiveness of her brother's
murderer be fact or fiction, but at any rate it is true to the perfect
Catholic tradition of the devout people of the Tyrol. The boy Hans
is very well drawn, and his adventures are most thrilling. The
author lacks the dramatic instinct, and her English might be
greatly improved. But the children to whom her book will appeal
will not be critical.
THE STUDENT'S HANDBOOK TO THE STUDY OF THE NEW
TESTAMENT. Translated from the thirteenth French Edi-
tion of Augustus Brassac, S.S., by Jos. L. Weidenhan. The
Gospels Jesus Christ. St. Louis : B. Herder. $3.25 net.
We know of no other book in English which covers the same
ground as this excellent work of Father Brassac's on the Gospels.
1913.] NEW BOOKS 397
It is eminently fitted as a textbook in our seminaries, for it is
thorough, scholarly, and well adapted to the needs of beginners.
A General Introduction treats of textual criticism, and the various
systems of Biblical rationalism. The Gospels are first discussed
as a whole, and then considered in detail, special attention being
paid to the Synoptic problem, and to the characteristics of the Gos-
pel of St. John. Part II. contains an excellent summary of the life
of Christ, with special chapters dealing with His miracles and
prophecies, the parables, and the discourses. A final section is de-
voted to a synthesis of the principal teachings of Jesus.
Some may think that the answers to the innumerable objec-
tions of rationalistic critics are rather inadequate; but that is the
common fault of every textbook. It always calls for the teacher
to develop its subject-matter more fully, and point out the lines of
further study. The translator professes to have revised the bibli-
ography for English readers, but we do not find it complete enough.
Besides all sorts of authorities are quoted in the footnotes, Catholic,
Protestant, and Rationalistic, without a word being said regarding
their comparative worth. What is the value of Father Lepin as
compared with Monsignor Batiffol? What is the different view-
point of Reville, Harnack, Loisy or Julicher?
We noticed a great many misprints, viz., on pp. 35, 82, 125,
131, 149, 182, 230, 233, 243, 245, 249, 251, 331, 333, 460, 474,
478, 492, and 577. There are besides a few grammatical mis-
takes (pp. 54, 82, 239, 240, 245, 254, 472), although on the whole
the translation is very well done. We trust that the publishers will
correct these mistakes in a future edition, as the volume is too
valuable a contribution to our Scriptural textbooks to be marred
by so many errors.
UNEXPECTED AFFINITIES. A Serio-Comedy. By Susan
Taber. New York: Duffield & Co. $1.25 net.
We managed to read this novel through to the end, although
there was not a character in it that we would desire to number
among our acquaintances. Edward Norton is mean enough to
make money by means of his cousin's attraction for his wife;
Rosalie is utterly devoid of character or principle, having been
taught by her father that " we had a perfect right to everything
we could get. All that old-fashioned talk about self-sacrifice was
only calculated to make half the people as selfish as the other half
were miserable." Peter St. Clair does not know whether to choose
398 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
his art or the girl he loves; Rosalie's father is full of theories
for the betterment of the race, although selfish and lazy to the in-
nermost core; Joe Conway, the hater of the rich and a murderer
in intent, is all too quickly converted from the error of his ways.
The hero and heroine should never have married, for their marriage
must needs prove as great a failure as Rosalie's had been. The
story is well written, and teaches at least one lesson, viz., that mere
impulse is no guide to righteous living, and that religion alone can
furnish the principles that make for true happiness.
CRIME AND ITS REPRESSION. By Gustav Aschaffenburg.
Translated by Adelbert Albrecht. Boston : Little, Brown &
Co. $4.00 net.
The American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology has
been for some time translating the works of European criminolo-
gists to familiarize American lawyers, judges, and sociologists
with the progress of modern criminal science abroad. As the science
has various aspects and emphasis the anthropological, psycholog-
ical, legal, statistical, economic, pathological, and sociological they
have tried their utmost to select representative authors in these
various fields. This is the ninth volume of the series. Dr. As-
chaffenburg's book, Das Verbrechen und seine Bekampfung, has
been chosen as one of the most notable contributions to the psy-
chological side of crime.
The first two parts of this book are devoted to a statistical
study of the causes of crime, based in the main upon data gathered
in Germany. The conclusions reached by the author with regard to
season, race, religion, national customs, and occupation as causes of
crime, are much the same as those of other experts in France and
Italy. He regards alcholism as one of the most important causes
of crime. He declares it impossible to exterminate the social evil,
and, therefore, urges governments to regulate it, and keep it under
strict surveillance; at the same time he advocates severe repressive
measures against procuration. We are glad to notice that in
discussing the individual causes of crime, he takes a very unfavor-
able attitude towards the theory of Lombroso, that certain inborn
abnormal physical characteristics are frequent causes of crime.
In Part III. " The Struggle Against Crime " he discusses
several measures, such as the indeterminate sentence, and probation,
which are very well-known in this country. His brief statement
of the fundamental principles upon which these penal measures
1913-] NEW BOOKS 399
are based is excellent. Like most of his confreres, his treatment
of responsibility is most unphilosophic and unchristian. He sees in
crime only the injury to society, and in punishment only the neces-
sary social reaction against it. He thus departs from the moral,
and in its place sets up what he calls the social responsibility. His
endeavor to maintain the sense of responsibility, and at the same
time to give up free will, is unsuccessful. This chapter is per-
haps the weakest in the whole volume. We were also astonished
to find him declare that St. Augustine denied the doctrine of free
will ! He is also inaccurate in his discussion of the purpose of pun-
ishment, for he utterly eliminates the idea of retribution, and looks
merely to the deterrent effect of punishment.
The most important lesson to be learned from this book is
that " even if you have the best law, the best judge, the best sen-
tence, and the prison official is not efficient, you might as well throw
the statute into the waste basket and burn the sentence." Germany
is superior to us, in as much as its minor public officials receive a
particular education and training for their duties. With us most
public officers often hold their places by the grace of some boss,
and get their jobs as a return for political services rendered. As
Mr. Train says in his preface : " Some of our court clerks were
originally barkeepers, and many of our prison officers have had
little better preparation for their task. Those employed in the
minor functions of the administration of criminal justice, and par-
ticularly in and about prisons and penitentiaries, are apt to be per-
sons who are unable to secure other and more attractive work."
The criminal statistics in the present volume are most helpful,
because in the United States there are no penal statistics of any
real value. While the scope of the book is necessarily limited to
German institutions, many of its lessons are equally applicable
to our own.
THROUGH GOOD HUMOR TO HAPPINESS. By Grace de
Saint-Maurice. Paris : Bibliotheque Nouvelle. 2 frs. 50.
We have nothing but words of praise for a little book in Eng-
lish, but published by the Bibliotheque Nouvelle of Paris, and sent
us by the author, Grace de Saint-Maurice. It is full of good com-
mon sense, and is a wise appeal to all of us to cultivate the valuable
asset of good humor.
And the little book itself contributes in no small way to make
the reader good-humored, but in a way not intended by the author.
400 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
Her wisdom has as its vehicle the English of a French woman,
who is French still. Punctuation, save for periods, is for the most
part neglected, and the proof reader did not know his English
spelling well.
We can all take a lesson from the following admonitions :
Pessimistes and neurasthenics have nothing to gain by feeding
their bile on their black ideas.
People who rush about agitating themselves and everyone
about them who talk loud and fast, who laugh scream and
roar climb up'lampposts, paint the town red under the pretext
of having fun; those who make puns endeavoring to create
the impression of having a good time, are only encumbering,
they do not possess the real qualities of sociability.
Nothing works more havocs among those obliged to associa-
tion than uncontrolled agitation. The man or woman who cannot
sit still, who cannot talk much less listen without making all
kinds of disturbing movements pulling at his or her hands and
ringers, crossing and uncrossing the feet, rocking to and fro is a
subject of caution one who should consult a doctor or set about
seriously te learn self controle. Wildly emotional people are a
nuisance and usually poorly equilbrated.
So the second precept of the religion of good humor is that
it is inadmissable that after having dominated electricity and
space man should not know how to dominate himself.
Even crossing the streets in large centers has grown to be
an art. The modern street is like modern life a difficult thing
to traverse but all the advantages are on the side of the man
who quietly surveys the situation chooses his time tranquilly
passes in and out among the moving vehicles calmly picking
his way through the seemingly hopelessly encumbered thorough-
fare and reaches the other side safe and sound and none the
worse for the crossing.
But the nervous man who darts here and there in headlong
confusion who wants to get over in his own way and at every
one elses expense force himself across impossible barriers
instead of circumventing them, who scolds the chauffeurs and
menaces the drivers who bar the way is nearly knocked down
and only reaches the opposite side by sheer luck mudspattered
and exhausted is an exact picture of the morally nervous per-
son who scolds and rushes along pell mell. If he or she es-
capes being utterly crushed and trodden down by the trend
of life he or she are at least bespattered and exhausted often
a physical as well as a moral wreck.
I9I3-] NEW BOOKS 401
Therefore the third precept in the doctrine of good humor
is that it is surely making a bad start to set forth in a fury
and means an equally bad finish.
And we will end with a wise warning:
Times have gone forward however and social conditions
despite the croakers so improved that the large majority of the
world has enough food and clothes for comfort and is flighting
for the supperfluity. It is not his bread nor his suit of clothes
that the socialist is calling for to-day. Both he possesses, it
is the frock coat, the dress suit, the game on the rich man's
table he craves. And here is the origin of the increase in the
price of living, the difficulties of living. Everyone is ambitious
to live as well as wealthiest in the land. All want to live on
the big avenue and after big avenue style on the small street
income. If wants were restrained much of the difficulty in
living would be overcome.
There is nothing Utopian nor ridiculous in the plea for a
simple existence, in the restraint of our wants.
It is certainly better to possess little to want little but
to thoroughly enjoy that little, than to have so much and to want
so much that it is impossible to enjoy anything for we miss
all possible chance of enjoyment we have or could have in the
mad chase after things, beyond our reach coveted by unreas-
onable desire.
So the fifth precept of the religion of happiness is under
all circumstances to practise self restraint and in particular
to restrain our wants.
T^WO pamphlets on Minimum Wage Legislation, written by
Rev. John A. Ryan, D.D., of St. Paul, have been issued
by the Central Bureau of the Central Verein. They are entitled
Minimum Wage Legislation and A Minimum Wage by Legislation.
The former sells at one cent per copy, the latter at five cents.
A reduction is given when ordered in quantities. The pamphlets
may be obtained from the Central Verein, 307 Temple Building,
St. Louis, Mo.
i
"PROM the Australian Catholic Truth Society we have lately re-
* ceived: The Vision of Peace, by Rev. M. Forest, M.S.H. ;
Sister Etheldrcda's Experiment, by M. Elizabeth Walton; Ghosts
in General, by Rev. P. C. Yorke, D.D. ; How the Angel Became
Happy, by Canon Sheehan, D.D. ; The Church and the Foundling,
VOL. XCVIII. 26
402 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
by Rev. J. J. Malone; The Melancholy Heart, by F. W. Faber,
D.D. ; Spiritualism and Christianity, by Rev. P. J. Manly; The
Church: A Mother to Love and to be Proud Of, by Rev. Dr. Keane,
O.P. ; Purification after Death, by Rev. M. J. Watson, SJ. ; The
Vocation of the Celt, by Rev. Robert Kane, S. J. ; Culture and Be-
lief, by Very Rev. M. J. O'Reilly, CM. ; Adventures in Papua,
by Beatrice Grimshaw. Price, one penny each.
'THE CATHOLIC WORLD recommended to its readers at the
time of its first publication, Kathleen Norris' work, Mother.
We are pleased to see that the publishers, The Macmillan Co., New
York, have included this worthy volume in their Fiction Library,
and now sell it for 50 cents. This brings it within the reach of all.
C WEATED LABOR AND THE TRADE BOARDS ACT, pub-
^ lished by the Catholic Social Guild of England, and edited by
Rev. Thomas Wright, will interest only students of the labor
laws of England; but another of the Guild's publications, First
Notions on Social Service, edited by Mrs. Philip Gibbs, has much
in it which will be of help to all interested in social questions.
London : P. S. King & Co. 6 d. net.
'THE following miscellaneous publications in pamphlet are : Irish
-*- History, by Syracuse Printing and Publishing Co., Syracuse,
New York (15 cents) ; from The Brothers of Holy Cross, Notre
Dame, Indiana, Vocations to the Teaching Orders, by Rt. Rev. Jo-
seph Schrembs, D.D. ; from The Catholic Book and Church Supply
Co., Portland, Oregon, The Faith and Duties of a Catholic, by Rev.
W. A. Daly (5 cents) ; from The Rosary Press, Somerset, Ohio,
The Seven Last Words upon the Cross, by Joseph Post Hall ; from
St. Anthony College, Santa Barbara, California, My Lady Poverty,
a drama in five acts, by Francis de Sales Gliebe, O.F.M. (35 cents).
TT W. GRAY CO., New York, publishes Twenty-Two Hymns,
* set to music, by Franklin Hopkins. Price, 50 cents.
T^ROM James Duffy & Co., Ltd., Dublin : Grievances in Ireland,
by one of the Tolerant Majority. Price, one penny.
FROM M. H. Gill & Son, Ltd., Dublin : Alleluia's Sequence from
" Harmonics'' by Rev. T. J. O'Mahony, D.D. Price, 6 d.
ROM R. & T. Washbourne, Ltd., London: Lourdes and the
Holy Eucharist, by Rev. Paul Aucler, S.J. Price, one penny.
I9I3-] NEW BOOKS 403
Gary & Co., London : Mass of St. Anthony, by Alphonse
* Gary. Price, i s. 6d. net.
DENZIGER BROTHERS have sent us the first part of what
^ promises to be a noteworthy work, and one that will be of par-
ticular interest to all Catholics. The work is entitled Rome, and
will be a complete history and reproduction in picture of the Eternal
City, and its heroes and its monuments. Cardinal Gibbons in his
preface says: "Rome's charm is infinite; and forever it attracts
mankind as the mighty seat of ancient empire, the mother and
nurse of all modern nations, and the centre of Catholicism." And
this work, to be published in eighteen parts, will put forth Rome's
appeal in popular, attractive style. It will be a splendid volume
for the Catholic home. The first part deals with the beginnings
of Rome to the downfall of its Emperors. The price of each part
is 35 cents.
We are pleased to announce that the same house has pub-
lished in a very presentable way, and at the exceptionally low
price of 50 cents per volume, a series of novels and religious books
by the best Catholic authors. Among the novels we call special
attention to the following: Dion and the Sibyls, by Miles Keon;
Marcella Grace and Agatha's Hard Saying, by Rosa Mulholland;
Fabiola, by Cardinal Wiseman; Bond and Free, by Jean Connor;
The Monk's Pardon and Idols, by Raoul de Navery ; The Light of
PI is Countenance, by Jerome Hart.
Some of the well-known religious books of the list are: The
Life of Christ, by Rev. M. Cochem ; The Veneration of the Blessed
Virgin, by Rev. B. Rohmer; Lourdes, by Father Clarke, S.J. ;
St. Anthony, by Father Ward; St. Francis of 'Assisi and A Social
Reformer, by Father Dubois, and The History of the Protestant
Reformation, by William Cobbett.
The same publishers have issued a helpful and instructive
volume, entitled The Promises of the Sacred Heart, by Joseph Mc-
Donnell, S.J. Price, 90 cents. The commentary and meditations
contained in the book appeared first in The Irish Messenger of
the Sacred Heart; also The Holy Hour, by Rt. Rev. B. J. Keiley,
D.D. (10 cents), and Gospel Verses for Holy Communion, by a
Sister of Notre Dame (5 cents), and a suitable announcement card
for requiem Mass at the very low price of 10 cents each.
For the Feasts of our Lady, another publication of this firm,
Landmarks of Grace will be found a helpful companion. It in-
404 NEW BOOKS [Dec.,
eludes many poems reprinted from various sources on our Lady's
titles, and also prose extracts that will be aids to devotion. Its
compilation shows wide reading and good taste. Price, 90 cents.
TTOW futile the neo-pagan theories which in many places are
-* * coming or are in vogue nowadays, how futile the preaching of
the self-sufficiency of nature, may be seen from the study of
the best flower of paganism Marcus Aurelius. In the light of
the opportunity it has for doing great good, disillusionizing the
defenders of Naturalism, strengthening and enlightening Catho-
lics, we know of few recent books so timely as the little volume
entitled The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, written by John C. Joy,
SJ. It is done in a pleasant, masterly way, and our advice to all
is to get it and read it. It costs but 35 cents, and is published by
B. Herder of St. Louis.
In a volume, published by the same house, the author says in his
preface that the heroes of Ireland's battles should not be allowed
to die, and Dr. MacSweeney has done a praiseworthy work in pre-
senting in the one small volume under the title, 'A Group of Nation
Builders, the history of three great leaders in Ireland's fight for
intellectual freedom O'Donovan, O'Curry, and Petrie. The little
volume is a valuable contribution to the lona Series. Price, 35 cents.
They have also issued The Nature of Human Society, by
Bernard J. Otten, SJ. Price, 5 cents.
ATODERN SOCIALISM, by Rev. Herman J. Maeckel, S.J., is
''-* a brochure of the German Roman Catholic Central Verein,
St. Louis, Mo.
JOHN JOSEPH McVEY, of Philadelphia, has issued in pamph-
let form an interesting lecture of George W. Norris on The
Housing Problem in Philadelphia. Price, 10 cents.
JOSEPH WAGNER, New York, has published a manual of Pic-
J tonal Church History, for use with the Stereoptican, which
includes the period of the French Revolution. Price, 40 cents net.
jForefgn periodicals*
St. Jerome's Accuracy. By W. H. K. In St. Jerome's Pro-
logus Galeatus, which is still prefixed to most editions of the Vul-
gate, the Saint makes a remarkable statement as to the method of
writing the Divine Name in some of the Greek manuscripts. After
saying that, in earlier days, the Jews used the same alphabetical
characters as the Samaritans, and that the present Hebrew letters
were introduced by Esdras after the captivity, he asserts that in
certain Greek manuscripts then extant the Sacred Name was written
in what we now know as the Samaritan or old Hebrew letters.
Some modern scholars have disputed this statement, one Hebraist
conjecturing that the Saint must have mistaken the Greek, or half-
Greek, writing of the Hebrew for an archaic form, another that his
words must refer to some form of the square Chaldee script. But
St. Jerome's critical and accurate observation is completely sus-
tained by the fragments of Aquila's version of the Psalms in
the palimpsests discovered at Cairo a few years ago. The Tablet,
November i.
Franciscan Influences in Art. By Mrs. Virginia M. Crawford.
It has been reserved for the German scholar and historian, Heinrich
Thode, to present a synthetic view of the Franciscan movement in
its relations to the various branches of religious art; yet his im-
portant work has only recently been translated into French and
never into English. Non-Catholic critics clinging to a prejudice
that Christianity has, somehow, always been antagonistic to art
have been wont to explain the wonderful efflorescence of art in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, by assuming that the influences
of the Renaissance made themselves felt much easier than it was
customary to suppose. To lovers of St. Francis it is clear that the
art impulse, like so many other influences of the century, came from
Assisi. Preaching in the vulgar tongue; the laudi or popular
religious songs; the work of Giotto at Assisi and in the Arena
chapel at Padua; the fostering of devotion to the Madonna, and
consequently the more frequent representation of her in painting;
the work of Andrea della Robbia, of Pinturicchio, and Sassetta in
Franciscan shrines ; Fra Angelico's " Last Judgment " and Fran-
cia's " Immaculate Conception " at Lucca ; the churches of the
Friars at Florence, Siena, and Pisa all these were expressions
406 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Dec.,
and results of the free religious life whose cradle was the Porziun-
cula. The Dublin Review, October.
An Indian Mystic Rabindranath Tagore. By Rev. C. C.
Martindale, S.J. This new volume of prose poems, translated by
the author from the Bengali, is unique in giving an Indian expres-
sion of Indian thought and emotion in most beautiful English.
So beautiful, indeed, that one fears the translation has been worked
over by an Occidental litterateur. If not, the author must have
assimilated much Western work to write, unaided, so modern an
English, and in so doing may he not have modified genuine Indian
thought by absorbing European ideals? His poems bear striking
resemblances to the Canticle of Canticles, the Canticle of St. John
of the Cross, the Imitation, the Hound of Heaven, and Rabbi ben
Ezra, but they sadly lack the sense of sin, the proper emphasis on
self-realization through self-sacrifice for man, and self-subordina-
tion to humanity, and, above all, the Name and the Presence of
Christ. The Dublin Review, October.
A Critic of Casuistry. M. Alfred Bayet, one of the leaders
in the attempt to frame a " scientific, rational morality " entirely in-
dependent of religion, has issued a small book attacking modern
Catholic morality. For this purpose he has selected some eighty
cases, dealing with justice and charity, homicide, theft, lying, duties
towards the family and the state, quoting them exactly from the
works of approved authors, and trying to prove a divergence from
the morality of the Gospels in the answers given. H. Lesetre in the
Revue du Clerge Frangais (November i), and J. Verdier in the
Revue Pratique d'Apologetique (November i), make the following
general observations on the matter: Catholic morality, being pre-
occupied with the direction of consciences and the government of
souls, has to be practical as well as theoretical. It is not concerned
merely with the speculative relations, e. g., truth and falsehood,
but with the concrete case of an idividual who wishes to avoid false-
hood and sin, yet preserve the secret intrusted to him by a friend
(Verdier). Casuistry is, therefore, necessary. But the solutions
given in textbooks are of past or imaginary character ; they have to
be modified in application according to the circumstances of the
case (Lesetre). The conclusions of casuists are not the Catholic
ideal, but the minimum of obligation which the law of God or of the
Church imposes (Verdier). Applying these principles, usually
in the confessional, the priest can and should urge a higher standard
1913-] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 407
of duty, and appeal to higher motives (Lesetre). And the penitent,
being a real and, therefore, a complex individual, not the simplified
abstraction of the textbooks, may often be bound to take the higher
course. Many of the theoretical cases are put in high relief to
produce a pedagogic clearness, but no casuist holds that their solu-
tions are or can be exactly applied to real men and women
(Verdier).
Rescue Work. By Henri Joly. The official criminal statistics
for 1911 show a return to the high figures of 1907, for minors as well
as for adults. The state, none the less, has not yet publicly acknowl-
edged the rescue and protection work done by members of religious
communities, although in some cases it has subsidized their work,
claiming the credit if the work succeeded, but, in case of failure,
pointing the moral loudly against private charity. One institution,
however, the House of St. Augustine, founded in Lyons in 1900 by
Madame Payeu, has thus far met with general and even civic ap-
probation, and is an excellent example of what lay people can do
when religious are officially under the ban. Madame Payeu believes
strongly in individual work. The tone of the institution is home-
like, and opportunity is given each girl to earn something as a start
upon leaving the house. In contrast to an official institution, whose
preliminary expenses for buildings, staff, etc., were enormous, and
whose annual budget when its inmates numbered seven was fifteen
thousands francs apiece, the House of St. Augustine, containing
thirty-two girls and six religious, cost for the same period a little
less than this sum. Le Correspondent, October 10.
An Apostle of Daily Communion. By Paul Dudon. When
but a young religious Father Leonard Cros, S.J., cultivated a
pious and tender devotion to our Eucharistic King, although the
rules of the Constitution of the Society then allowed the reception
of Holy Communion oftener than once a week only under special
permissions. This the young religious obtained from his confessor,
and received Holy Communion every day. On taking up his work
as teacher in the colleges of his Society, he strove to lead young
men into a more intimate union with Jesus Christ by means of more
frequent communion. On this subject he wrote much. He lived
to see daily communion advocated by the present Pontiff. He
also wished to see confirmation given at a very tender age. Pere
Cros died on November 18, 1912. Etudes, October 5.
408 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Dec.,
The Baptism of Clovis. By E. Vacandard. Was Clovis,
as the traditional opinion affirms, really baptized at Rheims? The
only contemporary evidence is a letter of congratulation sent him
by the Bishop of Vienne, St. Avitus. There are besides a letter
of the Bishop of Treves, St. Nizier, written between 561 and 568;
the story of Gregory of Tours in his Historia Francorum of about
573-576; two works of Jonas of Susa and the pseudo-Frede-
gairus of about 642, and Hincmar's Life of Remigius written
about 878. The conclusion drawn from these documents seems to
prove that he was baptized by St. Remigius at Rheims on Christ-
mas Eve in 496. Revue du Clerge Frangais, October 15.
The Tablet (October 18) : Blessed Boniface of Savoy, Arch-
bishop of Canterbury, by Father Thurston, S J. The opinion held
by some of the last Archbishop of Canterbury to be beatified, is
that he was a money scrapper, generally hated, and that his tenure
of office was characterized only by arrogance, violence, and greed.
This view rests on the testimony of Mathew Paris, the Chronicler
of St. Albans, whose bitterness was probably fostered by knowledge
that Boniface was menacing monastic exemptions. Thomas Wykes,
Augustinian Canon of Osney at this period, and the Christ Church
(Canterbury) monks represent Boniface as a man of wonderful
simplicity, deficient in learning, but a sober liver who guided him-
self by the advice of wise counselors. He was humble, modest, and
a most lavish benefactor of the poor. The value of the views of the
Christ Church monks is increased by the fact that at the time it was
set down, Boniface was dead and no longer to be feared, while
Paris' testimony seems to include several discrepancies of which
even he was aware.
(October 25) : Mr. Belloc on the Church and the World: The
future of the Catholic Church in the modern world, judged upon
temporal indices alone, seems to " depend upon three factors," the
type of Catholic society represented by France, the type of Catholic
nations more or less subject to non-Catholic governments, and the
type of Catholic societies existing without -any natural bond to
cement them in the midst of their non-Catholic fellows. The
Church will triumph soon in the first two societies, in the third a
heavy artillery war must first be waged. Cardinal Bourne and
the Ritual Murder Accusation: In reply to a request from Rabbi Dr.
Hertz that he defend the Jews from the charge of ritual murder
raised recently in Russia, Cardinal Bourne wrote that the " Catholic
Church has, so far as I am aware, always recognized that such
1913-] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 409
accusations had no foundation whatever in the religion, belief or
practices of the Jewish people."
( November I ) : Manchester's Catholic Lord Mayor is to be
Mr. McCabe, for twenty-five years a member of the Council, and
for twelve years an Alderman; the first Catholic to be so honored.
The Month (November) : The Church and the Money Lender,
by Rev. Henry Irwin, S.J. An examination of the seemingly para-
doxical attitude of the Church on the subject of money lending.
The practical aspect of the question, Father Irwin will treat
in a subsequent article. The Men of the Old Stone Age, by
Lewis Watt. This paper considers the relation of recent discov-
eries of fossilized remains, especially the Piltdown fragments,
of men of the old Stone Age, and the theory of evolution, also the
value of these discoveries in this regard. 'Adventures in
Journalism, by Philip Gibbs. Mr. Gibbs recounts some of his ad-
ventures in the service of a London daily. Presbyterian
Union in Scotland, by Rev. Sydney Smith, SJ. In this article
Father Smith considers the proposed union of the United Free
Presbyterian Church and the Established Church in Scotland, and
the difficulties which make such a union at this time extremely
problematic.
The Church Quarterly Review (October) : St. Teresa, by Rt.
Rev. Arthur Chandler. This is a synthetic appreciation of the
Saint's work and writings based on " excellent new translations,"
" in the hope of encouraging a wider public to appreciate and profit
by St. Teresa's help and guidance to the spiritual life." Several
pages are devoted to a consideration of the various states of prayer
described in her works, and then of the height to which one can
humbly desire to mount. The Grace of Orders and Apostolic
Succession, by Rev. F. W. Puller. The grace of orders was given by
Christ to the Apostles with power of transmission ; the early Church
considered that orders must be transmitted through bishops as suc-
cessors of the Apostles, and the Church has always held to the
same tradition. Jane Austen, by Miss Elizabeth Wordsworth.
By means of quotations from Jane Austen's letters and works,
a character sketch of the novelist is drawn. Miss Austen seems
to have disregarded the great events which happened during her
lifetime, and to have lived in the country an uneventful life, full
of sympathy for the poor and undemonstratively, but sincerely,
religious.
410 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Dec.,
The Dublin Review (October) : // Home Ride is Defeated,
by Charles Bewley. A forecast of what may happen in Ireland
should the present government go before the country on the Home
Rule Bill and be defeated. Two phases of the subject are dis-
cussed, viz., the attitude of the Irish towards the two dominant polit-
ical parties, and the relation of Ireland to England. Papal Dis-
pensation for Polygamy, by Norman Evans Hardy. An examina-
tion of a document quoted in Professor A. F. Pollard's Life of
Henry Fill., to support the theory that Clement VII. proposed to
dispense Henry in order that he might have two wives. Richard
Wagner: A Centennial Sketch, by Donald Davidson. A sketch of
Wagner's career in four phases. His life; the man; the author and
philosopher; the poet-musician. The Present Religious Situation
in France, by G. Fonsegrive. This paper is a consideration of the
effects of the Law of Separation and the present outlook for Cathol-
icism.
The Irish Ecclesiastical Record (November) : The Rt. Rev.
John S. Vaughan, D.D., by many quotations from Carlyle's writ-
ings, aims at introducing or recalling the sage's writings by empha-
sizing the vigor, originality, and picturesqueness of his style.
The Rev. Aelred Whitacre, O.P., defends " the philosophy of com-
mon sense." J. B. Williams, in The Regicides in Ireland, de-
scribes the persecutions inflicted on the Catholics by Daniel Axtell,
Governor of Kilkenny, who seems, however, to have repented at the
end. This last point is said to be inaccurately described in the
Dictionary of National Biography, where the sole authority cited
is a pamphlet now proved to be a forgery.
Le Correspondent (October 10) : Georges Goyau writes on the
Founder of the Marianists, William Joseph Chaminade.
(October 25) : A Christian Hwnanist, by Fribart de la Tour.
Lefevre d'fitaples, friend of Erasmus and of all the great scholars
of the sixteenth century, has been charged with being a Protestant
at heart while outwardly a Catholic. He sought renovation, not
revolution. His doctrine, amid his appeals for reform, is always
Catholic. Some of his disciples, however, like Farel, went over to
radical " evangelicism," and his school, after its glories of 1522-
1525 and again after 1530, gradually disappeared. The Present
State of the English Navy is a severe attack on the incompetence
and arbitrary methods of Mr. Churchill.
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 411
Etudes (October 20) contains four articles on Louis Veuillot,
the great French apologist.
Revue du Clerge Frangais (November i) : Leopardi, by E.
Lenoble. E. Voron summarizes the extent and occasions of
infantile and juvenile criminality in France, and the methods of
trial and reform applied after the crime.
Revue Pratique d'Apologetique (November i) : Apropos of
the celebration of the centenary of Diderot, J. Guiraud accuses this
eighteenth century encyclopaedist of dishonesty, unblushing immor-
ality and obsequiousness. In philosophy he was a materialist;
in religion an atheist; towards government an anarchist; willing
to keep the people in bondage, and calling Christianity a vile super-
stition useful for such an end.
Revue Thomiste (September-October) : Father A. Gardeil,
O.P., presents a summary and a defence of the synthetic
apologetic of the late P. Schwalm, O.P., on the reasonableness of
the act of faith. Father L. Raymond, O.P., continues his
study on the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, showing their possibility, and
their moral necessity for the perfection of our supernatural acts
and for perseverance. C. Henry, P.B., argues from the nature of
the act of knowing, wherein the knower must receive and unite to
itself, have and indeed be the thing known, to the immaterial char-
acter of the mind. Father M.-R. Cathala, O.P., criticizes
severely the study of M. Vacandard, and a little less severely those
of M. de Cauzons and of M. Choupin on the Inquisition, and praises
that by M. Guiraud in the Dictionnaire Apologetique de la Foi
Catholique.
Revue Benedictine (October) : D. G. Morin presents an unpub-
lished sermon by St. Augustine. The arguments, language, compar-
isons, Biblical texts, and their formulation leave no doubt as to its
authenticity. D. O. Casel presents in German a study of a con-
troverted passage in St. Cyprian (De Catholics Ecclesia Unitate,
chap, v.) which reads: Episcopatus units est cujus a singulis in
soliduni pars tenetur.
IRecent Events.
The Ministry of M. Barthou still remains
France. in office, although its life from the beginning
was considered precarious, and its enemies
have multiplied as time went on. The Radicals, who form the
most powerful of the groups in Parliament, accuse it of reactionary
tendencies, and M. Clemenceau, the destroyer of so many govern-
ments, has been assailing it in the paper which he has recently
started.
In consequence of certain defects disclosed in the manoeuvres
of the army held last autumn, the Chief of the General Staff found
it necessary to severely criticize some of the generals in command.
By one of these generals this criticism was so keenly resented
that he violated the rules of the army by publishing an answer to
his superior officer, an answer which is said to manifest the worst
spirit of the times when, as during the Boulanger and Dreyfus
episodes, politics played a disastrous part in the higher ranks of
the army. The incriminated general declared that the action taken
by his superior was part of a conspiracy to crush him because
he was a Republican. The Socialist journal of M. Jaures, the
Humanite, finds in the action of the government, when it relieved
General Faurie of his command, the hand of Jesuitism, and declares
it to be an attempt to hand over the army to the worst enemies of
the Republic. The only thing which keeps the government in
office is the inability of its adversaries to unite among themselves.
M. Poincare, the President, has also been subjected to criti-
cism. It is said the object he had in view in making the tours
through various parts of France, during which he was received with
so much enthusiasm, was to establish his own influence, and to
prepare the way for bringing back personal rule. One of the visits
paid by M. Poincare was to M. Mistral, the poet of Provence, who
has done so much to foster local patriotism, that attachment to
particular districts which the centralization which followed upon
the Revolution tended to suppress. The President's visit is taken
as an indication of his sympathy with those who think that it is by
fostering and reviving the local customs of the provinces that
France herself will renew her youth.
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 413
Two Regencies have disappeared in Ger-
Germany. many, one of the Kingdom of Bavaria, the
other of the Duchy of Brunswick. The in-
ability of Ludwig II. of Bavaria during the latter years of his reign,
and that of his successor Otho, have placed the crown in abeyance
for a long time. The greatly respected Regent, Prince Luitpold
who died last December, always refused to take any steps to depose
the nominal monarch. The Bavarian people, however, have become
so discontented with the actual ruler being for so long a time
deprived of his full rights and the honors attached thereto, that
it has been found necessary to pass a bill amending the Constitution,
by which it is enacted that in the event of a King becoming physi-
cally or mentally incapable of carrying on the government, and
there be, after the lapse of ten years, no prospect of recovery, the
Regent can declare the Regency at an end and the throne vacant.
The power conferred by this act of the Diet the Prince Regent made
use of on the fifth of last month, and declared himself King of
Bavaria, under the title of Ludwig III., he being the person to
whom the crown fell as being the next qualified by right of primo-
geniture and of agnatic lineal succession. His majesty shortly
afterwards took the oath required by the Constitution in the pres-
ence of his Ministers, the members of the State Council, and
deputations from both Chambers of. the Diet.
The Regency of the Duchy of Brunswick has been terminated
by the accession of the son of the Duke of Cumberland. The Duke
of Cumberland is the heir to the kingdom of Hanover as well as
to the Duchy of Brunswick. Hanover, as a result of the war of
1866, was incorporated into Prussia, and because King George
would not consent to his having been despoiled of his throne and
possessions, and of his having made his sons promise never to give
their consent, the Federal Council of the German Empire would
not allow either him or his children to become Dukes of Brunswick.
The recent marriage of the surviving son of the Duke of Cumber-
land, Prince Ernest Augustus, to the only daughter of the German
Emperor, and the fact of his having entered the Prussian army and
having taken the required oath, have removed these obstacles, and
the Prince is thus allowed to become Duke of Brunswick. There are
not wanting objectors, however, for the Prince, although he has
taken the oath of loyalty to the German Emperor and King of
Prussia, and has explained that he understands that by so doing he
has made a promise that he would not do anything or support any-
4H RECENT EVENTS [Dec.,
thing calculated to alter the territorial possessions of Prussia, has
not expressly renounced his right to the kingdom of Hanover.
Among these objectors is the Crown Prince, who for a second time
within the last two years has thought proper to intervene per-
sonally in questions of public policy. These indiscretions of the
future ruler of Germany make it highly desirable, for the world's
peace and tranquillity, that that mighty Empire should for many
years be left under the control of its wiser head.
The last of the many celebrations of the War of Liberation
which have been taking place during the present year, was held
at Leipzig on the iQth of October. A monument has been erected
in that city in commemoration of the battle which laid the founda-
tions of modern Germany, and which saved for the European na-
tions the right to their existence as free States. At its inaugura-
tion were present the German Emperor and the representatives
of the three non-German States that shared with Prussia in the
struggles of those days, as well as the King of Saxony and numer-
ous other German dignitaries. The King of Saxony described the
monument as a symbol of German strength and German unity,
erected by the devotion of German patriots; and prayed that it
might recall to the generations yet unborn the scene of that day
Germans, Russians, Austrians, Hungarians, and Swedes bowing the
knee in reverence before God, the Almighty Pilot of the world's
history, and praying Him to preserve the peace.
A gloom was cast over the celebration at Leipzig by the news
which arrived of the destruction of the Zeppelin L.-II., and of the
great loss of life which accompanied it. This is the tenth disaster
that has befallen German airships, but it has not weakened the deter-
mination of the country to secure German supremacy in the air.
The proposal of Mr. Churchill, the British First Lord of the Ad-
miralty, that Germany and Great Britain should make of 1914 a
naval holiday by a mutual agreement not to build during its
course any dreadnoughts, was received in Germany with
a mixture of indignation, contempt, and pity. Even in France the
proposal met with an unfavorable reception. There seems to be no
hope that a limit can be put to the increase of armaments. Noth-
ing but a European war or universal bankruptcy holds out a pros-
pect of the termination of the present phase of this main feature of
European civilization.
It is the habit to consider the universities of Germany as the
type of every perfection, but this view is not that held by all
I9I3-] RECENT EVENTS 415
Germans. At a Congress of university teachers, which recently
met at Strasburg, a discussion showed that there is a movement
for the creation of a number of new universities, owing to the
alleged fact that the old do not supply the wants of the times.
Various faults in the working and in the results were mentioned.
One of the speakers said that owing to the system now in existence
the German " doctor " was the laughing-stock of foreigners, the
present mode of examination being so loose. On the other hand,
the defenders of the existent system maintained that the foundation
of new universities was altogether unnecessary, and that there was
danger that the standard of teaching would thereby be relaxed.
New universities would not relieve the old, and would simply in-
crease the number of students. As it was, there were too many;
forty per cent would do better not to study at all, for large numbers
had been paralyzed by academic training, and rendered unfit for
practical life. Whatever the real state of the case may be it is
hard to say, however it is somewhat surprising to hear of such
statements being made in view of the progress of German industry
and commerce.
Within the last few weeks two German doctors have shown
that academic studies have not rendered them, at least, unfit for
practical life; for they have succeeded in making an instrument
which reveals the presence of dangerous gases in mines, and which,
if it works as well as it promises, will be the means of saving
many thousands of lives. This instrument registers the state of
the atmosphere by means of sounds. If the air is pure the sound is
continuous; if gas is present, the sound is interrupted, and the
volume of fire damp present can be gauged by the number of in-
terruptions. The Emperor, to whom the instrument was shown,
said that it seemed to fulfill all the requirements.
An army law passed last year increased
Austria-Hungary. the number of annual recruits by 86,000
men. The military authorities wished
this year to add to the annual contingent some 40,000. A compro-
mise, however, was made, and the increase this year will be only
31,300 men. The annual contingent will then roughly amount to
220,000, making the peace footing of the army about 490,000.
This will involve an increase in non-recurring expenditure alone of
something like $23,000,000. It is not to be wondered at, therefore,
416 RECENT EVENTS [Dec.,
that the Minister of Finance had to present an unfavorable budget
to the Reichsrath. The budget, indeed, showed a small surplus,
but this was due to the fact that a large part of the income was
derived from loans that had been authorized. And as still further
loans will be necessary, with an involved increase of taxation, it is
not to be wondered at that large numbers within the Austrian
territories are seeking to escape from them. This has led to the
arrest, in what seems a high-handed and arbitrary manner, of the
European agent of the Canadian-Pacific Railway, and the closing
of its offices. A bill, too, has been introduced into the Reichsrath
to restrict emigration. It seems somewhat hard that a mighty
empire should be made into a prison-house. This is one of many
evil consequences of the all-dominant militarism.
The late Lukacs Cabinet in Hungary seems to have been
steeped in violence and corruption. It suppressed, by the most
oppressive means, its opponents in the Chamber, and fell at last
because it had accepted subsidies for political purposes from the
Hungarian Bank in return for concessions granted to it. Since its
fall another instance has been revealed of its corruption. For the
sake of a contribution to the party funds, it granted to a company
the right to open a gambling casino at Budapest. The present
Prime Minister, Count Tisza, is opposed to every such proposal, as
tending to increase gambling, and has cancelled the concession, and
is ready to return the money. The Hungarian government and
Parliament have been doing great injury to the good name of con-
stitutional institutions. They seem to be governed by interests
rather than principles.
The German Emperor has been paying a visit to the Emperor
Francis Joseph. The unsettled state of Europe for sometime past
has rendered the visits of kings and emperors a somewhat rare
event. The second Balkan war led to a divergence of view between
the two chief parties to the Triple Alliance, Austria-Hungary hav-
ing supported Bulgaria, and having demanded the revision of the
Treaty of Bukarest, whereas the German Emperor took the side of
Greece, and declared the treaty definitive. No one thinks that this
divergence has weakened the bonds of the Triple Alliance, but there
are in Austria some who hold the view that Germany is too apt to
forget that Austrian interests have been more vitally affected by
the recent changes resulting from the wars than have those of
Germany. The Emperor's visit will perhaps have done something
to remove this impression.
1913-] RECENT EVENTS 417
The general election which has recently
Italy. taken place in Italy has resulted in the giving
to Signer Giolitti, who has now been Prime
Minister since the 29th of March, 1911, a clear expression of the
country's approval of his past policy. The vote, however, is not
to be taken as necessarily involving his long continuance in office,
for political storms are very frequent in the Italian Parliament, and,
owing to the group system, he may be overturned on a sudden.
His victory was largely due to the fact that he had given to the
Radicals the utmost of their demands, and there was nothing left
with which to find fault.
A suffrage practically universal was established by the last
reform bill, by which the number of the electors was increased
threefold, the number being raised from under three millions to
more than eight. The only one excluded from the franchise is
the man who is at one and the same time under thirty, illiterate,
and a fugitive from military service. The effort to give votes to
women received very little support. This being the first time that
an election had taken place since the act had been passed, it was
expected that there would be a great rush to the polls. But just
the opposite took place; extreme apathy was manifested. As in
England so in Italy, it may take some time for the electors to
realize their new privileges, but when they do the results may be
equally surprising. The effect of the war in Tripoli on the election
ought not to be overlooked. All Italy is still rejoicing. It is not,
however, certain that there is good reason for jubilation. The
country is not yet thoroughly pacified; nor is it certain that when
pacified it will yield any substantial profit.
A short time after the visit of the French
Spain. President, the Liberal Ministry of Count
Romanones gave in its resignation. This
was due to the dissensions in the ranks of the Liberals, and chiefly
to the public declaration of Senor Prieto that he could no longer
give his support to the Prime Minister. This led to his defeat by
a vote of the Senate. The King sought to form a Ministry from
the ranks of the Liberals, but as Count Romanones declared that he
would oppose any Liberal Ministry the attempt was unsuccessful.
His Majesty then had recourse to the leaders of the Conservative
Party, Sefiores Maura and Dato, and after a long consultation with
VOL. XCVIII. 27
418 RECENT EVENTS [Dec.,
the former the latter was chosen. In a short time he succeeded
in forming a Ministry. The choice of Senor Maura would have
caused great trouble, so keen is the resentment still felt for the
execution of Ferrer. The Republicans, some of whom are now
willing to cooperate with the Liberals, had resolved to provoke
riots and revolution rather than suffer the return to power of Senor
Maura.
Against Senor Dato's Cabinet they have announced that they
will take no extreme measures. The new Cabinet has been formed
in a perfectly constitutional way. Although the Conservatives have
no majority in the Cortes, the Liberals are, on account of their dif-
ferences, unable to form a government. It would be rash, however,
to predict how long Senor Dato's Cabinet will remain in office.
The government of Senhor Costa has had to
Portugal. maintain itself by the use of force against
enemies at both extremes. A few months
ago it succeeded in suppressing the Syndicalists and Anarchists who
were plotting its overthrow; in the latter part of October it had
to take similar measures against supporters of the Monarchy.
These of course aimed not merely at overturning the ministry,
but at changing the established form of government. In both
cases the authorities have been equally successful. The plan of the
Monarchists had been long in forming, and those involved in the
attempt to carry it into effect embraced every grade of the people.
The system of espionage, which is widely organized both for and
against the government, rendered it easy for the authorities to learn
all the secrets of the plotters, and this with the greater facility,
as they seemed quite ready to tell these secrets to everyone who
expressed the least sympathy with their cause. At the moment of
crisis, the courage of the leaders failed. They vanished, and
left their followers in the lurch, to become the prey of their foes.
The attempt has resulted in strengthening the power of the Premier,
Senhor Costa a thing of which from special circumstances he
was standing in considerable need.
The trial which has been going on at Kieff,
Russia. and which lasted for more than thirty days,
of a Jew named Beiliss for the murder of a
boy named Yushchinsky, has a twofold interest. Intense hatred of
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 419
the Jews exists among large numbers of the Russians, and is always
seeking an excuse for showing itself by such deeds of violence as
go by the name of pogroms. The Kieff trial was a deliberate
attempt to prove against them the habitual practice of murdering
children as a part of the Jewish ritual. If success had attended the
attempt, it would have been succeeded by a series of wholesale
murders and destruction of property. The evidence, however, broke
down completely, and the jury, of which one half were simple
peasants, acquitted the accused.
For Catholics the trial was of special interest, for one of the
witnesses brought forward as an expert to prove the Jewish custom
of ritual murder was a priest named Justinus Elisejevitch Pranaitis.
In a long document which was read as an affidavit at the trial,
Father Pranaitis declared that all the rabbis agree in teaching hatred
of the Gentile, and that he is to be regarded as an animal, and not
as a human being; the Commandment " Thou shalt not kill " does
not apply to the Gentile. The murder of a Gentile is supposed to
hasten the coming of the Messiah. It is also, according to Father
Pranaitis, of a sacrificial value. Since the destruction of the Temple
there has been no sacrificial altar for animals, and the killing of
Gentiles is accepted as a substitute. Such slaughter is performed
with certain cabalistic rites, which Father Pranaitis went on to
describe.
These accusations have been made many times, and it so hap-
pens that Pope Clement XIV. when, as Cardinal Ganganelli, he
acted as Consultor of the Holy Office, had fully gone into the ques-
tion, and had declared the charge to be unfounded. Innocent IV.
also has issued an encyclical letter specically declaring the charge
of ritual murder, as applying to Judaism, to be a baseless and wicked
invention. Other great authorities have taken a similar course,
among them a General of the Dominicans in 1664. Father Pran-
aitis was not ignorant of these declarations, for he referred to them
in his affidavit, but said he could not find them in the usual works
of reference. This led Lord Rothschild to write to the Cardinal
Secretary of State to obtain his authentication of the letter of
Innocent IV. and of the report of Cardinal Ganganelli. In reply
Cardinal Merry del Val certified that Cardinal Ganganelli's report
was in the archives of the Holy Office, and the letter of Innocent
was accurately printed in Raynald's Annalcs Ecclesiastici. In this
way the Church has been freed from any responsibility for
420 RECENT EVENTS [Dec.,
making odious accusations which might have been laid at her door,
had Father Pranaitis been allowed to be looked upon as her
spokesman.
Our own Cardinal has taken a part in this act of justice, and
Monsignor Duchesne has published in the Temps a letter in which
he declares the story of ritual murder an absurd invention, com-
parable to the slanders which were circulated about the rites of
early Christians, and to the once prevalent belief that the Church
had decreed that women had no souls. That such charges should
be so easily and so widely believed in Russia, throws light upon
the character of the Russian mind, and the strong antagonism
which exists to the Jew. Only a short time ago the mere fact that
Dr. George Brandes, the Danish critic, was of Jewish descent, made
the Russian government forbid his lecturing in Russia.
As a treaty of peace has at last been made
The Balkans. between Greece and Turkey, there is a pos-
sibility that for a time there will be no open
war in the Balkans, although more or less overt preparations for its
renewal will be going on behind the scenes. The number of
treaties which regulate the present situation is in itself perplexing.
At the background of all is the Berlin Treaty of 1878, Disraeli's
" Peace with Honor " Treaty, which by many is considered the
cause of all the subsequent Balkan troubles. Before war broke
out at all, there were treaties between Bulgaria and Greece and
between Bulgaria and Servia, the latter of which was the cause of
the second Balkan war. Then, to close the first Balkan war,
the Treaty of London under the supervision of the Great Powers,
was made between Turkey and the Allied Balkan States. There
followed upon this the Bukarest Treaty between Bulgaria on the
one hand and Greece and Servia on the other. This brought an
end to the second Balkan war. The relations between Turkey and
Bulgaria were settled by the Treaty of Constantinople. This in-
volved, so far as these two States were concerned, a breach of the
Treaty of London. By its provisions Adrianople and a large
district around that city were restored to Turkey, thereby leaving
that State a considerable foothold in Europe, and putting it in a
position to exercise a malign influence over Balkan politics. In
fact, it is now a question whether Salonika may not be again brought
I9I3-] RECENT EVENTS 421
under Ottoman rule. This is the avowed object of the Committee
of Union and Progress. Its realization in the immediate future is,
of course, precluded by the signing of the new treaty between
Turkey and Greece. Numerous as are these treaties, they are of
but little value in the present demoralized stage of European de-
velopment.
The injustice involved in the Bukarest Treaty, both in its
provisions and in the way in which it was forced upon Bulgaria,
gives a special instability to the Balkan situation, so far as that
situation is due to the treaty. The Bulgarian government is en-
deavoring to convince the world of this injustice, so far as the as-
signment made to Greece is concerned, by sending to every part of
the civilized world a map which has been made by a professor
in the University of Sofia. According to this map, the total popu-
lation of the Southern Macedonia which is now included in
the district allotted to Greece by the Bukarest Treaty, amounts to
1,042,039. Of these Dr. Ivanow claims that 329,371 are Bulgars,
314,854 Turks, while only 236,755 are Greeks. As, however, the
Greeks are said to be on the point of bringing out a map which
will show a preponderance of Greek communities, it may be well
for those of our readers who wish to form an unbiased judgment
on the question at issue, to keep it in suspense until the two maps
have been submitted by the competent.
Bulgaria has entered into possession of the small territory
which has fallen to her lot in Western Thrace as the result of the
war. It was feared for a time that armed opposition would have
been offered, an autonomous state having been formed by a section
of the inhabitants. Bulgarian rule is not loved by the other nation-
alities that have been subjected to it. The Armenians of Adria-
nople held public thanksgiving services on the return of the Turks.
Large tracts of the recently-occupied territory have been depopu-
lated by the two Balkan wars. Scores of miles may be traveled
without any sign of life being seen, the villages having either been
burned and wrecked, or simply abandoned. As the inhabitants left
are either Turks inland, or Greeks on the seacoasts, the right of
Bulgaria to its possession is merely that of conquest, nor does the
enjoyment of it promise to be peaceful. The access to the sea forms
its chief value in the eyes of Bulgaria.
The abdication of King Ferdinand is by many considered to
be imminent. It is not because he is unpopular with his subjects :
422 RECENT EVENTS [Dec.,
on the contrary, they have shown marks of their high appreciation
of his services, notwithstanding the want of success which has of
late attended his efforts. They recognize that it is to him that the
country owes its very existence. But after the first Balkan war
he made two mistakes which may prove fatal. He rejected the
Tsar's offer of arbitration in the dispute which had arisen with
Servia, and, something much worse in the eyes of the Tsar, he
accepted the support of Austria-Hungary in the conflict which en-
sued with Servia and Greece, the conflict in which he was so utterly
worsted. It is now said to have been decided by the Russian Em-
peror that King Ferdinand must retire into private life, and resign
his crown to his son Boris.
Servia suppressed within a very short time the insurrection
of the Albanians in the district recently acquired. In the course
of the operations her troops took possession of certain strategic
points within the borders marked out by the Powers for the new
Albania. The support given to their compatriots who had revolted
justified this action of Servia, and in fact would have justified a war
with the Albanians. Austria-Hungary, however, came upon the
scene, sending an ultimatum that Servia must retire from these
positions before an assigned date under penalties not mentioned
but well understood. With some little hesitation Servia yielded
to the demands of her more powerful neighbor, thereby giving to
Austria-Hungary the one cause of satisfaction which recent events
have accorded to the Dual Monarchy. There were not wanting
those who looked upon the Austrian proceedings as a usurpation
of the rights of the European Concert. Hopes were also excited
in Turkey that advantages might accrue to her from the difficulties
threatening Servia. These events show how far after all their
struggles the Balkan States are from being independent and self-
sufficient. As in the past, so in the future, they will have to submit
to foreign influences and interests. That it is due to their own
folly, is no great consolation.
The delimitation of Albania is being made by an International
Commission appointed for that purpose, the Ambassadors' Con-
ference at London having fixed the chief points. The Constitu-
tion of the new State has not yet been made; it is not, however, to
be a Republic. Dissensions have already arisen among the members
of the provisional government, Essad Pasha, the defender of Sku-
taria, having proved himself extremely independent. It is not likely
I9I3-] RECENT EVENTS 423
that he will be chosen to be the Prince; recourse it is thought will
be had to Germany. The chief cause for anxiety at the present
moment is the determination of a large number of the Greeks,
who live within the new boundaries, not to submit to the Albanian
authorities when these are established. They express the resolve to
lay down their lives in resisting any attempt to place upon them the
Albanian yoke. This has given to certain Greeks an opportunity
of intervening, and has brought Austria-Hungary and Italy into the
field.
These two Powers have presented joint notes to the Greek
government on the subject of the obstacles which have been placed
in the way of the Boundary Commission. These notes affirm that
its work has been rendered difficult through the influence of Hel-
lenic agitators, and declare that instructions have been sent to the
Italian and the Austrian members of the Commission to write
down as Albanian all the villages of which the inhabitants have
rendered the investigation impossible. This action of the two
Powers is looked upon as a usurpation of the rights of the other
Powers which have hitherto been acting in concert.
A few weeks ago it was very probable that war would break
out between Turkey and Greece. The two States have, however,
come to terms, and added one more to the long list of treaties.
The possession of the ^Egean Islands is the most important of the
questions still left unsettled. The Treaty of London left the settle-
ment on this question to the Great Powers, although a short time ago
Turkey threatened to take the matter into her own hands. These
islands are now actually held, some by the Greek forces, the rest by
Italian. Italy is bound by the Treaty of Lausanne to restore to
Turkey those in her possession on certain conditions being fulfilled,
and is showing herself quite unable to see that these conditions
have been fulfilled. It is quite possible that difficulties may arise as
to the ultimate settlement of the question. Crete, however, has been
definitely annexed to Greece.
As a sequence of the second Balkan war,
Turkey. Turkey must still be numbered among the
Powers of Europe. There even exists the
possibility of an increase of the territory now possessed. This is,
at all events, a contingency that must be taken into account. The
424 RECENT EVENTS [Dec.,
chief Powers are placing themselves at her service for the sake
of obtaining various kinds of concessions. To the list given last
month Russia must be added, concessions having been made for
the construction of railways in the districts bordering on the Cauca-
sus. France is to help Turkey in raising a loan, and the longed-for
permission to raise the rate of customs is said to be on the point of
being granted. Little, however, has been heard of the reforms
which the friends of Turkey declare to be as necessary for the
maintenance of the Ottoman power in Asia as they were in the
Balkans. These reforms are being demanded by the Armenians in
particular; in making these demands they are being supported by
Russia as well as by Great Britain and France. In 1895, on the
occasion of the massacres which then took place, Turkey promised,
in deference to the representations of the Powers, that Armenia,
should be made into a province with an orderly administration. It
need hardly be stated that this promise has not been kept. Russia
is now willing to agree to the organization of Armenia into two
provinces, with the essential condition that their administration
shall be subject to international control. The purpose of intervening
is disclaimed by Russia if these reforms are carried into effect, but
a continuance of the present conditions will not be tolerated. The
desire of an increase in the rate of customs will be used as a lever
to secure Turkey's consent.
With Our Readers.
IT requires something very near akin to genius to employ satire
effectively. Moreover, he who can so use it is sure of his con-
victions, and certain of his subject. A forgetfulness, an inconsistency,
means that the satirist writes his own condemnation. Satire is com-
paratively easy when institutions are widely reverenced and well-
defined. The primary principles of morality were known clearly
by both Juvenal and Petronius. In the ages when all the world be-
lieved in Christianity, it was not difficult to satirize the conduct of
Christians. Everyone saw distinctly the clear background of prin-
ciple that displayed so effectively the folly and the inconsistency of
men. Only in a believing people is blasphemy possible ; only in an age
of faith revealed or natural is satire possible. He who has not
faith, or^| knowledge of the faith that should guide us, will suffer
confusion.
* * * *
IT is beyond question that a large portion of our present world has
lost faith. We speak not only of the definite revealed faith of
our Lord, but also of that natural faith in the worth and steadfast-
ness and definiteness of the primary things of human nature. Faith
in individual responsibility and individual worth; faith in the sacred-
ness of duty and the plighted word; faith in personal honor; faith in
husband and wife, in parent and child; faith in the sanctity of the
family; faith in the uprightness of human society; faith in our coun-
try all these are doubted to-day, and the whole of life is thrown into
an uncertain flux that simply eddies round and round.
* * * *
NO swimmer in such a mad vortex could possibly view with com-
posure any of its currents. He would have to be out of it if
he ever sought to change them or direct them aright. Only when
he was safe on dry land could he afford if he wished to laugh at its
helpless victims.
* * * *
MRS. EDITH WHARTON has given great promise as a novelist.
The sentence is ominous, and our readers will know at once
that we do not think the promise has been fulfilled. The House of
Mirth was a strong, effective book. Ethan Frome is a miniature
Wuthering Heights, wherein hate yields to fatalism. And from the
hand that could pen these, surely great things might be expected.
But how can a soul deal masterfully with problems by which it itself
426 WITH OUR READERS [Dec.,
is mastered? How can it direct torrents when torrents bear it away?
In The Custom of the Country, Mrs. Wharton seeks to deal with
problems that are ever nearest to the heart of man and of society
duty; tradition; education; marriage; responsibility; the bearing of
children; and she seeks to deal with them as they are looked upon
by the typical modern American woman. She writes a satire, but the
perplexing difficulty, and an insolvable one for the reader, is to know
what she satirizes and what she does not. One feels that Mrs. Whar-
ton is not sure herself, and that she knows no satisfying philosophy
of life. The mad whirlpool was too much for her, and, lest it drown
her altogether, she grows very serious at the last, and marries the
heroine to her first and, canonically speaking, her only husband.
* * * *
MRS. WHARTON might have freed her heroine from all scruples,
and not have worried her about that " annulment " from Rome.
This heroine, Undine Spragg, was married when a young girl in her
native city of Apex. She lived with her husband some months and
then, because of her father's entreaty, left him. The husband was
poor; she would be rich. Nothing is heard for a long time from the
young man. Undine goes to New York, and there, never mentioning
her former marriage, marries a man named Marvell. Later she is
divorced from Marvell, and expects to marry a certain Van Degen.
But he disappoints her. Then she seeks matrimony with a French
nobleman. Mrs. Wharton says that they could procure an annulment
from the Pope of her marriage with Marvell. The truth of the matter
is that there was no ground for annulment, since Undine was never
really married to Marvell. Marvell commits suicide, and then Mrs.
Wharton thinks the road is clear. Undine marries the nobleman and
becomes a Catholic! But, again, the truth is that had she attempted
to become a Catholic, she would have had to speak of her former
marriage, and would not have been allowed to live as the wife of this
Frenchman. Later she deserts the Frenchman, and throws herself
at the feet of her first and her only husband, Moffatt.
* * * *
HPHAT this book could have been written and could be published
1 by an American publisher, is a striking, thought-provoking com-
mentary on our country.
* * * *
WHAT makes it impossible for the reader to discriminate between
the satirical and the non-satirical, is the defence or the excuse
offered for this woman of iniquity. She is frankly materialistic;
selfish ; disloyal ; faithless to everything that could possibly be sacred ;
a liar; an adulteress; and yet she is not responsible for all this,
1913.] WITH OUR READERS 427
since institutions and customs have made her, and she could hardly act
otherwise than she does. Again, American morals, with all the rotten-
ness with which Mrs. Wharton paints them, are much better and health-
ier, according to her mind, than those of the French. On her own
confession, we are hardly in a position to make a comparison, and this
indirect defence of the terrible indictment she draws is one of the
puzzles of the book.
* * * *
1T7E do not ask Mrs. Wharton to defend the Catholic teaching upon
VV matrimony ; nor, if she knew that teaching, would we say that she
was outside her rights in dissenting from it. But what we may in
all justice ask is that, if she is going to write upon it, she might
at least properly inform herself. She would have no difficulty in
so doing. Any intelligent lay Catholic or any priest would have
given her the information in a few minutes. If she treated of any
secular subject, if she wished to employ a figure from physical science,
she would undoubtedly have made sure of its accuracy. But a matter
of Catholic teaching seems doomed to a different fate. There is no
responsibility to treat it honestly and intelligently. Another writer
of recent notoriety has shown the same ignorance as Mrs. Wharton.
* * * *
WE may justly say, then, that the fault is not intellectual, but moral.
" Thou shalt not bear false witness " still abides as a divine
commandment, whether novelists like Mrs. Wharton or Hall Caine
admit it or not. They write, however, without deep thought, and we
suppose that it is not the commandment, but rather the actual present
necessity of complying with it, that escapes them in their emotional
hurry.
* * * *
IT will be noted also and it is most profitable to note it in the light
of the new feminist movement that Mrs. Wharton, treating of a
woman, makes her a truly pitiable creature. Why is it that women
novelists of to-day, treating of women, always depict them without
character, without moral strength, the abject slaves of social condi-
tions? The picture of Undine offering herself to Moffatt at any price,
under any condition, is one of the most loathsome in all modern fiction.
* * * *
WHEN we deny the necessity of severe Christian virtue, and that
life-long renunciation which has made woman the greatest
power of the Christian world, is the only alternative for her the primi-
tive condition of a helpless slave to man, the brute? Does Chris-
tianity alone redeem woman? Mrs. Wharton's novel seems to be a
contribution towards an affirmative answer.
428 WITH OUR READERS [Dec.,
TO all interested in the welfare of humanity, we propose the study
of a new science, which we choose to call, "Book Hygiene."
Under this new science will be included not only books, but magazines,
journals, official organs, newspapers, and reading matter of every
kind and description. The supreme importance of this science will
be apparent at once if we recall the immense strain put upon wood pulp
and the printing press, and the fact that the output of books is in-
creasing every year, that it has now reached a point that successfully
challenges the most vivid imagination.
BOOKS treat of every subject in every conceivable way. Reticence
and the discipline of knowledge are unknown to them. They un-
scrupulously father every sort of theory and preachment affecting
every department of life and the very sources of life, physical,
intellectual, moral, social. There are many good books of course.
But our mind is centred on the question of hygiene: on the work of
lessening the activity of the too common pathogenic bacteria of irre-
sponsible and evil books. So if any one is interested in any phase of
the welfare of the individual or of society, he will take up with zeal
this crusade of book hygiene.
WE forbid by law the use of a common drinking cup. It may
look innocent and clean enough, but expert knowledge has taught
us it may hold disease germs, and to protect the public against itself we
forbid its use. In like manner we prohibit the common hair brush or
the common towel. Attempts are being made to effect legislation that
will put away the feeble-minded, to the end that the feeble-minded may
be unknown upon earth. We are endeavoring to enact laws that will
give a public health commission plenipotentiary powers to force all in-
fected with disease germs into asylums, or at least into isolation;
to prevent any but the physically well fit to contract marriage; to see
that the people eat nothing but pure food in a word to make asepsis
universal.
BUT, on the other hand, modern philosophy is revolting against the
rank materialism of forty years ago, and laying renewed em-
phasis upon spiritual values, upon the supreme worth of thought, and
of the power of mind. It is realizing the old truth that things
within defile a man ; that the most important requisite is to be clothed
with sense and to be in one's right mind; that unless there be the
mens sana, the corpus sanum is of very little use.
I9I3-] WITH OUR READERS 429
CHOULD not, therefore, the things that affect the very source, re-
vJ ceive the service of a greater zeal than the things that may flow
from the source? To free the Canal Zone from the carriers of
disease, Colonel Goethals did not take the doubtful and laborious
method of covering every stream and pool with disinfectant; no, he
went to the source of every stream, and by the simple device of a barrel
of disinfectant that gave drop after drop to the stream just as it was
born, he purified the whole district. So common sense teaches us that
it saves much labor, and produces far better results, to go to the source.
* * * *
ARE not the evils, even the physical evils of humanity, due in great
measure, and in their origins particularly, to a perversion, wilful,
or ignorant, of the laws of nature and of nature's God? To that
perversion ultimately may society trace its evils, and reformers the curse
from under which they would lift humanity. We do not for a moment
say that any of the means for combating disease should be neglected,
or that all physical evil is traceable immediately to a moral source.
But we do say that as the body is more than the raiment, so is the
soul more than the body.
TF we prohibit by law the agencies that convey the bacteria of physical
i- disease, shall we not prohibit the agencies that convey the germ of
moral and mental disease ? What would it profit us to have a nation of
physical giants, with weak minds and weaker characters? If we are
told that we must be safeguarded by experts from water that is ap-
parently pure, yet which contains harmful bacteria in abundance, or
from the air of certain districts that contains a plentiful supply of
germs, how much more ought we seek to protect by law, which is force,
the helpless ones from the infection of moral disease and death
scattered broadcast by books?
* * * *
IT matters not that the authors do not know, or that they accept
theories and doctrines other than those accepted by a normal,
healthy community. A .factory owner who did not accept the germ
theory, and who in consequence hung a roller towel in his employees'
wash room, would be arrested and fined, nor would the court have
any patience with his speculative theories. No more should the ignor-
ance or the egotism of authors give them permission to scatter the
germs of sickness and death. We bar the guiltless leper from the so-
ciety of men. Book hygiene will teach us at once to bar the leprous
writer from the public bookstalls, and the libraries, and the mails,
and the express companies.
430 WITH OUR READERS [Dec.,
IT will be seen that the attractions offered by this new science are
wonderful and quite comprehensive. Its field includes all other
sciences. It is like the care of souls, scientia scientiarum, the science
of sciences. Considering the state of the community it ought to have
a great vogue, and enlist under its banner every earnest social worker.
Since we began writing on it, we see that it has possibilities open to no
other hygiene movement of the present day. And hygiene itself, like
germs, is in the air. It has infected everybody. Therefore, we boast-
fully proclaim a great future for this new science. As soon as its
value becomes known, public exhibitions will be held showing the
disastrous effects of bad books and irresponsible newspapers. The
wealthy who have funds at their command, and who are so interested
in the real welfare of society, will endow the movement. Public
bodies will take it up and further it. Boards of Education will require
a special course on it from teachers, and appropriate money for text-
books in this new science. Class instructions will be given in our schools.
Wonderful and most happy will be the result when all have taken
up the new crusade, and enrolled themselves as members in the new
society to be called " The National League for the Promotion of Book
Hygiene."
THE General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, re-
cently in session in this city, enacted legislation and made some
notable pronouncements that are of interest outside their own com-
munion. We had hoped to give our readers, in this number of THE
CATHOLIC WORLD, a well-considered article, pointing out the condition
and trend of thought and affairs in that denomination; but the Epis-
copalian weeklies arrived too late for our purpose. Our readers may
look for the article in our next issue.
~\I 7E reprint here a letter from the late author of The Triumph of
VV Failure, which one of our readers has sent to us. The portion
of it which we give will show how consistently Father Sheehan applied
to his own private life the truths which he so ably presented in his
books.
DONERAILE, COUNTY CORK, March 25, 1905.
DEAR MR. R :
Your letter has just now reached my hands; and, amongst the many inter-
esting communications which my books have elicited from correspondents every-
where, I assure you that yours most deeply touched me. If an author has any
earthly reward for his labor, and the many cares and anxieties of authorship, it is
assuredly the consciousness that he has spoken to many kindred souls, separated
widely from him by space and association; but brought very close by com-
munity of sentiment and ideals.
I9I3-] WITH OUR READERS 431
Have you seen enough of life to be able to understand that the only thing
worth a moment's consideration to a thoughtful soul, is to make our individual
lives noble, and to separate our higher being from the accidents and environ-
ments of life? I speak as one who knows, when I say that success and failure,
honor and obscurity, and all other contrary elements in this mysterious life of
ours, are empty words, devoid of all meaning. It is the experience of all men
that, in middle life, we take the just view of human things; and that to all,
especially to those who are called to a life of higher thought, there remains
but one certainty, namely, that, surrounded as we are by mysteries, mysteries
that deepen as we advance in life, there is one certainty of faith that is, the
teaching of a Divinely-appointed Church ; and one certainty of action, that is,
the duty nearest to hand. And that all speculations, surmises, doubts, perplexi-
ties, are solved by action the performance of the duty that calls on us for
the moment. Our futures are in God's hands : we can neither make nor mar
them. The present only is ours. Fear not. You are in the hands of the
Father. He will make your pathway very clear and bright. With all kindliest
assurances, I am, dear Mr. R ,
Yours faithfully,
(Signed) P. A. SHEEHAN, P.P.
THE classes of Confraternity of Christian Doctrine have grown out
of a present-day need for an organized body of Catholic Sunday-
school teachers to work in our Catholic Settlement centres, and in
those parishes where lay teachers are required. Their aim is to instruct
young men and young women in the elements of pedagogy, and to pro-
mote the efficient teaching of the Catechism.
* * * *
T T NDER the auspices of the Confraternity, the Free Lecture Bureau
U of the Alumni Society of the New York Training School for
Catechists offers illustrated lectures free of charge for any evening
or for Sunday afternoons, to any church society desiring its services.
The screens, slides, lanterns, and operators are furnished free on
condition that no admission fee be charged.
A MONG the subjects offered are " Frederic Ozanam," " Joan of
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and Story," " Life of Our Lord," " Life of the Blessed Virgin," and
" Stones from the Old Testament " for children.
Applications for lectures must be made two weeks in advance
to Mr. Walter R. P. Smith, 514 57th Street, Brooklyn.
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THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XCVIII. JANUARY, 1914. No. 586.
THE EARLIEST MEN.
BY SIR BERTRAM C. A. WINDLE, M.D., SC.D., LL.D., F.R.S., F.S.A., K.S.G.,
President and Professor of Archeology, University College, Cork.
UESTIONS respecting the earliest human inhabitants
of the earth are not merely engaging the best atten-
tion of the learned, but are seriously occupying the
thoughts, and sometimes, it would appear, grievously
disturbing the minds of those who, without laying
any claim to the title of learned, extend their reading beyond the
limits of current fiction. No one indeed can read the newspapers
with any care without, from time to time as some new discovery
is made, having questions of the kind indicated forced upon his
attention. There is nothing wonderful in all this, indeed the won-
der would be if our attention were not attracted by such questions, so
closely related to ourselves and to matters which many of us hold
dear and which appear it is only an appearance, but it seems real
to those imperfectly acquainted with the facts which appear, I re-
peat, to conflict with those teachings of religion which we so pro-
foundly respect.
How long ago is it since man first appeared on this earth?
What sort of a person was this far-off ancestor ? Did he resemble
ourselves, or was he like any of the other races of human beings
with whom we are familiar? Or was he a creature whom we
should never recognize as a man and a brother if we were
able, like Peter Ibbetson and the Duchess of Towers in the story,
to dream ourselves backwards until we could in vision behold those
far-off days? How did this individual live? What did he make?
Had he any ideas about art? About God? About another life?
Copyright. 1913. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
VOL. xcvin. 28
434 THE EARLIEST MEN [Jan.,
All these and many other questions are constantly being asked, and
what is most strange are being asked not without considerable
prospect of an answer being returned, and that answer one which,
up to a point, we may quite reasonably accept in spite of the remote
and shadowy period to which it applies. To sketch very briefly the
replies to some of these questions, and to indicate as far as possible
the point at which reasonable certainty ceases and surmise some-
times legitimate, sometimes wholly visionary commences, is the
object of these papers. They are written in order that Catholics
who require such knowledge certainly not less urgently than other
people may know exactly what is established fact and what is
mere surmise, what, in other words may, nay must, be believed,
and what may be rejected or accepted, according as the wavering
balance is inclined this way or the other by fresh pieces of informa-
tion coming to light.
Before attacking the questions indicated, indeed as an essential
preliminary to any such attack upon them, it will be necessary to
clear our minds as to the fundamentals of chronology, for on an
easily understood misconception of those fundamentals depends a
great deal of the confusion and, further, of the unsettlement of mind
which exists on these questions.
We may say, then, that there are : Geological Time ; Archaeo-
logical Time, and Historical Time. And, we may add, that it is
important that these three should not be confused with one another.
Let us briefly consider each of them. Historical Time is the chro-
nology of recent events capable of being set down in actual, definite,
incontrovertible (usually) figures. Thus the Battle of Senlac took
place in A. D. 1066, and the Declaration of Independence on July
4, 1776. With facts of this kind we have nothing to do in these
papers, but with certain chronological problems, and notably with
that of the so-called Ussherian chronology we shall find ourselves
concerned in a later section. Meantime it may not be without
interest to consider how far back we can safely go in actual his-
torical chronology. As far as records go, Egypt and Babylonia
afford us the best chance, and of these Egypt is perhaps the better
known example. Now in the history of that country, we can
tread with security as far back as the conquest of Alexander (B. c.
332). But that period, need it be said? is only as yesterday in the
long history of this earth, or even of the history of man upon it.
From Alexander backwards to the commencement of what is known
as the First Dynasty, our path becomes less certain. There is a kind
I9I4-] THE EARLIEST MEN 435
of a chronology, but how uncertain and indefinite that is may be
gathered from the fact that the dates assigned for the commence-
ment of the First Dynasty vary from B. c. 3315 to B. c. 5510, and
that one of the leading authorities (Petrie), who in 1894 fixed the
date as 4777, has felt himself compelled by further evidence to
change his opinion, and assign B. c. 5510 as the proper date (in
1906). Yet even this period is only as the day before yesterday
in the history of the globe, or even of its human inhabitants. So
that we may safely say of Historical Time, that of the events of
to-day and of yesterday we are tolerably sure, and as to those of
the day before yesterday we can make reasonable guesses. Of
those of the days before that we know nothing, though we can
(and do) make many surmises as to them.
Archaological Time, which we may define, for our present
purposes, as commencing with that uncertain epoch when man first
made his appearance on this world, merges into Historical Time on
the one hand, and like Historical Time is, of course, co-existent with
Geological Time. In part, in very large part, and at its earlier
periods almost entirely as we shall see, Archaeological Time depends
upon Geological Time for its estimation. For it is by the strati-
graphical character of early deposits almost alone that we are able
to arrive at any conclusion, not merely as to their actual, but even
as to their relative chronological positions. We are quite safe at
present in assigning certain Periods to Archaeological Time, and
more or less safe in assigning certain objects to them. Thus there
was a time in every part of the world when mankind had no
knowledge of the use of metals, a time which we call the Stone
Age. But this time was by no manner of means synchronous in
all parts of the world. It is many a long year since Europe emerged
from this stage of its development: it is only the other day that
savage tribes in remote parts learnt that there were other imple-
ments than those they constructed from sticks and bones and stones.
This Stone Age may, in many if not most parts of the world,
be divided, roughly enough, into two periods : an earlier or Palaeo-
lithic, and a later or Neolithic, according to the character of the
implements made. The former may have been preceded by an
Eolithic Period; it merged into the latter, in some places at least,
by a Mesolithic Period. At any rate at the end of the Stone Period
man came into the knowledge of how to smelt and use metals, and
the Metallic Age commenced. After a brief Copper (or ^neo-
lithic) Period, which seems to have existed in many if not in most
436 THE EARLIEST MEN [Jan.,
places, a great manufacture of bronze, which is an alloy of copper
(ninety per cent) and tin (ten per cent) came into being, and this
is the characteristic material out of which implements were made
in the age named after it the Bronze Age.
As far as our present knowledge teaches us, and it is in the last
degree improbable that facts will ever arise to disturb the conclusion,
every race on this earth has at some time or another passed through
a Stone Age, an era or phase of their civilization during which they
were unacquainted with the use of metals. It is a little ambiguous
to use the term " Stone Age," since that would seem to imply that no
implements other than those made of stone were in use. Of course
this is not the case, for man availed himself of shell, horn, and
wood, as well as stone at this period. If we think of it as a non-
metallic age, we shall clarify our conception.
After having passed through this stage of development most
races arrived, by means which cannot here be discussed, at a knowl-
edge of the use of metals, and in some, perhaps in many instances,
the metal of which they made discovery was copper, and of copper,
at any rate in certain parts of the world, we find the earliest metallic
implements made. But the manufacture of stone implements did
not suddenly come to an end: it went on side by side with the
limited copper industry. To this period of transition, when there
was an overlap between the two forms of material, is given the
name of the ^neolithic Period. This period, wherever it occurred,
was probably one of short duration, for it was soon discovered
that the mixture of ten per cent of tin with the copper produced a
much harder and more useful metal, the mixture which we call
bronze. It is possible that metal first came under the notice of
some nations in the shape of bronze, that being brought to their
knowledge by travelers, and this would account for the fact that
there was no Copper Period in that particular area.
Throughout Europe, though not, as was the case with stone,
throughout the world, everywhere there has been a Bronze Age
preceding the discovery of iron, the dominant metal of the age in
which we ourselves live. We have seen that a race might have
escaped a Copper Age by having the more perfect metal bronze
introduced to them by travelers, whilst they were still in their
Stone Age. In the same manner within historic times tribes have
been discovered, unacquainted with the use of metal still in the
Stone Age to whom metal, in the shape of iron, has been presented
by travelers. Such races the native Australians for example
1914.] THE EARLIEST MEN 437
have never been through a Bronze Age. The Bronze Age was not,
therefore, universal throughout the world, nor was it synchronous
in those countries in which it is known to have existed. It prob-
ably commenced in Europe some four thousand years ago, and
lasted for something like two thousand years. But in Mexico
and Peru the native populations, up to a comparatively recent time,
were still in the Bronze Age.
What one has to remember about all these archaeological epochs
is, that they are not to be looked upon so much as periods of time,
but as successive reaches in a river of progress, arrived at sooner
in some cases, later in others. Perhaps the following table which
summarizes what has been said, will assist the reader.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL PERIODS.
Stone or Non-Metallic Age.
Eolithic Period ( ?)
Palaeolithic Period.
Neolithic Period.
Age of Transition from Stone to Metals.
^neolithic or Copper Period.
Metallic Age.
Bronze Period.
Iron Period.
With most of these periods we are not concerned in these pages,
but of the first two much remains to be discussed. This, however,
must be deferred to a later point.
We have now to turn to the subject of Geological Time, with
which a portion of our subject is inseparably bound up. Indeed, as
some writer has very aptly remarked, the problem of early man is
far more a problem of geology than a problem of biology.
Here again it has to be remarked that the use of the word
" time " in connection with geology, is more than a little misleading.
As in the case of archaeology, " time " in the sense of a definite
number of years can, as we shall shortly see, be applied only in the
most tentative manner to geological epochs. We can, with more
or less certainty, divide up the history of the world into geological
eras, and, though not always with complete certainty, assign a given
rock bed to its appropriate era, but when we come to attempt any
method of dating, in terms of years, the time when this era was in
being, we find ourselves confronted with a hitherto insuperable
problem.
Stratigraphically, however, we may divide Geological " Time "
438 THE EARLIEST MEN [Jan.,
into Primary or Palaeozoic; Secondary or Mesozoic; Tertiary or
Cainozoic, and Quaternary or Post-Tertiary. With the first two
of these, comprising vast areas of rock and formed during vast,
almost inconceivable ages of the world's history, we have nothing
to do in these notes, since man is not directly connected with them.
But in order to follow what has yet to come, it is necessary to deal
somewhat more particularly with the two latest of these periods,
and proceeding from the earlier to the later, we may set down the
following classification :
LATER GEOLOGICAL PERIODS.
Tertiary.
Eocene. Here there is no question of man.
(Wanting in Britain). At the
Oligocene. end of this Thenay flints ; and
Miocene. at the beginning of Miocene
Aurillac flints (see page 445).
Pliocene. At the upper part of this, or at the lower part
of the next, is the Red or Norwich Crag, associated
with the rostro-carinate forms (see page 446).
Quaternary.
Pleistocene or Glacial. Recent, which brings us down
to the present moment.
Incidentally some points in connection with these periods will
arise in our consideration of the relics of early man. There is only
one point which must be dealt with here, and that is the question
of the Glacial Period. This is a matter which cannot be entered
into at any great length, but at least the following points must be
borne in mind, since they are closely connected with the early
history of man upon this earth. During the Pleistocene Period, the
whole of the earth was more or less affected by intense cold, and
there were very special centres of glaciation in Northeastern Amer-
ica and in Northwestern Europe. During the more vigorous epochs
of the Great Ice Age, the areas concerned were covered with snow,
ice, and glaciers, much as Greenland is at the present day. And an
enormous area was concerned.
If we follow [says Sollas]* the southern boundary of the ice,
we shall find that it will take us out of Britain, and lead us right
across the continent of Europe. After stretching from Kerry
to Wexford, and through the Bristol Channel to London, it
crosses the sea, continues its course through Antwerp, past
* Ancient Hunters, p. 10 et. seq.
1914.] THE EARLIEST MEN 439
Madgeburg, Cracow, Kiev, runs south of Moscow to Kazan,
and then terminates at the southern end of the Ural Mountains.
All that lies to the north of this line the greater part of the
British Isles, Northern Germany,* Scandinavia, and almost the
whole of European Russia was buried out of sight beneath a
mantle of ice formed by the confluence of many colossal glaciers.
And with regard to North America the same writer says :
The great terminal moraine which marks the southern bound-
ary of the ice can be traced with occasional interruptions from
Nantucket, through Long Island, past New York, towards the
western extremity of Lake Erie, then along a sinuous course in
the same direction as the Ohio, down to its confluence with the
Mississippi ; then it follows the Missouri as far as Kansas City,
and beyond runs approximately parallel to that river but south
of it, through Nebraska, Dakota, Montana, and Washington,
where it meets the coast north of Columbia River. Within
this boundary nearly the half of North America was buried
beneath a thick sheet of ice, flowing more or less radiately out-
wards from a central region situated in and about the region
of Hudson Bay.
It is obvious that tracts of land thus covered with glaciers and
snow could not have been favorable, even though they were possible,
places for the habitation of man. But it seems certain that during
the period described as the Great Ice Age, there were lengthy epochs
during which milder conditions of climate prevailed, the glaciers re-
ceded, vegetation began to flourish where formerly it had been im-
possible, and, in a word, it was possible for man to carry on his life
in greater comfort than could possibly be afforded by icy snow-clad
plains. Whether these genial intervals were local or general, and
how many of them there were, are still points much discussed by
geologists.
I believe that American geologists postulate six ice periods
with five genial intervals, and the same was claimed for Europe by
Croll. Sollas and others divide the Glacial Age into eight periods,
four of glaciation and four of genial conditions. To show how
doubtful everything known about this period except that there was
a period of glaciation still remains, it may be mentioned that it
has recently been claimed by a competent authority that there was
"There is a school of geologists which believes that during much of the Glacial
Period, Britain and Germany were submerged, and that many of the appearances
visible to-day are attributable to floating ice. But the greater weight of geological
opinion is on the side of the explanation given above.
440 THE EARLIEST MEN [Jan.,
no more than one genial interval in Britain, and that even this was
doubtful.*
However this may be, we may proceed on the assumption that
things were as Sollas lays down, and can tentatively adopt the fol-
lowing subdivision of the period given by Hoernes.f This brings
together geological, palseontological, and archaeological facts, some
of which will have to be much more carefully considered later on,
and when they are being considered, the meaning of some of the
technical terms belonging to the last-named science will be explained.
THE GREAT ICE AGE.
A. FIRST ICE AGE (Pliocene according to Geikie).
a. First Interglacial Period. Fauna includes Elephas
meridionalis, antiquus, and primigenius. Chelleo-
Mousterian.
B. SECOND ICE AGE. Hiatus : at least east of France.
b. Second Interglacial Period. Age of the Mammoth.
Bears, lions, and hyaenas inhabit the caves. Solu-
trean.
C. THIRD ICE AGE. Disappearance of the older pleistocene
fauna and appearance of arctic animals. (Reindeer,
wolverine.)
c. Third Interglacial Period.
(a) Reindeer or Magdalenian Period throughout
all Middle Europe.
(b) Red-deer or Asylian (Tourassian) Period in
Western Europe.
D. FOURTH ICE AGE. Arisian (Stage coquiliere) in South
France. Hiatus elsewhere in Europe.
d. Post-Glacial Period. Commencement of Neolithic
Period.
CAN WE MAKE ANY ESTIMATE OF THE TIME REQUIRED FOR THESE
OCCURRENCES?
In books of history, we find it set down that William the Con-
queror reigned from A. D. 1066 to 1087. Less sharp-cut, but suf-
ficiently definite, is the statement in books on architecture that the
early English period of Gothic belonged to the thirteenth, and the
decorated to the fourteenth century. It would be exceedingly con-
venient and enlightening if we were able to say that the fourth ice
age extended from B. c. - to B. c. , or even to say that it
covered so many years, and was approximately so many years ago.
It is not the fault of geologists that this cannot be done, or has
*Lamplugh, Brit. Ass., York, 1906.
\Der Diluviale Mensch in Europa, p. 8.
I9I4-] THE EARLIEST MEN 441
not been done. Numerous have the efforts been to solve the ques-
tion, and equally diverse the answers made to the riddle. I shall
not here refer to the very varying views which have been expressed
by scientific authorities as to the age of the world, but will content
myself by saying a few words as to the so-called "geological clocks."
What is wanted to solve the question under consideration, is some
kind of standard of comparison between past and present processes.
For instance, no one now doubts that with exceptions which need
not here be considered the processes which have shaped the world
as it now is, are the same kind of processes which are shaping the
world into what it will be in ages yet to come. If we could ac-
curately measure the result of one of these processes to-day, and
then compare it with the result of a similar process in the past,
we surely ought to be able to estimate the amount of time which
it would take that process to bring about that result.
In other words, we should have a " geological clock." Before
mentioning a few instances of these, it may be as well to point out
that a clock is useless as a measure of time, unless it is invariable
in its operations, unless in fact, as we put it, " it keeps time."
That is just what none of the " geological clocks " do. To leave
the metaphor, we can never feel sure that the conditions of the pro-
cess in the past have been identical with, or even very similar to,
those which we have been concerning ourselves with in the present.
In fact we can feel pretty certain that they were anything but
identical. But if they were not identical, our " clock " which is not,
like chronometers, " compensated " for all sorts of conditions under
which it may find itself, must necessarily fail to " keep time," and
this must necessarily deceive us if we place our confidence in it.
Let us examine one or two cases in order to understand this some-
what important matter more fully.
There is, first of all, the matter of erosion by rivers. It is
quite clear that river erosion has been going on for a good many
years, and it is equally clear that it is going on at the present day;
can we not measure the annual amount of erosion now taking place,
and from the amount which has been eroded in the past, which
can often be ascertained without much danger of error, form some
conclusion as to the length of time which has elapsed since the
river began its work, and so of the various deposits associated with
it? This apparently simple calculation is vitiated by two things.
In the first place, it is by no manner of means easy to gauge the
annual amount of erosion, a fact which is abundantly proved by
the very different estimates arrived at in selected cases by different
442 THE EARLIEST MEN [Jan.,
observers. Thus, for example, Sir Charles Lyell, a great authority
in geological matters, estimated that the amount of time required for
the erosion of a certain stretch of the Niagara Gorge was forty
thousand years, an estimate, of course, based upon his calculation
as to the annual amount of erosion. Yet, in 1907, C. K. Gilbert
stated, in the publications of the United States Geological Survey,
that in his opinion the amount of time required for the piece of
work in question would be no more than seven thousand six hun-
dred years. In fact, with all respect be it said, these estimates are
and must, so it would appear, always be, guesses guesses made by
men more likely to guess right than wrong perhaps, but, in the end,
only guesses, and thus very far removed from being scientific facts
as the more enthusiastic papers and magazines are prone to repre-
sent them. But there is yet another source of fallacy, and it is this :
The conditions cannot be shown to be constant, nay more, every-
thing points to the fact that they have been extremely inconstant
during past ages. But this state of affairs would wholly upset the
accuracy of our clock, and render any calculations based upon its
record wholly fallacious.
In a very interesting little book on ancient human remains,*
Professor Keith claims that the Thames is a reliable clock. " The
Thames itself," he says (p. 22), "is to be our clock one which
has never ceased to mark time and record history on its banks and
valley." No doubt, but are we quite clear that it has always
" kept time," even if we are quite clear that we know that " time? "
Professor Keith makes the " provisional estimate " that subsidence
has taken place at the rate of one foot per thousand years, and
apparently that this rate has been a constant one. Thus he is able
to date his skeletons at ten, twenty, thirty thousand years ago.
But in this calculation all reference is omitted to the very differing
physical conditions which must have existed during the long space
of years which has rolled by since the Thames began its work.
Nothing seems clearer than the fact that during quite a considerable
part of that era, the volume of water discharged must have been
enormously greater than that which has flowed under London
Bridge since that was built. And this greater volume, of course,
would mean a much more rapid erosion. Which, in its turn, would
wholly upset the calculation as to time based upon it.f
*Ancient Types of Man.
tThat the calculation in question which would place the man of Galley Hill
at 200,000 years ago, and those of Neanderthal at 500,000 to 1,500,000 years ago, are
not acceptable to other workers, is obvious from the criticism of the work in question
by M. M. Boule in L'Anthropologie (vol. xxiii., p. 218), in which, after speaking of the
1914.] THE EARLIEST MEN 443
It is quite clear that estimates of time of this character, how-
ever picturesque they may be, and however seductive to the journal-
ist in search of a sensation, are quite useless and not to be depended
upon. The same story applies to other geological clocks. Take
the case of those glaciers which have been in operation during the
Glacial Period, and are still in being. De Mortillet selected these
as his " clock," and based his calculations on the length of time
which, as he calculated, it would have taken the Rhone glacier to
deposit its terminal moraine, namely forty thousand years. But it
is quite clear that the Swiss glaciers are comparatively trifling
objects to what they must have been during the Great Ice Age.
Dom Izzard* points out that
glaciers of the Glacial Period cannot be compared to their de-
generate descendants now remaining in the Alps, but rather with
the glaciers of Alaska and the Himalayas. In a recent official
communication of the geological survey of India, it is attested
that in 1903 the glacier of Hassanabad extended itself in two
months a distance of nine thousand six hundred metres. The
Rhone glacier during the glacial epoch would be a vast mass of
ice similar to this, and if it had advanced towards Lyons at
the pace of the Himalayan glacier, it would have covered the
. distance in thirty years. The Alaskan glaciers do not furnish us
with any rapid progress such as this, but they move much more
rapidly than the present Alpine glaciers, and in addition the rate
of neighboring glaciers at the same period seems very variable.
We cannot, therefore, take the present day Alpine glaciers as
standards for movement in the glacial epoch.
Finally, there is the question of the deposition of stalagmite,
to which allusion may be made. When an inscription as to the
genuineness of which no doubt seems to be entertained was dis-
covered in Kent's Cave near Torquay, with the date 1688, and with
a thin coat of stalagmite over it, it seemed as if we might get some
ratio as to the time which must have been taken in forming the
vast floors of stalagmite investigated in that cavern beneath which
were objects of human manufacture. Yet observations in another
cave after a great flood which had lifted the floors, brought to
light ginger-beer bottles under a layer of stalagmite a foot in thick-
ness. The fact is that the rate of deposition of stalagmite depends
upon a whole range of factors, such as the amount of moisture
author as " peu familiarise certainement avec les questions de geologic et d'archeo-
logie prehistorique," he goes on to quote his estimates of age, and speak of their
" imprudente hardiesse."
*In a very interesting and useful paper in The Oscotian, 1913.
444 THE EARLIEST MEN [Jan.,
and the quantity of dissolved carbonic acid which it contains, and
no estimate of time can be founded upon it with any sort of security.
The above remarks may seem rather too prolonged, but the
matter has purposely been dealt with in some detail, and for this
reason : The vast epochs of time assigned for the existence of the
human race upon the earth, are based upon calculations of the
character of those just dealt with. Little wonder is it that there
are such extraordinary discrepancies between the findings as to
time of one writer and of another. The important point to bear in
mind is that, whether long or short, the chronologies of geologists
are all more or less of the nature of guesses founded on guesses,
and as such liable to revision, and possibly to complete alteration
as fresh facts come to light.
MAN AND HIS IMPLEMENTS.
As far as our present knowledge, we know of the existence of
man upon this earth by the implements which he made before we
know of him by his physical remains. The question bristles with
difficulties as we have yet to see, but, on the whole, the statement
just made may be taken to represent our knowledge at the moment.
Nor is this difficult to explain. In his earliest days man no doubt
used any object which came to his hand, stick, stone or shell, pro-
vided that it was capable of doing the bit of work which he had
in hand at the time, whether that bit of work was the slaying of
an animal, the preparation of its skin for wearing purposes or what
not. Some of the implements thus employed would be perishable,
and have long since disappeared, others those of stone would
be practically imperishable, and these are what have come down to
us as the earliest relics, though we have also objects of bone and horn
of great antiquity. Much dispute exists as to which are the earliest
objects, which are quite clearly the work of man's hands, and it may
be well to explain very briefly why this should be so. The first
point to bear in mind is, that the utilitarian ideas of early man
would very naturally lead him to use a natural piece of stone, where
such would serve his purpose without any shaping or alteration.
It is obvious that it must always be very difficult, and usually quite
impossible, to detect the fact that a given fragment of stone was
once an implement used by man, when that fragment has not been
obviously shaped by intention for some purpose. Let us proceed a
stage further, and suppose man shaping his stones so as to become
somewhat more serviceable implements than the natural pebble or
flake. It can hardly be doubted that these first attempts would be
1914.] THE EARLIEST MEN 445
so exceedingly like the results of nature's own operations as to
render it a very difficult, perhaps an impossible, task to decide
whether a given object had been produced by the one agency or
the other. Then, however, there comes a stage when the evidence
of workmanship becomes clearer, and in the mind of the expert no
sort of doubt is left that the rude fragment of stone which he is
examining has been purposely fabricated by the hand of man. Yet
even here, when these discoveries were first made, the scientific
world was exceedingly incredulous. It is not necessary here to
detail how Boucher des Perthes, in the middle of the last century,
made his classical discoveries of palaeolithic implements at Abbe-
ville in France, of the controversy which arose as to the nature of
these objects, and of their final acceptance by all men of science.
It is as well to bear this history in mind when one is considering
other and still unsettled controversies with regard to so-called im-
plements.
After these preliminary remarks, we may now turn our atten-
tion to some of the fragments of stone which have been claimed as
the work of man's hands. In 1867 the Abbe Bourgeois discovered
at Thenay, near Orleans, broken flints which he believed to be im-
plements of human manufacture. These were in beds of the Upper
Oligocene Period, and since no signs of human remains had or have
been found of that geological date, de Mortillet, who was convinced
of the human character of the implements, postulated a semi-human
precursor of man as their manufacturer, and named him Homosi-
mius bourgeoisii. It may be added that no trace of this imaginary
creature has ever been discovered, and that the flints themselves are
now believed to have been of natural origin, i. e., not shaped by the
hands of man, but by natural causes, such as water, earth-pressure,
lightning perhaps, and so on. A similar statement may be made as
to the Puy Courny flints described by J. B. Rames in 1877, and
found by him in Upper Miocene beds in Auvergne. De Mortillet
again postulated a hypothetical Homosimius Ramesii (who has
never materialized) as their maker.
Omitting other less important cases, we may come to the
question of the so-called " eoliths," as to which so much controversy
has been carried on during the past twenty years or more. These
objects, which have been found in considerable quantities in England
and on the Continent, are undoubtedly of great antiquity, though
their exact geological position is not certain. Up to a comparatively
recent period, there was a strong body of opinion favorable to their
446 THE EARLIEST MEN [Jan.,
artificial nature, but the most recent observations have rendered
their character much more doubtful. That such implements may be
formed by cart wheels from the flints newly laid upon a road, proves
but little, for after all that is a form of work by man, though un-
intentional, and is not strictly comparable to the operations of na-
ture. Something similar may perhaps be said as to the discovery
that " eoliths " can be and are produced by the revolutions of an
iron rake, in a mixture of water with chalk (containing flints)
and clay, in the process of cement making as practised near Mantes.
But the most crushing piece of evidence is that brought for-
ward by the learned Abbe Breuil,* who has found " eoliths " in
Lower Eocene sands in Clermont, with the detached flakes in situ,
showing how the process has taken place. He has proved conclu-
sively that these so-called implements can be made by one process
of nature, and that a process which must have been in operation dur-
ing long ages, and even at this present moment, and that process
is the gradual movements of strata whilst settling down under
pressure of the soil. This pressure causes the flint nodules to be
squeezed against one another, and thus flakes to be detached which
eventuate in the " eolith." Now it may be taken for granted that
no implement or so-called implement can be accepted as unquestion-
ably the work of man's hands, unless it is quite clear that it cannot
owe its shape to any other cause. It has been shown that " eoliths "
can be produced by purely natural means. Therefore it cannot be
shown that any of them were the works of the hands of man.
Nevertheless the fact remains that we ought to expect to find some-
thing much more rude than the comparatively finished implements
which have yet to be dealt with. The only question is whether we
shall be able when such finds are submitted to us to say, with
the slightest certainty, whether they were made by man or not.
We may pass from these to the Icenian or rostro-carinate im-
plements, found by Mr. Moir below the base of the Red Crag of
Suffolk, and described very carefully by Sir Ray Lankester.* The
geological period to which the Red Crag belongs is not quite clear.
It has usually been assigned to the Pliocene series, but Sir Ray
thinks that this is an error; that its fauna proves that it should
be included in the Pleistocene Age. At any rate it is of great
antiquity, and, if the objects described be really of human manufac-
ture, a point on which Professor Sollas has recently thrown doubt,
*L'Anthropologie, 1910, vol. xxi., p. 385.
^Philosophical Transactions, pp. 202, 283.
1914.] THE EARLIEST MEN 447
they unquestionably set back the date of man's appearance on the
earth to a very distant date. The position of these flints must at
present be left undecided until the controversy has developed, and
further facts as in the case of the " eoliths " appear, when it is
possible that a definite opinion, one way or another, may be cap-
able of expression.
De Mortillet divided the Palaeolithic epoch into four periods
each, associated with a special culture or form of implement. This
scheme has been somewhat enlarged by other workers, and Sollas'
modification may here be given, as it will serve as a convenient
scheme when dealing with human remains in the later portion of
this paper.
Commencing with the earlier and proceeding to the later stages
we have
Mesvinian.
Strepyan. Lower Paleolithic,
Chellean.
Acheulean.
Mousterian. Middle Paleolithic.
Aurignacian. '
Solutrian. Upper Paleolithic.
Magdalenian.*
In connection with this it may be added that the Mesvinian
and Strepyan Periods are as yet not fully accepted by all authorities
on prehistoric archaeology ; the " implements " belonging to them
may or they may not be the work of man's hands. But with the
Chellean, at any rate, we enter a region where there is no doubt,
nor of course is there with regard to any of the later sub-divisions
of the Palaeolithic Age. After this has passed away, the Neolithic
Period is entered upon, as stated at an earlier part of this paper.
The difference between the kinds of implements found in the various
stages of the Palaeolithic Age are very marked and very interesting,
but, from the point of view of this paper, it will not be necessary to
deal with them here. We mark the fact that there are such dif-
ferences, and that they are quite recognizable, and pass on.
*De Mortillet's four periods were : Chellean from Chelles, a few miles east
of Paris ; Mousterian from the cave of Moustier on the river Vezere, Dordogne ;
Solutrian from the cave at Solutre near Macon, and Magdalenian from the rock-
shelter of La Madeleine, Dordogne.
[TO BE CONCLUDED.]
A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM.
BY JOHN AYSCOUGH.
V.
OME of those who came to the " meetings " were a
little impatient to hear more quickly about the Catho-
lic religion that is of a religion which it had not
occurred to them was simply Christianity. But
neither of the priests seemed in a hurry : their great
desire, odd as it seemed to many, was to talk about God. The need
of religion was their theme for quite a long time. The
reality of God was the first truth to bring home, and
that it was always realized they would not take for granted.
So very old stories were told again: of God alone; of His first
creation of the angels ; of the great rebellion and the war in heaven
and the beginning of hell; of the second creation, and man's
original beatitude and original fall from it; of the initial promise of
Redemption, and then of the long, slow preparation for it; of the
making of a nation from whom the Redeemer should be born, Who
should be God and Man both able to suffer and capable of re-
deeming; of the history of the nation, and God's patience; of the
nation's true but not full revelation; of its saints and prophets; of
the choice of one family out of the nation; of the choice of one
woman out of the family; and of the prophecy fulfilled, the Virgin-
born Child, and His deliberate experience of every phase of our
life, except decay, to which He was the Antidote; of His office
Supreme Teacher, Master of Revelation, Divine Physician, Sover-
eign Consoler and Sovereign Sufferer, Redeemer, Lifegiver, and
Founder; and so at last to the Church.
By this time the preachers had shown that there had always
been a revelation, clear and certain, though not at first entire
and full; that there had in fact always been a Church and a true
one; that God never stands still in His work for man or goes
back upon it, but has moved forward to wider perfection of rela-
tions with men; that if Christ's Church had not been Catholic
there would have been no advance, but decay and decline in the
relations of God and man. The first presentation of a Church had
I9I4-] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 449
been personal and private, the second national : the full achieve-
ment universal, Catholic. God had spoken to Adam, and to
Abraham privately; to the holy Hebrew nation He had not ceased
to speak, but had spoken on, in a wider fashion, through the
prophets : that if His voice had fallen into final silence with the
coming of Christianity, then would the Christian world have been
in less noble relations with Him than Adam, or the Patriarchs, or
the Hebrew nation; but God's relations with man were not to be
thrown back by the coming of Christ, Who was Himself Man as
He was God, but to be moved onward to a nobler intimacy and
permanence. It was not enough to say that Christ had said all
there could be said : it was true that He had ; but would man, left
alone, remember? Had Adam, to whom God spoke directly, re-
membered ? Had David ? Had the Hebrew people, in spite of all
God had taught them by the prophets? It was irritable man, not
patient God, that expected man to behave like the angels who see
God. God never did, and His whole history in reference to man
has been the history of an untiring condescension. Was His con-
descension to cease with Christ's return to heaven? The founda-
tion in perpetuity of the Catholic Church was His final and supreme
proof of condescension to human need and weakness. The rela-
tions of God and man were not to be made less intimate, but more ;
the old occasional intercourse was to be made unceasing and per-
petual; Christ had not withdrawn Himself from men to His in-
visible throne, but hidden Himself among them forever, in a shining
white Disguise that should be no Disguise at all to faith and love;
in the old days before the foundation of the Hebrew Church
there had been a word from God now and then, to one lonely man
or another; in the days of the Hebrew Church there had been occa-
sional but wider speech, through the prophets, to a whole people
if they would listen; in the Catholic Church w r as to be a Voice living
and unbroken, still God's, but no longer whispered in a private ear
or delivered as an exclusive message to one isolated people.
Even in the days of the Hebrew Church God had let a prophet
tell one guilty sinner how to amend; and how, amended, he was
forgiven ; in the Catholic Church there was not a prophet, here and
there, for a sinful king's need, but for every sinner, however lowly,
a priest to bring him God's guiding to repentance, and God's mes-
sage of full pardon. In the Hebrew Church's day the will of
God was proclaimed by a prophet now and then, in the new Catholic
Church was a Voice from God, authorized by Himself, to promul-
VOL. xcvin. 29
450 A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Jan.,
gate His Will unfailingly, in every shift of time, that all might walk
in healthy certainty, not groping or stumbling along with blind
guides for leaders.
The need and promise of Redemption was shown, and the
need and promise of a perfect Church; the promise of Redemption
was re-told and the fulfillment of the promise; the promise of the
Church upon a rock and the fulfillment in fact of the promise.
In hurried and arid words I have tried to sum up what was
taught, not hurriedly nor in dry phrases, by two earnest, clever men,
in instructions which it took them a fortnight to deliver. Often
they had to say over again, in other words, what had been said once.
To repeat their words would fill a book. What I desire here is
simply to show that the string of their sayings was not tangled,
twisted nor broken ; that those who listened and accepted their mes-
sage were not silly, nor led away by novelty and sentiment. That the
whole aim of these men was to force their hearers to think of God,
and of man's relations with God; as it is the whole aim and business
of the Catholic Church. That the aim of the Catholic Church is
to muffle up God, and hide Him, to push herself before Him, and
steal the allegiance of His creatures from Him for her own vulgar
purposes, is the pretense of the vulgar ; but many at simple Railham
were not vulgar-hearted, and the truth came to them as an awaken-
ing.
Almost all who listened, so far as they had ever thought of
the subject at all, had dimly possessed the idea that God, since
the old Bible days, had grown more remote; that in a past so
distant as to seem half -legendary, half -unreal, God and man had
been bound together by an intercourse that was personal, actual
and easy to understand, in spite of its hanging in a haze of miracle.
But that those days were gone forever, and that, from the world in
which men lived now, God was withdrawn to the impenetrable
recesses of heaven. His voice was never to be heard, and, since
creation was finished long ago, He could be seen no more in His
acts.
This vague sense of Divine aloofness was specially distinctive
of that part of the audience which nominally went to church, but
it was not theirs exclusively : many of the Dissenters had much the
same feeling, though not quite all.
The old days of early Methodism were long past, and the
heirs of those simple, very earnest people had largely been taught
to turn their attention to a more worldly inheritance. Both at
1914-] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 451
Arannah and Bethesda there had been for some time as much crude
political talk as crude theological oratory; some of those who at-
tended the two chapels liked it very well, and some were more
puzzled than nourished ; odd things about the old books of the Bible,
too, had been said by strange preachers who came from the big
midland and northern towns to enlighten Railham's rustic ignor-
ance. There was not much in either Bethesda or Arannah to con-
nect them with the chapel in Little Lantern yard ; they were a good
deal advanced; for on each was creeping a certain pale dawn of
timidly agnostic rationalism.
To almost all of those who attended the " van chapel " meet-
ings, it was a new and great idea that God's relations with man
might be more intimate than ever. The Church had been a word
with little meaning to them; to some it was a part of politics, and
not a vital part. To some it seemed an institution that should,
with all convenient speed, be abolished: they who did not care
much to see it abolished, cared not much more that it should be
maintained. To themselves it mattered not greatly, and it would
never have occurred to them that it mattered to God. The Church
of which Father Catesby and Father Longcliff spoke was a new
idea altogether; it was not hard to see that the two priests spoke
of their Church as one speaks of a living being, with a life vigorous
and full of motion and consciousness, a thing of vital consequence,
of indispensable usefulness and service to live men and women.
These two men clearly loved it, and obeyed it, were taught by it,
and were as certain, as they were of being alive, that their business
in life was to belong to it and be formed by it.
It is a shame to speak as if only bad influences are contagious:
unbelief has its microbes, and they attack souls made ready for
them by spiritual apathy and evil living; but faith is infectious
too, and the plain fact of faith in the two priests did as much for
their hearers as anything they said. Their belief in God was as
obvious as their figures and outward appearance, and it was equally
clear that their belief in their Church was a part of their faith in
God. Of course some who listened had absorbed, somehow, some
dim notion that the Roman Catholics set up their Church as a rival
to God: that its great object was to make people give over think-
ing about God and think about it instead. No one hearing these
priests could believe that they separated God from the Church, that
the Church was their Golden Calf, to which the world was to bow
down while God was hidden in highest Sinai.
452 A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Jan.,
Of those who came to the first meeting few expected to hear
much about God : God was not, as they had supposed, the business
of Catholic preachers, and they had heard about scarcely anything
else. The business of the Catholic Church, these priests evidently
believed, was nothing else than to make God more familiarly known,
more truly loved, and more unhesitatingly obeyed. It was not to
be doubted that the strange priests firmly believed that ever since
Christ went back to heaven the Catholic Church had been doing His
work on earth; that millions of men in many lands had only heard
of God from her, and by her had been taught to love God and
live in His law; that all they knew of God themselves they had
learned from her: and few of their simple hearers failed to
recognize that the priests had a knowledge of God, an understanding
of His ways, and an indubitable, close personal love for Him, more
actual and real than anything they had then encountered.
Nothing appeals to simple people like facts: the fact of the
priests' faith they could see as clearly as they could see the men
themselves ; and it had a force far stronger than that of any theory.
And it was plain that in that faith there was no divided allegiance,
so much to God, so much to the Church ; but the faith in God had
produced the faith in the Church, because it was His Church, His
servant, and His own invention.
If the reader imagines that he is to hear of all becoming
Catholics who attended the meetings, he will be disappointed. But
some did, and, perhaps, the first step in belief was with many a
yielding to that infection of good of which I spoke just now. If the
Catholic Church could lead these men, and had led hundreds of mil-
lions besides, to God and happiness, why might it not lead them?
That the Church called them, and claimed them, the priests showed,
just as they showed how God calls and claims all. That Christ's own
claim could have no excuse or justification, except in the fact that
He is God, they said frankly; and the universal claim of the Church
was involved in the claim of Christ, and had, could have, no other
excuse or justification. If there were many gods, there could not
be one Church with a supreme claim on all men ; but one God implied
one only truth about God, and one truth implied one teaching
of it. The truth could no more be divided against itself than God
could : black and white cannot be equally true of any real color.
It may show how ignorant was this audience if we confess
that few of them had ever thought of Christ as the greatest of
teachers: to the best of them He was only a teacher of kindness,.
I9I4-] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 453
and of nothing much besides. Nor had it struck them that to learn
the truth was a definite duty, and, like every duty exacted by God,
quite possible.
It may seem, perhaps, from my own poor attempt at summing
up briefly what took a long while to say, that the two priests
appealed too much to the intelligence of people to whom anything
like a theological idea was a strange novelty ; but the words actually
used were always the most simple and direct, and all those who
heard were not stupid, though most were ignorant enough. Plenty
of them were shrewd in their way, and able to acknowledge a truth
better than they might be able to follow the arguments by which
it was set forth. Tom Tulliver, we may remember, while " he was
in a state bordering on idiocy with regard to the demonstration that
two given triangles must be equal," could discern with great promp-
titude and certainty the fact that they were equal. And there are
facts and truths as appealing as any in geometry : there were those
in the Railham audience to whom the presentation of such truths
and facts did not appeal in vain even when the theological proofs
of them were rather obscuring than otherwise. Father Catesby
and Father Longcliff, however, did not belabor their hearers with
much theology: they were content to be truthful, direct, and as
clear as they could be.
Only a few of the Railham folk have been mentioned here
by name : many whose names have not occurred were among those
who put themselves in the priests' hands for regular instruction;
and not all of those whom we have mentioned by name did so.
Among those who did were young Mr. David Brail, the wealthy
farmer's son, and Enoch Pound, and Jake Sheen, and Tom Hallam :
everybody thought that what Tom did Bill would do also, for
the brothers were inseparable, and Bill was like Tom's echo; but
the elder brother became a Catholic, and the younger, so far as I
know, has never done so. Nor did Stephen Drub: he declared,
with perfect truth, that he had never heard of a carrier that was a
Catholic though eighty- four carriers came to Market Railham
every Tuesday and Thursday ; and he was People's Church Warden :
if he deserted them they might feel driven to elect Job Phibbet,
as they was talking of electing before, and Job was under Farmer
Lome's thumb to that extent that there might as well be no People's
Warden and then the gallery'd come down: who had saved the
gallery if it wasn't him, Stephen Drub? And in the gallery were
pews as families had sat in since they was families. It was all
very well for a young unmarried man like Tom Alum to please
454 A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Jan.,
hisself : he had no public position and no public dooty. He knew
very well the Parish'd niver elect he to be People's Warden : that's
where it lay. Not as he'd a word to say agin the Catholics : Father
Catesby and Father Longcliff was both gentlemen, and he'd gone
to the meetin's spite of all the Lomes in Europe, and would again
if he liked; nor he hadn't no wishes to interfere wi' Miriam he'd
always let her please her sen: if Arannah pleased her well and
good; if the Catholic meetin's pleased her better he should niver
say her nay. Why should he begin as hadn't begun before?
From this it will appear that when Mr. Drub said that it was
all very well for an unmarried man like Tom Hallam to please
himself, he was not alluding to any conjugal difficulties of his own.
If Drub had wished to become a Mussulman, he would have done
so in spite of any opposition Miriam might have raised; but, as it
happened, to the considerable surprise of Mrs. Yest and Mrs. Sheen,
Miriam became a Catholic herself. Mrs. Yest was mildly jealous,
without in the least knowing why. Mrs. Sheen, since Jake was
" joining the Catholics," was prepared to quarrel with anybody who
saw any harm in it, and did quarrel pretty often with Simon Yest,
accordingly: also with Farmer Lome who congratulated her on
sticking to the Church of England.
" My niece and your son," he said, " have run after these
strangers from Lord knows where; I'm glad you're staunch to the
old religion, like me."
" Well, Mr. Lome, the old religion as you call it (and Jake's
new religion, by all I hear, is the oldest of the two), has niver run
after me much, nor yet after my son. I'm sure I might be dead
and Mr. Broad know naught about it, till he was asked if Sunday
arternoon would suit him for the funeral. I'm sure nobody iver
did much to make my lad care for the Church of England, and
if he cares about this other it's like to do him no harm; you can't
expect him, as pays no rent and takes no wage, for this house and
the bit o' land was his father's and his grandfather's too before him,
to ask anybody's leave. Who asks Mr. Broad's leave to go to
Arannah, or Bethesda? If a young man runs wildish, who iver says
him nay? And it's not like he'll be said nay when he thinks he's
found a religion to his liking."
Mrs. Sheen was a large woman, and her arm, with the sleeve
rolled back to the elbow, suggested strength rather than mildness,
as she brandished the big knife over a loin of mutton in the energy
of her rhetoric. Mr. Lome was small and wizened ("his face as
long as his legs," Mrs. Sheen declared, afterwards, hyperbolically),
I9I4-] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 455
and he was not habituated to loud opposition. It somewhat scan-
dalized him, and he prepared to withdraw.
" Well," he said, with uneasy pleasantry, " you're not turning
Catholic by what I hear. There'll be a Protestant side to the car-
casses still, and my Friday mutton'll come off it, I hope. We never
have had a fishmonger in Railham yet, but it's what we must come
to, I doubt. Let's hope it'll be good for your business, Mrs. Sheen."
" Oh, but, Mr. Lome, you're forgetting poor Sammy Dubbs as
comes round with his hand-barrer ivery Monday ; it'll only be chang-
ing the day to Friday : and little enough he makes it's not Jake
nor his mother'll grudge him more custom he'll be the less beat
down, maybe, and not forced to sell his best fish for coarse-fish
prices. Last Monday was a week he said how he'd parted with a
sole as weighed full three pound, for one and eleven, and to a gentle-
man with Esquire arter his name, who comes out to the back door to
do his own bargaining."
Mr. Lome had walked away, but his narrow back betrayed con-
sciousness, and one of his large ears twitched as Mrs. Sheen's
strident voice broke into a merciless laugh.
" So Miss Floralia's turning too," she said to herself. " Well,
I'd do it, if it was me, if it was only to bother that old leather-skin.
She'll have a pretty time, though. Her aunt had by all accounts :
it says on her slab :
'Call me not back, my neighbors dear,
In perfect peace I'm sleeping here.
I've toiled on earth, here let me lie
Until I wake beyond the sky.'
Who iver would call her back? if it wasn't Miss Floralia's father
as fully expected to get her thousand pound. If all's true, it was
only when she was asleep she iver had much peace wi' John Lome.
I'd not marry him if the Church Farm was his own freehold, and the
meogany furniture pure gold. What's bordered Brussels carpets
with a temper like that trapesing about on 'em? Folks said the
doctor's sister wouldn't ha' minded : but it's my belief she had the
chance and had the sense to stick to the Monkhouse and her brother.
And he's another : it's odd, too, his goin' in for the Catholic ; him
and my Jake : if iver there was two jolly carum-harum young chaps
i' Railham them was the two, as I'd niver ha' thought like to take the
religious turn. And doctors are partly like butchers, on'y in our
line it's done a purpose, and the doctors mostly does it by mistake.
" Folks says doctors niver believes in religion, through knowin'
456 A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Jan.,
what folks' insides is: and butchers knows as much of insides as
anybody; they're mostly a lot o' bother and dirt and no profit,
the insides is: but poor folks is glad o' some of it, and Lor', who'd
charge 'em for 'em, unless it was old Lome? he'd sell the pig's
scratchins at prime-rump prices, he would ; but Jake was always soft-
hearted to poor bodies, fore iver he thought two chops o' this knife
o' religion, and it's unknown what he's givin' to 'em and good bits
too, let alone niver drivin' 'em for bills as many would ha' sold them
up. And I must say the doctor and Jake is as jolly as iver: and
my lad's more a son to me, for all he's took Catholic, than iver;
and a bad son he niver was, wild as he turned, God bless him. I
expect the Lord partly knew he'd come round. And why should /
say him nay, as niver had pluck (as has pluck for most) to say him
nay when he was goin' wrong ?
" I aren't like some mothers ; look at Sarah Gibb : her Tim
was worse than Jake, and an ugly chump as must ha' arst the divil
to be draggin' at him, and now he's took Catholic, and Sarah
wailin' and moanin' like a cow wi' her first calf in the cart, and cryin'
all o'er the village as the Catholics are stealin' her ewe-lamb from
her. If Tim's a ewe-lamb, I don't know what tough wether mutton
is. What's the Catholics goin' to do wi' him? If anybody'd buy
him by the pound o' them, I doubt they'd ne'er get fifteen shillin'
for him, cut up, cleaned and delivered, and the cleanin' alone'd cost
a tidy penny if I'd got to do it.
" If I can spare my lad to the Catholics, what's Sarah Gibb
got to squine and squeal about? She drinks herself, as you can
smell it on her, and praps that's what teases her: a well-livin',
decent son won't put up wi' a house like theirs, all guzzle and
muck, and she's partly aware he'll try to get things red up and
straighted. So long as Tim was heltering-skeltering to the Black
Tune she could high and sigh and pretend she was drowndin' her
sorrows in four penworth o' gin ; and so that's you, Jake ! You
remembers you've a home when it's dinner-time: I wonder you
don't dine wi' Father Catesby down on Tidd's Piece. The meat's
ready, and if you're ready, I am. Old Lome's bin here, snappin'
and yappin' like a dog on a chain; he don't approve o' your joinin'
the Catholics; so, if you'd liever please him than yourself, you'd
better send round and tell Father Catesby you've changed your
mind. It's a pity you was out o' the way if you can't speak up
for yourself you can't look for it as 7 should "
But Jake could see by his mother's complacent manner, and
slightly heightened color, that she had not listened quite so meekly
1914.] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 457
to Mr. Lome as she pretended. She was, in fact, in high good
humor, and when Jake laughed she pursed her lips only to restrain
her inclination to laugh triumphantly herself.
" If Miriam Drub had my spirit," she observed, as she was
helping her son to the best of the meat and gravy, " she'd niver
stand bein' jawed by Simon Yest. He told me hisself he'd
bin at her to hold up the Standard for the honor of Arannah.
What's it matter to him whether it's Standard or Chronicle she
fancies? If Drub don't mind, why should Simon? He has a
rig'lar spite agin the Catholics, and says he knows more Catholics
than some do; his sister was in service in a Catholic home, and
they could be as mean as anybody, he says. She used to have his
mother, and another sister and her three lads, in to tea i' the
kitchen onst or twice in the week, and the missis (her that was a
Catholic) complained as the cook didn't like it. 'Nor I shouldn't
like it,' said she, 'it's inbarressin' cookin' with five strangers sittin'
round and watchin'.' 'Twas all stinginess and bigotry, Yest makes
out, because the lady knew they was Baptists "
Jake laughed again.
" I'd ha' baptized 'em, if I was the lady," his mother added
significantly, as she ladled a big and boiling-hot spoonful of gravy
out of the saucepan.
The whole population of Railham village was under eight hun-
dred, and forty-nine became Catholics before Father Catesby and
Father Longcliff went away. The Catholic reader may wonder
how this infant congregation was to hear Mass. Even at Market
Railham there was no mission; but, nine miles away, there was
Chorley Hall, a big house that had lately been taken by a retired
General, Sir Hugh Ingestre, a Catholic of a very old Catholic family,
and Sir Hugh had a resident chaplain who undertook the charge of
the Railham converts, and came over every Sunday to offer Mass,
and again in the evening to give Benediction.
He carried on the work begun by the two " motor priests "
with extreme vigor, and his small Anglo-Saxon flock liked him
immensely, though he was an Irishman. He was a huge young
man, with an insatiable appetite for work, and a very converting
simplicity of conviction that it was every Protestant's business to
be converted. He could be drastically eloquent, and the one thing
he could not do with religious matters was to mince them; but he
could also be very amusing, and often was.
He chaffed Stephen Drub unmercifully, and there seems some
458 A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Jan.,
probability of his chaffing him into the Church. He chaffed Simon
Yest too, but with a heavier sarcasm, and if he did not convert
him, he succeeded in laughing away much of that solemn simpleton's
capacity to do harm.
He merely insisted on Jake's mother becoming a Catholic, and
Mrs. Sheen succumbed, with almost hysterical protest.
" The Catholic Church is your Mother, and she knows what's
good for you better than you," he declared. " When Jake was a
baby you knew what was good for him, and gave it him. You're
a baby yourself, and a fine one; but you don't know what's good
for you, and your Mother does. Jake used to set himself up against
you, I daresay "
" So he did. Of all the teasin' babies"
" Of course. But he had to give in. And so will you. Then
you'll find the comfort of it."
"Arum Catholic /'d be!"
" And isn't it better you should be a rum Catholic than a rum
Protestant? What on earth good does it do you calling yourself
a Protestant? I suppose you're afraid of Simon Yest? "
" Simon Yest be bothered."
" No hurry for that. You'll be bothered too when the time
comes, if you don't look out. Who made you? "
Mrs. Sheen tossed her head.
"I know who made me. It's not much manners talkin' as
if on'y the Catholics know'd what's what."
" And what were you made for? Manners or no manners
you'll have to answer, and it's not me that will be asking you.
Jake's isn't the only soul in the family, is it? But it's the only
one that shows up. All the same you've got one, and it's my
business to remind you of it."
" My soul's my own, by all I've iver heard."
" And that's a lie if you've heard it. Your soul's no more
your own than it's the County Council's. It belongs to God, what
there is of it, and if you play the fool with it, you'll have to answer
for it to Him."
" What in glory are you going on for, whativer have 7 iver
done wi' my soul ? "
" Nothing. That's just it. Nothing in life. For all you have
ever done with your soul, you might as well never have had one.
But it's there, and where it will be concerns you more than it con-
cerns me. God forgive me for saying so, for every soul concerns
1914-] A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM 459
me, and it concerns me closely to see sensible people like you so
senseless."
" Me ! Me senseless ? "
" Yes, you. You've no more sense in this than a child hoard-
ing farthings, and giving sovereigns for everyone of them."
Mrs. Sheen quite well understood the drift of the metaphor, but
she replied demurely:
" Children has no business wi' sovereigns. It can't be looked
for as they'd understan' the vally o' them."
" That's their excuse. You try, when the time comes, if the
excuse will do for you. I'd be sorry to try and offer you a new
farthing for a pound of mutton, and expect nineteen shillings
change."
" It ain't a shillin' a pound, mutton isn't."
"I thought I'd catch you! See how sharp you are about
the price of a bit of a dead sheep, and how stupid about the value
of your own living soul. Look here, my child "
" 'My child,' indeed ! You're big enough, and loud enough,
but I was a grown girl when you was born."
" And you've grown since. Your body has. It's your soul
that's dwindling, dwindling if you don't mind it'll be lost out
and out."
Jake never interfered: he was present at none of these inter-
views, and his mother seldom repeated even the gist of them to him.
After there had been a good many of them she said casually one
evening :
" Father Burke's bin botherin' here agin. He wears me to a
bone, he does."
" Well, I'd never sell you for bone," Jake remarked, with a
cheerful grin as he surveyed his mother's ample person. " Shall
I tell him you'd as lief have his room as his company ? "
" Just you mind your own business : it 'ud be a nice thing
insultin' your own priest on my accounts. The parlor's my parlor,
and he's welcome to sit in it as often as he likes he's more to
say to me nor Father Catesby ever had: and I can speak up to
him better. If he gives me rat I give him tat, I reckon."
" I thought you were complaining of him," said Jake inno-
cently ; " I don't want you to be bothered by my priest."
" Your priest ! I spose you keep a private chaplain and a pic-
ture gallery. If anyone bothered me I should know how to learn
'em better."
46o A BEGINNING AT RAILHAM [Jan.,
It was quite evident that whatever it was his mother had
meant to say, she could not, or would not, on that occasion bring
herself to say it. Probably Jake guessed very well, but he would
neither help nor hurry her, and no more was said then.
About a week after she stopped him as he was going out in
the morning, and said with a queer shyness :
" You're ridin' over to Shelport to see them sheep? "
Jake nodded.
" And you'll be away till tea time ? Well, when you come
back I shall ha' changed my name."
She was undoubtedly confused, and her healthy color was aug-
mented by an unmistakable blush of diffidence. Jake was really
taken aback.
" Change your name, mother ? " he repeated with a rather dis-
agreeable sensation of surprise.
" Isn't my name Selina Sheen ? "
" What then? I wish you'd get it out whatever it is."
Mrs. Sheen laughed, but still with a sort of shame facedness.
" Well, you want such a lot o' tellin'," she said, putting on her
shop apron. " Selina Sheen's my name, and Selina I shall be
arter the ceremony as before, though he says it's a heathenish name
as no saint ever had. Traps it suits me none the worse for that,'
said I. But of all the men for their own way he's the one "
"Who is?"
" Father Burke, of course. Who else has been botherin' me
to do it. And he will have it I'm to take the name o' Bridget.
'Bridget Sheen'll sound a'most like an Irishwoman,' says he "
" So that's it," said Jake, bursting out into a laugh that was
partly of relief, partly of amusement, and partly of real pleasure
and contentment. And to this day he is not sure whether his
mother had meant to mystify and plague him : she was quite capable
of it.
" Yes, that's it," said Mrs. Sheen. " It was the only way to
get any peace by what I could see of it. I wish summat'd bring
old Lome and Simon Yest into the shop together: I'd like well
to tell 'em both myself."
Jake knew his mother far too well to attempt any congratula-
tions, or even to express a word of his own contentment.
" I'd like to hear you," he said instead.
[THE END.]
THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY.
BY HILAIRE BELLOC.
III.
HEN in the sixteenth century a prodigious upheaval of
the human mind produced what we call the Renais-
sance, and at the same time the questioning of every
foundation upon which society had reposed for a
thousand years, one main political issue emerged
from the vortex. I speak only of one main political issue because,
though philosophy is far more important than political machinery
in the determining of men's lives, yet the political effect of the
philosophical conflict was the most clearly apparent effect it had,
and is that phenomenon which can be most clearly noted and de-
scribed in the generations that followed.
This political effect was the division of Europe as a whole
into two types of political society: the one type prevailing where
the tradition of civilization and the Catholic Church had withstood
the storm; the other type prevailing where the storm had uprooted
that tradition and the faith along with it. We must be very care-
ful to distinguish these two types, because they do not exactly cor-
respond to most of our preconceived modern ideas. For instance,
you cannot say that the one type was " democratic " compared with
the other type. It was far more complicated than that.
Speaking generally what happened was this : In the countries
which remained Catholic, central government remained exceedingly
strong, and the strength of central government naturally worked
for the defence of small property, and of the mass of men against
great wealth and the power of nobles. Where the Catholic faith
was lost, the tendency was for the central government to grow
weak, for small property to have no protection against the rich, and
for the great landowners and great merchants to become the chief
force in society.
Of this contrast you could have no better example than the
contrast between France and England. Within a hundred and
fifty years of the Reformation, France and England, which had
originated in exactly the same type of Catholic mediaeval society,
had arrived at opposite poles of political development. In Eng-
land the Crown had become an insufficiently salaried office, with
462 THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Jan.,
ever-diminishing power, quite overshadowed by the great merchants
of the town and the land-owning class, with whom those merchants
were closely intermixed. The small man was rapidly going to the
wall, losing his property more and more, and becoming a prole-
tarian wage-earner, while all the functions of government were fall-
ing into the hands of a small and wealthy clique which governed
the country.
In France the Crown was never in greater power than at that
moment. Louis XIV. could personally control most of the ener-
gies of the state. He inherited from his father's great minister,
Richelieu, and himself developed further, a great bureaucracy act-
ing under his absolute central government, and mainly drawn from
the middle professional classes, while at the basis of society was
a peasantry, which had come to have not only security of tenure,
but very widely-distributed ownership.
With this strong Crown was closely associated the Catholic
hierarchy of France, and all the external machinery of religion,
and one could almost say that France was Catholic because she
was politically a strong monarchy, and that she was politically a
strong monarchy because she was Catholic. That is the first point
to recognize clearly. There was in France about two hundred and
fifty years ago, arrived at its full maturity, a whole complicated
organization of society dependent upon one strong central point,
the monarch, and in all its elements closely associated with the
forms and external machinery of the Catholic Church.
The next point to be seized is that France thus organized
was not spiritually homogeneous, and perhaps it was as well for
the faith and for the future of the country, on the temporal side,
that this was so given the condition into which Europe had
fallen. The two elements of heterogeneity that is internal dif-
ferences were the indifference of increasing masses of the popula-
tion, and the presence of a large Protestant body, which, apart from
its numbers, was strong from causes I shall presently describe.
The growing indifference of great masses to the Catholic relig-
ion, especially in the towns and in proportion to the education of
the king's subjects, was due in great measure to this very alliance
or identity between the monarchy and the Church. It was inevit-
able that the external forms of religion should become official,
and, being official, should have less energy to spare for the non-
official side of rational life. There ceased to be any active care to
preserve the spiritual discipline of the Church; an appointment to
a bishopric was mainly a political matter, and, as the system grew
1914.] THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY 463
old, the most scandalous appointments were made, not indeed in
very large numbers, but with curious carelessness. At the same
time there was no movement from below, no fostering of the in-
ternal life of the organized Church, which could have prevented the
spread of infidelity or indifference. A few concrete instances will
make clear what I mean. A man had to have his child baptized
in the Catholic Church. That was virtually the only form of regis-
tering the birth. A man so baptized in the Catholic Church must
marry in the Catholic Church : there was for him no other legal
form of marriage. When he died, being thus formally and exter-
nally a Catholic subject of the king's, he must be buried in the
Catholic cemetery and with Catholic rites. But when that man
learnt in his studies a science which proceeded from all the brains
in Europe, and many of those brains outside the Catholic Church,
and even hostile to it, he found no corrective to the influence which
such learning so derived would naturally have in withdrawing him
from the Catholic attitude of mind.
It is exceedingly important, when we read history, to remember
that the Renaissance, which is at the foundation of the modern
world, ceased shortly after its origin to be universally Catholic.
The authorities of the Church thought it sufficient to be neutral.
They had behind them in the Catholic society of France the mo-
mentum of a civilization a thousand years old, and the preserva-
tion of all the external forms masked the rapid disintegration of
Catholic feeling that was going on below the surface.
Another aspect of the same thing was the history of the re-
ligious orders. The older ones continued to enjoy their rich endow-
ments, but there was not a corresponding zeal for recruiting new and
worthy subjects. The great abbeys became places of emolument,
largely within the gift of the Crown, and they were filled, as the
bishoprics were filled, often by pious -men and women, but also some-
times by men and women who simply regarded them as sources of
revenue and the gift of patronage. In the great noble families, a
son who " went into the Church " might live the most openly scan-
dalous of lives, and yet expect clerical appointment here as he might
expect it in the Civil Service; and as time went on what the posi-
tion of a great abbot meant to the mass of the people, was simply
a large income apportioned to one of their betters. The numbers of
those who could thus live upon the endowment of the older orders,
was regarded as a matter of almost equal indifference, and I think I
am right in saying that within a hundred years after the full matur-
ity of the centralized monarchy under Louis XIV., there were not, in
464 THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Jan.,
proportion to the population, one-tenth as many men and women
of French blood in religion then as there are to-day.
The second element which disturbed the external homogeneity
of this apparently secure Catholic society under the old French
monarchy, was the body of Protestants. They were very numer-
ous. A hundred years before, during the wars of religion, quite
half the gentry and great merchants had seen in the assault upon
the Catholic Church an opportunity for enriching themselves, and
for extending the influence of their class. True, the great mass of
the landed gentry had been brought back to Catholicism by the vig-
orous support which the nation gave to its great national institution,
the Crown, but very many of the nobles were still traditionally Prot-
estant, and this was still more so with regard to the great merchants.
To this must be added an effect of Protestantism in its youth,
which historians have too much neglected. Then as now the effect
of this philosophy was to call upon the powers of the individual,
to excite him to personal effort and to competition. It was long
before the final result of such a system could be apparent. We see
it to-day in the dreadful thing called capitalism, with its vast
hopeless mass of despoiled humanity working at a wage for the
small body of owners, but in the time of which I am speaking, what
was chiefly apparent as the economic effect of a Protestant upbring-
ing was the vigor it lent to private enterprise, to the quick appre-
ciation of new discoveries in industry, and to the rapid accumula-
tion of wealth in the hands of those who were thus sympathetic
with individual effort and competitive commerce. Thus the French
Protestants, or Huguenots as they were called, were, as their de-
scendants boast, the most modern in their industrial effort, and
the most successful in the existing processes of manufacture. They
were, of course, also occupied in founding that capitalist system
which is so odious to the Catholic temper, and which would have
conquered French society as it did England, had the Huguenot
power in France extended. Allied with all this Huguenot attitude
towards life and work, were of course the comparatively small body
of Jewish financiers. These were laying the foundations in many
other countries, but especially in England, of the power which we
have seen so enormously increased in our own time, and though
they were checked by the power of the Crown, they were checked
only, not set back or countered by any financial move of the
monarchy in competition with them. The Crown had vigorously
fought the political power of the Huguenots, which, as it was anti-
national and particularly odious to the mass of the people, it had
1914.] THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY 465
succeeded in repressing; but it did not effectively destroy their
commercial power. They were far more numerous in proportion
to the population than they are to-day, and they had behind them
the active sympathy of the Protestant and Jewish commercial so-
cieties of Holland, beyond the Rhine, and in England.
These, then, are the elements of the problem as the eight-
eenth century opens. A very strong central government, which,
by defending the small man, is creating a great body of independent
citizens : an alliance between all forms of this strong government
and the Catholic Church, which alliance masks under its external
order the very rapid growth of indifference or antagonism to the
spirit of the faith, a rapid decay in the moral prestige of the
hierarchy and the religious orders, and at the same time the presence
of a very large wealthy and actively commercial body of Huguenots
whose every effort was anti-Catholic.
For more than the lifetime of a man, for nearly the whole
of a century, this state of affairs, already mature, continued to
grow old. The lifeless, mechanical part of it went on unchanged.
Most of the living element in it made against the Catholic atmos-
phere in society. The best writing, the best thinking, and the best
talking was either upon matters indifferent to the Church, or was
actively hostile to it. Criticism, that ever active force without
which neither an art nor a society can live, found ready to hand
for its exploits the large, inert, and apparently secure body of
" Church and State " a mass of rules, officials, and set customs
which no one, not even the critics, thought could be overthrown,
and which, therefore, were attacked with the greater zeal, because
the attackers did not conceive that any great change destructive to
the comfort of their own lives could come about. How long this
state of affairs might have continued undisturbed, it is difficult to
say. It could not have continued for ever, but something was hap-
pening which was bound to terminate it, which was affecting its very
root, and this something was the accident that befell the monarchy.
That institution presupposed a fairly regular succession of
average men. There might be gaps in minorities, or in the illness
or incompetence of a particular monarch, but these gaps would
be tided over in the normal course of things, just as a bad series
of years are tided over in an established system of commerce. As
it happened, the French monarchy in the eighteenth century went
through a quite exceptional crisis, for which none of its framers or
supporters could have bargained. Just when the hardening of its
VOL. xcvui. 30
466 THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Jan.,
structure through old age and through the completion of its scheme
in every detail imperilled its survival, that institution happened to
come into hands which failed it. When Louis XIV. died the heir to
the throne was his great-grandson, a little boy of five years old. So
first of all there came a very long minority, following upon habits of
luxury among the governing classes, fostered by sixty full years of
splendor at the Court. Then when the boy (Louis XV.) was
grown to be a man, he turned out to be a man devoid of initiative.
He was a great gentleman, he had no inconsiderable personal
dignity; he was courageous enough and not disorderly in temper.
But he lacked all those springs of personal effort which can preserve
a man from sensuality or, even if he is sensual, direct him towards
the necessary daily effort which we should all exercise, and which
the personal head of a highly centralized state must exercise or
perish. His vices, which were those common enough to kings, were
on this account enormously exaggerated in the public eye, and when
he had passed midde age, they made him appear contemptible. He
was already fifty-three when, at the end of an unsuccessful war,
France saw herself humiliated by her rivals; he died in his sixty-
fifth year, leaving the institution of the monarchy upon which all
the old regime depended seriously, and perhaps irretrievably rot-
tened. The only thing that could have saved it, was the advent
of some vigorous character to replace the dead man. Of such
happy accidents the past history of the monarchy was full, although
it is true it had never gone through so prolonged a crisis as this,
but as luck would have it, his grandson and successor, Louis XVI.,
was a young man almost absurdly unfitted for that particular mo-
ment. There was a nervous weakness in him of a very grave
kind, hidden under a large unwieldy body. His young wife, ener-
getic and quite foreign, completed the disaster, and it was under his
nominal rule that the machinery of the monarchy began to cease
working. The symptoms were most apparent on the financial side ;
every experiment was tried before summoning the old National
Parliament to prop up the breakdown; they failed, and that Par-
liament was summoned in 1789.
What followed was the great Revolution. How it suddenly
revealed the true political and religious state of the country, the
new gulf which it happened to dig between the official machinery
of the Church and the mass of the people, and its consequent effect
upon the religious life of France in our time, I will make the sub-
ject of my next paper.
THE ORIGINAL DIARIES OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT.
BY BERTRAND L. CONWAY, C.S.P.
HE Goerres Society, which represents the best modern
German scholarship, has well merited the praise of
Popes Leo XIII. and Pius X. for undertaking to pub-
lish all the original documents relating to the Coun-
cil of Trent.* This monumental work will be com-
pleted in thirteen splendid quartos of some thousand pages each,
three of which (vols. i., ii., and v.) have already been published.
For nearly three centuries our knowledge of the inner work-
ings of the Council of Trent has been obtained principally from
either the prejudiced and unreliable History of the Council of Trent
by the apostate Servite, Fra Paolo Sarpi (London, 1619), and the
polemical treatisef published to refute it by the Jesuit Cardinal,
Sforza Pallavicino (Rome, 1656). Neither of these writers were
capable of writing an objective, impartial history. For as Calenzio
says : " Neither Pallavicino nor Sarpi possessed the true historical
spirit, which is bent solely upon discovering the truth, and setting it
forth in all clearness and honesty. Sarpi wrote to attack the
Church, and Pallavicino to defend her at all costs. "J Bossuet
wrote of Sarpi : " He was a Protestant under a religious habit,
who said Mass without believing in it, and who remained in a
Church which he considered idolatrous." Pallavicino, in a letter
to the Marchese Durazzo. June 2, 1657, says of his own work:
" My history is in great part apologetic in tone. In fact it is more
of a book of polemics than a history properly so-called. I aim at
refuting my adversary by showing his ignorance and deceit, and
hope to win the confidence of my readers by proving to them that
I am well informed. I would have them highly esteem both the
rulers of the Church and those who presided over the Council," etc.
Bishop Hefele, in his well-known History of the Councils of the
^Concilium Tridentinum Diariorum, Actorum, Epistolarum, Tracfatuum Nova
Collectio (The Council of Trent, a new Collection of Its Diaries, Acts, Epistles,
end Treatises). Edidit Societas Goerresiana. St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder. Price
of Vol. I., $18.00.
Wistaria del Concilia di Trento.
%Esame critico-litterario delle opere riguardanti la storia del concilia di Trento,
p. 117.
Littere del Pallavicino, p. 71. Venice, 1669.
468 THE DIARIES OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT [Jan.,
Church, declared only forty years ago that he would not dare write
the history of the Council of Trent, not only because of his age and
the heavy burden of the episcopate, but because he could not obtain
access to the original Ada of the Council written by Angelo Mas-
sarelli, its secretary-general.*
The very year (1874) in which Bishop Hefele made this state-
ment, Father Theiner, the Prefect of the Vatican Archives, pub-
lished his Ada genuina Concilii Tridentini (two volumes), but this
edition did not pretend to give all the critical documents, and even
those that were given were not published in full. He paid no
attention whatever to the editing of the other documents so essential
to a clear understanding of the Council, such as the diaries of the
secretary-general, the letters of the legates, the Cardinals of the
Curia, the bishops and the foreign ambassadors.
Some may ask what is the use of publishing such an enormous
amount of original material, when any scholar competent to write
a history of the Council could read the manuscripts himself? As
a matter of fact, no one man would be able to read all the original
documents, which are scattered in hundreds of public and private
libraries in Italy, Spain, Hungary, Germany, Austria, France, Bel-
gium, and England. But even if one man could have mastered all
this material it would take him fifty years of continuous work
we would still be doubtful about his critical estimate of the various
documents, which are frequently colored by writers who favor
politically either Spain, France, or the Holy See.
Before the opening of the Vatican Archives to the world by
Pope Leo XIII. , it was impossible for any scholar, Catholic or non-
Catholic, to obtain access to many of the most important original
documents. Not only the Roman See, but all the governments of
Europe for centuries guarded most jealously their State documents.
We know that even Pallavicino, who was chosen by the General of
his order to defend the Council against the attacks of Sarpi, was not
allowed to see the documents himself, but had to be content with
excerpts expressly made by two of the custodians of the Vatican
library, Conteloro and Centoflorino, and submit his work to the
strictest possible censorship before publication. Oderico Raynaldi,
continuing three centuries later the Annals of Baronius, suffered
the same restrictions.
Ranke wrote in 1836 that a new history of the Council of
Trent was absolutely necessary, but he was utterly skeptical about
*Conciliengeschichte, vol. ii., praef., p. vii. Freiburg, 1874.
1914.] THE DIARIES OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT 469
its ever being accomplished. He wrote in his Roman Papacy:
" That those who could do it have no wish to see it done, and those
anxious to do it do not possess the means."* As a matter of fact,
however, we know that it was the original intention of the Roman
pontiffs to publish everything relating to the Council. We learn
this from two letters that Cardinal Cervino, afterwards Pope Mar-
cellus II. (1555), wrote to Massarelli, November 12 and December
i, 1548. He acknowledges the receipt of two volumes of the de-
crees, and urges his correspondent to arrange carefully the Acta of
the Council in view of their being printed. f Moreover the manu-
scripts of the Acta in the Vatican Archives are marked " impri-
menda " to be printed. That they were not printed de facto was
due first to the sudden death of Massarelli, July 16, 1566,$ and,
second, to the well-founded conviction that the enemies of the
Church would use them everywhere for the purpose of anti-Catholic
polemics. There were no Protestant scholars in that day either
competent or willing to write a true history of the Council of Trent,
which they knew was held chiefly to condemn the errors of Prot-
estantism. They would simply have used the Acta to frame new
charges against the Church and its rulers.
Many non-Catholic writers, who blame the Pope severely for
not having published all the documents on the Council in the Vatican
Archives, in reality justify by their conduct the Roman authorities.
For they prove by their writings that they do not care so much for
the records in themselves, as for the acts or sayings of the prelates
which can be used against the Church. They take special de-
light, for instance, in calling attention to the sermon preached be-
fore the Council by a layman, Count Nogarola, December 26,
I545; the dancing of the bishops at the citadel of Trent on March
3, 1546 ;|| the scandalous speech of Father Diruta, preacher of the
Cardinal of Trent, May i, 1546;^ the unseemly quarrel between
an Italian and a Greek bishop, in which one pulled the other's beard,
July 7, 1546,** and certain sarcastic remarks spoken in anger by
some exasperated prelate in defence of his own views or the so-
called rights of his sovereign.ff
When Father Theiner published his edition of the Acta, non-
Catholics accused him of omitting intentionally all that might
militate against the Church, although he really did his utmost to
write objective history. He was seriously hampered by a rigorous
*Die Romischcn Papste, vol. iii., p. 289. t Pages 809, 813.
JPage Ixxix. Page 360. II Pages 507, 508.
UPage 543. **Page 90. ttPages 99, 100, 133, 326, 383, 477, 535, etc.
4/o THE DIARIES OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT [Jan.,
censorship, and his ignorance of some very important documents.
To set at rest forever all suspicion of a suppressio veri, and to
answer satisfactorily the fables, calumnies, and false conjectures
current among anti-Catholic controversialists, the scholars of the
Goerres Society have determined to publish every document that re-
lated to the Council. The proposed volumes of the series will treat
in detail the diaries (vols. i.-iii.), the Ada (vols. iv.-ix.), the
Epistles (vols. x.-xii.), and the treatises of the theologians and can-
onists (vol. xiii.).
The diaries are perhaps the best possible sources from which
we may ascertain the complete history of the Council. For as they
were written for the author's eye alone, and not for the general
public, they are apt to be truthful, sincere, and devoid of all human
respect. They are of special value in the present instance, for they
were written not merely by the friends, but also by the enemies of
the Roman Curia, and their authors are not merely prejudiced
Italians, but Spaniards, Frenchmen, Belgians, and Germans.
A new edition of the Ada was absolutely necessary, for Father
Theiner's arbitrary editing rendered his edition practically useless
from the standpoint of scholarship, and he made no use of the
original Ada of Massarelli, the secretary-general of the Council,
which recorded the vota of the congregations and the speeches made
at every session.
Some of the letters of the ambassadors, legates and other mem-
bers of the Council have already been published, and they form,
as can readily be seen, an excellent commentary on its proceedings.
Many of the most important letters that passed between the legates
and the Roman Curia are here published for the first time. The
final volume will give us all the important treatises of theologians
and canonists such as Nausea, Campeggio, and Sirleto which
were written either before or during the Council. They played an
important part in directing the discussion of certain dogmas and
laws, and they bring out clearly the full force of the different
decrees.
Throughout these volumes all the variant and doubtful readings
are given on every page, and copious critical notes furnish us brief
but accurate biographical sketches of all the personages mentioned
in the text. The editors also point out the differences in the var-
ious codices of the original documents, the epitomes and the com-
mentators, the writers who discuss the theology, the Scriptural texts,
and the canon law alluded to in the text, etc.
I9I4-] THE DIARIES OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT 471
The first volume, which lies before us, is edited by Sebastian
Merkle, who writes a very scholarly Introduction of one hundred
and twenty-nine pages. The text itself consists of five docu-
ments, namely, the Commentary of the Council of Trent by Hercole
Severolo, the Procurator of the Council (December n, 1545 to
January 16, 1548), and the four diaries of Angelo Massarelli, the
secretary-general of the Council (vol. i., February 22, 1545 to
December 13, 1545; vol. ii., February 6, 1545 to March n, 1547;
vol. iii., December 18, 1545 to March n, 1547; vol. iv., March 12,
1547 to November 10, 1549).
The Introduction consists of four chapters. Chapter I. dis-
cusses the reasons that prompted the publication of the present work,
gives a list of all the documents edited, and the European libraries
in which they may be found, and enumerates the seven diaries of
Massarelli, only two of which had hitherto been published by D61-
linger.
Chapter II. deals with the Commentary of Severolo. Father
Merkle proves its authenticity, discusses its origin, character, and
purpose, and gives a complete list of all the codices of the work,
with a critical estimate of their value. He then writes a brief bio-
graphical sketch of the author, setting forth his accuracy and his
trustworthiness. He next speaks of the epitome of this Com-
mentary, which Massarelli used in compiling his Ada,, and makes
a comparative critical study of the Commentary, the Epitome, and
the A eta. The Commentary of Severolo is the only original source
we possess of the first four months of the Council (December n,
1545 to April i, 1546). Neither Sarpi nor Pallavicino knew of
its existence, and Raynald.% the only writer who has hitherto made
use of it, did not know who wrote it.
Chapter III. gives a brief sketch of the life of Massarelli, and
analyzes his chief works, viz., his Acta of the Council, his seven
diaries, and his letters to the Cardinals of the Curia. The secretary
of the Council was not a very brilliant scholar, but he was a well-
educated cleric, an indefatigable worker, and ever most active
in ecclesiastical affairs. A man of more cultivated taste or greater
literary ability he makes frequent mistakes in Latin would have
omitted many of the gossipy and trivial details, which he relates
with all the gusto of a modern newspaper reporter. He tells us
about a murder and a robbery at Trent; the great entertainments
given on feast days in the line of jousting, fireworks, and walking
the tight-rope; the menus of the banquets given in honor of dis-
472 THE DIARIES OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT [Jan.,
tinguished guests; the state of the weather; the high cost of living;
the quarrels about precedence; fishing trips, deer hunts, horse
racing, etc., etc.
Everyone who reads these diaries carefully will acknowledge
that Massarelli was a simple, honest man, although, like most of the
Italians of his day, he was unable to distinguish between the divine
authority of the Church and the political policies of the Pope and
the Roman Curia.* When, for example, Charles V., the better to
win over the Protestants, earnestly and persistently demanded the
return of the Council from Bologna to Trent, Massarelli calls him
a persecutor of the Church on a par with the old Roman emperors,
and prophesies for him a miserable and violent death. Again he
taxes with stupidity or deliberate malice every bishop who honestly
opposed in Council the wishes of the Roman Cardinals, and he
accuses the opponents of the legates of ingratitude or heresy. Still
it is unjust to accuse him, as some have done, of continually making
false statement of fact, or of deliberately failing to record accurately
the vota of the bishops. The editors of the present work have de-
tected him in only one deliberate falsehood, t and declare that his
mistakes if they exist in recording the vota were due to the in-
advertence of a sick and busy secretary. We readily admit that he
was guilty of many errors in judgment, and that he occasionally
voiced his prejudices in pretty strong language.! The reader will
readily pardon him because of his evident sincerity.
Chapter IV. gives us the reasons which prompted the editors to
publish the text of all the original documents in its integrity.
They argue and rightly that it is fairer and more satisfactory
to allow the reader to form his own judgment upon the data as a
whole, than to make excerpts requiring lengthy and perhaps partisan
explanations. The critical editing of the text, with a complete list
of all the various readings, was in itself a gigantic task, and will
prove most helpful to the future historian of the Council of Trent.
During the first quarter of the sixteenth century, the Catholic
world was talking of the necessity of a General Council to reform
the flagrant abuses that had crept into the Church, and to determine
once for all the true Gospel of Christ in opposition to the errors
of the reformers, which were unsettling the minds of thousands.
The Popes were rather slow in answering the popular demand for
a General Council, because they felt that the times were unfavor-
*Page Ixxx. tPage 818, line 32; page 825, note 2.
JPage 232, line 28 ; page 383, line 20, etc.
1914-] THE DIARIES OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT 473
able. Many worldly clerics were utterly opposed to reform of any
kind ; the Emperor was afraid of antagonizing the Protestant princes
by the publishing of conciliar decrees denouncing the Lutheran
errors ; the continual wars between Charles V. and Francis I. made
it difficult for the bishops to assemble and to agree upon the place
of meeting; the Popes were afraid of a repetition of the schismatic
proceedings of the Council of Basle.
Pope Paul III., however, was determined that the Council
should be held. He convoked it in 1536 to meet in Mantua, May,
1537, but owing to the very strong opposition against it, he was
obliged to prorogue it for six months. It was then deferred for
various reasons to meet at Vicenza, May, 1538, and again at Trent,
November, 1542. The three legates sent in this year waited many
months for the bishops to arrive, but as they failed to appear, the
Council was again suspended until March, 1545. It was finally
opened December 13, 1545, by the three legates, Giammaria del
Monte, Cardinal Bishop of Palestrina, Marcello Cervini, Cardinal
Priest of Santa Croce, and Reginald Pole, Cardinal Priest of Santa
Maria in Cosmedin. There were present at the opening session
four archbishops, twenty bishops, five generals of religious orders,
two ambassadors of King Ferdinand, Pighini, the auditor of the
Roman Rota, and Severolo, the procurator of the Council.* The
Emperor's ambassador, Didaco de Mendoza, unable to attend be-
cause of sickness, begged the Council to excuse him. Because of
the small number of bishops present, nothing was accomplished at
the first session save the public reading of the Papal Bull of con-
vocation, and the mandate of the Papal legates.
The interval between, the first and second sessions (December
13, 1545 to January 7, 1546) was spent in discussing questions of
precedence, the credentials of those seeking admission to the Coun-
cil, the method of voting, the mode of procedure, and the like.
The legates insisted strongly upon the superiority of the Pope over
the Council, which had been questioned at Basle, and declared that
they presided in his name. The motion of the Bishop of Fiesole
to add the words : " Representing the Universal Church " to the
title " Sacred Ecumenical Council " was defeated, after a good deal
of argument, as misleading and unnecessary. The bishops then
elected all the officials of the Council, viz., a procurator, a secretary-
general, a lay protector, two notaries, and two scrutatores to count
the votes. Congregations of theologians and canonists were ap-
*Page 4
474 THE DIARIES OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT [Jan.,
pointed to prepare the schemata of the doctrinal and disciplinary
decrees, that were to be discussed and voted upon by the General
Congregation of Bishops. The old custom of individual voting,
which had been set aside at Constance on account of the great West-
ern Schism, was again adopted. One vote was given to each of
the generals of the religious orders, and to every three abbots. The
Public Session announced the final result of the discussions of the
General Congregations, and formulated the decrees and canons.
The third session (February 4, 1546)* published a decree upon
the Nicene Creed, and another on the obligation of attending the
Council. For about a month the bishops had discussed the mode
of procedure to be followed in their deliberations. They found it
difficult to decide whether matters of doctrine or discipline should
take precedence in the discussion and framing of the decrees. A
compromise was finally effected, and they decided to treat both
doctrine and discipline together. As a matter of fact the Council
published two decrees, the one on doctrine and the other on dis-
cipline, at nearly every public session. f During the next two
months the Sacred Scriptures formed the sole topic of discussion.
The fourth session (April 8, 1546)$ formulated the two de-
crees that settled finally the relation between the Bible and tradition,
the canon, the use of the Latin Vulgate, and the rules of Biblical in-
terpretation. The preliminary discussions are given in the most
minute detail in Massarelli's third diary. One has only to read
these well-reported speeches to see at a glance how false are many
of the statements made by prejudiced non-Catholics regarding the
meaning of the Tridentine decrees. Take, for example, the ques-
tion of the authority of the Latin Vulgate. It was explicitly stated ||
that in declaring the Vulgate the authentic edition to be used in
preaching, disputations, and theological lectures, the Council did
not thereby reject all other editions as false, but merely asserted its
superiority over them. It, moreover, admitted the fact that many
errors had crept into the original text, and requested the Pope to
order these mistakes corrected as soon as possible. One of the
bishops is recorded as saying that Christ and His Apostles used
the very words of the Vulgate a statement which our editor ques-
tions, although it is also recorded in the Acta.
*Pages 27, 434, 476. tPage 20, et seq.
I Page 534. There were present at this session five cardinals, eight archbishops,
forty-one bishops, three generals of religious orders, and two abbots.
Pages 476-523. II Page 527.
1914.] THE DIARIES OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT 475
The fifth session (June 17, 1546)* formulated first a decree on
original sin. It declared that Adam by his fall had lost his original
holiness and justice, and had deteriorated in both soul and body;
that the sin of Adam had injured not only himself but all his de-
scendants; that it had been transmitted to them by propagation;
that the effects of Adam's sin are wholly taken away by the merits
of Jesus Christ and His grace in baptism; that the concupiscence
which still remains in man, has never been called sin by the Catholic
Church, but that it comes from sin and inclines thereto; that this
decree has no reference whatever to the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception.
Most of the discussions preliminary to the fifth sessionf dealt
with the decree on discipline, which had reference to the teaching
of the Holy Scriptures, and the preaching of the Gospel by bishops,
priests, and regulars. Some very bitter speeches were made regard-
ing the duty of episcopal residence, and the preaching of regulars
without episcopal approval. 'Pietro Pachecci, the Bishop of Jaen,
and Braccio Martello, Bishop of Fiesole, were the chief offenders.
Both Cardinal del Monte, the presiding legate, and Cardinal Pole,
rebuked the Bishop of Fiesole on account of his " seditious, calum-
nious, quarrelsome, and illogical discourses."! They told him plainly
that he was calumniating the Holy See by accusing it of granting
privileges to the regulars contrary to the divine law, and that he
was schismatical and heretical in spirit by attempting to limit unduly
the Pope's power in their regard. The General of the Servites was
the chief defender of the rights and privileges of the religious
orders, and although his challenges were at times a bit vehement
and melodramatic in tone,, his points were well taken. He said in
conclusion, " I wish the Council to consider carefully all the privi-
leges granted by the Pope to the regulars. If the bishops assembled
consider them harmful to the Church, we are willing to be deprived
of them."
The sixth session (January 13, 1547)!! gives us the results
of six months discussion in the form of a lengthy doctrinal decree
on justification, and a disciplinary decree emphasizing the duty of
episcopal residence and visitation. fl The presiding legate expressly
stated, in view of some rather angry discussions, that the Council
*Page 80. There were present at this session four cardinals, nine archbishops,
fifty bishops, three generals of religious orders, and two abbots.
tPages 50-80. tPages 56-57. Pages 59, 63.
II Pages 121, 458, 601. There were present at this session four cardinals, ten
archbishops, and forty-five bishops. UPages 82-120, 440-458, 564-603.
476 THE DIARIES OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT [Jan.,
did not convene to settle any controversies of the schools on ques-
tions of grace, but to condemn the errors and heresies of the re-
formers on justification.* They wished particularly to denounce
Luther's heretical teaching on justification by faith alone, imputative
justice, the slave will, election, merit, good works, etc.
The untiring and irrepressible Bishop of Fiesole made so many
speeches that he finally wore out the patience of his listeners. Once,
when he asked leave to speak, the presiding legate, with a twinkle
in his eye, said, " I will always give his Grace of Fiesole permission
to say whatever he desires," whereat all the Council, seeing his
point, laughed heartily.f
The Cardinal of Trent lost his temper during a heated argu-
ment with Cardinal del Monte, and afterwards, while asking pardon
for his vehemence, got angry again because the legate did not deign
to reply, but merely nodded his head.J The presiding legate's
kindly, dignified, and firm treatment of all the bishops is an evidence
of one great quality of Pope Paul III. the power of selecting
capable men to carry out his will.
The seventh session (March 3, 1547) published a doctrinal
decree on the sacraments in general, baptism and confirmation, and
a disciplinary decree on matters connected with episcopal residence.
The Council forbade the holding of incompatible benefices, and set
forth the conditions required for valid appointments thereunto.
It is very interesting to note how the subject matter for the
doctrinal decrees of this session was originally presented by the
theologians. They submitted fifty-one questions for the considera-
tion of the bishops, which were divided into three sections : theses
which are absolutely heretical; theses which many theologians
declare should not be condemned without some explanation; and
theses which some theologians believe should not be condemned,
but entirely ignored.
The eighth session (March n, 1547) || did not publish any
decrees. The legates declared the Council adjourned, and trans-
ferred it to Bologna, alleging the existence of a pestilence, which,
according to the Council's physician, was then threatening the city.
The bishops of the Emperor's party voted unanimously against
the transfer, and declared that under no circumstances would they
stir from Trent. They declared, in great anger, that the pestilence
*Page 108. tPage 124. JPage 100.
Pages 124-136, 458-465, 601-621. There were present at this session three
cardinals, nine archbishops, fifty-one bishops, five generals of religious orders, and
two abbots. II Page 142.
1914-] THE DIARIES OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT 477
was a myth, and that the real reason of the transfer was the un-
friendliness that had arisen between the Pope and the Emperor.
As a matter of fact, they were estranged at this time, and re-
mained so until the death of Paul III. The Pope bitterly resented
the Emperor's refusal to give the investiture of Parma and Piacenza
to his relative, Pierluigi Farnese,* and was angry at the Emperor's
continued interference in theological matters. Charles V., in the
manner of one of the old Byzantine emperors, tried to settle the
doctrinal difference between Catholics and Protestants by his own
authority. The famous Interim of Augsburg, f May 15, 1548, men-
tioned frequently in the text allowed Protestants to receive the
Eucharist under both kinds, the married Protestant clergy to keep
their wives, and the princes to retain the stolen ecclesiastical prop-
erty. As might be expected, this decree satisfied no one. The
Catholics rightly maintained that the Emperor had no right what-
ever to make concessions, and the Protestants denied the power of a
General Council to legislate concerning their affairs.
It was stigmatized by the Protestant party as " a fornication
with the whore of Babylon, a work of the devil, a revival of
Papistry, and a scheme to undermine the pure faith."
The fourth diary $ treats of the ninth (April 21, 1547) and
tenth (Junr2, 1547) sessions of the Council held at Bologna. No
decrees were formulated at either session, although for eight months
the theologians discussed the five sacraments of Extreme Unction,
Orders, Matrimony, Penance, and the Eucharist, besides the Catho-
lic teaching on Purgatory and Indulgences.
Continual protests were made by the Emperor and the thirteen
bishops of his party, who wfcre still at Trent, against the validity of
the transfer, and although the Pope refused to consider their ob-
jections, their opposition prevented anything being accomplished at
Bologna. Massarelli remained in the city until October 6, 1549,!!
but most of his time was spent in writing up his diaries and the
Acta of the Council, and acting as inquisitor in a number of heresy
trials. The diary closes with the death of Pope Paul III., No-
vember 10, 1549.
* Pages 244, 248, 310, 692.
tPages 761, 762, 765-767, 771-773. 779, 831.
JPages 626-873. Pages 737, 757. HPage 867.
THE MISSION'S LAST TENANT.
BY MARY CATHERINE CROWLEY.
SMALL, crescent-shaped bay, formed by the wooded
promontory of the Pointe de Montreal and the curve
of the Canadian shore, such is the little harbor whose
steep strand marks the site of a once- famed Jesuit
mission for the Indians, during nearly two centuries
a landmark of the blue strait, known as the Detroit River, that con-
nects the great Lakes Huron and Erie.
Until a few years ago the original mission house was still
standing, a long, low structure of huge squared logs, with white
chimneys a house surrounded by a pleasant orchard, planted by
the good Father Poitier, S.J., at the period when large numbers of
the Huron tribe worshipped in the rude chapel, whose foundation
walls may, to-day, be traced in the field just beyond.
So solitary was the orchard in its age that it appeared to have
been forgotten by the world. Having re-discovered it for our-
selves, the girl artist and I spent many happy afternoons under the
gnarled trees that occasionally dropped down to us a withered, rosy
apple, wholesome and of excellent flavor, although but a meagre
representative of the fine " pomme de neige " whose graft was
brought from Normandy when Canada was a province of France.
Here we were ensconced one day, with sketch-book and writ-
ing-pad respectively, in the shade of the old French pear tree that,
straight and tall, like a grenadier, guarded the entrance to the
orchard. From our coign of vantage, looking up the wide, sunlit
strait, we could see, on the northern bank, the buildings of the city
of Detroit; opposite to us, across the shining waters, stood out the
gray walls and green bastions of Fort Wayne, and all around us
was the beauty of summer.
When we had first found this quiet sanctuary, the mission
house was occupied by a swarming family of French-Canadians,
descendants, perhaps, of the sturdy habitants that were employed
to build it as a headquarters for the " Blackrobes " and explorers
who, in the eighteenth century, roamed the wilderness from Michili-
mackinac to Louisiana.
Now, the ruin, whose unpainted timbers gave back a sheen of
1914.] THE MISSION'S LAST TENANT 479
silver, appeared deserted. That it was not entirely abandoned,
nevertheless, soon became manifest, for, as we worked, its weather-
beaten door opened, and from the shadowy interior issued a little
old woman, who came quickly toward us, through the long grass
to which the wild flowers gave a hue of purple, like the mists that
lie on distant hills.
Like the venerable mission, its tenant was low in stature and
of broad dimensions. The keen eyes, that studied us from beneath
a grotesque, narrow-brimmed hat, reminded me of the dormer win-
dows in the moss-grown roof, and her air, although unmistakably
shabby, was that of one who opposes a strong and cheerful endur-
ance to the ills of life.
" Madame, we are trespassers," I called out in French, for
such was, evidently, her origin.
At the unexpected greeting in her native tongue, she forgot
all else, and, clapping her hands together with the joy of a child,
replied in the same language:
" Ah, it is good that madame speaks as I do, because I know
not English."
As the mission's tenant spoke with a burr in her throat, there
might be. a doubt about the compliment, but on neither side was
evidenced a disposition to be critical.
" And your name is ? " I said interrogatively.
" Madame Beaufort. My husband and I live here with the
rats and the ghosts. My faith! I cannot tell which are the more
troublesome."
;< You are not a Canadian ? " I hazarded further, leaving
the question of the spiritual manifestations for another occasion.
" No, madame," she raised her head and spread her palms up-
ward in a fine disdain. " I am from Poissy in France. So also
is my husband. We have been, too, in Paris."
She must have been over sixty years of age and very poor,
otherwise she would not have taken up her abode in this dilapidated
house, isolated from the happy-hearted habitant families, for whose
provincialism she professed so withering a scorn.
" From Paris to Detroit is a long journey," I said musingly.
Madame Beaufort sighed, and her glance swept over the scene
before her, the expanse of azure waters flowing on in a swift tide
to Lake Erie, the city not far away, the star-blazoned banner float-
ing above the fort, the orchard with its fragrant grass, the birds
singing in the trees, and, last of all, the old home of the missionaries.
480 THE MISSION'S LAST TENANT [Jan,
" Yes, it is very far away, and so different," she faltered.
For a moment her round, wrinkled face lost its brightness and
grew comically pensive, like the face of Pierrot when he weeps.
How we all, even to the humblest, look at life through the prism
of the emotions! What did this woman know of the city of Paris
beyond the wretchedness of the most miserable streets of Mont-
martre or the " quartiers " where the "little people" congregate?
Here before her now lay the loveliness of earth, and sea, and sky,
the peace of nature, and yet she saw no beauty in the prospect as she
contrasted it with the picture in her mind.
" Oh, a day in the city's square, there is no such pleasure
in life," quoted the girl artist, in a murmured aside.
"Madame has been in my country, perhaps?" asked the
French woman wistfully, turning to me.
" In Paris and other parts of France, but not in Poissy."
" It is almost the same. Madame knows how beautiful are the
fields of grain, with the poppies growing in between, how green and
fresh are the market gardens for many miles about Paris. Ah,
it is gay," she continued, resolutely banishing the regret aroused,
it would seem, by the recollection of ancestral cabbage plots. " In
France they sing and step lightly in the 'ronde, ronde, ronde !' Upon
the Avignon bridge. Like this, madame."
Throwing off her hat, and catching up the sides of her blue
print gown, Madame Beaufort began to dance around lightly in a
ring, singing and tripping as merrily as any young girl in the parish
of 1'Assomption, the church whose slender spire rises from among
the trees west of the mission, presenting one of the prettiest view r s
along the river.
The dance was naively pathetic, the old woman, squat in figure
yet sprightly, with her gray hair wound in tight plaits about her
head and covered with a silk net, spinning around, now swaying
backward and forward, now courtesying with the coquetry and
affected grace of a young lass, and a playfulness that was ludi-
crously engaging. Yet this abandonment of gaiety was but a means
of concealing deeper emotions. Madame Beaufort danced, because
if she had not she must have cast herself down on the green carpet
under the trees, and given herself to passionate weeping. In the
midst of her witch-like gyrations she stopped short, and an expres-
sion of alarm settled upon her old face, over which smiles and
frowns had alternately flitted during her fantastic ebullition of
feeling.
1914.] THE MISSION'S LAST TENANT 481
" Madame," she cried earnestly, fearing I might misunder-
stand, " I dance, I sing, but I am not crazy."
" No, no, we comprehend," I hastened to reassure her, taking
her brown hand in mine. " When the heart is touched, and some-
times when it is sad, we must laugh, sing, dance our merriest, or
else weep bitterly. Is it not so ? "
" Yes, yes, madame knows, madame has lived," she stammered,
dashing the bright drops from her eyes. " My, I have no brains.
'Je suis bete comme une cruche,'* but I can dance; yes, all my life,
whatever comes, I dance. Now, if it pleases madame and made-
moiselle, I will show them my house. Monsieur Beaufort, he is
gone to market."
Madame Beaufort pointed in the direction of Sandwich, the
Canadian town a mile away, whither her lord and master, as the
man proved literally to be, had betaken himself to sell garden truck
and buy a few necessaries for madame's frugal housekeeping.
The old couple lived under one corner of the mission roof, and
their " menage " was simplicity itself. But Madame Beaufort led
us through the unoccupied part of the ruin, from cellar to loft, with
a grand air of proprietorship. Here was the kitchen where the
Indians used to gather around the hearth. Never was hospitality re-
fused them; indeed, the chiefs often sat at table with the good Father,
the superior of the mission. There was the library where "Black-
robe " travelers from the wilds were made welcome, and where
Father Poitier spent his scant leisure, with his few precious books
and his writings. For he had set forth the Indian tongues in a manu-
script that, unhappily, was lost in a great war. In those early days
the garret was barricaded,, so that the Indian women and children,
and the old men, might find a safe shelter in the mission house, when
the villages along the shore were attacked by redmen of hostile
tribes, and the warriors were away on the warpath. Thus we went
through all the shadowy rooms, whose walls, could they but speak,
might have told us so many stories of the scenes of heroism they
had witnessed. And then Madame Beaufort showed us her garden,
as faithful a reproduction as might be of the vegetable patches that
dot the country for miles in the environs of Paris.
It was over her leeks and chicory, lentils a'nd cabbages, that
the hale old woman told us the story of her life, which, translated
into English, ran as follows:
" Seeing me now, perhaps, madame would not think that I had
*" I am as stupid as a pig."
VOL. XCVIII. 31
482 THE MISSION'S LAST TENANT [Jan.,
the luck, good or bad, to get two husbands. Yet so it is. The first
was a good man, alas, too good for this world. After he died
I fell in with Monsieur Beaufort; we married, and after that I fell
out with him many times, ha! ha! It was all because of my
daughter, madame, the child of my first marriage. He was jealous
of the love I gave her. Now she is married, and has children of
her own, and we are out here in America. So there is peace on
that score.
" It is twelve years since Monsieur Beaufort came from France
to New York. From there he journeyed to Detroit, which place
he thought was still a city of French-Canadians. When leaving
me he had said he would send for me as soon as he found work.
In six months he sent my passage money, and told me to come.
My daughter wept, the children sobbed, and I felt that my heart
would break, when I thought that I was taking leave of them
forever, and such, indeed, the separation is like to prove. 'My
son-in-law,' he said, 'do not go. Monsieur Beaufort is not so good
to you as he might be ; you shall have a home with us while you live.'
" From my soul I thanked him, madame, but I came. My
passage money was for the steerage, but my daughter bought a
second cabin ticket for me. Mercy, the voyage! When I
began to care to live, again, there was nothing to eat. They do
not know how to cook on these great ships, madame. Ah, I have
often thought since, as I did then, if I could only have had a cup of
broth, such as I make every day from the vegetables that grow in
every French peasant's garden, and which, as you see, flourish here
as well. Well, I reached New York, but it was to find new
difficulties. Since there was no one to meet me at the island called
Ellis, and I had very little coin, I was detained until the officials
should hear from Monsieur Beaufort. Not knowing me, they
feared I might be telling them a lie, madame, and that I was trying
to slip into this great rich country wrongfully, and might become
a beggar in its city streets. But, I was not troubled. I gave
them the name of my husband, and a man in uniform wrote it down,
with the address. The place where the immigrants were lodged
was well enough; but still there was no black broth, and for lack
of it I could not eat. But I laughed and sang, and, sometimes,
I danced to cheer up the women among us who were sad. After
a few days came a letter concerning me. It was not from my hus-
band, but from the Immigration Office in Detroit. My heart seemed
to stand still when the official read it to me.
I9I4-] THE MISSION'S LAST TENANT 483
" 'No man of the name you gave me has called at the office
to inform the officials of your coming, and they can find no trace
of any such man,' he said. 'You are like to become a public charge,
I must send you back to France.'
" Ah, madame, then my heart began to beat again very fast, to
beat with joy. It was all I could do to keep from dancing, even
before those gruff men. Through no fault of mine, I was to be
returned to France. I would see my daughter and my little grand-
children once more. I would spend the remainder of my life in
the home my son-in-law had offered me. I wept, madame, but I
wept from happiness. It was not for long. I took thought again,
Monsieur Beaufort would never have sent the passage money if he
had intended to desert me. 'There must be some mistake,' I de-
clared, and taking my husband's letter from the bosom of my blouse,
I showed the official the address Monsieur Beaufort had given me.
It was written large and plain, if not over well.
" 'B-e-a-u-f-o-r-t !' cried the man, picking it out letter by letter.
'Is that the way you spell it?'
" 'How else would it be ?' I asked with some sharpness. A
woman does not care to be thought a fool, madame.
" 'You said Bowfor, and so I wrote it, B-o-w-f-o-r,' he
replied roughly. 'I shall have to communicate with the agent
again.'
" The officials in America are not all clever, madame. How
was I to know that I should have tried to speak French in the
American fashion ? Not all Americans do, to be sure not, madame,
for instance," she added lest she might have given offence, and
then went on. " The next time, when the answer came, it was all
right. I journeyed on the steam cars by night and by day, and at
last got to Detroit, yonder, very weary. And when I arrived
Monsieur Beaufort was angry. He said the delay was all my fault.
And perhaps it was since, as I have told, madame, I have no
brains; I'm as stupid as a pig.
" Soon after my coming, we crossed over here to Canada, and
took up our abode among the French-Canadians of 1'Assomption
parish. Monsieur Beaufort worked at his carpenter's trade, and
I made a small garden, like this one, and sold the produce. We
did well at first; but the years passed; my husband took ill; he
became too old to work ; I was ill too ; the winters are so cold here,
and there is such a great wind that one cannot keep warm. And
so, we grew poorer and poorer, until we could pay no rent, and were
484 THE MISSION'S LAST TENANT [Jan.,
without a roof over our heads. Then the good Father of 1'Assomp-
tion said to us :
" 'The old mission house is scarce more than a ruin, but, if
you think it will afford you sufficient shelter, you are welcome to
live in it.'
" And truly it makes a good lodging for us, madame. In
winter I close all the rooms but the kitchen; Monsieur Beaufort
makes a great fire in the chimney, and, with our store of vegetables
and the wood we have gathered, we do very well. Yes, yes, the
old house will last as long as we shall need it."
"But what of your daughter and her children?" I inquired,
as Madame Beaufort paused to take breath.
The brightness died out of the wrinkled face, and its expression
grew mournful.
" Ah, madame and mademoiselle," replied the old woman with
a sigh, " in the beginning I had letters from my daughter, telling me
of the little ones, messages that made my heart glad. But they also
soon caused me trouble. Monsieur Beaufort was always vexed
when the letters came. At such times he would linger in the wine
shop of the town, or, coming home, would tell me I might return
to France if I desired, for he was tired of seeing me weep over the
precious letters, and he cared not at all to hear the news that was
in them. So after that I hid my tears and laughed and sang again.
Thus it was best to do. But, truly, it is long since I have danced,
as to-day, in the sunshine.
" I seldom sent an answer to the letters. Since I have no
brains I had to have the writing done for me, and one does not
like to tell one's troubles to everyone. So, after a while, my
daughter ceased to write. Perhaps she thinks I have moved away,
perhaps she thinks I am no longer living. Still letters matter not
so much between us, after all. She knows that while there is
breath in me I shall love her ; and afterwards, forever and forever,
since one loves with the soul as well as with the heart, is it not so ?
I think of her every day, and in my mind I see her children grown
tall and strong. Our love is a bridge across the sea, and over it
our thoughts pass to each other, so I am content."
" But, by all the mission saints ! " I cried thoughtlessly, " since
Monsieur Beaufort did not treat you well, and your daughter was
so devoted to you, why did you not stay with her? Why did you
leave your country and all whom you loved? "
Our hostess drew back a little and stared at me in frank sur-
I9I4-] THE MISSION'S LAST TENANT 485
prise. The sun was now sinking into the opalescent waters down
near Lake Erie, but a lingering ray of golden light, shining aslant
through the trees of the orchard, brought out into strong relief
the figure of the sturdy peasant as she stood before us Yet, was
it only the sunlight that gave to her parchment-like face a softer
expression, and to her squat figure a certain dignity as she answered?
" My daughter is my daughter, madame, and her children are my
grandchildren. It may be that my second marriage was a misfor-
tune, of that I do not often speak. But Monsieur Beaufort is my
husband; it was my duty to cleave to him. Therefore I came."
A decade of years ago the mission farm was sold. Would that
it could have been kept as a historic spot, and the mission house
could have been preserved as a shrine, for, verily, great deeds for
God and humanity and civilization were done here in the olden time !
The soil tilled by several generations of aborigines under the super-
vision of the "Blackrobes," is now cultivated anew; the mission
house has, with the exception of two or three rooms, been razed to
the ground. The study where the good Father Poitier wrestled with
the Indian tongues still exists, however, as the commercial office of
the productive and prosperous vineyards of the vicinity. But the
apple and pear trees have been cut down; and, together with the
house and the orchard, the mission's last tenant has passed away.
The girl artist and I have wandered far from the beautiful
strait, yet in memory I frequently see again its broad current sweep-
ing past the Pointe de Montreal, the city nearby, the flag floating
over the fort, and the little old woman dancing on the grass, or
standing with the sunlight shining upon her face, as she uncon-
sciously revealed, in naive speech, the heroism of her simple life.
CANON SHEEHAN.
A MEMORY AND AN APPRECIATION.
BY JOHN J. HORGAN.
I.
REMEMBER very well the last occasion on which I
visited him at Doneraile. It was a glorious spring
day. High overhead floated soft, white, fleecy
clouds in a sky of vivid blue. As we drove along
the high road from Mallow, suddenly at a turn in
the way the beautiful panorama of wood and valley and mountain
burst into view. There was Doneraile far below, as he himself
once described it, " nestling in a deep well, sheltered by the impene-
trable umbrage of woods and forests," away behind it lay the brown
and green solitudes of the Ballyhoura hills, and to the left the
towering Galtees, still topped with their winter nightcaps of snow.
Across the hills the cloud shadows chased each other in the sun,
below us in the fields a busy farmer guided his plow over the fresh
green turf. All was peaceful, quiet, remote from the roar of the
railway and the traffic of the town. And then we came down into
the valley along the winding road, well shaded with interlacing
trees, past the comfortable laborers' cottages, where his name was
a household word, down the long village street, and there at the end
was the Mecca of our pilgrimage, the little tw r o-storied, unpreten-
tious house where Canon Sheehan lived. A few yards away
Spenser's " gentle Mulla " flowed on its even way through reeds
and shallows. Across the road were the trees of Lord Castletown's
beautiful demesne. All around was the quiet leisured flow of life
in this prosperous little Irish village. There were the surroundings
amidst which all his great work was done, not only the work which
made his name famous throughout the world, but that other work
which he placed first, his work as priest and guardian of his people.
II.
I had come for the week end, one of many that I had the
honor and privilege of spending under his roof. In the afternoon
we went for a drive to visit the historic Kilcolman, where Spenser
I9I4-] CANON SHEEHAN 487
lived and wrote the Faerie Queene. It is an old, gray frontier
castle, perched above a brown bog. From the summit on a clear
day you can see five counties. The Galtees seem to frown over
your head, and the lordly Shannon is a gleam of glory on the hori-
zon. We talked there amongst the ruins of many things; of how
it was there Spenser welcomed Raleigh, newly-home from his voy-
age round the world, bringing with him those two commonplace
necessities of modern life, potatoes and tobacco; of how there, too,
he wrote his magnificent Epithalamium in loyal fealty to his
Irish wife, and how there finally as a reward for his ruthless policy
the " wilde Irishe," as he called them, burnt his castle to the ground.
Back at Doneraile again we spent the afternoon in the garden
he loved so well. The long, narrow garden, a hortus conclusus,
et disseptus with its high trees and shrubs, the garden with which
readers of his books are so familiar, and which he greatly loved.
Here he showed me the crocuses bursting up joyously from their
winter ^leep, and we paced up and down the narrow-sheltered path
where much of his work was thought out. There, too, was the
little wooden summerhouse where in summer he often wrote. Be-
fore his last illness fell upon him, he often worked in the garden
himself, directing or helping the gardener. It was his place of
peace and meditation secure from all interruption or observation ;
it was there he spent the happiest hours of his life. And when
the evening came, we strolled out along the country roads in the
dusk, and talked of books and men. He was at his best then.
He never shone in a crowd. His natural shyness and modesty,
which he so often admitted and deplored, seemed in a crowded
company to dry up that delightful easy flow of genial, speculative
conversation to which those who knew him intimately loved to
listen. But with a friend on a country walk or by his own fireside,
few men were more interesting or more entertaining. Interesting
not only because he talked well himself, but because, like all
good talkers, he drew from his companion the best he could give
to the common discussion. Americans and others anxious to meet
the famous author, often traveled to Doneraile to see him, but I
fear many went away without ever meeting the real Canon Sheehan
that his friends knew so well.
His house spoke of the man. Books everywhere. On the
drawing-room table ; in broad compact bookcases around the dining
room ; in marshaled ranks lining the little study upstairs where he
read and wrote. And all methodically neat. As he wrote some-
CANON SHEEHAN [Jan.,
where himself, he was a precisian, and this neatness and order was
reflected in his writings and in his life. But in that house there
was no luxury, no ostentation, no display.
The following day was Sunday, and I had the privilege of
attending his Mass, and listening to his simple, beautiful, little ser-
mon, in the fine old parish church, which he had done so much
to beautify and repair. In the afternoon we went up together
to the splendid field beyond the river, where every Sunday the
young Gaelic athletes of the surrounding parishes contended for
supremacy. There was a hurling match in progress, a fine exciting
match well played. It was delightful to see him there amongst his
people, quiet and unpretentious, the gentle parish priest beloved by
all, sharing the pleasures and sports of the crowd with all the
enthusiasm and interest of a boy. Those who wish to read one of
the best descriptions ever written of a hurling match, should turn
to the first chapter in his novel Glenanaar, and they will find there
a description of such a scene as we saw that afternoon. And in
Parerga also there is another description of a similar scene. I shall
always like to think of him, as I remember him that Sunday, a
genial smile lighting up his keen intellectual face as he pointed out
to me the celebrated players and the points of the game; one likes
to remember a dear friend at his best, and he was at his best then.
III.
And now I turn from this happy memory to write something,
feeble and unworthy though it be, about his life. Patrick Augustine
Sheehan was born in New Street, Mallow, on March 17, 1852. It
was probably the day of his birth that determined his baptismal
name; while his own choice at a later epoch fell on the glorious
son of St. Monica, whose praises he was afterwards to sound with
fervent eloquence. He did not play a noisy part amongst the juve-
nile " rakes of Mallow," but grew up a reserved, solitary boy. My
uncle who was then curate at Mallow, often told me of how he gave
Canon Sheehan his first musical lessons in the church choir. Read-
ers of My New Curate will remember the village choir over which
Father Letheby presided, and how he " brought clear to the front
the sweet tenors of the schoolboys, on whom he said all his hopes
depended." It was a picture of his own schoolboy triumphs in
the Mallow choir.
Very early he showed a singular aptitude for mathematics, and
1914-] CANON SHEEHAN 489
his last two years at the Mallow National School were devoted ex-
clusively to geometry and algebra. His classical education was not
begun until 1866, when he entered St. Colman's College, Fermoy.
In 1868 he took fourth place in the concursus, and was anxious to
go to Rome for his ecclesiastical studies. He was dissuaded, how-
ever, and returned to the Diocesan Seminary. He never lost his
affection for St. Colman's, and in after years he devoted a con-
siderable part of the profits from his books to renovating the college
chapel, and also for its general advancement. Gaining the first
place at the next concursus, he went to Maynooth in September,
entering for the class of logic. Strange to say he escaped distinc-
tion during his Maynooth course, so completely that after he became
famous many who were almost his contemporaries at college, have
been slow to believe that he was ever a student of Maynooth.
The explanation is chiefly that he was in very delicate health
during the whole of his Maynooth career, from 1869 to l &74- All
his family died at an early age, except a younger brother, who sur-
vives him, and who holds a high position under the local government
board. So unsatisfactory was his health at this period, that he was
obliged to interrupt his theological studies in the academical year
1872-1873, remaining at home to rest for those twelve months.
Meanwhile, however, he was not losing time or letting his mind lie
fallow. He was an omnivorous but desultory reader in the sec-
tional libraries of the college. Carlyle and Tennyson were his
teachers during this period. From the former he learned the gospel
of work, which had a marked influence on all his after life. He
was fascinated by Tennyson's dreaminess, mysticism, and music, and
learned by heart a great many of his poems. You will find apt quo-
tations from Tennyson in nearly all his books, and in most of his
addresses. Later on he was repelled by Carlyle's hatred of the
Church, and by his unchristian doctrine of brute force ; and Tenny-
son he exchanged for the more robust thought of Dante and Brown-
ing. Such reading was not without its influence on his professional
work. Father Tom Burke once said that he read poetry every
day, in order to gain as much vividness and sweetness as he could
for his language in the pulpit.
Canon Sheehan received the Holy Order of Priesthood at the
earliest legal age. He was ordained in the Cathedral of Cork on
the Feast of St. Joseph's Patronage, 1875, which is kept on the
third Sunday after Easter, and was, therefore, in that year the i8th
of April. The diocese of Cloyne being at that time sufficiently
490 CANON SHEEHAN [Jan.,
supplied with priests, he was lent to a less fortunate English diocese.
The Bishop of Plymouth placed him on the staff of his cathedral,
and in Plymouth he preached his first sermon on the first Sunday of
May, the subject being the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed
Virgin. One of his earliest sermons was on the sanctity of the
Church, and a remarkable circumstance is connected with it. A
very famous clergyman of the Established Church, the Rev. Robert
Hawker, Vicar of Morwenstow in Cornwall, broke down in health
that year, gave up his vicarage, and came to his native town Ply-
mouth. On the evening that the young Irish priest preached on the
sanctity of the Church, the retired vicar sat under the pulpit with
his wife and three daughters. This fact was brought out strongly
in the local newspaper by angry Protestants, when Mr. Hawker's
conversion was announced a few days later.
This was Canon Sheehan's last sermon at Plymouth, as he was
soon afterwards moved to Exeter, where the remainder of his time
in England was spent. Here he officiated for two years under
the saintly Canon Hobson, for whom he ever afterwards retained
the most graceful and affectionate regard. During these years,
amid all the occupations and distractions of active life, Canon
Sheehan read and studied far more theology than during all the
years of college life set apart exclusively for such studies. In the
midst of heretical surroundings, and addressing, Sunday after Sun-
day, congregations largely composed of actual or probable converts,
his profound sense of responsibility towards the souls with whom he
came in contact, urged him to exert his powers to the utmost, and
he felt himself obliged to master every subject of controversy that
might help souls on to the light. It was an experience gained dur-
ing this period of his life that he afterwards drew largely for some
of the most interesting chapters in The Triumph of Failure, Luke
Delmege, and other of his books. He was probably more reluctant
to be taken from such congenial and fruitful work, when the Bishop
of Cloyne called him back to Ireland, than he had been to leave
home originally and go into exile.
Of the thirty-eight years that have elapsed since he returned
to Ireland, the first four were spent in his native parish of Mallow.
One of the first works he undertook in this new sphere of action
was the formation of a Young Men's Society. This interest in the
work of the young Catholic laity was one of his leading charac-
teristics, as all who have read his works are aware. An inaugural
lecture which he delivered to this society in 1880 was one of his
1914.] CANON SHEEHAN 491
earliest publications. In 1881 he was transferred to Queenstown,
where he labored for eight years. Here it was that his literary
career fairly began with a simple little story called Topsy, written
for a children's magazine. Some other short stories of this period
have been reprinted by the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland
amongst their penny publications. His first long story, however,
Geoffrey Austin, Student, was not attempted till his second curacy
in the place of his birth, for in 1899 he returned from Queenstown
to Mallow.
He had previously contributed many articles to the Irish Ec-
clesiastical Record, and an essay of his in The Irish Monthly on
The Two Civilisations excited the warm admiration of Judge
O'Hagan. The friendship which was thus early formed between
him and Father Matthew Russell, continued to the end, and many
of his most beautiful poems and short articles first saw the light in
The Irish Monthly. The first work of his I ever read was a poem
on the sea, which appeared in its pages. Before he left Queenstown,
however, his health completely broke down from overwork. He
fell into such a state of nervous prostration that he had to be re-
lieved from all duty for a year (1888), which he spent at Glengariff
and Youghal. Like the similar interruption of his Maynooth life,
this year was by no means intellectually blank.
In 1895 ne was appointed parish priest of Doneraile. Here the
aid of two curates left him sufficient leisure to achieve the literary
work which has laid Catholic readers in every country in the world
under a heavy debt of gratitude. Geoffrey Austin was followed by
The Triumph of Failure (1899), in which some of the same char-
acters appear, and which was his favorite work. If The Triumph
of Failure did not meet with the success it deserved, his next book,
My New Curate (1900), raised Canon Sheehan to a position in
the world of letters which was unique. It appeared first in the
American Ecclesiastical Review, and had an enormous sale in
America before it was appreciated here. In it he revealed himself
as a master of a singularly pure, lucid, and cultured English style,
and as one of the little band of great writers who have truly and
sympathetically portrayed Irish life. Then followed from his pen
a series of novels, essays, and poems which enhanced and in-
creased his fame. Of these the most interesting to my mind are
Luke Delmege, Glenanaar, The Blindness of Dr. Gray, and the two
delightful books of essays, Under the Cedars and the Stars, and
Parerga, which are perhaps the best literary work he ever did.
492 CANON SHEEHAN [Jan.,
Of his novels I like Glenanaar much the best, and consider that the
dramatic description of O'Connell's defence of the Doneraile con-
spirators was one of the finest things he ever wrote. O'Connell
dominates the scene from his first angry interruption of the sur-
prised solicitor-general with the words, " That is not law," until
the final collapse of the Crown case under his determined attack.
It was one of O'Connell's greatest triumphs.
When his w r ork became known in Rome, Propaganda recom-
mended him to the Pope for the honorary degree of Doctor of
Divinity, which was immediately conferred upon him. And then
when he was at the height of his fame, came the first warning of
the illness which was to be fatal. He told no one, not even his
brother, but obtained the best advice, and finding that it was at
best only a matter of a few short years, he set himself quietly and
cheerfully to complete his work. Last year when I wrote to con-
gratulate him on his birthday, he wrote back, " Ever so many thanks
for your kind wishes just received. I close my sixtieth year to-
night, not a bad record for one who was often told he would never
comb his hair gray. Are you writing a book? I have no respect
for ephemeral literature, and I often see Great Catholic Laymen
alluded to in foreign papers, especially Australian, as a leading
Catholic work." This last reference was to my book, for which
he had kindly written a preface in 1905, and in the publication of
which he took a great interest. But the condition of his health
became rapidly worse, and, finally, in the early part of this year, he
had to be removed to the South Infirmary at Cork for special care
and nursing. Sad as it was to find him ill and suffering, it was
a great consolation to be able to see him so near and so often.
Every week I called on him, generally on Saturday afternoons,
when my work was done, and brought him books from my hetero-
geneous library, for his intellect was as keen as ever, and reading
did not tire him.
He had a most open mind. All literature was interesting
to him, and he read very quickly. After a time the careful nursing
and skillful medical treatment began to tell, and soon he was al-
lowed down into the garden, and the good nuns lent him a quiet little
room near the chapel, where he could sit and read undisturbed.
Through it all he never complained. He knew that his illness was
hopeless and his cure impossible, but he wanted to get back once
more to Doneraile to die in harness amongst his own people. And
in the early spring his brother took him back to the little village,
1914.] CANON SHEEHAN 493
amidst the trees and the garden that he loved. For sometime \ve
had good news of him, everything seemed to be going well, and he
returned by degrees to the daily round of duty. But it was not for
long. The heavy hand of illness descended on him again, and
he had to give up everything. His brother was with him. He
saw many of his old friends up to a few days before the end.
Then the final weakness came upon him, and he could see no one.
He could not even read, he who had so much loved books. Quietly
and patiently he waited for the end, reciting fervently and fre-
quently the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin, to whom his devotion
was great. He had written a beautiful book in her praise, Maria:
Corona. And at last on Rosary Sunday he passed quietly away.
Catholic Ireland had lost one of its greatest sons.
IV.
We are too near him yet to be able to estimate the place he will
eventually take amongst the writers of our time. His works have
been translated into all the leading European languages. Great
masters of literature have spoken of them in terms of well-deserved
praise. But I do not think that all this ever gave him more than
a moment's passing pleasure. To him his priesthood was before
and above everything else. He won the love and reverence of all
his people, rich and poor, old and young, ignorant and educated.
And he was always working and striving for them. He disliked
all humbugs and charlatans, and measured their worth without say-
ing a hurtful word. I do not think anyone ever saw him in a
temper or heard him say a 'bitter thing. A few days before he
died, he was looking through some old papers and manuscripts with
his brother, and they came to a big pile of memoirs and recollections
which he had written from time to time. " Ah," he said, " we
will burn these, they might hurt some people's feelings if they were
ever published." His friends will regret this decision (which un-
fortunately he carried out), whilst they respect the fine charity of
the man.
He has left behind it is true a finished novel, The Graves of Kil-
monna, which deals with the rising of '67, and some other manu-
scripts, which will no doubt be published in due course. Like all
his work it is committed to paper fully and perfectly, not in an
illegible scrawl like Carlyle's, or with " walking sticks gone mad "
(as Tennyson described Dr. W. G. Ward's), but with characters,
494 CANON SHEEHAN [Jan.,
deft, uniform, neat, and even elegant, while at the same time simple
and unaffected. If my readers believe, as I do, that handwriting
often betrays personal characteristics, they will appreciate the sig-
nificance of the epithets I have applied to Canon Sheehan's calli-
graphy.
He never let his literary work impair his pastoral efficiency.
He used to rise early, and offer Mass at Our Lady's altar in his
parish church. When not otherwise bound he always applied it
through her hands to the soul in purgatory that was next to be
released, for he held that devotion to the Holy Souls is the per-
fection of charity, just as devotion to our Blessed Lady is the
secret of all civilization in its reverence for womanhood, and as the
ineffable mystery of the Eucharist is the solution of all the mysteries
of life. After breakfast he used to visit the schools or some of his
parishioners, and in these quiet walks he composed much of what he
afterwards wrote down. But his favorite place for composition
was, as I have already said, his garden. Flowers and little children
were his chief delights. He seldom left Doneraile, and a few weeks
at the sea sometimes Ballycotton, sometimes Kilkee were the only
holidays he ever took. The sea was ever present to him.
There could be no solitude here [he wrote], for voices were
ever calling, calling to you; and you had to shade your eyes
from the glare of the sunlit foam, that not only dazzled and
blinded at your feet, but floated up in a kind of sea-dust that
filled all the air with sun mists, and was shot through and through
with rainbows that melted and appeared again, and vanished as
the sunlight fell, or the wind caught the smoke of the breakers
and flung it back against the steel blue, darkened sea without.
Far up along the coast, you could see the same glorious phenom-
enon a fringe of golden foam breaking helplessly against iron
barriers; and here and there where a great rock stood alone
and motionless, cut loose from the mainland by centuries of
attrition, you might behold cataract after cataract of molten
gold pouring out and over it, covering it for a moment in a
glittering sheet of water, and then diminishing into threads of
silver as the spent waves divided into tiny streamlets and fell.
It was again the eternal war of nature, the aggressive sea, fling-
ing its tremendous tonnage of waters on the land; and the
patient rocks washed and beaten and tortured forever turning
their faces to the sea.
You understand now how he loved the sea.
1914.] " YEA, AND HIS OWN LIFE ALSO " 495
V.
I came again to Doneraile on the day of his funeral. All the
countryside had come to do him homage. A nation mourned by his
grave. Lords and members of Parliament, farmers and laborers,
professional men and artisans, all at one in their sorrow and in their
loss. But it was in the little house by the river that one missed him
most. The gentle presence, the quiet voice, the kindly smile, all
gone. And yet not altogether gone. For his example lives the
example of pain borne without complaint, of duty nobly done, of a
great work for Ireland, and the faith persevered in to the end.
The procession passed through the little village street, through the
convent grounds, where he so often went to encourage and help
the good nuns in their work, and finally they laid him to rest beside
his church. There his body lies, but his brave soul has gone from
us he has passed to his reward.
In the garden of death, where the singers whose names
are deathless,
One with another make music unheard of men.
" YEA, AND HIS OWN LIFE ALSO."
BY FRANCIS P. DONNELLY, S.J.
WHAT, must I ever whet the altar knife,
My God and Father ? Oh, relent, relent !
Wouldst Thou have every tie be rudely rent,
Of blood, of friendship, mother, child or wife?
Must heart-beat with its fellow beat have strife,
And will the edge of war's arbitrament
Through raw, through quick, through quivering soul be sent,
Unto the parting of my life from life?
Alas, but Thou wilt have it so with me,
Blending sweet solace with the bleeding smart
And forging weakness to the strength of Christ.
Bleak Bethlehem and darkest Calvary
And spear that slays the slain, teach my faint heart :
Love is best love when love is sacrificed.
THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC.
II. THE PROBLEM OF THE PRESENT.
BY THOMAS J. GERRARD.
[INCE in Beethoven intellectual design seemed to have
reached its apogee, no alternative was left the com-
poser but to seek originality in new color rather than
in new design. Since in Beethoven pure music was
at its purest, novelty could only be obtained through
new elements. So a reaction set in towards mixed music, and spe-
cifically towards what is called programme music, where the words
are not sung, but a description of the ideas to be conveyed is printed
on the programme. Beethoven, himself, gave the impetus to this
new direction, but he is careful to tell us his descriptive music is
rather the expression of inward feeling than outward painting.
Although Beethoven's intellectual level was not maintained, his intel-
lectual principle was. It is paramount in Spohr, Weber, Berlioz,
Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Dvorak. The
staggering blow to real music was first dealt by a Wagner.
Wagner was undoubtedly a very great musician. But Wagner
came of a family of actors, and he was a dramatist first and
a musician afterwards. He built his music according to the exi-
gencies of the dramatic situation. He was not anti-intellectual in
the same sense as some of the later modernists. He kept an intel-
lectual grip on all his work, but it was his individual intellect un-
corrected by the collective intellect. If he made a mistake, he
stuck to it, and worked it out to its logical consequences. Hence,
although his music contains some of the finest overtures of all
time, some of the most entrancing melodies, some of the most
compelling choruses, it contains, also, many, long, tiresome recita-
tives. The rarity of closing cadences causes nerve strain. The
trained musician will not feel it, but the psychological effect on the
average hearer is decidedly unhealthy. More harmful still is the
authority given to smaller men to dispense with the laws of beauty,
and, under plea of sincerity, to express any and every subjective
state.
Before an artist answers the question : " Ought I to express
1914-] THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC 497
what I feel ? " he ought to ask a previous question : " Ought I to feel
what I feel ? " If he ponder morbidly an illicit feeling, he is an
incipient lunatic. If he present it to the general public through
the medium of a music-drama or a symphonic poem, he is a criminal.
If he do so and call it sincerity, he is a hypocrite.
Since exaggerated subjectivism is the selective principle of
modernism, each modern becomes a class by himself. Strauss,
Ravel, Moussorgsky, Mahler, Reger, Debussy, Scriabin, Schonberg
cannot be said to be Wagner ian. No two of them can even be
called affinities. To keep our inquiry within tangible limits, we will
choose the last three as representing three degrees of extreme
modernity.
Claude- Achille Debussy was born in 1862 at St. Germain-en-
Laye. He was educated at the Paris Conservatory, and conse-
quently received a thorough grounding in the classic forms. No
charge of incompetence can be brought against him. What he
does, he does with full knowledge and intent. He early showed a
disposition to assert his independence. The Prix de Rome which
he won at the Conservatory, enabled him to follow a course of
study in Italy. Not satisfied he went to Russia to observe the
extempore music of the wandering gypsies. The outcome of this
we find as the chief characteristic of his later work the formless
expression of primitive, natural impulses. Debussy was fond of
day-dreaming, and essayed throughout his music to express their
incoherent and fleeting substance. Whilst living in Rome he sub-
mitted to the Societe des Beaux Arts in Paris two works, first Le
Printemps, and then, a year later, a setting to a French translation
of Rosetti's Blessed Damosel. Although the board of examiners
was comprised of such moderns as Gounod, Delibes, Massanet,
Saint-Saens, Thomas, and Reyer, both works were declared to be
" erratic and infected with modernism." The rejection of his work
by the Societe des Beaux Arts only stung him into more determined
rebellion.
About 1893 Debussy came into prominence. His chief work
at this time, the one which has given him most fame in England
and America, was the prelude L'apres-midi d'un faune. It can
hardly be called descriptive music, nor yet pure music. It attempts
to express the feelings left after reading Malarme's poem of the
same name. He reached the height of his success in 1903, when
his lyric drama Pelleas et Melisande, a musical setting to a drama
by another pseudo-mystic, Maurice Maeterlinck, was produced at
VOL. xcvin. 32
498 THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC [Jan.,
the Opera-Comique in Paris. In this there is a certain amount of
unity owing to the sequence of the story. But it is a literary unity,
not a musical unity. Musically it is a collection of Debussy's moods
and colors. The orchestra provides an atmosphere rather than a
design as a setting for the voice.
The composer desires to dispense with what he considers par-
asitic musical phrases. Melody, he maintains, is anti-lyrical. Its
rhythm differs from the rhythm of the soul, whose feelings vary
frequently and rapidly. The music to express these feelings must
be capable of frequent and rapid change. If musical form does
not directly adapt itself to express impulse, it must be blotted out.
Intellectual symphonic development is entirely out of keeping with
dramatic life and action. When design has been thus cast aside
nothing is left but color. Those who like the new colors discovered
by Debussy, call them quaint, those who do not. call them eccentric.
They are derived from a scale which is a convention of Debussy with
himself. Some say he picked it up in Russia, others that he made
it up from the Gregorian modes. In any case, it is certainly not
Gregorian as it stands. It is, however, well adapted to produce
that quality of modern music which is called its mystery.
Debussy does not wish us to inquire too closely into his
mystery, lest we see through it and it be no longer mystery. Herein
lies the difference between true and false mysticism. A real mystery
is a truth partly revealed and partly concealed ; by meditating on the
part revealed we go on receiving new insights into the part con-
cealed. A false mystery is a truth wherein the known terms are
too confused and ill-defined for us to grasp it. When we analyze
the given terms and coordinate them, we understand everything, and
there is an end to the so-called mystery. Debussy calls such analysis
un crime de lese-mystere.
Bach and Beethoven, however, have lost nothing of their
mystery by analysis. Nay, the more we analyze them, the more
mystery we find. There is ever a receding " beyond," the perennial
interest which constitutes true mystery. But when mystery is
obtained by the juxtaposition of unrelated chords, by the repetition
of unresolved dissonances, by successions of perfect fifths, by spas-
modic changes of time, devices meant to produce intellectual con-
fusion, the result is mistiness not mystery. As in all other spheres
of experience, the problem of intellectualism in music is allied to
the problem of will. When intellectual light has been snuffed out,
the only principle of guidance left is animal impulse.
1914.] THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC 499
In the determinism of irrational nature, Debussy finds his
" splendid object-lessons of liberty." The freedom he asks is not
the freedom of a reasonable human being. It is an independence
which is the very antithesis of such freedom, the independence of
the animal impulses from intellectual control. Recognized beauty
of musical form must be sacrificed to obtain this end. "Therefore,"
he says, " no fixed rule should guide the creative artist : rules are
established by works of art, not for works of art. One should
seek discipline in freedom, not in the precepts of a philosophy in its
decline, and that is good only for those who are weak."
Debussy was not as advanced in practice as he was in principle.
His use of the cyclical method gives coherence to large areas of his
work, and saves much of it from the reproach of mere sensuous-
ness. Then, too, his practice of applying music to symbolize natural
sounds kept him in touch with the objective world. His Reflets
dans I'eau is a beautiful idealization of a rippling stream and the
trembling shadows beneath it. In his Jardins sous la pluie we can
hear the drip, drip of the rain, the sharp shower, and afterwards
the bright sunshine falling on the leaves, but all beautifully idealized,
as far removed from vulgar imitation as it is possible to be. If he
had only balanced human nature as he balanced the nature of the
streams and clouds and flowers, he might have been the prophet
whom the exigencies of modern music demand.
Still more subjective and nebulous is the Russian composer,
Scriabin. Theosophy is the secret of his eccentricity, and he uses
all the modern tricks to give its ideas expression. Scriabin was
born at Moscow in 1872. Educated for a military career, he early
renounced it to enter the Moscow Conservatory. He studied piano-
forte, and in 1892 was a gold medalist. He spent much time in
Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam, building up his reputation as a
pianist. In 1898 he returned to the Moscow Conservatory as pro-
fessor of pianoforte, which position he held until 1903. Then he
resigned and gave himself entirely to composition.
Prometheus, " a tone poem of fire, a musical exposition of the
philosophy of theosophy," has recently won him European
notoriety. The hero is not the hero of ^schylus, but one of the
" Sons of the Flames of Wisdom," who has as special mission to
humanity to convey the spark which develops into human intel-
ligence and consciousness. The chaos in the beginning of things,
when sounds were elementary and natural, has to be interpreted.
A theme having confusion in it becomes an inevitable component
500 THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC [Jan.,
of the modernist tone poem, an excuse for producing hideous
sounds, which politeness requires us to call cacophony.
Scriabin produces his cacophony by the use of a scale basis of
his own invention. It is something like that of Debussy, only a
little more eccentric. His work is all tone or musical color. To
elucidate its meaning, he proposes to invent machines whereby his
hearers may receive simultaneous sensible impressions of the meta-
phorical color and smell of music. The artistic principles so la-
boriously wrought out by Palestrina, Bach, and Beethoven now fade
away before the tricks of the light-piano, the color-organ, and the
smell-machine. Intelligence retires in the presence of sensuality.
And still the composer cannot express himself, but must issue a long
descriptive programme to tell his hearers what he means.
If we take Debussy as analogous to early post-impressionist
painters, and Scriabin as analogous to the later ones, then we may
class our next example, Arnold Schonberg, as analogous to the
futurists. Debussy and Scriabin had each a definite scale basis,
scales with some remote foundation in the nature of things. Schon-
berg employs the whole chromatic scale in one chord combination.
He literally sits on the keyboard of his piano, and thereby produces
his artistic cacophony ! Yet Schonberg is not a member of the Stock
Exchange playing a Saturday afternoon joke. He is a musician
of European repute. He was born at Vienna in 1874. In 1901
he went to Berlin, acting first as kapellmeister in Wolzogen's " Bun-
tern Theatre," and later as teacher of composition at the Sternschen
Konservatorium. In 1903 he returned to Vienna. For seven years
he worked successfully as a private teacher of composition. In
1910 he received an appointment for the same subject in the
Imperial Academy of Music. Late in 1911, however, he returned
to Berlin. In his book on harmony there is a passage which sums
up not only his own life work, but the whole of the method of
modernist art. He says : " The artist does nothing which other
people hold to be beautiful. He simply does that which he himself
feels that he must do."*
Schonberg is an artist who has come to himself. He speaks
only to the elect. There is a kind of silent outspokenness, whatever
that may be, between him and his friends. But how may one be-
come an illuminatif Be open and yielding. Throw aside every-
thing to which you are accustomed, all principle, conviction, infal-
*" Der kunstler tut nichts, was andere fiir schon halten, sondern nur, was ihm
ootwendig ist." Arnold Schonberg, von Karl Linke, etc., p. 22.
1914.] THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC 501
libility, nervousness. Put out the lights in the room and listen to
yourself within. Then suddenly the light will flood your soul.
If Schonberg cannot express himself in sound, he ex-
presses himself in paint. His hand is guided not by under-
standing, but by a strong inexplicable impulse, which overpowers
the defenceless artist. He has only this feeling: "Something is
happening to me. My hand is being led." When he has finished
these pictures he calls them " Visions." I have two of them lying
on my desk. One looks like an ape with the earache. The other,
like Satan in delirium tremens. Such is the drama of the vast in-
wardness. Schonberg's music steers us with unerring aim into a
great chaos. It takes us along paths which give no indication either
of coming to an end or of going to anywhere. Tradition is the wall
which bars entrance to the new cacophonious world. Tradition, the
idol of a bygone day, must be shattered.
We are loth to follow this movement to its still lower depths.
It would not be difficult to show its association with rag-time and
the degenerated dances connected therewith. It is time to ask
whether there be no way out of the mess. Is there no modern
school which retains the traditions of the past, and yet is alive to
the needs of the present and the future? Our English composers
are very correct, as clear as twice two are four, and as barren.
Our musical festivals have given birth to an endless number of
useless oratorios and cantatas, Balaam, Beelzebub, Potiphar, and
the like. But they are all so prim and uninteresting that they die
quite young. Even Elgar, whom we would like to claim as the
Newman of music, has foregone the promise of his Dream of
Gerontius. We ask again : Is there no living composer who satis-
fies or at least assuages the modern demand for tone, color, and
feeling without apostatizing from intellect? Is there no artist
in musical sound who utters the claims of enhanced individuality
without apostatizing from the collective judgment?
Such a prophet seems to stand among the French group of
writers. We may be premature in speaking thus of Vincent d'Indy,
but we think we see in him one who understands the aspirations
of the time-spirit, one who is in constant communication with its
every slighted movement, yet is thoroughly saturated with and
enamored of tradition, who, in fine, is capable of speaking the
ancient truth to the modern world.
D'Indy inherits his Bach-Beethoven tradition from his master,
Cesar Franck, who was born at Liege in 1822, and died in 1890.
502 THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC [Jan,
Franck was a professor at the conservatory in Paris. He studied
and employed every form of the musical art. He is best known,
however, for his organ compositions, and for his oratorio Les
Beatitudes. In Les Beatitudes he sustains the beauty of reason,
clothed with feeling. The music is solid architectural design, and
alive with mystic poetry, Franck suggests mystery, not by cacoph-
ony, but by silences. With the fact value there is a spirit value,
and the silent periods following upon the spoken word give oppor-
tunity for reflection and inference.
Franck was alive and working when the Wagnerian crash
came, and he was courageous enough to stand out against it. His
was not an unreasonable complaint, but a protest founded on
a thorough scientific knowledge of his art, and made effectual by
his strong personality, and the moral authority which he exercised
on his circle of friends.
Vincent d'Indy was born at Paris in 1851. With the exuber-
ance of French youth, he thought he could make a short cut to the
end without using the means, and wrote a grand opera without
studying counterpoint and fugue. But just then he had the good
fortune to fall under Franck's influence, and became his pupil at
the conservatory. For several years he played the drums in the
Colonne orchestra, and eventually acted as chorus master, all to
gain experience. Out of the fullness of his knowledge he wrote
three important works : Le Chant de Cloche, a dramatic legend ;
Fervaal, an opera in three acts, and L'Etranger, an opera in two
acts, all characterized by extraordinary knowledge of technical com-
binations, and rich fecundity of color. The real genius of d'Indy
shows itself in that with such a complete knowledge of orchestration
based on practical experience, he yet depended chiefly on the re-
sources of design for the production of color. His melody may
even be called poor, but so intelligently is it manipulated that the
simplest themes become gorgeous under his treatment. In studying
M. d'Indy's work, we realize St. Thomas' requirement of claritas for
the perfection of a work of art. Not the clearness of plain banal-
ities of the two and two make four type, but the clearness of a great
complexity of elements organized in harmonious unity.
That master critic, M. Remain Rolland writes of d'Indy: M.
d'Indy eliminates very little: he organizes. He employs in his
music the qualities of a commander : intelligence of aim and patient
will-power to attain, a complete knowledge of the means at his
disposal, a sense of order, and a mastery of himself and his work.
I9I4-] THE TIME SPIRIT IN MUSIC 503
In spite of the variety of materials which he employs, the ensemble
is always clear." Although d'Indy was born in Paris, yet his
parents came from the mountains, and his delight has ever been to
go to the mountains to breathe in the inspirations of nature. His
Poeme des Montagues (1881), his Symphonic sur un thtme Mon-
tagnard frangais (1886), and his Jour d'ete dans la montagne
( 1905) illustrate both his power to idealize scenes from nature, and
the evolution of his form from the material to the spiritual. D'Indy
is now engaged on a great oratorio, St. Christopher.
It is true d'Indy has many critics. He has not made the
same splash as Debussy. His work is not so sensational, but it will
certainly be more permanent. He is above all things an artist.
But he is also a propagandist, as his connection with the Scuola
Cantorum shows.
The Scuola Cantorum is a rival of the conservatory of Paris.
It was founded by d'Indy, Charles Bordes, and A. Guilmant primar-
ily for the reform of church music by a return to plain chant and
Palestrina. To meet the problem of how to apply the restrictions
of ecclesiastical usage to the enrichment of secular art, its founders
turned for guidance to the musicians who had set things right after
Monteverde's rebellion several centuries earlier to Heinrich
Schiitz, and Giovanni Gabriele and the German and Italian com-
posers of the seventeenth century who prepared the way for Bach.
In 1900 d'Indy became head of the school, and at once set about
enlarging its ideals and activities.
The principles of M. d'Indy and his school may be summed
up as a strong faith in the classic traditions combined with a sane
eclecticism; a summary, truly, of the notes of development as
opposed to corruption. Strong faith in the classic tradition sounds
the notes of continuity of principles, logical sequence and conserva-
tive action upon the past. Venture in a sane eclecticism sounds the
notes of power of assimilation, anticipation of the future and
chronic vigor. The leader of such a movement cares nothing for
the glamor of public applause. He may well be content to await
the steady growth which all history shows to be the condition of
healthy life.
THE GENERAL CONVENTION OF THE PROTESTANT
EPISCOPAL CHURCH.
BY JOHN F. FENLON.
E are sometimes interesting for reasons we do not
suspect. The recent General Convention of the
Episcopal Church attracted an unusual degree of
attention, if big headlines and generous notices in
the papers had their accustomed effect. Many read-
ers were won by a pure interest in religion; many others, under
the inspiration of the press, cherished the devout hope of seeing a
good fight. The public, which dearly loves to see the godly in
a fight, was led to expect a battle royal between the Catholic
and Protestant parties in the Episcopal Church. The convention
met; the opposing parties debated, divided, skirmished, but they
did not fight; there were no casualties; hardly anyone lost his
temper; politeness, urbanity, reigned; excitement there was none.
It was all a sad disappointment. And so the wearied public to-
ward the close of October, turned for comfort to the New York
campaign in the hope (which was realized) that it would bear little
resemblance to a prayer meeting. The disciple of Mr. Chesterton
will say they did not fight because they did not feel. It ap-
pears he will be mistaken. The truth is, we are told, that a
clash was averted because the feeling was too intense, the havoc
would be too great ; just as modern nations avoid war, because the
consequences would be too terrible. The battle is yet to be; it
must be; although it may be fought out silently, on many a field,
and the victory really won before the last clash on the floor of
some future convention. In the meantime, although there was no
great battle, there were several minor ones of significance; and
much that was said and done at this convention is of interest to
those who watch the fortunes of religion.
I.
Let us begin with the message of the constituted authorities of
the Church. The bishops, reverting to the exercise of an ancient
prerogative long fallen into disuse, issued a pastoral letter at
I9I4-] THE EPISCOPAL CONVENTION 505
the end of the convention. It is a beautiful, and, in some respects,
a strong document. In these days, when the most earnest prayer of
Christians is for reunion, it is good for us to hear from the official
leaders of another Church an utterance with almost every word of
which we can heartily agree. Its aim is the aim of our Holy
Father, Pius X. to restore all things in Christ. Catholics will
note with more than sympathy its unequivocal assertion of our
Lord's divinity; its vivid realization of His unceasing work in the
world, enlightening, purifying, and strengthening mankind; the
personal devotion to our Savior which the letter breathes ; the long-
ing for a united Church; the condemnation of godless education,
the insistence on the necessity of religious education for the pres-
ervation of the nation ; the recognition of eternal truth, dogma, as
the foundation of religion; and, finally, the high doctrine of the
Church as the custodian of truth, the representative of Christ on
earth, and His protagonist in the unending conflict with the wicked-
ness and ignorance of the world. In all these great truths and
principles, we are one with the author of the letter, whose mean-
ing we hope to have given correctly. We trust we are one, too,
with the great majority of the bishops in whose name it is issued;
though, knowing the diversity of opinion in the Episcopal Church,
we are not so sanguine as to believe that all interpret the letter
precisely in the sense of its author. Some things in it we should
say differently, and we would add many ; but, taking it as it is, we
are happy to be able to agree with it so heartily. We count it a
great gain that a document so strong in its doctrines and principles,
so catholic in tone, is put forth in the name of all the Episcopalian
bishops.
II.
The most distinct advance in Episcopalian opinion which this
convention marked, in our judgment, is in the earnestness of its con-
viction about the necessity of Christian education. The note is not
new, but never before was it so clear and insistent. Danger opens
our eyes. It has forced the Episcopal Church to see clearly, as all
the Churches will see in time, that " the foundation of our hope
for the future of this country, of the Church and of the nation, is
the Christian education of our children."
The spectre which the Episcopalians have seen in their own
house, is the diminishing interest in religion on the part of children.
A considerable increase in adult church membership is, strangely
506 THE EPISCOPAL CONVENTION [Jan.,
enough, accompanied by a falling off in the enrollment of the
parochial and Sunday schools, and in the number of children con-
firmed. The decrease in the Sunday school is particularly remark-
able, being a loss of sixteen thousand since 1910. Furthermore, the
Sunday school, which ought to be the aid of the Church, has be-
come to no small extent its rival or supplanter ; a kind of children's
church, as I believe it is called. The children who go to Sunday
school, having had enough religion for one day, seldom accompany
their parents to the family pew. Apparently, they have little sense
of the meaning of divine worship. The church is no more sacred
than the class-room, where they may sing hymns and listen to a
discourse. Would this be so, we may ask parenthetically, if they
believed in the Real Presence of Christ and in a Sacrifice? It is
not surprising, then, that after Sunday school days are gone forever,
a very large percentage, perhaps seventy-five per cent of the boys,
disappear as active members of the Church. No doubt, much
of the blame must fall where the committee which makes this report
places the whole of it : upon the indifference of parents. :< We can-
not escape the conclusion," it declares, " that parental neglect, and
the non-attendance of children at service and Sunday school, may
cost us our very existence as a Church in this nation."
The situation is serious : what can mend it ? Is it the public
school ? We note it as a sign of the times that hardly one word was
said at this convention in praise of our public school system; and
nobody seemed to regard it as an aid to religion. The most radical
and outspoken was Bishop Brent, whose words condensed as much
wisdom and practical sense in a short space as any speech on this
subject we remember to have read. The Bishop finds in our public
school system " a degree of moral failure," " a degree of moral
chaos " which threatens the life of our country. " Am I not right
in saying," he asks, " that many of you who are just as loyal to
the spirit of democracy as I am, are sending your children to
Church schools because you are afraid for the morals of your chil-
dren ? " He instances the proposal to teach " sex hygiene " as an
indication of that moral failure, as well as a fresh danger for the
children.
Our secular system of education, however, according to most
of the speakers, is fixed and permanent; a change cannot be made
and ought not to be attempted. Nevertheless, a resolution was
passed without debate, instructing their General Board of Religious
Education
I9I4-] THE EPISCOPAL CONVENTION 507
to take up the whole question of moral and ethical education
in the public schools, and to effect, if possible, through coopera-
tion with other religious bodies, a system of instruction com-
mensurate with the needs of our youth, together with such forms
and exercises as will conduce to the truest patriotism, the high-
est sense of personal integrity and purity of life, and that as one
means of furthering this object, the General Board of Religious
Education be instructed to take prompt action to promote the
daily reading of a portion of the Holy Scriptures in the public
schools.
The import of this is not yet clear. It seems, however, to
evidence a desire (we do not say a design) to introduce " unde-
nominational religion " into the public schools. There are no indi-
cations that any attempt of this kind could succeed for many years
to come. It would be opposed by the great majority of non-
Catholics; and by Catholics as well. Whatever be the meaning
of this resolution, the dominant sentiment at the convention seems
to be crystallized in this saying of Bishop Brent, that " religious
teaching in schools is the normal thing." It is secular education,
education with God and religion eliminated, which is the abnormal
thing, deformed, maimed, as truly piteous as a child born blind.
The idea was put in the clearest light by Mr. George Wharton
Pepper.
Education without religion [he says] is no education at all.
There cannot possibly be a religious education and a secular
education. There is only education, and these two elements
must enter into it. This being so, if you neglect the religious
part of education, you make a mess of the whole matter.
Education consists in drawing out of a man all that is noblest
and best in him, and the very noblest 'and best thing is for a
man to find God and know that he has found Him.
Bearing in mind these words of Mr. Pepper, as well as Bishop
Brent's opinion of public school education, let us read now the
statement put forth at the end of the convention in the name of
all the bishops. " The noblest faculty of the human soul is the
capacity of knowing and realizing the presence of God; and a sys-
tem for the training of youth which should make no provision at
all for the development of this faculty, would be a travesty of
education and a menace to civilization." Strong language, indeed.
It is put hypothetically, for the House of Bishops would not
508 THE EPISCOPAL CONVENTION [Jan.,
countenance a direct attack on the public schools; but its appli-
cation is obvious.
It is but a short time since none but Catholic priests and
bishops dared to use such language : it will not be long before
the sad logic of facts the decline of religion, the thinning of
Sunday school ranks, the decay of morals among children and
youth will cause the leaders of other Churches besides the Epis-
copal to see a great light. History will record (we grow prophetic,
for there are some things too plain not to be foreseen) that one
of the most curious anomalies of the nineteenth century was this,
viz., that the religious teachers of a people enthusiastically em-
braced the suicidal policy of opposing the daily teaching of religion
in the schools. Already many of them realize that the only hope
of preserving the Protestant Churches lies in some system of re-
ligious training more efficient than the Sunday school. Children
need the daily bread of religious instruction and influence; is it
possible for them to thrive on a cream puff Sunday afternoons ?
For the Episcopal Church to reduce its high ideal to practice
to create parochial and secondary schools and colleges is no
light task. Conditions are not favorable. We must remember
that the Episcopalians are a relatively small and widely-dispersed
body. Parochial schools are necessarily local; and as it rarely
happens that Episcopalian children are numerous enough in a
neighborhood to justify starting a parochial school, success in this
line is quite limited, and prospects are not bright. Their secondary
schools for both boys and girls thrive better, some of them being
among the very best in the country. Unhappily, they are usually
for the very rich. What the Church needs urgently, as Bishop
Brent points out, is an increase of secondary schools for people of
modest means. Strange, with all the wealth of Episcopalians,
they do scarcely anything to supply this need. Their rich men
prefer to endow secular colleges. The Church thinks it wiser to
spend its millions on the numberless struggling or moribund little
missions that dot this land. It even prefers to waste, as it seems
to us, its money and men and women in the effort to convert Cubans,
Porto Ricans, Haitians, Mexicans, Panamanians, Brazilians, etc.,
many of whom, we are sure, need the Gospel very sadly, as sadly,
perhaps, as the unchurched millions in our slums, possibly even as
sadly (who knows?) as the unchurched myriads in our fashionable
suburbs, apartment houses, palaces, and Newport villas ; yet, sadly
as they need the Gospel, they have shown only a very feeble desire
1914.] THE EPISCOPAL CONVENTION 509
to receive it from Protestant missionaries. If the Episcopal Church
concentrates its efforts on building up its own life; if, heeding
the advice of Bishop Brent and men like him, who see things, it
develops teaching vocations among the many earnest men and
women of its communion; if it multiplies schools where God
and our Savior Jesus Christ may be named and honored and wor-
shipped, then will there be great hope of preserving its children from
the materialism and agnosticism of our secular education. None
wish them this success more heartily than Catholics.
III.
The idea of social service has seized strong hold upon Epis-
copalians. It stirred this convention to enthusiasm. How much
of this was real, how much the sort that flourishes at conventions
and dies the day after, we do not know ; but there can be no doubt
that a new spirit is kindling the hearts of many. The Episcopal
Church has always been considered the ally of the rich classes,
the apologist of capital. It used to have hardly any contact at all
with the poor; and the little it knew about them aroused no warm
sympathy for their lot. The present convention was very much oc-
cupied with conditions among the poor, and with the question of
social justice. When we read the speeches of some, we are inclined
to believe that the pendulum is swinging towards the other extreme,
Socialism; but these are, of course, the more ardent and radical
minds. The convention created a permanent Joint Commission
of Social Service, and referred to it, among other resolutions, the
following which deserves notice and consideration:
Resolved, the House of Bishops concurring: That we, the
members of the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal
Church, do hereby affirm that the Church stands for the ideal of
social justice, and that it demands the achievement of a social
order in which there shall be a more equitable distribution of
wealth ; in which the social cause of poverty and the gross hu-
man waste of the present order shall be eliminated; and in
which every worker shall have a just return for that which he
produces, a fair opportunity for self-development, and a
fair share in all the gains of progress. And since
such a social order can only be achieved progressively
by the effort of men and women, who, in the spirit of Christ,
put the common welfare above private gain, the Church calls
510 THE EPISCOPAL CONVENTION [Jan.,
upon every communicant, clerical and lay, seriously to take part,
and to study the complex conditions under which we are called
upon to live, and so to act that the present prejudice, hate
and injustice may be supplanted by mutual understanding, sym-
pathy and just dealings, and the ideal of thorough -going democ-
racy may be finally realized in our land.
This is excellent: it is immeasurably truer and better and
wiser than a resolution merely proclaiming the Church the defender
of private property and the foe of Socialism. This great truth has
become a hoary platitude; the effect of insisting upon it, if that
is the only message one has for this age, is to convince the convinced,
to cause doubters to scorn and deniers to rage. Those who thunder
denunciations against Socialism, and have only enough breath left
to whisper a gentle impeachment of the terrible and inveterate in-
justices of society, are among the most efficient allies of the social-
ists. The only possible way of preventing the spread of social
discontent and socialistic ideas, is to root out some of the most glar-
ing injustices of society, and by continued progress to approach
nearer and nearer to the ideal of social justice. This, we take it,
is the wisdom that has dictated this resolution; and it is a very
promising sign of the times when a Church made up so largely
of the capitalistic classes should so clearly and strongly confess
the evils resulting from the capitalistic system, but not necessarily
inherent in it. The resolution, however, be it noted, does not
advocate social justice as a preventive of Socialism. Justice is
justice, and should be wrought if there were never a danger of So-
cialism; the menace of Socialism, however, is having as one happy
effect the quickening of our sense of social justice.
There is an earnest desire abroad to redeem the Episcopal
Church from the disgrace of being the Church of the rich and
fashionable. Exclusiveness and the smug sense of superiority,
which are said to be far too prevalent among them, are denounced
in scathing terms which no outsider would feel justified in using.
There was no lack of frank self-criticism during these weeks.
It has been practised in the past, also; but we have never heard
that it led to the creation of churches in which a goodly number
of the poor worshipped side by side with Morgans and Vanderbilts
and Astors. It is hard to learn the lesson of the equality of all
before the altar of God, as well as in the sight of God; it is one of
the lessons men learn best, and most readily on their knees before
1914- ] THE EPISCOPAL CONVENTION 511
His Real Presence on the real altar of the Sacrifice. If the spirit
of democracy is not yet very vigorous among Episcopalians, the
Church is at least turning to the people, and particularly to the poor ;
and they are ill acquainted with the Episcopal Church who do not
know that it has many men and women working among the poor of
our large cities, with an earnest desire to better their material and
moral and spiritual condition.
IV.
One thing made plain by the convention is an ever-increasing
desire for a fuller sacramental, ritualistic, and liturgical life in
the Church. There is a yearning in many hearts for some of
these divine helps which mean so much to Catholics, because they
are received with so deep and spiritual a faith. This desire is
showing itself notably in the case of the sick, in those whose
need of spiritual ministration is most urgent. Catholics have
always thought it strange that so many Episcopalians (are they
not the vast majority?) should be content to face death and the
judgment throne of God with no desire of the Sacrament. We do
not, of course, believe they have a true Sacrament; but they
profess to believe they receive in it or with it the Body and
Blood of their Savior which He declared necessary for our spiritual
life (John vi. 53). Yet most of these persons seem never to have
realized the meaning of their faith; else, where is their love of
their Savior? where is their desire to be made pure and free from
sin, and thus be prepared to meet Him Who is the Judge as well
as the Savior of mankind? It is, then, a touching and hopeful
sign when an increasing number of the sick, as we are assured,
manifest a desire for the Sacrament: it betokens a deeper sense
of sin, a keener perception of their soul's needs, and a livelier faith
in Christ. There is a wish on the part of thoughtful men in the
Church to meet this practical need of their people. The present
communion service for the sick is often found inconvenient, as it
requires the consecration ; hence, the demand for the reservation
of the Sacrament. The prejudice against reserving the Sacrament
is still dominant in the Episcopal Church, and the practice is not
authorized, as this would almost be equivalent to sanctioning belief
in the Real Presence. This the Church is certainly not yet ready to
do. Ardent high churchmen have overleapt the official barrier, and
have begun to reserve the Sacrament and carry it to the sick. A form
of prayers for this service is now recommended by an official com-
512 THE EPISCOPAL CONVENTION [Jan.,
mission, and, if reported favorably, will come up for adoption at
the next convention. It is safe to prophesy that it will not then be
adopted in such a form as to commit the Church to a belief in
the Real Presence.
Incidentally, the practice of reserving the Sacrament is also
an adoption of the Catholic Church's custom, among the laity, of
communion under the form of bread alone. As faith in the Real
Presence deepens, there is less attachment to the unessential custom
of partaking of the cup. The reception of Christ Himself, the
one thing essential, is accomplished under the one form as com-
pletely as under both. The use of the cup is regarded as a menace
to health by one delegation in the convention, which proposed as
a remedy the practice of intinction, or the dipping of the bread
into the wine. This expedient is not likely to prove the most prac-
tical, if ever adopted. The Catholic custom is the true solution of
the difficulty.
Parallel to the desire of the sick for the Sacrament is the
desire, now declared to be widespread, for the anointing of the sick
with oil in the name of the Savior. The use of this rite, which is
growing, has arisen and spread entirely without authorization, "each
priest using such prayers as he sees fit." The form of prayer most
in use, I am told, is a translation of our own ; a new form was sub-
mitted and referred to the Commission on the Prayer Book. The
impulse to the spread of this practice, which is still very far from
being general, came chiefly from the example of the Catholic
Church, but partly also from the belief in faith cure among follow-
ers of the Emmanuel movement. At present there seems to be a
disposition among many to believe, with St. James, that the prayer
of faith shall save the sick man, but not to go so far as the Apostle,
and believe that if he be in sins they shall be forgiven him. At any
rate, we welcome the advance many are making towards Catholic
doctrine in regard both to this sacrament and to the Eucharist.
The abiding, eternal question of revising and enriching the
liturgy was, naturally, the subject of much discussion and many
memorials. Few, if any, are satisfied with the Prayer Book in its
present form ; it is felt to be too rigid and monotonous, while the
Catholic-minded men feel also how sad is the mutilation inflicted
by the reformers of the sixteenth century upon the rich and mag-
nificent liturgy of the Catholic Church. The question is likewise a
very vital one to-day in the Church of England, where a group of
scholars, said to be well versed in liturgy, have just put forth
I9I4-] THE EPISCOPAL CONVENTION 513
a revised version of the Prayer Book. Lex orandi, lex credendi.
The revisers, whether in America or in England, have an impossible
task; for if a Church is to have a real liturgy, and express in
beautiful language and rites its deepest beliefs and sentiments,
how is that possible unless its faith be one? And though they
have but one creed, who knows better than our Episcopalian breth-
ren, however unwelcome it may be to be reminded of it, that the
faiths among them are multitudinous? It is possible and perhaps
not difficult to suggest improvements in the liturgy that may be
generally welcomed; but to compose a liturgy that will satisfy
the variety of minds in the Episcopal Church, is a task beyond
the wit of man. The Gordian Knot may be cut, however; and
many ministers solve the difficulty by making additions to the
liturgy which please their own taste, and harmonize with their own
beliefs and sentiments. The Prayer Book is no longer reverenced
as it once was. How reverential was the attitude of Newman and
the Tractarians ! They regarded it almost as an inspired book.
A kindred question is the enrichment of the calendar,
which, in the revised American form, contains no saint who
lived after the Apostolic age. This remnant of pure, unmitigated
Protestantism is naturally extremely distasteful, to those who claim
to be children of the Catholic Church, and kin with the saints of all
times. They would, therefore, place upon their calendar certain
of the fathers; great apostles of the nations, such as St. Patrick,
St. Boniface, St. Willibrord, " the patron saint of the old Catholics;"
certain notable mediaeval and later Saints, such as St. Thomas
Aquinas, St. Jeanne d'Arc, and St. Catharine of Siena. While
thus satisfying their feeling of kinship with the saints of the
Church, they would also vindicate for their own Churches of
England and America the honor of raising up saints. The idea
at the root of this is certainly true, and the sentiment right; for the
Anglican and Episcopal Churches cannot be truly Catholic unless
they are in communion with the Church of the saints, and unless
they themselves can prove the indwelling of the Holy Spirit by
the eminent sanctity of some, at least, of their children. Unfor-
tunately for the strength of their position, there is no deep sentiment,
either in the English or American Church, which would proclaim
any son of theirs a true Catholic saint. Even those most deeply
venerated have never received the veneration accorded to saints.
And when the question arises as to the tribunal which will judge
of sainthood, it will be a difficult matter, we fancy, to get the
VOL. xcvm. 33
5H THE EPISCOPAL CONVENTION [Jan.,
majority of Episcopalians to take seriously the competence of the
General Convention.
One suggestion in this connection was the occasion of some
hilarity in the daily press, which, however, did not report it quite
fairly. It was not proposed, exactly, to place George Washington
among the canonized saints. The proposal was, as the layman who
made it explains, to place his birthday on the calendar, and thus
" to give the stamp of the Church's approval to the patriotic com-
memoration of George Washington." This idea is startling, and
opens up a long vista of possibilities. We gaze adown the long
calendar from New Year's Day to December 3ist; nearly every
niche is vacant. Now patriots are more easily discovered than
saints, and it would be an easy and pleasant occupation to enrich
the calendar with the imposing figures of American patriots and
worthies. The gentleman who made the suggestion was not as
happily inspired as usual. It is pure positivism; once admit the
principle, and the enriched calendar would soon resemble West-
minster Abbey, which was dedicated to the glory of God and His
saints, and turned to the glory of the nation's heroes. And heroes
are rarely heroic in sanctity, even when they are the fathers of their
country. The one only passport to the saints' calendar which is
honored by the Catholic Church is heroic sanctity.
The reform of marriage discipline is a very urgent matter.
It is all the more urgent because the Episcopal Church has been
going on all these years with very little marriage discipline, either
on paper or in practice. In regard to divorce, however, it has
maintained a far better standard than other Protestant Churches.
The Catholic ideal forbidding any sundering of a lawfully con-
tracted and complete marriage, is upheld by very many Episcopal-
ians, particularly among the clergy, but conventions meet and con-
ventions dissolve, yet divorce and the remarriage of a divorced per-
son remain permissible. A formal report on the question will be
presented to the next convention. Despite the absence of legislation,
the Catholic ideal is steadily gaining ground ; members of the Epis-
copal and of other Churches are coming to see that this ideal must be
the mind of Christ. Before many years, we are hoping a General
Convention will enact a canon absolutely prohibiting divorce. This
reform will require courage, for many of the laity bitterly oppose
such a canon; but the Church cannot stand up forever against its
most enlightened opinion. It is conscious, too, of a great oppor-
tunity of leadership; for if it purges itself of its sins, it will
1914.] THE EPISCOPAL CONVENTION 515
become the champion of Christian marriage among the Protestant
public. It will be bound to have a deep influence upon the other
Protestant Churches, which, in their turn, are becoming aware that
they have wandered still further from the ideal of Christ.
The Ne Temere decree of Pope Pius X., as this convention
shows, is resented by many Episcopalians ; in so far, at least, as it
enacts that a marriage between a Catholic and a non-Catholic is
valid only when witnessed by a duly authorized Catholic priest.
We cannot compress an explanation and a defence of the Ne Temere
decree into our brief remaining space. Let us remark, however,
that many seem to misunderstand the import of the law. One would
imagine its main purpose was to insult Protestants. Some people,
like many Orangemen and German Protestants, seem to crave to be
insulted by the Pope : we expect better judgment from most Epis-
copalians. The law is made, of course, for Catholics, and its
purpose is to safeguard the sacredness and inviolability of mar-
riage.
Let us, for a moment, consider the tables reversed. Let the
Episcopal Church decide not to recognize any marriage between an
Episcopalian and a Catholic unless the ceremony be performed
by an Episcopalian minister. I am very sure we Catholics should
not mind it in the least; we should look upon the law as a matter
of home discipline which concerned its own members; and as we
do not believe in the infallibility of a General Convention, its deci-
sion would not cause a single ripple of uneasiness in our conscience,
nor one twinge of resentment in our hearts.
Many reflections crowd the mind in watching, on the one hand,
these efforts to Catholicize the Episcopal Church, and, on the other,
the active opposition as well as the great force of inertia by which
they are resisted; in studying the actual working of Church au-
thority and the real power controlling it; and, finally, in trying
to estimate the value of the title upon which the Protestant Epis-
copal Church might claim the right to be called Catholic, and to be
recognized as Catholic by all Christendom. What the reflections
of the writer are, it ought not to be difficult to divine; but it is
surely high time to leave the reader, for the present at least, to
his own reflections.
THE SISTERS OF PERPETUAL ADORATION.
BY E. M. DINNIS.
THEY lingered when the banqueting had ceased
To thank Thee, and the moments sped apace ;
Still at the undiminishable feast
They say perpetual grace,
Thy guests, dear Lord, who while the years take wing
Their Benedicite before Thine altar sing.
For hunger hath not naked left the Board
Whose Heavenly Food the quickening Spirit held ;
That Love her gift might render to the Lord
To stay Thou wert compelled,
Though for the guest the board no more was spread
How could they let Thee go, Thou Who art Living Bread?
For these brief, beauteous moments of the morn
When Thou didst deign within their hearts to dwell,
Demand the intervening hours forlorn
Wherein Thy praise to tell.
So must they needs, in love and holy fear,
Adore Thee from afar, Who came so near so near!
Healed by the Living Balm we passed, all-swift,
Back to our world, but these remained behind
To thank the Giver, present in the Gift
Upon the altar shrined.
One word in gratitude they paused to say,
And in that " Thank You, Lord ! " a lifetime passed away.
THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE.
BY KATHARINE TYNAN.
CHAPTER XI.
THE TRUCE.
T was a month later when Meg came back to prepare
for the travelers. She had been very happy in the
dear, shabby, comfortable, love-lit home, less populated
now than of old, since so many of the children were at
school.
" You'll be staying with us now, Meg ? " said
Terence Hildebrand fondly, the evening she came home. " Sure the
house is not the same with so many of the children out of it. I do
sometimes awake in the night, and ask myself where my children are
all gone to. I never thought I'd have a little girl of mine earning her
bread."
Meg kissed him.
" Pauline is very happy with the Archduchess," she said. Pauline
was the second sister who had gone to take Meg's place. " Now that
Aunt Agatha has come you won't miss her. Are we not lucky girls,
we Hildebrands, that when we must go out into the world we should
find such dear employers ? "
" You're really happy at Castle Eagle ? " Terence Hildebrand
asked wistfully. " Isn't it a gloomy place with all that trouble hang-
ing over it ? I was grieved to the heart, indeed I was so, when I heard
of the loss of the yacht; I suppose there's no doubt the poor fellow's
gone with it. Ireland could ill afford to lose the like of him."
Another time Meg had commented to her father on the strange
coincidence of a Hildebrand entering the house of a Rosse, leading
him on to tell the old story in his own way, which, except in the
matter of detail, did not differ materially from the story as she had
heard it.
" I was all against your going at first, Meg," he said ; " but after-
wards I knew I could trust my girl."
Meg said nothing, but she wondered what her father would think
if he knew that day and night now she prayed that it might be given
to her, a Hildebrand, to help to fight the shadows which lay heavily
upon the Earls of Turloughmore. She was half-shocked, also, because
she was so eager to go back. There was something of contrition in the
way she kissed her father and the children the morning she left.
518 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Jan.,
Terence was a little puzzled and shy before his daughter's ardent em-
brace, and the flash of tears in her eyes.
" There, Meg, there ! " he said soothingly. " If you care so much,
child, in the name of heaven stay at home. I'll write and say they
can't have you. Mary O'Neill let me in for this. I never meant you
to go off earning your bread instead of enjoying yourself as you ought
to at your age."
" In the name of heaven I must go," she said, smiling through
her tears. " You cannot imagine, papa, how much I have to do.
If you knew you would be the first to tell me to go."
" Why then go and God speed you ! " Terence said, standing by
the car which was to convey his daughter to the station.
Meg was haunted after the train had sped on its way, leaving him
behind, by the memory of her father's solitary figure as he stood at
the end of the platform, while she leant out to wave a last farewell ;
he had run with the train the length of the platform to see the last
of her.
" It isn't Budapest, papa," she had called out to him. " I can
be home any time in a few hours," and she saw by the smile on his
rosy face under the grizzled hair that he had heard her, and was
comforted.
After a couple of hours in the train she changed, crossed country
by a slowly-crawling, loop-line train: reached a junction and went
south. The warmth of the south came up to greet her. She saw the
mountains: between the mountains lay golden tracts of fertile lands.
The train ran by towns, in valleys with a river flowing through them,
the hills either side clothed in richness. She tried to read a book, and
could not, because of the haste of her spirit. At last in the distance
rose up the blue hills beyond Castle Eagle. At last she was nearly
home.
The country had clothed itself in verdure since she had last seen
it. Anything it had had of a gloomy and forbidding aspect in the
winter had passed away. Streams were singing in all the fields, and
the trees were out in their first verdure. The pastures were full of
daisies. The meadows spread a richness of color, which came to her
with a shock of delight. As a background the greenness almost dazzled
the eye: if it were not the most restful of colors she could not have
looked at it.
For a day or two she should be alone at Castle Eagle, except for
the servants. The Dowager, who had many friends, had been called
away to one who was sick. Meg was disappointed not to see again
the old lady who had seemed so ready to enter with her into a
conspiracy for the good of the family. She went on thinking of the
doom of her friends. Were the Rosses to come to an end and their
1914.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 519
possessions pass to the cousin three-parts English by blood, whole
English by birth, training, education, and traditions, because the last
of the Rosses was sickly and ready to lay down the burden of his race
for someone who could take it up without the doom attached to it?
Her heart cried out against the thought. The good family which
Ireland could so ill spare!
She remembered how Lady Turloughmore had said, lifting her
head proudly above her grief, that it had been worth while, that
despite all the shadows it had been worth while, and that there were
others who would have found it worth while if she had not. Meg's
face softened and glowed. She was looking out of the carriage win-
dow at the distant blue hills coming nearer and nearer. She was alone,
and she spoke above her breath, startling herself.
" Oh, my dear," she said, and it might have been a quotation from
Lady Turloughmore : "there are women who would not count the cost."
The orchard trees below the terraces of Castle Eagle were still
in a wild bloom of tossed shell-pink and white when she drove up to
the door. The creepers which ran over the house front and up the
side of the tower were shining and glossy-green. The window boxes
had been rilled, and their brilliant color shone out against the back-
ground of the windows.
She received a passionate welcome from the dogs. Phelim re-
ceived her with a beaming face, and Kate ran down the stairs to take
her small parcels and carry them to her room, with " You're welcome
as flowers in spring, Miss," on her tongue. Even Mrs. Browne, who
was no longer as light on her feet as she had been, climbed from the
housekeeper's room in the basement to welcome Meg back.
While she unpacked her trunk, Kate gave her the local news.
Not much of it, for neighbors were few and far between. Julia, she
said, was growing " more of a torment " than ever. She hadn't yet
got the wind out of her head.
" 'Tis annoyin' her ladyship she'll be instead of lettin' the creature
rest. Her tongue's never off his poor lordship. God rest him; an'
she's as merry as a cricket makin' ready for him that'll never come
home. I wouldn't be botherin' wid her to-night, Miss," Kate said earn-
estly. ' 'Tis as like as not you'd find her in bed. She doesn't seem
to know day from night half the time. I hope to goodness she won't
be burnin' herself to death in her bed, an' the rest of us with her, one
of these nights. 'Tis in an' out like a dog at a fair, it do be wid her,
seein' if the Earl is come, enough to break anyone's heart, an' him
tossin' about in the say. 'Tis the handsome gentleman he was, and
many a poor girl would have given up all for him if he asked her, but
he never did, not like some gentlemen I could tell of. The Rosses
were always good."
520 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Jan.,
Meg's heart lifted at the praise. She was so glad the Rosses
were always good. She had a fear that if they were not so good she
might yet have been constrained, unhappily, to love them. Now she
was happy in the house, among these familiar things that awaited
them, with a peace, like a truce of God, lying sweetly on the world.
CHAPTER XII.
THE DAWN.
Meg was very glad to sleep, and she slept, but she was soon
awakened. In the furbishing of the room which had taken place in
her absence, the curtains with which her bed head was draped had been
removed, and white linen ones substituted. At the head of her bed the
starched curtains gaped, and she had not noticed it. Now she felt a
draught stirring her hair on the pillow ; it had aroused her as though
cold fingers had passed through her hair. Sleepily she got up, leaning
on an elbow to draw the curtains closer. Her hand touched the wall.
She discovered that it was chintz drawn tight as a drum that covered
the walls, and not a flowery paper as she had thought it.
She fell asleep, having drawn the curtains. She awoke once more,
this time with her heart in her mouth. There had been some noise
close to her ear. A tremendous noise. It might have been the report
of a gun. She had an idea that she smelt powder. The crackling
of wood had been in her ears. Surely there was a smell of burning
wood. She jumped out of bed in some alarm, and went out into the
corridor. The house lay in the strange unreal light of the summer
dawn. Through the windows she caught a glimpse of the fields still
asleep: the hills with the mists curling and rolling away from them.
In the fields were cattle and sheep. Above the hills hung an eagle,
motionless it seemed. The world looked like a picture, still life indeed,
as it looks at early morning, awaiting the touch that shall bid it live.
There was no smoke in the corridor. The air was fresh and pure.
Not a stir in the house. The servants were not yet lighting the morning
fires. She went back into her room. The grayness of the dews had
been on the fields, and she felt cold in her thin nightgown, with her
windows open to the sea. The faint smell of wood smoke still lin-
gered. She explained it .to herself. The gardeners had left a heap
of smoking rubbish somewhere. She remembered to have seen a spiral
of smoke ascending in the courtyard.
She must have dreamt the noise unless it came from the sea.
The sea was calm, almost waveless, as though it could never be lashed
1914.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 521
to fury. From the short grass, dry and brittle, studded with a myriad
little snail shells, over the Wolves and the Little Beach, the larks rose
shrilling into the air. The gulls wheeled and poised, uttering shrill
cries. Everything was sweet and quiet. She must certainly have
dreamt the noise. A memory came to her of having heard such a noise
before, in the winter darkness. Then she had been terrified at first.
But who could be frightened now, with the long shaft of the morning
sun piercing the blinds and falling goldenly on her bed ? Yet the early
morning had a strange sense of solitude. She lay with closed eyes,
and while she waited for sleep to come, the clock in the stable yard
struck four o'clock.
She was not to sleep so easily, although there was a drowsiness
upon her. Prince, who had welcomed her in the corridor with a
quiet and dignified delight characteristic of him, had followed her into
the room. Now he showed a curious uneasiness, sniffing and whining
about the walls. She called him to her sleepily, laying a hand upon
his head, and presently he lay down on the rug beside her, and was
quiet while she slept. She said to herself, getting up in the familiar
morning room, that if such things had happened in the winter dark she
might well be frightened. Impossible to be afraid in the shining
summer dawn, and with the companionship of such a splendid brave
protector as Prince.
She was standing, brushing out her long hair at the glass. It was
full of light. The sun was in it, and brought a million sparks and
running trails of light, as you sometimes see it in a peat fire when there
is a meteoric trail of light and then darkness. Her brush lifted in her
hand she had a sudden revelation; she turned and stared at the wall
behind her, the wall against which the head of her bed stood. She had
discovered the reason for the chintz, and also for the curious chill she
had often felt in the room despite warm rugs and deep carpets and
splendid fires. The wall of her room was the wall of the tower. The
chintz was stretched tightly over its irregularities and roughnesses.
She could see and feel them through it. The next thing that occurred
was had there ever been any communication between the tower and
her room. She drew the little French bedstead away from the wall.
She passed her hands over the chintz. There was nothing but the
hardness of the stone beneath. She could feel the rough edges of
the granite under her hand the strong wall of the tower, built for
eternity rather than time, enclosing its secret as in the bowels of the
earth and the depths of the sea.
Her imagination leaped beyond the stone wall, and saw the crumbl-
ing skeleton of the man who had starved to death there, caught by his
remorseless enemy like a rat in a trap. A handful of crumbling bones
amid the litter of ages, the sand, the dead leaves on the floor, in the
522 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Jan.,
dimness of the stone room pierced only by the arrow-slit. She won-
dered if the poor soul was at rest; if it craved a sleeping place in
the green earth for what remained of its body. " May the Lord have
mercy upon Conall M'Garvey," she said, as many a one had said
before her. She tried to banish the tremor of fear that shook her
with the discovery. She could not be afraid in broad daylight. She
had a thought that she would ask permission to change her room.
But no : that would be cowardice ; that would be running away ; that
would be to yield to the superstition against which she had talked so
bravely.
Supposing there had been a noise she wasn't sure there had been,
that she had not dreamt it it could have no power over her in this
golden day. Something of a strange happiness seemed to brood
over the world. She dressed herself quickly, and went down into the
dew-drenched garden where the birds were singing. The mists had
rolled away from the mountains, while yet the plains might have been
a lake, so motionless was the surface of silver that hid the fields, and
villages within its depths. The world seemed new-made, so beautiful
was it; just straight from the hands of God. There was a brooding
happiness and peace in the day. They are such days in human life,
foretastes of heaven, when beatitude seems to fill the heart flowing in,
brimming it to its heights, filling it to its depths, like the sea. She asked
herself why she felt such a radiant happiness. Was it because Lady
Turloughmore and Lord Erris were coming home? She had good
reports of them. Lady Turloughmore had gained a measure of resig-
nation. Her bodily health had benefited by the peace of her spirit.
As she stood dipping her finger in the fountain, a flock of pigeons,
which had come to drink, strutting daintily about her feet they
looked so clean, so demure with their feathers of slate gray and their
feet like scarlet sealing-wax she was again struck with a sense of
the unreality of the morning world. It looked so clean and clear,
emerging from the mists. One shared in the renewal of everything,
being out in it. The sense of being utterly alone in that shining,
morning world, gave her a thrill of delight. She had a good deal
of time to put in before the servants were about. They took it more
easily than usual in the absence of the family, and it had been some-
thing of a distress to Kate that Miss Hildebrand would not have her
breakfast in bed, and be pampered and lapped about in luxury, but must
get up and dive into a stone-cold bath, and go walking on an empty
stomach, which to Kate's mind were about as dangerous things as
anyone could do. She looked about her, and saw that the mists were
clearing away before the power of the sun. The fields lay steaming in
a golden haze. The woods were revealing themselves out of the
shrouding vapors.
1914- ] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 523
Something scattered the strutting pigeons; drove them to flight.
Lady Turloughmore's pet pigeon had followed her from the house;
the creature had become as tame as a dog, and was disputing the pride
of place near her. By this time he would attempt even to drive Prince
away, and while the other dogs treated the bird as an enemy to be
fought or propitiated, Prince treated him with a characteristic dignity
and forbearance. She picked up the bird and put it on her shoulder,
where it preened itself against her neck.
The clock in the stable yard pealed out five silvery strokes. It
would be at least three hours before she could think of breakfast.
She had a sense of exhilaration that made her feet light. She remem-
bered in a corner of the garden a gate that led into the woods where
the owls hooted at night. She thought she would explore that way,
which she had not taken hitherto. Laughing to herself at the thought
of old Phelim's mystification when he should come down to an un-
barred, unbolted door, she took the path into the wood, Prince frolick-
ing decorously about her, the pigeon cooing on her shoulder, as she
went.
CHAPTER XIII.
BIDDY PENDERGAST'S COTTAGE.
She emerged from the wood on to a hillside alive with rabbits
who sat at the door of their homes, washing their innocent faces
in the morning dew. The appearance of the dog was a signal for a
scurry, a noiseless scurry, which in a breath left the hillside bare of
life. She went on down the hill, past clumps of blackberry bushes
which at one point surrounded a steep quarry, from the stones of which,
in all probability, Castle Eagle had been built.
She glanced over the edge of the quarry and drew back sharply.
There was a sheer fall of a hundred feet to the hewn-out pit below.
How easy it would be to walk over the edge, although the ivy had
grown in thick masses, and sent out long trails to catch at the unwary
foot and hold it back. There was something cold and lonely about
the quarry in the shining morning. She turned away from it with a
feeling that was almost relief, and went on down to the meadow
below, where the corn crakes were sawing in an ecstasy of the summer
spirit. If she had not known it to be a long-legged bird, she would
have thought the corn crake some faun-like creature, sitting on a gray
rock in the summer heat, making rude music that is the very voice of
the summer itself.
The meadow had been cut by the scythe close to the hedges, in
preparation for an early mowing, so that there should be a way for
524 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Jan.,
the machine to pass. She took that way over the pale green of the
lopped grasses. A little stream sang in the ditches. The hedge was
yet white with the May, which was responsible for the fragrance that
ascended in the air these days and nights. The stream was so clear
that it seemed to run over shining sands of gold, set with jewels which
in the hand would be only pebbles. A dark furry creature, a badger
or some such beast, ran across the track and disappeared in the ditch,
causing a great excitement and quite a futile chase on the part of the
stately Prince. She followed the little path along by the edge of the
meadow. It came to the boundary hedge, and climbed a bank through
a gap into the next field. The field was sown with young oats, that
sent up their silken, emerald spears like a little army of banners
above the brave earth.
About the middle of the field was something that attracted her
attention, a building of some kind or other. She had a curiosity to
see what it might be ; and turning aside from her path she went towards
it between the lines of the young oats. It was rich country, of dark
brown mould, very fertile. Therefore, it was a somewhat surprising
thing to find a considerable space in the centre of the field as bare
as your hand, except for a few tufts of weeds, enclosing in its dreary
square the thing which she had taken for a cabin or a rough cattle shed.
It was in fact the gable of a cottage, the gable, a bit of the wall and
what had been a portion of a chimney, the stones rising in ledges
one above the other blackened with smoke.
As she stepped on to the bare patch and looked at the ruin, she
was all of a sudden aware of the greatest sense of desolation. Had
a cloud been drawn over the sun that the golden morning was turned
cold? A low wind sighed about the fields. The immense loneliness
of the Irish landscape at twilight came upon her, daunting her spirit.
Something seemed to pass her by in the chilly wind, lifting her hair.
Prince pressed himself against her as though he would push her back.
He growled, and looking down at him she saw his spine lift sharply.
What devilry was in the place that the dog saw and she did not see?
For a moment she felt impelled to turn and run. But she was afraid
of her own cowardice. A person whose daily life was not spent among
shadows could afford to be frightened; not she. If she once let
fear enter into her stronghold she was lost. Fear is a relentless master.
She went forward a step or two. " In the name of God," she
said aloud. " In the name of God." The sun was shining once more,
and the sun was warm. She stooped and patted the dog. She had
infected him with her fear. What was there in a ruined gable set in
the middle of a field to frighten anyone?
Looking about, her eye lit on the figure of a scarecrow at a little
distance. She might as well be frightened of that. She stood and
1914- ] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 525
noticed gulls blown in by the storm swooping daintily down between
the rows of oats in search of food. A flight of rooks came from
the wood, also on the hunt for provender. It was an odd thing.
They broke their flight before passing over the bare patch with its
gable, dividing in two lines which passed to either side. A coincidence,
of course; it could be nothing but a coincidence. She had regained
her courage in the name of God ; and she would not be daunted.
She went forward and inspected the gable, and the adjoining wall and
bit of chimney piece. It must be very old. The stone slabs of which
it was built were of great age. Doubtless some of the slabs were sunk
in the earth ; others lay heaped about overgrown with nettles. Nothing
grew there but the dock and the nettle.
She turned to walk away, quietly, without panic. Among the
weeds her foot struck against something, a piece of metal, a ring
of iron perhaps. She forgot it in observing for the first time that
Prince had not followed her, but was sitting bolt upright between the
rows of oats, watching her with an anxious and grim expression.
When he saw her come to join him he turned about with one of his
sedate gambols, ran along between the oats, came back and leaped
on her; altogether displayed great relief at her turning her back
upon the ruined gable. She extended her walk, and came home by
the orchards below the house, where there was still a drift of blue-
bells under the trees, although the bloom had fallen and the little
fruit was forming on the boughs. Her appearance in the dining-room,
where the table was set for her with as much care as though she were
one of a large party, drew a compliment from Phelim.
; 'Tis like Diana you are or the Graces, Miss," he said.
Meg laughed. She found Phelim's humorous, respectful ways,
his roguish, innocent, old face, irresistible.
" I've been on foot since five o'clock," she said, " and I'm as
hungry as a hunter."
" Glory be to goodness," said Phelim, " why would you be gettin'
up in the middle of the night like that, Miss, unless it was to be that
you'd be taken for Aurora? It was a misty mornin'. It'll be a hot
day."
Meg laughed merrily. She had a very happy and infectious laugh.
" I don't know where you got your acquaintance with all those
fine people, Diana and Aurora and the Graces "
" Aye an' Hebe too and Venus an' Helen of Troy. Unless it was
to be I had a grandfather a schoolmaster."
" That might be it," said Meg, setting to with zest on her eggs and
bacon, the delicious perfume of the Irish coffee in her nostrils.
Phelim watched her with the greatest enjoyment, looking all the
time the very personification of dignity.
526 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Jan.,
" Ye'll have found the fields wet, Miss," he said. " I understand
from the state of the dog's paws that you took the field way."
" We did, indeed ; and there was a heavy dew. Prince got
wetter than I did, for he would run in and out of the meadows."
" Tis well a farmer didn't catch him at it ; a dog like that, as
big as a calf, would trample down a dale of medda."
" It would soon rise again in the sun. Tell me, please, Phelim "
she took a slice of the toast which Phelim brought to her " I
want to know something. Beyond the wood and the hill where the
quarry is and the meadow, you come to a field of oats. There's
the gable of an old house in a queer, big, bare patch. Why don't
they root up the old house and plow the bare patch? It looks so
odd and wasteful in the middle of a beautiful fertile field."
" Is it that, Miss ? Ye haven't been wanderin' there on your
peregrinations? That was a very unlucky spot for ye to come to on
a mornin' walk. There isn't a man in the country 'ud dare to plow
up that bare patch as you call it, Miss, not even if it would grow
anything but weeds, an' that I am sure it wouldn't. The birds of the
air won't pass over it. As for the ould stones, they'd bring a curse
anywhere they wint. Nothin'll grow on the bare patch but docks and
nettles, an' when the field was pasture the very bastes wouldn't go over
it. The dew never falls on it they say. There's a curse on the place."
" What put the curse on it ? " Meg asked.
" I wouldn't be sayin' anything to his lordship or her ladyship
about it if I was you, Miss." He looked at her with his alluring
slyness. " Because, ye see, 'tis an unlucky ould spot. That was Biddy
Pendergast's cottage, the Lord betune us an' harm ! There isn't a man
in the country 'ud plow that field by himself. I wouldn't blame
them. The horses do be tuk with the greatest of terror as soon as they
comes near it. They say 'tis pitiful to see them, the poor dumb bastes."
Meg did not feel that she could rebuke this superstition as whole-
heartedly as she would have done yesterday. For a moment she too
had known the blind, unreasoning terror.
The event of the morning cast no shadow over Meg's radiant day.
She put the uncanny place and her momentary terror out of her mind,
while she went about doing all manner of little things in the house
which a daughter might have done, and singing to herself for pure
pleasure that the world was so good, and that the shadows must still
flee before the light. The sense of a happy expectancy was over all the
hours. During her holiday, her godmother had added to her ward-
robe one really charming frock. It was much prettier than anything
Meg had hitherto possessed. She wondered if she might wear it for
the home-coming to-morrow night, with a green ribbon at the waist.
She went to her room early and sat by her window, with a shaded
1914- ] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 527
candle, making some slight alteration in the frock. The owls had
begun to hoot in the wood, although the green light was yet in the sky :
and the blackbirds were shouting " good-night," keeping the birds
awake when they should be sleeping. She was out of sight of the
wood, but she imagined the long aisles of it silvered by moonlight,
and the stir of the little wood-creatures everywhere. As though the
thought had caused the thing, she was aware of a stealthy movement
somewhere close at hand. Not in the room. She thought it was not
in the room. The birds in the ivy outside. It must be the birds in
the ivy, the little ones pressing and pushing for room in the over- full
nests. She glanced suspiciously at her bed, where it stood against the
walls of the tower. There was a fumbling, a pushing somewhere.
Rats in the wall. An old house like Castle Eagle was certain to be
riddled by rats. The sounds ceased. All was quiet. Except for the
hooting of the owls and the last good-night of the blackbirds, there
was not a sound.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE GAME OF CHESS.
There was a golden quietness over the next day, which long after-
wards Meg remembered. What fruition, what budding, and flowering
of happiness was it that her heart waited for with a satisfied expect-
ancy? She could not have told. She only knew that as the golden
day spilled out its sands, she would not have lost one minute of it. She
did not desire to hasten it towards its end. Whatever awaited her at
the end, that was to be better than all else, she would not anticipate it.
The day was enough. She did not ask herself whither her absorp-
tion in the new friends was leading her. She was not in the mood
for troublesome questions. She laid hold upon the passion of pity
which Lady Turloughmore's need had excited in her, and let that
suffice. She spent the day in decking the rooms with flowers, in re-
arranging, in decorating ; everything had been made thoroughly sweet
and clean, and it was only left to her to give the last decorative touches.
She took the dogs for a long walk, and came back to find the
house quieter and sweeter than ever in the long, golden afternoon sun.
The hall door stood open. Except in a storm, doors and windows had
a way of standing open at Castle Eagle. The gardens were all
smiling in the sun. Thrushes and blackbirds, linnets and finches
were singing ; larks were rising all over the short pastures close to the
sea. As she stood on the steps of the hall door, she noticed that the
tower threw a long shadow, which made the front of the house almost
528 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Jan.,
cold. She shivered. Vaguely she felt that the shadow of the tower,
between the sun and the flowers, was like the shadow of the old cruelty
that lay between the Earls of Turloughmore and the happiness and
peace other men enjoyed.
The mood passed as she entered the house. It was a good house,
she thought as she entered it. Whatever had been done far back in
the past, for many generations now the family had been above re-
proach. It had purged itself. Religion and charity had made their
home in Castle Eagle. Surely the visible blessing must follow ; or
else the promises were unfulfilled.
" Late, late in the gloaming," they came home. Meg was in the
hall to receive them, on the door step, helping Lady Turloughmore
to alight from the carriage, feeling her hand taken in a warm clasp by
Lord Erris, collecting innumerable small packages; a little afraid of
the light and shy radiance she felt now to be on her face as she fol-
lowed them into the dining-room.
Miss Roche, in her ridiculous poke-bonnet and cloak with capes,
was to stay the night. Impossible to have an awkward moment with
Miss Roche of the company. She presented herself in a new aspect
to Meg. No courier could have more knowledge of Europe, its hotels
and picture galleries and scenery, and all the rest of it, than Miss Roche.
She poured out a flood of talk during the supper time. There was no
possible moment for awkward pauses. A disgraceful trunk, covered
with cowhide from which the hair had come off in patches, stood in the
hall, waiting till Miss Roche's temporary man-of-all-work should come
to fetch it in the morning. She carried all the things she needed for
the moment in a string bag and hold-all. The little old face was falling
into lines of fatigue before the supper concluded, and Miss Roche
assented readily enough to Lady Turloughmore's suggestion that she
should go to bed.
" I'll have a deal to do as soon as I get home," she said, "so I'd
better be getting rest when I can. The house won't be the better of
a month's absence from it, and it falling to pieces already."
" Stay with us a few days, Anastasia, and let me send over a
couple of maids to make the house ready for you. Seeing what you've
done for us "
But Miss Roche shook her head vehemently.
" Maybe it's too far gone for charring," she said. " Anyhow I
like the house as it is."
Meg had noticed with joy that Lady Turloughmore was looking
almost herself again. She had not put on mourning.
" I am so glad to be at home," she said, gazing about at all her
familiar things, " so glad ! There will be so much to do and to see
to-morrow. The creatures, the gardens what is up in the gardens,
I9I4-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 529
Miss Hildebrand? It seems ages since we went away. No change
would surprise me."
" There is still some apple blossom left," said Meg. " I've been
watching it jealously, fearing it would fall off before you came. The
first wind will scatter it."
" Supposing we see it to-night lest a wind should spring up before
morning," said Lord Erris. " It's a pity it's so dark. But a lantern
will show us the apple blossom, or else we may never see it this year."
He too was looking the better for his change. There was a cer-
tain excitement about him quite new in Meg's experience of him. She
said to herself that the change had heartened him, that he had
come back to his youth. He had looked much older than his twenty-
seven years in the habitual pain and weariness which had lain upon
him like a cloud. To-morrow it might descend again. To-night he
was no more than twenty-seven.
Phelim was not surprised at being asked for a lantern, so that
Lady Turloughmore might see the apple blossom. " The wild roses'll
be out in sheets over all the hedges, before yez know where yez are,"
he said, confidentially. " I do always be sorry meself whin the haw-
thorn's over."
They went out, Lord Erris carrying the lantern, Lady Tur-
loughmore with a hand thrust through Meg's arm. Was this to be a
companion? Meg asked herself, in a happy excitement. Her father
had grumbled at his daughters being governesses or companions. " Be
cooks if ye must," he had said, " and train for it. Try to be the best
cook ye can be: don't swing between earth and heaven, belonging to
neither." Which was perhaps only the good gentleman's way of ex-
pressing his annoyance that his daughters should quit the parental
hearth.
Here was no swinging between earth and heaven. There was
something in Lady Turloughmore's manner tenderly warm. She leant
on Meg's arm. She forgot to call her " Miss Hildebrand," and called
her " my dear " instead. She asked for news of Crane's Nest and
the Hildebrands. " When the summer holidays come, we must have
those boys and girls to stay with us," she said. " We are always glad
of young things about the place are we not, Ulick ? "
Lady Turloughmore went up to bed after her inspection of the
garden. " I shall sleep to-night," she said. " It is so quiet after
the waterfall, that grew louder every night once the snows had melted."
She allowed Meg to go with her to her bed-room door. Arrived
there she turned and kissed her, and the sweetness of the unexpected
caress brought the happy flush to the girl's cheeks, and the moisture
to her eyes.
" It was very sweet to find you awaiting us, my dear," she said.
VOL. xcvni. 34
530 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Jan.,
" If my little girl had lived she would have been just your age. Now
go down and sing to Ulick. It is good for him to listen to your soft
singing."
Meg went back to the drawing-room obediently. There was some-
thing about Lady Turloughmore which made it a delight to do her
behests. She went into the drawing-room shyly her movements were
very gentle always. Lord Erris, who had been standing by the
chimney piece, looking down at the ground with a somewhat gloomy
air, turned round at the sound of the closing door, his face flashed a
gleam of delight, transfiguring it.
" I thought you were gone for the night," he said ; " and I was
just wondering how I should put in the evening. It is only half-past
nine."
" Lady Turloughmore said I was to sing to you : afterwards, if
you wish it, we can play a game of chess."
"Excellent mother!" he said, quite joyously. "The songs first
then, and the chess afterwards. The blue devils were just lying in
wait for me. You have exorcised the blue devils. I shall entertain
an angel instead."
She sang for him, while he stood by the piano and watched her
face. Her repertoire was limited : " Silent, O Moyle," " Has Sorrow
Thy Young Days Shaded?" "She is Far from Land," the " Ave
Maria " of Gounod, and a new song she had learned in his absence,
" Bredon Hill." She had a little voice, but of a softness like dew or
twilight, and a most sweet expressiveness. While she sang the new
song he walked away to the fireplace; and when she turned about
at the conclusion to look at him, he was standing gazing on the rug
at his feet, as he had been when she had come into the room.
" I'm afraid you don't like it," she said, disappointed.
"The new song?" he replied. "Oh, yes I like it. It is rather
terrible, don't you think ? I suppose the bells would be terrible."
" I am so sorry," she said. " I won't sing it any more."
" You will, please : to-morrow night and the next. I shall always
want to hear it. Perhaps there is a pleasure in pain."
She got out the table and the chessmen. She was sorry the song
had so moved him. He did not sleep well, she knew, being often a
creature of racked nerves. She hoped he would forget the song after
a well-contested game of chess, and be ready to sleep.
" They call it the game of kings," he said, his hand poised above
his men. " If I was anything but a cripple I should never play a game
to which I had to sit."
Her eyes fluttered and fell before his. It was the first time he
had referred to his weakness so nakedly; and it hurt her.
" Am I brutal ? " he asked. " I have something to tell you. Per-
1914.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 531
haps I could not be so brutal to myself if I had not something
to tell. It is my move, is it ? Well, here goes ! "
He moved his king on the board, and was silent, watching her,
while she made a flurried move, smiling at him. She was no great
player at chess.
" I said I had something to tell you did I ? " he said. " Well, it
is we have learnt that my disability may be cured. Cured or made
worse. The bone will have to be unknit, a tendon stretched. It will
be a case of kill or cure."
" Oh, I am so glad," she said breathlessly. " When will it be ?
You do not hesitate? "
" You advise me to have it done ? " he asked slowly.
" Can there be any doubt of it? "
" If it fails it leaves me much worse off."
" It won't fail."
" At my age the bones are pretty well established. But there is
a chance."
" No more than a chance ? "
" I confess the chance seems worth taking, to myself. If you
could know how hard it has been. It may cripple me worse than
ever. On the other hand it may make me like my fellows. Would you
wish me to be like my fellows ? "
He leant across the chessboard and mechanically moved the pieces.
His hand touched hers, and the color sprang to his cheek.
"What do you say?" he asked, in a voice of curious intensity.
" Shall I remain as I am or shall I take the risk ? "
" I should take the risk," she said : and her eyes fell before his.
CHAPTER XV.
" LOVE THAT HATH US IN HIS NET."
They finished the game with an outward quietness. If the atmos-
phere was charged with electricity, if they trembled as their hands
met over the pieces, there was no indication of the fact. Nothing
could have been more outwardly decorous than the lit drawing-room,
the windows open to the summer night and a bright fire on the hearth,
because a fire was cheerful to welcome the travelers home, and because
there are few evenings in the moist Irish climate when one cares to be
without a fire. The young man and the pretty girl, their heads bent
over the chessboard, made a quiet picture. Meg was badly beaten,
hopelessly checkmated. Terence Hildebrand, who had taught his
daughter chess, would have been ashamed of her as a pupil. She
532 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Jan.,
wanted to escape to get away before anything could happen. She
had run up against the thing she most desired and was afraid of it.
She escaped at last, none too soon, for she was afraid of betraying
herself. She had begun to realize with a sinking heart what the
exaltation, the golden peacefulness of the last few days meant. She
had thought she pitied Lord Erris, pitied him profoundly, and loved
and pitied his mother. Her love, her affection for these people, strong
enough for the first time in her life to make it possible for her to turn
her back on her own home without pangs she had felt it a treachery
that Castle Eagle had had power to draw her from Crane's Nest without
grief, rather with joy had been something more than she had realized.
She had deceived herself.
Alone, in her little room, she sat down and faced things, with
flushed cheeks and an excitement which would not be still, although
she tried to beat it down, to chill it with cold common sense and worse.
The memory of Lord Erris' eyes as he said good-night, as he had
stood and watched her pass up the stairs, came over her with a rush
of delight, bidding cold common sense go packing. Was this then the
way love took, by the road of pity, to enter the heart? She had a
memory of the white and gold hussar, straight, strong, debonair. She
had felt a sense of surprise at her own limitations, that it was so easy
to be discreet where he was concerned. For Lord Erris she had
believed herself to have a passionate kindness cheating herself; and
lo and behold it had become love. For the moment she did not look
further than love. Suddenly it came upon her as a cold shock that
he had let her go. If he had wanted to keep her as she went up the
stairs she must have stayed, for love had entered by the gate of pity,
and the citadel was surrendered. He had not wished her to stay. It
was a dash of cold water on her ardor that he had been willing, even
more than willing, to let her go. Some instinct told her that he had
been glad when the hour of temptation was over.
She remembered a foolish speech of a foolish young woman, an
English governess whom she had met in Vienna. " At home in Eng-
land," Miss Sayers had said, "you and I would be 'only the governess.' "
What had she been thinking of ? She remembered how her god-
mother, following the Archduchess, had commended her discretion.
What was it she had said ? Something to the effect that not every girl
could be trusted at Castle Eagle. " They would be making eyes at
Lord Erris," she had said. " He is very handsome, poor boy. I can
trust your discretion." And she, Meg, with the white and gold hussar
in her memory, and certain other fine gentlemen who had been ready
to pay her furtive attentions if she had been the girl to receive them,
had laughed while she had replied that her discretion could be trusted.
Memories came to her mind of how many times Lady Turlough-
1914-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 533
more had thrown her and Lord Erris together ; of things the Dowager
had said, had seemed about to say ; of something in the way Miss Roche
had looked at her which had caused her a vague embarrassment. But
was it not because they trusted her discretion, as the Archduchess
had trusted it, but with less reason ? She was not the governess of the
penny novelettes to believe that the noble son of the house was ready
to fall in love with her the minute he looked at her, while his mother,
the Countess, stood ready and eager to aid and abet him. She stood
up from her chair, making an impatient gesture as though she flung her
folly behind her. If there was to be any more of this nonsense, if she
could not trust herself, she would have to go, to put herself out of the
occasions of folly. The thought of going was so intolerable to her as
to make her realize, with a sharp condemnation of herself, that if things
were so bad as all that she had better go at once, without delay, be-
fore she betrayed their trust in her " making eyes " odious thought !
at Lord Erris.
As she laid her head on the pillow tears came to relieve her.
She asked for light in the night, and the morning brought her light.
She was first down sitting behind the urn at the breakfast table when
Lady Turloughmore, followed by her son, entered the room. Plainly
they had been in conclave; they were still talking as they came in.
Lord Erris' face looked eager and young. " The sooner the better,"
he said, as he came towards the table ; and his mother assented gently :
" Yes, the sooner the better, although I could wish you had not the
long journey back so soon."
" My dear mother, I shall, I hope, grow accustomed to getting
about the world. I have been too long content with being a useless
cumberer of the ground. I shall have so much to see."
Lady Turloughmore sat down at the table, and stretched her hand
for her letters.
" Anything for me, Ulick? "
The hope which at one time had been in her expression at such a
moment was no longer there. She took her letters listlessly, and laid
them to one side. The animation of her home-coming had died out
this morning. Meg noticed that her blue eyes had a washed-out look,
as though in the night she had wept in torrents.
" My son goes to Baden almost at once," she said to Meg. " He
will not be long with us."
Meg noticed that nothing was said as to the reason for Lord
Erris' visit to Baden, and understood the delicacy that withheld the
explanation.
" You will be able to get on without me, mother," Lord Erris
said, " now that you have Miss Hildebrand to keep you company.
It will not be for very long."
534 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Jan.,
" Have you forgotten that Algy Rosse is coming?" asked Lady
Turloughmore. " Algy will insist on entertaining and being enter-
tained. We must achieve some mild gaieties for him."
" I shall be sorry to miss Algy. He is an agreeable creature,"
Lord Erris said. " Miss Hildebrand, are you equal to entertaining
my cousin, Mr. Algernon Rosse? He is not long down from Oxford,
and he has a very pretty taste in art, poetry, and music. He plays
tennis and croquet, and can do most things that befit a young gentle-
man. Withal he is as modest as having a very good opinion of himself
consists with; he has taken a very decent degree at Oxford; he is
going into the diplomatic service. He has a pretty, golden mustache,
small feet and hands, of which he is not proud, is very careful of his
clothes, and dances divinely I think that is the phrase."
" Poor Algy ! " said Lady Turloughmore. " You make him out a
petit-maitre, Ulick. He is better than that."
" It is pure jealousy," Lord Erris said grimly. " An Orson like
me cannot be expected to appreciate Prince Charming."
He hurried through his breakfast and went out to inspect his
horses. He was dressed for riding. He had hardly left the breakfast
table when his mother spoke.
" I am so rejoiced that Ulick is going to see Dr. Kellner," she
said. " There has been so much doubt about it. Now he seems to
have made up his mind. Dr. Kellner has made some wonderful cures,
really and truly wonderful. His little house in Baden is thronged as
a miraculous shrine might be. They are few he sends away
unhealed."
" He has seen Lord Erris ? "
" Oh, yes, he has seen him. He said a terrible thing in his queer
German-English. 'It ess von of dose gases/ he said, 'dat ees gill or
gure, gill or gure.' I was horrified till I discovered that the killing
would mean things worse and more hopeless than they have been.
They have been so bad that I could not wish my poor boy not to take
the chance of being cured. Think what it would be to see him walk
like other people! The treatment is very drastic; there is not only
the operation, but his foot will have to be kept in plaster of Paris till
the bones knit again. And there may be the terrible disappointment
at the end. I did not dare urge it upon Ulick ; it is such a risk ; but I
am glad he will take it. It is worth the risk."
Light and shade passed over Lady Turloughmore's face with the
rapidity of sun and cloud as they ruffle a meadow. She concluded on
a lightening of the expression.
"After all, God is good," she said. " God is very good. I could
not have lived my life at all if I had not felt so convinced of the
goodness of God."
1914.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 535
Miss Roche came in, dressed in her eccentric traveling clothes,
and was told the news.
" I knew Ulick would face it," she said. " I knew Ulick would
face it. He will be one of Dr. Kellner's famous cases. You shall see,
Shelagh, you shall see. He made up his mind quickly;" she sent a
queer glance at Meg from under her eyelids, between which the eyes
narrowed themselves to mere slits. " I heard you playing and singing
last night, Miss Hildebrand, and I in my beauty-sleep."
Lady Turloughmore took no notice of Miss Roche's apparently
irrelevant remark.
" He is eager to be off. He has telegraphed for Dr. Dwyer to
meet him in Dublin the day after to-morrow. Dr. Dwyer will see
after him. He was eager to go by himself, but he accepts Dr. Dwyer
to lessen my anxieties. Fortunately he likes him. He would certainly
need someone to travel back with him if he is to be in plaster of Paris.
He will have to travel very carefully."
" He'll lose the hunting next winter." Again Miss Roche's eyes
darted brightly at Meg and were hidden again. " We'll be put to the
pin of our collar, as the saying is, to amuse him when he comes back.
I think the Lord meant him to get well, for he has never yet attained
to that resignation which is the hardest thing to see in anyone that
suffers. As long as there's discontent there is hope."
" Poor Ulick ! " said the mother softly. " I am sure he was very
patient. I've found it hard to forgive myself, when I've had to look
at him in pain and he built for strength. That was the saddest
part of it."
" Indeed then the Lord won't find it hard to forgive you, a good,
little valiant woman if ever there was one. I'm not saying Ulick wasn't
patient. He chafed. Bless my heart, I don't want him to be patient,
with a foot like that. I want him to be impatient, and to get well
like other men. I want to see him married, with a houseful of chil-
dren, before I die."
Again the swift glance darted and was withdrawn. Lady Tur-
loughmore sighed.
" Algy Rosse is a very pretty fellow, and a nice, pleasant lad,"
said Miss Roche : " but all the same we don't want to see him in Ulick's
shoes. Not but what I'll be at rest with my fathers long before that.
I'd like to see Ulick married before I die. I'm as fond of him as if
he was my son. Why wouldn't he marry? Lots of girls would jump
at him, just as he is. Not because he is Lord Erris. There is some-
thing about him. Bless you, there are some men that attract women
and some men that don't. I know, though I'm an old maid."
She finished breakfast, and went off, refusing Lady Turlough-
more's offer of a carriage to take herself and her queer belongings.
536 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Jan.,
The trunk which had come out of the ark she would send a donkey
cart for. She insisted on carrying all manner of queer odds and ends,
and did not refuse Meg's offer to walk with her as far as Carrick,
though she insisted on bearing her share of the burdens.
" I won't ask you in," she said, when they reached the house.
" The place wouldn't be fit to receive you. The last time I was away
a water pipe burst, and destroyed I don't know how many things on
me. The carpets were rotten with the damp. You never know what
will happen in those old houses as soon as your back's turned. They're
crumbling like their owners that's what they are."
" I wish you would let me stay," she said. " It seems so lonely
for you. I could help you to get straight. I really love housework."
" In a nice clean house. Things have been allowed to go too
long at Carrick. It would break your heart, so it would. You don't
suppose I like to live in all the dirt and decay. My father kept twenty
servants, to say nothing of hangers-on. It was a very different place
in his time. Good-bye."
She whisked round the corner of the house, carrying a certain
proportion of the things they had brought between them, and returned
to find Meg still standing where she had left her, contemplating the sad
house front.
" I wouldn't know what to do with the likes of you at all," she said
humorously. " Go back now and give my love to Shelagh Turlough-
more, and tell her not to fret for her boy, that he'll come home as well
as anybody. And listen now don't be coming over or sending mes-
sages, for I've got a working fit on me, and I'm going to put the place
in order. Tell Shelagh that from me to let me alone till I come or
send. And listen now, child, if you were to send Ulick away heart-
ened up and lively, it might be doing him a power of good. Do you
think you could do it, dear ? "
There was something of a painful anxiety in Miss Anastasia's
face and voice as she leant a little closer to Meg, speaking in a whisper.
Apparently what she saw in Meg's face satisfied her, for she did not
wait for an answer.
" Never mind me," she went on, " never mind me, child. I've
known the boy from a baby, and I know he's worth all you could
give him, even if he drags a lame foot after him all his days. Don't
I know? Well, God bless you, my dear." And so saying she dis-
appeared finally.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
IRew Boohs*
VINCENT DE PAUL. By E. K. Sanders. New York: Long-
mans, Green & Co. $4.00 net.
This book is a record of the life and times and work of St.
Vincent de Paul. The author, who is not a Catholic, has chosen to
treat rather of the work of the Saint than of the Saint himself.
Her attitude is always one of impartiality and detachment. She
dwells, therefore, for the most part on those features of St. Vin-
cent's work and character which meet the common approval of man-
kind. She sees the splendid temporal results of so sanctified a life,
and, indeed, she goes far in her apprehension of the secret which
made that holy life so obviously effective. The evidence of a wit-
ness so single-minded and so temperate, cannot fail to impress every
reader who is fortunate enough to peruse this excellent biography.
The life of St. Vincent is most encouraging to the ordinary
man. St. Vincent was a peasant; he was not unusually learned,
and he achieved no particular distinction in early life. In fact,
until he was over forty, no casual observer would have proclaimed
him above the average in any particular. His father was a peasant
proprietor in the south of France, and so rough and unpolished
that his pious son admits that he was once ashamed of him before
his fellow-students.
St. Vincent was ordained priest in 1600, and subsequently com-
pleted his studies and took his degree. In 1605 he was captured by
pirates, taken to Tunis and sold as a slave. Having converted one
of his masters, he escaped and got back to France in 1607. In 161 1
he became curate of Clichy, but soon exchanged his curacy for
a tutorship in the noble family of de Gondi. The holiness of his
priestly life, and the wisdom of his spiritual guidance, seem suddenly
to have captured the admiration of his noble patrons. At this time,
when he was forty-one years of age, an incident happened which
might almost be compared with St. Augustine's Tolle! Lege!
He was summoned to the deathbed of one of the peasants on the
estate. The sick man, though apparently respected by his neigh-
bors, had been for long in the habit of making false confessions,
which were followed, of course, by sacrilegious communions. And
now that he was dying, the terror of all this evil doing possessed
538 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
him, and St. Vincent was called to his assistance. But the poor
penitent was not content with the secret shame of the confessional.
He desired that Madame de Gondi, as representing his liege lord,
should come to him, so that he might make a public acknowledgment
of his wrongdoing in her presence. The whole incident came to
St. Vincent as a great spiritual experience, indeed, as a " revelation
of the spiritual conditions under which the peasantry of France were
at that time living " it came to him as a decisive call to his real
life-work.
We need not touch upon every link in the chain of St. Vincent's
life. He was brought by divine guidance to Paris, and there was
put into his hands the work to which he had served almost fifty
years of hidden apprenticeship. In 1625 he founded the Congrega-
tion of Mission Priests; in 1642 the Sisters of Charity took their
first vows, while the Ladies of Charity were established in due course
with their variously appropriate works of mercy. In reading the
history of these immensely successful undertakings, we are natur-
ally led to wonder what was the real secret of St. Vincent's power.
The answer is to be found in the statement that St. Vincent was at
one and the same time a practical man and a man of prayer;
and, furthermore, that his life of prayer was the cause of his
practical success. He weighed all things in " the scales of the
sanctuary."
Until St. Vincent understood through prayer that a given
matter or policy was according to the Divine Will, he would take no
active steps towards carrying it out fearing, as he said, " to en-
croach upon the purposes of God." Given, however, the divine
sanction, nothing would hinder him from resolutely carrying it
through. Such a course saved him from endless mistakes and com-
plications, and from the endless worry and wear and tear that such
mistakes would certainly have cost him. " Let us leave all to God,"
he would say, " for ourselves it is only necessary that we should
have humility and patience as we await the orderings of His prov-
idence we may (then) feel that we have only what God has
given us, and that we have sought neither men, nor goods, nor
importance Let us leave all to God. Let us wait for His
commands, and not try to forestall them." A clear brain, a true
heart, an immense patience, an absolute distrust of and indifference
to self, and, finally, above all, a serene and child-like dependence on
God these are the qualities that made St. Vincent de Paul at once
the holiest and most practical man of his time.
1914.] NEW BOOKS 539
St. Vincent was far ahead of his time. The foundation of the
Sisters of Charity was at that period an altogether novel experiment.
To no body of religious women had such freedom ever before been
allowed. But their saintly founder knew that God needed them to
save His poor, and would, therefore, protect them in their new and
devoted work.
One could speak with great pleasure and sincerity of other
features of this thorough piece of biography. It would have been
interesting to have heard of the English foundation of the Sisters
of Charity, or a little more of the great devotion paid by St. Vin-
cent to our Blessed Lady, and, above all, of his interior life and its
services. But apart from these matters, the historical part
of the work is well done. Paris during the Regency; the intrigues
of Mazarin, his relations with the Queen ; the noble ecclesiastic who
was rather more " noble " and rather less ecclesiastical than he
should have been; the great ladies who re-acted from pleasure to
piety, and gave their jewels to St. Vincent; the terrible rebellion
of the Fronde; the efforts at social reform undertaken by the ex-
cellent Renaudot and the sad reason of their ultimate failure; the
Port Royalists and their relations with St. Vincent all these things
are sketched with lively fidelity. But the sense of proportion is
never lost. St. Vincent stands out in all his splendid simplicity as a
man sent by God to do His Will to save the suffering and to cor-
rect the frivolous.
THE CURE OF ALCOHOLISM. By Austin O'Malley. St. Louis :
B. Herder. $1.25 net.
Dr. O'Malley writes in his preface :
The reason for the existence of this book is to call attention
to the fact that the efforts commonly made in opposition to
alcoholism are too specialized: they try to plant sobriety in a
soil not fitted for it. Sobriety is only a part of temperance, and
temperance itself is but one indivisible phase of that spiritual
unity called the cardinal virtues. The drunkard must aim at the
acquisition in the natural order of all the cardinal virtues, or
their reception in the supernatural order, since he is lacking
in each of these almost as much as he fails in temperance, and
temperance will never come to anyone unaccompanied by the
other virtues. It is impossible short of a miracle of grace to
cure a drunkard whilst the physical effects of the drug he has
taken are present, therefore before applying moral treatment,
physical elimination of the poison must be accomplished.
540 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
The first five chapters of the book explain the nature of alcohol,
its proportions in liquors and patent medicines, its physical and
mental effects, the alcoholic insanities, the relation between alcohol-
ism and heredity, and the physical treatment of alcoholism. The
next five chapters describe the moral treatment. The author ex-
plains the moral responsibility of the drunkard, the control of the
passions, the four cardinal virtues, and the natural and supernatural
means of curing drunkenness. A final chapter treats of opium,
cocaine, morphine, and other intoxicating drugs.
We commend this excellent treatise to doctors and priests, al-
though we are skeptical of some of Dr. O'Malley's pet theories,
as, for example, the relation of climate to certain races. Dr.
O'Malley gives too much theology in his second part. What he
says is accurate and true, but it is hardly germane to his subject to
discuss at such length the various Catholic theories of grace, the
gifts of the Holy Ghost, the cardinal virtues, etc. For instance:
Treating a drunkard with drugs solely is quackery; giving
the pledge as a remedy is often an incitement to perjury.
The hospital authorities that supply whiskey to drunken pa-
tients are respectable " speak easys," which are never raided by
the police, because no one has ever directed the attention of
the police to them.
There is always something wrong with the mind of a true
neurasthenic, and he does not take moral medicine well.
A confirmed drunkard is not a Catholic, of course, except in
the state census.
WORLDLYMAN: A MODERN MORALITY OF OUR DAY. By
Percy Fitzgerald. New York: Benziger Brothers. 90 cents
net.
We are pleased to be able to welcome a new book from the
author of Saxonhurst. Mr. Fitzgerald's latest publication is a
" modern morality," Anslem Worldlyman of Old Saxonhurst, a
dissipated, frivolous pleasure-monger, not too bad it is true, but
" like the curate's egg," good in parts, is rapidly sliding down-hill.
His friend, Father S. Sepulchre, has foreseen this, and true to the
promise made when Worldlyman was leaving school, has always
kept an eye on his young protege.
A crisis comes. A breakdown in health ; a convenient " really
you must take a sea voyage " from H. R. H.'s own medico; a first
trip of the new unsinkable Leviathan, a few days of " reckless
1914.] NEW BOOKS 541
junketing in the booths of this Vanity Fair afloat," and then the
beginning of the end. A festival in honor of the " admirable
captain of I don't know how many voyages " brings on a speech
in praise of the " unsinkable ship." This covert blasphemy is re-
buked by Worldlyman, but his words are greeted with cries of:
" shut up," " keep it till Sunday," " no sermons here." Events
move rapidly. Fun and folly pay no heed to the sudden shock,
and the rasping sound as the iceberg strikes the ship. The ghastly
figure of Mors, the monk, stalks across the scene, and warns
Worldlyman of the approaching doom. In answer to Worldly-
man's prayers, Father S. Sepulchre arrives (never mind how) to
prepare him for the end. And the end is not long delayed. The
lifeboats hurry off with their burdens, and those who must die
face death with a calmness and a courage given them by the faith
and zeal of the wonder-working priest.
" You don't like thinking? Well, here are some facts." This
is the spirit of the book. Worldlyman is every man, and the thin
wall of an ocean liner is about as sure and as treacherous as what
separates any of us from eternity that enormous fact which we
glide over so heedlessly, " when we glibly say, 'life everlasting.
Amen.' "
The book is attractively written, and alive with humor. Its
most interesting character is Father S. Sepulchre, with his impro-
vised proverbs; his shrewd and quaint comments; his wonder-
working zeal. The closing paragraph shows the kindly apostle
the same in death as in life, " smiling, praying, comforting, encour-
aging, calling on all near him io be ready and alert for the only next
few moments, when they should at last 'step into eternity' together."
There is more fact than fancy in this little book, and much food for
thought in the sober realism of Worldlyman, a modern morality of
our own day, setting forth how he passed from death to life, from
sin to virtue ; how he was lost and how he was found again.
FRANCISCAN TERTIARIES. By Father William, O.S.F.C
New York: Benziger Brothers. $1.00 net.
Though, as the title indicates, this book is intended for mem-
bers of the Third Order of St. Francis, it is in many respects
adapted to the needs of any Catholic who sincerely desires to put
the teaching of the Church into practice in daily life. Such chapters
as those on Loyalty to Church, on Dress, and on Amusements are
exceedingly " timely."
542 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
SPIRITISM UNVEILED. By D. I. Lanslots, O.S.B. St. Louis:
B. Herder. 75 cents net.
This work ought to be welcomed by Catholics who are desirious
of knowing the attitude of the Church on this important subject.
The treatment, though brief, is thorough, and questions of philos-
ophy and theology are considered entirely from the viewpoint of
Catholic teaching. The book has the value and authority so utterly
lacking in the studies of Spiritism, which confuse verifiable phe-
nomena with hypothetical explanations not always consistent with
what the present author calls " sound theology."
"CHRIST'S CADETS." By C. C. Martindale, SJ. New York:
Benziger Brothers. 35 cents net.
This little volume of the " Stella Maris " Library is addressed
to the Sodalists of Our Lady, and deals with the three young Saints,
Aloysius Gonzaga, Stanislaus Kostka, and John Berchmans. The
author does not attempt to write " lives " of these " cadets " of
Christ; he gives rather a study of the salient features of their
ascetic growth. The book is excellent reading, and its practical
teaching on the subject of sanctity is much to be commended.
Judging by this volume, the " Stella Maris " Library should be a
valuable addition to our devotional literature, for both in its style
and its treatment of excellent matter, "Christ's Cadets" is altogether
pleasing.
THE STORY OF MARY DUNNE. By M. E. Francis. New
York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.35 net.
It would be a difficult question to decide just for whom this
book is intended. If it is designed for the use of parents and
guardians, the story form is hardly suitable; if for those who are
entering womanhood, few of those entrusted with souls who stand
" where the brook and river meet," would choose to place such a tale
in their hands ; if it be designed for those whose work and experience
have put them in possession of such facts, it is, to say the least,
superfluous. There only remains the victims themselves, and while
we do not deny the possibility of its moving them to remorse, regret,
repentance, such a result is, on the whole, improbable. Altogether
we do not find it easy to justify the existence of this book, being
of opinion that in common with eugenics and their kindred sub-
jects, it is a matter for private and individual handling; and likely
to make an impression, and bear fruit for good, only under these
I9I4-] NEW BOOKS 543
conditions. Doubtless the book has been written with the best
intentions, but the tale itself is depressing and hopeless, disturbing
in its effect on the youthful reader, and even on maturer ones.
We regret exceedingly that the author who has given us
that charming idyll of The Manor Farm, should have felt impelled
to combat moral evil by such a misguided method. The words of
Archbishop Whiteside quoted by the author: "A barrier at the
top of the precipice is better than an ambulance at the bottom," are
very true and very sad, but we fear that a novel will prove but a
frail barrier. The evil which this book combats is appalling, is
tremendous, but no doctor endorses the exhibition of the victims of
contagious disease as beneficial to those in health, neither will
such exposures as this book gives stem the tide of moral corrup-
tion which at present works such havoc. A weapon to slay these
dragons must be stronger forged than a novel.
THOMAS HARDY'S WESSEX. By Hermann Lea. New York:
The Macmillan Co. $2.00.
Those who desire to know well the country of Hardy's novels,
will be interested in this book. When all is said, mental pic-
tures do need confirmation, at any rate, in the majority of cases.
And here we have just such confirmation as is needful. Books of
this kind are sometimes " made to order ;" but to Mr. Hermann Lea
this work has been one of leisurely delight. " It is more than
twenty years," he tells us, " since I first became interested in tracing
the topographical features of the Wessex novels, and I have lived
in Wessex continuously during that period, and have traveled over
practically all the main roads, and many of the lanes and byroads
traversing more than one hundred and fifty thousand miles on cycle,
in a car and on foot."
The author's method is to give a short historical background to
the Hardy country, and then to deal with the topographical features
of each story in turn. The volume contains two hundred and forty
illustrations, some of them of unusual excellence.
THE REVOLT OF DEMOCRACY. By Alfred Russel Wallace,
O.M., F.R.S. New York : The Cassell Co.
Only a few days after the appearance of this little book, the
illustrious author of it died. His own last work, to tell the truth,
is a little slight and disappointing, but the excellent biographical
notice of Dr. Russel Wallace contributed by Mr. James Marchant,
544 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
is both interesting and timely. In a periodical quite uncommitted
to any prejudice in favor of dogmatic Christianity, there occurred
a short while ago a passage which sums up most justly the great
results of Dr. Wallace's life. We quote the passage, and put in
italics the remarkable sentence with which it closes.
What Darwin and Wallace really did was not so much to
invent a theory of evolution by Natural Selection, as to furnish
and marshal the large and varied evidence necessary to establish
it in the world of science, and to exhibit its far-reaching conse-
quences in the life of thought. In this work Wallace was an
able though an independent lieutenant. But his true service to
his age was in furnishing a stout barrier to the torrent of quasi-
scientific rationalism, which, drawing over-freely from the new
evolutionary teaching, threatened to submerge all the landmarks
not merely of dogmatic religion, but of morality and human-
itarianism.
It is certain that a later and more definitely religious generation
than our own will abundantly confirm this verdict. It will look
back upon Russel Wallace not only as a man who saw a valuable,
though partial, scientific truth, but also as a man who saw this
truth in proper relation to other truths that were far more important
truths that proclaim the spiritual nature and destiny of the whole
human race. In this respect he differed from Darwin. As Mr.
Marchant puts it, " Darwin thought that Natural Selection alone
was sufficient to explain the development of man, in all aspects from
some lower form. Wallace thought that as an intellectual
and moral being some other influence some spiritual influx was
required to account for his special mental and psychic nature."
Darwin, again, believed that acquired characters were inherited,
Wallace thought not. To sum up, Wallace had philosophy enough
to see that biological formulae could not be applied beyond their
proper sphere without great danger to individual, to political, and
to social life. Unfortunately, many prominent leaders in thought
and action seemed quite unaware of this. As a result both trade
and politics have suffered terribly. Apply the doctrine of the sur-
vival of the fittest to trade, and we get the warrant for savage com-
petition, in which the weaker always goes to the wall, and the em-
ployee becomes a mere pawn in a game of giants; apply it again
to international politics, and we have a sufficient excuse for the
tyranny and destruction which " imperialists " wage against inferior
races.
1914-] NEW BOOKS 545
Wallace saw what was going on, and the latter part of his life
was mainly occupied in protesting against the false deductions
drawn from what may be truly called his own scientific premises.
He proclaimed that man was the master and not the slave of material
forces; that the laws of the spirit "could utilize, modify, or
abrogate and override the physical laws of evolution for their proper
purposes," and that man had to look above himself and not beneath
himself for the highest truth and for the most powerful inspiration.
In his search after spiritual truth he held, and sometimes relin-
quished, many tentative opinions at variance with revelation; but
that was to be expected. At any rate he was moving in the right
direction, and he took many followers in his train. His influence,
perhaps, more than that of any of his contemporaries, tended to
assuage the bitterness of conflict between science and religion; and
the force of that benevolent influence is increasing rather than not,
for it has become contagious.
THE CATHOLIC STUDENT'S "AIDS" TO THE BIBLE. By
Hugh Pope, O.P. New York : Benziger Brothers. $1.35 net.
Father Pope has written this book to guide the Catholic student
in his reading of the Bible, and to help him read it with an intel-
ligent interest. He says in his introduction : " In these days of
specialization there is always a danger lest what we term found-
ation work be neglected. This is especially true of Biblical studies.
A knowledge of the written Word itself must precede the use of
commentaries, and even of introductions. Of what use to read
a commentary on one book when we are ignorant of the relations be-
tween that book and preceding or subsequent ones? Of \vhat use
to read about inspiration before we know something at least of the
inspired Word itself ? "
This book is not an introduction, still less is it a dictionary
of the Bible. The author has departed from the lines usually
adopted in similar aids to the Bible, and has purposely developed
certain features at the expense of others. He has omitted, for
instance, the concordances generally given, and has devoted the
space thus saved to the amplification of the introductions to each
book. He has made these as complete as possible, in order to
interest the student in the books themselves, by showing him their
contents and divisions, the main points in their teaching, the prin-
cipal proofs of their authenticity, and by indicating all the serious
difficulties connected with these questions. Following the example
VOL. xcvni. 35
546 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
of St. Augustine, whom he continually quotes, he does not hesitate
to point out the chief Biblical difficulties, thinking it preferable
that a student should from the outset realize that the Bible is a
book which he who runs may not read, than that he should later
be tempted to think that difficulties and apparent contradictions have
been unfairly passed over by his teachers. Some very good maps
accompany the volume.
THE CORYSTON FAMILY. By Mrs. Humphrey Ward. New
York: Harper & Brothers. $1.35 net
There is not one of the Coryston family that we would care to
number among our friends. Lady Coryston, herself, is a cold,
unfeeling, unnatural tyrant, whose political opinions have deprived
her of all true feminine and motherly instincts. She so dominated
her henpecked husband that she forced him to disinherit his eldest
son, and to leave her perfect control of his immense estates. Cory-
ston, the eldest boy, a hare-brained socialist enthusiast, on learning
his mother's determination to cut him off without a penny, retaliates
by renting a small house on her estate, and spreading the seeds
of discontent among his mother's hitherto satisfied tenants. Arthur,
the mother's darling, is rather an effeminate nincompoop, who re-
cites his mother's Conservative speeches by heart in Parliament,
until he falls in love with Enid, the daughter of the Radical Chan-
cellor. Marcia, the daughter, accepts without question her mother's
tyrannical rule, and obediently engages herself to Edward New-
bury, a man of Conservative principles after her mother's own heart.
One of the farmers on the Newbury estate is about to be evicted
for having married a divorced woman, whereupon his wife calls
upon Marcia for help, with the result that her engagement is
broken. The suicide of the farmer and his wife makes Marcia
realize that the intolerance of her fiance would negative their future
happiness. The young Newbury in despair follows " his mystic
bent," and becomes an Anglican missionary to the pagans.
Of course Mrs. Humphrey Ward tries to bring out clearly the
utter heartlessness and cruelty of dogmatic Christianity, although
her picture of the High Church Anglican is a caricature rather than
a portrait.
The whole book is a subtle attack on the suffrage movement.
For Mrs. Ward's idea of the true function of a woman is : " The
creation of a spiritual atmosphere in which the nation may do its
best, and may be insensibly urged to do its best, in fresh, spon-
1914-] NEW BOOKS 547
taneous ways, like a plant flowering in a happy climate, instead of
taking up with all the old-fashioned, disappointing, political ma-
chinery that men have found out."
JANE AUSTEN. By F. Warre Cornish. English Men of Letter
Series. New York: The Macmillan Co. 75 cents net.
Mr. F. Warre Cornish has added an interesting volume to the
English Men of Letter Series on Jane Austen. English country
life, even if we look at it from the privileged point of view of the
well-to-do country gentry of her time, was rather an empty kind
of existence. "Difficulty of locomotion makes neighborhoods small,
and small neighborhoods contract interests and create monotonous
habits of living. The vacuity of country life a century ago is
illustrated by every chapter of Jane Austen's books; and those
who complain that her range of subjects and scenes is small must
remember the seclusion of her life in the country, " where nothing
ever happens." The distractions of this kind of life are charac-
teristic books of engravings, cabinets of coins and medals, drawers
of shells and fossils ; backgammon, cribbage, speculation, and other
card games. The clever ladies were permitted charades and acros-
tics, but the dull ones must needs be content with " filigree work,
netting and knitting, miles of fringe, and acres of carpet work."
The men were only a little more employed. They did not
smoke and they did not read; shooting, riding, and driving seemed
to prescribe the range of their daily activities. Jane Austen's father,
it is true, was endowed with so much leisure that he found time to
read Cowper aloud to his family of a morning. But human nature
is always human nature; and where men and women, young and
old, meet together in such an atmosphere of spacious leisure we
shall have comedy, we shall have tragedy, we shall have life. Jane
Austen has given us this early nineteenth century English country
life. Her presentment of it as a delightful comedy of manners is
final, the beauty, the delicacy, the reticent perfection of her novels
will never be surpassed.
Mr. Warre Cornish has done his work of appreciation with
loving care. The first chapter is biographical, the second deals
with Jane Austen's Letters, while the subsequent ones are devoted to
the study of each particular novel. His own favorite is Pride and
Prejudice, and we heartily subscribe to his preference. Elizabeth
Bennet was Jane Austen's favorite, too. " I must confess," she
wrote, " that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared
548 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
in print." As our author says, " she is as much alive as Clarissa,
or Shirley or Bathsheba Everdene or Clara Middleton, and in the
unity of a nature full of contradictions belongs to the highest class
of creations in comedy." It is a clear gain to turn from the vulgar
open-work of so much modern fiction to the novels of Jane Austen,
with their delicacy, merriment, and reserve.
COURT MASQUES OF JAMES I. Their Influence on Shakes-
peare and the Public Theatres. By Mary Sullivan, Ph.D.
Xew York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. $2.50 net.
Dr. Sullivan has made an original study of the Court masques
in the days of James I., in order to show their diplomatic bearing,
and their influence upon English literature. As she says in her
opening chapter:
The real occasion of the production of all the greatest masques
of the Jacobean Court lies as deep as the business of State.
When foreign ambassadors at the English Court officially in-
sisted that a masque was a public action, wherein one nation
could not be favored more than another without manifest testi-
mony of bad faith to the nation neglected; that a masque was
a public spectacle and solemnity which could be seen by ten
thousand persons, who would publish to all Christendom the
diplomatic significance of the Court's least action during its
performance ; when masques were held in one country to coun-
teract or influence the diplomatic importance of a masque given
in another; when King James himself insisted that a masque
was a diplomatic function, used to prove to a continental sover-
eign England's affection for him ; when prime ministers an-
nounced that deportment at a masque had a large influence in
shaping a treaty of peace; it seems time to examine such
masques in connection with the historic conditions with which
they were associated, for the effect of the diplomatic bearing
upon the literature of the masque and of other dramatic forms.
Chapter I. -IV. consider in detail the ascendancy of Spain, and
then of France, at the English Court as evidenced by the masques
given on holidays like Twelfth-night, or in honor of the marriage
of one of the King's relatives. If the masque was given to
show special favor to some country, the King paid marked attention
to the ambassador of that country, the Queen danced with him at
the close of the masque, and his wife and family were treated with
the greatest possible courtesy.
A literary production which had for its patrons an audience
I9H-] NEW BOOKS 549
like that of the Court of King James, was not destined to be wholly
satisfying from the viewpoint of literature. The audience called
for a high-class, costly vaudeville entertainment, abounding in ani-
mated dialogue and historical allusions, and attractive to the eye
by the dazzling splendor of jewelled costumes and the intricate
steps of the dance. They were always on the lookout for surprises
in the line of the grotesque and the comic. Such writers as Ben
Jonson must have suffered to force themselves under contract to
answer such an appeal.
Some writers have maintained that the Shakespearean stage
was devoid of splendor, and that the women's parts were given to
boys. Dr. Sullivan thinks both these untenable.
The author acknowledges her debt to prior investigators of the
masque such as Paul Reyher, Dr. A. Soergel, Dr. Rudolph Brotanek,
and Dr. Albert Feuilleart, though she herself has gone to the
original documents in the British Museum and in the Public Record
Office. An appendix of some sixty pages gives a number of the
original documents.
MEMOIRS OF BARON HYDE DE NEUVILLE. Translated and
abridged by Frances Jackson. Two Volumes. St. Louis:
B. Herder. $6.00 net.
The subject of these memoirs, Jean Guillaume Baron de
Neuville, was born at La Charite-sur-Loire in 1776, descended on
his father's side from a Jacobite English family that had settled in
France after the uprising of 1745. Hereditary legitimist tendencies
were strongly marked in him, and soon received opportunity to
display themselves, as he was only fifteen years old when the first
rumblings of the Revolution called him to Paris, to attach himself
to the unpopular cause of monarchy. A consistent Royalist through-
out those terrible days, he played a part in the rising at Berry, and
this, together with his efforts to persuade the first Consul to restore
the Bourbon heir, had much to do with his self -exile to the United
States. After the downfall of Napoleon he became an important
diplomatic agent of Louis XVIII. and of Charles X., representing
his country at Washington and at Lisbon, besides conducting va-
rious special negotiations, and holding a portfolio in the Martignac
cabinet. But the revolution of July forced him once more into
retirement. Faithful unto the end to his " legitimate " sovereign,
he died in Paris in 1857.
Although he wrote no memoirs, he left behind a considerable
550 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
amount of autobiographical notes and correspondence, and it was
mostly from these that his nieces compiled the three volumes which
appeared in France in 1888. The variety and interest of his nar-
rative, the simplicity and force of his style, and his absolute dis-
interestedness and honesty, make the work, despite its size, un-
usually attractive. The work has an added and higher value as a
historical source. The present work is an abridged translation of
these voluminous memoirs, space having been saved by the omis-
sion of the correspondence and debates. While this diminishes
considerably its value to the historical student, it renders it more
inviting to the general reader. The work, both of translation and
of abridgment, has been capably performed, and the material
make-up is equally good. It is to be hoped that the translator will
provide us with an English rendering of the most important por-
tions of the correspondence omitted in this volume.
RELIGIOUS ORDERS OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES.
By Elinor Long Dehey. Hammond, Indiana : W. B. Conkey
Co. $3.00 net.
This volume is a valuable contribution to the history of the
Catholic Church in the United States. It is far more than a mere
summary of facts. It contains a history of the foundation, rule
and purpose of all the female religious communities of our country.
Their history is an inspiration, and the present volume shows what
a vital force they are in the life of the Church. The book includes
numerous illustrations of persons and places, and represents ex-
tended and painstaking labor; and we trust it will meet with a
sale encouraging to its zealous author.
SWEET-SCENTED LEAVES AND OTHER STORIES. By Violet
Bullock- Webster (Mrs. Armel O'Connor). Published at Lud-
low, England. 5 s.
Charming is the word that rises to the lips as one skims these
exquisite little tales, but a further acquaintance soon shows that
they are more than that : they are steeped in that fragrant essence
of charity which we had almost feared had been swept off this
poor old earth of ours by organization, methods, rules. We confess
to being something of an anarchist in this matter of relief of the
poor. Present-day ways snatch from one the delicate fragrance, the
privacy of sweet charity that seems best to suit Christ's words, " Let
not thy left hand know what thy right hand doth." As the Re-
1914.] NEW BOOKS 551
cording Angel visits at eve this world of ours, we suspect that
it is not the eminently proper reports of philanthropy that arrest his
attention, comforting as these may be, but rather the attitude of
mind and soul so well portrayed in these beautiful sketches. How
far from modern methods seems the delicate reverence shown in
Our Lady's Party; the almost timid consideration and kindness of
Sweet-Scented Leaves, of John and Sally of Mrs. Marchant, and
her simple self -surrender between two exacting natures.
For ourselves, we confess to a preference for Sweet-Scented
Leaves. Miss Devereux is delightfully natural in the midst of her
holiness. Lose no time in making her acquaintance, and enjoying
the contrast between grace, which she typifies, and her maid, Sally,
who represents a very human piece of our nature unadorned. To
have been the inspiration of such loving acts of fraternal charity
should be reward enough, but our author merits also the praise of a
lesser charm literary grace, and her sure touch of familiarity with
the invisible world.
THE EIGHTH YEAR. A Vital Problem of Married Life. By
Philip Gibbs. New York: The Devin-Adair Co. $1.25.
Mr. Gibbs writes a quick, brilliant story to prove how some
men by their selfish thoughtlessness drive their wives either to
desperation, or force them into the ranks of the militant suffragettes.
He shows how much of modern marital unhappiness comes from
men and women trying to live beyond their means, and shirking
the duties of paternity and maternity. This book is an excellent
sermon on the evils of divorce and race suicide.
THE SEVENTH WAVE AND OTHER SOUL STORIES. By
Constance E. Bishop. London : R. & T. Washbourne. 3 s. 6 d.
We were not at all impressed with this series of psychological
tales, although the publisher's advertisement assured us that in them
" the twentieth century life of to-day seems to be infused with the
spirit-sense of the ages of faith, and the supernatural is made as
near and familiar as it was when miracles were generally unques-
tioned, and to encounter dancing fairies hardly raised surprise."
Perhaps we are made merely of ordinary mortal clay, for this new
writer utterly failed to imbue us with " any deep mystical yearnings
to pass through the fleshy screen to reach the hidden heart of all
things."
We felt throughout that we were listening to a highly nervous
552 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
and imaginative woman, who was most of the time on the verge of
hysteria. She is always having presentiments; she hears voices
continually rousing her from sleep; she feels that when the wind
howls, the sound is almost human; she is ever weeping in an
anguish of soul, "desolating, unspeakable, and overwhelming;"
she doubts at times "whether she is in or out of the body;" she
knows that the wind always howls in November human-like, etc., etc.
Occasionally we are surprised after reading some very pious pas-
sages, to come across such expressions as : "I have had a h
of a time since I saw you last It is my spine, they say some
rotten disease and it's h to bear." This is bathos with a ven-
geance.
HTHE Manresa Press announces the publication of a shilling library
of Catholic books, some original and some reprinted, to per-
form for Catholics the services rendered to the general public by
such series as Everyman's Library and the People's Books. The
editor is the Rev. Alban Goodier, S.J., who has already enlisted
many notable contributors; the project has the approbation of the
Cardinal of Westminster. The earliest publications will be the
Letters and Instructions of St. Ignatius Loyola; Allen's Defence
of English Catholics, and St. Antonino, Patron of Economists.
B. Herder, St. Louis, will be the agent in the United States.
A SPECIAL word of commendation is due to the excellent man-
** ual of Irish history, entitled Ireland's Story, by Johnston and
Spencer. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.) It is some years
since it first appeared, and happily it has not wanted for a cordial
welcome. But if there be still teachers, or directors of reading
circles, who are interested in " Ireland's story," and are unac-
quainted with this presentment of it, we would strongly advise
them to secure a copy.
A VERY attractive book for children is Grace Keon's The Life
** on Earth of Our Blessed Lord for Little Catholic Children.
( St. Louis : B. Herder. 60 cents net. ) Mothers will be the most
helped by it, though all who have the care of the tiny ones will be
assisted by these pages. Music, song, and story are all called
into requisition, and very easy verses tell the chief events of Christ's
Life, Passion, Death, and Resurrection, so simply that there is very
little to explain. The illustrations are usually well chosen, but
there are one or two which might have been better selected. The
I9I4-] NEW BOOKS 553
size of the book and the typography are all that can be desired, and
the price is very reasonable. Finally the book well deserves the
patronage of those for whom it was written Catholic children
as well as Catholic mothers, whose labor of love it will lighten con-
siderably. May it lead the hearts of the children to the love of
our Incarnate Lord !
FOREIGN PUBLICATIONS.
L'Esclave des Negres, by Jean Charman. (Paris: Pierre Tequi. 2frs.)
A biography of St. Peter Claver, the missionary to the negroes in Spanish
America. The author's sympathy with his subject has given us a life which,
though not long, and covering ground already familiar, is a real addition to
the literature of this great Saint.
Arinelle Nicolas, 1606-1671, by Le Vicomte Hippolyte le Gouvello. (Paris:
Pierre Tequi. 3frs. 50.) The subject of this biography has not been canonized,
but her wonderful life and humility and close union with God have led to the
hope that one day she may receive the honor. Meanwhile the number of her
biographers is none too great to admit a new one. The present work is a
theological no less than an historical study. The character of " la bonne
Armelle" is well drawn, and at the end the author gives, as "pieces justifica-
tives," some important contemporary letters concerning her from high sources.
Had he done no more than remove from her memory the undeserved stigma
of Quietism, the author would have rendered a -real service.
Louis Veuillot, L'Homme, Le Lutteur, L'Ecrivain, by Eugene Tavernier.
(Paris: Plon-Nourrit et Cie. 3frs. 50.) M. Eugene Tavernier, his former
private secretary, has given us a most admirable and interesting summary of
the works and personality of Louis Veuillot, that "good soldier of St. Peter"
as Jules Lemaitre calls him. He is perhaps better understood now than in
his lifetime, when he was verily a storm centre, and brought " not peace but a
sword ;" and we shall leave it to yet another generation to understand him still
better. Louis Veuillot rose from the people by his own immense talent and
force. M. Tavernier describes ho* in the place of honor in his study hung
the portrait of his father in his leather workman's apron, a maker of wine
barrels at Bercy, the great wine-selling district of Paris. Veuillot's parents had
a hard struggle for existence, and the struggle was unlit by religious belief.
His own conversion was during a journalistic expedition to Rome, after he had
established himself in the journalistic world, and from that day his pen was
at the service of the Church, as a soldier's sword is at the service of his country.
M. Tavernier's own personal recollections of his master make his portrait
of the man a very living and lovable one. His appreciation of his work as a
writer sends one with keen anticipation never disappointed to his books.
L'dit de Calliste; Etude sur les Origines de la Penitence Chretienne, by
Adhemar d'Ales. (Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne. 7 frs. 50.) Several chapters
of this work have already appeared in various French reviews, namely, The
Etudes, The Recherches de Science religieuse, The Revue d'Histoire ecclesias-
tique, The Revue Pratique d'Apologetique, and The Revue des Questions his-
toriques. The book also supposes the reader's knowledge of two other works of
the author, namely, The Theology of Tertullian and The Theology of St. Hip-
polytus. The author discusses at great length the place of the "peremptory
edict " of Pope Calixtus in the development of the Church's penitential discipline.
554 NEW BOOKS [Jan.,
Was it in reality a great revolutionary change as some scholars maintain, or was
it, as the author holds, a mere minor incident in the history of the Sacrament of
Penance, which obtained undue prominence owing to the bitter attacks of Ter-
tullian and other anti-Catholic rigorists. The book is in reality a detailed
history of the origins of penance in the first three centuries, the author bringing
out clearly two things; first, the Christian tradition proves with the utmost
clearness that God pardons all sins without exception, no matter what their
number or their enormity, and, second, the Church has always claimed the
power of pardoning sins given it by Jesus Christ. We do not think that the
author settles once for all, all the points in controversy, and we think him at
times rather unfair to such eminent scholars as Dr. Funk. But no student of
early church history can afford to neglect reading this most suggestive volume.
Dieu: Existence et Cognoscibilite, by S. Belmond. (Paris: Gabriel Beau-
chesne. 4frs.) This volume is an ardent defence of the philosophy of Dun
Scotus. The author blames the opponents of the Subtle Doctor for not having
read his writings, and for ascribing to him many a false theory, merely because
they were incompetent to judge him aright. He is especially angry at those
who would fain see Scotus denounced in the Encyclical Pascendi of Pius X.
The book consists of three parts, The Existence of God, What We know of
God, and The Knowledge of God.
Gustave III. et la Rentree du Catholicisme en Suede, by P. Fiel et A. Ser-
riere. (Paris: Plon-Nourrit et Cie. 3frs. 50.) This work does not pretend
to give a complete picture of the religious history of Sweden during the reign
of Gustavus III. The authors wish merely to describe, after the original docu-
ments, the mission of the Vicar Apostolic Oster, who was sent to Sweden by
Pius VI. in July, 1783. Most of their material is drawn from the Abbe Oster's
letters to Propaganda. Although his apostolate did not bring about the counter-
reform that he dreamed of, and although Sweden remained dominantly Lutheran,
the Church of Stockholm owes a great debt to its first Vicar Apostolic.
Le Mystere de I' Incarnation, by fidouard Hugon. (Paris: Pierre Tequi.
3frs. 50.) Father Hugon has written a scholarly, theological treatise on the
Incarnation. Its five chapters discuss : The Mystery of the Incarnation, The
Divine and Human Natures, The Union of the Two Natures, The Qualities
of the Humanity of Christ, and The Worship of Jesus Christ.
Les Commandements, by J. C. Brousselle. (Paris: Pierre Tequi. sfrs. 50.)
Father Brousselle of the Lycee Michlet has added another volume to his already
rather extended course of religious instruction. He treats in a simple, practical
way the Commandments of God and the Church. We would like to see manuals
of this type written in English for the boys of our Catholic colleges.
Les Conventionnels Regicides, by Pierre Bliard. (Paris: Perrin et Cie. 5/r.y.)
Pierre Bliard gives us a complete sketch of the political life of the chief mem-
bers of the Convention who condemned Louis XVI. to death. He follows them
from the days of the revolution up to the time of Louis XVIII. He brings out
in bold relief their ignorance, immorality, cruelty, irreligion, obsequiousness,
and dishonesty. No greater set of rascals ever lived in history, unless we
except the apostate Scotish nobles in the time of Mary, Queen of Scots, or the
corrupt courtiers of the early Roman Emperors. An appendix gives an alpha-
betic list of the three hundred and eighty-seven regicides.
Abel, by G. Fanton. (Paris: Eugene Figuiere et Cie. sfrs. 50.) M. Fan-
ton writes this novel to show that the sins of the fathers are visited upon their
innocent children by a sort of fatality. The story is spoiled by the author's
overzeal in defending the cult of the effete positivism of Auguste Comte.
tforefcjn
Catholic Principles and Social Policy. By Henry Somerville.
Is there a distinctive Catholic social policy? Apart from the ques-
tions of divorce, secular education, and the treatment of the feeble
minded, does our faith perform merely the negative office of warn-
ing us against what is actually immoral or poisonous, or does it
positively supply us with definite principles, distinctively even if not
exclusively Catholic, suggesting the broad lines of a constructive
social policy? The former is the opinion of many Catholics, yet
to the writer it seems erroneous. Social reform implies a pattern
according to which existing society should be altered. The four
factors in every social question are the individual, the family, the
state, and wealth, to omit for the moment the fifth, and for a
Catholic the essential factor of the Church.
Now has the Church any definite teaching on these four sub-
jects? Most certainly she has; principally indeed as regards the
ends to be achieved, but in certain cases also as regards the means
proposed to reach those ends. Catholic principles are in many in-
stances adopted by non-Catholics, yet the latter often spoil their
effect by intermingling irreligious principles with them, or by push-
ing them to extremes. English Catholics are indeed divided in
social policies; sometimes merely as to the means of attaining
commonly accepted ends, sometimes because modern social reform
has to deal with situations created by a deliberate setting aside
of Catholic principles, Catholic remedies, though the simplest and
best, cannot be applied in these cases, because the people whose co-
operation Catholics require would not respond to appeals based on
Catholic assumptions. English Catholics still lack a carefully
thought-out policy, such as Bishop Ketteler gave Germany. A be-
ginning towards this end is being made by the Catholic Social Guild.
The Month, December.
The Discipline of the Church. By Gustave Neyron. From
the time of the Reformation even to this day, the great cry which
rings through the world is for liberty of thought. The discipline
which the Catholic Church exercises over the restless brains of men,
has ever been a stumbling-block to those without her pale. To
dissipate this erroneous view is the chief intention of this article,
proving that order and not chaos is the result of recognition of this
prerogative of the Church. Etudes, November 5.
556 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Jan.,
The Forgiveness of Sins. By L. Labauche. A. d'Ales of the
Catholic Institute of Paris has written a book on the edict whereby
Pope Calixtus declared that he absolved persons guilty of immoral-
ity if they had done penance. The protests of Hippolytus and of
Tertullian, at that time a Montanist heretic, raise the question as to
whether this was a doctrinal innovation, or merely the exercise of
a power which the Popes not only had had from the beginning, but
had used? Did the Church, as Harnack says, then first become
conscious of her power to absolve? Or shall we say with Funk
that, though conscious of this power always, she had not previously
used it in favor of such persons, but had abandoned them to the
extra-sacramental judgments of God? M. d'Ales shows that the
Church always had this power, and that under Calixtus there was
a relaxing of the former disciplinary strictness. His successors
extended this relaxation to apostates and murderers. Revue Pra-
tique d'Apologetique, December i.
The Tablet (December 6) : Anglicans, if they accept a reve-
lation, are quite at a loss to know what that revelation is. A proof
of this is seen in a recent open letter from the Bishop of Zanzibar
to the Bishop of St. Albans under the title, Ecclesia Anglicana; for
What Does She Stand? The Bishop, in fiery words, points out
that at the recent Conference at Kikuyu between Anglican and Non-
conformist missionary societies, steps were taken for the establish-
ment of " a new, united Protestant Church of East Africa and
Uganda." Pending the formation of this Church, the two Bishops
and the heads of four Protestant societies have pledged themselves :
(a) to recognize common membership between federated churches;
(b) to establish a common form of Church organization; (c) to ad-
mit to any pulpit a preacher recognized by his own Church; (d)
to admit to communion a recognized member of any other Church;
(e) to draw up and follow common courses of instruction both for
candidates for baptism and candidates for ordination. The Bishop
has petitioned that this Conference be judged by his Metropolitan's
Provincial court. We look for the decision. The whole matter is
another evidence of the doctrinal chaos in the Anglican Church.
The Month (December) : Selections from the late Father Ger-
ard's diaries illustrating his opinions on materialism, his careful
observations of nature, and his sense of humor, are given by the
Editor. Continuing his discussion as to The Church and
the Money Lender, Rev. Henry Irwin rebuts the contention of the
I9I4-] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 557
laissez-faire school, that the canonist prohibition of usury hindered
the natural evolution of trade and industry by discouraging the
growth of credit. Against Lecky he quotes the non-Catholic econo-
mists Cunningham, Nicholson, and Ashley. The Society of St.
Willibrord, formed to be a medium of closer communion between
the old Catholics and the Church of England, recently met at St.
Mary's, Charing Cross, and in the presence of at least one bishop
with indisputable orders, the Jansenist Bishop Prins of Haarlem,
the Rev. F. W. Puller delivered as a sermon a history of the ancient
(Jansenist) Church of Holland. Father Sydney Smith points out
many historical inaccuracies in the address, and takes up the larger
question of the value of this Society. What principle of unity
will hold together Anglicans, Jansenists, and old Catholics, since
their only common element is the negative element of revolt against
the authority of the Holy See?
The Irish Ecclesiastical Record (December) : Rev. Austin
Cane, M.A., reprints a paper, entitled Roma Liberata, apropos of the
Constantinian centenary. In Excuse of Silence John Ayscough
tells why he does not give to the public his impressions of the
Church from within. Some remains, probably of Irish origin,
found at Angers, France, are described by Dom L. Gourand, O.S.B.
Rev. H. V. Gill, S.J., reproduces statements from great scien-
tists on The Origin of Life, to prove that the existence of living
creatures is one of the strongest arguments for the existence of a
living Being Who is the author of life. A sketch of the eleven
houses formerly belonging to the Premonstratensians in Ireland, is
given by W. H. Grattan Flood.
Le Correspondant (November 10) : Rene Lavollee shows the
financial gulf into which the French government is plunging more
and more deeply. From 1876 to 1899 the increase in state expenses
was nine hundred and twenty-five million francs; from 1900 to
1913 some one thousand four hundred and three millions. In 1913
the figures, officially given at four thousand three hundred and
seventy-eight million francs, should really be raised to five thousand
one hundred and fifty-eight millions, and the prospects are that the
1914 budget will surpass this by three hundred millions. Of the
various projects designed to meet this increase, the income tax
seems the favorite. This solution is energetically attacked by M.
Lavollee. An anonymous article describes the equipment and
history of the United States Navy. The intense Catholicism of
558 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Jan.,
the Catholic youth of Belgium, their patriotism, social spirit, and
energy, guided and directed by Henry Carton de Wiart, is the sub-
ject of an article by Henri Davignon.
(November 25) : Biard D'Aunet describes France's loss of
prestige through her unfortunate financial moves in Egypt from
1884-1904, and warns against a similar policy in Asiatic Turkey.
An anonymous article on the Mexican situation asserts that
the United States is trying to establish a protectorate in that coun-
try. Twenty years from now, the writer says, " all the inhabitants
of the Mexico of Hernando Cortes will be speaking Yankee
Never has 'Christian and Latin' Europe had such a chance to ruin
the Monroe Doctrine forever Thus it is that the weak who
lack will power perish, and the ambitious who lack scruples wax
great. The Latins are abdicating. He is blind indeed who refuses
to see it ! " E. Sainte-Marie Perrin discusses the poetry and
novels of the Countess de Noailles, the leader of a school which
publishes to the world its most personal experiences. Henri
Bremond pays high tribute to the charming writings and the delicate
Catholic soul of Madame Lucy Goyau.
Revue du Clerge Frangais (December i) : P. Pisani describes
the fate of the old colleges of Mount St. Genevieve, the Latin
Quarter during the Revolution. Adam Bertrand, O.S.B., a mem-
ber of the Astronomical Society of France, presents a plan for the
reform of the Calendar, which would make Christmas the opening
day of the year. E. Vacandard, in the Chronicle of Ecclesiastical
History, praises Lucien Romer's Political Origins of the Wars of
Religion, and considers Henri Fouqueray's History of the Jesuits,
vol ii., excellent as an apologetic work, but not entirely impartial.
He also praises Leon Cahen's Religious and Parliamentary Quarrels
of the reign of Louis XV. as an exposition of facts; and finds
Abbe Garzend's study of the Galileo question utterly unsatisfactory
in its attempted distinction between theological and inquisitorial
heresy. A. Boudinhon presents long opinions as to the guilt in-
curred by reading books put on the Index for other reasons than
heresy.
Etudes Franciscaines (November) : The Motives of the In-
carnation, by P. Chrysostome, O.F.M. This article is a discussion
of the proofs given for the Thomistic view of this question by P.
fidouard Hugon, O.P., in the Revue Thomiste (May-June, 1913).
The latter argued that revelation knew no other motive for the
I9I4-] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 559
Incarnation than the redemption of mankind; P. Chrysostome
claims that St. Francis de Sales, St. Hilary, and the Venerable
Bede say that Scripture does know other motives. P. Hugon quotes
St. Irenaeus, St. Athanasius, St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. Augustine ;
his opponent quotes other passages from the same Fathers, in
which they formally recognize other motives. An anonymous
writer of the sixteenth century made some remarkable notes on
pictures and works of art in Italy. H. Matrod enlarges on what
this writer has to say of the Franciscan churches in Northern Italy,
many of which, however, the critic did not visit, and only one of
which was entirely intact. To measure the direct influence of the
Friars Minor on art in that century, one ought, M. Matrod con-
cludes, to multiply what remains by ten ; their indirect influence is
incalculable. Father Raymond, O.M.C., prints all the documents
in a controversy with M. T. Richard, O.P., on Dun Scotus and
Modernism.
Etudes (December 5) : Marc Dubruel gives a full account of
the excommunication of Louis XIV. by Pope Innocent XL in 1687,
based on the private and hitherto unpublished correspondence be-
tween the nuncio Ranuzzi and the Pope's private secretary, Lorenzo
Casoni. H. Caye reviews the thirty-sixth meeting of the Houses
of Christian Education, discussing particularly the spirit and ac-
tivities of the Catholic Association of French youths, and its coun-
terparts in Canada and Belgium. Since France bids fair to be
one of the great iron producing countries of the world, Henri du
Passage thinks it fitting to describe the deposits in Lorraine and
Normandy. Unfortunately France is lacking in native miners
and coal.
Revue Pratique d'Apologetique (November 15) : The Right
Use of Liberty, the address delivered by Monsignor Baudrillart at
the opening Mass of the Catholic Institute of Paris. Now that
the three-year military law has been voted, means must be taken to
preserve the soldier seminarists from the moral dangers of army life.
L'Ami du Pretre offers suggestions on this point ; the Holy Father
has urged the holding of provincial reunions of the bishops for the
same purpose.
(December i) : Dom A. Grea points out the great value of
poverty for the sanctification of clerics. Up to the thirteenth cen-
tury church property was held in common; the bishop was strictly
560 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Jan.,
considered as an administrator, and he used this property for the
social welfare. But when the system of benefices grew up, un-
worthy men entered the clerical state to obtain them or seized
them as laymen. The apostolic life in common largely disappeared
outside of the religious Orders. The riches of the churches became
an object of complaining and of hatred among the people, and one
of the causes of the sixteenth century revolt. We are now facing
and in part experiencing a spoliation of church property. It is
to be hoped that this will cause priests to have increased trust in
the providence of the bishops and the people to reassume more
generously their duty of supporting their pastors. P. Richard
discusses the latest history of France by Lavisse, published in eight-
een volumes, from 1900-1910, with eminent collaborators. The
last six volumes he considers utterly unsuitable in tone for any
patriotic or Christian student; the others may be made helpful if
the teacher guide the student in his use of them. M. d'Herbigny
describes a new philosophico-religious Russian cult, founded by
M. N.-F. Fedorov. This cult aims at finding a scientific and natural
means, whereby all may rise after death as Christ did. One of
the leaders, M. N. Peterson, has tried to prove his theories by St.
Paul. When he attempted to find them in the works of Vladimir
Soloviev, he fell foul of a living defender of this Newman of the
North, Prince Eugene Troubetzkoi, who has had no difficulty in
proving the entirely Catholic and Papal views of his friend.
Max Turmann contributes a review of Socialist activity abroad.
Revue des Deux Mondes (December i): Will the Village
Churches of France be Allowed to Disappear? This is the question
which M. Maurice Barres puts to the French people in a sincere
and eloquent appeal. His article gives a graphic account of the
vandalism of the local " commune " in all parts of France towards
the small churches. They have withstood the centuries, the tem-
pests, the Jacquerie, the English Wars, and the revolutions, and are
now to be torn down by the French government! The attitude
of the latter towards the Church is well shown in M. Barres'
interview with M. Briand. Mes Espagnes, by M. Louis Bertrand,
is an interesting and sympathetic presentment of modern Spain,
as yet so little known to the world at large. A curious point made
by the author is the strong influence which Spain has always exer-
cised on the French.
TRecent Events,
The Ministry of which M. Barthou was the
France. head has fallen, after a tenure of power
which was longer than was at first expected.
It developed strength as time passed, and its defeat was somewhat of
a surprise. The ostensible cause was not entirely the real cause.
What led to the resignation of the Ministry was the rejection by the
Chamber of the proposal to exempt from taxation the new Rente
which had been voted. The support given by the government to
the Electoral Reform Bill, which would have allowed minorities a
voice in the Parliament, was, it is thought, the real reason. This
bill was obnoxious to M. Clemenceau, and to a large number of the
Radicals, the seats of many of that party being threatened in the
event of its having gone into effect. To a certain extent the fate
of the government was affected by the rumors that negotiations
were being carried on with the Holy See, with a view to the resump-
tion of diplomatic relations. The Radicals are the remorseless
enemies of any step looking towards a reconciliation. Even the
increase in the army was not warmly supported by them, as many
considered that it might become an instrument of reaction. Pro-
portional representation would have strengthened the Right, and
this M. Clemenceau and the Radicals looked upon as dangerous
to the Republic. In the administration of the Church and school
laws, the late Ministry stood for the policy of I'apaiscment, ad-
vocated by M. Briand : its fall must therefore be looked upon as a
victory of the more anti-religious elements of the Chamber.
The new Ministry is made up of men of whom very little is
known, although several of its members have held office in some one
or other of the many previous Cabinets. There is, however, one
exception. M. Caillaux, the Minister of Finance, is the Prime
Minister who, in the negotiations with Germany which followed
upon the action of that Power in sending a warship to Agadir, was
on the point of betraying the interests of France. He was in con-
sequence driven from office almost with obloquy. That he should
so soon be restored to power, shows either how short-lived is the
memory of French politicians, or the extreme need in which France
finds herself of men of ability. He is reputed to be one of the best
VOL. XCVI1I. 36
562 RECENT EVENTS [Jan.,
financiers which the country possesses, and it is of such men that
there is the chief need, as the financial position is very serious.
The budget for the year 1914, for which provision has to be made,
shows a deficit of some one hundred and sixty millions. In addition
to this the increase of the term of service in the army involves
a non-recurring expenditure of one hundred and eighty millions.
To meet this deficit and this additional expense, the government
made elaborate proposals; but as they have been defeated in the
Chamber, and withdrawn by the new Ministry, it is not necessary
to specify them in detail. The new government has a difficult task
before it.
The Prussian officer has, by the arrogance
Germany. which is his characteristic, been the cause of
serious trouble not only in the Reichsland,
but also in the Reichstag. At a place called Zabern not far from
Strassburg, a lieutenant in an infantry regiment is reported to
have said to a recruit that if he stabbed a Wacke, he would not be
punished; on the contrary, he would give him a reward. The
term Wacke applied to a native of Alsace, was considered in the
highest degree insulting, and led to riots and demonstrations last-
ing several weeks. The lieutenant in question was not adequately
punished by the military authorities, and had to go about with a
guard of soldiers for protection from the people. The military
authorities at length got so exasperated that they took the law into
their own hands, and without having recourse to the civil authorities
arrested discriminately a large number of civilians, including even
officials of the courts. The conflict which arose was between
German officials. Indirectly, however, it was an indication of the
dislike which is still felt by the people of Alsace for their German
overlords. The Alsatians keep the laws, indeed, and have no in-
tention to revolt, but their feelings and aspirations are still French.
Hence it is that they were so easily excited.
These occurrences in Alsace led to a stormy debate in the
Reichstag, where the conduct of the military was defended by the
Chancellor of the Empire. 'A vote of censure was passed on the
Chancellor for his treatment of the affair by a majority of two
hundred and ninety-three votes against fifty-four. This majority
was made up of the Socialists, the National Liberals, and the
Catholic Centre. The only supporters of the government were the
Conservative and Extreme Conservative groups, with one National
IQI4-] RECENT EVENTS 563
Liberal. This defeat of the Chancellor has led to a grave consti-
tutional crisis, of which the results cannot be foreseen. It has re-
vived the movement for making the members of the Ministry re-
sponsible to the Reichstag, and giving thereby to Germany real
parliamentary government. To this the Emperor and the Con-
servatives are vehemently opposed, but the odium which has been
excited by the high-handed proceedings of the military may give an
impetus to it such as has never been received before. It is a new
feature in German life, that so complete and universal a condemna-
tion should have been passed on the military element.
Last August the trial took place of the military officials who
had communicated secrets entrusted to them to the firm of Krupp.
In November the agent of that firm in Berlin and one of its directors
were convicted, the one of bribery and the other of aiding and abet-
ting the agent in committing the offence. The court was satisfied
that no German military secrets had been betrayed abroad, but it af-
firmed that, while the proceedings left no stain upon the German
officials as a whole, the bribery had done grave injury to the military
administration. It shows that their standard of public duty and
personal honor is far from high. The Socialists, however, are
taking the conviction as a proof that wholesale corruption pervades
the War Office. The injustice of this accusation is made evident
by the fact that it was the War Office itself that brought the
offenders to trial, and resisted every attempt to hush the matter up.
The Dual Monarchy is placed in the same
Austria-Hungary. difficulty as the French Republic, and, to a
certain extent, for the same reason. In
both countries the army has been increased; but Austria-Hungary
has also to pay the bill for the mobilization of its forces during the
Balkan crisis. The cost of the army increase is far less than that
of France, being only about thirty millions. The mobilization,
however, cost nearly seventy-five millions of dollars. For the first
six months of 1914 the expenditure on the army and navy exceeds
the revenue ear-marked for that purpose by the vast sum of one
hundred and forty-three millions. The government is at its wit's
end to find the ways and means.
The Emperor Francis Joseph has just been celebrating the
sixty-fifth anniversary of his accession. In spite of the heavy work
of the past year, his Majesty still continues to enjoy excellent
564 RECENT EVENTS [Jan,
health. The consciousness that by his persistent forbearance he
saved his country from a war that might have been disastrous,
make it a matter almost of world-wide congratulation that his life
has been prolonged. His heir, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand,
has been paying a visit to King George of England. The relations
between the two Courts were at one time very cordial. Many were
surprised when they learned from Queen Victoria's diaries and
letters how close their sympathy was. The policy adopted by Count
Aehrenthal brought about a certain degree of coolness. It is
thought that the visit may tend to a restoration of the former
relations.
Students of the working of parliamentary institutions find in
the various forms in which they exist in Austria-Hungary, and the
ever varying methods of their working ever fresh developments.
For months past the Opposition in the Hungarian Chamber has
entirely abstained from participation in the proceedings of the
House. They have recently, however, decided to return, but will
not take any part in divisions, although they will set forth their
point of view when circumstances demand it. The way they have
chosen is startling indeed: law tomes and packs of playing cards
have hurtled through the air; the President's bell has been unable
to cope with the din of interjections and invectives; the Parlia-
mentary guard has had to intervene between the irate legislators.
The Hungarian government, which is so obnoxious to a part of
its own people, sometime ago altogether deprived the people of
Croatia of their Constitution, and placed them under the absolute
rule of a commissioner. It has now vouchsafed to abolish the
dictatorship, and give back to Croatia its Constitution. It was the
question of the official language to be used on the railways that
led to these arbitrary proceedings of the government. The matter
has been settled by a compromise. A Diet is to be elected almost
immediately.
One of the most remarkable features of the political arrange-
ments of the Dual Monarchy is their instability. Constitutions
seem to come and go at the good will of the officials. Last July
Bohemian autonomy was suspended by an imperial decree, and
lately there was a prospect of a similar fate befalling Galicia. The
tactics of obstruction adopted by the opposition have been the
reasons alleged for such drastic proceedings on the part of the
government. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Count Berchtold,
recently gave an exposition of the relations now held by Austria-
I9I4-] RECENT EVENTS 565
Hungary to its neighbors. He openly acknowledged that during
the recent crisis sentiments hostile to the Monarchy existed, not
only among the Balkan States, but also among the great Powers.
The development of the situation, however, had removed many
causes of misunderstanding, and had not only decreased the causes
of friction, but had led to an agreement which will have a favorable
influence in the future. The Triple Alliance is declared to re-
main in full force and vigor, the great safeguard of the peace of
Europe. With Italy the cooperation is particularly close, owing to
their common interests in Albania. With the Balkan States a
new era of closer economic friendly relations is, it is hoped, about
to be opened. The territorial expansion of the Monarchy in the
Balkans, the Count declares, was terminated by the annexation of
Bosnia-Herzegovina. The withdrawal of the Trieste Decrees,
which followed shortly after Count Berchtold's statement, has con-
vinced the Italian people that the good will towards Italy which
Austria-Hungary professes is really felt.
One of the most gratifying features of the
Italy. general election which recently took place,
was the defeat in the first and fourth
divisions of Rome of the candidates who belonged to what is
called the Bloc. This Bloc had made the Roman municipality prac-
tically a Freemason corporation. In politics it was to a large extent
Republican, and was almost as much antimonarchical as anticlerical.
Two-thirds were aliens by birth that is to say, Neapolitans, Sicil-
ians, Piedmontese, and other provincials. Signer Nathan, the
Syndic, was half an Englishman. Above all the Bloc was anti-
clerical. With considerable reluctance the municipality accepted the
verdict of condemnation passed upon it, and gave in its resignation.
A Royal Commissioner has been appointed until another election can
be held.
The Deputies of the new Chamber are classified in the follow-
ing way under the genus Liberal, as this is claimed by all: Con-
stitutional Ministerialists, 291 ; Constitutional Opposition, 22; Con-
stitutional Independents, 5; Catholics, 24; Radicals, 70; Republi-
cans, 16; Socialist Reformists, 23 ; Socialists Proper, 5 1 ; Syndical-
ist Socialists, 3 ; Independent Socialists, 3 ; making a total of 508.
The majority of Signer Giolitti is 291 to 217, and it is considered
to ensure his safety, for on no conceivable question could the
217 which make up the opposition be brought into agreement.
566 RECENT EVENTS [Jan.,
No little stir has been caused by the disclosure made after the
elections, that no fewer than two hundred and forty-eight of the
successful candidates had received the support of Catholics because
they had accepted the six- fold programme which Count Gentiloni,
the head of the Catholic Electoral Union, had made the con-
dition of that support. The pledge which he required of a can-
didate was that he would support no legislation directed against the
Catholic religion or Church, that he would be in favor of religious
education, and that he would not help to bring in a bill for divorce.
As on three hundred and thirty elections the non expedit was sus-
pended, this gave to Catholics a good opportunity to exert their
strength. Rather indiscreetly Count Gentiloni published the names
of the new members who on these conditions had acccepted Catholic
support. This has led to a number of denials, and the Socialists
are crying out at the existence of a vast clerical plot which is a
menace to their liberties. A "'concentration to the Left " has
become the political watchword of which they stood so much in need.
The war which was looked upon as in the
The Balkans. highest degree probable between Turkey,
with Bulgaria as an ally, on one side, and
Greece on the other, has been averted. This was due to the diplo-
matic intervention of Rumania, which is at the present time the most
powerful of the Balkan States. Not that she deserves this position,
for she did nothing against the common enemy, thereby main-
taining her own strength unimpaired, and taking advantage of the
weakness of Bulgaria to deprive her of a considerable strip of terri-
tory. How long the peace will last is doubtful; the same paper
which contained the news of the ratification of the treaty, published
a telegram from the Dardanelles announcing the arrival there of a
body of Turkish troops, which were to be quartered there for the
winter. This was looked upon as confirmatory of the prevailing
belief that the war would be renewed in the spring. A treaty with
Servia adds to the long list of these instruments. Montenegro
and Albania are now the only Balkan States that have not in this
way resumed regular relations with Turkey.
Very little progress has been made in the settlement of the
other outstanding questions. How the ^Egean Islands are to be
divided is now being discussed. Turkey, Greece, and Italy are
claimants, the latter, so far as is known, not avowedly, but by an
1914.] RECENT EVENTS 567
actual possession which she shows every sign of making permanent.
The question is left by the Treaty of London to the Powers for
settlement. The exact delimitation of the southern boundary of
Albania has been put off to the spring. A Prussian officer has been
found willing to make the attempt to rule over the Albanians as their
king. He has been made in Germany, being a member of the
House of Wied, one of the mediatized families. As he is a
Protestant, it is very doubtful whether he will find a single co-
religionist among his subjects, three-fifths of whom are Moslems,
and the rest either Catholics or Orthodox. The Constitution has
yet to be made. It will be interesting to see how Prince Henry
of Wied will execute authority over tribes that from times im-
memorial have never really submitted to any control.
The rumors that have been in circulation that King Ferdinand
was going to abdicate the throne of Bulgaria, have not been verified,
although there is reason to think they were not entirely without
foundation. As more facts come to light, the conduct of Bulgaria
in bringing on the second Balkan war is seen to be more defensible
than was thought at first, although, even yet, it cannot be fully
justified. Great blame attaches to General Savoff, the Bulgarian
Commander-in-Chief in the first war against the Turks. He seems
to have disregarded the commands of his own government, and to
have attacked the Greeks in defiance of its orders. The chief cause
of the disastrous termination of the second war must be laid at the
door of the Russian Tsar. He was displeased with King Ferdinand
for having refused, in a somewhat curt way, his proffered mediation.
In consequence, he gave to Rumania the permission, which he had
hitherto withheld, to invade Bulgaria an event which decided the
conflict.
The International Commission which has been investigating
the charges and counter-charges of cruelty, has presented a sum-
mary report. It finds that the soldiers of every state engaged
in the wars, were guilty of gross crimes against the civilized usages
of warfare. The Bulgarians were the most guilty, although they
had the magnanimity to give every facility for the investigation, a
thing which Servia refused to do. Certain private letters of Greek
soldiers which fell into the hands of the Bulgarians, have been pub-
lished, which show that if the Greeks were not the worst, the worst
must indeed be beyond description. The authenticity of these
letters has been both denied and re-affirmed.
568 RECENT EVENTS [Jan.,
China remains in name a Republic, but for
China. the time being is being ruled by a dictator.
Yuan Shih-kai secured his election as Presi-
dent before the Constitution had been made, although that portion
which defined the powers of the President was settled, at least on
paper, before his election. No sooner, however, had he obtained
power than he silenced the opposition in a more effective manner
than Count Tisza has done in Hungary, although he has not gone
quite so far as General Huerta in Mexico. Yuan Shih-kai was
elected President on the second of November; on the fourth he
issued mandates, in which he denounced the democratic opposition
party, which goes by the name of the Kuo Ming Tang, ordered its
dissolution, and deprived its members of their seats in Parliament.
Nearly four hundred members were affected by these decrees, and
as a result the whole of the Parliamentary opposition to the wishes
of the so-called President was swept away, and he was left to mould
the Constitution, which has still to be framed, according to his own
good pleasure. His action was of course totally unconstitutional.
The pretext alleged was that the members of the Kuo Ming Tang
had been guilty of complicity in the recent rebellion. But there
was not even the pretense of a trial, nor was any opportunity
offered for defence. The real reason was that the organization
stood for making Parliament the depositary of power, whereas
Yuan Shih-kai wished the President to be supreme. Foreign opin-
ion justifies his action as necessary in the chaos that now exists in
China as the only means of maintaining order, in the same way as
General Huerta is recognized by every country except our own on
the same plea.
Not many days had passed, however, when the President took
further and still more drastic action. His former decree had left
so few members of Parliament that a quorum could not be formed.
Yuan Shih-kai accordingly, by a further decree, suspended Parlia-
ment altogether. The government is to form an administrative
conference, consisting of seventy-one members, to act until, at some
undetermined date, Parliament is reorganized, or able to resume
its settings. What is to be the business of this nominated con-
ference has not yet been disclosed, although the discussion of the
budget, the reorganization of the National Assembly, and the draft-
ing of a constitution are mentioned as within the scope of its func-
tions. All, however, is to be according to the good pleasure of
Yuan Shih-kai. It is thought probable that Manchus will be made
1914.] RECENT EVENTS 569
members of this new authority, and it is looked upon as certain
that there will be included no Young Chinese. The latter are held
to have thoroughly demonstrated their complete incapacity.
It is evident from the actions of the President, that he looks
upon himself as the teacher and guide of the nation, not as its
mouthpiece and voice. Students of the address delivered by him
at his inauguration might have foretold what was coming. In it he
declares that it is his conviction that the fundamental principle
of governance consisits in a clearly defined system of administra-
tion, and in the strengthening of the cardinal principles of morality.
It is when these have been attained, that the time will have come
to take in hand the promoting of the progress of the masses.
It is for this reason that he has aimed at producing gradually such
reforms as would make for public enlightenment. When, however,
the President claims credit for having preferred conservative to
extreme measures, one may well wonder what in his eyes would be
an extreme measure.
The Republican form of government, he declares, is that which
China possessed four thousand years ago. This form, however,
presupposes a respect for morality, and a law-abiding habit on the
part of the people; and this is just what the Chinese people lack.
He has himself met with so much opposition that sleep and appetite
have deserted him. The President then proceeded to give a long
homily on morality, declaring that it consisted in the four char-
acters : loyalty, trust, steadfastness, and sobermindedness. George
Washington is cited as the example of trustworthiness, inasmuch as,
when a lad, owing to his father's discipline, he never told a lie.
The President concluded his address by saying : " I solemnly pledge
myself to make those four words my own ideal, and to impress
them on my countrymen. I declare solemnly that so long as I
remain President so long will I perform my duty."
The declaration that he recognized as binding all the treaties
made by former Chinese governments with foreign countries, and
the privileges bestowed on their citizens, as well as all contracts
entered into with foreign firms, together with his acknowledgment
of the dependence of China upon foreign capital for its development,
has secured the good will and friendship of those countries. The
utmost aim of modern diplomacy in its present stage of development
is the maintenance of the law and order which are necessary for
trade and commerce. It has been rumored that it is the purpose of
the President to declare Confucianism to be the established religion
570 RECENT EVENTS [Jan.,
of the Republic. If these rumors should prove to be true, an
obstacle would be placed to that spread of Christianity of which so
much hope has recently been felt.
In view of the chaotic state of internal affairs, the President
has thought it prudent to abandon the purpose of maintaining over
Mongolia the dominion hitherto exercised. An agreement has been
made with Russia which, while it leaves to China a suzerainty
over Mongolia, fully recognizes its autonomy, and re-
nounces any right on the part of the Chinese to plant colonies in
that province or send soldiers there. Its exact boundaries are to
be settled by a conference called for that purpose. With reference
to Tibet, and the autonomy which it demands, negotiations are
being carried on with the British government. It seems probable
that China will be deprived of all real power over territories which
comprise more than half of the present empire. If the result of
this were to be the strengthening of the power of the central govern-
ment over the provinces that remain, the loss of Mongolia and
Tibet would be to the advantage of the Republic. But of this as yet
there is no sign. Since the establishment of the Republic, the
provinces have been asserting greater independence than before,
and have been sending to Peking smaller contributions to the
expenses of government. It is for this reason that China is, as
the President fully recognizes, dependent upon the foreigner for
the means of carrying on his government. All its money is ex-
hausted, and it is now crying out for more.
How strange are the relations which exist between China and
foreign powers is illustrated by an event which occurred recently
at Tientsin. The troops of seven nationalities took part in military
manoeuvres on Chinese soil. A force made up of Americans,
French, Germans, Japanese, Russians, and British, under the com-
mand of a British general, was opposed to a skeleton invading army
composed of American, Austrian, French, German, British, Japan-
ese, and Russia detachments under a French commander, while a
Japanese general was the director and umpire-in-chief.
The government in Japan has succeeded in
Japan. controlling a people which seems rather
prone to hasty action. A short time ago it
looked as if the popular excitement would have forced it to intervene
in China in consequence of certain outrages committed upon Japan-
1914-] RECENT EVENTS 571
ese in the course of the suppression of the revolution. The conces-
sions prudently made by China averted this danger. The present
Ministry is fulfilling its task of reducing expenditure, and of prac-
tising that economy which is the chief necessity of Japan at the
present time.
The death of Prince Katsura has deprived the Empire of one of
the principal makers of recent history. He was at once an able
soldier, a keen-sighted statesman, and a resourceful financier. The
papers are telling us that his brain was the largest of which the
weight is known, with the exception of that of the philosopher Kant,
and his was of the same weight. The last efforts of the Prince,
however, resulted in failure. He was an aristocrat by temperament,
and his attempt to resist the movement for a more complete con-
trol of the government by the people, led to his downfall last
February.
By the death of Prince Keiki Tokugawa, Japan has lost the
last of the Shoguns, that is to say, of the military officials who had
for some centuries supplanted the Mikado, and had become the
practical rulers of the country. Prince Keiki Tokugawa submitted
to the Mikado's troops in 1868, and has since that time been living
in retirement, although not in disgrace, for the title of Prince was
conferred upon him as a token of the Imperial favor.
The failure of Japan to do justice to the Christians of Korea,
who were accused of conspiracy against the life of Count Terauchi,
the Governor-General, has contributed greatly to the loss of esteem
for the Japanese now widely felt in this country. The story is too
long to tell here, but clearly discloses the inconsistency and partiality
of the judges, and their subservience to the government of Korea.
With Our Readers.
THE end of the year is an appropriate time to review the work of The
Paulist Press during the past twelve months. We feel that it is a
subject of special interest to our readers. The Paulist Press is the
publishing house of the Paulist Fathers. Its work covers not only
the publication of THE CATHOLIC WORLD and of the juvenile monthly,
The Leader, but also that of books and pamphlets which instruct the
faithful, and aid in the defence and promotion of Catholic truth.
''PHE PAULIST PRESS is essentially a missionary enterprise, and it
1 aims to sell its tracts, books, etc., at a price that will cover the cost
of their publication. Also it endeavors to help poor missions by send-
ing reading matter free ; to distribute in needy localities, or in places
where the Church is suffering special attack, or where misunderstand-
ing is particularly prevalent, such pamphlets and books as will meet
the attack or remove the ignorance, and to do this without cost to
pastor or to people. The Press is able to do this by donations which
it receives from generous souls interested in this urgent and fruitful
work, and of course its success in this line is proportionate to the
amounts so received.
'"THROUGH such donations it has been able also to send THE CATHO-
-1- Lie WORLD to non-Catholic universities, to colleges, to societies
of various kinds where there is much misunderstanding of Catho-
lic teaching and practice, and where bigotry is often very pro-
nounced. Experience has shown that THE CATHOLIC WORLD has in
this way done splendid work in directing Catholics; in giving others,
who perhaps would never otherwise have the opportunity, a right un-
derstanding of Catholic teaching, and in many instances has been the
direct means of winning souls to the true Faith.
THE work of The Paulist Press is but a small part of that great
apostolate of the press in which so many earnest souls are en-
gaged throughout the country. The increased interest in the work of
that apostolate shows a gratifying growth among our Catholic people,
and is very encouraging. For such interest means a more extended and
a keener appreciation of Catholic truth, and a realization of how Catho-
lic teaching affects every walk of life, every field of human endeavor.
I9I4-] WITH OUR READERS 573
OUCH a growth is consoling to everyone who has at heart the present
O and future welfare of our Holy Church. Where the Catholic
press is intelligently conducted and well-supported; where the interest
of the faithful is real and vital, there is Catholic life strong and virile
and stable. That interest and support are not by any means as great
and generous as they should be: but there is decided growth, and
from that we may gain new hope and inspiration.
AS one evidence of such growth we may point to the book racks
which are now quite common in our churches. These racks have
proved a great stimulus and blessing to our people. They make it easy
and convenient to obtain Catholic reading matter. As he enters or
leaves the church, the Catholic sees a number of pamphlets on inter-
esting subjects. He is at liberty to look them over at his leisure,
and he may purchase any of them at a very low price. And the read-
ing of these small pamphlets will lead him to know and to read also
the more valuable and weightier books on Catholic teaching and prac-
tice. These book racks are no longer an experiment. The work was
inaugurated by The Paulist Press. The metal rack which that Press
has produced, after some years of experiment, has been introduced
into more than one thousand churches during the past year. To fill
these racks, to keep them regularly supplied with timely reading matter,
requires a constant supply of new booklets, tracts, etc. Not only from
The Paulist Press, but from all the Catholic publishing houses in the
country such publications are being constantly issued.
DURING the past year The Paulist Press has sold ninety-seven
thousand copies of its pamphlets ; of leaflets, four hundred and six
thousand. Of the books published, it is worthy of note that the
Question Box keeps up its exceptional record. The sales of the edition
in English during the past year were over fifty thousand copies, and
of the Spanish edition twenty-six thousand four hundred copies. The
sales of the Question Box have now reached a total of seven hundred
thousand copies. This publication will soon equal Plain Facts, of
which over eight hundred and seventy-five thousand copies have been
sold. Of the other books published by The Paulist Press, the sales have
amounted to three thousand one hundred. This does not include the
forty-eight thousand copies of the popular Mass Book, nor the small
publications on temperance subjects, which have reached a sale of
fifty-one thousand copies. To sum up, The Paulist Press has sold and
distributed during the past twelve months over one million one hundred
thousand copies of its publications.
574 WITH OUR READERS [Jan.,
OF new publications The Paulist Press has just issued Parish Ser-
mons by Father Walter Elliott, and The Saviour's Life, by a
Paulist Father, both of which give promise of a large circulation.
IT is a mark of strength to apologize with dignity. Fair-minded per-
sons will appreciate the strength, honesty, and sense of justice
shown by the Editor of The Survey in his recent sincere apology for
allowing a story offensive to Catholics to appear in his magazine. The
Century Company has not shown equal courtesy after a similar offence.
The tone of their apology does not ring true. Catholics do not relish
flippancy in regard to the Sacrament of Matrimony, the confessional,
and the priesthood.
A MONTH or so ago THE CATHOLIC WORLD spoke of the reaction
among many, who had first encouraged it, against the craze
of eugenics and sex instruction in schools. As a further evidence
that intelligent minds are trying to put some sober sense into the dis-
cussion of the matter, we quote the following from the Evening Post
of New York City:
A decided reaction from the first fine frenzy of the militant eugenists is
revealed in the latest literature on the subject
Common sense is always bound to make itself heard Common sense
has no authority in the field of pure science, where discoveries frequently
consist in establishing the truth of things that the ordinary sense of men
has declared impossible. But once the principles of science are brought into
touch with life, the corrective and inhibiting influence of common sense must
enter.
Common sense, as applied to this question of eugenics, denotes something
far different from a Gradgrind philosophy of hard facts and strictly prudential
considerations. Common sense connotes sentiment, poesy, and the higher human
instincts when it upholds the sanctity of life, of love, and of human purpose
against the stock-farm interpreters of eugenism. Common sense is much more
philosophical than the mass of pseudo-scientific eugenists, when it refuses to
fix its attention upon an isolated problem to the overlooking of counter-prob-
lems. Common sense refuses to grow excited over the necessity of preventing
the " degeneration " of the race because it recognizes that no such process is
under way; because it recognizes that the health of the race is improving, that
the span of human life is increasing, and that a greater proportion of the
race is tasting a greater share of happiness than ever before. Common sense is
aware, for instance, that discoveries are constantly and continually being made
in the field of medicine, which at one stroke do more for the health and well-
being of the race than the eugenists could hope to attain through ages of
painful effort.
* * * *
STILL another evidence of the terrible evil wrought by such hap-
hazard and thoughtless (to say the least) methods, as direct the
extreme champions of eugenics, is furnished in the condemnation by the
I9I4-] WITH OUR READERS 575
State Board of Charities of New York of the much-discussed George
Junior Republic. The republic was a sort of " co-ed " institution of
correction. Its boys and girls were to govern themselves. They were
to try, sentence, and imprison, for whatever period they wished, all
offenders among their members. According to its founder, one might
see at this institution " boys and girls as they really are." Now after
a thorough investigation the State Board not only criticizes the moral
conduct of the founder, William R. George, but also finds that his
example had the effect of leading to immoral acts on the part of a
number of the older boys and girls.
report of the Board recommends the removal of the girls from
-I- the colony, and condemns practically every feature that has charac-
terized the " republic " idea. But the most germane contribution
from the report to the matter we are discussing, is its finding that
the republic gave too great emphasis to the exposition and discussion
of crime, and that this in turn generated crime. Now, according to
some modern educators, knowledge of evil and of the wretched conse-
quences of sin, will inevitably check the growth of evil and of sin.
" Put before them the horrible results, show them the far-reaching
evil effects, and they will halt. Paint the picture in all its horror,
and anyone who sees will never again offend."
'"PHE root fallacy of all this is that it forgets that if a man is ever
1 to be virtuous, he must love virtue for itself. Vice has enough
attraction in it to win him, and enough power to persuade him that he
can have the pleasure without the penalty. It is strong enough some-
times to win him, even though he knows he must pay the penalty.
And the exposition of its power over our fellows does not help us to
be any stronger. Rather does it furnish a cloak and an excuse for
our own weakness. The members of the Junior Republic knew enough
of vice too much says that unprejudiced Board and thus they were
made more vicious. Many of the men and women who have the charge
of public instruction might well take the lesson to heart.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
BENZIGER BROTHERS, New York :
The Unworthy Pact. By D. Gerard. $1.37 postpaid. Lives of the Saints.
Compiled from the " Lives of the Saints," by Rev. A. Butler. 50 cents.
England and the Sacred Heart. By Rev. G. E. Price. 90 cents net.
P. J. KENEDY & SONS, New York :
The Morning Watch. Translated by Father Mullan, S.J. $1.70 postpaid. Life
and Characteristics of Rt. Rev. Alfred A. Curtis, D.D. By the Sisters of the
Visitation. $2.70 postpaid. The Tower of St. Nicholas. By M. A. Gray.
75 cents. The Practice of Mental Prayer. By Father R. de Mauniigny, SJ.
$1.35 postpaid.
LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., New York :
Sermons and Homilies. By Edmund English. $1.35 net. The Early Church
in the Light of the Monuments. By A. S. Barnes, M.A. $1.50 net.
FR. PUSTET & Co., New York:
Psalterium Vespertinum. Edited by J. M. Petler, S.T.B. 15 cents net.
THE MACMILLAN Co., New York:
History of the Popes. By Leopold von Ranke. Three Volumes. 35 cents each.
D. APPLETON & Co., New York :
The Vatican, the Center of Government of the Catholic World. By Rt. Rev.
Edmond Canon Hughes de Ragnau. $4.00 net, by mail, $4.20.
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York :
The Sonnets of William Shakespeare. By Countess de Chambrun. $1.75 net.
John Murray's Landfall. By H. N. Dodge. $1.25 net. Folk-Ballads of
Southern Europe. Translated into English verse by Sophie Jewett. $1.50 net.
THE DEVIN-ADAIR Co., New York :
A Primer of Social Science. By Rt. Rev. Monsignor H. Parkinson, D.D. $1.00.
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, New York :
The Life of Francis Thompson. By Everard Meynell. $4.50 net.
DODD, MEAD & Co., New York :
Italian Yesterdays. By Hugh Fraser. Two Volumes. $6.00 net.
SCHWARTZ, KIRWIN & FAUSS, New York :
Hints on Latin Style. By J. A. Kleist, SJ. Aids to Latin Prose Composition.
By J. A. Kleist, S.J.
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Chippewa Music II. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin. By F. Densmore.
J. B. LIPPINCOTT Co., Philadelphia :
The Book of the Epic. By H. A. Guerber. $2.00 net. A New Variorum Edi-
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$4.00 net.
ANGEL GUARDIAN PRESS, Boston, Mass. :
The Cry of the Street. By Mabel A. Farnum. Lyrics of Faith and Hope.
By Henry Coyle.
B. HERDER, St. Louis :
Goethe: His Life and Work. By A. Baumgartner, SJ. Volume II. In German.
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REV. JAMES DONAHOE, St. Paul, Minn. :
The Scope of Charity for Catholic Charity Workers. By Rev. James Donahoe.
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Claudella. By M. W. Handly.
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Prodigals and Sons. By John Ayscough. 6s.
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The Church and Labour. The Church and Working Men, The Church and
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THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XCVIII. FEBRUARY, 1914. No. 587.
THE UNCONSIDERED REMAINDER.
BY EDMUND T. SHANAHAN, S.T.D.
T is curious what creatures of one idea we all are,
especially when we begin to frame theories. Some
particular aspect of a problem we are engaged in
considering, monopolizes our attention; some lum-
inous spot in the object of our search darkens the
rest of our field of vision. A mysterious form of hypnotism steals
over us ; consciousness becomes for the time being partially eclipsed ;
we have failed to control our ideas, and they retaliate by con-
trolling us.
If you have ever pored over the history of philosophy, you
must have turned from its pages with a feeling of surprise, amount-
ing almost to bewilderment, at the amount of incomplete thinking
there recorded. Nearly everybody appears to be basking in the
light of his own predilections. It veritably seems as if the system-
builders were incapable of seeing the truth in all its relations, and
foredoomed to see it in but one; and that not always the broadest,
nor the most inclusive, though constantly mistaken for such by its
devotees. Were another Ruth to follow in the wake of these
gleaners, she would find enough unused material for a second reap-
ing, and be well rewarded for her search. A history of human
oversights would make a fine companion volume to the history
of philosophy.
It is not necessary, however, to go so far afield in quest of
Copyright. 1914. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
TOL. XCVIII. 37
578 THE UNCONSIDERED REMAINDER [Feb.,
instances. These may be discovered closer to hand in the intimacy
of your own mental life in the profiles of truth so often mis-
taken for its full-faced picture; in the opinions once held with
pride, and later abandoned in humiliation, when the limited sweep
of your vision was suddenly pointed out in blinding clearness by
a mind more penetrating than your own. It is hard for any of us
to realize how easily his attention may be monopolized. Victims
of ideas seem to be less conscious of their enslavement than vic-
tims of passion and habit.
Psychologists say it is all a matter of temperament, this
tendency of the mind to confine attention unduly to one side of
a problem. The reasons underlying it, in other words, are tempera-
mental rather than logical matters pertaining more to the dif-
ferent way individuals are affected by their environment, and to
their greater or less ability to assimilate it, than to any radical
difference in the structure of the mind itself. This explanation
is made to cover all the differences of opinion appearing in the
history of philosophy from Thales to James. In fact, the recent
philosophy of Pragmatism might justly be called the autobiography
of this temperamental theory.
There is, indeed, an original capacity, a native disposition of
mind, differing in each individual, and determining to a large ex-
tent how he shall assimilate his environment, and be affected by
it. Things and interests that rouse your soul to a high pitch of
enthusiasm may leave mine cold, indifferent, and unresponsive.
The way I think, feel, and respond to the same stimulus differs
from yours, though we both possess a common nature. A varying
power of assimilation, a different receptive capacity, is the badge
of all our tribe. Lazarus may have a richer vision than Dives,
notwithstanding the difference in economic ease and comfort. The
unconsidered remainder of truth too often lies, like an undiscovered
country, beyond the range of the temperamental choices peculiar
to each of us as individuals.
But this does not mean that character is the joint product of
heredity and environment. Nurture, no less than nature, is at
play in the making of men. Our native capacities are easily en-
larged by training, they are not predestined to move in appointed
grooves. Be the explanation of our mental shortsightedness, there-
fore, what it may, the fact is more important than the theory.
One concerns life; the other, knowledge. It is enough if we
realize that we lack, in no small measure, what has recently been
1914-] THE UNCONSIDERED REMAINDER 579
well called " the ability to see things steadily, and to see them
whole."
There is no need to pursue the matter further in the introduc-
tion to the present theme. We have the power within ourselves
to correct and overcome this defectiveness of vision. A more care-
ful training of the attention, a more severe exercise of our reason-
ing powers, less chasing after metaphors, images, analogies, and
suggestive figures of speech, not to mention that other chief pre-
requisite the elimination of judgments based wholly on the per-
sonal temperament of the individual will go a long way, if not,
indeed, the full length, towards effecting a cure. Recurrences of
the same fault should not stay our efforts to accomplish this
mental reform. Robert Bruce took heart at the sight of a spider,
repeatedly trying, in the face of many failures, to remount the
filmy ladder leading to his web. Success favors the persistent,
as fortune the brave.
The possession of a fixed idea or principle may be a sign of
perfection in matters that concern the performance of duty, public
and private. The road of the moral conscience is unbending, lit
with the silvery light that makes good resplendent, and leaves
evil dark. A definite moral sense of direction is not a limitation
of action, so much as a free, unwavering choice of a particular
destiny, and the means that lead thereunto. But when we leave
the sphere of matters moral, and enter that of truths to be seen
rather than of things to be done; when we step, so to speak, out
of conscience into consciousness, it must be confessed that the
world which floods our vision with the rich variety of its contents
is not one that may be written out in a simple formula, or exhausted
in a single line of thought. Your Socialist, therefore, and your
biologist, all the men, in fact, who sing one song, and thrum a
single string, have not caught the music of the spheres, nor gathered
in and garnered the full meaning of life. This requires a chorus
for its rendering; no solo could ever do it justice. Accordingly,
the purpose of what follows is simply to show, by means of several
shining examples to the contrary, what a redeeming thing it is to
be able to complete the thinking which others leave unfinished; to
consider the unconsidered remainder, and escape out into the open
from the imprisoning theories of men.
Let the account, usually given, of the American Revolution lead
the way in the line of instances. It is one of the straws showing
how steadily the wind blows over the fields of history; and, inci-
58o THE UNCONSIDERED REMAINDER [Feb.,
dentally, how the very heart of movements sometimes escapes us in
the hurried prepossessions of inquiry. The historic struggle of the
Colonies against the Crown is usually set down to the stupidity of
Lord North and the Tory ministry then in power. The writings of
Edmund Burke, and the speeches of William Pitt, have done not a
little towards dramatizing this ministerial theory in our school-
books and histories. One is led to wonder, on reading our own his-
torians, how Lord North, the Earl of Guilford, has managed, all
these years, to escape a monument to himself as the great American
liberator, so little does anybody or anything else seem to have
commandingly figured in the winning of our liberties. But for him,
it would seem, the Colonies would never have forsworn their alle-
giance to the Crown.
The dramatic surface of the situation has drawn attention away
from its real undertow. It was good politics at the time, against
a blundering and overbearing ministry, to lay the American uprising
at their door ; and the first Earl of Chatham, William Pitt, was not
the man to allow such an occasion to slip unimproved; so telling
a blow against the Earl of Guilford to remain undelivered. Stu-
pidity there was, and plenty of it, assuredly ; but there was politics,
too, as well as tragedy and drama. William Pitt, as every school-
boy knows, opposed the policy of the reigning ministry with an
eloquence that still lives. But we should not forget his " swan
song." On the seventh of April, 1778, the old lion, with all his
remaining strength and fire, protested in the House of Lords against
the recognition of American independence. He saw the dismem-
berment of the British Empire approaching, and drew back. The
political mantle had fallen from his shoulders; things had gone
too far to wear it longer; he stood forth at last, an Englishman,
grieving over the prospective loss of the brightest jewels in the
British imperial crown. It was no longer a question of the min-
istry, but of England. The rude awakening had come.
On cur own side of the ocean, historians for a hundred years
past seem to have read the Declaration of Independence in the ex-
clusive light of a protest against tax-gatherers. In the cry, " No
taxation without representation," the first noun has attracted far
more attention to itself than the last; with the result that what
was merely an occasion and excuse, has been made to pass for the
real cause and reason of colonial disaffection. Who, however
slightly versed in American history, but knows and realizes that
the spirit of self-government was astir in the land, against all
1914.] THE UNCONSIDERED REMAINDER 581
legislation shipped overseas from the Parliament in London? More
than the stupidity of a Tory ministry, levying obnoxious taxes on
otherwise faithful dependencies of the Crown, inspired the revolu-
tionary movement, and carried it through, against untold odds. It
was the Tory conception of the nature and powers of the State, as
instanced in the odious tax measures, that fanned the incipient
spark of self-government into a flame. It is only natural to wish
to have a voice in one's own despoiling. The New England town
meetings had given a foretaste of the sweetness of self-government,
long before the bitterness of oppression had set the people's teeth
on edge. Liberty, long rocking in the cradle, had at least learned
to stand upon its feet, and saunter forth to destiny. Parliament
had a rival, and was unaware of the fact, until the youthful David
went forth to measure his strength and skill against Goliath.
The Earl of Chatham, no less than the Earl of Guilford then
at the head of the ministry, underestimated the situation. The
English army officers themselves, if we may judge by their trans-
mitted reports, were slow in realizing the extent to which disloyalty
had spread. There is no reason for doubting the genuineness of
their surprise at the counterblasts which Lord John Burgoyne's
bombastic proclamations to the countryside elicited, on his disas-
trous march to defeat at Saratoga. And can anyone for a moment
imagine that the " embattled farmers, who stood by the rude bridge
that arched the flood " at Concord, and " fired the shot heard round
the world," were consumed with regret, as they primed their pieces,
at the action of Lord North and his ministry in stepping between
them and their devotion to the mother country oversea? It would
put a tax upon credulity to do so. The ministerial theory breaks
down at every turn. Napoleon Bonaparte once made the remark,
that " the true statesman is one who keeps his heart in his head."
There were many statesmen and gentlemen farmers in America
in 1775, or thereabouts, who would have welcomed classification
under this definition. It fitted their case perfectly. Truly, what
historians neglect to take into account, is sometimes of far greater
reach and importance than what they actually consider. No more
chronic instance offers than the one we have just reviewed.
A more serious example of human oversight is furnished by
current discussions of the social problem. The paramount issue
to be considered and reasoned out need one so emphasize the
obvious? is the right relation of the individual to society. Some
means of mediation between the two has to be found. And yet,
582 THE UNCONSIDERED REMAINDER [Feb.,
when we look into the history of the problem, we are surprised to
discover that extremism, and not mediation, has governed nearly
all the attempted solutions. The middle ground has been left un-
occupied by the theorists. A century and a quarter or more ago,
Thomas Paine contended against Edmund Burke that enlightened
self-interest is the ideal force of government and social organization.
The individualist theory thus obtruded itself upon a nation's notice.
But when the evils of unregulated individualism began to make
themselves felt in the economic order of existence, the Socialist
made his appearance on the scene, seeking to abolish all private
ownership of the means of production, as a condition precedent to
the more equitable distribution of the world's wealth and oppor-
tunity.
Thus in a century thought has swung from pole to pole, without
coming to equilibrium. The result of this oscillation from the
doctrine of the rights of man to the dogma of State supremacy is a
peculiar one, which he who runs may read in current literature.
The individual, who makes his bow so impressively to the reader,
when the social problem is stated, becomes conspicuous by his
absence when the problem is solved. His salutatory was in the
nature of a farewell. He seems to have been introduced merely
to afford an occasion and excuse for talking about the State, so
little does he personally figure in the determination of his rights,
or in the freedom of his choice of destiny. A problem which began
with two distinct agencies to consider, ends with only one of them
clearly discernible. The individual has disappeared, swallowed up
in society, as a part in a whole, as a cog in a wheel, as a grape in a
winepress. He is made the victim of an overbalanced social theory,
and must perforce pay his toll to the theorists.
The price demanded is his individuality, and all the things that
lie outside the narrower problem of living yet fall under, and add
zest to, the wider problem of life. It has recently been said, with
much more than the proverbial grain of truth to lend the saying sa-
vor, that most modern discussions of the social question " afford
the strange spectacle of a man walking down a country road, fol-
lowed at a more and more respectful distance by his own soul."
The mysterious disappearance of the human individual, in modern
sociology and philosophy, from the high post of spiritual dignity
and moral grandeur that once was, and still should be his, is a story
all by itself, which must await a less crowded moment for the telling
than the present, when the method rather than the merit of the
1914.] THE UNCONSIDERED REMAINDER 583
subjects under review has the first claim to consideration, and
the main thought of our theme has the right of way.
It should be clear to all minds, not oversteeped in prejudice,
that the solution of the social problem, whatever particular form
it take, must not destroy either the individual or the State, nor
over-empower either to the ruin of the other; but rather seek to
discover some practical way of reconciling the conflicting rights
and interests of both, that shall not in the end amount to the ex-
termination of one of the parties to the issue. Personal initiative
and social control are not exclusive opposites, but complementary
factors. This dual aspect of the social problem is coming to be
more and more recognized by recent writers. A less institutional
and more personal tone is observable. Less effort is spent on try-
ing to rearrange institutions, and more on securing the acceptance
of practical principles of relief. This change of front is signifi-
cant. It means that the weakness of the former line of thought is
being discovered. To make the lamb lie down with the lion, by
changing his relation to the king of beasts, from the external one of
individuality to the internal one of " benevolent assimilation," " ab-
sorption into the larger self," " organic unity," " common conscious-
ness," or what not else of like import, is, no doubt, a most effective
and thorough means of adjusting differences. But who can fail
to see that such a drastic recourse as this overdoes the solution
badly, in attempting to treat a problem of reconciliation as if it
were, by right and of necessity, a problem of elimination and
substitution ?
Individuality is not all wrong, because individuals abuse it.
That many of our social ills come from the competition of industry,
unfavorable environment, and insufficient or unenforced legislation,
is unfortunately all too true. But have we here the roots of the
social evil, have we not rather its fruits? Does not the problem
lie deeper than all such external manifestations in the ungov-
erned passions and ambitions of individual men? If so, is it not
social reform that we need, and not Socialism? The need of the
former is no proof of the need of the latter, though often put for-
ward as such. The two things have about as much in common as
a volume of Edmund Burke and of Karl Marx bound in one.
The strangest thing about recent social theories is that they
invert the problem of reform, and displace the real issue. The
State does not exist for its own sake, but for the sake of the in-
dividuals who go to make it up. The individual is prior to the
584 THE UNCONSIDERED REMAINDER [Feb.,
group, and individual morality to social, in point of fact, what-
ever may be theoretically argued to the contrary. Individual moral-
ity furnishes the ground for social, opening outwards in its de-
velopment, like the buds of a rose, or the folds of a fan. Individ-
ual rights and duties are accordingly the source, not the result of
social morality. The revival by the modern Socialist of the old
Tory conception of the State is a strange anachronism, based upon
an absurdity in the conception of government, long since outgrown
and discarded, though the theorists of the day have unfortunately
renewed its lease of life. This absurdity is the conception of the
State as an external entity, having its existence apart from the
society of human beings, managing their affairs, allotting their
tasks and duties, and subjecting them, one and all, to a despotic
paternalism and meddlesome interference.
The State is an inner outgrowth of society, not an external im-
position upon it. It has no existence apart from individual, human
beings. These it was who gave it form and constitution, under the
laws of nature and of God. And certainly, if history counts for
anything in reaching a conclusion on the matter, it was not to put a
premium upon mediocrity, or to reduce all men to the dullest, lowest
level of their kind, that the State came originally into existence.
A protest should be filed against the present levelling-down move-
ment of Socialism, which attempts to carry over the personal rights
of man to the column of social duties, in a ledger badly in the need
of balancing. The individual, as an individual, has personal rights
and duties, distinct from those which entail upon him as a social
being, as a member of society. These personal rights cannot be in-
vaded. Sociality is not the only attribute of man, all Tory thinkers,
past and present, to the contrary notwithstanding. The duty of the
State is to protect the individual, not to absorb him and his, body
and soul, by extending the right of eminent domain to everybody and
everything within its borders. The social problem must be viewed
and solved from within the individual, not from without. Human
conditions can neither lastingly nor effectively be improved by
changing the internal problem of reforming the character of in-
dividuals into the external problem of reforming their environment.
This is to stand the social problem on its head; to invite us to
view and solve it upside down.
Another addition to our dreams, therefore, is the engaging
Altruria of the Socialist, which now succeeds Utopia as the future
land of promise, flowing with milk and honey, where no man may
1914.] THE UNCONSIDERED REMAINDER 585
overfill his measure without discovering that it has dwindled to
his rightful portion, when he raises it to his greedy lips. Planning
a perfect State is not so much like novel-writing, that one may
manage the characters at will, and make all the future citizens of
Altruria automatically good and moral, merely by the literary ex-
pedient of arranging all the circumstances to that end beforehand,
and by killing off the marplots and undesirables before the last and
crowning chapter is reached. It is indeed poetic to imagine, and
courageous to maintain in print, that a change in the industrial
environment will bring with it, of necessity, a change in the indi-
vidual. New machinery, new men ! We do not remember having
seen any of those who solemnly repeat this social rhapsody, pause
long enough to prove it. They are content with stating the para-
dox, that we shall all grow gradually better by improving everything
but ourselves. Self -improvement is to be the inevitable result of
changed surroundings.
This optimistic forecast of the social future does not rest on
any profound analysis of the nature of moral character. Morality
is not transferred to the individual from the external conditions
under which he lives. It does not exist ready-made in any sur-
roundings. The most favorable environment refines rather than
removes moral evil. It neither produces virtue, nor extirpates vice,
automatically ; it merely offers a free field for the sowing either of
cockles or of wheat. Custom and circumstances may indeed
modify morality for good or ill, but it is beyond their power to create
it. Doing a thing a thousand times a day would never engender
in us a sense that it had to be done. The imperative necessity that
accompanies the manifestations of the moral law in conscience is,
therefore, no result of long-repeated custom. Character is some-
thing we have to work for in any situation, not a magically bestowed
gift. And until the social optimist of the day can show that custom
and circumstance may create morality, as well as modify it, he has
not advanced a single step in the direction of proving his Utopian
thesis.
The fact of the matter is, he has left out of consideration the
very groundwork his optimism needs to prove itself effective. The
omitted portions of life contain the inspiration which the parts re-
tained in his theory conspicuously lack. To work for humanity
with extinction ahead for the workers; to be reef -builders all of us,
like the corals, turning to stone after our laborious day is done,
that others may rise on our dead selves, there to find surer foot-
586 THE UNCONSIDERED REMAINDER [Feb.,
ing against submersion in the sea of life, and a larger outlook over
its engulfing waters, is this the clarion cry of the new optimism?
And are we to be asked to face all this nescience and future nothing-
ness, merely because a group of materially-minded economists have
forgotten that the State, like the Sabbath, was made for man ?
The race, the community, the greatest good of the greatest
number are we to be put off with these abstractions, and asked to
accept them as life's finalities? we who feel the eternities astir
within us; we who experience a hunger of soul, which no theories
of future economic comfort in bodily life can ever appease; we
who want the infinite and not the indefinite for our lasting portion.
Truly the unconsidered remainder has its revenge, when set forth
in contrast to all the drear blankness of negation, proposed for
acceptance in its stead. It would seem we should have learned
something from the fate of the far East, where the doctrine of
future nothingness has held sway for centuries of empty years.
There is no real optimism in thinking of ourselves as bubbles in a
cosmic stream, with our names writ in water, and Euripides or
Shakespeare to read o' winter nights, to inject some tragedy into
the dullness of a socialistic Altruria; with its dead levels of purring
content; its lack of all real occasions for sympathy, pity, or self-
sacrifice; with nothing but the moving-picture show of the imag-
ination left, to relieve the monotony of " perfect " existence.
Further discussion of Socialism is not to our present purpose.
Accordingly we dismiss it from view, with the parting remark that
it is an over-emphasis of the problem of living at the expense of the
problem of life; an attempt, in fact, to substitute the former for
the latter. Other examples of incompleteness of thought and in-
sufficiency of consideration, besides the two already dwelt upon
somewhat at length, await their turn for treatment at our hands.
Out of the many that offer, we choose those which may be grouped
conveniently under one head the idea of development. These will
illustrate our theme still further by pointing out the limitations
of the comparative method, now all too exclusively employed as the
instrument of research.
The avenue by which the problems of life, education, and relig-
ion are now approached is the biological. The " germ-theory " is
made to cover everything under the sun, neither that luminary itself,
nor even the universal frame of things which we call the world,
escaping the intake of its sweep. The thought of our times is
guided not so much by the actual facts of human life and human his-
1914-] THE UNCONSIDERED REMAINDER 587
tory, directly studied in themselves, as by an analogy, much open to
question, drawn from the history of plant and animal life. This
analogy is the familiar one of organism. Society is said to be an
organism; so is religion, aye, even the universe itself.
The result is that we find ourselves more frequently investigat-
ing the origin and growth of things, than inquiring into their na-
ture and value. What things grew out of, rather than what they
have grown into, if grow they ever did to the extent imagined,
preoccupies and monopolizes attention. We are hearing a vast deal
about our animal ancestry in consequence ; and oaks are as nothing,
compared to acorns, at the present hour of writing. The history of
man is rewritten as if it were for all the world the story of the
animal and the plant, serially continued. Marginal attention has
so displaced focal, that we see men, verily, " as trees walking," like
the blind man of the Gospel in the first stages of his cure. We
ransack the flowery kingdoms, explore the supposed life-giving
chemistry of warm brooks, make long side-excursions into the psy-
chology of animal life, and spend so much time in visiting our
" distant relations " that home begins to wear an unfamiliar look.
Is it any wonder that we return from these digressions with a
view of the human individual, and his human life, which looks as if
taken from the wrong end of a telescope? Surely, there is some-
thing more distinctively human about us than these long-distance
glimpses afford; something we have not caught, simply because
we have not looked for it in the right place. Methods, instead of
being our servants, have become our masters.
The overflow of all this comparative thinking into our educa-
tional methods, our social and religious theories, is not surprising.
Thought has always had the habit, and never more so than now,
of stepping down from its mental seat to visit classrooms, and
accost the so-called man of the street. Formerly the Good Book
counseled us to go to the ant, and learn diligence of this busy
little mason. We make the same journey now, it would seem, to
learn the advanced principles of his sociology. The ant and the
bee are our new Solons. The lure of what we imagine ourselves
to have been distracts us from the study of what we are, or may
become. So far is this comparative method carried at times, it
would really seem to be an accepted principle of education, that the
best way to study anything is to study something else !
Now the point we wish to make is, not that this is all wrong,
but rather that it is not all right. Whether society, or religion, or
588 THE UNCONSIDERED REMAINDER [Feb.,
the universe itself, each in its own way, sufficiently resembles an
organism, to be called such in very truth or not, there is no gain-
saying the fact that this is a pretty roundabout way of approaching
and attacking problems which are distinctively human in their
nature, and paramountly so in their concerns. Things have indi-
viduality as well as fraternity; and no amount of comparative
thinking, spent upon their fraternal relations, or their putative
links of parentage, will yield either the pith or the fullness of their
individual being. The fact of the matter is, we should never call
society, religion, or the universe at large, an organism without
putting an interrogation point in brackets immediately after the
term, to call attention to the inherent shortcomings of the analogy.
All comparisons limp, and this one is no exception to the lameness
of its kind.
To compare society to an organism is to view the entire range
of social phenomena in a new but misleading light. The truth is
ill served by such a comparison when overdrawn. The concept of
organism is validly applied to living things. Plants, animals, and
men are " organic wholes," known to be such through reason and
experience. But when extended to society, religion, and the world
at large, in a literal biological sense, the concept of organism is
employed beyond its legitimate sphere, and fills the mind with
much ambiguity and false suggestiveness. Of course, in the logical
sense of a coherent whole, held together by an internal principle
of some kind, the concept in question is clear and unmistakable,
applying indifferently to a book, a philosophical or political sys-
tem, the State, nay, even the cosmos itself; all of which may be
called organic wholes, without a strain upon language or a tax
upon credulity, when the meaning is simply that of consistency. It
is quite another matter, however, when the term is used not log-
ically, but biologically, to imply that society is a living thing, and
that individuals, in their relation to it, are comparable to the
organs or functioning parts of an animal body.
This inflated meaning of the term leads at once to much loose
thinking, at variance with the dictates of common sense, and serious
in its consequences. Society ceases to be a collection of indi-
viduals, and becomes an individual itself. A collective idea is
reified, real existence is conferred upon an abstraction. The re-
sult of this analogical prejudgment is to transfer individuality
from its real possessor the human individual to something which
we know does not and cannot possess it, namely, society at large.
1914-] THE UNCONSIDERED REMAINDER 589
The psychological effect produced by spelling society with a
capital S is simply tremendous. It makes us feel, as the Greeks
must have felt, when they found themselves encased within the
wooden horse of Troy. We begin to speak of ourselves as " parts,"
" organs," " functions," " centres," " differences," " units " of the
" organic whole." Biological language comes as trippingly to the
tongue as if animals, and not men, were recounting the story of
their lives. All our human rights and duties are translated into
biological terms, and re-defined according to the demands of anal-
ogy, rather than in the light of objective fact. The protest of con-
science and consciousness against this high-handed procedure is
stifled in the very utterance, simply by enlarging the scope of the
analogy so as to include these two shrieking protestants within its
net. The analogy is now in complete control of a situation which
should have been inductively studied, and not deductively prejudged.
We are in the grasp of a comparison that finds us men, and leaves
us little short of manikins. It would indeed seem that, before
reforming our ways of acting, we might profitably spend some time
on the reformation of our ways of thinking.
Is religion any better off than society for being styled an
organism? It seems not. Whatever resemblances religion may
bear to an organism, there are differences which makes the appella-
tion dubious and ill-deserved. It is a general law of analogies that
they hold only in one point, and this general law makes it inevit-
able that at some stage or other in its career of explaining religion,
the biological analogy should break down. Religion is not so
thoroughly like an organism, that we may write its history as we
would that of the growth of a geranium or a tree. History is not
written merely by consulting analogies, or exegeting metaphors.
One might, in a comfortable armchair, a pad and pencil to hand, and
the suggestive idea of organism before the mind's eye, dash off the
life-story of religion, without rising to take a book down from the
surrounding shelves. But the religion thus discovered would be
made in the study, and smell suspiciously of the lamp. It would
be a task to find its real counterpart among the religions that
appeared in history, the course of which is not determined by the
demands of analogy, or necessarily in accord with the suggestive-
ness of a comparison.
And yet who has not seen the rich and complex story of relig-
ion told over and over again in this simple, off-hand, pretentious
way? No historical connections studied, no relation of parent re-
590 THE UNCONSIDERED REMAINDER [Feb.,
ligion to its supposed offspring historically established; but every-
thing subjectively decided beforehand, and the course of history
mapped out with a stroke of the pen, and on the authority of
a questionable biological equation such as that of organism. Is
there no such thing as a direct method of investigation? Must we
regard the comparative method as a substitute for the direct, or
merely as a complementary aspect of the latter? What has be-
come of contrast the grim challenger of comparison?
He has been forgotten, and we need to renew his acquaintance.
This collector of differences has quite another story to tell than
the one usually told by the collector of resemblances. He offers
us no composite photographs of men and animals, religions, nations,
races, worlds. His is an assortment of individual photographs
directly taken, resembling somebody in particular, each of them, and
not everybody in general, all of them. He is the party of the other
part, bringing in a supplementary report, and smiling, as he tells
us, of the unconsidered remainder. Let us hear him for his cause.
There is such a thing as integral comparison, and it represents
the full fruits of scholarship; there is such a thing as partial
comparison, and it stands condemned by its very name. Compare
completely any Christian doctrine you will with the doctrine of
any other religion, Jewish or pagan, said to resemble it and to
have been its source, and you will find distinct elements of dif-
ference in the Christian that appear nowhere else; just as, if you
compare the complete natural history of man with that of any other
animal, you will never doubt that there is a difference in kind be-
tween the two. The objective differences defy reduction to subject-
ive unity. They offset the resemblances, and tilt the scales to the
other side. It is only by putting on our analogical spectacles that
we can see, for instance, the glimmerings of all monotheistic re-
ligion in the galleries of the ancient gods. The historian enjoys
no such keenness of vision. He knows that you cannot argue
from resemblances to the historical dependence, or the common
origin of the things resembling. His sense of the limitations of
history saves him from the omniscience of his analogically-minded
fellowmen. Good biology makes poor history; and if we reverse
the adjectives in this sentence, it will still appear to have an equal
amount of truth.
Unfortunately we seldom see the integral method of comparing
religions employed. The tendency is all towards the partial method
of comparison. Some isolated point of resemblance, taken out of
1914.] THE UNCONSIDERED REMAINDER 591
its concrete context and setting, is compared with another point,
similarly detached, and a flying leap made to the conclusion that,
because there is partial resemblance, there must have been complete
identity originally. Philo's doctrine of the Divine Word is a
chronic instance of this unscholarly procedure. We remember but
one critic who took the trouble to compare Philo and St. John com-
pletely ; and he reached the conclusion, quite unusual for his times,
that the latter did not borrow his ideas from the former, but
merely used the same wrapper of language for their expression. A
direct study of religious facts and doctrines, in themselves, apart
from all biological presuppositions, is badly needed just at present,
to recall human thought from the ways of indirection, along which
it is obstinately proceeding.
As applied to the universe in general, the concept of organism
fails no less signally than elsewhere to justify the wisdom of its
exclusive employers. There is indeed a common ground, so to
speak, in which all things meet; a unity in the midst of difference,
that is no mere rhetorical flourish or figure of speech. When we
think away the differences that mark off rose from rhododendron,
and man from all beings else, we reach a sublimated remainder
which is the idea of being the common attribute of all things, the
exclusive appanage of none. Hegel once compared this absolute,
or rather Schelling's view of it, to a dark night in which all cows
look black. And so well he might. Is this sublimated remainder,
in which everything looks like everything else, an organism, a germ,
the well-spring of the world, and the underpinning of all reality, or
just a vague, indefinite, empty, common, ordinary abstraction?
It depends on the amount of " philosophic faith " or " com-
mon sense " which you bring to its consideration. Time out of
.mind it has been mistaken for the Infinite. Its favorite name
now is that of organism, but this rechristening by Hegel has not
changed its nature a whit. An organism it surely is not, unless
we regard philosophy as the art of transferring names from their
rightful owners to others whose title to the same is clouded. The
extension of this concept of organism from the limited sphere of
plant and animal life, where we know it really belongs, to the uni-
verse at large, where, from the very nature of the case, we are
forced to relinquish knowledge for guesswork, is a leap in the dark
which only a thorough-paced, long-indoctrinated idealist has faith
enough to make. He alone believes that we have the power to
know the universe as a whole. His more modest brethren claim
592 THE UNCONSIDERED REMAINDER [Feb.,
that it is the parts, not the whole, with which we are first and last
acquainted. So it is, after all, a choice between Gnosticism and
knowledge, which must finally decide the question, whether we
shall continue to regard the universe as an aggregate or system
of interrelated individual things, or as an individual and living
organism, within which we are all caught like squirrels in a revolv-
ing cage or rats in a trap.
The " germ-theory " is altogether too audacious. It ought to
turn about and account for itself, after finishing its merry round of
universal explanation. A universe that " just growed," like Topsy,
is too self-sufficient altogether. It mistakes the fact of its develop-
ment for an explanation of its origin. Topsy missed this point in
her philosophizings, and she has not lacked for distinguished com-
pany. She failed to see that the question of growth involves, but
leaves unanswered, the further question of origin. Within the
" organic whole " of budding individuality which she was, she dis-
covered the reason of her existence, as philosophers some of them,
at any rate discover within the world itself the solitary source
and ground of all its being and relationship. The inner wheel of de-
velopment arrested her attention, the outer wheel of origin escaped
it, as it escapes that of others. Perhaps there is a moral to the
story. Who knows ? The self-sufficient world of the present may
yet turn its attention to the unconsidered remainder, and rediscover
God.
THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY.
BY HILAIRE BELLOC.
IV.
EFORE describing by what a series of accidents the
religious state of France was disturbed and its evils
accentuated for the moment by the Great Revolution,
I must give my readers some idea of the actualities
of religion upon the eve of the outbreak.
If you had gone into a middle class family in Paris just before
the Revolution, you would have found very much what you found in
France a generation or two ago in the matter of religion. The
father rarely, and perhaps never, attended to the exercise of the
faith. The wife did; the children made their First Communion,
the daughters would preserve their religion, the sons would not.
The intellectual and scientific life of the time in which one may sup-
pose the father and his sons to be interested, either left religion on
one side or attacked it. Some of its most eminent leaders practised,
but none of them produced, those powerful apologetics for the
Church which similar men in our own time have so abundantly pro-
duced. Some of the best intellectual work was proceeding from
Catholic pens and even from those of Religious, but you will read it
in vain to discover any trace ,pf a reaction against the pressure
which the fashionable scientific and political philosophies were exer-
cising against and upon the Catholic temper.
If you had gone into one of the Parisian churches upon a
Sunday morning, you would have found it nearly empty, and the
small congregations attending the few Masses hardly ever composed
of the working classes. For them the hierarchy of the Church
had come ,(o mean simply a part of the established order which
they disliked, and which they regarded as a form of oppression.
The few religious houses in the capital you would have found
in something the same position that a club in London is to-day,
excepting of course that you would have discovered a much smaller
membership. They would have interested you with the story of
their large endowments, and of their history. But you would
(save in the case of a few educational bodies and of a much larger
body of nursing Sisters) have found them as indifferent to the
TOL. XCVIII. 38
594 THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Feb.,
people as the people were to them. While you would have discov-
ered upon every side the official recognition of religion, the splendor
of its great offices, its regular place in the palace, the kept days of
many guilds, and a host of minor customs surviving, you would
perhaps nowhere have listened to a sermon that arrested you ; you
would hardly have come across a book which would have awakened
you to the nature of the subterranean conflict between the Church
and the people, in the sense of explaining that conflict in Catholic
terms, and attempting to regain for the faith a popular support.
Certainly you would nowhere have discovered a trace of public
enthusiasm. You would have found no meetings, no crowds in
favor of the Church; not even a large congregation which would
have given you evidence that the Church was really alive. Indeed
our religion never reached in France a lower level of energy be-
tween the third century and the twentieth than it had fallen to in the
great French towns at the close of the eighteenth.
In the country it was otherwise. There were whole great
districts where the universal practices of religion were still the rule,
though these districts did not cover the greater part either of the
area or of the population. But unfortunately these patches of
secure conservation and continuity enjoyed their conservation and
continuity almost in proportion to their isolation ; and whether be-
cause a difference in language, or mountains and barren lands, or
poverty, or the lack of opportunities for travel or insufficient in-
struction, or distance from the great towns thus isolated them, it
was without a doubt to their isolation that they owed the spiritual
benefits they enjoyed. Such a condition was of grave omen for the
upheaval that was about to take place.
The steps by which that upheaval proceeded in so far as they
concern the Church, I will next detail, first premising a very impor-
tant point which you will find omitted in most histories, and which
was this: That the one most widespread social institution of the
middle and upper classes at this moment was Freemasonry. Every-
one belonged to it, priests and nobles, and probably the King him-
self ; while not consciously or directly organized at that moment in
opposition to the Catholic faith, and while forming nothing like the
disciplined army which the exaggerated fear of occult power has
sometimes believed them to form, the Masonic lodges could not but
afford a mould into which any widespread national action on the
part of the educated classes would run ; and that mould was by its
constitution alien to the framework of the Catholic Church, and
1914.] THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY 595
vaguely devoted not at all to the spiritual ideals of Catholicism, but
to a vague humanitarianism which was, if anything, opposed to the
Catholic ideal, and was at any rate a world apart from it.
The revolutionary movement took definite external form in the
early summer of the year 1789. The French National Congress
which had centuries of tradition behind it (and was far more
democratic in spirit and in procedure than is any modern parliament
in the New World or the Old), had not been summoned for one
hundred years, when it met in the month of May, 1789, to begin its
great task. There was not a mere election of deputies to the
Commons House of these " States General " (such was their official
name), there was also a vast collection of documents from every
district and from every trade and profession in the country, form-
ing a complete and exhaustive foundation for reform. Further,
this National Congress, or " States General," met with the mo-
mentum behind it of quite a generation. For nearly the full life-
time of a man, and for all the lifetime of the younger men, French
society had been filled with democratic theory, and latterly with
democratic practice like a driving force. All authority that was
not from the people had decayed and was ready to fall. In other
words, public opinion was alive and working at a higher pressure
than perhaps it has ever been seen to work before or since in any
nation of Christendom. Remember that all this readiness for
achieving a great change towards democracy came after that period
which I have described, in which the faith was at its lowest ebb, and
you will be better able to appreciate the consequences of certain
accidents that followed.
The first year of the Revolution was one of extremely rapid
and tumultuous change. The three or four thousand towns, large
and small, which had been the centres of French life since the be-
ginning of history, which began as Gaulish tribal centres, con-
tinued as Roman centres of administration, and, the most important
of them, as Christian bishoprics, spontaneously organized active
forms of self-government. They raised a militia, they instituted
debate and resolution as an instrument of government everywhere.
Paris, of course, led all this, compelled the Court and the Parliament
to come within its walls, and expressed throughout its million inhab-
itants so violent a sympathy with the new movement towards democ-
racy that it had the force of an army. To this torrent the Crown,
which was the fundamental institution of the French, bowed.
It remained in control of the finances and of the army to a
596 THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Feb.,
degree which modern historians often forget. Even at the height
of this first period of the Revolution, all the organized official
power was centred in the hands of the monarch and his personal
advisers, as much as it is centred in the hands of the governing
wealthy class of England to-day. Therefore the conflict between
the new movement and this old fundamental institution of an abso-
lute monarchy was exceedingly serious. You had nearly all talent
and the great bulk of an enthusiastic national opinion on- the one
side. You had the greater part of national administration upon the
other. It was evident that following upon such a tension there
would either be a fierce struggle or the complete humiliation of
the Crown, its possible breakdown, and, if it broke down, the
breaking down with it of a vast quantity of ancient subsidiary
institutions dependent upon it, such as the organization of the
magistracy, of the army and navy, and of all the old society. .
That old society was still represented throughout the rest of
Europe by similar national institutions which, though in many
places decayed, were nowhere the subject of such violent assault as
in France. The governments, therefore, of the various German
States, and of Spain and of England, were all of them more and
more opposed to the course of the Revolution in France, and in
this opposition they had the support of their people in a greater
or a less degree. Thus, there was a great deal of sympathy with
the revolutionary side in the valley of the Rhine, in North Italy,
and other districts ; less in Eastern Germany, very little in England,
and none at all in Russia. The French people, therefore, were
going eagerly forward to the accomplishment of their great reform,
not only at the risk of a collision with their still existing executive
institutions, but also a still greater risk of foreign war, invasion,
and the suppression by European armies which hemmed them in on
every side of their national desire.
It was in the heat of such a moment, in the second year
of the Revolution, in 1790, that the democratic politicians of the
Congress committed the prime error from which their conflict with
religion was to follow. They proposed what was called " The
Civil Constitution of the Clergy." Three forces combined to pro-
duce this lamentable error and anomaly, the spirit of which is only
now disappearing after the lapse of a hundred years.
First, the French people have always, from Roman times, loved
an exact organization of the State. It was that appetite which
had produced the absolute monarchy, and the breakdown of the
I 9 i4-] THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY 597
monarchy in no way involved the breakdown of so vital a national
characteristic. That the various parts of the State should be co-
ordinated one with another, and should move from one centre, had
been an idea permanently inherited by the French from the genius
of Rome. It is one which the French will never relinquish. Among
these institutions which men could coordinate with the rest was, of
course, the national hierarchy, and the monarchy had given expres-
sion to this feeling for unity by a strict control over the hierarchy,
coupled with a high public recognition of it as one of the chief
factors of society.
The Revolutionaries would have found it simply unthinkable
to leave such a factor adrift in the new state of things, and
in proposing a novel arrangement for the Church, consonant to
the new state of society they were erecting, they found themselves
doing what seemed in their eyes and for that matter in the eyes
of nearly all Frenchmen a natural thing. That they bungled
the job and why they bungled it, I shall presently show, but that the
job should be attempted was in the very nature of French society
and tradition, and it is only those ignorant of that society and tra-
dition who can for a moment envisage the French Church as some-
thing fundamentally separate from and independent of the French
people. In other words, the conditions to which Catholics are
accustomed in Protestant countries, and especially in England and
in the New World, the conception of a Church which is but one of
many sects, and a sect of which the State takes no official cognizance,
is an essentially Protestant conception which the French will never
long tolerate, and which the French of the Revolution could not con-
sider for a moment.
Secondly, the main material issue in the early part of the
Revolution was financial. The immediate cause which led to the
summoning of a revolutionary Parliament at all was the inability
of the government to " carry on " the load of debt, and the insuf-
ficiency of the revenue. One very ancient form of property
had already gone in the crash, and these were the dues, called
Feudal Dues, paid to the nobler class by the farmers of the land.
Another much larger form of property, but closely analogous to
these Feudal Dues, was the property of the religious corporations,
of the bishoprics, of the parishes, religious hospitals, religious edu-
cational institutions, etc.
The reader must clearly understand what that property was.
Only part of it was what we would call real estate; the greater
598 THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Feb.,
half of it was a right to receive dues from land, the strict property
in which was vested in others. It will be apparent both that pay-
ments of this kind would be less popular and less natural than rent
paid on land owned absolutely, and that these old-fashioned pay-
ments would suffer in public opinion from the same appearance of
being meaningless and often unjust as the Feudal Dues had suffered
from. Meanwhile, it was urgently and imperatively necessary
to find some security upon which to raise the great sum which
alone could prevent national bankruptcy. From all these financial
causes combined the Parliament proposed in their scheme of
Church settlement that the old quasi-Feudal Dues and other prop-
erty of the Church should in part be abolished (where they were
thought unjust); in part taken over by the State; that against
this revenue should be issued script or paper representing its value
and acceptable as tender, that is, acceptable in payment of any debt,
national or private. While the clergy were to receive a large
revenue (but one very much smaller than their old revenue), which
revenue was to be paid them by the State and apportioned to the
strictly ecclesiastical needs (and no more) of each diocese, parish,
etc.
Collegiate property such as that of hospitals, monasteries,
etc. was to be dissolved. The religious side of such dissolution
I will explain in my next paragraph. Its financial side was part of
this old financial policy with which I have just dealt. Thus, if a
monastery doing no public work was receiving dues from neighbor-
ing farmers and land, the land was to pass to the State as security
for the new script, the farmers were in future to be relieved of the
vexatious dues, the community was to be dissolved, and a small
pension to be attached to those who desired to remain in religious
life, and for these particular houses (much fewer in number than
the old houses) were to be provided. Thirdly, there was the relig-
ious idea behind the whole matter, and it was here more than in
any other respect that the blunder came in.
The whole mass of educated men, many of them of the highest
talent, most of them of the sincerest conviction occupied in the revo-
lutionary settlement, took it for granted that the Catholic Church,
already obviously moribund, was dying. They thought of it as
something inherited from antiquity, still a strongly organized insti-
tution within the nations but self -evidently failing, and therefore to
be dealt with tenderly, and to be allowed to dissolve without pro-
ducing a catastrophe in its dissolution.
I9I4-] THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY 599
A parallel from modern affairs will make clear what I mean.
Let us consider a body representative of the modern European
nations like the Congress at Berlin thirty-five years ago. They were
dealing with the Ottoman Empire. They took it for granted that
the Ottoman Empire was destined to disappear, and that fairly
soon. But they recognized that it was still an existent though de-
clining force. They thought that if it was not " let down gently "
it might, as it went to pieces, bring about grave troubles, just as a
ship sinking, if it sinks too rapidly, sucks objects near it down into
a whirlpool.
Calculations of this kind in history are nearly always wrong
because man cannot prophesy, but they are always being made, and
it is most instructive to note how and why they fail. It is a very
good lesson in statesmanship. Make a list of all the great men, all
the powerful intelligences, that were appreciating European society
at the end of the eighteenth century, and you will see how universal
was this attitude towards the Catholic Church at the time. Talley-
rand, Mirabeau, Rousseau, Voltaire, Burke, Frederick of Prussia,
Metternich I take the list entirely at random, and the names cover
different generations. It might be extended indefinitely before you
should discover here and there perhaps one name in a hundred of a
man who had at least some comprehension of the vitality and prob-
able permanence of Catholicism. England and Prussia took it for
granted that Catholicism was but the surviving superstition *f
Polish or Irish peasants. The great French statesmen and writers
took it for granted that it was strong in proportion to the ignor-
ance of its adherents. It is only when you come to the very great-
est intelligence of that time, Napoleon's, that you find some grasp
of the then hidden springs of European history. And I think it
may be truly said even of Napoleon that, while the Catholic Church
attracted his attention all his life and piqued his marvelous intelli-
gence, he did not, save perhaps at the very end of his life, know
quite what he had been dealing with in that matter. Miracle was
put on one side altogether by those men. The Catholic philosophy
never appears in their writing. No one I think could conceivably
have calculated in that time what the resurrection of the Catholic
Church in the ensuing century was to be.
Filled with such a spirit it was but natural, though it
was erroneous, that the settlement of the hierarchy under the
new regime, of its functions in the State, of the discipline to which
it was to be subjected, should be a civil settlement; nor is it at all
6oo THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Feb.,
remarkable that the resistance aroused should have bewildered and
even exasperated those who had to meet it.
I think the best lesson for any man who desires to understand
what I mean in this matter, is to be derived, if he has the leisure,
by reading the debates in the French Parliament. He will there per-
ceive how even those who most .vigorously defended the claims of
the Church failed to use those arguments, as to her nature and her
mission, which are to-day commonplaces. Even the pious and de-
voted Catholic priest, if he were of the wealthier and governing
classes, did not understand how strong a case he had. He always
defended his faith in terms, so to speak, of the enemy's philosophy.
The upshot of these three forces which combined to frame
the new policy of the revolutionary French State, was this act for
" The Civil Constitution of the Clergy." There were other forces
at work. There was the sectarian bitterness of the newly-enfran-
chised Huguenot, immensely wealthy and rancidly hateful; there
was the contemptuous attitude of the very few who were already
powerful in Jewish finance; there was the pedantry of lawyers,
and there was the impatience of worldly men who wanted to have
done with the whole business quickly. But in the main it was
these three factors which were at work, and this is what they pro-
duced :
The clergy were not only to be despoiled of endowments often
excessive and always disproportionate (the most necessitous serv-
ices gained by the new settlement, and many irreligious worldly
foundations very properly lost), they were not only to receive in
return a much diminished revenue paid directly by the State, but
they were to be incorporated into the new arrangement of society
in two ways. First, their nomination was to depend upon popular
election, in particular of bishops. Secondly, the link with Rome
was to be confined to letters notifying elections, and merely demand-
ing confirmation thereof.*
It so happened that the lethargic and good-natured King was
a very convinced and practising Catholic. A somewhat unexpected
opposition came from him. A much more expected but still sur-
prising opposition came from the priests and bishops directly in-
volved. The Parliament passed the Act upon the I2th of July,
1790. It was not until the 26th of August that the King consented
*The whole of this part of my subject the reader will find treated at greater
length in the sixth and last section of my little book on the French Revolution in
the Home University Library, published by Henry Holt & Co. of New York at 75
cents.
1914-] THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY 601
to sign, but sign he did. It was not until the autumn, in the month
of October, that the protests of the bishops began to come in.
The test was the oath. Nearly all the bishops and a great
majority of the clergy were opposed to taking the new oath of
loyalty to the State, because part of the new constitution of the
State included this " civil " rearrangement of the French Church.
Rome had not yet finally decided against the measure; it is very
important to remember this point which is too often forgotten, and
a good deal of latitude was at first allowed. It was not until
nearly the end of the year that the Parliament demanded the oath
upon compulsion, an oath by this time demanded, remember, for a
law duly passed and signed and sanctioned by the King. It was not
until the 26th of December that the King signed the decree by which
that compulsory oath should be tendered. Upon the 4th of Janu-
ary, 1791, came the first attempt at compulsion in the form of
requiring at least those priests and bishops who were members of
the National Assembly to give way.
All the bishops save four refused to do so. The revolutionary
statesmen, now frankly bewildered, could still point out, however,
that of the parish clergy a much larger proportion (nearly one-
third) had accepted the oath of fidelity to the new democratic or-
ganization of society, though this new organization of society in-
cluded this " Civil Constitution of the Clergy."
With the spring of 1791 the policy was inaugurated of re-
placing, or attempting to replace, the clergy who had refused to
take the oath. The popular elections to ecclesiastical vacancies
took place in March. There\was of course the most violent resist-
ance to this attempt at ousting the old familiar and popular occu-
pants of the benefices. Still Rome remained silent; though the
Pope, Pius VI., wrote letters both to the bishops and to the King,
they were but letters attempting to prevent schism. It was not
until the I3th of April, 1791, that Rome at last spoke strongly.
Upon that date appeared the Brief Caritas. It condemned " The
Civil Constitution of the Clergy." But the declaration came late:
the flame in France was already well alight.
The confiscation of the Papal possessions in France followed,
and the withdrawal of the representative of the Holy See from the
French Court. But not even the Papal. Brief which encouraged
resistance, let alone the rupture of diplomatic relations between
the Court of the Vatican and that of Louis XVI., were the root of
the matter. The root of the matter was that the clergy had re-
602 THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Feb.,
sisted for the most part (and in the persons of their bishops almost
unanimously) the taking of an oath of loyalty to the new democratic
regime. This oath seemed to those who imposed it the simplest
and most legitimate of demands, merely requiring the same honest
allegiance to the new France as had been paid to the old. But that
same oath could only be, in the eyes of an alert Catholic above
all if he were a priest an admission of forms of Church govern-
ment divorced from and alien to the tradition and authority of the
faith.
From that moment, then, and after that blunder, all the ele-
ments of a violent divorce between the structure, if not the spirit,
of the Catholic Church and the revolutionary movement had openly
appeared. By the beginning of June, 1791, the quarrel was fully de-
veloped to the point of a refusal to admit a Papal Bull or Brief
into France without leave of the government.
Yet even a quarrel of such violence might have been appeased,
as many similar quarrels had been appeased in the past of European
history, and no fatal breach might have happened between the hier-
archy of the Church and the new state of society let alone between
the spirit and discipline of the Church and the new state of society-
had it not been for a further accident, through the advent of which
the conflict was enormously embittered and rendered in some sort
final. This accident was the outbreak of war between the Revolu-
tion and Europe, and the henceforward fatal and unavoidable an-
tagonism between the priest who would be loyal to the Church and
the nation which was determined to conquer its foreign enemies.
For once the war had begun there was introduced not only as be-
tween one man and other, but as between the various parts of most
men, each within his own soul, a necessary conflict between patriot-
ism and religion.
It is to the consequences of this, which color the whole of
the French nineteenth century, that I shall turn in my next paper.
JEAN FRANgOIS MILLET.
A LOWLY LIFE; A LOFTY SPIRIT.
BY CHARLES BAUSSAN.
HERE is an austere beauty about the country of The
Hague. Situated at the extreme point of the pen-
insular of La Manche, its fertile fields rise like
flowers from the granite vase that holds them up
above the lashing of the sea. Here in this land of
toilers on sea and shore, in the parish of Greville, stands the little
hamlet of Gruchy, its houses scattering along both sides of the
road. Near the centre of the village a lane branches off: a very
lonely lane over which ancient gables, scarred with cracks and
veiled with ivy, lean ominously. This lane leads to a courtyard,
surrounded by crumbling houses, and closed by a thorny green
hedge, in front of which is a well with stone coping and cord.
The first house on the right, as you enter the courtyard, is
separated from its neighbor by a vine that runs up the wall to
the very top of the roof. It is a two-story building, with four win-
dows, two on the ground floor and two above, looking towards the
rising sun. Here on the fourth of October, 1814, the painter, Jean
Frangois Millet, was born.
His father was a tall, gentle peasant, with curly black hair,
and peaceful eyes. His mother bore and raised nine children,
devoting all her time to the care of her household and her little
ones. She came of a family of farmers and fishermen, from Sainte-
Croix-Hague, of fairly good birth. The family name was Henry-
du-Perron, and the farm where one of the members lived had all the
air of a manor house. With Jean Millet and his wife lived his
mother and his uncle, a priest, the Abbe Charles Millet. This
grandmother was Jean Frangois' godmother. She named him Jean
after his father, and Frangois first because of her devotion to the
Saint of Assisi, and then, too, because he was born on the feast
of St. Francis. She was a woman of great good sense and some
culture, of strong faith and deep spiritual insight, who not only
gave alms to the poor, but did them reverence as well a truly
Christian attitude. The Abbe Charles Millet was in hiding because
he would not take the oath of " The Civil Constitution of the
604 JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET [Feb.,
Clergy." He recited his breviary and helped on the farm, fol-
lowing the plow and tilling the soil in cassock and sabots.
The parents of the future painter of the " Angelus " were both
very pious, so the boy grew to manhood in an atmosphere of faith,
which clung to him throughout life. Frequently he was awakened
in the morning by his grandmother's sweet, grave voice saying:
" Wake up, my little Frangois, the birds have been singing God's
praises for a long time."
The ceremony of the blessing of a bell, a storm, a shipwreck
on the coast were the earliest recollections of Millet's life; but it
was the work and peace of the fireside, the plowing, the long winter
evenings when the men braided baskets and the women spun, the
soothing whirr of his mother's and grandmother's spinning wheels,
which made the deep and lasting impression upon his life and
thought.
When he was six and a half he went to school, a little later
to Sunday school, and at twelve years of age made his First
Communion. For two or three years afterwards, he studied Latin
with the vicars of Greville, the Abbe Herpert and the Abbe Le-
brisseux, thus acquiring his taste for the Bucolics and Georgics
of Virgil. He worked, too, in the fields with his father;
cultivating, sowing, mowing, curing the hay, threshing the grain,
leading the hard life of a peasant, while the slumbering soul of an
artist recorded impressions of life, of truth, and of beauty. In
his leisure moments at home he read his grandmother's and great-
uncle's books; the life of St. Francis de Sales, the works of St.
Jerome, particularly his letters, Virgil, and the Bible, a Latin
Bible illustrated with old engravings. Perhaps it was these old
engravings that first stirred in him the desire to draw. Who can
tell? At all events he began to study and to reproduce everything
he saw about him : the garden, the stables, the fields, the neighboring
farm lying in a dip of the land, the distant horizon. He carried the
thought of his art with him to his work in the fields; then, too,
his father had an eye for beauty, and would often pause, his hand
on the plow or the scythe, to say : " Look at that tree, Francois,
it is as beautiful as a flower." And Frangois looked so well that
ever after, in Paris or in Barbizon, his eye never ceased to behold
these sights of his childhood, nor his hand to portray them: the
peasants of Greville, the work of Greville, the country of Greville.
" How intensely local I am! " he used to say later on, thinking
of that little corner of Normandy where his spirit forever dwelt.
1914.3 JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET 605
So the little peasant drew in pencil the trees, the houses, the
fields, or etched them on wood with the point of his knife. An
etching of a boat may still be seen on the door of his home in the
lonely courtyard of Gruchy.
One day, as he came from Mass, he saw an old man with bent
back and trembling limbs. With the sight there came to him
suddenly the idea of motion, of design, of foreshortening. As soon
as he reached the house, he drew the figure from memory with a bit
of coal. Everyone recognized the old man at once. Francois
Millet was then eighteen.
" I see that you have had this on your mind for a long time,"
said his father ; " we will go to a painter in Cherbourg, and ask
him to give you lessons."
Francois made two drawings to take with him: one was of a
shepherd playing the flute under a tree, while another, near a group
of sheep grazing on the hillside, listened. It was an Eclogue of
Virgil, but the shepherds and the landscape were distinctly of
Greville. A quotation from St. Luke was the inspiration of the
second drawing, which showed a man coming out of his house to
give bread to a beggar. When the painter Mouchel, a pupil of
David, saw them he would not believe that Millet had done them
alone. Millet then began to work with him, studying the masters
and the laws of drawing.
At the time of his father's death, in 1835, he returned for a
while to Gruchy, and tried to work the farm, but although he always
loved the soil, his desire henceforth was to paint it, not to till it.
He soon went back to Cherbourg, and entered the studio of Lang-
lais, who was a pupil of Gros. He passed all his free time either
at the museum, pencil in hand, or in his room reading. When
he received a scholarship from the city of Cherbourg, he went to
Paris to study with Delaroche. The master's comment to Millet,
when he saw his first drawing at the studio, was : " You are a new-
comer. Well, you know too much and too little." Millet worked
away in his corner. His comrades called him " the man from the
woods," and Delaroche, puzzled by his self-contained individuality,
sometimes overwhelmed him with criticism, and again was loud in
his praise.
But Millet found friends in the Louvre: Lesueur, Poussin,
Fra Angelico. He used to say : " Fra Angelico made me see
visions, and when I was alone in my garret at night, I would think
of those s\Yeet masters who made the creature so fervent that she
6o6 JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET [Feb.,
was beautiful, and so nobly beautiful that she was good." He
had taken a little studio with a friend, and was earning a meagre
living, painting portraits for ten francs, and Biblical scenes and
genre pictures for five francs. The loving, earnest face that used
to bend over his crib to wake him in the mornings when the birds
sang at Gruchy, was ever in his thoughts, and this beloved grand-
mother's portrait was the first canvas he sent to the Salon in 1840.
To this he added the portrait of old Fanchon, a family servant,
another memory of childhood days. The following year Millet
spent some time in Cherbourg, and there married Mile. Ono. From
1842 to 1844 they lived near the Church of St. Sulpice, at number
5 Rue Princesse. These were sad years. His young wife was
sick all the time, and finally died in the spring of 1844. Driven by
necessity, Millet had continued his work in spite of his sorrow.
Two pictures sent to the Salon were the result: " The Milkmaid "
and the " Riding Lesson," children playing horse.
After his wife's death, he returned to his beloved Normandy,
seeking to regain his courage. There he remained nearly two years,
married Mile. Catherine Lemaire of Lorient, and in December
1845, went again to Paris. In 1846 he produced the " Man Pushing
a Wheelbarrow " and the " Young Girl Carrying a Lamb;" in 1847
" CEdipus Loosed from the Tree;" in 1848 the "Winnower."
These were among his greatest works. But yet to this austere
painter, living apart and not knowing how to bring himself before
the public, fame did not come. The Revolution of 1848 paralyzed
all sales; and the spectre want sat at Millet's hearth. A friend at
last succeeded in getting him help from the administration of the
Beaux-Arts. " I thank you," said Millet simply when it was
brought to him, " it comes just in time; we have eaten nothing for
two days; however, what matters most is that the children have
not suffered; up to the present they have had food." Ledru-
Rollin bought the " Winnower " for five hundred francs, and the
father and mother could then eat with their children.
Want did not debase Millet's soul, nor weaken his character.
One night he met two young men who had stopped before a window
to look at one of his pictures, " The Bathers." " Do you know who
painted this picture? " asked one. " Yes," answered the other, " a
fellow named Millet, who only paints nudes." The remark was
unjust, for although at the time, and when he first finished his
studies, Millet occasionally indulged in mythological or figure sub-
jects, he did so but rarely, and never crudely. He was none the less
1914.] JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET 607
affected by what he had overheard, and said to his wife when he
went home:
" If you are willing, I will never again paint that sort of thing.
Life will be harder; you will suffer, but I shall be free, and can
accomplish what I have wanted to do for so long."
" I am ready; do what you will," was Mme. Millet's answer.
Millet was now free indeed; he had shaken off the shackles of
the school of the day. Henceforth he was entirely himself, the man
of the soil, the peasant, painter of peasants.
In 1849 ne exhibited a " Peasant Woman Seated," and went
with his family to live in Barbizon. Eighteen hundred francs and
his brushes comprised his fortune. He settled himself in a peas-
ant's house at the entrance to the forest of Fontainebleau, and there
he remained for the rest of his days, adding from time to time first
one room and then another, as they were needed to accommodate
his children, of whom he had nine, four sons and five daughters.
Someone asked him : " How many children have you ? " "I do
not know," he replied; " I count them at table." Francois Millet's
nine children perpetuated the tradition of the nine children of his
father, Jean Millet, and the home at Barbizon differed little from
that at Greville. Millet's life in Paris and in the studios was an
incident, an incident without influence on his thought, his work,
his genius. His inspiration, his genius were bound up in that
simple rural life which was truly a part of himself.
His mornings were spent in the garden, planting, sowing, hoe-
ing, gathering; his afternoons in a low-ceilinged, ill-lighted studio
painting. From time to time he made studies of the peasants in
the fields, sometimes giving a day to a sketch, sometimes completing
it in two hours. Towards evening, whenever possible, he went to
the forest to rest.
" I know of no greater joy," he wrote, " than to lie on the
heather and watch the clouds. If you could but see the beauty
of the forest! I run away to it sometimes at nightfall when my
work is done, and each time I return crushed. There is such calm,
such terrifying grandeur, that I find myself really afraid. I do
not know what those rascally trees talk about, but what they say
we do not understand merely because we speak a different lan-
guage. I am pretty sure, however, that they crack no jokes."
Nothing could be simpler, more rustic, more homelike than
Millet's life and house in Barbizon. While he worked on a canvas,
his wife and daughters chatted and knitted in the studio, or in the
6o8 JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET [Feb.,
garden under the elders and lilacs, a pet crow hopping about.
Millet delighted in the sound of these dear voices; sometimes he
interrupted his painting to kiss one, or to play with another. Or
he would read aloud to the family the Bible, Theocritus, Virgil,
Lamartine. His love of the forest and of art drew him to Jacque
and to Rousseau, but with these two exceptions he scarcely saw
anyone. His family was all sufficient. When visitors asked for a
sketch as a remembrance, he usually gave the men a pair of sabots
and the women a sheaf of grain.
He was tall and well-built with a bushy black beard ; and with
his nine children about him reminded one of the patriarchs of the
Bible, from which he loved to read. The first canvas to go forth
from the Barbizon studio was " Ruth and Boaz," a Biblical subject,
but translated into French. The reapers and gleaners were those
of the country about him.
From year to year Millet garnered a harvest from the fields :
in 1850 "The Sower" and "The Binders." The sower's
rhythm of motion and absorption of manner belong to all times
and all countries, but Millet's " Sower " in his felt hat and sabots
is a youth from Greville. He carries on his left arm a white seed-
bag; in the background is a laborer holding a plow drawn by two
horses; the ground, over which a flock of crows may be seen flying
against the gray autumn sky, is the high ground of Normandy,
where Millet worked in his childhood and youth, where were planted
in his heart the seeds that now were ripe for the harvest.
" The Binders " are working under a hot June sun. Two of
them stand by a stack binding the hay, squeezing it tightly with arms
and knees. Close at hand a young girl of melancholy mien is
raking up the hay which has escaped them. Her motions blend
with theirs, her grace with their strength, in the unity and harmony
of a common task.
The " Departure for Work in the Fields " and the " Wood
Pickers" were the product of 1851. In that same year Millet's
grandmother died. "Ah! could I but have seen her again!" he
cried. Then, in 1853, came his mother's death, she who for so
many years waited anxiously for him to surprise her by a visit.
With her in mind he painted, some years later, " Waiting," a picture
of intense feeling.
He was obliged to go to Gruchy to divide the few family
effects. For his share he asked only an oak wardrobe and his great*
uncle's, the Abbe Charles Millet, books. The following year he
1914.] JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET 609
took his wife and children with him to Normandy. He heard
the Angelus ringing at Greville, and going into the church of Ecule-
ville, a neighboring parish, saw an old priest kneeling before the
altar. It was the Abbe Lebrisseux, his old Latin teacher. Millet
rushed up to embrace him.
" Have you forgotten your Bible ? Do you still read the
Psalms ? " the good priest asked.
" They are my breviary, my inspiration," Millet said.
The sight of his pupil had roused the spirit of the old Latinist :
" You used to love Virgil."
" I love him still," replied the artist.
Millet sent the " Peasant Grafting a Tree " to the Exposition of
1855. The man in his garden, the woman with a child in her arms
watching him, is a rendering in the universal language of art of
the verse that never grows old :
Insere, Daphne, piros, carpent tua poma nepotes.
During the preceding years he had painted a " Woman Glean-
ing," the " Harvesters Resting," the " Woman Putting Bread in the
Oven," and the " Woman Feeding Chickens." In spite of his in-
dustry and genius, in spite of the simplicity of his life, and that of
his family, want often visited his hearth and forced him to sell
dozens of drawings, sketches, even paintings for a bit of bread.
In a time of need his neighbor, the artist Rousseau, gave evidence
of his tactful friendship. While Millet was absent from home, he
carried off one of his paintings. Next day he told him : " Do not
look for your picture. I have sold it to an Englishman. Here
are three thousand francs." Some years afterwards Millet found
the picture in Rousseau's possession. " Were you the English-
man? " he asked. " Yes," admitted Rousseau, " but you know the
picture is still yours to dispose of."
The shepherd pictures belong to 1856: " The Shepherd in the
Fold at Night," a lonely plain with the sheep in the moonlight,
and the " Shepherd Bringing Home His Flock at Sunset." In
1857 the " Gleaners " followed. Of the three figures, one, the old
woman, stoops slightly, anxiously scanning the ground with eyes
no longer good, while the two young women bend well over, grasp-
ing the blades with one hand and binding the sheaves with the other.
In the background the harvesters, with wagons and horses, are stack-
ing the grain. A little later in the same year Millet painted an
Immaculate Conception for the Pope's state carriage. He repre-
VOL. xcvui. 39
610 JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET [Feb.,
sented the Blessed Virgin as a young country girl, gazing tenderly
at the Child in her arms; on the globe at her feet lies the dead
serpent.
1859 was the year in which the " Angelus " was painted. Who
does not know that touchingly sublime story? the man and woman
praying with bowed heads. The man, his hat in his hands, the
woman, her hands clasped ; the basket on the ground, the fork stuck
in the earth, and far away across the plain a pointed belfry outlined
against a gray twilight sky, illumined only along the horizon by a
streak of light.
"I want them to hear the bell ring! " Millet said. And we
hear it. We hear it in the quiet of the plain, in the stillness of the
listening things, in the attitude of the two peasants who hear the
bell, and obey it.
In answer to Simon Luce's question, Millet wrote : " The
'Angelus ?' I can tell you nothing more about it except that while
painting it, my thoughts were back in the fields in my early days
when my grandmother always made us stop our work at the sound
of the bell, and say the Angelus 'for the souls of the departed,'
very reverently, hat in hand." The Belgian Minister, M. Van
Praet, bought the " Angelus " for two thousand five hundred francs.
It was re-sold successively for one hundred and sixty thousand,
two hundred and forty thousand, and five hundred thousand, francs.
" Death and the Woodcutter," and the " Woman Watering
Her Cow " appeared the same year as the " Angelus;" in 1861 fol-
lowed " Waiting," the " Woman Feeding Her Children," the
"Sheep-shearing," the "Woman Carrying Buckets;" in 1862.
"Crows in Winter" and the " Potato Planter;" in 1863, the
" Man Resting on His Hoe," and the " Shepherdess." There was
no decline in his art, but his health was failing, and for several
years he was obliged to go to Vichy for the cure.
" November " and the " Woman Churning " were exhibited in
1870. After the war he went again to see his " country," to look
again with love and sadness upon his home of former days.
It distresses me [he wrote] to revisit these fields, the house
where I was born, where my parents lived and died. As I ap-
proached the poor old home, I was so overcome I could scarcely
control myself. Oh! how much it recalled! I also walked
over the fields where I used to work. Where are now those
who worked with me? Where are the poor people with whom
I used to gaze upon the boundless sea? Now the fields belong
JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET 611
to strangers, who have a right to ask me why I trespass, and
to order me off. My heart is bursting with sadness and melan-
choly.
He brought back from this expedition a sketch of the " Church
of Greville." This and the " Shepherdess Leaning Against a Tree,"
the " Churner," and the " Vine-dresser at Rest " were among his
last works.
Illness attacked him, and stopped his painting. He dared no
longer say to his physician as he had formerly : " Doctor, cure me,
for I have no right to be sick." One winter's day, lying in his
bed, he heard the hounds in the forest, the dark forest he loved
so dearly. They had a stag at bay, and Millet could hear the poor
creature's death cry. " It is a warning," he said, " it announces
my end." A few days later, January 20, 1875, he died in the little
house which stands between the forest and the plain. To earn the
daily bread, the bread for his family, was the constant effort of
this hard worker, and the effort killed him. Yet this hard-earned
bread was never bought by the sacrifice of courage or honor. The
daily bread was also the inspiration of his art.
No painter has ever done a work greater, or more full of unity.
Millet's work was directed entirely by the Biblical command:
" Thou shalt eat thy bread by the sweat of thy brow." These
words, the truth of which he experienced daily, formed the basic
philosophy of his art. To express this thought he re-illustrated,
after his own fashion, the old Bible, his first book, the first love
of his childhood. He pictured work, the universal law, and pic-
tured it of a kind ever old and ever new, the most unchanging,
the most noble, the most beautiful, the work he knew best the
labor of the fields.
The Biblical mind in a rustic soul made this " peasant genius."
His art is simple, austere, religious. His characters are clothed
with great simplicity; their gestures are rare and serious; their
attitudes almost hieratic. Their emotion is not hysterical; it is
restrained, and is all the more real and intense to the discerning
eye. As his correspondence shows, Millet himself was keenly sensi-
tive. Still he was often accused of hardness and brutality, and even
of Socialism. He defended himself from these accusations with
good sense and wit, and with eloquence too.
The gossip about my " Man with a Hoe " seems very strange
to me [he wrote] ; thank you for telling it to me, as it gives
612 JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET [Feb.,
me an insight into the marvelous ideas ascribed to me. In
what club have my critics met me? Socialist! Truly I might
answer the accusation in the words of the Auvergnat agent
writing to his people : " They say I am a Saint-Simonian ; it
is not true; I do not know what that is " Is it not per-
missible to depict simply the thoughts that come to mind at sight
of a man destined to earn his living by the sweat of his brow?
Some say I deny the charms of the country. I find there
something greater than charm infinite grandeur. I see, as
they do, the little flowers of which Christ said : " Not Solomon
in all his glory was arrayed as one of these." I see very clearly
the dandelions' aureoles, and how the sun far above the earth
touches the clouds with his glory. I see none the less, in the
smoking plain, horses plowing, and a weary laborer in a rocky
spot stopping after long hours of work to straighten up and
take breath. The drama is surrounded by glory. It is not my
invention. The " cry of the earth " is an old saying.
My critics are, undoubtedly, men of intelligence and taste,
but I cannot put myself in their shoes, and as I never have seen
anything all my life except fields I try to tell as well as I can
the story of what I have seen and felt at work. Those who
would do better have certainly a wide scope.
Again he wrote:
You do well to lay stress on the rustic, for, truly, if that does
not show a little in my work, then I have accomplished nothing at
all. I repudiate utterly the democratic idea, as it is interpreted
by the followers of Theophile Silvestre, which they have tried
to attribute to me. I merely wished to draw attention to the
man devoted to earning his living by the sweat of his brow,
with never a thought of any special pleading. I am a peasant
of peasants.
Millet, both in conception and execution, differs entirely from
Courbet. It is scarcely necessary to say that Millet cannot be
claimed as a pupil of Courbet, simply because both painted peasants.
Dates disprove the claim. Courbet exhibited his first rural sub-
jects in 1850: the " Burial at Ornano," the " Stone Breaker," and
the " Return from the Fair." The same year Millet exhibited his
" Sower " and the " Binders," having already shown in 1846, 1848,
1849, among other canvasses, the " Man with the Wheelbarrow,"
the " Haymakers Resting," the " Peasant Woman Seated," the
" Keeper of the Sheep," and the " Winnower," all strictly rural
1914.] JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET 613
as well as individual. If one copied the other, surely Millet was
not the cipher.
One clay Millet was working in Diaz's studio. Proudhon
came in, and began to talk of the people and of Courbet's poverty.
He did not see Millet, or pretended not to see him, and the latter
went on working in his corner, without paying attention to him.
Their minds ran in different channels. Millet's peasant was a very
different man from Proudhon's. The peasant, as Millet saw him,
was not rebellious, he was obedient to his task ; he stood out a noble
figure. Millet's art ennobled all it touched. In that he was the
superior of the Dutch and the Flemish, who were too given to
detail. He saw, he painted broad lines, outlines, simple actions,
man against the horizon of the world.
It happened that he and Decamps both painted at the same time
a shepherd watching a stream. " We both painted a shepherd,"
said Decamps, " but mine was a peasant by the edge of a brook ;
Millet's a man on the brink of the river." Herein is genius. Alone
in space, glorified by work, his peasant is a king. He dominates
the picture ; the landscape is subordinated to the man ; it obeys him.
The lines of the fields, the coloring of the earth, the hills, the woods
on the horizon harmonize and become one with the figures.
Whether he plant potatoes, kill a pig, or sow grain, Millet's peasant
is serious and calm; he has a task to perform, and he masters it.
Everyday life, arduous or peaceful, is what Millet always pur-
sues with his peasant.
It is the human side that touches me most [he writes]. The
joyous side never appears to me, I do not know where it is.
I have never seen it. The gayest moments I have known have
been found in the calm, the silence which one may enjoy so
deliciously in a forest or in cultivated fields In cultivated
places, however arid, you may see people hoeing, digging. From
time to time someone will straighten himself up and wipe his
forehead with the palm of his hand Is this work the gay,
hilarious thing some would have us believe in? Nevertheless
I find there the truest humanity, the loftiest poetry.
He applied this law of labor to himself, to art, to everything:
Work is my programme [he said], for every man is subject to
the ills of the flesh. " Thou shalt live by the sweat of thy brow,"
is the edict of the ages, the immutable destiny which changes
614 JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET [Feb.,
not. What every man should seek is progress in his profession,
to strive ever to do better, to become strong and skillful in his
trade, to surpass others by his ability and conscientious applica-
tion to work. This to me is the only way. All others are
dreams or guesswork.
This conscientious application to work Millet had in perfec-
tion. Although he looked at things in a large way, he was scrupu-
lous in his attention to detail, when they were important to convey
his thought. He writes : " X thought my 'Potato Planter's'
sabots were lined with sheepskin. If I tried to put anything in
them, it must have been straw. Where I come from a man would
be a laughing stock who put sheepskin in or on his sabots ..-,;."
When he painted his dear hamlet of Greville, he was distressed
because he could not make everyone see it as he saw it. " I am
working at my end of the village which looks out to sea. My old
elm begins, I think, to bow to the wind. If only I could make it
stand out in space as I see it in my memory. Oh! the infinite
spaces of my childish dreams, shall I ever be able even to suggest
you to others? " Art rooted in thoughts of such depth and gravity
could not rest in mere surface beauty. " Beauty," said Millet, " does
not dwell in the countenance alone ; it is found rather in the compo-
sition of the figures, and of all that goes to complete the subject.
Beauty is expression."
To Millet art is but the artist's servant: "His facility of
execution should only be used by the painter to accomplish good.
Unhappy the artist who puts his talent before his work. It would
be amusing, indeed, if the wrist should lead the hand."
A child of the people, he believed the people could understand
art. Did he not remember the admirations of his childhood, of his
father, the plowman stopping at the end of his furrow to look
at a tree " as beautiful as a flower? " In every instance, painting
after painting, drawing after drawing, his work exalts sternly,
without flattery, yet all the more nobly, the tiller of the soil at his
work.
With a text from the Bible for his mental inspiration, with the
love of his " country," the recollections of his childhood for emo-
tional inspiration, with the intimacy gained by daily struggle with
the wind, the sun, the soil, this peasant peasant, as he calls himself,
has made of seedtime and harvest, of plowman and shepherd, an
epic poem worthy to rank with the greatest the epic of the earth.
THE TESTING OF ISABEL.
BY CHRISTIAN REID.
I.
HE young interne with the keen, clear-cut face, and
air of intellectual alertness, which made discerning
people say that " young Dr. Wyverne had a future
before him," sat by the side of the white hospital bed,
regarding with a compassionate gaze the patient to
whom he had just delivered a very unfavorable opinion. This pa-
tient was a gaunt man, whose wasted face showed traces of having
possessed more than ordinary good looks in early life, which were
almost obliterated by later signs of hard living and dissipation, but
whose blue eyes retained a singular charm of appealing frankness.
The appeal deepened in them now as he looked at the doctor.
"And so," he said at length, after a silence that had lasted a
minute or two, " you can't give me any hope of ever getting
well?"
" I'm sorry to say I can't," the young man answered, with the
same compassion in voice as in glance. " You have a disease which
is practically incurable, and although you may live for sometime "
" That's the worst of it," the other broke in. " To live for
sometime when I can never walk again, or be anything but a help-
less invalid, is a harder sentence than if you told me death was near
at hand."
' Yes, it's hard," Wyverne agreed sympathetically ; " but there
comes a time when we all have to face hard things, and " pausing
an instant while he cast about in his mind for some form of possible
consolation " after all they are 'stuff to try the soul's strength on,'
you know."
" But suppose your soul hasn't any strength," the man re-
turned. " I haven't any illusions about my soul, you see its been
tried and found wanting long ago. If it had had any strength,
I might have held what was mine at the beginning, and not be what
I am now a human derelict, floating about the world, without ties
or friends, and only fit to be put out of the way as soon as possible."
" It's a pity to regard things so hopelessly," the young interne
616 THE TESTING OF ISABEL [Feb.,
remarked. " Courage helps in facing the worst situation, and no
doubt you have someone to whom you can look for care and help."
" Not a soul ! " the other replied. " There isn't a human being,
so far as I know, who would turn around to save me from dying in
the street. Certainly not " an inexpressible bitterness came into
the voice now " my wife or my daughter."
" You have, then, a wife and a daughter? " Wyverne said, a
little surprised.
" It would be more correct to say I had both," the sick man
answered, with the same bitterness of tone. " They are not mine
now: another man has them."
" You mean "
"A very ordinary thing: my wife obtained a divorce from
me fifteen years ago, and the court gave my daughter to her. I
haven't seen either of them since."
" But surely you might have seen your daughter. There's
always a provision for that."
" Oh, yes, I might have" seen her, if I had chosen to insist upon
my right to do so. But it would have meant fighting my er ex-
wife straight along; so I thought it best, for the good of the child,
to drop out of her life. I couldn't do anything for her ; and I was
very fond of her seeing her now and then, and realizing that she
was getting farther and farther away from me could only have been
painful, so I had courage enough to cut the rope of connection,
and drop."
" Wasn't it rather weakness than courage ? " Wyverne felt im-
pelled to ask. " Don't you think you were shirking a duty ? You
are her father: no divorce could change that fact."
" It couldn't change the fact, but it changed all the circum-
stances, so that the fact lost its significance," the man replied. " I
wasn't so much to blame as you may perhaps think," he added after
a moment. "If you've time to spare, and wouldn't mind, I'd
like to tell you about it, and make you understand why I'm so
utterly alone in the world."
The young doctor glanced at his watch. There were a few
minutes still left of the time he had arranged to give to this patient,
who, afflicted with an incurable and increasingly painful disease,
had from the first interested him in rather unusual degree. There
was some subtle quality in the man wreck as he truly called him-
self which made him attractive, and touched the sympathy in
Wyverne which was always quick in responding to any demand. It
1914.] THE TESTING OF ISABEL 617
had been hard to tell him in plain terms that there was no hope
of his recovery, and since he had been led for the first time to speak
of himself and his own affairs, if it would afford him any comfort
in such dire strait to speak further, why surely it was a small act
of charity to listen. Therefore Wyverne said :
" I've a little longer time I can give you, if it would be any
relief to you to tell me about yourself."
" It would be a great relief," the other answered. " You've
an uncommonly kind way about you as if you really cared what
became of a poor devil which isn't what one expects to find in a
hospital; so if you're sure you don't mind "
" I'm quite sure of that."
" Then here goes : I'll make the story short, and, as you'll
find, it's common enough in the main outlines I had a good
start in life, and I married early, for I fell desperately in love with
a girl who was beautiful enough to turn any man's head. As a
matter of fact, she had turned a great many before mine, and the
admiration she excited hadn't been very good for her, though I
didn't find this out until after we were married. Then I soon dis-
covered that she wasn't satisfied with my devotion only, and she
wasn't satisfied either with the kind of life I was able to give her,
though it was much better than any she had known before, for her
people were in extremely reduced circumstances. But the more
she had, the more she wanted social pleasures, fine dress, and
above all constant admiration. I stretched things to the utmost to
give her what she desired; but my means had fixed limits, and I
presently found myself deeply in debt. We were forced to pull up,
our mode of life necessarily became much narrower, and she grew
so discontented that life was soon a hell don't think," he broke off
abruptly, " that I'm acquitting myself of all blame. I was weak, in
the first place, in yielding to her extravagant demands, and after-
wards I grew irritable and violent, as a man will, who has debts
abroad and discontent at home. Then the child came, and for a
little while matters were better; but the improvement didn't last
long, and after a time I found it a relief to take a traveling position,
and be away as much as possible Yes, I see by your face that
you know how that ended. I began to drink to enable me to forget
my troubles, and dissipated habits led to other things ; so it wasn't
remarkable that when I came home one day my wife told me plainly
that she was tired of me, that she had secured evidence sufficient
for a divorce, and that she was about to take steps to obtain it."
6i8 THE TESTING OF ISABEL [Feb.,
The speaker paused, and lay silent for a minute, staring out of
the window beside his bed with eyes which seemed looking far away
into the past, as if seeing again the final scene of which he had
spoken.
"Of course there was another man," he went on presently;
" a man who could give her all that I hadn't been able to give. He
was a rich man then, and rising rapidly he's one of the heads of the
great trust to which he belongs now and her beauty had fascinated
him so that he told her, 'Get a divorce, and I'll marry you at once.'
There was no difficulty about getting the divorce I savagely and
deliberately helped her to obtain it by myself furnishing all the
evidence needed and I had no desire to make any contest, even
when the court handed over the child to her. What could I do with
a child, a man without a home, and without any woman relative,
besides being of dissipated habits? So when my wife requested
me to efface myself, and let the child grow up without intruding
my claim, since Beresford could do so much for her "
Here the young interne, who had been listening silently find-
ing the story common and sordid enough, yet conscious that it was
veritable tragedy, the tragedy of a ruined and broken life, which
was being laid bare to him suddenly roused to keener attention.
" Beresford ! " he exclaimed quickly. "Are you speaking of
Andrew Beresford, the multimillionaire?"
" Exactly," the other replied. "Andrew Beresford it was.
You see how much chance I had against a man like that. He took
my wife when he wanted her, just as he absorbed the business of a
thousand men, when it served his interest to do so, and I was as
helpless as they were."
"And is it possible that the girl who is known as Isabel Beres-
ford is your daughter?" Wyverne asked with increasing wonder
and excitement.
The sick man glanced at him curiously. " Certainly Isabel
Beresford, as she is called her real name is Isabel Ferguson is
my daughter," he replied. " Do you know her? "
" Yes, I know her," Wyverne answered. " Perhaps you're not
aware that Beresford makes his home in this city? "
" I've heard so bought a large estate, and built a palace on
it, didn't he?"
" He has a very fine place, and when the family are here they
entertain a great deal, and quite magnificently."
" That must suit Kate my wife that was down to the
I9I4-] THE TESTING OF ISABEL 619
ground," the other commented sardonically. " It's the kind of life
she was always longing for, and would have sold her soul at any
time to gain. Well, if she did sell it I'm not making any assertion
about that, you understand she's got her price, which is more than
many people succeed in getting. But " a different tone came into
the voice now " tell me something about Isabel. What is she
like? Do you know her well?"
" As well as a busy hospital interne would be likely to know a
young lady in fashionable society," Wyverne answered. " I've
always admired her extremely. She's very beautiful "
" I thought she would be."
"And she has a charming character. And O by Jove! " the
young man cried suddenly, " she's got your eyes. I recognize
them now, and know why they have all the time seemed so familiar
to me."
Ferguson nodded, evidently pleased. " Yes, she always had
my eyes," he said; " but the rest of her face was like her mother.
I wish I could see her, if it were only for a few minutes," he added,
sighing a little.
"And why shouldn't you see her?" the young doctor asked.
" What could be easier than for her to come to see you ? And if she
knew of your condition, I'm sure she would wish to come."
" Do you think so ? do you really think so ? " the other queried
wistfully. " She's heard dreadful things of me "
" But she knows that you are her father, all the same. And she
has a very tender heart for suffering. I believe that if she was told
of your hopeless illness, she would be willing to come and take
care of you as a daughter should."
Ferguson shook his head. " I couldn't expect anything of the
kind," he said. " She doesn't know me. I've done nothing for her
since she was five years old "
" But you're her father, and you have need of her that consti-
tutes a claim of duty."
" I don't feel that it does, considering all that has gone
before," Ferguson declared obstinately. "And she hasn't been
brought up to think much of duty. The only duty my wife ever
recognized was to do the best for herself."
" You will find your daughter different."
" I'm doubtful of it, but, after all, you know her and I don't.
Are you " abruptly " in love with her? "
The dark eyes met the blue ones fully and frankly.
620 THE TESTING OF ISABEL [Feb.,
" Yes," the young man answered. " I've been in love with,
her for a long time. I have never told her so, because it appeared
rather hopeless, when I thought she was Andrew Beresford's
daughter, and heiress to all his wealth. But what you've told me
seems to change things, and bring her within reach in an almost
miraculous manner. I have sometimes been presumptuous enough
to think she cares for me, and if she does, she'll be willing to come
to me and to you when I tell her about you."
There was wonder and compassion mingled in the gaze that
rested now on the keen, handsome face so suddenly aglow with
strong feeling.
" I hope you may be right in your judgment of her," Ferguson
said slowly, " but I wouldn't count on it too certainly if I were you.
It will be a hard test, and you see I know the influences that have
moulded her."
The young interne rose and stood by the side of the bed,
smiling down at the helpless man stretched on it.
"A hard test!" he repeated. "Perhaps so, but if it wasn't
hard it wouldn't be a test at all, and personally I can't doubt the
result. Whether or not she cares to come to me, I'm sure Isabel
will come to you, my friend."
II.
Any other than such a pronounced optimist and idealist as
Alan Wyverne would have hesitated before making his confident
prediction to the poor victim of spinal paralysis in the hospital, and
might have been assailed by even stronger misgivings than those
which came to him when, on the evening of the same day, he drove
up to the imposing Beresford mansion always spoken of in the
press as " palatial " where a brilliant entertainment was in pro-
gress, in honor of the birthday of the daughter of the house.
He was rather late in arrival for an emergency operation at
the hospital had detained him and although his profession had
long since made him familiar with the contrasts of human existence,
he had a sudden, vivid sense of such contrast now, between the
scene he had so lately left, with all its gruesome details, and this
scene of festivity the great house glazing with lights, the throbbing
seductive music of a hidden orchestra, and the gay throng, for
whom pleasure was the law and end of life ! " One almost wonders
I9I4-] THE TESTING OF ISABEL 621
if one is on the same planet!" he reflected, and a moment later
found himself gazing into Isabel Beresford's beautiful eyes.
These eyes of violet-blue under dark lashes had always
charmed him, and they seemed more than ever charming now, in
their singular likeness to those which had looked up at him from a
bed of pain, and given him a hope he had never dared indulge
before. It was this hope which kindled a glow in his own eyes that
made the girl exclaim :
' You look as if you had heard some wonderful good news !
Are you going to share it with me ? "
" Be quite sure of that," he answered, as he took her hand.
" But, first, let me offer my congratulations and best wishes on your
birthday, though you have already received both "
" Yes, with your lovely flowers. No one else sent any that I
liked so well. You see I am wearing some of them."
" I see. They match your eyes. It was for that reason I
chose them."
They did indeed match her eyes wonderfully, the great cluster
of Parma violets which she wore at her waist. She was a slender,
exquisite creature, fair as a lily, with delicate features, and dark
silken hair, and her absolute unlikeness to the rugged personality
of Andrew Beresford had often struck Wyverne, when he thought
her his daughter. Now it was all explained. The poor wreck
lying on the hospital bed was of altogether finer fibre than the man
who had so ruthlessly thrust him aside in the battle of life; and this
fineness was his daughter's inheritance. Had she also inherited
the strain-of weakness which Ferguson's story so clearly revealed, or
had the mother, who had taken her way, over his heart, " to the
world made for her," given to her daughter's character an element
of hardening strength ? This was the question in Wyverne's mind,
as he looked at the graceful, violet-eyed girl, and knew that on the
answer to it depended all for which he and the desolate man in the
hospital hoped.
" When can you give me an opportunity to tell you my news ? "
he asked. "Am I too late to beg for a dance ? "
She smiled as she held out her card to him. " I've saved a
place for you," she said, " because I knew it wasn't your fault that
you were so late."
His glance thanked her eloquently. " It wasn't in the least my
fault, or I shouldn't deserve your kindness," he said. " Until I
can claim my turn, then "
622 THE TESTING OF ISABEL [Feb.,
He fell back as another man came to claim his, and devoted the_
interval which followed to exploring the spacious rooms thrown
open on all sides, until he found what he was in search of, a remote
palm-screened nook where two might talk without fear of being
disturbed ; and to this he led Isabel Beresford when the time for his
dance arrived.
" I'm sure you'll like to rest for a little while," he told her.
" You must be tired of dancing, and I want to talk to you."
" I am a little tired," she confessed, " and this is a pleasant
place to rest and talk." She leaned back in a corner of the luxurious
seat, which was only large enough for two, and looked at the young
man with an enchanting smile. " Now tell me your news," she
said. "If it is good and it must be good, or you wouldn't be so
anxious to tell it it will fit in delightfully with the rest of my day,
which has been so very good."
But instead of replying, he sat gazing at her silently for a mo-
ment, with a deeper sense of misgiving than he had yet known, as he
suddenly realized how far from fitting in with the rest of her day
was the news he had to tell. And while he hesitated, she went on
speaking, with a soft, little laugh of happiness:
" It hasn't been quite like an ordinary birthday, you know,"
she said. " It is my twenty-first, and it has been celebrated as if
it were the coming of age of a princess. Indeed I'm sure no
princess could have had anything more charming than some of the
gifts I've received. This " she lifted a string of pearls which
hung around her neck, that he might admire their perfect form and
lustre " was my father's gift."
Her father's gift! At the words Wyverne's thoughts turned
swiftly again to the bed by which he had stood in the morning, and
the man who lay thereon the man whose only possible gift to his
daughter on this anniversary of her birth, was the priceless jewel
of a great opportunity. And then he found his tongue :
" They are beautiful pearls," he said, " and must have cost a
fortune. But when you speak of them as your father's gift,
are you not making a mistake? Mr. Beresford is not your
father."
Her eyes opened widely on him in surprise and evident dis-
pleasure.
" It is you who are making a mistake," she replied quickly.
" He is my father the only father I have ever known."
" But not the only father you have ever had," Wyverne re-
I 9 i4-] THE TESTING OF ISABEL 623
minded her. "If you cannot remember your real father, you must
at least know that he existed that he still exists."
Involuntarily, as it seemed, she shrank farther away, with re-
pugnance expressed in every line of her face and figure.
" I don't understand why you should wish to remind me of
something which I have no desire to remember," she said coldly.
" I cannot imagine how you discovered the the fact of which you
speak."
" I can tell you that very easily," Wyverne replied. " I have
met your father. He is a patient in our hospital."
She was deeply startled now; but he saw clearly that her re-
pugnance did not decrease.
" Is there any reason for talking of this? " she asked, drawing
her slender, dark brows together in a frown. " It it is not a sub-
ject which I care to discuss." She made a motion to rise. " Shall
we go back to the ball-room?" she said. "I believe that after
all, I would prefer to dance."
But Wyverne caught her hand, and the entreaty in his eyes
compelled her to sink back into her seat.
" Please don't insist on going," he said earnestly. " You will
have a great deal of time to dance, but I have only these few min-
utes to tell you what it is vitally important that you should know."
" How can it be vitally important?" she asked, turning pale.
" Don't you know that the man of whom you speak has no place
in my life, and no claim on me?"
" I couldn't possibly knew that," Wyverne answered in his
deepest and gravest tones. "As your father, he must always have
a claim on you for honor and love and service."
" But this is absurd ! " she broke out. " How can I honor
and love a man I have never seen since I was six years old, when
my mother was forced to divorce him?"
" We will not speak of your mother's divorce," Wyverne an-
swered. " Let us leave that aside. For however great her reasons
for the step may have been, one fact is clear : no court can divorce
child and parent. Your father is your father, whatever his faults
or failures; and I am sure that your heart is too true, too tender,
and too good not to acknowledge the claim of such a relation-
ship."
There was an appeal in his voice which she found it difficult
to resist, and suddenly her eyes the lovely violet eyes which had
charmed him filled with tears.
624 THE TESTING OF ISABEL [Feb.,
" Oh," she cried, in a tone of almost childlike disappointment,
" is it possible that this is the news you wanted to tell me? "
At these words, a flash of intuition came to him, and leaning
forward quickly, he took her hands.
" Yes, this is the news," he said, " but there is much involved
in it. The great fact that I love you is involved in it. Isabel,
do you hear, I love you ! "
A radiance which shone through their tears, now sprang into
the wide eyes which met his own, and, as if by magic, all the sweet-
ness and enchanting softness returned to her face.
"Ah ! " she breathed, rather than said, " that is the news I
wanted to hear ! "
And then, for a brief space, paradise opened its gates for them.
Presently some words of hers brought them back to the point
where the world had dropped away, and left them with the blissful
certainty of their mutual love.
"This is my best birthday gift! " she sighed softly. " I am
glad you have brought it to me to-day."
Wyverne started. In the sweetness of these golden moments,
he had forgotten how much of his news still remained to be told ;
but there seemed less difficulty now in telling it. Since Isabel loved
him, everything else became easy, and dropping a kiss on the silken
masses of her hair, he said :
" Dear heart, the gift has been yours almost as long as I have
known you; but it would not have been brought to you to-day
nor, I fear, on any other day if I had continued to believe that Mr.
Beresford was your father. It was only when I met your own
father that the way to you was opened to me, that I could come and
tell you of my love."
" But why should you have felt in that way ? " she asked,
drawing back a little, so as to look up in his face. " Why would
you not have told me that you loved me as long as you believed
that Mr. Beresford was my father ? "
" Surely you must see why not," he replied. " Mr. Beresford
is 3. very rich man, and if you were his daughter you would be the
heiress of his wealth. Such an inheritance would open all the pos-
sibilities of the world to you ; so how could I, a comparatively poor,
and certainly an obscure man, have asked such a brilliant princess
to consider any life which I have to offer? "
"Are you so proud, then," she reproached him, " that you
would not be willing to share a great inheritance with me?"
I9I4-] THE TESTING OF ISABEL 625
" I would rather share anything else," he told her, " and there
is a duty which .1 shall be glad and proud to share with you. Isabel,
dearest, may I tell you about it may I tell you about your father? "
Again she shrank involuntarily. " Is it necessary? " she asked.
" It is very necessary," Wyverne answered, " for he, too, has a
gift for you the gift of an opportunity not only to fulfill a duty,
but to bestow a great happiness."
She glanced at him with a frightened expression. " You had
better tell me exactly what you mean," she said.
And then he told her. She listened silently, but he went on.
As he described the desolate condition of the man to whom he had
been obliged to communicate the terrible sentence of medical science,
he saw a softening of her attitude of resistance; and when he fin-
ished his story, she looked up with her eyes again misted with tears.
" How sad ! " she said. "And will he never be able to walk
again ? "
" Never. The case is quite hopeless. But he may live for
years."
" That makes it the more dreadful."
" So he feels, for he is alone in the world : he has nobody or
he thought he had nobody to take care of him."
There was a pause, in which from the ball-room distant allur-
ing strains of dance music reached them, before Wyverne said
urgently :
" Isabel, darling, don't you see the duty which is before, not
you alone, but before us? "
" You think," she murmured, " that we should take care of
him?"
" Could I think anything else ? Could you think anything
else? And it is not only an imperative duty, but, as I've already
said, a great opportunity for love and service. Do you not feel
it so?"
Under the magnetism of his eyes, his voice, the influence of his
stronger nature, and above all of her own love, the girl was con-
scious of being lifted on a wave of emotion, which seemed to make
all things possible, even such a sacrifice as was asked of her.
" Yes," she replied, " I do feel it. Of course he is my father,
and and I was very fond of him when I was a little child. I
remember that. And with you to help me I shall be strong enough
for anything. But I couldn't do it without you, for mamma would
never consent to my seeing him. She has often said so."
TOL. xcviu. 40
626 THE TESTING OF ISABEL [Feb.,
" Your mother has no right to object," Wyverne answered
with involuntary sternness. " He is not only your father, with a
claim upon you which nothing can set aside, but she should remem-
ber that she has had you for fifteen years, and that the need of the
man who was her husband is very great."
"And my fa that is, Mr. Beresford will not like it," Isabel
went on. " Mamma has told me that when he adopted me, it was
on the condition that my own father should never make any claim
on me."
" Your father remembers that, and he has made none : it is I
who make it for him," Wyverne said. " It is I who offer you, to-
gether with my love and help, the opportunity to bless an existence
which is as sad and desolate as existence could well be. And it
seems more than a mere chance that this opportunity has come to
you on the day of your majority, the day when, free of all control,
you may choose for yourself what appears to you best in life.
Isabel, will you choose him and me? "
Once more, through the force of that poignant appeal, the great
wave of emotion lifted Isabel up, and gave her a glimpse of ideals
different indeed from any that had ever been presented to her.
And something in her nature responded to their call. Ease, pleas-
ure, prosperity these objects of habitual desire receded before
the austere but beautiful vision of love, service and duty, and
Wyverne felt how well his optimism was justified when she turned
to him, crying:
" I choose you you and him ! "
III.
It was a very triumphant interne who stood by the bedside of
the paralytic patient next morning, and told him of Isabel's decision.
" But I never doubted what her choice would be," he declared
joyously. " That is, of course, as far as you were concerned. It
would have been tremendously presumptuous to have had no doubt
of what her answer to me would be, but it's all right. She has
promised to marry me, and together we'll take care of you."
The blue eyes that were so like Isabel's gazed up at the young
man with an expression of wonder and gratitude which he never
forgot. Then Ferguson held out a wasted hand.
" Congratulations mean something in a case like this," he said.
" I was sorry for you when you went away yesterday, for I didn't
1914.] THE TESTING OF ISABEL 627
believe the girl would ever make such a choice. I couldn't believe it,
and it seems almost incredible now it seems too good, far too
good to be true ! "
In his happiness Wyverne laughed aloud.
" You'll find that it isn't too good to be true when I bring her
to you, as I am to do to-day," he said. " The appointment is made,
and after I have had an interview with Mrs. Beresford which is
a mere matter of courtesy Isabel will come with me to see you.
Don't doubt it ! " he cried quickly, as a look expressive of such doubt
sprang into the eyes regarding him. " Her mother will have no
power to prevent her doing what she has promised to do."
" Her mother will certainly try to prevent it," Ferguson said
with conviction.
" Let her try ! " Wyverne replied, in a tone of superb confi-
dence. " I have Isabel's promise, and Isabel will keep her promise.
Be sure of that. And now we must have your room made ready
for such a joyful occasion. I've ordered a quantity of flowers,
and I'll ask one of the nurses to come and arrange them. Every-
thing must be en fete for Isabel's coming, you know."
:< Yes, yes," Ferguson assented eagerly, adding in a voice
husky with emotion, " I don't know how to thank you it's all
beyond thanks! I can hardly believe that such good luck should
come to me at last."
' You'll believe it when Isabel stands here beside you,"
Wyverne told him again.
" Yes, I'll believe it then," the other replied, with a possibly
unconscious note of incredulity in his voice.
When a few hours later Wyverne drove out to the Beresford
mansion to keep his appointment with Isabel, he was not surprised
to be shown into a room apart from the magnificent reception suite,
where almost immediately not Isabel, but Mrs. Beresford came to
him.
He had known that, sooner or later, he must reckon with the
latter, and he was not sorry that the encounter should occur without
delay, though he entertained no doubt of the nature of this en-
counter. If he had felt any such doubt, his first glance at Mrs.
Beresford, as she entered the room, would have ended it. For
while he had never been more struck by the splendidly matured
beauty of the woman, nor by her air of arrogant assurance as of
one who has never known any other atmosphere than that of adula-
tion and power he was even more strongly impressed by the
628 THE TESTING OF ISABEL [Feb.,
dominant strength of will which her whole, personality breathed,
as well as by the disapproval and indignation that were unmis-
takably to be read in the eyes which met his own.
" My daughter tells me, Dr. Wyverne," she began at once,
" that you have made a proposal to her, which I must speak
frankly I regard as extremely presumptuous."
" I'm sorry that you consider it presumptuous," Wyverne
answered calmly, " but I am glad to say that your daughter did not
regard it in that light. On the contrary, she did me the honor
to accept my proposal."
" She could not have accepted it without my consent," Mrs.
Beresford declared sharply. "And that consent, you may under-
stand at once, I will never give."
" Waiving the point of the necessity for your consent, and I
think you must be aware that there is no necessity for it," Wyverne
replied with the same calmness, " I should like to ask what is your
objection to me as a suitor for your daughter? "
" I am astonished that you should find it necessary to ask,"
she returned. " My daughter is a great heiress, and you are a
hospital interne. What have you to offer that is worth her accept-
ance that it would not be madness for her to accept? "
The dark eyes regarding her so quietly, had in them now a
look before which even her angry insolence quailed a little.
" I suppose it is natural that you should rate wealth above
everything else in the world, Mrs. Beresford," the young man said
in a tone of cool contempt ; " but it might be well to remember that
there are a considerable number of people who do not agree with
you. Such people would tell you that I offer your daughter a
name which is of the best, a social position which cannot be ques-
tioned, and the assurance of sufficient means for ease and independ-
ence. According to your standard, this may be little, but accord-
ing to hers "
" It is quite as little ! " Mrs. Beresford interrupted. " You are
very much mistaken if you think otherwise. The wealth at which
you sneer rules the world, and my daughter has been brought up
to expect all that it can give, and especially that the man she
marries shall bring her advantages to equal the millions she will
inherit from her father."
She was sorry for having uttered the last words when she
saw the smile that came to Wyverne's lips.
"Are you not mistaken? " he asked, as he had asked Isabel the
1914.] THE TESTING OF ISABEL 629
night before. " Your daughter will inherit no millions as her
father's heiress, for her father, as she has probably told you,
lies an impoverished and hopeless invalid in the hospital to which
I am attached."
" She has told me that you have had the audacity to make an
appeal to her on behalf of the man of whom you speak," Mrs.
Beresford answered, with no further effort to restrain her intense
anger. " It is a shameful attempt to influence her in favor of one
who deserves nothing from her, who gave her up, and bound him-
self never to make any claim on her when I divorced him."
" He has made no claim," Wyverne assured her, as he had
already assured Isabel. "It was I who told her of him; I who
offered her the opportunity to answer a call of duty, and give a
daughter's love and care to the man who has been deprived of both
for so long, and whose need is now very great."
" However great it may be, he has no claim upon her," Mrs.
Beresford reiterated, " and it is impossible that she should have
anything to do with him."
"Why is it impossible?" Wyverne inquired with unmoved
coolness.
" Because," she flashed back at him, " the one condition which
my husband made when he adopted her as his daughter, was that
her father should never make any claim upon her, and that she,
on her part, should never have any communication with him. This
was distinctly understood by all concerned."
" Very likely," Wyverne said, " but Isabel, although deeply
concerned, was not a party to the compact, and is free to repudiate
it."
" If she does, she will forfeit all that Beresford can do for her
he is a man who never changes his mind or breaks his word
and she will lose such an inheritance as few women have ever had
a chance to gain or lose."
" Well," the young man had grown a little pale, but had not
lost his composure " the point at issue is sufficiently clear : in the
first place you decline to allow your daughter to marry me "
" I absolutely decline. I have told her that I will not consider
your proposal for a moment."
" And, in the second place," he went on calmly, " you refuse to
permit her to have any communication with her father, and threaten
her with the loss of a great inheritance if she insists upon going
to fulfill her duty to him."
630 THE TESTING OF ISABEL [Feb.,
" You put the matter exactly," Mrs. Beresford told him, " and
I assure you that no cant about duty will have any effect upon me."
" I can believe that very easily," he said, with a significance
which was not lost on her. "And now " he rose as he spoke
" I will, with your permission, ring and request Isabel's presence."
" You may do so, if you like," Mrs. Beresford said, " but if you
have any regard for her, you will spare her a painful scene. I have
explained everything to her, and she is fully convinced that she
cannot afford either to marry you, or to see her father. Her choice
is made ; and I told her that I would make it plain to you that there
was nothing to be gained by seeing her."
" Nevertheless," Wyverne said firmly, " I shall not leave the
house without seeing her."
" In that case by all means ring the bell," said Mrs. Beresford.
It was several minutes after the message requesting her pres-
ence had been sent, that the door of the room opened and Isabel
appeared.
But an Isabel so changed from the girl of the night before, so
pale, so shrinking, so bereft of all brightness, that Wyverne's heart
went out to her in an overwhelming impulse of love and pity, for
he saw how she had gone down under the influence of the imperious
nature that had ruled her so long. He made a great stride forward
and took her hands.
" Isabel, dear love," he said, " I have come for you, as I prom-
ised, and your father is waiting for you waiting so eagerly, so
anxiously, Isabel ! on his bed of pain in the hospital. I don't for
a moment believe that you are going to be so cruel as to disappoint
him and me. I have a taxicab waiting at the door. Come, we will
go at once ! "
He tried to lead her forward, but Isabel drew back, and looked
up at him with eyes darkened by pain.
" Haven't you been told ? " she asked, almost in a whisper.
" I I can't go. It would mean so much "
" It would mean closing the door of this house, and all your
life as it has been, behind you," her mother's clear tones cut in.
" Make no mistake about that. If you go with the man who is
urging you so selfishly, you cannot come back to your place here."
" Come to a better place, Isabel," the man so spoken of en-
treated her. " Come where love will be given you in fullest meas-
ure to make amends for all that you lose here ; where you can find
happiness in making happiness not only for me, whose whole life
1914.] THE TESTING OF ISABEL 631
will be devoted to you, but for the desolate man who is waiting for
you your father, Isabel, your father! "
But even as he spoke his heart sank, for Isabel drew her hands
out of his clasp, and shrank still farther away from him.
" He gave me up," she said, " and I I don't think I am bound
to ruin my whole life, and and give up so much for his sake.
It it is too great a sacrifice. If you loved me, you would not
ask it."
" It is because I love you that I ask it," Wyverne told her.
" It is because this is the crucial test of your life. You must
choose to-day between the wealth you have been brought up to
worship, and the duty which calls you with all the force of nature,
and of the law of God. I put myself aside: I make no plea of my
love for you, and I will not remind you of your love for me; but
I implore you, for your own soul's sake, to come with me to your
father ! It will be an act worthy of the woman I believe you to be,
and that woman will never regret it. Isabel, come ! "
Insistent, compelling, fighting, as he had said, for her soul,
and unconsciously employing all the force of his will to influence
her, his voice pleaded with a passion so irresistible that, out of the
very desperation of her weakness, Isabel found strength to answer
him. Leaning back against the wall, to which she had retreated,
like a creature at bay, she lifted her pain-shadowed eyes again to his
face, and spoke :
" The woman you have in your mind might not regret such
a sacrifice," she said; "but I am not that woman; and I would
regret it. I know that if I listened to you if I let myself listen
you could make me do what you think I ought to do; but I also
know that after it was done I should spend my life in being sorry
for it. I'm not strong enough to give up everything I've had and
cared for up to this time, to go and lead a narrow existence even
with you, and take care of a man who is nothing to me. I know
this so please go away, and leave me alone ! "
It was like a child's piteous appeal to be relieved from a strain
too great for frail strength and undisciplined energies, and for a
moment Wyverne stood silent, looking at her with a concentrated
gaze which seemed to pierce and gauge all the weakness of spirit
and body. Then, as if recognizing the utter uselessness of further
appeal, he said quietly :
" Since you desire, I will go and leave you alone."
And turning, he walked out of the room.
632 THE TESTING OF ISABEL [Feb.,
In accordance with the directions he had given before leaving
the hospital, Wyverne found the small chamber in which the paraly-
tic patient lay transformed from its usual bare whiteness into a
bower of bloom and beauty by the masses of flowers which met him
with their fragrance as he entered. And in the midst of this wealth
of blossoms, of color and perfume, the man who lay on the narrow
white bed looked up with a pathetic light of expectation on his
haggard face which struck the young man like a blow. He saw the
light fade before he could utter a word : indeed words seemed alto-
gether unnecessary to explain to Ferguson why he had returned
alone. Nevertheless, pausing at the foot of the bed, and clutching
the brass rail as if to steady himself, he said :
" You see that, after all, I was mistaken. Isabel has failed
us. Her mother's influence you were right about that was too
great to allow her to come. Left to herself, I think she would have
wished to do so, but when she was confronted with the necessity of
choosing between you and the Beresford fortune, it was too much."
" Of course it was too much," Ferguson agreed quickly. " I've
known it all the time, though I was foolish enough to hope differ-
ently after your visit this morning. But it was like hoping for a
miracle; since it surely would have been a miracle if Isabel had
given up the Beresford fortune to come to me ! I couldn't expect
it; I didn't expect it really; but I'm sorry for you, who were so
confident of her. Only out of my experience let me tell you, that
it's better to have tested her now than later."
The eyes of the two met; and under the deep significance of
the look of the man who spoke out of his experience, Wyverne felt
himself constrained to say :
" Yes, it is better now than later."
THE ECCLESIA ANGLICANA.
FOR WHAT DOES SHE STAND?
BY ABBOT GASQUET, O.S.B.
HAT one Anglican bishop should publicly ask another
what their particular form of religious belief really
is, must be considered a sign of the times in which we
live. The Open Letter, which the Bishop of Zanzi-
bar addressed to His Lordship of St. Albans, is a
human document of melancholy interest, and a revelation of the
doctrinal chaos at present existing in the communion to which the
two prelates belong. To a Catholic accustomed to an absolutely rigid
unity of belief, it is difficult, of course, to grasp the position of a
religious body without a definite doctrinal basis, in which, ap-
parently, anyone can believe, or not believe, what he pleases upon
the most vital matters. Of course, on the Protestant basis of private
judgment in all matters of faith, and by the exclusion of any
authoritative teacher, there would appear to be no reason why any
two members should agree upon any single point of the Christian
faith Quot homines, tot sententur.
The object of the Open Letter is stated with complete frankness
on the first page. The Bishop of Zanzibar as a Missionary Bishop
addressed the Bishop of St. Albans, as one of the Anglican bishops
in England, who is connected especially with the Missionary So-
ciety which sent him out to convert the heathens and Mohammedans
in East Africa, " to submit to you, as a representative prelate of the
Ecdesia Anglicana, and as a most zealous supporter of her foreign
missions, the thesis that at the present time, having regard to her ex-
ceedingly ehaotic system of truth, she is entirely unfit to send mis-
sionaries to heathen or Mohammedan lands."
As missionaries the Bishop of Zanzibar sees that they have been
sent to give the heathen the faith of Canterbury; but his difficulty
is to determine what Canterbury does teach, and " if once the
Church at the base gets into any difficulties of self-expression, the
missionaries in the front are practically giving their lives to a lost
cause." He adds : " It must be confessed that the most prominent
feature in the present picture is just this difficulty of self-expres-
634 THE ECCLESIA ANGLICAN A [Feb.,
sion. The Church at home, to use a homely and un-theological
name, is in a state of mental chaos : it is more than ever talkative,
but what it expresses is anything rather than its true self."
It may be open to doubt whether the Bishop himself has not set
up an ideal of the Anglican Church which is not supported by its
history. But, be this as it may, he certainly has our sympathy in
his manly protest against the inroad of modernistic theological
thought being allowed in the Established Church, without protest or
prohibition from those who claim to be Christian bishops. In re-
gard, however, to his second point, namely, that what has hap-
pened lately in Africa shows that the Ecclesia Anglicana is bent
upon a mission " to Protestantize the world," whereas she should
" Catholicize " the heathen world, it is to be feared that the history
of the Anglican Church is against him both as to theory and fact;
and if, with prayer for light, he will look into that history, his
honest mind will say to him, to use his own words, " I for my part
have no longer place or lot within her borders."
But to return to the substance of this Open Letter. The
Bishop's indictment of the Church to which he still belongs is sup-
ported by a detailed statement of three " incidents," as he calls them,
which date "within the past year," and which, in his opinion, bear
out " that the Ecclesia Anglicana is content to have lost her power
of self-expression, so that we out here can no longer appeal to her
Voice or rest upon her Witness. She has no Voice : she offers no
single Witness."
In proof of this the Bishop of Zanzibar points to a book called
Foundations, published by seven Oxford men, under the editorship
of Mr. Streeter, the Bishop of St. Albans' chaplain. A good deal
has been heard of this publication, and many protests have been
uttered by members of the Church of England against the Mod-
ernistic theological principles advocated in its pages. Amongst
other objectionable features, the authors treat such questions as the
necessity of the Episcopate in the Christian Church; the institution
by Christ of any Church at all and of any sacraments; the un-
reliability of the Bible to put it mildly as a witness; the Res-
urrection of our Lord from the dead, and of course His divinity, as
open questions which may be accepted or rejected by members of
the Anglican communion.
He points out that these serious opinions, destructive of the
very foundations of the Christian faith, have in late years fre-
quently been advanced by clergymen, and even by high dignitaries of
1914.] THE ECCLESIA ANGLIC AN A 635
the Established Church, without eliciting from the official heads of
this Church any serious protest, individual or corporate. But "what
an examining chaplain, or the principal of a theological college, can
tolerate in a book of which he is a joint author, he is bound to
accept as within the limits of orthodoxy from his ordination candi-
dates." Foundations, therefore, " is a revelation of the official
attitude of the bishops implicated towards heresy and un-orthodox
speculation."
The only excuse for this attitude of the authorities of this
Church, which the Bishop of Zanzibar states but will not accept
as adequate, is that "to save confusion and schism she (the Ec-
clesia Anglicana'} allows men to remain within her communion
who on the continent (i. e., in the Catholic Church) would have been
driven out." In other words, in the English Church people
may believe what they like, even as regards the essential elements of
the Christian religion. If the Anglican Established Church, the
Bishop of Zanzibar says in substance, is a witness of truth, surely
her bishops are called upon to speak out, and condemn plain heresy
in her clergy, unless they wish to let the world think they will
tolerate any and every opinion subversive of Christianity, in order
to keep men within her already too comprehensive fold.
Passing for a moment over the second " incident," which has
compelled the Bishop of Zanzibar to issue his indictment against
the present rulers of the Ecclesia Anglicana, it may be convenient
first to take the third point of his Open Letter. This, he says,
" bears out my contention of our unfitness, as a Church, for mis-
sionary work." For his part in editing the volume of pronounced
modernist type known as Foundations, Mr. Streeter, the Bishop of
St. Albans' chaplain, was requested by His Lordship to resign his
chaplaincy " privately and quietly." Of this action the Bishop of
Zanzibar writes :
This step on your part, in so far as it has become known, has
been heartily approved by all who hold the faith. A priest
who denies the bodily Resurrection of our Lord; regards the
Christ as the last of the Jewish prophets; dates His historic
life from His baptism, disparages the trustworthiness of the
Gospel record, except in so far as he has himself corrected and
annotated it, challenges the infallibility of our Lord and Master,
and accepts editorial responsibility for many more strange and
erroneous doctrines, may well be asked privately to surrender
the responsible office of selecting candidates for the Catholic
636 THE ECCLESIA ANGLIC AN A [Feb.,
ministry. It is to many of us surprising that your Lordship
did not make public the admirable action that you took.
This measure of " mercy and judgment " on the part of the
Bishop of St. Albans, is turned into " utter bewilderment " in the
mind of his brother bishop, when he contrasts it with the punish-
ment awarded to another priest, Dr. Langford James, almost at the
same time. This latter was " inhibited from ministering " in the
diocese of St. Albans, because " he had invoked our Lady and two
other saints in one of the churches in that diocese. And, fur-
ther, the same bishop, who had treated with conspicuous leniency his
own chaplain, who had thrown discredit upon the fundamental
teachings of the Christian faith, " delated " this other clergyman
" to his own diocesan, as an offender against church law and Catho-
lic truth," and announced his " refusal both of ordination and
jurisdiction to any who practise these invocations."
No wonder that the Bishop of Zanzibar confesses his bewilder-
ment, and asks himself on what possible principle the Bishop of St.
Albans has brought himself to discriminate between the actions of
the two clergymen who have been thus dealt with so differently.
Had you measured both priests by the standard of antiquity
[he writes], Dr. Langford James would have been reproved for
holding an unauthorized service and commended for his piety;
while Mr. Streeter would have been publicly condemned and
inhibited.
Had you measured them both by the present faith and prac-
tice of the whole episcopate of East and West the Doctor
would, again, have been at once reproved for a technical illegal-
ity, and excused for his devotion, while your chaplain would
have been forbidden to enter your churches.
For this strange mode of action on the part of one claiming
to be a Christian bishop, the Bishop of Zanzibar protests that he
will not be a party to toleration of a " new theology " which strikes
at the very root principles of the Christian religion, nor to the
" complete condemnation of a practice so Catholic, so beautiful, and
so profoundly useful," as devotion to the Mother of God and the
saints.
And now, to turn to the second " incident," which called forth
this Open Letter from the Bishop of Zanzibar, and which really
forms the main item of the indictment thus made by one bishop of
the Anglican Church against other bishops of the same communion,
I9I4-] THE ECCLESIA ANGLICAN A 637
and for the condemnation of whose action, as plainly heretical, he
demands the sentence of the constituted authorities of the Church
of England. In June, 1913, a Conference of Protestant Missions,
with the Church Missionary Society, was held at a place called
Kikuyu in British East Africa. The main object of this meeting
was apparently to endeavor to arrange a common basis of mission-
ary enterprise among the various Protestant bodies at work in that
part of the world. It was recognized that much energy was lost,
and much " overlapping " of the work of these societies was
caused, by their want of coordination, and the proposal appears to
have been to establish what is described as a system of " interde-
nominational " compact, whereby certain districts were assigned
to individual missionary societies, in which the other societies were
to undertake not to energize. Thus, one district was to be content
with the form of Christianity proposed by the English Church;
another that by the Presbyterians; another that by the Baptists,
and so on. To us Catholics it seems inconceivable that any such
arrangement could have been seriously suggested. For it would
at once appear that if the Episcopalian form of church government
was, as may be supposed, the only true and certain form established
by Christ, those who held this could hardly hand over a special
district to a body teaching otherwise, and what to them must be false
doctrine in so serious a matter. And the same must be said of
all the many differences which divide the various sects which call
themselves Protestant.
The doctrinal basis of the proposed Federation involves the
acknowledgment of the Bible as the rule of faith and practice; the
acceptance of the Apostles' and Nicene Creed as a general expres-
sion of belief, and "the vital importance of belief in the atoning death
of our Lord as the ground of forgiveness." Pending the formation
of this new Church, the two bishops and the heads of four Prot-
estant missionary societies have pledged themselves :
(a) To recognize common membership between federated
Churches ;
(b) To establish a common form of church organization;
(c) To admit to any pulpit a preacher recognized by his own
Church ;
(d) To admit to communion a recognized member of any
other Church ;
(e) To draw up and follow common courses of instruction
both for candidates for baptism and candidates for ordination.
638 THE ECCLESIA ANGLICAN A [Feb.,
At the end of the conference to cement this proposed union,
the Anglican Bishop of Mombasa " celebrated the Holy Communion
in the Presbyterian church, and admitted to communion as many of
the delegates of Protestant societies as cared to present themselves."
The Bishop of Zanzibar protests energetically against both
the proposed doctrinal basis which is to unite the various Protest-
ant missions in East Africa with the Anglican Episcopal Church,
and against the public manifestation of doctrines which would fol-
low from the communion service celebrated for Presbyterians, etc.,
by the Bishop of Mombasa. He points out, amongst other things,
that the "concordat" of the sects does not contain many points which
he considers of Catholic faith. These naturally have been thrown
over in the process of arriving at the greatest common measure of
doctrine, which would be accepted by all the contracting parties.
The Open Letter fell like a bombshell among the adherents of
the Anglican communion in England. Letters from men of posi-
tion, representing all the various shades of doctrine existing in the
Established Church, have appeared in the daily and weekly papers.
For the most part the general feeling would seem to be that the
Open Letter is a mistake, for there is no general desire to clear up
the ambiguity with which the formularies of the Anglican Church
have been framed. According to the New York Times of Sunday,
January 4, 1914, the controversy " has assumed alarming propor-
tions," and " on many sides fears are expressed that the controversy
may result in a schism which will rend the Church in two."
The most serious question raised by the admission of the
Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and others to communion by
the Bishop of Mombasa, is whether the Anglican Church is Episco-
pal to the exclusion of the orders and sacraments of the non-
Episcopal bodies? A letter to the London Times (December 13,
1913) from the Bishop of Durham claims that the history of the
Anglican Church shows that the ministry given in non-Episcopal
bodies has been admitted by many of the great divines of that
body. He cites :
Bancroft, who carried his colleagues, including Andrewes,
with him in consecrating Presbyterian ministers bishops for Scot-
land in 1609; Andrewes, who claims "our government to be by
divine right, yet it follows not that a Church cannot stand
without it;" Ussher, who says (to Du Moulin), after a solemn
assertion of the greatness of episcopacy, that he is prepared
" to receive the Blessed Sacrament at the hands of the French
1914- ] THE ECCLESIA ANGLIC AN A 639
ministers if he were at Charenton," loving and honoring the
(Huguenot) Church of France " as a true member of the Church
Universal," and Cosin, asserting in his will " his union of soul
with all the orthodox, which I desire chiefly to be understood
of Protestants and the best Reformed Churches."
To this witness of the views of Anglican divines may be added
the case of Bishop Hooker, " the judicious," who received the
sacraments from Saravia, a Calvinist minister, and not an ordained
clergyman of the Established Church. And, although it is true
that since 1662 no one who has not received episcopal orders can
legally hold a benefice in the Church of England, instances have
not been wanting in high places where the validity of Presbyterian
and other orders have been apparently allowed without question.
The English sovereign attended Presbyterian services, so it is said,
when in Scotland, and comparatively recently one of the Anglican
bishops invited any member of any of the various Protestant bodies
who might wish to come and receive communion on a special occa-
sion in his cathedral.
That this event in the hitherto unknown settlement of Kikuyu
has called forth special searching of hearts, is in some measure at
least due to the bold protest contained in the Bishop of Zanzibar's
Open Letter. It has raised the true issue : is the Church of England
Catholic or Protestant? Dean Hensley Henson, in a letter on the
controversy, says that the appeal now is to the English people
on the question as to whether the English Church shall remain
Protestant or become Roman Catholic. This is no doubt an exag-
gerated statement of the issue, because the history of the past
three centuries has proved beyond question that English churchmen
of whatever school of thought are not logical in dealing with relig-
ious matters. But that the case is serious, and is regarded as such
by both sides, may be judged by the communication of Lord Hali-
fax, the respected leader of the High Church Union, who says : " I
pray to God that the controversy may not occasion a schism which
shall rend the Church in two. The dangers are only too obvious,
and can hardly be exaggerated. They involve consequences affect-
ing not only the Church of England, but the whole of Christendom."
The Bishop of Oxford, too, thinks that there never was a time when
the cohesion of the Anglican Establishment was more seriously
threatened than by this controversy; and he concludes that unless
the authorities of that Church can speedily arrive at some statement
640 THE ECCLESIA ANGLICAN A [Feb.,
of principles, which will pull it together again, it will go on the
certain way to destruction.
To us Catholics it may seem impossible that any body of men
holding diametrically opposite opinions on important doctrinal is-
sues, can possibly agree on any basis which will be satisfactory to
both sides. What they can do, however, is to endeavor to cover up
the fires of a raging controversy and to do what they have done
often before in their history, " agree to differ," even though the
issues would appear to us to be vital. " Compromise " on religious
truth has saved the " comprehensive " character of the English
Church often enough, and this note of that Church will probably
be invoked again at this time of danger. The London Times in an
article (December 27, 1913) puts this aspect of the controversy
to its readers.
It may be counted one of the distinctive, as well as one of
the most honorable, characteristics of the Church of England
that it always has been able to find a place for men who hold di-
vergent opinions on such questions as those raised at Kikuyu.
Both sides in the present controversy may claim to be true to the
Ecclesia Anglicana, and so long as they recognize the rights of
each other, and refrain from any attempt at mutual exclusion,
nothing but gain can result from a frank discussion of their
differences.
Can it be possible that anyone can believe that our Lord came
down on earth to establish a Church which has no voice to de-
clare which of two opposite doctrines is true, and no authority to
speak in His name ? We Catholics can at least thank God that this
is not our conception of the Church of Christ which is to us " the
pillar and groundwork of the truth."
THE EDICT OF POPE CALLISTUS.*
BY BERTRAND L. CONWAY, C.S.P.
N the opening chapter of Tertullian's book On Modesty
(De Pudicitia), we read : " I hear that there has been
an Edict set forth, and a peremptory one too. The
Pontifex Maximus that is, the Bishop of bishops
issues an Edict: I remit the sins both of adultery
and fornication to such as have discharged (the requirements of)
penance."
Ever since the seventeenth century scholars have argued about
the meaning of this Edict. It was once ascribed to Pope Zephy-
rinus,f but since the discovery of the Philosophumena of Hippolytus
in 1851,1 all agree in attributing it to Pope Callistus (A. D. 220).
Some maintain that this decree evidenced a profound revolution
in the Church's penitential discipline, which had hitherto excom-
municated in perpetuity all baptized Christians guilty of the three
capital sins of murder, apostasy, and impurity.
Others hold that the Edict merely sanctioned the traditional
penitential discipline which was rejected by the Montanists of the
third century, and that it attained undue prominence on account
of the bitter attacks of Tertullian and Hippolytus.||
The Abbe d'Ales, in the present treatise, is a firm believer
in the second theory, which he has defended before in the pages
of the Revue du Clerge Frangais,^ and in his two works on The
Theology of Tertullian and The Theology of Hippolytus.** While
admitting that the controversy has a dogmatic side, inasmuch as
it concerns the historical exercise of the power of the keys, he de-
clares it to be primarily an historical question, to be decided only
after a careful consideration of the texts of the first three centuries.
Granting that the Church possessed the power of pardon, did she
*L'Edit de Calliste ; tude sur les Origines de la Penitence Chretienne. By
Adhemar d'Ales. Paris : Gabriel Beauchesne. 7 frs. 50.
tPetavius, De Ptenitentia publica, lib. 2, ch. ii., p. 244 (A. D. 1644).
t" He (Callistus) was the first to forgive men the sins of impurity, by declaring
that he forgave all sins." Philos. ix. 12.
Petavius, Funk, Boudinhon, Batiffol, Tixeront, Pohle, Vacandard, and Rauschen.
IIMorinus, Monceaux, Seeburg, Esser, and Stufler.
HVol. i., pp. 337-365-
**La Theologie de Tertullien; La Theologie de Saint Hippolyte.
VOL. xcvill. 41
642 THE EDICT OF POPE CALLISTUS [Feb.,
or did she not, for weighty reasons, refrain from exercising this
power in regard to capital crimes? Such a problem cannot be
solved a priori, as some unreasonable opponents of the historical
method maintain. As Dr. Pohle well says, " We strongly insist
upon the dogmatic theologian bowing before the facts of history,
even though they appear extraordinary, and seeking to acquire a
better understanding of the spirit of the primitive Church. Noth-
ing could be more unfair than to judge the past by the present.
Antiquity must be viewed in its historical setting and judged in its
own light."*
In Chapter II. the Abbe d'Ales proves that our Savior gave the
pardoning power the power to bind and loose to St. Peter, when
he appointed him head of the apostolic body;f that the power
granted to JohnJ and to the other Apostles was merely an extension
of the power granted to St. Peter, the foundation rock on which
the Church was to be built. || The authenticity of these texts is main-
tained against those rationalistic critics, who arbitrarily place them
even as late as the beginning of the third century.^
He next discusses those Scriptural texts which are said to
deny the Church's power of pardoning all sins. In St. Matthew's
Gospel, our Savior said to the Jews who refused to admit His
miraculous power : " He that shall speak against the Holy Ghost,
it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world nor in the world
to come."** A careful study of the context will make it clear that
there was no question here of any limitation being put upon
the pardoning power of the Church. The unpardonable sin was
the Pharisees' obstinate denial of all divine power: that hatred of
God which closed the eyes to the light, and rendered the soul in-
capable of pardon. " The sin of the Pharisees was more of an
attitude of mind than a particular action ; they persistently despised
Him, Who was the Way, the Truth and the Life."f f
The passages from the Epistle to the Hebrews,$$ which are
frequently quoted to prove the existence of unpardonable sins,
do not, as Harnack maintains, picture the primitive Church as
" a society of saints, entirely opposed to the principle of penance,
at least for grave sins, and consequently closed to repentant Chris-
tians." On the contrary, the author of this letter was writing to
*Lekrbuch der Dogmatik, vol. iii., p. 404. tMatt. xvi. 19.
JJohn xx. 23. SMatt. xviii. 18. IIMatt. xvi. 18,
%Resch, Aussercanonische Paralleltexte, vol. ii., pp. 187-196.
**Matt. xii. 32. ttPage 26. ttHeb. vi. 4-8; x. 26-27; xii. 16-17.
der Dogmengeschichte, vol. i., p. 439.
1914.] THE EDICT OF POPE CALLISTUS 643
converts who were inclined to make little of their baptism, and who
needed strengthening against all thought of relapsing into Judaism.
The apostasy he denounced was " a persistent and obstinate apos-
tasy."*
When St. John speaks of " the sin unto death "f and denies
those guilty of it the benefit of Christian prayers, he has in mind only
those who have been excommunicated for grave sins.J The chil-
dren of the devil, by their persistence in sin, render themselves
incapable of pardon.
The New Testament clearly teaches that the Apostles con-
sidered their pardoning power unlimited. St. Peter does not de-
spair of Simon Magus, but says to him : " Do penance, therefore,
for this thy wickedness ; and pray to God, that perhaps this thought
of thy heart may be forgiven thee."|| St. Paul in his second letter
to Corinth pardons the sinner whom he had excommunicated in
the first.ff St. James,** St. Jude,ft and St. John,$$ are con-
tinually calling upon sinners to repent, and renew their first fervor.
They certainly knew nothing of a Church composed solely of saints.
The oldest witness for the Church's penitential discipline is
Hermas, the writer of that obscure and mysterious book known as
the Shepherd. Very little is known about the author. Origen makes
him a companion of St. Paul, although Hennas' picture of the
Roman Church certainly does not portray the apostolic age.|||| The
Muratorian fragment, with greater probability, declares him a
brother of Pope Pius I. (A. D. 139-154). But it is universally ad-
mitted that the book was written during the first half of the second
century, although probably many years elapsed between the writing
of its several parts. It was first placed among the canonical Scrip-
tures ; later on it was given a lower rank, though still read publicly
in the churches. It is certainly an invaluable witness to the Church's
early penitential discipline.
There has always been and there always will be a great deal of
controversy concerning Hermas' actual teaching on penance. Some
scholars like Funkfifl and Rauschen*** think him opposed to all ec-
clesiastical reconciliation after baptism; others likeStahlfff consider
*Page 32. fi John v. 16. JPage 34. fjohn viii. 44.
RActs viii. 22. fl2 Cor. ii. 10. **James iv. 8-9; T. 15-16.
ttjude xxii. 23. tfApoc. ii., iii.
\\Comm. in Rom., x. 31; P. G. xiv., col. 1282. HUPage 52.
WKirchengeschichtliche Abhandlungen, vol. i., p. 171 et seq.
***Evchorist and Penance, pp. 155-159.
Untersuchungen, vol. i., pp. 295, 296.
644 THE EDICT OF POPE CALLISTUS [Feb.,
the Shepherd a manifesto of the anti-Montanistic party. Our author
declares both these hypotheses untenable, the first because it con-
tradicts the very text, and the second because it is founded upon an
anachronism. Montanism was non-existent in Hennas' time.*
His own theory, based on the text of the Third Vision, the
Fourth Commandment, and the Eighth and Ninth Parables is as
follows:f Hermas excludes no sincere penkent from the benefit
of pardon. He repeats this time and time again.J He asserts,
however, that some are so deeply rooted in sin that an extraor-
dinary effort is required on their part to be freed therefrom. It is
a fact that all sinners do not make this effort. Hermas strongly
urges them to repent, and plainly sets forth the malice of those who
refuse to do so. His encratism is not the encratism of Marcion,
but the fervent practice of the Christian law a question of per-
sonal fervor, and not of ecclesiastical discipline. || If he speaks
of apostates being without hope,fl it is only because they persist
in their apostasy and blasphemy. Our author writes : "After as
before baptism, the only certain sign of damnation is absolute
obstinacy in sin.** This is the doctrine of the Gospel a distinct
echo of the anathema pronounced by Christ on the sin against the
Holy Ghost.ft
The Abbe d'Ales asserts against Funk that the idea of the
Church being the dispenser of the pardoning power is clearly set
forth in the pages of the Shepherd, although nowhere does it take
the explicit form of a sacerdotal judgment. $$ The Shepherd,
although not an official document, is of the highest importance,
because it reveals the mind of the Roman clergy of the second
century.
The Church in her universal call to salvation, had ever in
mind the various classes of people who made up her fold. She
judged it inopportune to tell the catechumens in advance all
their chances of rehabilitation, if they sinned after bap-
tism. To baptized Christians who relapsed after bap-
tism into sins like adultery, apostasy or idolatry she offered once,
by means of penance, not only the divine pardon, but pardon
through the ministry of the Church. At the same time she took
good care not to tell them that this penance could be renewed.
*Page 53- tPages 54-97.
tVis. Hi., 3, 3-7. Com. iv., 3, 7. Sim. viii., 6, 6 ; ix. 7, 2 ; 33, 3.
STertullian, Adv. Marc., i., 29; iv., 34. La Thcologie de Tertullien, p. 460
et seq. ||Pag e 99.
ISim. ix., 26. **Vis. iii., pu. 7, 2. ttPage 101. JJPage no.
1914- ] THE EDICT OF POPE CALLISTUS 645
She never despaired of the relapsed sinner, but always taught
that whoever desired to do penance could regain thereby the
grace of God.*
Chapter IV. treats of the other witnesses of the second century
who speak of penance. The Didache^ urges the Christian to con-
fess his sins in church, and not to dare enter the assembly with a
bad conscience. It speaks of a confession of sins preliminary to the
Eucharistic sacrifice, and recommends fraternal correction to bring
about the repentance of sinners.
St. Clement of Rome,? speaking of the sin of discord and
insubordination at Corinth, adjures the guilty ones not to harden
their hearts, but to repent of their iniquity. He declares that their
amendment lies in submission to their priests, the doctors of pen-
ance; that humility is the way of salvation; that the centre of
Christian hope is the fold of Christ, His Church.
St. Ignatius of Antioch writes : " Where there is anger and
division, God is not; but whoever does penance and returns to the
unity of God around the bishop's seat, is assured the grace of Jesus
Christ to deliver him from every bond."||
St. Poly carp characterizes the ministry of the priests as a
ministry of charity and mercy towards all. It requires, he tells us,
" sweetness, impartiality, just judgment, disinterestedness, reserve
in accepting accusations, and slowness in condemning. He prays
God that he may give the apostate priest Valens and his wife
the grace of true repentance.*[
We read in St. Irenaeus** that the Gnostic Cerdon was admitted
to penance about the year 140, and in Tertullianff that Marcion
was received back more than once before his final excommunica-
tion. St. Irenaeus does indeed first assert that eternal flames will
be the lot of every apostate, but a few lines further on he adds that
" hell awaits all those who persevere in their apostasy without
repentance."$$ He does not broach the question of the remission of
sins by an ecclesiastical ministry, but his silence is easily under-
stood, once we remember how little space he gives in his writings
to the doctrine of the sacraments. He makes but two allusions
at most to the sacrament of baptism in his Adversus H<zreses.
*Page 113. t4, M; 14. i; i5, 3-
$Epis. ad. Cor., viii., 5; 1., 5-51; Hi., i; Ivii., i, 2.
Page 117. UPhiladel., iii., i, 2. fiPhilip., vi., i, 2; xi., 1-4.
**Adv. Her., iii., 4 ; P. G. vii., col. 857. ttlte Frees., 30.
%\Adv. Hcer., v., 26, 2; P. G. vii., col. 1194.
5iv., 36, 4; P. G. vii., col. 1093; c. 7.
646 THE EDICT OF POPE CALLISTUS [Feb.,
St. Justin Martyr declares that there is pardon in heaven for all
repentant sinners. In explaining to the Jew Trypho that apostates
will be lost forever unless they repent, he gives us to under-
stand that if they do repent they will be saved.* Dionysius of
Corinthf insists upon all truly repentant sinners even apostates
and heretics being kindly received by the Church. In a word, the
constant witness of the second century Rome, Antioch, Corinth,
and Alexandria tells us that pardon is ever awaiting the repentant
sinner.
The hierarchical Church, grouped about the bishop, is the nor-
mal dispenser of this pardon, and the offer of ecclesiastical recon-
ciliation is an earnest of the offer of divine pardon. The only
legislative measure of the second century that we meet with is the
prohibition of repeating the public penance. The Church's aim in
this strict discipline was to prevent laxity by giving this institution
the form of an unique favor. Hernias is the first witness to this
law, which is solely of ecclesiastical origin. There is no warrant
for it, whatever, in the sacred Scriptures. Introduced probably
under the stress of peculiar circumstances, it gradually acquired
the force of a general law.
The De P&nitentia of Tertullian, which he wrote while a
Catholic, does not mention the existence of any unpardonable sins,
nor does it speak of the pardon of sins independently of the min-
istry of the Church.J In this treatise, Tertullian defines penance,
and insists that it is necessary both for catechumens preparing for
baptism, || and for Christians who have relapsed into sin after
baptism.ll He warns sinners that they can make use of this "second
penance" only once,** and that their interior dispositions of sorrow
must be manifested externally by the performance of the canonical
penance or exomologesis, " the discipline for man's prostration and
humiliation."tf The Church is the dispenser of the second pen-
ance, just as she is of the first penance or baptism. This our author
deduces$$ from Tertullian's own words : " Therefore, while it (the
canonical penance) abases a man, it raises him; while it covers
him with squalor, it renders him more clean; while it accuses, it
excuses; while it condemns it absolves.
In the De Pudicitia, Tertullian, now a Montanist,|||| attacks the
Catholic teaching of his De Panitentia. Angry at the Pope's Edict^fl
*//. Apol., 2; P. G. vi., col. 444. tEusebius, Hist. Eccl., iv., 23, 6.
tPages 151-168. Ch. i. ||Chs. iv.-vi. flChs. vii.-xii. **Ch. v.
ttCh. ix. ttPage 166. Ch. ix. HUCh. ii. UJCh. i.
1914- ] THE EDICT OF POPE CALLISTUS 647
which set forth so clearly the Church's claim to pardon all sinners,
the puritan Tertullian formulates his teaching about the unpardon-
able sins,* not as an appeal to the original tradition of the Church,
as some Catholic scholars maintain, but as a protest of " the spotless
young Church of the paraclete " against the old and corrupt Church
of Callistus. f He then proceeds to ridicule bitterly the Church's
claim to pardon all sins, for his heretical sect maintained, " the
Lord alone has power to pardon. $ Tertullian, like all heretics,
denied the divine authority of the Church, and consequently her
power to pardon. Montanism was essentially a multitude without
any organic authority, its members depending entirely on a supposed
direct illumination of the Spirit.
Not very long after the schism of Tertullian in Carthage, the
schism of Hippolytus occurred at Rome. Hippolytus' philippic
against Pope Callistus, the Philosophumena, aims at giving a com-
plete history of all heresies, and paints in the blackest colors pos-
sible "the sect of Callistus," i. e., the Catholic Church. |.| His
viewpoint is different from Tertullian's, inasmuch as he proposes to
give a picture of the whole career of a detested rival, while Ter-
tullian writes apropos of a particular act of the Pope.fl
Hippolytus tells us that Pope Callistus grants pardon to sinners
of every description, especially to those followers of his who,
repenting of their schism, are anxious to return to Catholic unity.
The Pope refuses to depose every bishop guilty of a capital crime,
and admits into the ranks of the clergy men who had been married
two or three times. He gains the applause of the multitude by
flattering their passions contrary to the law of Christ, and encour-
ages them to commit sin by boasting of his power to pardon the
well-disposed. He permits noble women to marry secretly beneath
their rank even slaves against the civil law, and thereby is an
abettor of concubinage and abortion; yet despite all this he con-
tinues to call his party the Catholic Church without the slightest
shame. For the first time in history we find him and his followers
asserting a second baptism, etc.**
We can easily read through the lines of this bitter diatribe.
The schismatic Hippolytus is angry at the defections in his
ranks, and, in the bitterness of his railing, witnesses despite
himself to the universal mercy and pardon which the Catholic
Church at all times accords the repentant sinner. It is most likely
*Ch. ii. tPage 179. tCh. iii. SPage 195.
IPage 217. flPage 219. **Philos. ix. 2.
648 THE EDICT OF POPE CALLISTUS [Feb.,
true that for good reasons Pope Callistus pardoned certain unfaith-
ful clerics, but there is no evidence whatever to show that he abro-
gated the canon law deposing unworthy priests and bishops, which
we know was in existence long after his pontificate. That he ig-
nored the marriage laws of the pagan Emperors Marcus Aurelius
and Commodus,* is greatly to his credit, and proves both his good
sense and kindly Christian heart. We can readily believe that
some of these marriages turned out badly, and that some of the
women alluded to were actually guilty of child murder; but the
lawgiver who legislates honestly for the general good is never con-
sidered responsible for the crimes of every law-breaker.f
The Abbe d'Ales admits, with De Rossi, t that under Pope
Callistus there was a certain softening of the old-time rigorous
discipline in particular cases, and that the anger of Hippolytus
was due to the Pope's clear and uncompromising defence of
the Church's claim to pardon all sinners, no matter what their
crimes. The second baptism that Hippolytus speaks of was prob-
ably the " second penance " of Tertullian, and not re-baptism, for we
learn from one of the immediate successors of Pope Callistus,
Pope Stephen (A. D. 254-257), that re-baptism was always discoun-
tenanced by the Roman Church.
We see, therefore, that Tertullian protested against the Edict of
Callistus because the Pope maintained or at least strongly enforced
the old-time discipline mentioned by Hermas, whereas Hip-
polytus protested against an innovation introduced by the Pope Cal-
listus to flatter men's passions. || Against Funk, the Abbe d'Ales
holds that Tertullian was right. The Edict of Callistus was in no
sense an innovation; it simply evidenced the enforcement of an old
Church law which some Catholic bishops were in danger of forgetting
and which was denied by the heretics and schismatics of the time.fl
Origen was too extraordinary a feacher he may be rightly
styled the Doctor of Penance to escape being claimed by both
parties in the present controversy. Both sides admit that he de-
clared in his book against Celsus (A. D. 246-248) the possible pardon
and reconciliation of all sinners, no matter how grossly they might
have offended.** But some maintain that he changed his opinion
in the fourteen years that elapsed from the time he had written his
De Oratione (A. D. 232-235). ft
*Dig., I., ix., 8; XXIIL, i., 16; ii., 16, 42, 44, 47; XXIV., i. 3.
tPages 216-217. iBullettino, 1866, p. 30. De Pud., 10, 12. II Page 230.
fPage 240. **Contra Celsum., Hi., 51 ; P. G. xl., col. 988.
ttxxviii., 10 ; P. G. xi., 529.
1914.] THE EDICT OF POPE CALLISTUS 649
Origen tells us that " we must not despair of those who weep
for their sins and turn again to God, for the malice of our sinning
does not surpass the goodness of God."* He declares further .that
those who speak of " natures incapable of salvation " are heretics, f
He makes it pretty clear in some of his homilies that it is the
Church which effects the reconciliation of sinners by means of her
system of public penance. " What we do in secret," he writes,
" even by mere words or thoughts, must be published and
declared by him who makes himself the accuser of the sin after
having been the instigator .% Homicide and adultery are not un-
pardonable sins, for the Church can reconcile all sinners without
exception." In the present life, " anyone who has left the assembly
of the people of God can return to it by penance." || Only those
who sin against the Holy Ghost cannot be pardoned; not that the
Holy Ghost is in any way superior to Christ, but because such sin-
ners turn away from the counsels of the Spirit, Who dwells within
them, and obstinately persevere in their sin. Every mortal sin
of a baptized Christian is a sin against the Holy Ghost which merits
eternal damnation, unless he repents of it with all his heart.fl
To be pardoned his sin, the sinner must have recourse to those
who have on earth the power of the keys, i. e., St. Peter and the
bishops who share with him his dignity.** When Origen speaks
of unpardonable sins in his De Oratione, he does not imply that they
are unpardonable in se, but unpardonable on account of the malice of
unrepentant sinners or the laxity of priests who fail to dispose them
to penance.ff He makes a char-cut distinction between slight faults
which are easily pardoned by the divine goodness, and those graver
faults which require public penance. He looks upon every tendency
to relax the severity of the ordinary penitential discipline as a
menace to Christian morality, but he never once doubts the Church's
power to pardon all sins.JJ Whether or not he denied the right
of pardon to sinful bishops and priests is uncertain, although our
author rejects this theory himself. The so-called conflict between
*In Lev. (xvi.), Horn, ix., 8; P. G. xii., col. 520.
tin Jer. (li.), Horn, xxi., 12; P. G. xiii., col. 541.
tin Lev. (v.), Horn, iii., 4; P. G. xii., col. 429.
In Ex. (xv.), Horn, vi., 9; P. G. xii., col. 335.
II In Zech. (xiv. 8), Horn, iii., 8; P. G. xiii., col. 694.
fl/rt. Joan. (i. 3), i. ii., n; P. G. xiv., col. 129. Cf. Poschmann, Die Sunden-
vergebung bci Origenes, p. 7.
**In Matt, (xviii. 18), Horn, xiii., 31; P. G. xiii., col. 1180.
ttxxviii., 8-10; P. G. xi., col. 528.
JJIn Lev. (xxv.), Horn, xv., 2, 3 ; P. G. xii., col. 560.
Holl, Enthusiasmus und Bussegwalt, p. 231.
650 THE EDICT OF POPE CALL1STUS [Feb.,
Origen and Pope Callistus* he considers absolutely imaginary, for,
first, the only writings of Origen which may be dated with any
probability during the pontificate of Pope Callistus, give no evidence
whatever of any such conflict; second, the only treatise in which
some claim to have found a trace of this pretended conflict, is not
contemporaneous with Pope Callistus; and, third, if this treatise is
read together with the other writings of Origen, it takes on a
totally different meaning. It is undoubtedly true that Origen very
frequently anathematized the sin of impurity, and associated it with
the other great sins of idolatry and murder. But he never mani-
fested the slightest intention of protesting against any Papal act
such as the Edict of Callistus. There is good reason to believe
that he knew the De Pudicitia and the Philosophumena, but it never
can be proved that he sympathized in any form with either the
Roman schism or the African heresy. f
The successors of Pope Callistus in the third century held
the same views as he did upon the reconciliation of repentant
sinners. We see this clearly in the question of the lapsi in North
Africa, where so many had denied the faith during the persecution
of Decius. The Roman clergy wrote two letters to St. Cyprian, |
urging him not to admit them to communion until they had
undergone penance ; but neither Rome nor Carthage ques-
tioned for a moment the right of idolaters to be pardoned by the
Church. ||
The election of Pope Cornelius cemented an alliance between
the Chair of Peter and the African Episcopate grouped about St.
Cyprian. They agreed in retaining the old penitential discipline,
i. e., the immediate reconciliation of the libellatici after an investiga-
tion of each particular case, and the admitting to penance of the
sacrificati, and their reconciliation at the hour of death if they
persevered.^ At Rome some clerics, like the priest Maximus and
others, were fully restored after they had abandoned the schism
of Novatian, while others, like the Novatian bishop, Trophimus,
for certain reasons, were admitted only to lay communion. Later on
a Council of Carthage extended to the sacrificati the same privileges
that had formally been granted to the libellatici, provided they gave
signs of true penance.**
There is not a text of the first three centuries which can be
*Doellinger, Hippolytus und Kallistus, pp. 254-256.
tPage 296. JPage 306. lEpistola, xxx., xxxvi.
UPages 306-318. IPage 339. **Page 340.
1914.] THE EDICT OF POPE CALLISTUS 651
adduced to prove that reconciliation was denied to murderers.*
On the contrary, we find testimony after testimony to the fact of
their being pardoned in Hermas,f the Didascalia of the Apostles,^
Clement of Alexandria, Origen,[| Eusebius,ff and St. Gregory
Thaumaturgus.**
Our readers can readily see that this scholarly dissertation on
the Edict of Callistus will prove invaluable to the student of the
origins of the Church's early penitential discipline. Many of his
conclusions are disputed by Catholic scholars like Funk, ft Batif-
fol,i$ Vacandard, Duchesne,|||| Tixeront,fifl and Rauschen,***
and the brevity and obscurity of the passages in dispute will per-
haps leave many of these problems forever insoluble. Most men,
in matters wherein the Church has not spoken, will take sides in
interpreting those documents according as the bias of their minds is
conservative or not. The Abbe d'Ales treats the arguments of his
opponents with the utmost courtesy and fairness, although, we
must admit, they have been utterly unmoved by his answers to their
objections.fff We recommend this volume highly as the most
complete, detailed, and careful exposition of the Church's penitential
discipline in the first three centuries. It should be read, together
with the author's two works on The Theology of Tertullian and
The Theology of St. Hippolytus.
*Pages 350-360. tVis. ii., 2, 2. tCh. ix.
Quis dives salvetur., 42. ||In Ex., Horn, v., i, 9; P. G. xii., col. 338.
$Hist. Eccl., vi., 34 ; Chronicon Pascale, P. G. xcii., col. 668 ; case of Emperor
Philip (A. D. 244-249).
**Epist. Can., viii., P. G. x., col. 1040.
\^Kirchenges. Abhand., 3 vols. Paderborn, 1897, 1899, 1907.
^Bulletin de litt. Eccles., p. 339. Paris, 1906.
Revue du Clerge Frangais, pp. 113-131. Paris, April, 1907.
\\\\Histoire Ancienne de I'Eglise, vol. i., p. 317. Paris, 1908.
\fiHistoire des dogmes, vol. i., p. 368. Paris, 1906.
***Eucharist and Penance, pp. 152-184. Bonn, 1908.
du Clerge Francois, pp. 365-367. May 15, 1907.
THE EARLIEST MEN.
BY SIR BERTRAM C. A. WINDLE, M.D., SC.D., LL.D., F.R.S., F.S.A., K.S.G.,
President and Professor of Archeology, University College, Cork.
THE REMAINS OF MAN HIMSELF.
EFORE proceeding to describe and comment on the
examples of early human skeletons or portions
thereof, it will be convenient to deal with a few
general points in connection with this section of our
subject. In the first place, then, it may be said that
the remains of early man so far discovered are but few, and that
it is not to be expected that they will ever be very numerous. Only
under the most favorable and unusual conditions could they have
been preserved to the present day, and even when they have been
preserved to the present day, it is often (one may say invariably
with regard to the very earliest cases) in a much mutilated condi-
tion. Nor is this difficult to understand, as we shall see if we
consider the condition and surroundings of early man, and in con-
nection therewith some of the difficulties which arise when we come
to attempt to place his skeletal remains in their appropriate geo-
logical or cultural horizon. When early man came to die his
.tribe might either feed on his remains or leave them to lie where
they were at the time of his death, or they might inter them with
or without cremating the body. Cremation we may dispose of at
once, for, though it was a favorite practice in a later period of
the prehistoirc age, we have no evidence of it during those earlier
stages with which alone we are here concerned.
Let us suppose that his remains were left to lie where they
were when life fled from the body. The flesh would gradually dis-
appear, either devoured by wild beasts of which there were great
numbers and varieties or disposed of by ordinary process of de-
composition. The bones might for some considerable time resist
disintegration, but eventually they, too, in the course of long ages,
would disappear, unless some lucky accident occurred to preserve
them or some portion of them. They might be covered up, or the
complete body might be covered up by wind-blown sand, by gravel
or earth brought down by a flood, by a land-slip or by other natural,
1914.] THE EARLIEST MEN 653
fortuitous circumstance. Then long ages afterwards, the gravel-
seeker or some other son of toil gets to work and exposes the
remains. Let us suppose, however, that his fellows resolve to bury
their dead comrade. They may do so by depositing his body in a
cave, as was actually done in many portions of the Palaeolithic Age,
though not, so far as we are aware, in its very earliest stages, and
if that cave was rendered inaccessible to wild beasts, the remains
would have the best chance of surviving to our own day.
Incidentally it may be added that where primitive man took the
trouble to place the remains of his dead brother in security, he in
the vast majority of cases placed with them some of the implements
which the dead man had been in the habit of using whilst on earth.
These offerings are called " grave-goods " or " accompanying gifts,"
and they are important from two points of view. First of all they
throw great light upon the period to which the remains belong.
Thus, if a bronze dagger is found with a skeleton, in an untouched
interment, it must be clear to everyone that the remains are not
earlier than the Bronze Age. They may be later, because the
implement may be one of an earlier period, placed with the remains
of the dead man for some ritual or other reason, but they cannot
be earlier. And so with the various kinds of stone implements:
when they are found with the remains of the dead, they are of great
assistance in enabling us to say at what stage of the world's history
he lived.
But there is a further point of perhaps even greater interest
in connection with these " gra/e-goods," and it is this. All over the
world, and at all stages of the world's history with which we are
acquainted, these " grave-goods " have one significance and one
only, and it would be illogical and absurd to deny that the same sig-
nificance does not attach to them in the period before history began.
These offerings were placed with the dead body, because it was
believed that. the man did not all die, but that something of him
remained which went to live in some other existence perhaps very
similar to that enjoyed by the dead man when on earth in which
he would need the implements which were placed by his dead body.
Hence wherever these " grave-goods " are found, we may conclude
that those who placed them there believed in the existence of what we
call the " soul " we do not know how they spoke of it or thought
of it of the man himself, as apart from his body, in some other
world invisible to his fellows. To dispose of this part of the matter
at once it may here be said that the earliest race of whose burials
654 THE EARLIEST MEN [Feb.,
we have any knowledge as will appear at a later stage is that
known as the Mousterian. A complete account of an interment of
this period in a cave known as La Chapelle aux Saints in the Dor-
dogne district, was given by MM. les Abbes A. and J. Bouyssonie
et L. Bardon.*
Around this body lay a great number of well-made implements
of the period, and bits of the red ochre with which we may reason-
ably conclude that the members of the tribe, like other savages,
were in the habit of decorating their bodies. Further, bones were
placed over the head, in fact, as Sollas says, " this was evidently
a ceremonial interment, accompanied by offerings of food and im-
plements for the use of the deceased in the spirit world." And he
continues : " It is almost with a shock bf surprise that we discover
this well-known custom, and all that it implies, already in existence
during the last episode of the Great Ice Age."
After this digression we may return to the question of inter-
ment which may not in an overwhelming number of cases could
not have taken place in a cave. Then the survivors must have (a)
dug a hole in the ground, or (b) in the side of a bank, or (c) have
heaped up a pile of earth or stones or both a cairn in fact over
the remains. It will be observed that a similar result, so far as
the remains are concerned, might occur from natural causes, and the
first thing which has to be determined when bones of an early man
are in question, is whether they were interred or not, and this is
by no means always a problem easy of solution. In the first place
the discovery of these remains must necessarily, in almost every
conceivable case except where caves are being purposely searched
for the remains be made by some laborer wholly ignorant of the
matter in question. If the remains themselves are not destroyed
or grievously mutilated, the surrounding conditions must necessarily
have been so much interfered with as to render it very difficult,
perhaps almost impossible, to say whether the body lies in disturbed
or undisturbed earth, that is, whether we have to do with an inter-
ment or a natural position of the body.
The next question refers to the objects found with the remains.
If it is an undoubted interment and remains are found with it,
as in the case of La Chapelle aux Saints, no question arises. But
let us take the case of a fragment of skull found in a gravel pit
*L'Anthropologie, 1908, p. 513. Perhaps one may be allowed to call attention
here to the extraordinary number of facts in connection with prehistoric archaeology
which have been brought to light by Catholic clerics, e. g., Breuil, McEnery, and
those mentioned above cum multis aliis.
1914.] THE EARLIEST MEN 655
in association with palaeolithic implements, and the teeth of elephants
and a hippopotamus. They may all belong to the same period it
is true, but then, on the other hand, they may not, for they may
belong to different periods, and have been rolled together in the same
pit by some great flood. Here it may be remarked that animal
remains, particularly of the kind alluded to above, are of great
service in assigning a period to things found with them, but only
where it can be definitely proved that the collocation of the two
classes of objects is not wholly accidental. A fragment or the
entire of a skull of a Roman soldier might quite conceivably be
found in gravels containing palaeolithic implements and teeth of the
kind alluded to above, but long ages would have separated the
various things under consideration.
It is well to bear in mind that there are always three questions
to be asked in connection with any discovery of human remains;
that the reply to any or all of them is often most difficult and most
doubtful, yet until these questions are answered, no absolutely
certain decision as to the precise scientific value of the discovery
can be arrived at. These questions are :
First: What is the geological period of the stratum in which
they are found?
Second: Do the remains in question belong to that period, or
were they of later date, and introduced by man or by other
means into a stratum with which they were not related by time ?
Third: Were any implements or bones or teeth or other such
objects found with the iemains, and, if so, was the collocation
accidental or was it significant?
Having cleared away these preliminary points, we may now
proceed to a brief consideration of the chief remains of early man
at present under discussion.
EARLY HUMAN REMAINS.
Very briefly, from considerations of space, must the chief
examples be touched upon, and in so doing an effort will be made to
avoid details, and to give the main features of interest to the general
reader.
The Trinil Remains. Discovered in Java by Dubois in 1891.
They consist of the top part of a skull, two molar teeth, and a thigh
bone found in the same locality, but forty-six feet apart. They
were clearly not an interment, and the first difficulty which arises
656 THE EARLIEST MEN [Feb.,
with regard to them is whether they all belonged to the same
individual or not, a difficulty which can perhaps never be set
at rest. An attempt to throw light upon this and other disputed
points was made by the expedition of Mdme. Selenka, the results
of which have been recently published. After enormous labors
nothing was found with the exception of another tooth, pretty cer-
tainly human. So far as can be ascertained, for it has not yet
been described, it did not belong to the previously-discovered re-
mains. It is impossible to build any theory on this last tooth, since
it might have belonged to a man of a comparatively recent period,
and have come to lie where it did in any one of several ways, e. g.,
by falling down a deep crack in the earth. The remains themselves
have been assigned to a single individual, named Pithecanthropus
erectus, but apart from the initial difficulty alluded to above, the
greatest difference of opinion exists as to the character of the skull.
Dr. Munro* gives a list of seven authorities who look upon it as
human, six who consider it to be simian, and seven who believe it to
be a transitional form. Further, he quotes the following amusing
paragraph, which exemplifies the discordance of opinion on the sub-
ject, from a paper by the veteran archaeologist, G. de Mortillet, whose
name has already been mentioned in these pages : " Les avis ont
etc on ne peut plus partages. Us se sont tout d'abord parques par
nationalites. Les Anglais, bien que compatriotes de Darwin, ont fait
des grands efforts pour demontrer qu'il ne s'agit que d'un homme,
un homme tres inferieur, mais deja un veritable homme. Les Alle-
mands, au contraire, se sont froidement ingenies a prouver qu'il
ne s'agit que d'un singe. Les Franchises ont purement et simple-
ment adopte les determinations du jeune savant. C'etait chose
facile pour des compatriotes de Lamarck."
Apart from, or rather in addition to, these unsolved difficulties,
it is not certain whether the geological epoch of the stratum in which
the remains were found belongs to pliocene or pliestocene times,
the latter opinion being now, I understand, more in favor than it
was. It is obvious that however much discussion may rage around
these bones, and quite legitimately rage, no stable theory can be
reared upon the very unstable footing which is now presented,
until some fairly certain conclusion is arrived at with regard to these
controverted points. At the same time it must be remembered
that in connection with the Neanderthal skull, even in 1901 Schwalbe
was able to tabulate four distinct views, with several subdivisions
* Paleolithic Man, p. 190.
1914.] THE EARLIEST MEN 657
in each, as to its character. Yet more recent discoveries have
cleared up the difficulties, and there is but little if any difference
of opinion on this skull at the present moment.
One other point may be dealt with here. The cubic capacity
of the skull is, generally speaking, a measure of the skull-contents,
i. e., the brain. It is generally considered that size of brain and
amount of intellect have some ratio, though perhaps it would be
more correct to speak of the extent of the gray cortex. At any rate
it is generally conceded that an estimate of the intellectual position,
or at least possibilities of a race, may be gathered from their cranial
capacity. There are remarkable exceptions to this rule, and it may
at once be said that nothing is more certain than that quite small
brains may be associated with very good intellects. For example,
a dwarf, Paulina Musters, commonly known as the Princess Paul-
ina, who measured about twenty inches at the time of her death,
and had the brain-size of a child of that stature, i. e., immensely
inferior to that of the lowest race of mankind, for her body-weight
was only one hundred and forty- four ounces, whilst the brain-
weight of an ordinary woman is on the average forty-five ounces.
Yet the doctor who attended her in her last illness at the age of
nineteen, speaks of her as being " of a good general education,
and speaking four languages her native Dutch, French, German,
and a little English." But a much more striking case is that of
Gambetta, who will certainly not be accused by anyone of having
been deficient in what is commonly called " brains." Yet his brain
weighed only two and a half pounds, the average British brain
being about three pounds. As a matter of fact, Gambetta's brain-
weight fell considerably below that of the average of savage races.
However, with this word of caution, it may be said that skull
capacity is the best, and indeed almost the only, measure which we
have of intellectual possibilities in otherwise unknown races. This
statement is made with all caution, and with all reservations, as to
relative size of different parts of the skull, and consequently brain.
The rule in question can only be regarded as a rough approximation,
but it is the best that we have.
In the case of the Trinil skull, which is very imperfect, it is
exceedingly difficult to make an accurate estimate of what was its
original capacity. Dubois put it down at eight hundred and fifty-
five cubic centimeters, but Keith thinks that is an underestimate,
though he does not commit himself to any figure, no doubt wisely,
for the estimation can be little more than a guess. It may just be
VOL. xcvni. 42
658 THE EARLIEST MEN [Feb.,
mentioned that the Australian savages' skull-capacity runs down to
about one thousand cubic centimeters.
The Piltdoivn Skull. This skull, in an imperfect condition and
with half a lower jaw, was found by Mr. Dawson in a flint-bearing
gravel overlying the Wealden (Hastings beds) at Piltdown in Sus-
sex, and was described by him and by Dr. Smith Woodward.*
It is at this moment an object of active controversy. Its describers
think that skull and mandible " cannot safely be described as being
of earlier date than the first half of the Pleistocene epoch." There
is some doubt as to whether the fragment of skull and the mandible
belong to the same individual. Chellean implements were found
with the remains, and are claimed as being of the same date. As
to the skull itself, or rather the fragments which remain, it is stated
that the cubic capacity is above that of the modern Australian sav-
age, but in connection with the Piltdown example, it is a curious
fact that the reconstruction of the skull carried out by the authors
of the paper does not at all please Professor Keith, another high
authority. This authority says that Dr. Smith Woodward's re-
construction is one of a man who " could neither breathe nor eat,
which was an absolutely impossible condition. The mistake had
been made similar to that in 1887, of putting a chimpanzee face on
a human skull." And he also states that the cubic capacity was
one thousand five hundred and sixty cubic centimeters, in other
words, that it was a very large skull, whilst the authors of the paper
say that it was " at least one thousand and seventy cubic centi-
meters," a very great discrepancy in description. Whichever may
be right, it is clear that it is a human skull with which we have to do.
Far more remarkable features attach to the mandible, and that may
be considered in connection with another specimen which it some-
what resembles, namely,
The Heidelburg Jaw. Found near the place after which it
was named, and first described in 1908, this jaw and that found at
Piltdown resemble each other, in being more like a simian jaw than
any others associated with human beings; yet both of them are
believed to be human in their character, chiefly because the teeth
are obviously human. What is still more remarkable is that they
are actually more like the teeth of the higher races of man to-day,
and less like the teeth of apes than are the teeth of some of the
savage human races of to-day. This has been stated by Sollas of
the Heidelburg jaw, and the teeth of the Piltdown specimen are
^Quarterly Journal, Geological Society, London, March, 1913.
1914.] THE EARLIEST MEN 659
claimed as definitely human. In some accounts of this specimen it
is stated that the anatomical conditions point to the inability of
the former possessor of the jaw to speak, but this has been shown
to be a mistake. There is no doubt that the Piltdown jaw and the
skull, if the two belong to each other (which is thought by some
to be unlikely), form in many ways a great puzzle, and one which
is by no means cleared up. Perhaps further discoveries may throw
light on the matter, as was the case with the Neanderthal skull.
Whilst dealing with this specimen, allusion may be made to the
matter of reconstructions, since Professor Keith in his book has
actually attempted to reconstruct the entire Heidelburg skull from
the mandible which alone has come to hand. Of course it is
most natural that anatomists should undertake tasks of this kind,
and they have various rules and facts to aid them in carrying out
their operations. But after all a great deal must be left to surmise,
and the results obtained differ within too wide limits, far too wide
limits, even to fall within the province of the law of error; in other
words, they cannot be depended upon. A friend once suggested to
me that a small committee of anatomists might very carefully meas-
ure a modern skull and take a cast of the same. Having done this
they might then cut away the missing parts of the Piltdown skull,
and hand the fragments to some of the reconstructors of ancient
skulls to work upon. The results compared with the cast and meas-
urements would afford very interesting comments on the value of
reconstructions, and would act as a splendid example of a control
experiment. But perhaps it never will be carried out. Respecting
the Piltdown skull, at this moment probably the most interesting
remnant of humanity under discussion amongst scientists, it may be
said, first, that it seems quite clear that it dates back to a period of
extreme antiquity, though it may be impossible to translate this
statement into any actual number of years in such a manner as to
stand criticism. Secondly, it may also be said that the skull is that
of a man, and, even more, that the skull is of a character not inferior
to that of races now in existence on this earth. Further, the imple-
ments found with it, if indeed they be the implements of the race
to which the former owner of the skull belonged, are definite human
instruments of a kind quite familiar to students of prehistoric
archaeology.
Later Examples. The specimens which have been so far en-
gaging our attention are of a more or less isolated character, at
least in our present state of knowledge, and present, as has
660 THE EARLIEST MEN [Feb.,
been indicated, many features difficult to explain, and per-
haps incapable of complete explanation. Such was the case,
up to what we may fairly call the other day, with regard to some
of the other specimens of the remains of early man on which recent
discoveries have thrown a flood of light. Notably, as already men-
tioned, was this the case with regard to the Neanderthal skull. This
fragment has been shown to possess characters so closely resembling
those of other crania of an early date, that anthropologists now
speak of a Neanderthal race from the name of the spot where the
first and most celebrated example was discovered. This, again, is
only one of several races at present believed to have been in exist-
ence at a very early period, such as the Cro-Magnon Race, the Mous-
terian Race, and, at somewhat later but still very remote eras, the
Aurignacians and the Magdalenians. These papers were not in-
tended to contain an account of the discoveries of anthropologists,
save in so far as they touch on a few fundamental problems which
were indicated in the first pages. Hence no attempt will be made
to deal with these various races, other than to sum up in a few
words the principal matters of interest which arise in connection
with them. In the first place, it may be said that at whatever date
or period they may have lived, they were unquestionably men, and
that they possessed skulls of a cranial capacity not inferior, and in
some cases even very ancient cases superior to that of races
reckoned to-day as amongst the highest in existence. They had
certain racial characteristics, but so have the peoples of the world
to-day, and just as Tartar differs from Negro, and Negro from
European, so there were different races of mankind even at these
very early periods. Such is the conclusion at which science has
arrived at the present date.
In the second place the remains of their handicraft which have
come down to us, prove conclusively that they had not only the
skulls but the hands of man, and very skillful hands too, as will be
admitted by any person who has examined the highly-finished im-
plements which have come down to us. Let any person who exam-
ines some of these implements of flint, set himself down to the task
of endeavoring to imitate them with the same materials and the
same tools pieces of stone as were used by primitive man, and
he will find his respect for the craftsman of bygone days enormously
raised as the result of his own failures to accomplish anything like
what his far-off ancestor was able to achieve. The same fact is
impressed upon us by the remarkable discoveries which have been
I9I4-] THE EARLIEST MEN 661
made in connection with the artistic capacities of some of the earliest
races of mankind.
Of the art of the earliest peoples known to us, we have at
present no knowledge. Perhaps they lived in too strenuous times,
and had too severe a struggle to maintain their existence, to devote
any time to what is after all not a necessity of life, namely, art.
For. as will be readily understood, the pursuit of art connotes a cer-
tain relief from extreme strain. When a man takes the trouble
to decorate his weapons, it means that he has moments when he can
feel sure that he will not be called upon to use them for their primary
purpose. At any rate it is only towards the later Palaeolithic
Period that we begin to find undoubted and extensive evidence of
a love for and a great skill in pictorial art. This again is not a
matter over which it is possible here to linger, but those who take
the trouble to examine the numerous reproductions of this early art
which are now available, will be struck by its excellence, its spirit,
and its admirable reproduction of the great beasts and creatures
amongst which man lived, with which he had to war, and of which
he made his food.
Finally it may be said, that as far as we go back amongst the
races to which allusion is now being made, we discover undoubted
evidence of a belief in the future life of man, and thus so far as
this is evidence of the possession of religious beliefs. And con-
sidering how little we know about these far-off people, this is a
great deal. Supposing that everything in these countries could be
swept away except our graveyards, and that some aftercoming race,
ignorant of the customs of its forbears, were to examine
them, the savants of that race would hardly be able to say
much more than that the people whose cemeteries they had been
examining believed in a future life. Of these far-off inhabitants
of the world whose condition we have been inquiring into, we have
nothing but the cemeteries or interments in caves to guide us, and
yet of them we are able to make an exactly similar statement.
Thus we may sum up by saying with regard to all these peoples,
that, judged by every standard, they were men like unto ourselves,
though in many ways perhaps in some cases quite certainly of a
more rugged cast, and though unprovided with the resources of
civilization now at our disposal.
The Question of Date. A few words may perhaps be devoted
to this important subject. It has already been seen that enormous,
quite possibly insuperable, difficulties surround the task of endeav-
662 THE EARLIEST MEN [Feb.,
oring to translate geological periods into actual numbers of years.
How impossible this is, may be gathered from the fact that every
book which has attempted the task discloses a different scheme of
chronology.
Let it be clearly understood that as to relative epochs, there is
comparatively little difference of opinion. Some may doubt
whether, e. g., the Red Crag is a Pliocene or a Pleistocene forma-
tion, and others may hold differing opinions as to the number of
inter-glacial periods, but on the main question of the succession of
periods there is fairly general consent. It is when geologists
and still worse anthropologists try to set these periods down
in terms of years, that we enter the domain of chaos. But
with all this it may be said quite definitely, that the point of appear-
ance of man upon this earth must be put back to a very much greater
distance of time than was dreamed of by writers up to a compara-
tively recent date. In this there is nothing whatsoever to disturb
the mind of any Catholic. The Catholic Encyclopedia deals with
this matter in a very carefully written article, which is no doubt
accessible to most of the readers of these pages, and from which,
therefore, only the following quotation may be made for the sake
of those who may not have the volume at hand. The writer says
(sub voce Chronology) Creation of Man:
The question which this subject suggests is: Can we confine
the time that man has existed on earth within the limits usually
assigned, i. e., within about four thousand years of the birth
of Christ? The Church does not interfere with the freedom of
scientists to examine into this subject, and form the best judg-
ment they can with the aid of science. She evidently does not
attach decisive influence to the chronology of the Vulgate, the
official version of the Western Church, since in the Martyrology
for Christmas Day the creation of Adam is put down in the year
5199 B. c., which is the reading of the Septuagint. It is, how-
ever, certain that we cannot confine the years of man's sojourn
on earth to that usually set down. But on the other hand, we
are by no means driven to accept the extravagant conclusions
of some scientists.
With these words we may fully concur. Guibert says man
need not have existed for more than ten thousand years on this
earth. It may be so, but few would assign so brief a period.
Driver says that on the most moderate estimate " it cannot be less
1914.] THE EARLIEST MEN 663
than twenty thousand years." Many would say that this was too
limited a period. But the Abbe Breuil, one of the foremost au-
thorities of the day in prehistoric archaeology, is in agreement with
the writer just quoted. As to the differences in estimates amongst
scientific men, it may just be mentioned that Professor Sollas
(a geologist) places the date of the Mousterian interments at Cha-
pelle aux Saints at twenty-five thousand years distance, whilst Pro-
fessor Keith (an anthropologist) demands three hundred and fifty
thousand years. It is obvious that amidst discrepancies of this
magnitude, it is impossible for any ordinary reader to form any
safe conclusion. The sum and substance of all this is, that no
definite figure of years can be fixed for the period of man upon
the earth; One word of caution in conclusion. The extreme dates
demanded by some writers are based upon two assumptions. These
are that the body of man was evolved from that of some pre-
existent simian animal, and that the process of evolution was very
gradual and very slow. Both of these questions have been ex-
amined in a previous series of papers in THE CATHOLIC WORLD,
and have been further considered in a little book by the author of
the present papers,* so that neither of them need be dealt with again
here. Suffice it to say that it is not possible to base any sound argu-
ment as to date on theories which are at present unproved. Ques-
tions of date must be approached from quite a different standpoint.
Whether they are insoluble or whether a genius will arise some day
who will point the way to their solution, nothing but time can tell.
*Facts and Theories. London : Catholic Truth Society, i s. net.
[THE END.]
CATHOLICS AND THE ITALIAN ELECTIONS.
BY I. QUIRICO, S.J.
N October of last year, the political elections were
held in Italy under the new system of universal suf-
frage. Previously the numbers of voters inscribed
on the State lists amounted to 3,319,202; at the
present time the figure reaches 8,612,249, showing,
therefore, an increase of 5,293,047.
All male citizens over thirty years of age are entitled to
the vote, provided they have not been guilty of any criminal offence,
although they may be illiterates. Those citizens whose age is below
thirty and over twenty-one, and who are able to produce a certificate
of scholarship, those who have obtained a government permit after
their term of military service, and those who pay a fixed tax are
allowed to vote. Almost one-fourth of the entire population, which
now numbers thirty-six millions, are accordingly entitled to use the
right to vote.
In the face of this new fight, which might have led to serious
consequences, Catholics had received precise instructions from the
Holy See, and they carried them out most loyally. At the head
of our (political) faction is the Electoral Catholic Union of Italy,
whose President is the illustrious Count Gentiloni, nominated by
the present Pope for this post. The Electoral Catholic Union is an
organization which extends over the whole peninsula.
The rules laid down by the Holy See with respect to the
political elections may be stated as follows : The non expedit, which
is the right to forbid any approach to the polls either in the quality
of electors or of candidates, is retained for the best of reasons ; at
the same time many are permitted to be dispensed from it when it
affects the social welfare, which must undeniably be protected.
When moderate Liberals, who favor religious liberty, present them-
selves in opposition to candidates who are openly anti-religious or
sectarian, Catholics can and ought to support them. The Holy See
does not wish that a Catholic party should be formed in the Italian
Chamber, but it allows any Catholic to stand as parliamentary candi-
date under certain conditions and circumstances.
These regulations have given a singular character to the Italian
1914.] CATHOLICS AND THE ITALIAN ELECTIONS 665
elections, unparalleled in any other country in the world. It can be
seen how readily misconceptions may arise with regard to a correct
appreciation of the subject more especially outside Italy itself.
The Catholic Electoral Union, in order to act with greater
security, established certain conditions to which Liberal Deputies
are obliged to confirm in order to obtain Catholic support. We
are pleased to be able to show our readers the document relating
to this matter, which was kept secret for some time, and which has
the distinct approval of the Holy See.
We give it in full :
CONDITIONS OF AGREEMENT.
1. The defence of statutory institutions and of guarantees
given to constitutional ordinances of liberty of conscience and
of associations, and consequently opposition also to every legal
proposition which opposes religious congregations, and whatever
tends to disturb the religious peace of the nation.
2. The enactment of just educational legislation, and par-
ticularly that, in view of the large increase in government
schools, no restrictions be made that would embarrass or dis-
credit the work of private education an important factor in the
promotion and growth of national culture.
3. The removal of all undefined and arbitrary legislation,
the effective administration of practical guarantees that heads of
families should have the right to demand a course of religious
instruction for their children in the communal schools.
4. The resistance of every attempt made to weaken the unity
of the family, and absolute opposition to divorce.
5. The recognition, by reason of the results of the repre-
sentation of the State Council, of the right to equality as to eco-
nomic organizations, independently of social or religious prin-
ciples by which these may be inspired.
6. A gradual and continual reform of taxation and of ju-
dicial institutions, with a view to a better appreciation of the
principles of justice concerning social conditions.
7. To support the political party which tends to conserve and
strengthen the economic and social forces of the country, with
the aim of a progressive increase of Italian influence in the
development of international citizenship.
N. B. The above statements are the conditions of agree-
ment to which the candidates who represent us must give genuine
approval, either privately in writing or by explicitly including
such conditions in the public electoral programme.
666 CATHOLICS AND THE ITALIAN ELECTIONS [Feb.,
The political constituencies of Italy and their corresponding
Deputies number five hundred and eight. The non expedit was
lifted in three hundred and thirty constituencies; in the other
one hundred and seventy-eight extension was declared, and was
maintained in an absolute manner for many reasons, in some in-
stances also for local ones. Those candidates who were supported
by Catholics were successful in two hundred and twenty-eight con-
stituencies; they lost a hundred seats. Catholics have reason to
congratulate themselves upon the issue of the struggle. There is
particular cause for exultation in the defeat of the apostate ex-
priest Murri, who will no longer stand for Parliament, and will fall
into an oblivion from which he ought never to emerge. Podrecca,
the director of the infamous weekly periodical L'Asino, also sus-
tained defeat.
It is not possible to speak of any real agreement between
the Government and the Electoral Catholic Union; in many con-
stituencies government candidates were returned by Catholics,
while in others the State contested those Deputies who had the
support of the Catholic Union.
But a certain mutual consent there must be, and to that
above all is due the sacrifice which organzied Catholics were
forced to make in leaving the Minister of Instruction Credaro
and his undersecretary Viciai unopposed in two constituencies,
where Catholics had promised themselves a great victory. The Gov-
ernment for its part seems to have cooperated in effecting the defeat
of Murri and Podrecca.
And now we have the final results of the elections. Barely
three hundred and nine Liberal members were nominated, of whom
a certain number are Catholics in principle as well as practice;
thirty Deputies belong to the ranks of the Catholic movement;
seventy Radical members of the Constitutional side are inclined
to be anticlerical; seventeen Republicans; eighty-two Socialists;
twenty-three Radicals, and fifty-nine Socialists who belong to the
official Socialist Party. These figures may perhaps be modified on
further and more detailed investigation, but to no great degree.
If one considers the joining together of the Chamber of
Deputies with the ministerial majority of the all-powerful Giolitti,
the aforesaid majority amounts to over three hundred Deputies;
of the Liberals only about twenty-five belong to the Oppo-
sition, the other Liberals, the true Catholics, a large number of
Radicals and reformed Socialists support the government.
1914- ] THE WHITE RIDER 667
It will be satisfactory to Catholics to hear that Freemasonry
sustained grave defeats in these elections, especially in Rome. The
municipal Bloc of that city led by Nathan, has realized this, and
has been forced to resign.
All things considered, the political elections show a successful
issue with respect to Italian Catholics, and it would seem to demon-
strate that religious persecution which unfortunately is flourishing
in adjacent France, is still a long way from being established in
Italy.
THE WHITE RIDER.
BY THOMAS WALSH.
" SADDLE me forth the great white steed,
I ride on a mighty quest to-day ;
A cavalier of the Spanish breed
Too long hath mocked my sway ! "
(Crash of hoofs as the drawbridge fell;
Clank of dread through the courts and stair.)
" Stand back, thou monk leave Cross and spell
And let him meet me fair ! "
" Don Roderick, Master of the Sword
Of Santiago, bend the head
You that put down so many a lord,
Yield to the lance of dread ! "
Speaketh the Grand-Master:
" What, Death, thou menial, com'st thou here
To play the haughty foe with me?
Throw off that visor have no fear,
Don Roderick breaks no lance with thee!
" But speak thy message, nor delay
To take my carcass to the clod ;
Whilst thou art trudging on the way
My soul shall spur to God."
THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE.
BY KATHARINE TYNAN.
CHAPTER XVI.
A KISS.
ISS ROCHE'S words threw Meg's mind into a strange
confusion. It recalled her troubles of the night when
she had remembered that she was specially commended
to Lady Turloughmore, because of the discretion in her
which would make her observe the proper attitude
towards Lord Erris. At the time her godmother's
words had passed her by what had she, Meg Hildebrand, to do with
the girl who would use her position to make eyes at the heir? But
since she had been at home a speech of her father's had made her wince.
" It isn't altogether what I'd choose for my girl," he had said.
" The poor afflicted lad ! He hasn't been making love to you, has
he, Meg? If he was that sort I'd be against your going back there.
The likes of him are often terribly ready to fall in love and terribly
troublesome when they're in it. You'll have to be careful with Lord
Erris."
" He's not a bit queer, papa, in any way, except his poor foot,"
Meg had interrupted. She felt badly jarred by her father's speech.
" I wish you wouldn't go on thinking he is wrong in his head. He's
absolutely normal, just as normal as you or I."
" I'm glad to hear it, for his mother's sake, poor thing," Terence
Hildebrand had said amicably. " It's more than you'd look for, con-
sidering everything. They did say that some of the Earls of Turlough-
more needn't have died that it wasn't altogether the old woman's
curse. It was always brought in accidental. Dear me, what am I
saying at all ? Here I am gossiping, like the worst old woman of them
all. And nothing but hearsay, nothing but hearsay. To be sure I can
trust my girl to be kind and prudent."
Why did they all trust her discretion ? It had been the same with
the Archduchess, who had given her credit for the utmost good sense
in the matter of the white and gold hussar. Meg had accepted the
Archduchess' praise without blinking. She had had no temptation to
be otherwise than discreet. Now she wondered to herself whether
she would have merited the Archduchess' commendations if Count
Fritz Von Thai, that glittering creature, had appealed to her as Lord
Erris appealed.
Thus debating with herself, Meg walked down the road from Car-
rick. The sounds of a horse's hoofs cantering along the grassy stretch
1914-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 669
by the wayside had not reached her ears. She looked up startled
as the horse's head drew almost level with her.
" Oh, it is you," she said, recognizing Lord Erris.
" May I walk my horse with you ? " he asked.
" If I am not interrupting your ride."
" I was on my homeward way. You will excuse my not walking
with you."
" Oh, yes, yes ! " she answered hurriedly, so as to avert any painful
explanations.
" Perhaps when Dr. Kellner has had a go at me I may be able
to walk with you like any other man."
She turned her bright look on him, and put up her hand to pat
his horse's neck.
"You will have to be very patient and very brave," she said,
softly, remembering what Miss Roche had said.
" I know. Not for the operation. It is nothing. I have always
been used to pain. People who have not had much pain find it
harder to bear. There will be the long inaction the plaster of Paris.
I am not so easy as I ought to be. It will be hard, but not so hard
as it would be to people who lead an active life. It will be perhaps
easier to bear if you will sing to me sometimes when I come home."
Walking along, keeping pace with the horse, she looked up at him,
throwing back her shining head so that her gaze should be level with
his.
" That will be very easy to do," she said, not knowing how much
assurance there was in her eyes.
" When next I come this way," he said, " I shall be like other
men, or I shall be worse than i was before."
" You will be like other men," she said.
" So far as I may be," he replied.
She turned about, moved by a sudden impulse, and fell back a
little, so that she walked beside him rather than a little in advance
of him.
" Would nothing put it out of your head," she said, " that you
are not like other men, apart from the thing which Dr. Kellner is
going to set right? Forgive me! I don't know why I dare to touch
on such things." The color flamed in her cheeks, but she was too
intent on the thing she had to say to be silent. " Can't you trust the
good God for yourself and those to come after you? Cannot you be-
lieve that the doom is a superstition and a delusion ? "
He stared at her as though she fascinated him. With her parted
lips, her fresh wild color, the agitation which made her bosom lift
and fall and her eyes soft, she was indeed alluring.
"The superstition has been very persistent," he said, looking
down at her. " I know what you would say that we gave the super-
670 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Feb.,
stition its power. Well perhaps if I were not sickly, perhaps even
yet, if Dr. Kellner can mend this lame foot of mine, I might have the
courage to set the superstition at naught. My fathers before me were
not sickly. They had the courage. They loved women and gave hos-
tages to fortune. There were women as brave as you, as daring,
because they loved look at my mother! Not one of them received
the reward of her courage."
He averted his eyes from her face.
" I have sworn to myself that I would be the one to end it," he
said. " I have striven to bring Algy Rosse to a sense of his respon-
sibilities when he shall be master here. To do Algy justice the pros-
pect has not seemed to elate him. He has refused to believe that
I shall not marry."
" I don't know what I should do," he went on, " if a woman
I loved were willing to take the risk of me. I used to say that I
would not accept it. I have led the life of a hermit, perhaps because
I was not so sure of myself as I thought. I was very sure of myself
till these last few weeks."
She found words at last; but they drew away from the things
he had been saying.
" I love Lady Turloughmore," she said simply. " Even if you
should marry some day even if you stood up, as I think you ought
to do, and resolved to fight the terror that flieth by night, still she
would be afraid. Dear soul, she would be afraid as long as she lived.
I would do anything in the world to deliver her from that terror."
" There would be only one way," he said, quietly, " and that would
be if an Earl of Turloughmore should die in his bed. We have no
means of proving my father's death, although we shall have to pre-
sume it presently if proof is not forthcoming. There are hard business
reasons why his place should not remain empty. It would not help her
if I were to die in my bed, else perhaps it might be managed."
She could have cried out at the cruelty of it. What change had
come over the golden morning? The sun had gone behind the cloud,
and it was cold in the shadow of the trees. She turned her face to
his in a piteous, dumb protest.
" I am sorry," he said. " I am a brute to hurt you. Your eyes
are very candid. They cry out on me. I make no excuse for myself.
You see how unwise it is to care for us even as friends. We have
power to hurt our friends. Think how much worse it is for ourselves."
He was watching her profile with strange intentness. She was
hatless, and from his seat on horseback he could see how her hair
waved away from the parting in delicate waves and curls that were
full of hidden light. The small, pure, pale profile, the delicate lifted
brow, the whiteness of the neck below the abundant hair, all seemed
to move him poignantly.
I9H-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 671
" If one of us were to die in his bed," he repeated. " That must
break the doom for all of us. You don't know what it is to be born
to it : to know that everyone expects it of us. It takes the courage
out of a man, I can tell you. Horrible to know that it is expected
of you. I will tell you something, Miss Hildebrand, which I would not
tell everyone."
He checked his horse, which came to a standstill, and stood eating
the grass by the side of the road. She looked up at him, expectant,
her breath coming faster.
" I believe," he said deliberately, " that some of my ancestors
died violent deaths, not so much by accident as by design, their own
design. Such a thing may be forced on you if you believe it is bound
to come. Some day you are cleaning a revolver, walking on a cliff,
climbing a mountain, sharpening a razor; it might come upon you
irresistibly that the thing was bound to happen; and it happens.
Coroner's juries often err on the side of mercy, especially if the sub-
ject of the inquest has been in life a popular person: and we have
nearly always been popular. Do you suppose that any of my tenants
would bring in a verdict of felo de se against me ? "
She cried out sharply, and stood looking up at him, panting, red
and white, as though he had struck her.
" Oh, you should not," he began, with a sound like a sob.
He let the reins drop on his horse's neck, and, leaning towards
her, while a dark flush rose in his cheeks, he took the cool, pure face
between his hands.
" You see what I have to fight against for myself as well as for
you," he said with a heart-breaking tenderness. " My dear, my dear,
do you know that I have never kissed a woman's lips yet ? "
With a motion so slight as to seem almost unconscious, she lifted
her face a little way towards him, and their lips met. Then he released
her, gathered up his horse's reins, and was gone.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE OTHER WOMAN.
It was characteristic of Meg that the kiss which passed between
her and Lord Erris seemed to her as solemn as a betrothal. Nothing
more was said between them. He avoided her while he stayed, and
in a few hours he was gone. For some days after his departure her
mood of exaltation lasted. She said to herself, in a passion of generous
folly, that she would not have chosen a happier love if she could,
thanking God in her happy thoughts that it was given to her to carry
a burden not her own. She accepted all that might be. Times were
when, looking down the vista of the years, she saw them under a golden
672 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Feb.,
haze. If one were in the hands of God, she said over and over to
herself, there would be nothing to fear. Nothing could befall them
of dread and terror too great to be borne. She came tumbling down
from her mood of exaltation with a suddenness that left her breathless
and spent. She was driving with Lady Turloughmore. The intimacy
between them had made steady progress.
"How excellently you suit me, Meg! I always feel that you
understand me, dear child, even when you are silent. As you sit there
beside me I have a feeling of your answering me in some way
deep calling to deep."
" I am so glad," Meg said, with her ready blush and shyness. " I
have not had many devotions, Lady Turloughmore."
She said no more. The hiatus was more eloquent than words.
Lady Turloughmore smiled, and laid her hand over the girl's. It was
a thin hand, blue-veined and over-white, and the wedding ring on the
third finger needed a guard to keep it in its place.
" Dear child ! " she said. " Dear child ! "
She was a woman who could be exquisitely tender; who could
make her tenderness felt like a benediction.
" We all love you," she went on. " You have made a difference
to us all. Even Prince loves you, and Prince is slow to make friends.
The servants are devoted to you. My son I have not seen him so
normal since Eileen left us. That was a trial. He let Eileen go with-
out speaking. Since then he has made up his mind not to marry. My
dear, that was a very sad disappointment for me."
Down went Meg's heart like a plummet. A sense of the most pro-
found calamity and sadness enveloped her.
" You are like Eileen, only she is fairer than you. My son noticed
it the first time he saw you. You walk like her, only she is taller;
she is more than common tall. She cries out on her own beautiful
height. You must see her one of these days. She is most fascinating."
For the life of her Meg could not have asked who Eileen was,
this girl of the beautiful height, of whom she had not heard five
minutes ago, the mere mention of whom had laid her castles in ruins.
So that was why Lord Erris had kissed her because she reminded
him irresistibly of the girl he had loved so much that he would
not shadow her brightness with the darkness of his own fate. Being
young Meg was very quick to rush on the thorns, to press them
into her breast.
" Perhaps," she said, in a voice that sounded small and cold to
her own ears, " perhaps it would make a difference if the operation
should prove successful."
She wondered if Lady Turloughmore would notice anything amiss
in her tone. Apparently Lady Turloughmore did not, for she went
on, with her usual, quiet placidity of manner :
I9I4-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE
" That is my dearest hope. Poor Ulick, if you saw her, the
charming creature, you would understand how hard it was for the
boy to resist her! He has not spoken of her to you? You are such
friends."
" He has not spoken of her."
As she said it she was conscious of an amazed bewilderment.
How was it possible that after a four months' residence at Castle
Eagle, during which every day had seemed to draw her into closer
intimacy with the family, she had never heard of this Eileen who had
started up to push her from her stool? From her state of well-being
she dropped to* a dreary estimate of herself. She was next to nothing
in their lives, next to nothing. Lord Erris' ways with her, those
looks, the memory of which had filled her with a passionate delight,
had been hers because she was like Eileen.
Later in the afternoon she had been writing letters for Lady
Turloughmore, and had just finished and stamped a little pile she
had a revelation. The room had many portraits in water colors in
pastel and one in oil of a beautiful little girl Lady Turloughmore's
little daughter, Cicely. There was also a large photograph in a silver
frame of a girl wearing court dress. Meg had glanced at it one day
with a passing wonder at the girl's height and grace. That must be
Eileen. The photograph stood on an old escritoire of satinwood deli-
cately inlaid.
" That is" she said.
" Yes, that is Eileen Miss Trant. Her father is Lord de Sales.
Perhaps you may see her this summer. I shall ask her to come if
Dr. Kellner thinks it necessary to keep my son under his immediate
supervision till the foot comes out of plaster of Paris."
" I did not know there was a question of that."
" I have had a letter from Ulick. He thinks it very likely. After
all it is a risk to come home. Why should he do it ? He will find the
days hang less heavily on his hands when winter comes there than here.
He would miss his hunting. And there are so many days of winter
here when any kind of outdoor life is impossible for the wind and
the rain."
The wind and the rain. Meg felt as though the storm dashed in
her face. She said to herself that before Lord Erris came home cured
she would be back at Crane's Nest. Later, in the watches of the
night, when sleep seemed to have forsaken her, that thought of run-
ning away after all her exaltation, her high resolves, showed itself to
her as a cowardly one. If but Castle Eagle could be from under the
shadows if ever it could be from under the shadows she could go
then, without any sense of cowardice, of forsaking her post. "A
soldier never forsakes his post," Terence Hildebrand had been wont to
VOL. xcvm. 43
674 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Feb.,
say, inculcating one of the very few rules of conduct he thought
necessary upon his children. "A soldier never forsakes his post."
It was a reminiscence of his young and splendid days of soldiering in
a crack regiment, of which there were few enough now in the tall,
gray, shabby gentleman. It was a rule good enough for his children.
The pigeon which had hopped from the fender-stool to a chair, on to a
table, and finally to Lady Turloughmore's shoulder, cooed contentedly.
" Tom grows too daring," said Lady Turloughmore. " We must
be careful of him, Meg. If anything were to happen to him, what
should I do ? " She smiled her wistful, patient smile. " I know he is
only somebody's pet escaped and flown in here out of the storm. Yet
he seemed to bring me assurance of the mercy of God to me and mine.
Coming when he did, he might perhaps have been a raven. But he is
a dove a messenger of peace."
" We shall have to watch him," Meg said, taking up something and
laying it down again. " I don't think he will ever fly again. His
wing must have been injured when he was blown against the pane
that night. But he hops everywhere he will. Kate tells me that he
attacks the farmyard fowl and drives them before him. A triumph
of mind over matter. He has a great character."
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE GOLDEN YOUTH.
As the days passed Meg became more than ever convinced that
some merciful dullness lay upon Lady Turloughmore's grief, which
was not forgotten but only quiescent. She went nowhere, and received
no one in the weeks that intervened between her son's going away
and the coming of Algernon Rosse, for whom Meg had conceived a
dislike beforehand, writing him down in her own mind as a petit
maitre, imagining him small-handed, small-footed, exquisitely tailored :
just such a barber's block of a man as she abhorred. Lady Turlough-
more had not again referred to Miss Trant; but some time in the
week preceding Mr. Rosse's arrival, she looked up from her letters
at the breakfast table to say :
" Eileen will be with us by the first of July. She will take the
burden of entertaining Algy off my shoulders. She comes for that,
dear girl. Somehow this year it seems too much for me to do, though
I am fond of Algy."
Meg wanted to hear more about Miss Trant, but she felt it im-
possible to ask ; and presently Lady Turloughmore collected her letters
and, asking to be excused, glided away from the table, smiling her
I9I4-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 675
faint smile. Meg heard something from Kate in a day or two. Kate
waxed communicative in the act of brushing Miss Hildebrand's hair ; it
had to be conceded that Kate's communicativeness seldom or never
overstepped the line of good feeling and good manners.
" It'll be livelier for ye, Miss, when Mr. Rosse comes. I never
seen such a young gentleman for lovely clothes. He's a very pleasant-
spoken young gentleman, though maybe a bit too fine in his ways. But
sure it does you good to look at him all the same : for 'tis like lookin'
into a world where no hardships is nor ever could be. You'd never
think his lordship an' him were cousins."
" No ? " said Meg, looking at her reflection in the glass.
" 'Twill be good for yourself," said Kate, "to have somethin' young
and cheerful in the house wid you. It's been castin' its shadows over
you, so it has. 'Tis the sorrowful time we've been havin' since you
come."
She lifted a heavy piece of Meg's hair, brushed it and let it fall
again in its place, before resuming her speech.
" If I was you, Miss Hildebran'," she said, " whin Mr. Rosse
comes and Miss Trant, I'd just be forgettin' 'twas a house of mournin'
at all, an' enjoy myself a bit. It won't do her ladyship any good to be
keepin' up the misery. I think myself she does be hopin' agin hope that
he'll come home safe. The Lord return her son to her safe and well ! "
Meg turned a startled face on Kate so suddenly that the stroke
of the brush intended for her hair fell upon her ear instead.
" Why what would happen to him ? " she asked. " It isn't an
operation that threatens life. What would happen to him ? "
" Sure there's no sayin'. If he wasn't who he is you needn't
trouble about him at all. There's no knowin' wid our family. Isn't it
a quare thing to see her ladyship delightin' herself wid that bird, the
impident thing? "
" I hope he won't come to harm," said Meg earnestly, " for to tell
you the truth, Kate, I believe he's a cause of great hope and comfort
to poor Lady Turloughmore. It was strange, if you'll think of it, his
flying in like that out of the storm."
" I'm not sayin' it wasn't quare," said Kate ; " for the matter o'
that the world's full o' quare things elbowin' and shovin' aich other.
I've seen so many myself in my time, an' I'm no ould maid yet, that
I wonder at the foolishness o' people that won't listen to a thing they
haven't got the hang of. It's true for you about her ladyship and the
ould pigeon. If I see a stray cat as much as shovin' her nose in the
place, I'll give her a welcome '11 surprise her."
Out of this conversation arose a development of that capacity
for self-sacrifice which is inherent in the female breast.
"We all thought it would be a match between his lordship and
Miss Trant," Kate had said, lifting the long strands of Meg's hair and
676 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Feb.,
brushing them singly in the way that is soothing to tired nerves and
aching head. " She seemed just the sort o' lady to take him out of
himself. Sure what's a lame foot to keep a gentleman at home all
his life ? She's the lovely creature is Miss Trant. Not but what there's
some as lovely if they haven't got the beautiful clothes itself."
From Kate's irrelevances Meg deduced more than from what
Lady Turloughmore had said, a whole theory of unrequited love on
Lord Erris' part for the beautiful Miss Trant. He must have felt
the contrast of his own shadowed life with the brilliant and beautiful
creature who came into it from the outside world. A word here,
a hint there, built up her picture of Miss Trant.
" She's a glorious creature," said Mr. Algernon Rosse, as he
walked by Meg's side one morning a week or so later. "Poor Erris
was hard hit. He couldn't help it. She was adorably kind. Erris
has such a poor conceit of himself," went on the golden youth. " Of
course, it would be a sacrifice, especially as he broods on the mis-
fortunes that have attended on the family. Do you believe in them,
Miss Hildebrand ? The misfortunes, I mean."
Meg shook her head.
" I suppose you think there's no use denyin' them," said Algy
Rosse, who dropped his final g's, " especially with the last experience
fresh in your mind. I believe it when I'm here, and I don't believe it
when I get away. There's something in the bally air, I beg your
pardon, Miss Hildebrand, I mean the Irish atmosphere."
" Oh, I don't mind your saying 'bally,' " said Meg. " It's rather
refreshing in this house." She looked at his clean, pink, wholesome
face. " Why don't you come here more, Mr. Rosse ? You'd be a
cheerful influence, especially as your cousins are very fond of you. I
can't imagine you and superstition in the same house."
" Now, can't you ? That's awfully good of you, to have thought
about me, I mean. Why don't I come here more? Well I don't
know. I love the place. I always thought everything about it just
rippin'. But, Erris can't do the things I do. He's too beastly unselfish
to let me be tied to his armchair : and I've heard Cousin Shelagh sigh
when I was jumpin' over the backs of chairs to work off some of the
bottled-up spirits. It's a shame when a fellow's as strong as Erris is if
it wasn't for the confounded stupidity of that foot of his. Did you
ever feel his grip? Of course you didn't, but it's like iron. I'll tell
you what, Miss Hildebrand, if Erris comes back cured we must do
something to take him out of himself. We must fight the family bogey
between us, somehow."
Mr. Rosse was two days at Castle Eagle, and already Meg felt
as though she had known him for years. He had come with an easy
brightness into the life. There were a hundred minute differences,
which Lady Turloughmore would never have observed, patent to Meg.
1914.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 677
There was a new alertness in the whole establishment. Everybody,
from Mrs. Browne down to the youngest gardener's helper, seemed
bucked up by the coming of Algy Rosse. Meg, accustomed to a greater
easiness of life than prevailed at Castle Eagle, had found nothing amiss
in the running of that establishment. Now she discovered that the
cook had put on an additional spurt of endeavor, that Bates the
gardener was ready to cut his best blooms, and to sacrifice his prize
fruit and vegetables for Mr. Rosse's delectation. The horses in the
stables were ridden by someone else than grooms and stable boys ; the
carriages were in constant requisition. She began to realize that Castle
Eagle, before the coming of Algy Rosse, had been somewhat of a
palace of the Sleeping Beauty; that the family had existed for its
servants rather than its servants for it by the contrast that followed
on the arrival of the heir-presumptive.
If he had been less debonair, less pleasant and simple, less at-
tached to his relatives, Meg felt that she could hardly have forgiven
him, because everyone smiled on his coming. This gay, insouciant boy
was a poignant contrast to the man with whom pain had so long been
an inhabitant that he could have little joy of his youth. One person
only refused to smile upon Algy Rosse. That was Julia, who pretended
not to know him when he went to visit her in the nurseries, where she
kept the house now all kinds of weather, not even going forth to
Mass on Sundays, because of the rheumatism that kept her on the rack.
She treated Algy Rosse as someone she had never seen before, to
the amiable youth's discomfiture. Meg watched him while he sat in
an atmosphere intolerable on a hot summer morning, trying to recall
himself to Julia's memory and failing, so that at last he went away
baffled. Meg remained. She had discovered a certain resentment in
Julia's manner, and thought it might be due to her having neglected
the old woman of late, since Algy Rosse claimed much of her time,
and Lady Turloughmore seemed to desire that she should fall in with
his wishes.
"Did you not really remember Mr. Rosse?" she asked, when the
door had closed behind the golden youth. " You have such a good
memory for things in general."
"Aye then, I remembered him well enough," said Julia, turning a
far less friendly eye than usual upon Meg. "I call it just impidence
of him puttin' his nose in here where he isn't wanted. Och, indeed,
there's some that forget aisy, an' the risin' sun's better to some thin the
the settin' sun. But maybe the settin's farther away thin some people
thinks. There was wan in this house I h'ard it wid me own ears
that said the house was gayer wid Mr. Rosse in it thin Lord Erris.
It's gaiety some people wants, an' to stand in the sun an' let others
sit in the darkness. But he needn't be stickin' his nose into my
nurseries, where I hope I'll see his lordship's children before I die."
678 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Feb.,
" No one forgets Lord Erris because Mr. Rosse is very pleasant,
Julia," Meg said. " And I know that Mr. Rosse wouldn't want to push
anyone into the dark. He is deeply attached both to Lady Turlough-
more and to Lord Erris."
The old woman looked up at her, with something in the expres-
sion of her purblind eyes that made Meg wonder what was coming.
" Your face is like crame and roses to me poor ould blind eyes,"
she said. " But it isn't the same as it was, jewel. Tis like as if it
had got nipped by the frost. Listen, dear, you wouldn't be thinkin'
there was a new light in the day because Mr. Rosse was come, and
my poor lamb gone away out of it, to try to get his poor foot made
as good as any beggar's foot that walks the road ? You wouldn't now,
would you ? "
Meg, as though constrained by some power beyond herself, looked
down into the old woman's eyes, but said nothing, and Julia, with
a baffled air, went on.
" You needn't be ashamed or afraid of poor old Julia, darlint.
The child of my milk, isn't he as dear to me as if he was the child
I bore? I couldn't bear to see any wrong done to him. If he was
to be in love with a lady and why wouldn't he be? I wouldn't like
to see any wrong done to him nor anyone preferred before him. I'd
like to give him the thing he wanted, you see, dear. That's the way
with all of us women; whether we're poor, ould, mad women that's
outlived our time or a beautiful young lady that's the desire of a man's
eyes; we all want to give them all they want. Sure what is women
for but to content the men?"
At the moment this abject and contemptible betrayal of her sex
only struck an answering chord in Meg's bosom. Her eyes filled with
tears as she stooped and set her fresh young lips to cheeks that felt
like the texture of an old kid glove. Whatever else Julia might have
said she fled from hearing. It was something of a relief to all that was
pent up in her heart, to let it go for a moment before the eyes of the
old half-mad woman who had nursed Lord Erris and his father before
him. But after the momentary slackening of her bonds she fled, ter-
rified of her self-betrayal.
In the quiet and shelter of her own room she stood, her hands
clasped upon her breast as though she would keep down the tumult
of her heart. What a simple creed it was, that immemoriably old
creed of the women, to which she in her turn was ready to subscribe,
that the man should be given all he wanted! All he wanted! Even
though it broke the heart of the woman, the man should have all he
wanted.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
Bew Boohs.
THE ENGLISH NOVEL. By Professor George Saintsbury. New
York : E. P. Button & Co. $1.50 net.
It has almost become a proverb that Professor Saintsbury
knows more about English literature than anybody else; but this
though true, would not be sufficient to account for the interest of this
volume. Knowledge, though always impressive, is not always inter-
esting. This book is interesting because it is alive from the very
first page to the very last it is full of life. It has itself caught the
true quality of the great novel, "the quality of story interest." It is
a "yarn" about English novels and English novelists. Prose fiction
has two well-recognized forms, the romance and the novel. The
romance is the story of incident, while the novel is the story of
character and motive. The one gives special attention to the out-
ward and visible life of the hero, the other attends in particular to
his inner life. But of course any good story involves both ele-
ments. It is easy to imagine that the novel would grow out of the
romance, but how this really took place is known to very few.
Professor Saintsbury gives us this knowledge in the most natural,
straightforward, and personal way.
Our author is of opinion that the beginnings of romance may be
traced to the " lives of the saints," which began to circulate after
the older East had been joined to the newer non-classical West by
the spread of Christianity. We see this influence at work, for
instance, in the Anglo-Saxon homilies and lives of the saints, in
Aelfric's Life of St. Cuthbert, and in the Csedmon story as told
by Bede. Whatever else they may be, they are real good stories full
of personal romance. And in these lives of the saints we have the
beginnings not only of romance, but of the novel itself the interior
life of the hero is just as important, nay more important, than his
outward and visible deeds. And so it is that Professor Saintsbury,
from the outset, protests against the separation of the romance and
the novel. It can't be done, he says, it is a mistake logically and
psychologically. He shows the novel interest of Havelok the Dane
and King Horn, but to Malory in his Morte D' Arthur, " one of the
great books of the world," he pays most honor in this respect.
Malory was an artist not a mere compiler; he had "the sense of
grasp, the power to put his finger, and to keep it, on the central
68o NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
pulse and nerve of the story. The Arthurian legend is the greatest
of mediaeval creations." It unites (where even Dante could only
isolate and divide) valor, love, and religion. ' The ancients never
realized this combination at all : the moderns have merely struggled
after it, or blasphemed in f ox-and-grape fashion : the mediaeval had
it. Malory came to give the sum and substance of what mediaeval
fiction could do in prose."
The Italian novella or prose tale exercised great influence
on English literature as early as Chaucer, but its direct influence
on the growth of the English novel was somewhat deferred. Trans-
lations of these novella became common in England after the middle
of the sixteenth century, and their effect was most noticeable on two
important Elizabethan works, the Euphues of Lely (1579) and the
Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney (1581). Some have denied the title
of novel to the former work, but in spite of its affected style it gives
out the proper " note " of the novel in its very human preoccupa-
tion with the moral, political, educational, and social ideas of the
time. The Arcadia may be described as heroic pastoral romance,
looking back to classical models in the conventional renaissance
fashion. But this and kindred attempts at the novel can hardly
be called genuine; they were imitations of imitations; they had
little variety and no life at all. Paradoxical as it may sound, it was
Bunyan who next after this advanced the novel many stages in its
growth.
The next important period was that of Addison, Steele, and
their Spectator (1713). These papers were not novels it is true, but
they contained elements of the developed novel not to be found at
this time in the novel itself. The dialogue, the liveliness of the
main characters, the natural rendering of ordinary life and manners
were all to become part of the novel proper. And now at last,
about 1720, we reach Defoe, the novelist per se et non secundum
quid, the first of those wonderful magicians who create the real
which is not real, the fiction that is more wonderful than fact, the
first but not by any means the greatest of that royal line of story
tellers who can make the most ordinary and uninteresting events of
life most interesting to read about, " not by burlesquing them or
satirizing them; not by suffusing or inflaming them with passion;
not by giving them the amber of style ; but by serving them 'simple
of themselves' as though they actually existed."
We have now left the building-shed, we have come to the
starting place of the novel proper, and our space prevents a further
1914.] NEW BOOKS 681
sequence of detailed observation. Why not go to the book itself?
There we may read of the novel wain, so solidly built, so splendidly
wheeled, and now set agoing through the centuries.
POLICY AND PAINT. By the Author of A Life of Sir Kenelm
Digby. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $2.75 net.
We enjoyed every page of this entertaining sketch of the lives
of Dudley Carleton, Charles I.'s ambassador at Venice, Paris,
and The Hague, and of Peter Paul Rubens, the eminent Court
painter at Mantua, Madrid, and London. Carleton, the profes-
sional diplomat, was an amateur artist; in fact he was the first
Englishman to form a collection of pictures. Rubens, eminently
distinguished in the profession of art, was an amateur in politics,
working secretly at the English Court for the interests of the Arch-
duchess Isabella.
This book gives us a good insight into the devious ways of
seventeenth century diplomacy. It was Machiavellian to the core,
and largely conducted by lying and spying. Carleton " did much
to raise its tone and character. He set an admirable example to
other ambassadors, and showed them that low cunning was not
invariably the surest method of serving the interests of the country
they represented Nothing would induce him to intercept
letters, nor to employ spies." Although he cannot be considered
a great statesman, he was an honest, industrious, and loyal official.
While abroad in the government service, he was continually
buying pictures and statuary. It was through the exchanging of
some antique sculptures of a number of Ruben's pictures, that the
great friendship between these two utterly dissimilar characters
arose. Carleton was always ready to talk about art to Rubens,
although he despised him a bit as an amateur diplomatist. He him-
self was averse to mixing up policy with paint.
The two chief objects to which the Archduchess Isabella
directed the diplomatic powers of Rubens, were the return of the
United Provinces to the Spanish allegiance, and the good will of
England with Spain. He totally failed to influence the Dutch,
although he was much more successful in keeping peace between
England and Spain. Rubens was always kind to his fellow
artists, whom he frequently aided with both advice and money.
In politics he was honest and incorruptible, a marked contrast to his
brother artist, Gerbier, a well-known ambassador of Charles, who
always had his price.
682 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
Our author is right in calling James I. the weakest king that
ever sat upon the English throne, and in styling Charles I. a neu-
rotic, self-opinionated, shifty believer in the divine right of kings.
So bad a picture does he give us of Charles I. that, in the closing
chapter, he attempts a sort of half-hearted apology for him. We
do not agree with his verdict, " that in smooth times Charles I.
might have been a highly respectable and a greatly respected mon-
arch."
DIRK: A SOUTH AFRICAN. By Annabella Bruce Marchand.
New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.35 net.
Dirk is a story of South Africa fifty years ago. It centres
about a villainous peddler, who, after years of dishonesty in deceiv-
ing hundreds of stupid, slow-witted Boer farmers, manages to be-
come the wealthy autocrat of Groenvallei. Dirk van Rooyen, whose
family has been brought to wretchedness and poverty by the villain's
crooked dealings, vows to be avenged. For a time, however, he
forswears his vengeance because he falls in love with Fanny, the
daughter of his enemy. She, unacquainted with the principles of
Catholic ethics, stupidly thinks it her duty not to marry without
her father's consent. Dirk, the rejected suitor, resumes his plans
of revenge, and is just on the point of securing his enemy's con-
viction for felony, when Fanny calls upon him to save her father
from death in an impending railway disaster. The lovers die in
the vain attempt to give warning to the doomed train.
Our author tells us at the close that there are five morals to the
story. The reader may choose the one which suits his fancy.
FRANCE TO-DAY. Its Religious Orientation. By Paul Sabatier.
Translated by Henry Bryant Binns. New York: E. P. Dut-
ton & Co. $2.00 net.
In his introduction Paul Sabatier states the purpose of his
writing : " We would attempt a somewhat novel essay ; to see
whether, apart from any metaphysical thesis, in the independent,
disinterested spirit of scientific investigation, a kind of inquiry
cannot be opened into religious feeling, its presence or absence, its
disappearance or re-emergence, and, in short, into the direction of
its evolution to-day In other words, is there not a somewhat
deep religious feeling in our country, apart from any habits of
worship and traditional acts, apart from a language that still sub-
sists, though the ideas and needs to which it corresponded have
1914.] NEW BOOKS 683
passed away ? " While admitting that absolute impartiality is
impossible in discussing this question, he tells us that despite his
attachment to Protestantism ultra-liberal of course he will do his
utmost " to understand, admire, and love both Catholicism and Free
Thought." We can easily understand that most of his readers will
lay down this book greatly exasperated with a writer who mixes
so illogically and superciliously his hodge-podge of patronizing
praise and cock-sure condemnation.
Sabatier quotes a number of French writers to prove the utter
bankruptcy of French Protestantism. For instance:
French Protestantism is like a driving belt which runs loose.
It throws no part into gear. Intellectually, morally, and so-
cially it remains outside human action. It has not stirred for
a century Its action is null ; it appears to some pastors and
laymen as a sort of pseudo-Catholicism, less logical, less grand
than the other French Protestantism is on the way to dis-
appearance, to decomposition, and by non-equivocal signs it may
be foreseen that the succession of phenomena heralding the end
will be somewhat rapid. The chapels and the faculties also are
becoming empty. Before long the number of professors will
exceed that of the students. The ministerial average is becom-
ing lower, etc., etc.
He declares that most Frenchmen have been shocked by the
negative element in the Protestant propaganda, and have been dis-
gusted at the blustering lecture tours of renegade priests. Others
object to the want of reticence with which the most intimate and
private matters of the inner life are spoken of by some evangelists.
" Protestants," he concludes, " have wounded France by their theol-
ogism, their critical turn of mind, and an iconoclastic zeal that seeks
everywhere for idols to destroy."
There are many tributes of praise to the Catholic Church
scattered throughout this volume. Sabatier writes:
The glory and power of the Catholic Church lies in this, that
being in fact a society by the side of other similar societies, she
has passed beyond this idea. Not satisfied to have her place in
the sun, nor even to stand first, she wished to be the only one.
By symbols which are both the most diverse and the
most precise, she proclaimed the unity of humanity, even the
unity and solidarity of the whole of nature, thus anticipating the
most lofty preoccupations of our day by a sort of bold prophecy.
684 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
She appeals to the most mystical and powerful element of
human nature, the instinct of devotion Claiming a per-
fect devotion, and absolute immolation, the Church has rendered
homage to the best inclinations of the heart; therein lies her
great superiority over all attempted reforms and new religions.
Her symbolism and liturgy join the ages together in a
mysterious harmony ; her discipline aims at calling all the inhab-
itants of the earth to communicate in the same Host, and in a
single effort. Let us not be deceived : tradition is the elder sister
of evolution If the Church of Rome appears to have been
more affected than any other by the political and intellectual
crisis, it may, nevertheless, be said that, in the midst of the spirit-
ual debris that surrounds us, the thought of to-day is seeking
out, for the foundations and columns of the new temple, ideas
and feelings whose Catholic origin is unquestionable ; the senti-
ment of the mystery that envelops and embraces us; of the
unity and solidarity of all beings throughout time as throughout
space The Church of Rome keeps thus a unique and peer-
less place in the heart and conscience of the coming generation,
because it alone has realized the unity and eternity of its life.
The communion of the Catholic with the Church is the
initial act of his moral life. He believes in her as naturally
as the new-born babe believes in his mother.
Of course Sabatier, true to his rationalistic prejudices, declares
that there are two Catholicisms in France, in order that he might
give his enthusiastic support to the modernistic wind condemned by
the Encyclical Pascendi. He condemns Popes Leo XIII. and Pius
X. for their insistence upon the temporal power, and their utter
lack of sympathy with the Irish people and the Poles of Prussian
Poland. He denounces the intransigeance of the present Roman
Curia, which is continually anathematizing Catholic scholars of note,
and confounding things ecclesiastical and religious. He seems to
think that Modernism is present everywhere, and that it is impos-
sible to stay its course by forming the hierarchy into a sort of
police force. He does not seem to grasp the fact of the Church's
wisdom in denouncing the undenominational schools, nor realize that
their teaching has degenerated de facto into a bitter anti-religious
teaching. We smile when we hear him impudently declare that the
ethical course of the French neutral school " is an entire stranger
to polemics, and finds a lesson of toleration and spiritual labor in
the historical statement of the extreme diversity of religions."
His chapter on Free Thought attempts vainly to prove that
1914.] NEW BOOKS 685
Free Thought is not essentially anti-religious. Although, we are
informed, it occasionally has had " fits of fury against churches,
dogmas, and rites, still its authoritative representatives aim to
recover the feeling which created religious institutions." He admits
that the plain soldiers, and even the non-commissioned officers of
Free Thought, often declare their intention of extirpating all relig-
ion, but maintains that its leaders desire for science " not only a
limitless freedom, but wish its efforts inspired with an ardor, a
patience, a heroism which are nothing else than faith. They do not
think of destroying faith, but, on the contrary, of giving it a better
knowledge of itself!"
In his chapter on Contemporary Philosophy, he shows that
the present generation leans to the thought of Bergson, Boutroux,
and William James, because they answer the need which present-
day France manifests in every quarter " to see the living reality;"
whereas the superficial, exaggerated and pessimistic tendencies of
Nietzsche have undergone a complete eclipse. " Neitzsche failed
to answer the real, better and deeper needs of France for a more
intense and more devoted common life."
It would require a volume to point out all the inaccuracies of
fact and of philosophical statement with which this book teems.
On every page we realize how utterly out of sympathy the author
is with the true ethos and spirit of Catholicism.
COLUMBUS AND HIS PREDECESSORS. A Study in the Be-
ginnings of American History. By Charles H. McCarthy,
Ph.D. Philadelphia: John Joseph McVey. 50 cents net.
Professor McCarthy has written a brief but careful sketch
of the maritime achievements which culminated in the discovery of
the American continent. The main facts which are contained in
countless monographs and volumes are here collected and arranged,
so that the reader may easily acquire a firm grasp of the beginnings
of American history.
We have often come across the assertion that : " It was not
jewels but Jews " that furnished the funds for the equipment of
Columbus. This witticism suggests two errors, which Professor
McCarthy successfully combats. In the first place, Isabella did not
pledge her jewels to provide for the expedition for Columbus,
though in Spain there is a legend that, as early as 1489, they were
pledged to certain money lenders for the prosecution of the war
against the Moors. It is clear from the account books of the
686 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
Santa Hermanadad that Luis de Santangel, its treasurer, loaned for
the equipment of Columbus one million one hundred and forty
thousand maravedis, which were repaid with interest during the
years 1492 and 1493.
The historian Fiske in his Discovery of America seems to be
ignorant of this fact. Columbus himself contributed one-eighth
of the expense of the expedition, on the express condition that
he was to receive one-eighth of the profits. There is no evidence
whatever that Aragon contributed so much as a single maravedi
toward the enterprise, despite the proud boasting of some Aragonese
historians.
The author confutes at some length the popular opinion of some
superficial school histories, which pretend that Columbus was merely
interested in traffic with the Indies, and in the discovery of a safer
route thither. On the contrary, he looked ultimately to nothing less
than the conversion to Christianity of the millions of pagans dwell-
ing in the countries of the East, and to the discovery of islands
and mainlands lying in the Ocean- Sea. In a word, he was both
a missionary and an explorer. Columbus' own Journal states his
purpose clearly.
This scholarly volume is dedicated to the Knights of Columbus,
whose Supreme Knight, Mr. Flaherty, has written an excellent
preface.
LIFE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF RIGHT REV. ALFRED A.
CURTIS, D.D. Second Bishop of Wilmington. Compiled by
the Sisters of the Visitation, Wilmington, Delaware. New
York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $2.50; postpaid $2.70.
Cardinal Gibbons in his preface to this life of Bishop Curtis,
tells us that his characteristic virtues were his sterling honesty,
his hatred of sham, his practices of mortification, and his sense
of duty. His sterling honesty and hatred of sham drove him per-
force out of the Episcopalian Church. Bishop Whittingham was
one day holding communion service at Mount Calvary Church in
Baltimore, and the Rector, Mr. Curtis, while assisting him, made
profound reverence to the elements of bread and wine. This was
observed by the Bishop, who, after the service was ended, privately
took Mr. Curtis to task, assuring him that if he acted similarly
on a future occasion, he would feel himself constrained to reprove
him openly before the assembly in church. " Christ," said the
Bishop, " is there to be communicated and not to be adored." This
1914.] NEW BOOKS 687
struck Mr. Curtis as shifty and dishonest; for as he wrote to the
Bishop, November 14, 1871, commenting on his Pastoral condemn-
ing the adoration of the Eucharist : " I cannot at all see how Christ
can be received as Christ without adoration. To say that He is
present but is not to be adored, is to me only a certain way of
saying that He is not veritably present at all."
Mr. Curtis was finally received into the Church by Newman in
1872. He thanked God for having attained peace in the one fold
of the True Shepherd. He writes of
that secure feeling of having found the reality. You feel not
only as if a child again in ignorance, but a child also in truth
and simplicity. It is a hard battle to put to death totally self-
will, but when you have conquered and you have finally sub-
mitted, and are quite sure that nothing could ever make you
undo your submission, there comes so great a calm and so great
a joy, such certainty, such blessed and incredible faith, that
you don't know your own self.
Bishop Curtis was always remarkable for his austere life,
his utter forgetfulness of self, and his indefatigable zeal for souls.
He dressed so poorly that more than once, on his con-
firmation tours, he was mistaken for a beggar by the pastor's
servant who opened the door to him. Often instead of going to
a hotel in one of the country towns of Delaware, he would roll up
his old cassock for a pillow and sleep all night in church at the foot
of the altar. He was often known to sweep the church himself, and
light the lamps in church, standing on a board which he placed
across the back of the pews. He did a great deal of his
traveling to his far-away missions upon his bicycle, thinking
nothing of sixty or seventy miles a day. He thought he could not
afford the luxury of a horse. He never took any breakfast during
Lent, not even the small cup of black coffee which his friends urged
upon him. He died gloriously poor. All that he left behind were
a rosary, his breviary and ordo, a gun-metal watch, one suit of
clothes, a few changes of underwear, some fishing tackle, and about
three dollars in money.
The second part of the volume contains a few letters, sermons
and spiritual counsels which he gave during his retreats to the
Visitation nuns. They are rather commonplace, and of value only
as evidencing the piety and devotion of the saintly bishop. We
think they might be omitted with profit in the next edition of his
life.
688 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
MODERNISM AND MODERN THOUGHT. By Father Bampton.
SJ. St. Louis: B. Herder. 60 cents net.
Father Bampton has published the seven lectures on Modernism
which he delivered in London last spring. As he himself says,
" they make no pretense of any profound or exhaustive treatment
of the subject. They were addressed to a popular audience, and
the subject was, therefore, handled in popular fashion." He traces
its origin to Kant, who taught that we could not know with intel-
lectual knowledge God and the supernatural. For Kant's Practical
Reason as the means of reaching God, the modernists substitute the
Religious Sentiment or Religious Experience. They declare reve-
lation wholely internal, a mere psychological experience, and faith
the soul's response to it. God, apprehended by the religious senti-
ment, is vitally immanent in the soul, and not apprehended by
any external teaching. Dogma consists of " tentative and
provisional formulas," which express vaguely man's religious ex-
perience. By communicating these dogmas to his neighbors, man
associates his individual conscience with the consciences of others,
thus forming the collective conscience. People so united in
thought form themselves into a society, or the Church. Jesus
Christ is God not in fact, but in the belief of Christians. The
Gospels are true, not historically speaking, but merely as a sign or
symbol of truth; they do not possess a fact value, but a moral or
spiritual value. As a pragmatist, the Modernist asserts that dogmas
like the resurrection of Christ, are true only with practical or instru-
mental truth.
Father Bampton takes up all these false theses in turn, and
briefly compares them with the teaching of the Church. He con-
cludes with a brief sketch of the history of Modernism. It is an ex-
cellent little volume to put in the hands of the tyro in philosophy
or theology.
LIFE OF THE VISCOUNTESS DE BONNAULT D'HOUET.
Foundress of the Society of the Faithful Companions of Jesus
(1781-1858). By Rev. Father Stanislaus, F. M. Capuchin.
Translated from the French by one of her daughters. New
York: Longmans, Green & Co. $2.50 net.
Madame d'Houet was born in 1781 at Chateauroux in France,
a town in the Department of Indre. Her father suffered imprison-
ment during the Reign of Terror, and owing to the disturbed state
of France during the Revolution, his daughter Victoire did not re-
1914.] NEW BOOKS 689
ceive a regular course of school training. She made up for this lack
of methodical instruction by reading and private study; and being
gifted with a receptive and retentive memory and a sound judgment,
she became thoroughly well informed. At twenty-three she married
the Viscount de Bonnault d'Houet, an exceptionally pious Catholic.
Their short married life of ten months reminds us very much of
St. Jane Frances de Chantal and her husband. In the first
stages of her widowhood, though eminently fervent and ardent in
her devotion, she felt no attraction towards the life of a religious;
but gradually through the influence of her director, the Jesuit Father
Varin, she felt called upon to establish a new Institute, the members
of which should be pledged to serve our Savior on the model of the
holy women who ministered to Him during His earthly ministry.
The constitutions of the Jesuits suggested to her the main principles
upon which her society The Faithful Companions of Jesus
should be governed.
After many trials, during which she never lost courage for a
moment, she established her first novitiate at Amiens in 1823. The
purpose of her Institute, as set forth in the Brief of Praise of
Pope Leo XII., was " to teach and to bring up in Christian morality
young girls, especially those born of poor parents." Another
development of her work, evidenced by her second foundation at
Chateauroux, was the training and education of children of the
better class. Before her death in 1858 she had founded twenty-
eight houses in France, Switzerland, Italy, England, and Ireland,
although for one reason or other nine of these foundations were not
permanent.
Like all founders of religious communities, she met with a great
deal of opposition from her ecclesiastical superiors. She and her
companions were denounced as heretics and schismatics, as restless,
intriguing and scheming persons, who were obstinately determined
to have their own will no matter what happened. Her opponents
succeeded in prejudicing both the Archbishop of Bourges and the
Bishop of Langres against her. Many of her closest friends not
only deserted her, but declared themselves her enemies. She was
forced to suppress many of her houses, and Holy Communion was
once publicly refused her community. She persevered, until fin-
ally her Institute was approved by Gregory XVI., August 5, 1837.
Madame d'Houet had for her motto the words courage and con-
fidence, and although, humanly speaking, her Institute from the
first seemed doomed to extinction, her trust in God never wavered.
VOL. xcvui. 44
690 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
She began every day with a two hours meditation, and although she
invariably spent from eleven till midnight in prayer before the
Blessed Sacrament, she was up every morning at four o'clock. She
always endeavored to impress upon her daughters the fact that
she was to be looked upon as a cipher in the foundation of her
community, although in reality she was its sole mainstay and in-
spiration.
We are glad to learn that the cause of the beatification and
canonization of Madame d'Houet is going on in Rome. In 1894
the documentary evidence of the many witnesses who had been ex-
amined and had borne testimony to the heroic sanctity of this
servant of God, was placed in the hands of the Cardinal Secretary
of the Sacred Congregation of Rites.
WOMAN IN SCIENCE. By H. J. Mozans. New York: D.
Appleton & Co. $2.50 net.
Those who share the notion that women are not only intel-
lectually inferior to men, but are decidedly incapable of notable
proficiency and achievement in scientific study, will do well to read
this record of what women have actually accomplished along those
very lines in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, etc. It
will be a revelation to them, and, like other revelations, should have
an instructive, broadening effect.
A long introduction sketches the intellectual condition, diffi-
culties, and struggles of women from the days of Grecian glory to
the present time. An exhaustive account of what they have done
in spite of manifold handicaps and prejudice follows. It is an
extremely interesting record, told in a pleasing, strongly sympathetic
way.
AMERICAN LITERATURE. A Study of the Men and the Books
that in Earlier and Later Times Reflect the American Spirit.
By William J. Long. Boston: Ginn & Co. $1.35.
The aim of this textbook is to present an accurate and interest-
ing record of American literature from the colonial to the present
age, and to keep the record in harmony with the history and spirit
of the American people. The author has tried to make the work
national in its scope, ignoring all political and geographical bound-
aries, and laying special stress only on the writers and books that
reflect our national traditions. Bradford and Byrd, Cooper, Simms,
Longfellow, and Lanier, Hawthorne and Bret Harte are studied,
1914.] NEW BOOKS 691
not as representative of North, South, East, or West, but as so many
different reflections of the same life and spirit.
The book divides our literary history into four great periods
the colonial, the revolutionary, the first and second national con-
tinuous in their development, yet having each its distinct and signifi-
cant characteristics. The study of each period includes a historical
outline of important events, and of significant political and social
conditions; a general survey of the literature of the period, its
dominant tendencies, and its relation to literary movements in
England and on the continent ; a detailed treatment of every major
writer, including a biography, an analysis of his chief works, and
a critical appreciation of his place and influence in our national
literature ; a consideration of the minor writers and of the notable
miscellaneous works of the period ; and, at the end, a general sum-
mary, with selections recommended for reading, bibliography, text,
suggestive questions, and other helps for teachers and students.
Mr. Long writes in a charming, incisive style, and summarizes
clearly and accurately the views of the most eminent literary critics.
PRODIGALS AND SONS. By John Ayscough. London: Chatto
& Windus. $1.50.
Monsignor Bickerstaffe-Drew has gathered together in the
present volume about thirty short stories that most of his readers
will devour at a sitting. Some are weird and uncanny, as A Shadow
of Death and The Pink-Eyed Man; some are full of humor, as
Changed and The Happy End of Sister Elisabeth; some inculcate
a moral lesson, as By Easy Instalments and The Schoolmistress;
others are rather commonplace, and might well be omitted in a
second edition. The chief objection to many of these stories is
the constant harping on one theme, the death theme. It is developed
dramatically enough at times, but becomes rather monotonous in its
constant repetition.
THE MARRIAGE OF MADEMOISELLE GIMEL. By Rene
Bazin. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.25 net.
Of the five stories that make up this delightful volume, three
are altogether new. The others appeared almost twenty years ago
in magazine and in book form, but have been rewritten. The first
which gives its title to the book, is the longest. It is a sweet,
wholesome story of strong, pure love a love that has a real obstacle
and a hard prejudice in its way. You know that both were over-
692 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
come, but for all that, you will be delighted and your heart will be
warmed by learning how. The whole book, like the rest of Rene
Bazin's works, but unlike the average French fiction, is sound and
clean and fragrant.
THE INTERIOR LIFE. Simplified and Reduced to its Funda-
mental Principle. Edited by the Very Rev. Father Tissot,
Superior General of the Missionaries of St. Francis de Sales,
and Translated by W. H. Mitchell, M.A. New York : Ben-
ziger Brothers. $1.75 net.
" If thine eye be single thy whole body will be lightsome,"
would seem to be the burden of this golden book. For golden it
certainly is, and as it becomes known to souls, truly desirous of
leading a devout life, it will come into its own, in the esteem of
those truly discriminating. Its title, The Interior Life, being some-
what too general, the significance of the book lies in the sub-title:
Simplified and Reduced to its Fundamental Principle. It is indeed
a mosaic of the spiritual life a summary to be studied, pondered,
assimilated with steady deliberation. One thing follows from
another, depends upon another with inexorable logic, and every
word has its value.
It contains nothing new, for, of course, the doctrine explained
is as old as Christ, and since Christ came " not to destroy but to
fulfill " as old as God's plan for the reconciliation of justice and
mercy; the royal road which follows in the footsteps of Christ
is still the road of the cross and of the crossbearers.
But being the children of an age of rush and hurry, of super-
ficiality and ill-regulated desire for quick results, we need to be
brought face to face with first principles, in order not to be lost
in a maze of experiments and methods, resulting only in wasted en-
ergy, discouragement, and disgust. One indelible impression which
the book must leave, is the author's insistence on the true idea
of piety, and its wide divergence from the ordinary notion. Piety
has almost fallen into disrepute through its misuse. A strong
thing, a forceful and virile thing is piety with our author, com-
prising the whole man the great source, whence flow and whither
tend all virtues the readiness to see, love, and seek God in all
things. " Sentiment has taken," he says, " an importance in the
guidance of life, which does not belong to it, either by nature or
grace, and in this way it diminishes both nature and grace." " The
sentimentalities of piety " receive no quarter whatever.
1914-] NEW BOOKS 693
No greater praise could be given to this book than to say
that it is a luminous commentary on St. Ignatius' foundation and
St. Francis de Sales' spirituality. And yet this is evident from
even a cursory study. " It is not a new devotional method : prin-
ciples alone are the foundation; method is merely an accessory."
The first person singular is employed throughout, reminding one
very forcibly of Newman and his recognition of but two personal-
ities God and himself in the arena of his soul; the author, too,
seems to credit our poor human nature, at least that of devout people,
with being better than spiritual writers generally admit ; it is rather
refreshing now and then.
The arch-tempter and temptations receive but small notice;
yet the masters of the spiritual life speak as if these were the
omnipresent microbes of the atmosphere about us. Thomas a
Kempi's bid us to be solicitous about our temptations, that is to take
account of such hindrances and be prepared for them; and St.
Teresa warns us of temptations under the appearance of good.
It seems a little like planning for a life in regions where storms
do not penetrate, however. An uprightness of character, a single-
ness of eye in the understanding, a rectitude of intention in the
will, and a serenity of judgment which seems to be the privilege
of the eagles of the mountains are requisite here.
But we will give the plan of this work in the words of the
author. " Three great ideas sum it up : the end, the way and the
means the end towards which it must lead ; the way it has to
go ; the means it should use." Then after saying that we are too
much taken up with the means, he continues : " All these things are
means, and means are of use only in the way, and the way is useful
only towards the end. Questions of means are only questions of
the third order in true religion. Questions as to the way come
before them and explain them ; and questions of the end come first
and explain all else, both the way and the means The means
will pass away, the way will pass, the end alone will abide."
And true to this summary, keeping rigidly to this framework,
we are shown: God's glory as the end, the purpose of our life;
the straight road which is the way the road that shows the will of
God; the means of which we have two kinds, God's and man's.
The first, God's grace; the second, penance and the exercise of
piety.
Much might be said of the beauties of special chapters, but it
would be difficult if once begun to make an end. The reader must
694 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
discover for himself the orderly development, the beautiful unfold-
ing of this noblest of themes, the union of pur souls with God their
last end.
The various summaries and analyses will prove extremely
helpful. But the translation will often be found unsatisfactory ;
for French idioms abound, while in one or two places the sense is
not made very clear, chiefly for want of good punctuation. But
aside from these blemishes which can be easily remedied, the book
should prove a powerful incentive to souls seeking to draw near
to the Divine Lover. The end is ever beckoning them onward;
the way is always spread before their gaze ; the means unfailingly
springing up according to their needs: the whole a strong un-
breakable, threefold cord.
ART IN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL. By Marcel Dieulafoy. New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.50 net.
Marcel Dieulafoy traces in this scholarly manual the genesis,
progress, and development of the art-history of Spain and Por-
tugal. He shows in the first three chapters that Persia was not
only the source of inspiration of Mussulman architecture, and of the
so-called Mudejar architecture of Spain, but that she played an
important and well-defined part in the elaboration of those religious
themes which found their way into the Asturias, Castille, and Cata-
lonia after the expulsion of the invaders. To prove his point, he has
traveled in the Persian East, and Asia, Africa, and Mussulman Eu-
rope, France, Italy, Sicily, and the Christian Lower Europe. He
shows how each of these countries played a part in the development
of Spanish art, and, however slight it may have been, he has recog-
nized it and submitted it to analysis. He shows how the germs of
the Romanesque and Gothic architecture of Europe were born of the
collaboration of the two Spains: the Spain of the Gospel and the
Spain of the Koran. This, as he himself states, is an essential
feature of his work, a point developed for the first time, and one
which necessitated a parallel between the Church and the Mosque.
In this connection he has restored to ancient Persia what belongs
to ancient Persia, and has limited the respected domains of Coptic
Egypt, Byzantium, and Rome.
Most of the volume deals with Spain, the various chapters
being the Church and the Mosque, Antique Periods, the Roman-
esque Period, the Gothic Period, the Renaissance, the Eight-
eenth Century and the Nineteenth Century. A final chapter deals
1914.] NEW BOOKS
with art in Portugal. A very complete bibliography follows every
chapter. The numerous illustrations, although most minute, are
most beautiful and well chosen.
A DIVINE FRIEND. By Henry C. Schuyler. Philadelphia:
Peter Reilly. $1.00.
We remember reading some twenty years ago an excellent
book by a French priest Pere Ollivier, if we remember aright on
The Friends of Christ, which was brought vividly to mind by this
new book of Father Schuyler's. But although the theme is an old
one, we must say that Father Schuyler's method of treatment is
charming in its simplicity and striking in its originality. The
volume consists of a series of studies on the characters and lives
of some of those whom our Savior expressly distinguishes as stand-
ing in degrees of particular intimacy with Himself. As Monsignor
Benson says in his preface : " They are specimens, so to speak,
selected from that 'multitude which no man can number,' selected
yet again from that smaller company of 'His own,' of whom so
many, as His own beloved disciple tells us, 'did not receive Him' >
those who were given the amazing and awful privilege of seeing
and speaking with, in the days of the flesh, the Divine Lover
and Redeemer of souls."
II 7 E received an Illustrated Catechism for First Communion,
which Father Libert of St. Bernard's Seminary, Rochester,
New York, has just edited. We call the attention of pastors and
Sunday-school teachers to this most valuable little book. It is
especially interesting, because the proceeds of its sale go towards
helping the Catholic Missions of Marfa and the Rio Grande, Texas.
Price, 15 cents; twenty-five copies, $3.0x3.
A TIMELY and valuable pamphlet, entitled The Why and
** Wherefor of Parochial Schools, has just been issued as a
penny leaflet by the Central Bureau of the Central Verein, St.
Louis, Missouri. The pamphlet is the reprint of an address de-
livered by the Reverend D. I. McDermott, Rector of St. Mary's
Church, Philadelphia, Pa. It would be well for pastors to dis-
tribute it among their people, and it is very useful to give to
inquirers who wish to understand the attitude of the Catholic
Church with regard to parochial schools.
696 NEW BOOKS [Feb.,
FOREIGN PUBLICATIONS.
La Bonte Chez les Saints, by Marquis de Segur. (Paris: Pierre Tequi.
6/rs.) The Marquis de Segur has written three volumes on the saints of the
primitive Church, the Middle Ages, and modern times, in which he brings out
particularly their kindness, charity, mercy, and tenderness. His thesis through-
out is that the perfect love of one's neighbor is an infallible proof of one's
perfect love for Jesus Christ.
L'Agonie des Fleurs, by A. Yves le Moyne. (Paris: Eugene Figuiere
et Cie.) M. le Moyen is evidently a disciple of Baudelaire. His poems are
full of the morbid melancholy of Poe, and the gross immorality of Whitman.
The only lyrics in the volume worthy of mention are those inspired by his
sojourn in North Africa, namely, Un Lever de Soleil, dans le Bled, Lcs Croco-
diles, and Le Crucifiement des Lions.
Devotion to the Blessed Virgin an Earnest of Salvation. (Paris: Pierre
Tequi.) The anonymous author of this little book proves, by citations from
the saints and by many a pious tale and legend, that the devout servant of Mary
is always the true lover of Jesus Christ, her Son. A non-Catholic might think
some of the stories extravagant and far-fetched, but one inside the fold will
readily interpret them in the light of Catholic dogma.
The Life of Rev. A. de Ponlevoy, S.J., by Rev. Alexandre de Gabriac, S.J.
(Paris: Pierre Tequi.) If the writer of The Candid History of the Jesuits
would only deign to read this life of a nineteenth century French Jesuit, he
might realize how basely he had calumniated the aim and spirit of the Society
of Jesus. We have in these vivid pages a perfect picture of the Jesuit as
novice, priest, professor, preacher, provincial, director of souls, instructor of
souls, and letter-writer. It is an excellent book to put in the hands of a Jesuit
novice.
Letter to a Religious Superior, by Father Franco, S.J. Translated from the
Italian by the Abbe A. E. Gautier. (Paris: Pierre Tequi.) The Decree, Que-
madmodum rerum, issued by the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, forbade
religious superiors to usurp the place of the confessor, either by insisting on a
private manifestation of conscience, or by regulating unduly the subject's right
to receive Holy Communion. The Jesuit Father Franco has written a brief ex-
planation of this decree to a certain religious superior who was greatly worried
about its true meaning.
Homilies for All Sundays and Feasts of Obligation, by Rev. I. L. Gondal,
S.S. (Paris: P. Lethielleux.) This "aid to the preacher" is one of the best
works of its kind that we have read for many a day. Each chapter is divided
into three parts, viz. : First, the text of the Sunday Gospel in Latin and French ;
second, a brief exegesis of the text ; and, third, an analysis of the most striking
sermons of the chief French pulpit orators. The learned Superior of the Sem-
inary of Toulouse has written a book which we would gladly welcome in an
English dress.
Addresses to Young Men, by Rev. Paul Lallemand. (Paris: Pierre Tequi.)
The French Oratorian, Father Lallemand, has published three volumes of simple,
devout, and eloquent addresses to young men, inculcating the love of God and
the love of country. W r e enjoyed particularly his sketches of Admiral Bergasse
and Father Marchal, and his brief talks on Christmas, Catholic France, and
The Saints of France.
Beyond the Tomb, by Rev. Ad. Hamon, S.J. (Paris: Pierre Tequi.) The
author has written this popular treatise on the joys and happiness of heaven
19I4-] NEW BOOKS 697
to console and encourage those Christians who are tempted to doubt and despair
in our unbelieving age. It is a good book to read during a retreat.
Let Us Defend Ourselves, by the Abbe Charles Grimaud. (Paris: Pierre
Tequi.) The Abbe Grimaud, in these short, lively stories, warns his readers
against the chief evils prevalent in France to-day. He studies in turn French
infidelity, the anti-Christian school, the impious press, Socialism, race suicide,
the pagan feminine movement, and the like. He shows clearly that the only
remedy lies in a return to the faith of old Catholic France.
Cases of Conscience for the Laity, by Abbe L. Desbrus. (Paris: Pierre
Tequi.) These two hundred questions on moral topics were originally sub-
mitted to the editor of a French Catholic paper, known as the Apostle of the
Fireside. The author has arranged them under three headings, viz. : the Com-
mandments of God, the Laws of the Church, and the Sacraments. It is really
a Question Box of Moral Theology for the laity clear, simple, and accurate.
The Administrative Removal of Pastors According to the Decree Maxima
Cura, by Abbe A. Villien. (Paris: P. Lethielleux.) Abbe Villien, Professor of
Canon Law at the Catholic Institute of Paris, has written a clear, detailed, and
well-ordered commentary on the decree, Maxima Cura, which was issued
by the Sacred Consistorial Congregation on August 20, 1910. After an historical
introduction on the former laws regarding the canonical removal of pastors, the
writer studies the new law in its every detail. The eight chapters of the volume
treat in turn of : the causes requisite for removal ; the procedure in general ;
the persons who must declare the removal ; the request for resignation ; the
decree of removal ; the revision of the trial ; the provision made for the deposed
pastor; and finally the subjects of the law. This scholarly treatise will prove
invaluable to both bishops and priests who are anxious to know their rights
and duties as set forth by this important law.
Meditations on the Agony of our Lord Jesus Christ, by the Abbe N. Laux.
(Paris: Pierre Tequi. i/r.) The Abbe Laux in these meditations has in view
the Sisters of the Holy Agony, and the confraternity of that name founded by
the Abbe Nicolle. They are arranged in the form of a novena preparatory
to the feast of the Holy Agony, a Holy Hour for each week, and a short prayer
for each day. The devotion seeks tr> make reparation for insults offered to our
Lord in the Blessed Sacrament.
Histoire De la Philosophic Ancienne, by Gaston Sortais. (Paris: P.
Lethielleux.) Gaston Sortais has published the first volume of his history of
philosophy. It embraces four periods : Classic Antiquity, the Patristic Epoch,
Mediaeval Philosophy, and the Renaissance. The author refers continually in a
series of cross references to his well-known Traite de Philosophic for a fuller
treatment of the systems he so accurately and tersely describes. The best part
of his work is his discussion of the origin, development, and decadence of
Scholasticism. We call especial attention to his brief sketches of the life and
writings of St. Bonaventure, Albert the Great, and St. Thomas, and the con-
troversies that arose when the Angelic Doctor first baptized Aristotle. Each
period has its special bibliography, and at the end he gives a most excellent
and complete bibliography of some seventy-eight pages. Indeed the whole vol-
ume is far above the average " farrago manualium," which a famous professor
at the Catholic University, Dr. Bouquillon, used to stigmatize as the curse of our
modern age. Gaston Sortais is always accurate, critical, and suggestive. He
is very brief at times but never vague ; he quotes hundreds of his predecessors,
but is never the slave of their opinions. Every professor of philosophy will
be glad to put such a volume in the hands of his pupils. With such a guide his
own labors will become comparatively easy.
iperfobicals.
The Catholic Church in 1915. By Very Rev. James MacCaf-
frey. The most notable event of the year, especially at this time
when religion is being attacked by so many adversaries, and the
freedom of the Church and of the Holy See is being restricted day
by day, was the celebration of the sixteenth centenary of Constan-
tine's Edict of Milan. The Italian government has refused to grant
Monsignor Caron permission to take possession of his see at Genoa,
and has tolerated acts of rowdyism at the very doors of the Vatican.
Pius X. not desiring the establishment of a purely Catholic party in
Italy, the efforts of the Catholic Electoral Union were directed to
securing pledges from the candidates that they would not support
anti-religious legislators and laws; these pledges were given by
two hundred and twenty-eight Liberals; Mayor Nathan of Rome
and his followers had to resign in a body. The reorganization and
improvement of the seminaries in Italy should do much to advance
culture and to strengthen faith. In France the burning question
has been that of education, the Catholic schools so increasing that
in some places the State schools are practically deserted. A most
violently anti-Catholic bill in this connection is now before the
Chamber of Deputies. Some hospital Sisters have been allowed to
return, as at Grenoble and Marseilles; the State has made partial
provision for the repair of churches not classed as historical monu-
ments; and there has been encouraging activity among the Catho-
lics. In seven years fifty-six new churches have been erected in
Paris or its suburbs.
In Spain the hoped-for complete reconciliation with Rome has
not been effected ; the powerful opposition to a scheme for purely
secular education has caused the government to reconsider its plans.
In Portugal the dominant party has grown ever more bitter toward
the Church, while the entire episcopate and almost the entire clergy
remain unswervingly loyal to Rome. The general condition of the
people grows daily worse. In Belgium the strike proved very par-
tial, because the workmen of the Catholic democratic societies re-
fused to " down tools." The Prime Minister has introduced a bill
to secure equal financial treatment for the voluntary and com-
munal schools. In Germany the relations of the Centre Party with
1914.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 699
the Chancellor have been strained ; the annual Catholic Congress at
Metz was preceded by a parade of thirty thousand workmen. Its
president urged union among Catholic forces according to the
Papal policy. In Holland the development of the Catholic Social
Action organization, begun in 1905, is noteworthy. In the United
States occurred the assembly of the Federation of Catholic So-
cieties at Milwaukee, with Archbishop Ireland's striking address;
the Catholic University Summer School for teaching Sisters, and
cooperation of the University with Louvain in publishing the works
of the Oriental Fathers; the Missionary Congress at Boston. In
Australia the school question has been to the fore. In England
occurred the conversions at Caldey. Ireland sent its first national
pilgrimage to Lourdes; Dr. Harty was made Archbishop of Cashel
and Emly, in place of Dr. Fennelly retired for ill-health; and the
long-protracted labor difficulty in Dublin showed the need of social
reform along Catholic lines, and the formation of organizations
on the plan of the Catholic Trade Unionists' Society of England.
The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, January.
The Situation in Finland. By Jacques de Coussange. Occa-
sionally events in Finland show the struggle she is making against
Russian tyranny. The situation there is most complex. There are
two races, the Swedes and the Finns, the latter forming eighty-
seven per cent of the population, the former twelve. Public of-
ficials have to know both languages and Russian. There are four
political parties: the Swedish, representing liberal and reforming
capitalists, and possessing as delegates in the Chamber men of
wealth, culture, and oratorical ability; the old Finns, recruited
among the peasants and the priests, willing to make concessions to
Russia to secure the preponderance of the Finns ; the young Finns,
the radicals defending the interests of the intellectual proletariat;
and the ever-increasing Socialists, occupied above all with agrarian
reforms, because composed mostly of small farmers whose lot is
most miserable. Feminism has been widely adopted since the
prominent part taken by women in the resistance offered to Russia
from 1899 to 1905; women are engaged in every profession, vote
and hold office. Religion is practically dead, though the State
Lutheran Church preserves an important material and social place;
the situation of the Catholic Church is very precarious. The best
client of Finland is England, to whom she sells her excellent butter ;
Germany has furnished her with merchants, with the scientific
7 oo FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Feb.,
training of her clergy and teachers, and with Socialism. This Ger-
man invasion is little to Russia's liking; the latter is striving for
protection on the west of Finland. Fearing a possible future up-
rising, she has forbidden the formation of boy scouts, and in every
way she is working for the incorporation and Russification of this
captive land. Le Correspondent, December.
The Franco-Russian Alliance. Anon. Russia is now debtor
to France for over seventeen billion francs. In November, 1913,
M. Kokovtzoff, Minister of Finance, announced that he had nego-
tiated another loan of five hundred million francs for railroads.
The truth is that the loan calls for five hundred million francs a year
for five years, and probably even more. Now in this marriage of
the nations, wherein France furnishes the dowry, Russia is sup-
posed to furnish the military strength. But what are the facts?
Although, as may be seen from the tables here given showing mili-
tary strength, Russia is numerically far superior to Germany and
Austria, yet practically she would be of little use to France in case
Germany declared war. Both Germany and France could mobilize
and concentrate their troops within two weeks; the mass of the
German army is now gathered near, and evidently against, France.
The troops of Russia are scattered; and on account of the lack of
railroad and telegraph connections, they could not be made effective
until the second month after the declaration of war. Meanwhile,
Germany could easily hold at bay the troops on the Russian frontier,
and even do much damage to means of communication, while at the
same time crushing France. It is only the part of prudence and
justice, therefore, that France should demand a voice in the location
of the Russian troops and her railroad and telegraph lines. This
article, with numerous tables and six maps, covers fifty-four pages.
Le Correspondant, December 25.
A Catholic Doctor in Russia. By Stanislas Tyszkiewicz.
Frederick Peter Haas was born in Miinster, the son of a pharmacist.
He studied medicine, beginning his private practice at the age of
twenty-two years. The Russian Prince Repnine, on his way to
Vienna, fell ill, and was speedily brought back to health by the bril-
liant young doctor, whom he induced to accompany him. At Mos-
cow he practised with great success for the next five years, giving
his services gratuitously to the poor. The fame of the doctor
reached St. Petersburg, and he was made chief physician in the
1914.3 FOREIGN PERIODICALS 701
Pavlovskaia Bolnitsa Hospital. Appointed to the Commission on
Prisons, he set at work to abolish the unhuman methods in use in
the prisons.
Another great work was his establishment of a hospital for
the sick who were on their way to exile in Siberia. Owing to the
crowded conditions in the prisons, it had been the custom to send
the sick first on the long journey to exile, in order to make room for
more prisoners. Dr. Haas decided to change all this, and estab-
lished a hospital, where he not only attended to their physical ail-
ments, but strengthened them spiritually by his kindly talks, the
source of which was the Holy Scriptures. Not only the Siberian
exiles received his attention, but even the inmates of the city prison,
whose intercourse with the outside world had been completely
broken off. Again, in spite of the fiercest opposition, he established
an agency to hear their complaints, and an intercessor to plead their
cause, but the personality and personal efforts of Dr. Haas was the
vivifying principle at all times.
Ever mindful of the spiritual concerns of the condemned, he
taught the unlettered to read, distributed copies of the Psalter and
the Gospels, and finally he compiled a little book entitled The
Alphabet of Christian Morality, composed of texts of Holy Scrip-
ture, to which were added commentaries by St. Francis of Sales.
During epidemics the Russian government has never been able
to control its subjects. The latter give vent to their rage, first at the
officials, then the doctors, and lastly the clergy. During the cholera
epidemic of 1848, Dr. Haas v;as the only one who could gain the
control of the people. A man of deepest faith all through his life,
his death on August 16, 1853, could be nothing else than edifying.
The grief of the people was widespread, twenty thousand followed
his remains to the grave. To-day in the farthest extremes of
Siberia there are families who treasure his saintly memory.
Etudes, December 20.
The Popes and Ritual Murder. By F. Vernet. The recent
trial at Kieff, Russia, has opened up this question of ritual murder
of Christians by Jews. What has been the attitude of the Church,
especially of the Popes, on this question? Innocent IV. appears to
have been the first pontiff to investigate the matter, and there is
extant an encyclical of his to the Archbishop of Vienna, in which
he maintained that the charge of ritual murder brought against the
Jews was utterly false. A bull of the same Pope six years later
7 02 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Feb.,
(1253) is even more explicit. In the same century (1272) Pope
Gregory X. issued a defence of the Jews. Other pontiffs, though
not treating expressly of this question of ritual murder, have been
very favorably disposed towards the Jews, for example, Martin V.
and Nicholas V. In the eighteenth century Pope Benedict XIV.
was called upon to suppress local cults in honor of children murdered
by Jews. There is documentary evidence, even one document
which claims to have papal authority, testifying to belief in the
Jewish practice of ritual murder; but no Pope ever made the charge
that ritual murder of Christians was part of the liturgy of the Jews.
Revue Pratique d'Apologetique, December 15.
Apprenticeship in France. By Et. Martin Saint-Leon. Formal
apprenticeship, made stable by a written contract, is growing more
and more rare in France. Parents want their children to earn a
salary as soon as possible; young people do not want to room or
board with their employers, or to be subject to their correction;
employers will not undertake the old responsibilities. Out of nine
hundred thousand young workmen under eighteen years of age,
hardly eighty thousand are receiving a technical education, hardly
fifty thousand are true apprentices. The quality of work done is
consequently lowered. Apprenticeship can be restored only if made
obligatory, but this is impossible. Technical education must, there-
fore, be given in the schools. The writer favors the plan of com-
munal schools, supported half by the government and the com-
mune, half by the employers who have no apprentices. These
schools should be gradually introduced as needed and as circum-
stances allow. Their establishment should be entrusted to profes-
sional associations, composed of employers and employees and, pos-
sibly, communal officials. Revue du Clerge Fran$ais, December 15.
The Tablet (December 27) : Catholic Emigrants in Canada:
Thirty-six thousand Catholic emigrants from various countries
landed in Quebec in less than seven months last year. The prob-
lem of providing religious attention for them is serious. At present
a large majority settle in colonies, and priests of their own nation-
ality cannot be provided. To provide for the future the Seminary at
Quebec has been turned into a school of languages. The Catholic
Immigration Society of Canada aims to guide those who come.
The many provisions made by the Society for caring for the in-
comers' spiritual needs are detailed. Literary Notes: W. H. K.,
1914.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 703
writing on the Home Rule question, notes that one great English-
man, a deep thinker, unmoved by party bias, Cardinal Newman,
grasped the real meaning of the Irish problem, and in 1881 wrote
that Home Rule from the very nature of the Irish people seemed
inevitable. The Osservatore Romano, approving of the declara-
tions made at the Social Week in Milan by the Archbishop of Udine
and Count della Torre on the question of the temporal power, denies
any contradiction between the two speeches, denies that their words
represented renunciations or proposals made by the Holy See. The
incident shows that the temporal power need not be the only solution
of the Roman question; efforts to find another solution have
hitherto been fruitless, but further efforts are not only not for-
bidden but are encouraged. The remodelling of the Law of Guar-
antees on some kind of international basis, might secure the Pope's
liberty and independence.
(January 3) : Very Rev. Vincent McNabb, O.P., contributes
some suggestions Towards Social Thinking. The Power of a
Uniform Doctrine: Mr. Hilliard Atteridge replies to the theory
" that a great Church propagating Christianity in the wilds of the
world (in China and in Mohammedan countries) cannot be thus
definite in its standard of belief and practice," with figures showing
that the Church which has been definite has had the greatest success.
" In China the Roman Catholic missionaries have now a million
and three-quarters of converts, including at one end of the scale
men of the lettered class and at the other the aboriginal tribesmen of
the Yunnan hill country, and the nomads of the Mongolian steppe."
The official returns of all Protestant bodies, including Anglican,
gives " a total for the heralds of the vaguer gospel " of three hun-
dred and twenty-four thousand adherents, of whom only one hun-
dred and sixty-seven thousand " are claimed as baptized Christians."
The Month (January) : Rev. A. L. Cortie presents the argu-
ments for The Origin of the Sun and Stars from primitive nebulae,
with photographic plates. Hilaire Belloc re-asserts, against Mr.
Henry Somerville in the December Month, that he does regard the
general policy of a minimum wage as a very definite approach to-
ward the servile state, wherein compulsory labor reigns. His argu-
ments are : First, the minimum wage excluding from employment,
as it does, by positive law, all those whose employment at a mini-
mum wage would cause a loss, condemns these to some form of com-
pulsory labor or to death. Secondly, the minimum wage, though
FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Feb.,
not by definition a maximum wage, (a) rapidly tends to become
in practice a maximum wage, and (b) tends to put the direction and
conditions of labor, as the producer of profits for capital, under
the courts, and, therefore, under compulsion. -The Rev. Sydney
F. Smith describes the perplexity in which the Anglican Church
finds itself because of Reunion at Kikuyu. On the occasion of
The Centenary of the Restoration of the Society of Jesus, the
Rev. J. H. Pollen relates the circumstances of that famous act
of Pius VII., and sketches the growth and activity of the Society,
particularly in England, during the century.
The Dublin Review (January) : Wilfrid Ward contributes
personal reminiscences of Richard Holt Hutton, particularly as re-
gards his literary and personal sympathies and his religious convic-
tions. ^Psychology in the Concrete, thinks Rev. C. C. Martin-
dale, S.J., is strikingly illustrated in three recent novels which he
summarizes : L'Homme de Desir, by Vallery Radot ; Jean Chris-
tophe, by Romain Rolland ; and Sinister Street, by Compton Mac-
kenzie. The Hon. Mrs. Maxwell Scott describes the life and
work of Frederic Ozanam. Six authors, Miss Cholmondeley,
Mrs. W. Ward, John Ayscough, A. C. Benson, Monsignor Benson,
and G. K. Chesterton review their own recent works, and tell their
purpose in writing them. Under the heading Catholic Progress
in the Study of Scripture, a long review is given to The Catholic
Student's Aids to the Bible, by Father Hugh Pope, O.P., and the
names of many of the leading French and German writers and
works on scriptural subjects. Countless books and pamphlets,
says Mr. James Britten, have been written during comparatively
recent years on the continuity of the Established Church of England
with the pre-Reformation Church. He undertakes a comparison of
later times, and points out in detail the contrast both as to doctrine
and as to ritual between the position which the Sacrament of the
Eucharist now occupies in the Established Church, and that which
it held from the Reformation down to the middle of the nineteenth
century. Hilaire Belloc exposes the historical errors and anti-
Christian animus of Professor Bury's History of the Freedom of
Thought.
Le Correspondant (December 25) : fidouard Delepouve de-
scribes old French Christmas plays and carols, and urges a return
to the use of them. Gustave Gautherot chronicles the ravages
1914.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 705
wrought during the great Revolution, by citizens embittered against
royalty, at the Louvre, Versailles, and Fontainebleau. Andre
Bellessort tries to fathom the character of " the mysterious Racine,"
his relations with the Port Royalists, his love affairs, his dramas, and
his conversion.
Etudes (December 20) : Ferdinand Prat, commenting on the
recent decree of the Biblical Commission as to the authorship of the
Third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, shows the unanimous
tradition which ascribed both these works to one and the same
author, St. Luke; notes his capabilities as a historian and as a
writer; and points out the a priori and unscientific methods em-
ployed by some rationalistic critics in attacking these works.
Pierre Suan contributes a eulogy of an historical work in two mas-
sive volumes on the great theologian Frangois Suarez, S.J., by Pere
Raoul de Scorraille. Joseph Boubee describes Catholicism and
Public Life in Argentina.
(January 5) : The editorial staff makes an indignant reply to
those few publicists who have been denouncing all persons, papers,
parties, movements designed to defend the Church in its religious,
social, and political relations. Leonce de Grandmaison begins
his proposed work on our Lord. Camille Torrend describes the
history and present situation of the religious crisis in Portugal.
Revue Pratique d'Apologetique (January i) : Francis Vincent
describes The Religious Thought of Maurice Barres, especially as
judged from his latest, much-discussed book La Colline Inspiree.
M. Vincent believes that Barres is working towards Catholicism,
but doubts his actual conversion; the Christ of Barres, he fears,
is only that of Renan ; his Church only a grand human dream.
F. Pinardel reviews the story of the massacre of St. Bartholomew's
Day, apropos of two recent books by Hauser and de Vaissiere,
which are devoted to the circumstances immediately preceding that
event.
VOL. xcvin. 45
IRecent Events*
France continues to be afflicted by instability
France. of government. Since the election of M.
Poincare as President a year ago, there have
been no fewer than three Cabinets. The new Cabinet, of which
M. Doumergue is the head, represents a radical departure in policy
from that of its two predecessors. These were animated to a
greater or less degree by what is called the spirit of I'apaisement,
the desire, that is, to treat all Frenchmen fairly, whether they be
Catholic or infidel, whether they belong to the Right or the Left,
maintaining at the same time republican institutions and the secu-
lar character of school teaching. The new Cabinet represents those
who profess to be the only orthodox Republicans, and look upon
their opponents as more or less unfaithful and untrustworthy. In
their eyes, the President himself is mal elu. M. Doumergue, the
Prime Minister, is a Protestant, belonging to a family which has al-
ways preserved a keen remembrance of the revocation of the Edict
of Nantes. The Minister of Finance is M. Caillaux, who has suc-
ceeded M. Combes as the leader of the Radicals, and who on the
eve of his appointment publicly declared that, if the Catholics con-
tinued to give trouble in the State management of the schools,
he would advocate the complete suppression of Catholic schools.
Among the members of the Cabinet is included M. Viviani, who
boasted that he and his friends were engaged " in a work of
irreligion," and that " they had extinguished in heaven lights that
would never be relit." To M. Viviani has been entrusted the
Ministry of Education. In other respects the members are divided :
some are defenders of the three years' service law, others have
expressed the purpose of gradually returning to two years' service,
and of supplanting the present military organization by what is
called the nation in arms. Some are in favor of proportional rep-
resentation ; others are against it. Behind the Cabinet is M. Cle-
menceau. In fact he was the chief influence in its formation, and
will, so long as it conforms to his wishes, be its chief mainstay.
M. Jaures, the leader of the Collective Socialists, is also a warm
supporter.
The chief preoccupation of France at the present time is the
financial situation. In the opinion of M. Ribot, the present crisis
I9I4-] RECENT EVENTS 707
is more serious than any which France has faced since 1871. Var-
ious statements of the amount of the deficit for the years 1914 and
1915 have been given. The last, made by M. Caillaux, makes the
deficit for 1914 to be one hundred and forty-three millions of
dollars, while for 1915, apart from forty-five millions of expend-
iture on Morocco, there will be a deficit of ninety millions. Esti-
mates of the non-recurring army expenditure also differ; but per-
fect certainty exists about the necessity of raising a vast additional
sum. This will be done partly by loans and partly by additional
taxation. The proposals of the late government have been with-
drawn by the new Cabinet. Its own proposals are still uncertain;
they will include, however, according to M. Caillaux, the taxation
of acquired wealth and an income tax. The singular point was
brought out in the course of debate, that the poor man was taxed
more and the rich man less in France than in England.
M. Briand is not going to acquiesce in the defeat of the policy
of I'apaisement, of which he was the originator. He has begun
a campaign in view of the elections which are to take place next
May, and many prominent men, and indeed several of the groups
into which politicians are divided, have rallied to his support, and
have formed a combination which is expected to be a new force in
French politics. There are those who see signs that the outcome
may be two main parties, similar to those which so long existed in
England. This would undoubtedly conduce to greater stability.
M. Briand -thinks it necessary for the Republic, if it is to survive,
to have an ideal. It cannot live, he says, on anticlericalism alone.
This ideal he finds in the organization of labor, the moulding of the
turbulent labor unions, so as to permit them to progress in order;
the giving rights of property to bodies now being created by modern
evolution. This ideal is impossible in a country where artificial
hatred is ranging citizen against citizen. Hence the necessity for
conciliation. " The country is tired," he says, " of a policy carried
out by bludgeoning." The programme, as promulgated by the com-
mittee of the new party, is firm on the intangibility of all secular
education; on the maintenance of three years' service; it insists
on the necessity of electoral reform with the representation of
minorities; and concludes with a stirring appeal to the country to
unite in order to free itself from the oppressive yoke of local
tyranny.
Two recent incidents show the spirit which animates the French
political world. Last June, M. Briand met with a serious accident
7 o8 RECENT EVENTS [Feb.,
while riding in an automobile with a friend. Every effort was
made not to let it be known who this friend was. It has at last
come out that it was M. Willm, a leading Socialist belonging to the
party of which M. Jaures is the leader. The result has been that
a violent campaign has been waged in his constituency against the
delinquent Socialist for thus betraying the cause. The party has
been called upon formally to expel him, and rather than allow his
personal friendship to be thus dictated, M. Willm has resigned
from the party.
On Christmas Day the President, M. Poincare, gave an enter-
tainment to some four thousand children, of which a Christmas
tree and conjuring were features. Thereupon the syndicate of
school teachers made a public protest, in which they severely crit-
icized the President's action. They compared the Christmas tree
and the conjuring to the panem et cir censes of the Caesars, and ex-
pressed their disapproval of the " revival of the practices of ancient
Rome, when the Emperors to strengthen their popularity offered
games to the people."
The relations of France with foreign Powers have undergone
no material change. The entente cordiale with Great Britain re-
mains so strong that the hopes of the supporters of a tunnel beneath
the Channel have been revived, and efforts are being made to over-
come the resistance of those among the British who glory in their
insularity. The cooperation of France with Germany during the
Balkan crisis has tended to diminish the normal coolness of their
relations, and this has led to friendly negotiations on several ques-
tions at issue. The restraint of the French press during the recent
incidents in Alsace was very marked. With Italy, however, there
is a slight change for the worse. While the governments of both
countries make the usual professions of undiminished confidence in
one another, between the press of each there has been waging a
newspaper warfare. The French press accuses Italy of having
made a secret agreement with its partners in the Triple Alliance,
the result of which would be to destroy the power of the French
navy in the Eastern Mediterranean; an allegation which is as
warmly denied by the Italian press.
The censure passed by the Reichstag upon
Germany. the Chancellor has not, for the time being,
produced the constitutional crisis which at
one time seemed probable, although there are those who think that
1914.] RECENT EVENTS 709
this may yet come. The position of the Chancellor with reference
to the Reichstag is not, theoretically, one of dependence upon its
good will. Indirectly, however, the Reichstag may render his posi-
tion untenable. In the event of its refusing to pass the estimates,
or any other important government proposals, a deadlock would be
produced, and unless the Chancellor were a Bismarck, or some
equally necessary man, he would have to yield his place to someone
who would be better able to achieve results. To bring about this
situation was the aim of the Social Democrats, but the Centre
Party, and the Radicals, who had joined the Social Democrats
in passing the vote of censure, refused to cooperate in bringing
about a crisis. The estimates were voted, the Reichstag adjourned,
and Herr von Bethmann Hollweg, although formally censured for
his unsatisfactory explanation of the Zabern affair, still remains
Chancellor of the German Empire.
This affair has, however, brought clearly to light the arrogant
pretensions of the army, and has led to a salutary lesson being
given to this would-be all-dominant factor. The Prussian War
Minister, speaking in the Reichstag, claimed for the soldiers
practical immunity in doing as they pleased. However bad the
insults any officer should think fit to offer to the population in the
midst of which his regiment was dwelling, these insults must be
passed over in respectful silence, must not on any account even be
mentioned. It was to the army that the German Empire owed its
existence. " If it had not been for the army, there would not be
a single stone of the proud building " in which the War Minister
was speaking. The conclusions drawn by the War Minister from
this premise, was that the sense of honor of each individual soldier
must be protected at all costs. This exposition of the relative posi-
tions of the civil and military authorities, to say nothing of the
rights of the people, met with the censure of all parties in the
Reichstag, except the Conservative. A member of the Centre said
that it sounded like an utterance from another and, presumably, a
lower world; and that if it represented the view of the highest
authority, there were black days in store for the German Empire.
A still clearer expression of the views entertained by soldiers
was given after Lieutenant von Forstner had been sentenced to
prison by a military court for having assaulted and wounded a
shoemaker. This sentence was inflicted, although the accused al-
leged that he had received special orders not to stand any insults
on the part of the civil population. The Colonel in command gave
7 io RECENT EVENTS [Feb.,
evidence that he had informed the civil authority that he had in-
structed his officers to compel respect in all circumstances. The fact
that Lieutenant von Forstner was convicted by a military court,
shows of course that all soldiers are not so overweening in their
pretensions. This it was that led to the protest of no less a person
than the Police President of Berlin, Herr von Jagow. He went to
the length of asserting that military exercises are acts of sov-
ereignty, in other words, that the soldiers in the exercise of their
functions are supreme. All obstacles, therefore, placed in the way
of their performance must, the Police President argued, be removed
in the execution of this sovereignty. No prosecution was permis-
sible. This was the law in Prussia: if it was not the same in the
Empire, the Imperial ought to be made conformable to the Prussian
law, and this as speedily as possible. It is only fair to say that
Herr von Jagow's views met with the approval of only the Con-
servatives; in fact wide indignation was manifested, his superiors
being called upon to take action. The organs of the Centre Party
were specially outspoken in their condemnation of pretensions
which have been outgrown by modern civilization. The army,
however, holds a position of great influence in the German Empire.
Hence the fact that views of this kind are held, even if it be by a
minority, gives good reason for some anxiety. The incidents at
Zabern and other places in Alsace prove how superficial is its
Germanization. Herr von Jagow characterized indeed the province
as almost an enemy's country. This, however, would seem to be an
exaggeration of the real state of things.
The end of the year saw the Triple Alliance in full vigor and
force. The events which took place during the Balkan crisis dem-
onstrated, in the view of the German Chancellor, that its solidarity
was established more firmly than ever. This solidarity, however,
has been quite compatible with loyal cooperation with England, and
with friendly relations with Russia. All the Powers, indeed, worked
together for the maintenance of peace during the trying period
which has just passed. Germany's intention is to work in the same
spirit until all remaining questions have been settled. There is no
doubt that for some time the relations of Germany with Great
Britain have been changing for the better. Mutual trust, according
to the Chancellor, now characterizes those relations. This makes
it probable that a settlement of various questions will soon be made,
particularly that of the Baghdad Railway. Much the same may be
said of the relations between France and Germany. Cooperation
1914-] RECENT EVENTS 711
for the maintenance of peace in Europe has been followed by nego-
tiation for the settlement of their mutual interests in Turkey.
A letter written by the Chancellor last June to a distinguished
German historian, has given considerable umbrage to the military
press, which says that it suggests that the Chancellor would do better
as a university professor. It may serve the good purpose of help-
ing to form a public opinion which will hold in check the influence
of the military element. In this letter the Chancellor says that the
Germans are a young people, with perhaps a too innocent belief
in force, and too little appreciation of the finer methods. They do
not yet know that force alone has never been able to maintain
what force has won. What is chiefly necessary is that the German
people should be awakened to this fact, for the government cannot
accomplish its task without the constant support and cooperation
of the educated classes. A truth stated by so unbiased an authority,
stands a chance of getting a fairer consideration than would have
been given to it if any lesser authority had given it utterance.
After a suspension which lasted more than
Austria-Hungary. eighteen months, constitutional government
has been restored in Croatia. The regula-
tions regarding the press censorship and the right of public meeting
no longer remain in force. The enforcement of the Magyar lan-
guage on the railways of Croatia in 1907 was the starting point of
the conflict which led to the suspension. The restoration of normal
conditions has been brought about by a compromise. A new Diet
has been elected. Its first session was characterized by stormy
scenes. Automobile horns, drums, and whistles were brought into
use to reinforce the arguments of the opposition. The possession
of the presidential chair was contested by two candidates, and it
was not until the early morning that this question was settled.
Scenes of this character tend to discredit parliamentary govern-
ment ; but when its very existence is at the mercy of a superior,
it can scarcely be looked upon as a real parliament. Its members
lose their sense of responsibility, and even of self-respect.
Treason trials are of frequent recurrence in the Dual Mon-
archy. A few years ago some hundreds were tried at Agram on
this charge; at Marmaros Sziget in Hungary eighty-three Ruth-
enians have recently been brought before a special court, charged
with having endeavored to bring the region inhabited by Greek
Catholic Ruthenians under Russia rule. Russians are accused of
7 12
RECENT EVENTS [Feb.,
having sent emissaries among the Ruthenians in order to convert
them to the Russian Church, as a preliminary to their coming under
Russian rule.
In the Austrian Parliament, for several weeks legislate work
was almost completely paralyzed by the obstruction of the Ruthenian
members. At last a sense of the danger involved in such proceed-
ings to parliamentary government led to their abandonment. The
fact that the Bohemian Constitution is still suspended, while that of
Galicia is threatened with the same fate, has tended to inspire a spirit
of caution in the Austrian legislators.
The Cabinet of Count Tisza still remains in office, the day of
retribution for its violent proceedings being deferred.
The Italian Chamber has been the scene of
Italy. tumult and disorder, caused by the efforts of
the Socialists to obstruct its proceedings.
There have been repeated scenes, and on one occasion the session had
to be suspended. By a vote of three hundred and sixty-two to
ninety, with thirteen abstentions, the confidence of the Chamber in
Signer Giolitti has been declared ; and it would seem that his posi-
tion may be looked upon as secure. For the last thirteen years
he has been frequently, although not continuously, Premier, and has
nominated nearly all the Senators, Prefects, and Privy Councillors.
And yet he is not looked upon as a man of principle, but as an
adroit manager making concessions in order to obtain support. The
insurance monopoly law and universal suffrage were the fruits of
this policy. He does not, however, seem to have conciliated the
Socialists, to judge by the way which they have been acting since
the Chamber opened. Students of Italian internal affairs look with
apprehension to the future on account of the growing influence of
these extremists. It was the one party which increased its strength
at the recent election, and the fact that the new suffrage law has
given to the illiterate majority the control of affairs, has added to
the danger; for it is to the uninstructed that the appeal of the So-
cialist appears the most plausible.
The great question for Italy now is what she will do about the
JEgean Islands, about a dozen of which she is in possession. These
she is bound by the Treaty of Lausanne to give up to Turkey, when
certain conditions have been fulfilled. In the view of the disinter-
ested, these conditions have been fulfilled, but Italy, is still blind
to the fact, and there is reason to think that this blindness will
1914.] RECENT EVENTS 713
last some time. The possession of these islands is one of the ques-
tions left by Turkey to the adjudication of the Powers.
During the progress of the war in Tripoli, assurances were
repeatedly made that its cost would be defrayed out of savings which
the government had been able to make. Surprise was felt at the
time, and the statement was received with some incredulity. Now
the truth has come out. In the financial statement recently made
by the Minister for the Treasury, the cost of the war is given as
one hundred and ninety millions of dollars. Hope was expressed
that some fifty millions of this would be met by the ordinary re-
sources of the budget, but for fifty millions it would be necessary
to raise an internal loan, while the balance, amounting to nearly
eighty-nine millions, would be left to the augmented resources of
future budgets.
On the surface political calm continues in
Russia. Russia, but there is good reason to think
that there is a more or less widespread
discontent, and that with just reason. Since the Tsar's Manifesto
of October, 1905, which was to have inaugurated a new era, over
forty thousand persons have been sentenced for political offences,
of whom ten thousand are confined in the hard labor prisons; the
prisoners are starved and ill-treated, and become the victims of all
kinds of epidemics; many commit suicide as the only way of
escape; of the political exiles that are deported to Siberia, the
majority perish for want of food, clothing, and housing.
The Octobrist Party in the Duma has lost faith in the govern-
ment, of which it has hitherto been the chief support. It has passed
a series of resolutions criticizing the Council of the Empire as ob-
structive to legislation, demanding inviolability of the person, and
freedom of conscience, speech, meeting, and association, the abo-
lition of government by exceptional laws, and the guaranteed free-
dom of parliamentary elections. The party declares that the policy
of the government is in entire opposition to the spirit of the Imperial
Manifesto, and that in consequence the country is full of angry
murmurings and discontent, fed by revolutionary organizations.
The suppression of the covenanted liberties of Finland still
continue. Last September sixteen members of the Supreme Court
of Appeals at Viborg were aroused from their slumbers and de-
ported to St. Petersburg. Early in December the three principal
editors of a leading journal were ordered, in violation of Finnish
RECENT EVENTS [Feb.,
law, to leave Helsingfors, on account of certain outspoken articles.
The measure of the liberty accorded to the press for the whole of
Russia, may be judged by the fact that the Council of Ministers has
recently published, a list of no fewer than thirteen subjects about
which the press is forbidden to publish any news. It is only fair to
to say, however, that this prohibition is confined to matters affecting
the national defence, and is issued under the provisions of the
Espionage Law of July 18, 1912. The fact that the relations be-
tween Great Britain and Russia are now of the most cordial char-
acter, makes British journalists more ready than they were in the
days of old to turn a blind eye to the dark spots in Russia. Another
reason for this reticence is the effort which is now being made by
British capitalists to develop Russian resources, and to secure a
share in Russian trade.
While the treatment of the Portuguese polit-
Portugal. ical prisoners has been in some degree miti-
gated, it is still so far from that which is
tolerable in a civilized country, that steps are on the point of being
taken to bring to bear upon the Republican government that force
of British public opinion which proved so effective in bringing an
end to the atrocities on the Congo. Adeline, Duchess of Bedford,
was the first to call attention to this matter, and has been most
energetic and untiring in her efforts to bring about a practical result.
A meeting is to be held in London, which will be addressed by lead-
ing members of both political parties, to advocate the cause of the
unfortunate sufferers. The hope that the Republic would bring
the blessings of freedom to a country which has suffered so long
the evils of bad government, has now been abandoned. " Espion-
age, treachery, illegal arrest, and detention without trial have be-
come the established conditions of government as it is now carried
on. The prisons are filled with protesting Republicans, no less
than suspected Royalists. The Carbonarios (an army of paid spies
who now rule their masters) do their deadly work with a thorough-
ness which terrorizes the entire population." These facts, the
Duchess declares, have now been fully established. The President
of the Republic himself advocated a year ago the granting of a
general amnesty. The government, however, turned a deaf ear.
Let us hope the agitation in England may strengthen his hands.
With Our Readers.
WHEN it is said that the defenders, within the Anglican Church, of
the Kikuyu compromise are " Protestantizing " that Church, we
feel that an injustice is being done to Protestantism. It would be more
just to say they are rationalising it, for the Protestant sects still stand
for something, even though it be, in many cases, a sorry remnant of the
Christian creed. The Kikuyu compromise brings out more and more
clearly that the Anglican Church as a Church stands for nothing.
There is not one definite Christian teaching on which anyone can imag-
ine the Anglican Church taking a determined stand, and staking its
existence.
* * * *
THE present discussion has revealed the overpowering strength of
the Low Church or " Protestant " party, and the fact that the
vast majority desire neither discussion nor settlement of any disputed
point, but rather a latitudinarian, rationalizing comprehension that
would include skeptic, theist, and Christian.
* * * *
OF course the real truth of the matter is that the Anglican Church
is subject to, and depends on, the civil law of England. Ulti-
mately it has as much, and as little, stability as, for example, the Amer-
ican tariff. A manufacturer who had influence with the members of
Congress, might succeed in having his particular line of goods declared
free of duty. Likewise members of the Anglican Church might, if
the Commons and Lords were willing and now possibly if the latter
were not secure the passage of some statement on Christian doctrine
or morality. If the Commons were unwilling, all the members of that
Church might "cry till heaven's great ear be deaf," and cry in vain.
Whatever the law of the land forbade, would be forbidden to their
Church; whatever the law decreed, the same would have to be ac-
cepted by their Church. If we may, without irreverence, paraphrase
the words of our Blessed Savior, we might say that the civil power
of England says to the Church by law established: "All power is
mine in heaven and on earth. Teach you the nations as I direct."
And the Ecclesia Anglic ana has for centuries " glorified God Who has
given such power to men."
* * * *
T ET us take an example. Sometime ago a married man, a member
J-> of the Anglican Church, was divorced or obtained a divorce, and
remarried. When he presented himself later for communion in his
7 i6 WITH OUR READERS [Feb.,
parish church he was refused. He appealed to the courts. The courts
decided his divorce was legal, his second marriage was legal in fact
the man was altogether legal, and had every claim to belong to Eng-
land's legal Church. The court so decreed, and the minister of the
Anglican Church gave the man communion. The logic of it all is
crystal clear, but nothing like Christianity, nor a revealed Word of God,
nor a Church protected and safeguarded by His Spirit, nor definite
teaching on things eternal, enters into it.
IF one tries to inject some principles of eternal truth he is reprimanded
for his pains. The Bishop of Oxford wrote that " this indis-
criminate giving of communion to Non-conformists involved principles
so totally subversive of Catholic order and doctrine as to be strictly
intolerable." The Spectator answers and says that the Bishop of
Oxford is in this " setting himself against the essential spirit of the
Church of England as by law established the spirit of inclusion and
comprehension. Not only does the law of the land prevent those who
conscientiously desire to be included in the Church of England from
being driven from it on grounds of religious opinion, but the best
minds and souls in the Church have always supported the law of the
land in that respect
* * * *
Ur PHE law of the land, i. e., the fact of establishment, has saved the
1 Church and maintained the policy of the open door "
And if conscience should perchance urge Bishop Gore to leave the
Anglican Church because no authority therein can be found to condemn
the action of the Bishop of Mombasa, love for England will
hold him back. " When it comes to the point," says The Spectator,
" there will be found enough of the true English spirit in them (Bishop
Gore and his sympathizers), the spirit of comprehension and compro-
mise, to hold them back."
But even if the true English spirit did not hold steadfast, and
Bishop Gore and a few other bishops were to secede, it would not
" seriously affect the National Church." The vast majority of the
English laity, and even of the English laity who hold High Church
doctrines, are in strong sympathy with rationalistic practice, are at heart
inspired with the true spirit of the Church of England the spirit of
comprehension.
* * * *
>r PHE giving of communion by an Anglican Bishop to Non-con-
1 formists is not a point of policy, but a point of law. Here those
who are indignant with the Bishop of Mombasa are either ignorant of
the law, or else, unfortunately, are governed by motives of conscience
1914.] WITH OUR READERS 717
which place them in direct opposition to the law of the land and the
law of the Establishment. The more the legal aspect is discussed, the
more clear must it become that neither at home nor abroad is any
bishop or clergyman of the Church of England guilty of any offence,
civil or ecclesiastical, in giving communion to unconfirmed Non-con-
formists, or even to persons alleged to hold heretical views
It is, indeed, we believe, no exaggeration to say that every layman has
a statutory right to receive the communion in his parish church, and
that no question as to the doctrines or dogmas which he holds being
those of the Church of England, or as to his adhesion to any other
religious body, can be entertained by the clergyman as a ground for
excluding him from the sacrament."
* * * *
THE only " Branch " theory that may be applied to the Ecclesia
Anglicana is that it is a branch of the legislative power of Great
Britain.
OUR joyful congratulations are extended to The Month on the com-
pletion of its fiftieth year. The Month, in reviewing its history,
places the founding of THE CATHOLIC WORLD in the same year 1864,
and extends to us its congratulations. We are grateful for them, but
we are a year younger than The Month, THE CATHOLIC WORLD having
been founded in April, 1865.
* * * *
TMFTY years of such loyal and intelligent leadership in Catholic jour-
nalism as the continued existence of The Month testifies to, is a
record seldom equalled, and one of which the Society of Jesus may well
be proud. Founded in July, 1864, through the inspiration and sugges-
tion of some of the Jesuits of Farm Street, the first editor and pro-
prietor of The Month was a Miss Frances Taylor. Twelve months later,
it became the possession of the Society, Father Henry Coleridge being
appointed editor. The present occupant of that post is his fourth suc-
cessor. Despite numerous changes in complete title, bulk, price, and
form (for three years it appeared bi-monthly in double numbers), it
has consistently followed its original principles, namely, to express
in a manner neither too technical nor too popular those " Catholic
principles which made our civilization, and which alone can maintain
it." Besides a change of cover, this issue sees the re-admittance of
poetry into its pages (two splendid samples at the start), and the
beginning of an attempt to collect references to apologetic material
in contemporary Catholic magazines. The articles appearing in The
Month are always dignified, scholarly, interesting, and timely. May
it live to enjoy many other jubilees!
718 WITH OUR READERS [Feb.,
THE following quotation from The London Tablet of January 3,
1914, will, we feel, be a source of pleasure and gratification to our
readers :
Among the many and universal anniversaries of this season, one anniver-
sary, local to New York, but not unremembered in London, has come and
gone. In the Christmas week of twenty-five years ago, Father Isaac Hecker
died the death of the just in St. Paul's Convent in New York. He had reached
man's allotted span he was seventy years old, or, as might have been said,
seventy years young. The difference between men who have genius and men
who have not, is that men of genius look at things all their lives with the
receptive eyes of the young. So said John Ruskin, who had some reason to
know. Saints, as another great authority has said, are men of genius in religion ;
and though Father Hecker is not technically a saint, no one acquainted with his
history will deny that sanctity and those experiences which he simply expressed
when he said of his youth : " I was conscious that God was preserving me inno-
cent with a view to some future providence." And again : " From my childhood
God influenced me by an interior light, and by the interior touch of the Holy
Spirit." He had that great gift a tender heart, the possession of which in
St Vincent de Paul led his father to prophesy that he would make a good
priest. The story of Father Hecker's conversion to the Catholic Church is well
known ; but what will never be known is the number of persons which that act
has directly and indirectly influenced to imitation. The Paulist Fathers of
New York have not lost their initiative with their leader; and the success of
their apostolate has its highest tribute in being comparable to his own.
WE have been requested by the Reverend William H. Ketcham,
President, to publish the following statement from the Society
for the Preservation of the Faith among Indian children. This state-
ment covers the year 1913.
From Membership Fees $11,687.57
From Special Appeal of the Bureau 10,514.81
From Marquette League, Chapels, etc 6,331.30
From Mass Intentions 2,178.00
From Trust Legacies and Interest on Same. . . 1,970.00
Total $32,681.68
The needs of the missions have not decreased. The cost of
living even the simple life of the missionary still exists for the one hun-
dred and seventy priests and four hundred Sisters, as well as for the
six thousand children in our Catholic boarding schools. We con-
fidently trust that the friends of missions will continue to support this
necessary and necessitous work, and that the appeal in person of the
bureau lecturer will not be required.
WITH keen wit and sane judgment Agnes Repplier in the January
Atlantic thus summarizes Popular Education:
This is so emphatically the children's age that a good many of us are
beginning to thank God we were not born in it. The little girl who said
1914.] WITH OUR READERS 719
she wished she had lived in the time of Charles the Second, because then " edu-
cation was much neglected," wins our sympathy and esteem. It is a doubtful
privilege to have the attention of the civilized world focused upon us both
before and after birth.
Begirt by well-wishers, hemmed in on every side by experts who speak of
" child-material " as if it were raw silk or wood-pulp, how can a little boy born
in this enlightened age dodge the educational influences which surround him?
It is hard to be dealt with as " child-material " when one is only an ordinary
little boy.
He is powerless to evade any revelations we choose to make, any facts or
theories we choose to elucidate. We can teach him sex-hygiene when he is
still young enough to believe that rabbits lay eggs. We can turn his work
into play, and his play into work, keeping well in mind the educational value
of his unconscious activities, and by careful oversight pervert a game of tag
into a preparation for the business of life. We can amuse and interest him
until he is powerless to amuse and interest himself. We can experiment with
him according to the dictates of hundreds of rival authorities. He is in a
measure at our mercy, though nature fights hard for him, safeguarding him
with ignorance of our mode of thought, and indifference to our point of view.
The education of my childhood was embryonic. The education of to-day
is exhaustive. '
" Training for maternity " was an unused phrase, and the short views of life,
more common then than now, would have robbed it of its savor. " Training
for citizenship " had, so far as we were concerned, no meaning whatsoever. A
little girl was a little girl, not the future mother of the race, or the future
savior of the Republic. One thing at a time. Therefore no deep significance
was attached to our possession of a doll, no concern was evinced over our
future handling of a vote.
A happy childhood did not necessarily mean a childhood free from proudly
accepted responsibility. There are few things in life so dear to girl or boy
as the chance to turn to good account the splendid self-confidence of youth.
The theory that school work must appeal to a child's fluctuating tastes,
must attract a child's involuntary attention, does grievous wrong to the rising
generation.
Let us boldly suppose that a child is not interested and he may con-
ceivably weary even of films is.it then optional with him to be or not to be
disorderly, and what is the effect of his disorder on other children whose tastes
may differ from his own?
I am aware that it is a dangerous thing to call kindness sentimental ; but
our feeling that children have a right to happiness, and our sincere effort to
protect them from any approach to pain, have led imperceptibly to the elimina-
tion from their lives of many strength-giving influences.
The "rights of children" include the doubtful privilege of freedom from
restraint, and the doubtful boon of shelter from obligation. It seems sweeter
and kinder to teach a child high principles and steadfastness of purpose by
means of symbolic games than by any open exaction. Unconscious obedience,
like indirect taxation, is supposed to be paid without strain. Our feverish fear
lest we offend against the helplessness of childhood, our feverish concern lest it
should be denied its full measure of content, drive us, burdened as we are
with good intentions, past the borderland of wisdom. If we were
Less winning soft, less amiably mild,
we might see more clearly the value of standards.
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THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XCVIII. MARCH, 1914. No. 588.
A PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL PROGRESS.
BY W. E. CAMPBELL.
|Y social progress we understand a change for the
better in our social condition. In a little book of
three hundred pages, Professor Urwick discusses
the possibilities of such a change in so lucid and
comprehensive a manner, that I venture to call at-
tention to his argument.
Every individual leads a life which, though one in itself, may be
thought of under five different aspects. Every community of or-
dinarily civilized beings has likewise an existence which may be
thought of in the same way. These five aspects (or universes as
the author has named them) of individual or social existence, may
be set down as follows: i. Material; 2. Vital; 3. Human; 4.
Social; 5. Spiritual.
In accordance with these categories, the individual may be
defined as a spiritual, social, personal, living, material being. In
the same way the community may not incorrectly be spoken of as
having a kind of existence which is at once material, living, human,
social, and spiritual. But though they are similar in these five
different ways, certain important differences must be noticed be-
tween the life of the individual and the existence of the com-
munity. The nature of the community is not identical with that
of the individual; the one is not really coextensive with the other;
the former does not explain the latter. For instance, the corn-
Copyright. 1914. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
VOL. XCVIII. 46
722 A PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL PROGRESS [Mar.,
munity is never a single, definitely physical body in the sense
that the individual, say John Smith, is a single definitely physical
body. Again John Smith has a soul which altogether transcends
both in its nature and destiny any form of spiritual existence which
the community may possess. " The community is a thing among
things, a group among groups just as is a forest, or a star-cluster,
or an ant hill; but it is not an organism, in spite of having organic
characteristics, nor is it a seat of feeling or thinking mind, in spite
of having a mental side a side of increasing importance."
These five aspects of individual or social existence are the
names, as it were, of five different levels in the single battlefield of
existence upon which both the individual and his community are
striving for the life yet more abundant sometimes in alliance, and
sometimes in opposition to each other.
There is, first of all, the material level, a crass conglomeration
of unfeeling things and forces by which both the individual and
the community are affected ; to which they are sometimes in bond-
age, or of which they are sometimes in partial control. This level
is the least important, and this in spite of all arguments advanced
to the contrary from the region of purely material science. Sec-
ond, there is the vital level, the universe of things that live and
grow and alter and die according to strictly natural laws. Third,
there is the human or personal level, the universe of thinking and
feeling men and women, each in pursuit of definitely selfish ends;
a universe of self-regarding, self -directing, self -enhancing mankind.
It is the level where John Smith is fighting for himself in quite
a candidly selfish way. Fourth, there is the level of social inter-
course and achievement. This, like the previous one, is a universe
of conscious thought and feeling, but thought and feeling at a higher
and less self -regarding level. At this stage John Smith is not quite
wholly absorbed in the success of his own affairs. At any rate,
in many cases, he conceives his own interests and those of his com-
munity to be one and the same. And, lastly, there is the spiritual
level, on which John Smith attains to a really supernatural view
of life. At this height he fights for what is good in himself and
in the community, and against what is bad in the community and
in himself.
We are now in a position to ask how the individual (how John
Smith) and the community act and re-act upon each other at each
and all these five different levels of their intercourse; what prob-
lems confront them, and what solutions of these problems are at all
1914.] A PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL PROGRESS 723
possible ? Let us acknowledge at once that no merely natural science
or philosophy is sufficiently comprehensive or profound to deal in
any adequate way with John Smith and the community of which
he is a member. But this should not discourage us from making
the fullest use of whatever natural science or philosophy there may
be. One important point, however, should be rescued from con-
fusion before we proceed further.
It has been proclaimed with great authority, and for a very
considerable length of time, that man is subject to nature, implying
thereby that man is inferior to nature. As a logical inference
from this, it has further been proclaimed that rrian is subject to
the community, thereby implying that man is inferior to the com-
munity. Both these statements are untrue. Man is not inferior
to nature; neither is man inferior to the community. The fact that
a lion sometimes devours a man, is no sufficient proof of the abso-
lute statement that man is inferior to the lion. Man is superior
to the lion on account of those mental qualities which he possesses,
and which the lion does not; and man can always claim this
superiority in spite of his obvious physical disadvantages. Now
just as a man has that in him which makes him superior to a lion
in a sense quite absolute and final, so also man has that in him
which makes him superior to both nature and the community in an
absolute and final way. John Smith may indeed be subject to
nature and the community on account of some particular weakness
of his; but in so far as he is a man alive, human, spiritual, and
free he is not, nor can ever be, subject to either in an absolute
sense. Having once acknowledged that man, in the highest reaches
of his personal being, is superior both to nature and the community,
we must now be prepared to allow that in so far as he had to live
within a community, and according to nature, he must learn to
obey both natural and social law. " In other words, whatever else
he may be, he still remains a thing among things, an animal among
animals, a mind among minds, a social unit among social units,
subject to all the laws of things, animals, minds, and society."
This, of course, is but a thumb-nail sketch of Professor Ur-
wick's argument. Space will not allow us to make detailed observa-
tions upon every section of this genuine piece of work. Many a
materialistic fallacy is here laid to rest in its parent dust; the mind
of the reader is gradually awakened to the moral importance of
every stage in our human and social life. As we follow our
author's vision, we see man himself coming back once more to
724 A PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL PROGRESS [Mar,
man's most honorable estate; we see him walking upright under
heaven, a free and immortal personality created in the likeness
of God. And all this is brought home to us in an atmosphere
deliberately cleared by reasonable persuasion. There is no heat of
religious intolerance; there is no bitterness of political passion;
there is nothing but the calm and disinterested witness of a man
whom we feel to be looking out on life from a moral and mental
height.
Professor Urwick points out in his first chapter that a merely
physical and materialistic interpretation of human life has been
pushed too far " the usual result," he adds, " of the discovery of
a real influence previously neglected." In the second chapter he
discusses the exact sense in which society may be held to be a kind
of organism. We must be very careful, he tells us, when applying
organic terms to the social process, to define the exact sense in
which we use those terms. Strictly speaking, society is not an or-
ganism at all, though it is undoubtedly organic in some of its aspects.
It may be likened to an organism in so far as it has a definite
arrangement of its parts, which we may call its structure.
Again it may be likened to an organism in so far as it has a
meaning, a purpose, and an action consequent upon this definite
structure, and this we may call its function. And, lastly, its parts
are interdependent, as, for instance, the governing, the food-pro-
ducing, and the defensive parts of any nation. But before we can
apply the term " organic " with absolute propriety to the social
process, we must consider certain other qualities implied by its use.
In an organism proper we may notice : ( i ) that changes are always
taking place; (2) that these changes " are always determined from
within by the life properties of the organism and its special needs,
as well as by the environment in which it lives;" (3) that these
changes follow an invariable order of growth, maturity, and decay
which ends in death.
Society certainly does possess the first of these qualities; it
is always undergoing a process of change. But the second quality,
while true of organisms, is not true of societies a society does not
change from within, according to some pre-established law of its
being. And, third, the changes which take place in any society do
not follow the invariable rules of organic growth, maturity, and
decay. " It is one of the shallowest social generalizations to pre-
dict old age or decrepitude of any society the life of a so-
ciety may be constantly renewed and is so renewed indefinitely."
I9I4-] A PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL PROGRESS 725
Finally, when we turn to society for evidences of " organic evolu-
tion," the analogy between an organism and a society breaks down
completely. We see, therefore, that it is a mistake to treat of
social life on the assumption that every society is an organism
in the proper sense of the word. We must acknowledge that social
life cannot be packed into the pigeon-holes of material, mechanical,
or even of organic science; it is too subtle for such a classification
the things which really make the difference elude the categories
of so simple a science.
The fact is societies think, feel, and will their way to new
conditions of existence; and this thinking, feeling, and willing is a
very spiritual business. At this level of existence societies as-
sume the dignity of self-direction. The full free will of its many
individual members is brought into play, and here (as in the case
of the single individual) free will is permitted full play without
ever coming into essential conflict with the Providence that rules
the world.
We must not, however, flatter ourselves that at this high and
interesting stage of social existence, we have left the old weak-
nesses behind. This was the mistake of Comte, the Positivist
philosopher. He assumed that societies, and the individuals of
which they were composed, left the lower stages of their existence
quite safely and completely behind and below them. All we are at
liberty to say now is, that some societies live at say three levels of
existence instead of two, with a tendency to reversion, but happily
also with a tendency to what is still higher and more spiritual.
The need and function of religion in every society quite plainly
follows from such an admission.
Professor Urwick warns the many would-be reformers of
those hasty attempts at social change which are so often put for-
ward at the instance of some great specialist in science. Take, for
instance, the present eugenic movement. Many of its theories
are in direct conflict with the Christian theory of marriage. It
does not follow, however, that because this is so that the Christian
theory of marriage is wrong. On the contrary. The advocates
of the eugenic movement forget that although the institution of
marriage is ordained for the physical good, it is also ordained for
other and still more important ends, as, for instance, the mental,
moral, and spiritual good of society at large. They should try to
comprehend the whole scheme of the institution before attempting
to change or destroy it. Suppose, indeed, that they had their way.
726 A PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL PROGRESS [Mar.,
Suppose that Christian marriage was abolished with all its individ-
ual, social, and religious values, and with all the customs and
traditions that have made it both a steadying and progressive factor
in human society ; would the community then be able to live up to
the eugenic counsels of physical perfection? Professor Urwick
thinks not.
In some individual cases, perhaps in a few reasonable groups
of society, it is possible that a full realization of the importance
of the ends of marriage ought to serve to restrain people from
falling in love unsuitably or marrying unfit mates, or marrying
at all if they themselves are unfit. But all such people would
have transcended habit, and would be guiding their action by
motives of conscious thought and purpose. But the majority
of the population is not ready to transcend habit in this way, or
to act " reasonably," especially as their habitual mode of action
has on its side not only the religious sanction and the feelings
connected with it, but also the more powerful feelings of sex-
impulse and " love." These feelings are only kept in check, and
forced to move on orderly lines, by very strong custom and
very strong religious fear or respect.
Professor Urwick seems a little too inclined to underrate the
quality, the consistency, the mental coherence of certain traditional
institutions. Should he not remember that when opinions are
changed to convictions, they pass from the mental to the moral
sphere an opinion is a mental product, but a habit is a moral
one? As he himself points out in another place, we have only to
rescue our convictions from the region of sub-conscious habit in
order to discover afresh their mental richness and validity. And
this, by the way, is a practice that every Catholic is constantly
urged to undertake. When we have done so; when we have res-
cued a great Christian principle from the realm of the sub-con-
scious, and have brought it to the level of intellectual comparison
with some more novel principle of modern fashion, we shall find
that it is well able to hold its own. We shall also find that of
the two it contains the more wholesome nutriment for the highest
energies of men. It seems not altogether fair to say, as Professor
Urwick does, that " tradition only represents a simple and rather
primitive form of mind largely inclined to be stagnant." If so,
indeed, why does he set so much store by such traditional institu-
tions as marriage, the family, and private property? If these
1914.] A PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL PROGRESS 727
institutions are essentially good in character and purpose, let us
acknowledge it, let us preserve them, let us do justice to the great
Christian tradition to which they owe their origin, their develop-
ment, their spiritual stability. There is no sufficient reason why
we should associate tradition with fallen leaves, broken branches,
and faded flowers, with dead and accidental things that are only
fit for the burning. Tradition should rather be thought of (and
this is especially true of the Christian tradition) as a live thing,
the growth of a life founded upon that Ancient Truth which once
created and still sustains the world. It should be associated with
spring and summer (for they are traditional enough), with blossom
and bud and kindly fruit, with whatever lives and makes for life,
because it is still one with tree and sun and soil, because it is still
in vital and evident communion with the Lord of life.
Our author hardly does justice to the traditional factor in
modern communities ; for the same reason he is somewhat inclined
to despise the democratic factor. He sets out the issue between a
community, and such theorists as desire to improve it, a little
unfairly. We cannot say, off-hand, that the theorists are neces-
sarily enlightened and in the right, while the community is neces-
sarily ignorant and in the wrong. Thought systems, though very
easily and clearly expressed, are often inadequate to the needs of
the community because of their partial and superficial nature.
We saw this just now when comparing modern eugenics with Chris-
tian marriage. And when this is so the community, without being
able to give clear reasons, rejects them instinctively.
We said just now that every society possessed a quasi-organic
nature. We may now add that in consequence of this it also
possesses a quasi-organic instinct, which we may call the democratic
instinct. The function of this instinct is to inform the community
both of its vital needs and of its mortal dangers. Such an instinct
does not act in a refined and polished manner, but rather as do pain
and hunger in the human body. It is sometimes brutal and some-
times violent, as a hungry man will snatch at food or a man in
danger of his life will strike out at an enemy. I am not saying
that this democratic instinct could not be changed for the better in
many respects, but I do say that it should never be neglected or
tyrannically repressed. It is a danger signal on the line of social
progress which no social reformer can safely avoid. Modern
specialists, those prolific and well-intentioned authors of countless
systems of partial thought and feeling, have yet to learn a proper
728 A PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL PROGRESS [Mar.,
regard for this healthy democratic instinct. As Mr. G. W. E.
Russell so happily put it not long ago, " Specialists should be on
tap, not on top."
We now come to the last and highest levels of human life,
where men cease to be personal in the lower and individualist sense,
and become personal in a higher, more social, and more spiritual
way. At these levels John Smith no longer fights for himself in
the merely selfish manner, but fights for what is good in himself
and in others, and against what is bad in others and in himself.
And here we find Professor Urwick even more convincing and
more original than in the earlier parts of his book. He first of
all makes a very sound distinction, which should encourage many
excellent people inclined to hasty despair. If we compare our own
human society with that, say, of the ants or bees, we find it in many
respects inferior to theirs.
Indeed it may very plausibly be urged that their minds, con-
sidered as social units, are far more perfect than ours, just as
the scheme of thought and purpose underlying their social or-
ganization is far more harmonious. Every feeling and idea
by which the bee's social activities are motived, appear to be
in complete harmony with the mental system of the whole so-
ciety; and this mental system must be very perfectly harmon-
ized with the purposes and ends for which the whole social life
exists. Either our human social life is of a lower order, with
all its disharmonies and cross-purposes, and most imperfect
relation of individual minds to the general system, or else it
belongs to a totally different order, which hardly admits of
comparison. Or we may say that it is both: as a social life,
designed to serve a limited natural end, it is immeasurably
inferior to the social life of bees or ants or wasps; but as a
social life designed to serve different ends from those of bees
or ants or wasps, it belongs to a different world altogether.
By making clear this difference we shall bring out more clearly
the real significance of our human social life.
Our author's elaboration of this all-important distinction will
be to many of us, who are Catholics, like the familiar conversations
of a friend; but the very fact that he who speaks is not of our own
faith, will be to us at once a deserved reproach and an encouraging
stimulus to follow in his footsteps. There is hardly a sentence in
the last hundred and fifty pages which a Catholic could not sub-
scribe to, hardly a proposal which he would not gladly acclaim.
I9I4-] A PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL PROGRESS 729
And yet, alas, how very far off does our own generation stand from
such a vision in knowledge, in sympathy and practice. We can
never understand the nature and function of society until we un-
derstand the nature and destiny of the individual man. Many so-
ciologists tell us that man " is a social product individualized into
a separate unit, but necessarily subordinate to the social unity,
and inseparable from it." But how small and unsatisfying an ex-
planation. " It fails to explain, or implicitly contradicts, the most
significant characteristic of the individual, namely, his persistent
antagonism to society the antagonism of an eternally distinct
individual to a society to which, as an individual, he is eternally
alien."
This permanent duality in human nature may perhaps be best
conveyed by way of a homely parable. Life is like a mountain
a steep and hard and high and rugged mountain of probation or of
reprobation. And living our lives is the attempt which each one
of us makes to climb up and around this mountain. Our main
business, whether we like it or not, is to climb, and, except for
such periodical rests as we require, to go on climbing to the end.
Each one of us as he stands upon the mountain side is alone alone
because he is himself and no other individual, and because he feels
that in some tremendous and final way he is separate from each
and every one of those things and persons that so often and so
insistently crowd in upon him, and so often and so obviously help
or hinder him in his climbing.
Amid all the noise and bustle, and distraction of his ordinary
life, he may often forget this one convincing thought, but when
he is brought back to himself again by leisure or sorrow, by love or
religion, it will shine out for him once more with all its old and
startling self -evidence. Yes, as a man stands there upon the moun-
tain side of life, he knows himself as a tingling spot of lonely
reality moving amid, but apart from, the to-and-fro and the up-and-
down of what is not himself; he knows that he is one in a very
true and incommunicable sense.
But he also has a sense of destiny; he knows that he is meant
to climb. It is a hard business to persevere with, for there are so
many inducements to go slowly, to loiter or to stop. Only a grimly
determined climber can resist the arresting invitations to permanent
hospitality which meet him on every side, each of them with its
own excusing philosophy.
There is an undoubted duality in human nature. Every one of
730 A PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL PROGRESS [Mar.,
us has to lead a double life, for better or worse. There is the
up-and-down of the spirit and there is the to-and-fro of the flesh.
The first is so much a matter of faith and struggle, the second so
much a matter of sight and satisfaction. We are, therefore, in
constant danger of giving up the harder struggle, and devoting our-
selves to the easier and more obviously pleasant occupations which
tempt us on every side. But what is our destiny, our main business
after all? Is it to climb up or to walk to and fro? It is surely
to climb up. What, therefore, one would wish to emphasize at
the conclusion of this paper, is the primary importance of the
up-and-down in the life of the individual. The to-and-fro is of
secondary importance to that. It is a man's life business, as it
should be his life's desire, to get to the top.
This philosophy of the up-and-down must be steadily faced
before we can turn to any other philosophy individual or social.
This traditional idea of man's life as a mountain pilgrimage is as
valuable as ever it was. The pilgrim, the man on a journey, the
mountain climber, must be fit and keep fit. And so long as he
keeps so, he will learn with accumulating skill to select from the
undiscriminated profusion of the to-and-fro those few things which
are needed to carry him lightly and cheerfully up the mountain side.
He is no cynical refuser of the joy of life; on the contrary, he has
more of it than most people, because he is more on his guard
against lawless pleasure and material luxury. Such men are the salt
of the earth, the only possible nucleus of any healthy society, just
because their desires are set above it; they are above the laws
because they keep them ; they are guardians of liberty because they
respect it in others; they set the standards of public and private
life because they have passed them in fine, they practice citizen-
ship, which is the only effectual way of preaching it, and all because
here they have no abiding city.
I am not for a moment forgetting that the life of man is not
only a matter of the up-and-down. It is also a matter of the
to-and-fro, but in these times the rights of the to-and-fro need
little further advocacy. They are more than sufficiently present to
the consciousness of our age. The up-and-down should never be
insisted upon to the exclusion of the to-and-fro. It is not a
question of exclusion; it is a question of order. The up-and-down
should be to the to-and-fro what the spirit is to the flesh. It should
inspire it, dominate it, energize it; finally it should make it, also,
a spiritual and glorious thing.
1914.] THE IDEAL 731
Human life is not human unless it is dual right through. Any
person, age, society, or institution which is not stamped with a
duality corresponding to the obvious duality of human nature,
will fail of its natural fruit. If it specializes to the forgetfulness
of the to-and-fro it will fail; and if it specializes to the forgetful-
ness of the up-and-down it will fail disastrously. Human life is a
dual thing, and the Sign of the Cross, where the up-and-down
and the to-and-fro are made one in a mastery of pain and redemp-
tion, is signed upon every human work that is touched by the finger
of God.
THE IDEAL.
(DANTE TO BEATRICE.)
BY ELEANOR DOWNING.
" YEA ! I forgot thee for a little space
In that dim other-world of years ago,
Because the radiant look, the queenly brow,
The guiding hand that checked, the peerless grace,
That made Elysium of earth's dwelling-place,
Were severed from my earthly sight; yet, lo!
When I remembered, not those realms below
Could keep me till I found thee face to face."
Thus spake the Tuscan on the flowering leas
Of Paradise, by bright Eunoe's flow;
And it is thus men lose, yet even so
Not earth, nor sky, nor depth of soundless seas
To traverse, shall they deem too great a cost
To find again the thing that they have lost.
THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY.
BY HILAIRE BELLOC.
V.
N my last article I brought my story of the quarrel
between the Revolution and the French Church up
to the spring of 1792, and the outbreak of war.
The state of war which existed between France and
her most powerful neighbors after April, 1792,
which spread within a year to the whole of Europe, and which con-
tinued with slight intermission over twenty years, was the deter-
mining thing in the whole matter. It was the great war that
hardened and rendered permanent the division between the new
scheme of society and the Catholic Church in Gaul. In order to
understand why this was, it is important to remember (if one has
had experience), to appreciate (if one can only take it on authority)
what the effect of war is upon any body of thought directly or
indirectly connected with the cause of hostilities. Ideas which were
only the opinion of many the passionate creed of but a few
become, under the stress of war, the still more passionate creed
of a vast multitude. Conversely, those who were originally op-
posed to such ideas, are excited by war to an opposition far more
violent and intense than could have seemed possible before the
taking up of arms. That is the first and most salient psychological
effect of war: the multiplication of political emotion to an in-
definite, one might almost say to an infinite, degree.
Proofs of this are apparent in every considerable armed con-
flict of history, where that conflict has concerned a political or
religious theory. It would have seemed quite incredible to the
Englishman of 1630 that he should feel either so passionate an
attachment to the House of Stuart, or so violent a hatred against
it, as he displayed less than twenty years later in the thick of
the English civil wars. We note the same in the sixteenth century
after the outbreak of the wars of religion in France, and in the
seventeenth century after their outbreak in the Empire.
The point to seize is not only that emotion is thus intensely
and almost indefinitely emphasized, but that it changes its very
1914.] THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY 733
character in changing its degree. The difference between opinion
in time of peace and opinion as affected by a war, is the difference
between cold iron and iron white hot. Further, it is to be remarked
that this effect is proportionate to two main factors. First, the
definiteness of the issue upon which men are so divided that war
has come. Second, the prolongation and peril of the conflict.
Where the issue is confused or of but slight attachment in men's
hearts, the psychological effect of war is far less pronounced.
Where the struggle is not desperate, it is similarly less pronounced.
In the case of the French challenge to the old regime in Europe,
you had as clear an issue as possible; the whole issue between
democracy and its opponent political theories; the whole issue
between men who profoundly feel the equality of man, and men
to whom that mystical doctrine seems a silly phrase. Each party is,
in the eyes of the other, as wicked as he is mad. Each is attempt-
ing to destroy a body of civil institutions which are in the very heart
of his opponent. There had been nothing like the vividness of
contrast between the French democratic attempt and its enemies
in the field since the contrast between the Mohammedan and the
Catholic world, which was apparent in the First Crusade. Further,
the conflict was as violent and as prolonged as it was bitter. The
French revolutionary scheme was in grave danger for full eighteen
months. It was not saved from its peril until the end of the second
year. It had to defend itself by continued victories for twenty
years more. Even so, the struggle ended in an apparent triumph
of its opponents, when the kings entered Paris after Waterloo. You
had, therefore, in this armed conflict all the elements that could
emphasize and exaggerate opinion.
But a state of war has other effects besides the exaggeration
and inflation of opinion. It gives to whatever organs of govern-
ment have conducted the campaign, an unlooked-for increase in
power. Whatever has been at the head during a war, and has
successfully carried it through, will acquire a cohesion throughout
its own body, a political momentum, and a prestige which may well
between them make it supreme in the State, and which will, in
any case, give it a prolonged and vigorous life. Now in the case
of the French Revolutionary War the organ which thus carried
through the whole business was that republican, organized minority
of the nation, the structure of which was already largely built round
the Masonic lodges throughout the country, and the members of
which, though not in a majority hostile to the Church, would
734 THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Mar.,
naturally during a war fall into the hands of a minority that was.
If indeed another minority had existed, present throughout the
lodges and spread universally throughout the republican group, as
eagerly attached to Catholicism as that other minority was hostile
to it, then it would not have followed that the democratic clique
which ran the great campaign would have been anticlerical. But
there was no such opposing minority. The mass of the middle
classes, as we have seen, and the mass of the artisans in the town,
had dropped the practice of religion. Of the people concerned
with democratic organization, therefore, almost the only ones that
cared about religion at all, were those whose religious emotion
took the form of violent reaction against the Catholic Church, and
a hatred of her as the supposed permanent enemy of civil liberties.
Now put together these two points, present in every war and
particularly present in the French Revolutionary War the intense
exaggeration of opinion and the prestige which war gives to what-
ever set is in power and it will be apparent how the war affected
the situation of the Church in France. Here was a body of men
nearly all the bishops and the great majority of the priests re-
fusing to take the oath to the new Constitution. This refusal, in
a time of profound religious indifference, appeared to all the in-
different inexplicable, save as a challenge against the whole Revo-
lution and the whole democratic movement. That opinion was
utterly erroneous, but it was exactly the opinion to which anyone
would come who had ceased to understand the motives of the Catho-
lic hierarchy, and the nature of the Catholic religion. Meanwhile
the same power which was doing its best to support the priests in
their refusal the Crown was also doing its best to prevent the
arming of citizens in defence of the nation, and was more than
suspected (rightly as history has now proved) of desiring the
success of the invader, and of plotting for the ruin of the revolution-
ary cause through alien arms. In the eyes of most artisans- in
the towns, of most professional men in the local Councils and in
the Parliament, the resistance of the clergy to the oath and the
resistance of the King to the various national demands were all one
thing; and to that one thing was soon annexed the treason of the
government in its suspected, and rightly suspected, support of the
foreign invaders.
One might add to causes already so powerful for the dis-
ruption between the Catholic Church and the new democratic state,
the intimate relation that must always exist between one ancient
1914.] THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY 735
institution in the commonwealth and another. The whole structure
of the Church in Gaul was intertwined with the monarchy, which
had been, so to speak, her twin during thirteen hundred years of the
national history. What is more, there was hardly a form of privi-
lege or even of abuse which, if it were of long standing, could not
be found connected with some clerical institution as well as existing
in its lay forms. Did the Revolution propose the levelling of the
nobles? The bishops and great abbots were almost invariably of
that class. Did the Revolution propose an abolition of Feudal
Dues? Those dues formed part of the revenues of nearly every
monastic establishment and every see. So it was throughout the
whole structure of society. The moment you began clearing away
the ruins of the old world, you tore away with them tendrils not
only dead, but some still living of the Church's organization in that
old society. For instance, if you proposed new and sensible divi-
sions of the national territory, conformable to the great changes
which had taken place after so many centuries, you at once came
into conflict with the old bishoprics as well as the old provinces.
Upon every side, then, you had the elements for converting what
was already a profound and embittered misunderstanding into an
acute and permanent hatred.
The early difficulties of the war and the maddening of popular
feeling did the rest. The priests, forming a class apart everywhere
recognizable and now everywhere confused with the opposition
to the national programme and to the national armies, were the
easiest victims that could be found whenever victims were de-
manded. If the French had from the first repelled their invaders,
the quarrel might yet have been appeased. But fate willed other-
wise. The invasion was at first successful. The French troops dis-
organized by democracy, by the emigration of their officers, and by
the original presence of great bodies of alien mercenaries, still more
disorganized by the presence among them of great masses of
volunteers, were at first quite unable to stand up to the fighting.
The national exasperation at such a peril, and at such facile initial
defeats, was all the greater from the exaltation in which they had
opened the war. The contrast between that mood of enthusiasm
and this deplorable breakdown, inflamed men to the last degree of
violence. The monarchy which was betraying the nation was
indeed swept away, and its palace, the seat of the central govern-
ment, stormed by the people of Paris. But that did not stay the
invasion. The fall of the great frontier fortress of Verdun was the
736 THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Mar.,
signal for massacres in the Paris prisons, in which a group of priests
were the first to be sacrificed.
The invasion was checked by something as like a miracle as
civil history affords. Upon the plains of the Province of Cham-
pagne, after the indecisive cannonade of Valmy, the invaders halted
and retreated for the moment. But when in the next year, 1793,
the peril reappeared upon a far greater scale; when all Europe
England, Spain, Holland, Prussia, Austria had joined in the coali-
tion against France, and armies of far greater magnitude than those
of the preceding year were everywhere passing the frontier, be-
sieging and taking the barrier strongholds of the northeast, rebel-
lion against the Revolutionary government broke out within French
territory upon every side. These rebellions were particularly vio-
lent, and for the moment successful, in the northwest, along the
lower course of the Loire; and this happened to be one of the
isolated peasant districts where the decline of religion, which had so
powerfully affected the towns, had been least felt. Once more the
Catholic Church was found identified with those who desired to
destroy the Revolution by force of arms.
One measure of persecution after another was enacted. There
was no public sentiment to stay that course. The minority that was
most violent in its prosecution were closely allied to the Revolution-
ary Committee of Government, and closely immixed with it. That
committee instituted for some months, at the close of the phase of
peril, a rigorous martial law, which has gone down to history
under the name of " The Reign of Terror," and it was during this
suspension of ordinary forms that the persecution of the priesthood
reached its height, and during the reprisals undertaken against the
internal rebellions that the worst acts of cruelty against the persons
and lives of the hierarchy were perpetrated.
When the storm abated and the wreckage could be surveyed
say about 1796-97 what remained was something of this sort:
You had a society in which only a minority, and that not a large one,
was still practicing the rites of religion. Within that minority
of practicing men and women, most were content with the adminis-
trations of the schismatic clergy. The great majority had passed
from indifference to hostility, and there had further grown up in
the course of those years, and in the white heat of the armed
struggle in Europe, an association of ideas whereby, save for a
mere handful of educated men conversant with history, and of an
intellectual calibre which transcended their time, the Catholic
1914.] THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY 737
Church as a whole was lumped with all the forces opposed to the
great democratic experiment, and the supporters of that great demo-
cratic experiment were equally taken to be naturally and inevitably
the opponents of Catholicism.
In that very small circle of superior intelligence was to be
found Napoleon Bonaparte ; and when I describe in my next article
by what forces the Church was built up again upon such a soil,
and in spite of such apparently invincible conditions of desolation
and enmity, it will be seen how great a part this greatest of soldiers
played in the revival. But before turning to that revival, I will
conclude this article by underlining for the reader that " associa-
tion of ideas " of which I have spoken. Only by a good grasp of
the way in which the Church was thus, not in reason but in practice,
taken to be a necessary enemy of the new settlement, shall we be able
to follow the varied fortunes of the Church and French democracy
in the nineteenth century. For by far the strongest force making
against the full re-establishment of the Faith in Europe (through
the influence of Gaul), has been this not reasonable but pragmatic
confusion between the Catholic organism and all the inherited so-
cial structure which is at issue with the novel democratic experi-
ment of the French.
This association together of ideas which are bound by no
rational link is familiar to all of us, though few of us appreciate
how large a part it plays in our errors of judgment. We associate,
from one experience perhaps, a particular profession with a par-
ticular vice, and so misjudge a whole class of fellow citizens. We
associate from some one or few experiences a particular provincial
accent with ignorance, and so miss many an opportunity of em-
ploying ability. We associate the accumulation of wealth with
talent, and so value a commercial gambler in his success, and forget
that the man who rises by luck may fall by it. This non-rational as-
sociation of ideas runs perpetually through the whole of human de-
cisions, and the recognition of it and the tempering of it by further
experience and by analysis, is the chief task of those who desire to
attain the truest conception of the world, and to be rid of prejudice.
In the sphere of politics this source of error in the mind is
particularly prominent. For instance, there is no rational connec-
tion between a representative Congress or Parliament and the con-
ception of democracy. On the contrary, representative bodies have
in large States always accompanied, or nearly always, the power
of minorities and especially of wealthy minorities. Democracies
VOL. xcvm. 47
738 THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY [Mar.,
have instinctively preferred government by popular meeting, or by
the direct reference of important measures to a popular vote. Yet
the accidental association of bodies upon this model with democratic
experiments in the last one hundred and fifty years, has made it
difficult for any but a very few to conceive of democracy without a
Parliament of some sort; and the first effort of your reformer
when he proposes the establishment of " self-government " in a
State hitherto despotic or oppressed by foreign rule, is to saddle
the new commonwealth with a representative system. In the same
way the historical student will confuse a large standing army with
the idea of arbitrary government, and yet will not recognize that a
large body of armed police drilled, disciplined, and professional, of
long service, and perpetually interfering with the details of civil life,
is a far more efficient instrument of tyranny than any army can be.
The list might be indefinitely extended of those institutions which,
by some accidental association in the past, stand permanently in
men's minds for cognate and logically allied things.
I may conclude with one typical example: The Roman com-
monwealth abhorred for centuries the name and title of "a king;"
it associated that name and title with the degradation of civic
liberty. But it came to tolerate powers greater than those of any
king under the title of " commander-in-chief ," " imperator," because
it did not conceive of the army as a monarchic thing: the Roman
army and monarchy were not associated ideas. The power of the
imperator grew until it was, by the end of the third century, a com-
plete, formal, unquestioned, and highly organized despotism. Yet
because it never bore the title of kingship, it was tolerated, and
achieved its end. Now it was this association of ideas, this hitch
in reasoning, which so perpetually diverts political judgment, and
which is so often the despair of a rational reformer, that more than
anything else has perpetuated the division between French democ-
racy and the Church.
The historical memory in either is of a period in which the
concrete expression of the one was directly opposed to the temporal
expression of the other, during an intense period of national war-
fare. To forget the actual fact of conflict is impossible; to give
that conflict no more than the place it should rationally occupy,
long seemed unnatural ; and to this day, more than a century after
the Revolutionary War, it still seems eccentric to many. Succes-
sive waves of experience, though not intensifying this association,
have at least preserved it. Every democrat remembers occasions
I9I4-] THE CHURCH AND FRENCH DEMOCRACY 739
on which he has met undemocratic influences in the Church. Every
practicing member of the Church remembers occasions on which he
has met democratic feeling combined with hostility to Catholicism.
Those great numbers which are indifferent to the democratic creed
upon the one side, to Catholicism upon the other, can but note the
antagonism of the minorities on either side, and, though they dis-
covered no logical foundation for that opposition, they came to think
of that opposition as inevitable in practice. All the external signs
of the Church, from the architecture of her buildings to the dress of
her priests, for long " went with " a denial in civic affairs of
the democratic postulates. Not that such a denial was formally
put forward in the name of the Church, but that all who were
indifferent, or external, to Catholicism knew that as a fact an op-
position between the Church and the government was apparent,
and concluded that, from some unknown necessity or other, it
must be so. Meanwhile all those practicing Catholics who were in-
different to the forms of civil government (and most men are indif-
ferent to these forms most of the time, though some have a per-
manent enthusiasm for a civic creed, and all are capable of moments
of such enthusiasm), all those practicing Catholics, I say, who
were not greatly moved by the words " republic," " empire " or
" monarchy," noted the frequency with which the member of some
local democratic caucus would be violently anti-Catholic, the large
proportion in such bodies of Protestants and Jews, and continued
to accept the association of ideas on his side. The truth is that
only that section of society where the two circles overlapped, only
those men who were at once more or less Catholic by inheritance,
and also more or less democratic by inheritance, would naturally
suspect such an association of ideas, would analyze it unfavorably,
would discover its lack of a reasonable basis, and would tend on
the one hand to repudiate the claim of Catholic reactionaries, that
democracy was in itself un-Catholic, and on the other hand to cast
off with irritation the claim of local anti-Catholic caucuses to
speak in the general name of democracy.
For reasons which I will describe later, this area of overlap
has recently grown very greatly. It will soon, I think, include the
mass of the State; and when it does so, that prime factor in Euro-
pean civilization, the identification of the Gallic spirit with the
Catholic Church, will reappear. If it fails to reappear European
civilization will not survive.
SIBERIAN EDUCATION.
BY RICHARDSON WRIGHT.
IMMIGRATION! Subjugation! Education!" as
Dmitri Petrovitch facetiously observed, " is the slo-
gan of the Russian government for Siberia." And
he was not far from the truth.
It was in the cafe of the " Rossia " at Tomsk
that I first saw Dmitri Petrovitch. With another university stu-
dent, he was feasting at a corner table, and now and again breaking
into those mournful dirges that pass in Russia for college songs.
There were many other uniformed students in the restaurant, but
Dmitri and his friend were at the table nearest mine, and as they
proceeded with dinner I heard snatches of their conversation. They
had just passed their winter semester examinations, I gathered, and
were celebrating. At the end of the next term they would be
awarded their degrees.
" Six months and I hang up my shingle, brother. Here's to
you ! " Glasses tinkled. Then in deep tones came the opening
words of Gaudeamus Igitur.
Between their collegiate East and my collegiate West, Gaude-
amus seemed to span the gulf of years and nations. I turned and
raised my glass. They saw me and begged me to join them. There
was no declining the invitation : it was one of those whole-hearted,
we-don't-care-who-you-are invitations such as Freshmen press on
unknown bearded alumni at commencement. So I moved to their
table. After the manner of Russians, they began to ply me with
questions, now in English, now in their own tongue. Who was
I? Whence had I come? Was I a university man? What were
American colleges like? Finally, when Dmitri Petrovitch seemed
convinced that he had a real, live American college graduate for
his guest, he settled back in his chair, and surveyed me with na'ive
gratification.
" Well, what do you think of our university? " he asked after
a pause.
" I arrived in Tomsk only a few hours ago," I replied, " and
I've not yet stirred from the hotel. I hope to visit your university
to-morrow, however."
" I gather then that you've come out to inspect some mines,"
I9I4-] SIBERIAN EDUCATION 741
he continued. " All the Americans who come to Tomsk are pros-
pectors or mine agents."
" No," I confessed, " I'm just wandering around to see the
country, and to try to understand what plan your government has
for Siberia and its peoples."
Dmitri stopped puffing his cigarette, and with impressive inter-
vals uttered the three words, " Immigration ! Subjugation ! Edu-
cation ! "
" But do you mean that your government intends to give these
quarter of a million peasants who come out here every year a col-
lege education? What chance, for instance, has a moudjick boy
at the University of Tomsk?"
" He has no means of acquiring the requisite elementary educa-
tion to qualify him for entrance. The university is no place for
him." Dmitri spoke with assurance. " Russia plans to make Si-
beria an agricultural country, and her aim is to make better farmers
of the immigrants."
" It may be possible," I acknowledged, with no little hesitation,
" but is it probable ? On my way out here I stopped at Tcheliabinsk
and saw the quarters for the new Siberians. Two thousand of them
were there being registered, and allotted their district in which to
settle. They did not strike me as very promising material for
scientific up-to-date farmers."
Dmitri smiled. " Let's get a samovar," he suggested. " I've
had enough of this Crimean wine, and I like to talk about these
farmers, because I'm going out to the country to practice medicine
when I get through here at the university."
The waiter cleared the table and brought the steaming samovar.
While Nikolai filled our " chai " glasses, Dmitri drew a rough
sketch map of Siberia on the tablecloth with a fork.
" You can't tell much from this," he said, " but it will give
you an idea. Now here is Siberia, 11,380,000 square versts (about
5,000,000 square miles), of which great areas are rich black soil
capable of supporting five hundred million people, or five times as
many as now constitute the Russian Empire. Remember that.
We are one and a half times as big as the United States."
He drew a line across the map.
" There's the Trans-Siberian Railway. Here is Omsk where
the railroads meet, a centre for the exportation of butter, wheat,
and meat."
"A kind of Siberian Chicago?"
Dmitri nodded. "Here is Kourgan where they have four fairs
742 SIBERIAN EDUCATION [Mar.,
each year, doing five million roubles worth of business in skins
and hides and fur. Here is Kainsk we call it the Jews' paradise
where there are more fairs of the steppe industries, and finally down
here, toward the Altai Mountains, lies Barnaul, chief city of the
Minusinsk District, the richest wheat area in Siberia."
I assured him that I had the location of each of these points
in my mind.
" Well, then. At each one of these centres, the government
has established a school of agriculture, with an experimental farm,
stock, implements, all up-to-date, and with an 'agronom,' or pro-
fessor of agriculture, in residence. Now what is the government's
plan? Remember, she wants to educate these farmers, these
shaggy-bearded, wild-eyed men you saw at Tcheliabinsk ; she plans
to teach them intensive farming, the use of proper utensils, the
modern methods of dairy producing.
" If a young moudjick can raise a little money, and seems fairly
bright, he takes a three months' course at one of these schools.
Then he goes back and hires himself out to an artel, or guild of
farmers, to whom he teaches what he has learned. Perhaps the
town may hire him to give lectures or consult him in the develop-
ment of the mir lands. In that way the government is getting a
nucleus of young men with ambition, who are going about dissem-
inating this knowledge of modern farm methods, and showing the
farmers how they can make their lands pay. And " Dmitri hes-
itated a moment " well, within two generations, there will be no
better farmers in the world than those unpromising moudjicks you
saw at Tcheliabinsk."
" It is rather like Sir Horace Plunkett's work in Ireland,"
I suggested.
Dmitri had never heard of Sir Horace. His tea had cooled,
and with a gulp, characteristic of the Russians, he tossed off half
the glassful.
" Siberia's future," he said with a sweep that included the en-
tire map on the cloth, " depends on her farmers, just as in any other
country. To-day she is exporting butter to the amount of three and
one-half million poods (100,000,000 pounds), but she doesn't raise
enough wheat to satisfy the demand here at home. In the Urals
they import wheat from Europe. Along the Pacific provinces they
buy great quantities of American wheat. That's why the govern-
ment wants to make good farmers out of these immigrants. That's
why they ought not to aspire to a university education. They should
be satisfied. Stay on the farm! If they all cluster in the cities,
1914.] SIBERIAN EDUCATION 743
in Omsk, Tomsk, Irkutsk, Chita, Vladivostok, who will grow the
grain for us? "
" But doesn't the peasant get any education apart from farm-
ing?"
" Oh, certainly. He goes to the Narodnija Utchilistcha, or
elementary school, if there is one in his village, and there he learns
reading, writing, arithmetic, and simple Bible lessons. That isn't
much, but that's enough for him. He can't imbibe as much educa-
tion as he does vodka."
I wanted to learn more, but as we chatted Dmitri and Nikolai
told me that they were going out into the country soon, so I did not
have the opportunity. They made me promise, however, that I
would come to the university the very next afternoon, and having
settled on our meeting time, I left them to their celebration and
their Gaudeamus Igihir.
The University of Tomsk consists of one main building, which
stands back from the street some hundred yards, a three-story affair
with long wings. The bacteriological laboratories occupy another
building, and the clinic, which covers the greater part of a city block,
is down in the heart of the town. The university was founded by
the government in 1 880, and opened seven years later. The private
endowment fund in 1911 stood at $2,500,000. The library contains
one hundred and ten thousand volumes. There are two principal
chairs, medicine and law. Fees are moderate, one hundred roubles
($50.00) a year. The year is divided into two semesters, giving
a man his degree at the end of the fourth year, as in America.
There are no dormitories, the students having to lodge in town.
The fact of the matter is, however, that the government will not
permit dormitory life, lest it will foster socialism and radicalism in
general. The only other school in Siberia that has university stand-
ing, is the Institute of Oriental Languages at Vladivostok, whose
curriculum, of course, is circumscribed to those studies. The
University of Tomsk, then, is the only one in the whole of Siberia.
Several years ago the citizens of Irkutsk aspired to establish a uni-
versity in their capital city, and even went so far as to pledge the
necessary funds for its founding and maintenance, but the govern-
ment promptly vetoed the idea.
Those who wish a higher technical education in Siberia, go to
the Tomsk Technology Institute, which is up the road a way from
the university. Nominally quite a separate concern, this institute
is practically affiliated with the university proper. It has an annual
enrolment of seventeen hundred students, which, with the fourteen
744
SIBERIAN EDUCATION [Mar.,
hundred at the university, gives Tomsk a large scholastic body.
Courses in mechanical and civil engineering, chemistry, and their al-
lied trades are offered at the institute. The main building, recently
finished, is thoroughly equipped. It would be the pride of any Amer-
ican or British city. The attendance fee is only twenty-five dollars
a year, and there are many scholarships that can be won. Like the
university, it has no dormitory, students finding lodgings in town.
In addition to the university and the institute, a " People's
University" has been projected, and buildings are in the course of
erection. The generosity of M. Makymasir, a local merchant, has
made this possible. His donation of fifty thousand dollars has been
augmented by gifts from private citizens and the municipality.
The details of instruction have not yet been planned, but the under-
lying idea is to educate the masses at nominal, if any, charges, prob-
ably along the lines of simply phrased and interesting lectures.
By analogy, Tomsk is the embryonic Boston of Siberia. One
can see there the entire gamut of the Siberian school system in the
working, watch its tendencies, and mark its weaknesses. Though
in the main it does not differ from the school system obtaining in
European Russia, it faces different problems, and presents one of
the most interesting phases of Siberian life.
A lad starts at the Narodnija Utchilistcha, the national free
elementary school, where he learns the three R's. This type of
school exists in all but the smallest and least accessible villages, and
is decidedly on the increase. In many of the smaller steppe vil-
lages, one finds new school buildings. The physical exercise equip-
ment of these rural schools, by the way, would put to shame the nor-
mal run of country schools in America or Britain. The Narodnija
Utchilistcha are supported partly by the government, partly by the
town. The salary of the teacher, which seldom amounts to over
fifty dollars a year, is paid from the imperial treasury. As a special
inducement to the spread of education, the government offers gen-
erous support to the schools in those zemstovs that make attendance
compulsory ; so it might be noted that the greatest hindrance to the
disseminating of elementary education in Siberia to-day is not the
much-maligned Russian government. It is the village " pope "
or priest. Having finished his elementary course, the lad passes
on to the Realnija (the German Realschule), where he studies his-
tory, geography, and mathematics. The Realnija is not established
in the villages. It is a town institution. Attendance is usually
free and optional.
The third step on the ladder, the gymnasium, equivalent to the
1914-] SIBERIAN EDUCATION 745
French Gymnase, is found only in towns and cities. As with the
rest of government schools, the curriculum is arranged by the edu-
cational authorities in St. Petersburg. Here, in the gymnasium, the
boy studies history, literature, higher mathematics, and elementary
sciences, though the last is taught from books alone, there being
no practical demonstrations and no equipment for experiments.
English, German, and French are optional, but Latin and Greek
are compulsory. In 1880 Count Alexis Tolstoi, Minister of Educa-
tion, became obsessed with the idea that in copious doses of the dead
languages would lie the dissipation of the Russian Empire's social
unrest, so he dealt out Latin and Greek with a liberal hand, and the
rising generation, even in frontier Siberia, still has to stagger along
under his legacy.
In the big cities there are, in addition, the Kommerscheskaja,
or privately-conducted trade schools, whose curricula are much
easier than those of the gymnasia. They are largely filled with the
children of well-to-do Jews. In Siberia the school roll of the
smaller towns permits five per cent to be Jewish; in the cities two.
There are, beside, in the larger cities, private finishing schools for
girls, which have the same exclusive atmosphere of our upper class
boarding schools. And to the list should be added the normal
institutes for teachers, and the seminaries for priests which are
found in all the cities.
When a Siberian lad has arrived at the university stage, he
faces a problem. According to governmental requirements, all
members of the professions must have taken a course at a university.
There is no such thing as reading law in the office of the Merovi
Soudi, or local justice of the peace, or studying materia medica at
a country hospital. The boy must go to Tomsk to the university.
This spells expense and stinting on the part of parents and boys
alike, for the average student at the university and the institute is
very poor. He works in summer, and even while he is attending
classes, he earns his way tutoring in town.
All Siberian schools are run on a government schedule.
Classes begin at nine, and continue until half-past eleven, with ten
minute intervals every hour, and forty minutes for a shoe-box
luncheon. Studies are resumed at half-past twelve, and continue
with intervals until three. This means that the scholar gets home
at about four o'clock, having had nothing since eight but a sandwich
or a cake. Teachers and professors have tried to rectify the system,
since they find that their scholars are dull and fatigued in the after-
noon sessions, but they have not succeeded.
74 6 SIBERIAN EDUCATION [Mar,
There is no co-education in Siberia. Recently, however, a
petition has been presented to St. Petersburg, begging the admittance
of women to the University of Tomsk. In all government-sup-
ported schools the scholars are required to wear uniforms. The
boys wear a blue suit with a dark-blue overcoat, and a peaked mili-
tary cap, and the girls a brown frock, a black pinafore, and a black
hat. On festivals and at school exercises, a white apron is worn.
It might be noted in passing that in most of the cities the
schools are so crowded as to necessitate classes running on half time.
More schools and more teachers are needed everywhere, and the
municipalities, awakened to the situation, are allotting generous
amounts of their budgets to that purpose. Irkutsk sets apart ten
per cent of her total revenues for education, a record in Siberia.
At the present writing, there are four thousand eight hundred and
forty-six schools in Siberia, serving two hundred and forty thou-
sand seven hundred and eighty-four pupils.
As the army and youth in Russia are almost synonymous terms,
the problem of education of officers presents not alone a problem,
but works itself out in a way that defeats its own ends, as one can
readily notice if he drops into a cafe and sees the disinterested
officers, or reads the records of the late war with Japan. The pay
of officers is not very high, even in frontier Siberia, and the govern-
ment has to make special inducements for boys to enter the ranks.
The son or sons of officers of the rank of captain or over are taken
at the age of ten, given board, lodging, and instruction free. Hav-
ing passed through their elementary examinations, they go to a more
advanced school, of which there is one at Tomsk, at Omsk, Irkutsk,
and Vladivostok, and take a course equivalent to that at West Point
or Woolwich. This finished, a youth receives a commission and a
grant for uniforms. All that is required of him for this free keep
and education is to serve six years. So he serves his time, and then,
tiring of the work, would gladly retire to some other profession,
but being a poor man's son, and knowing no other business but
soldiering, he simply stays in the ranks, year after year, losing inter-
est in the work as the days pass. He regards the army as an un-
pleasant duty that must be performed, simply because it supports
him. A pension awaits him after several years; in the meantime
he prays that there will be no war, so that he may spend his days
in the vodka tractir. The lack of interest of the officers in the
Russo-Japanese War can be traced directly to this system of their
education.
One afternoon, Dmitri Petrovitch and I wandered into the
1914-] SIBERIAN EDUCATION 747
park, in the shadow of the cathedral, and sat on a bench to chat.
I had been in Tomsk a fortnight, and had seen most of the city.
I had visited the club and the churches and the markets, had seen
the grave of the " Hermit Tsar," whom the Tomskians and almost
everyone in Siberia claim to have been Alexander I. I had visited
the schools and the university, the institute, and a military school.
I had talked with many professors and students, but there were still
several questions unanswered.
" By the way," I said, " where do you fellows have your ath-
letic field?"
" There isn't any," Dmitri replied as though it were nothing ex-
ceptional.
" But what do you do when you play your games ? "
" There aren't any games."
" Well what do you do to work off your surplus energy? "
Dmitri laughed. " I suppose some would say that we studied
economics and political economy, but there are other things that we
do. Come on, I'll show you."
We strolled across the square, and, passing down a side street,
came to a gap in the line of houses, where stood the charred shell
of what was once a building of some size.
" That was the theatre," said Dmitri Petrovitch. " On the
2Oth of November, 1905, when the strike of the railroad was at its
height, and when the students were especially excited over some
action of the governor-general, they gathered a gang of roughs and
set fire to that building, and stoned those who attempted to escape.
A couple of score were killed. Most of the students were caught.
They were either sentenced to death, or, what is worse, were
sent for long terms of hard labor to the northern prison settlements.
I suppose you might call that working off surplus energy."
Dmitri Petrovitch, as I saw him in his lodgings and at the uni-
versity, was a perfect example of a theory I had been evolving dur-
ing my stay in Tomsk, of the causes of student riots in Russian uni-
versities.
Like many other nationalities tinged with Oriental blood, the
Russian holds the male issue in special reverence. At home no dis-
cipline is laid on the boy. His sisters are punished, but never he.
It breaks a boy's spirit to use the rod, his mother will tell you.
When he goes to the elementary schools, he carries this same spoiled-
child spirit with him. There is no discipline. Corporal punish-
ment has been forbidden for the past fifty years. The master, being
748 SIBERIAN EDUCATION [Mar.,
dependent on his success with the boys for his salary, finds it wiser
to permit a boy the free hand, just so long as he passes his examina-
tions. Thus on through the school list, until the boy reaches the
university. Here matters take a different course. The professors
have little or no relations with their scholars. There are none of
those informal seminars known to American and British students,
whereby one is able to know his proctor. The reason for the
separation is obvious. In seminars a professor is chatty, and often
expresses personal views. His views on sociological and economic
questions may be revolutionary. Already professors have tumbled
into this pitfall, with the result that they and their scholars have
been exiled to the north. So the wise professor simply reads his
lectures, and lets the student get along without counsel and advice,
as best he can. The boy, having had a free hand at home and at
school, being away from his parents, being filled with adolescent en-
thusiasm which always runs to revolutions, is bound to get into
trouble. He has no games, for any assembling of students save
in class-rooms is forbidden by the government. 1 So the student
flares out now and then into riots, into silly revolutionary strikes.
The girls follow the men willy nilly, and the police soon have them
lodged in jail with serious political charges preferred.
This is the state of affairs at the University of Tomsk, and
this is the underlying cause of all the trouble that has been cropping
up there, and at other Russian universities, for the past fifteen years.
The utter lack of discipline, the lack of intimacy and friendship be-
tween professor and pupil, the lack of wholesome sports, the lack
of wise counsel. The government must shoulder part of the blame.
Her rulings for students defeat their own ends. This was what
Dmitri Petrovitch meant when he said that among the plans of the
Russian government for Siberia there was, beside emigration and
education, stern subjugation. That was also why, when he and his
fellow-students celebrated passing their examinations in the cafe of
the " Rossia," not more than two sat at a table, fearing that a third
would cause them to be suspected as arch plotters against the realm !
Yet they were singing, despite their subjugation, the song of youth
and of youthful lands
jGaudeamus Igitur
Juvenes dum sumus.
^Three students constitute a political meeting, according to the Russian police,
and when students are rioting, the police are allowed to fire upon groups of three
or more.
VENICE.
BY EVELYN MARCH PHILLIPPS.
enter Venice, as in these days we probably do, by
rail, is to end a long journey, often hot and crowded,
always noisy and fatiguing; to pass through the
bustle and uproar of a great railway terminus and
then, all in a moment, to find oneself lying in the
absolute peace and luxury of a gondola, and with brief delay to
glide off into the silence of the water. Well, as we come to know
and love Venice, perhaps the surprise and joy of that first impres-
sion, the beauty of that first coup d'ocil, whether by daylight or
moonlight, can never be surpassed.
The best way to realize the city as a whole, is to spend a day
or two in a gondola wandering about the lagoons and waterways.
We cannot think of Venice without picturing the wide lagoon in
which she lies, marshland between the city and the mainland, lake
where it lies in calm reaches close round the buildings, and almost
sea on the outer part, where the action of the tides as they flow
in from the porti are most strongly felt. The daily ebb and flow
sweeps through every smallest canal, covering or laying bare the
mud banks, making everything sweet and clean, and carrying all
refuse to the sea. In a storm, when the west wind blows strongly,
you may stand on the quays and listen to the waves booming on
that narrow rampart of sea, sand and mud, the Lido, which keeps
back the force of the Adriatic, just as it has kept all hostile forces
at bay in the past. It sounds as if a very little would bring the ocean
in overwhelming fury upon the city, and you realize the necessity
for the sea walls or murazzi, which strengthen the frail barrier
at its weakest points. The lagoon is full of channels deep enough
to float a ship at high tide and a boat at low tide. These are kept
open by dredging, and are defined by those groups of palli or posts,
which are such a characteristic feature of the lagoon. In the days
of Charlemagne, the force which sailed under Pepin against the
town was sent to its doom by an old woman of Malamocco, where
one of the ports opens. She pointed out the easy way, and the
Prankish ships set sail without misgiving across the broad calm
sheet of water, on the other side of which lay the goal of their
750
VENICE [Mar.,
envious desire, only to be stranded one by one upon banks of mud,
where they were surrounded and destroyed by the Venetians in
their light and shallow boats.
It is the presence of the living sea running through Venice, like
the very pulse of life, that gives her her abiding charm. The tides
come and go, the sea wind blows salt and fresh. The sky and sea
hold in themselves a perfect miracle of change, and under their
influence the sea-girt city has the charm of endless variety. On a
fresh morning the light glances off the water, the palaces are sharp
in shine and shadow, the green tide races up the Grand Canal, a
light wind lifts all the loose sails and fluttering pennons, and the
smell of the sea is strong and keen in our nostrils. Or it is evening,
and as we float across between San Giorgio, lying all rose and ivory
upon the cobalt water, and look towards the entrance to the Grand
Canal, the orange and crimson of the sunset is reflected in the
glowing lagoon to westward, and the domes of S. Maria della
Salute are silhouetted in amethyst against the flaming sky. Again
comes a pearl-gray sky, when every building is a silver ghost, and
the islands sleep upon the lagoon like cattle in the meadows. On
days after rain the white clouds pile themselves in mountain but-
tresses against the deep blue. Wonderful are the moonlight nights
when the gleaming path stretches before our prow, and the city is a
long line of dazzling light, with the campaniles gleaming white and
mysterious, and the moonlit dome of heaven is reflected in the vast
expanse below, and we seem to be floating in limitless space. If
some day you make an effort, and are out between four and five on
a summer morning, the sight is one never to be forgotten. The
only sounds to be heard are the plash of the tide, and the soft, wild
crying of the sea birds. The east is blushing like a bride, and upon
a silver mirror lies a mother-of-pearl city, so melting, so ethereal, it
might be the city of a dream. Basking on the broad lagoon at sun-
set, when the green-blue water is shot with rose and gold in every
ripple, you may descry far away to the west a row of visionary
peaks. They are " those famous Euganean Hills " of which
Shelley sang and where Petrarch died.
Those mountains towering as from waves of flame
Around the vaporous sun from which there came
The inmost purple spirit of light and made
Their very peaks transparent,
or more rarely, in the clear shining after rain or in the golden
I9H-3 VENICE 751
eventide of autumn, the mountains of Cadore, Titian's own coun-
try, rise in lapis-lazuli blue behind the city.
The fishing boats, the bragozzi, are little changed since the
days when Venice held the East in fee and safeguarded the West.
Their bows still keep the same free, audacious curve. On the
flowing red and yellow sails, angels, or the Madonna in glory,
St. George and the dragon, or symbolic designs, are painted in blue
or orange or pale sea-green. It is a wonderful sight to see all
these fishing boats drawn up after a storm, along the great quay
beyond the Ducal Palace, or in one of the harbors of the Giudecca,
with their sails hoisted to dry in the sunlight. It is a delight
to watch them coming in from the sea, a long line of burning color
in the evening light, or to come upon one anchored alone, perhaps
below some sea-shrine, a globe of radiance in the sunset.
We come to distinguish a great variety of boats; the tra-
baccoli are the large coasty vessels which trade with stone from
Istria, or wine from Dalmatia, and which crowd in their harbor
behind the Salute; the gondola and the dandola are boats of
pleasure; the topo is a fishing or fruit boat, smaller than the
bragozzi, and then there are barche and barchetti, heavy open boats,
but the bragozzi are the most picturesque of all, and carry at their
bows wonderful figures of Fame blowing a trumpet, great painted
eyes on the lookout, and, sometimes for luck, a little carved hunch-
back or gobbo. On a Sunday you may see a long line of boats lying
along the Riva, while the men have gone to Mass, for the fishers
of the lagoons are a pious folk. The fruit boats come in bringing
their load to the market on the Rialto, and though they vary
with the seasons, they are generally a gorgeous mass. Tomatoes
and brilliant pepper-pods are piled round huge watermelons, cut
open to show the rosy pulp, pears and grapes, the delicious red
frdgola, or strawberry, and purple plums, or piles of green vege-
tables and golden gourds make a tempting and delicious picture.
The newcomer enjoys Venice more thoroughly when he mas-
ters the way the city lies the main body divided by the Grand
Canal and having the Zattere, a wide fondamenta, running the
whole length of the seaward front, and the Giudecca, a long
tongue of land on the opposite side of the wide lagoon.
Then he may row along the noisy Riva dei Schiavoni, past the
public gardens and round behind, where the poorer quarters lie.
And as he goes he may learn that Venice is divided into sestieri
or quarters, San Polo, Santa Croce, Cannaregio, Dorsoduro, and
752
VENICE [Mar.,
Castello the names are set up prominently along the canals
and into parishes, of which there are thirty. It is well, too,
to know that a calle is a long narrow street ; a campo a large open
square, generally in front of a church ; that the Cannaregio is the
next largest after the Grand Canal; that the term Canale is only
applied to the latter and the Giudecca; that a rio is any smaller
canal, and a fondamenta is a sidewalk along a canal. The name of
piazza is given only to three squares, that of St. Mark's which is
the Piazza, par excellence, Piazza, Bandiera and Moro, and Piazza,
Daniele Maniri. A fondamenta on the Grand Canal is called a riva,
and a traghetto is a station for ferryboats and gondolas.
As the dark network of small canals is explored, a picture
meets the eye at every turn. There is something exciting in the
feast of light and color, old green water gates set in a framework
of worn white marble, or under slender Gothic arches, heavy bal-
conies of pierced and carved stone, a sudden curtain of vine leaves
tumbling over a parapet, a veil of purple wistaria, pots of vivid
carnations shining against a dark interior, deep shades and flash-
ing lights, all are reflected in the water, which has a peculiarity all
its own, for while every object is reduplicated with marvelous
exactitude, the sea-green mirror is always moving, swaying, trans-
forming and zigzagging every detail, and producing an effect which
is the delight of the artist and his despair.
The waters of the side canals keep the secrets of the mysterious
side of old Venetian life. What courtships, and hatred, what deeds
of darkness and echoes of revenge, what stains of blood and cries of
despair have not been known to these narrow channels in the past !
Sometimes it is a relief to escape from their tortuous windings, and
to emerge into the brilliant freshness of the Grand Canal, the mag-
nificent highway of Venice, along which stand many of her prin-
cipal palaces.
The walls of the palaces are with rare exceptions of brick, but
for beauty they are overlaid with thin slabs of marble, and set with
alabaster and discs of porphyry or serpentine. The wide door
opening from the canal runs through the house, and a broad flight of
steps descends into the water tall palli, painted in the colors of the
noble houses, are planted in the canal, to which the gondolas are
moored. The great stairway mounts upward to the apartments
above, each floor forming a large house, with a long sola and spac-
ious rooms. The steps seem made for the reception of guests;
wide windows with deep balconies open above the canal, everything
I9I4-] VENICE 753
suggests peace and fearlessness and welcome. It is all very unlike
the fortressed dwellings which in other Italian towns tell their
story of peril and insecurity.
And in the meantime all our exploring is done in the most
perfect carriage in the world. Without the gondola, of which one
never tires, Venice would not have half its charm. Its wide seat,
well supplied with large down cushions covered with soft black
leather, is low but not too low. Do you wish for solitude? With
the silent rower at your back, with no sound but the gentle plash
of the oar, and the gurgle of the water against the prow, no appar-
ent movement save the gliding of shore or palace, you feel abso-
lutely alone, or for the best company, the company of two, nothing
can be more perfect. You are near your companion, you can talk
without raising your voice, the worries of life seem left behind, and
are replaced by a sense of dreamy leisure and well being. The
gondolier, if he be a master of his craft, will glide through a
crowded canal, and round sharp angles, as softly and as swiftly as
a serpent. He will skirt corners with hardly an inch to spare,
and never graze them, and it is his pride never to come into collision
with any other boat. Above all, he will row on for hours in
perfect silence, never tired, never impatient, and yet should you
wish to talk, he will probably prove a courteous and intelligent
companion on his own subjects.
And what a beautiful thing the gondola is to watch! This
long, delicately-curved, jet-black creature, lithe and undulating as
a live thing, with its ornaments gleaming like gold, its swan-like
curve of neck and its high beak, or ferro, of polished steel, tossed
up and gliding forward with silent speed, seems a part of the water
as the rower seems part of his boat, and how can we sufficiently
commend the edict which in the sixteenth eentury, to curb the extent
to which the luxury of adornment was being carried, decreed that the
gondola must be black ? No color would convey the same smart and
graceful effect, or be such a happy foil to the brilliant mise-en-sctne.
The whole price of a new gondola is about $250.0x3, of
which the jelze or hood is nearly half. Very often, however, a
young gondolier has inherited the ferro and brass sea-horses and
other ornaments. The actual boat, which may need renewing every
five or six years, costs only $75.00, and the old hull will
sell for $25.00. A good gondolier is devotedly attached to his
boat, and it is pretty to see his pride in it, and the way in which he
spends his spare moments in rubbing and oiling the steel and brass
VOL. XCVIII. 48
754
VENICE [Mar.,
work. The felze, or little cabin, is as cozy as a sedan chair, and
when you have sunk into it, which should always be done back-
wards, the wind may howl and the rain beat, and you only feel
more snug and dry. It is to be feared that the gondoliers care
less than they did for keeping the lamp burning before the little
shrine which hangs at each traghetto. Formerly each man had
a special veneration for his own Madonna, and a very usual practice
in a quarrel was to make disparaging, not to say abusive, remarks
on the Madonna of the adversary's traghetto. The gondoliers
take turns in providing ferryboats, and each traghetto is a guild
or friendly society, which allows the members a certain sum in time
of sickness. Their houses are generally very comfortable, and the
handsome walnut furniture is a sort of fashion among them. They
would not hear of buying any other. " Ce costume " (it is the cus-
tom), they reply if you ask the reason.
Every city has its predominating color, or so one fancies.
That of Rome is yellow; her palaces and villas and churches
glow in golden travertine. The mediaeval houses of Florence are
brown in the shadows of her narrow streets, Verona and Siena
are cities of " the rosy walls and rosy towers," but the prevailing
hue of Venice is silvery white, worn and stained indeed, but still
keeping a delicacy and brilliance which are unequalled. Upon these
ivory palaces and churches, positive color shows sparing but vivid.
Wherever red brick appears it takes on an exquisite rose-pink,
and the rich, deep shadows combine to produce a very mezzotint of
chiaroscuro.
There is hardly an architectural effect which one loves better
than that great flamboyant Church of the Salute, which was built
as a thank offering when the great plague was stayed in 1630.
We love its splendid, ample curves and volutes, its faint, green,
copper domes, its gorgeous green door that Sargent painted, and
the rich cypresses that stand like sentinels on its seaward side.
Day by day the spell deepens. We get 'to know and love the
bridges. The rose-red arch which bestrides the Cannaregio, the
snow-white marble of the Ponte della Paglia, or the Canonica,
carved with fat dolphins or fringed with delicate balustrading,
the grand arch which spans the canal of SS. Giovanni e Paolo and
a dozen others, culminating in the noble Rialto, on whose broad
arches the water casts up an endless shimmer, and between whose
close-packed shops an eager crowd is always passing and haggling.
Here around the Rialto the national existence of Venice first solid-
I9I4-] VENICE 755
ified, and here centre all those memories of the wealth, the splen-
dor, and the pride of the Queen of the Adriatic. Rialto, deep
stream, r'wus altus, was her name till the thirteenth century, when
the name of Venice derived from Venetia first appears.
Venice was not peopled, as is sometimes supposed, solely by
exiles flying from Attila and his Huns. Fishing villages already
rose upon the shoals, saved from the shifting waters by frail
osier palisades, and with fleets of light, shallow boats lying at their
doors. Nor were those who sought "a refuge from the sword in the
paths of the sea," in any sense barbarians who had slowly to ac-
quire the arts of civilized life. Among them were persons of high
birth and great traditions, and they brought with them to the first
crazy settlement on the lagoons some political training, and some
idea of how to reconstruct their shattered social fabric. Hardly
had they settled there than their engineering repelled the attacks
of the sea, the piles were driven in, the canals arranged, the
sidewalks prepared, cisterns excavated, the fondamenta placed,
and salt factories established. Each little isle had its own magis-
trates, till the time came to unite with the central republic. The
first Doge elected in 697 was the choice of all classes, advantageous
treaties were concluded with the East, and the Venetian ressels
went in and out of the ports of the Greek Emperor exempt from
taxes and customs duties.
Venice does not belong to the West either in ideas or aspect,
and to understand her history and her art, we must never forget
her ties with the East. If there is any truth in a tradition con-
fidently upheld by recent historians, the people who fled to the
islands of the Adriatic had their origin in a colony of emigrants
from Asia Minor. They were of the same blood as the merchants
of Tyre and Carthage, an offshoot of that wonderful trading race.
They had commerce in their blood, and innate in them lay the in-
stinctive passion of the East for gorgeousness. Both in their art
and their philosophy of life, we are struck by this deep oriental
tinge. The greatness of Venice was derived from her Asiatic
trade, and her bazaars, heaped with Eastern riches, must have
assumed a deeply oriental aspect. The life of the people was all
addressed to enrich the city by traffic, to defend it from foreign
menace, and to adorn it with all that art could give, and in the
great note of commerce the nobles participated with the people.
But passionate as was the spirit of patriotism, enthusiastic the love
and loyalty of the people, the civic spirit was absent.
75 6 VENICE [Mar.,
The masses were content to live under a despotic rule. As
early as the twelfth century the people saw power pass into the
hands of the aristocracy, and as long as the despotism was a benev-
olent one the event aroused no opposition. Venice was a republic
only in name. The whole aspect of her government is Eastern;
its system of espionage, its secret tribunals, its swift and silent
blows. It had little in common with the mental excitement, the
inward quickening and stirring, the intellectual awakening of the
Renaissance in Florence.
But perhaps we are wandering too far into the domain of
history, and it is time we landed from our gondola. It will be
drawn up to the steps, and its bows held while we alight by a ragged
old man, who expects us to drop a soldo or two into his hat.
His services are quite unnecessary, but C$ costume, and no gondolier
would try to dispense with the help of the ganziero or hooker, as
he is called from the long hook or ganzo by which he holds the boat.
They know well how bitterly poor these old fellows are, and they
make common cause with them, for they are generally old gon-
doliers. Yet for all their miserable looks they are officials. They
may not ply their trade without a license, and their names are
entered in the municipal registers.
Where should we alight first but at the Piazzetta, where so
thick a throng of boats lies along the quay, and where wend our
steps first but to the Piazza to stand before St. Mark's, whose
exterior blazes like a breastplate set with jewels, and the Ducal
Palace all delicate old-rose and silver-white. Between the two
rises the restored Campanile, and all who saw the piazza without it
must have been struck with the knowledge which placed it where it
is. The whole square appeared so squat and monotonous without its
uplifting shaft, and it is needed to divide the palace from the cathe-
dral, both so beautiful in themselves but so incongruous in style.
The Campanile of St. Mark's is the next and tallest of all the
bell towers of Venice. The confraternity of St. Mark's took care
that no parish should build its equal. The bricks of which it was
built, some of which have been engrossed in the new building, were
Roman bricks of a texture and grain resembling marble, and re-
quiring a saw to divide them. They came from the abandoned re-
mains of ancient Roman cities on the mainland, and many of them
bore inscriptions, or the imprint of the feet and claws of animals
or birds which trod upon them when they lay unslaked by the
brick kilns of Aquileia and Tarvisium.
1914.] VENICE
We try to people the Piazza with the doings of by-gone days.
The bull fights, the pageants, the grand fetes, the processions;
gorgeous spectacles on such occasions as the marriage of a Doge or
the feast of a confraternity; the marvelous costumes, the mag-
nificent hangings that draped every window and balcony. No coun-
try in the world had such a splendid jousting ground as the Piazza
of St. Mark's. The Doge sat enthroned in a loggia, surrounded by
nobles and ladies in boxes, the Piazza was adorned with flags, and
the knights, dressed in purple and gold, were mounted on shining
Barbary steeds. " Foreigners were struck dumb at the sight of
such magnificence," writes Petrarch in 1364. The carnival orig-
inated in Venice, and the people gave themselves up to the enjoy-
ment of balls, tourneys, and banquets. It is strange to picture the
freights that were borne from the East to Venice during her cen-
turies of conquest, when every noble and every merchant as he swept
up the Grand Canal brought some treasure to add to her store.
What a welcome the bronze horses must have received when,
brought from Constantinople, they were placed over the great
portico. We cannot forbear a sigh for the gold and crimson ban-
ners which once swayed heavily in Leopardi's richly-adorned sock-
ets, where now the national flag of Italy waves its crude red, white,
and green.
How many great events have taken place between the twin
columns which stand on the piazzetta? The lion of St. Mark's,
which grins at us from one, is said to be partly of Assyrian
origin very, very old it is, at least, and all patched and clamped
together. St. Theodore and his crocodile stand upon a shaft of
red Egyptian granite, and both witnessed the terrible downfall
of Carmagnola, Venice's famous general. The republic's archives
hold no more tragic story, and it never fails to extort a shudder
of pity. Recent discoveries have shown the great soldier of for-
tune, to have been, if not positively a traitor, yet more culpable than
has hitherto been believed, in his neglect of the interests of an
employer who overlooked no shortcomings. Yet the picture is
one that remains with us in all its poignancy ; the triumphant, con-
fident return, the waving to wife and daughter, set in state to see
the loved ones pass; the entry into the Doge's palace; the prison
door opening suddenly "But that is not the way!" "Pardon,
it is the right way " and the splendid soldier disappeared with the
cry, " I am a lost man! " He came forth, a gagged and tortured
figure, to kneel before the headsman between the columns of the
75 8 VENICE [Mar.,
Piazzetta. His wife and daughter were hurried away from their
luminous palace to an obscure little town, to live on a miserable
pittance, paid them on condition that no attempt was made to re-
habilitate the dead. Truly the Council of Ten understood how
to keep order.
It is strange to dream of those old times as we sip our coffee
and eat ices at Florian's or Quadvi's, the largest and most fashion-
able caffts in the Piazza. Quadvi's, which is specially frequented
in the morning when the shadow falls on that side, was the chief
resort of the Austrians in the days when the two nationalities kept
rigidly apart. Probably every Venetian visits his favorite cafft
at least once a day. Men of business arrange meetings there,
loafers take their seat, and, franked by a sciroppo or a birra, gaze at
the stream of life as it flows past them for hours together. Part-
ies of English and American tourists, whole Italian families, of-
ficers in every variety of uniform, are grouped together in the
afternoon, or at evening, when the band plays. Close to you may
sit some old habitue, very poor and threadbare, living in a tiny
garret on a few francs a day, but who blacks his boots and starches
his collar, and throws on his shabby cloak with an air, and finds the
soldo or two which enable him to order his cup of coffee, and to buy
the Giornale, and basking " in piazza " to feel himself still in the
swim.
People sometimes talk as though it were impossible to walk in
Venice. The constant running up and down over the bridges is
rather irksome at first, but, as a matter of fact, it is easy to find
the way about, and surprising to discover how small a distance
lies between the Piazza and the Rialto, where the windings of the
Grand Canal are abandoned. If you use your eyes to the utmost
and look into every courtyard and down every calle, watch the pic-
turesque groups, the color effects, the gay fruit stalls, you will see
something to delight you at every moment. The fondamenta are
charming for a saunter, the sunlight basks on the pleasant little
campi, and green glimpses are to be had of hitherto unsuspected
gardens which lie behind many a palace or casa. And we get to
know the people. Graceful Venetian girls trip across the bridges,
draped in the black silk shawls that are as effective in their way as
the black gondolas. They walk well, and hold themselves with a
pigeon-like stateliness. Broad, ox-eyed mothers of delicious brown
bambini chatter volubly round the fine, carved well-heads in every
court; bronzed gondoliers rowing past, off duty; brown-f rocked
1914.] VENICE 759
Franciscans from the island on the lagoon pass by two and two,
on the lookout for provender. The cry of " acqua " is heard as
the water-carriers pass with their frame of glasses, and their cov-
ered copper pots. The beggars, in tattered but still dignified cloaks,
look like picturesque old ruins. People are poor, they would say, but
it is possible to live for very little on polenta and fruit and a half-
penny cup of coffee.
Two piazzas, or campi, come next in interest to St. Mark's.
In each a statue is set up, typical of the life of the city at two widely
different periods. In the campo of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Bar-
tolomeo Colleoni, the famous captain of Condottiere, the faithful
servant of Venice, rides in full armor, lifted high above the crowd.
Very splendid are Verrocchio's horse and rider. Horse and man
are one, the horse restrained yet full of fire, a perfectly responsive
instrument, yet instinct with pride and power, its willing coopera-
tion speaking in its wise and down-bent eye. All the bony struc-
ture discernible under the fine covering of flesh of muscle, and the
rider, poised backward, balances the onward tread of his horse.
And how saliently the statue embodies the collective traits of these
soldiers of fortune, who achieved in Italy their full development.
Only a contemporary, one who by tradition and observation was
familiar with the original, could have conceived so terribly realistic
a masterpiece. The dare-devil, confident gesture, the sense of direct
physical force, emanating from man and charger, the mingling of
brutality and nobility, the authority which claimed obedience as
much from dread as discipline, the personal ascendency enforced
by prompt hand and strong will; these are qualities which lend
to the chief of bandits its incomparable vigor, and witness to the
days when the power of Venice was felt throughout the world.
Passing along the Marceria, we reach the Campo di San
Bartolomeo, where the comedian Goldoni still seems a part of that
life amid which he moved in Venice in the eighteenth century.
He stands looking down on the people, wearing his court dress
with a jaunty air. His cocked hat is tipped over his powdered
periwig, and he scans the passers-by with a smile of amused interest
on his face, critical, whimsical, as if he saw them in one of his
comedies. He too witnesses to a moment when Venice had parted
with her old nobility of soul, and had become in a superlative
degree the city of pleasure, when the whole population lived for
amusement, laughing and gossiping " in piazza."
THE PASSING OF THE PEQUOT.
BY " OLIVER."
CONFESS to a constant historical interest in the Pe-
quots. I should like to catch their profile in story.
They were we are assured a truculent, warring,
and bloodthirsty clan, which once occupied what
is now southern New England. Their prowess was
such as to enable them to dominate other tribes surrounding them,
and to push their conquests even to the homes of the Iroquois.
Between them and the Abenaki there was constant conflict, with
varying victory. In fact, if I mistake not (although Peol could
never be brought to admit it), they were close akin to these
latter.
The Pequots, however, had the misfortune to be in occupation
of the land over which the Puritans and Pilgrims wished to
spread themselves; and of course they could never by fair means
or foul bring either Puritan or Pilgrim to recognize their rights
as first occupants. Mere pagans could have no just claims in com-
petition with the theocratic rights of the elect. So this great tribe
admittedly the hardiest, bravest and most stalwart of northern
tribes, and most wily and adroit was duly exterminated to the
chant of many a warlike psalm. They were wiped off the face
of their hunting grounds much as underbrush is cleared from
a pioneer farm, or dead leaves from the outlet of a spring.
A few stray bands or families escaped the slaughter on the
Mystic, and found refuge in neighboring tribes. They were thus
amalgamated with the Hurons and Algonquins; but theirs was a
forceful breed, not easily assimilated. Their tribal identity might
be merged into another, but their blood still shows after many
generations. Outside the Micmacs and they are degenerating
physically if you meet to-day an Indian of giant size, you can
safely set him down as of Pequot descent. In aspect and temper
he will still give forth the last echoes of tameless savagery.
All this, or its equivalent, I told Peol frankly and without
reserve; with little expectation, however, of learning from him
much that might redound to the credit of the Pequots. The feuds
between them and the Abenaki, in the ancient times, had been too
bitter and bloody to expect him to tell me a sympathetic story about
1914-] THE PASSING OF THE PEQUOT 761
them. Yet if he could only lift the veil of oblivion enough to let
me glimpse this warlike clan as they were known to their hereditary
enemies, my curiosity would be satisfied. How widely he surprised
me, let this story bear witness.
" How you like to be in the woods alone at night with a
crazy man?" he asked abruptly, and with a brisk irrelevancy that
I felt immediately like resenting.
" I would not like it at all," I replied, concealing my impa-
tience. "Where did you have that experience?" For I knew
that he must have had some such encounter or he would not have
asked the question. It was no unusual thing with him, I remem-
bered, to answer one question by asking another.
" Over here on the Sysladobsis waters," he replied, " a few
summers ago. Come in one evening to my camp from lake side
where I build 'im canoe." We will suffer him to talk a while in
his own quaint English. " Split 'im kindlin' to make fire. Dogs
growl, and I look around. There in the doorway stand 'im biggest
man I ever saw big as you and me together; and wild, eyes wild
like bull moose when he turn to fight. His clothes old, green with
age, and mossy where he had darned the rents with gray moss.
He had no hat on his head, nuthin' but a queer contrivance of
pleated cedar branchery, and his hair matted and fell around and
over his face.
" My dogs growl, growl, and I say sharp to them, Tish-
an-an!' but no use, they still growl and snarl as if at a bear.
He step inside over doorstep, and I see with corner of my eye
that he wore one larrigan and one low moccasin. I never take
my eyes from his; they snapped and glowed like coals on a
windy day. He sit down full in the doorway and glower round on
dogs. I bid him 'Good evenin',' and ask him have a chair; but
he say nuthin' just sit there and snap his eyes, while his long
arms drooped over his knees.
" I kept on splittin' wood, or makin' show of doin' so, and
dogs kept on growlin'. My gun stand to his hand just inside
door where I left 'im when I came in. 'Fraid he pick it up and
shoot. I had my axe, and so was not afraid of him in rough-and-
tumble fight, but afraid of gun. I ask him to have some supper,
for I was hungry myself and in a hurry to eat, but afraid to turn
my back on him. Still he just sit and glower; and dogs mumble
to themselves. All night they growl ; all night I sit by cold stove,
axe in hand ready to brain him; all night he sit in doorway and
watch me. When mornin' come I ask him have some breakfast,
762 THE PASSING OF THE PEQUOT [Mar.,
but he get up instead, and walk off as silent as he come. That
mornin' I lost my new canoe just make 'im."
The recollection of his loss seemed to bring Peol to a standstill
in his narrative, but it was only for a moment while he refilled his
pipe.
" That crazy man," he resumed, shaking his glowing pipe at
me, " was a Pequot. I knew it the moment I set eyes on him ; never
such a big man, unless he were one of the Micmac Ginniches,
and I knew them personally. Had he been a white man I would
have taken chances and got my supper, but could run no risk
with a crazy Pequot like 'im murder too well. Once afterwards
I met him, and he came near killin' me in hand-to-hand fight.
Had it not been for a bear he would have done so. But that
is a story for another time, when you won't have those ravagin',
murderin' Pequots so high on your mind."
Peol stopped and looked quizzically at me. I could perceive
that he was calculating to turn me aside from the subject with
which I started to his own more personal adventure; but I had
my mind fixed on the ancient Pequots, or Wampanoags, of early
New England history, and was not to be deflected. If I did not
take him now that he -was in the humor, I might have to wait
indefinitely for the information I sought. So, at the risk of losing
a better story, I affirmed again my desire to hear of the historic
Pequots. Peol assented as I knew he would.
Still, before dismissing the interruption, it may be courteous
to state that the story of his fight with the Pequot demented
and maniacal as he was was a stirring bit of adventure, which
was made doubly effective by the accidental interference of a bear,
whereby Peol's life was undoubtedly saved. As it is a recent and
personal tale, it very properly cannot find place amongst these
stories of the ancient times.
" I left my camp that same day," the old Indian resumed,
"because, with that wild man in the woods, my life was not safe.
Pequots are bad men to have lying around; but handy men in a
fight. Once in the old times they help us when we need it much;
so that afterwards when a few of them sought shelter among us
from the English we took them in; but we never would allow
them to marry our women; and we came, in the end, to say of
any bad man, 'He's a Pequot.' '
Peol had by this time settled down to his after-dinner smoke,
and the odor of kinnikinic scented the air with tradition. I shall
tell his tale in better English than he was wont to use. All through
I9I4-] THE PASSING OF THE PEQUOT 763
it the figure of the giant Pequot, sitting in the doorway and refusing
to accept hospitality, persisted in thrusting itself forward on my
imagination; and I took him, as the tale progressed, to be a fitting
type of his tribe irreconcilable, unwavering and fiercely aloof in
his racial hostility.
" I can hardly define," Peol began,," what were our relations,
in the ancient times, with the tribes to the south of us. Sometimes
it was peace, but more often it was war ; with the Malicetes only and
the Micmacs was there constant peace, for with them were we
allied from the outset. Moreover, there came a time when the
Abenaki of Chenascot took umbrage at the domineering spirit of
the Pequots, who up to that time had been their allies; and, being
defeated in the war that ensued, they were forced to seek refuge
with us. The Etchemin never had much reason to complain of
these Armouchiquois ; they were actually of our blood and race;
but because they had early drawn upon themselves the resentment
of the Micmacs we, as allies, came to look upon them as enemies
of our league. There was foray and revenge back and forth;
and sometimes our allied tribes brushed the intermediate Armouchi-
quois aside from their warpath when they descended in force upon
the Pequots. We were the fence around the bear trap, as I have
often said; the Abenaki of the Penobscot could hardly be called
more fenceful than the greenery along a runway of rabbits. They
pleased us or displeased us as the spirit moved us; we held no
deadly enmity against them; and sometimes a woman of their tribe
would find her way amongst us as wife to one of our warriors.
" Our attitude towards the Pequots, however, was constantly
hostile. We recognized them from the beginning as forceful and
stout enemies, with whom alliance meant subjugation. The ancient
word speaks often of expeditions by sea down into the land of
the Wampanoags; of surprises and stiff conflicts; of Pequots who,
as our prisoners, ran gallantly the gauntlet, and were feasted and
sent home unharmed ; and of like generous treatment given to our
warriors when they fell prisoners. But towards the Micmacs they
were implacable ; and the Micmacs, in turn, showed them no mercy.
It was indeed a combat of giants when the two tribes met. Usually
the Pequots had other clans allied with them, as the Micmacs
had the Malicetes and ourselves, and in our engagements with them
it came to be tacitly understood that the Pequots should be left
to the Micmacs while we fought the others. They sought each
other out in battle ; challenges to personal combat were of common
occurrence ; and many a worthy fight occurred between great chiefs
764 THE PASSING OF THE PEQUOT [Mar.,
beneath the gaze of the other combatants, who for the moment left
off their individual strife to watch the greater combat. It was
then battle-axe and knife against battle-axe and knife; club perhaps
against club; and, not infrequently, fist against fist, with a wrest-
ling bout thrown in to make the show more interesting. These
were by no means, however, mere exhibitions of dexterity and
adroitness, but fierce and deadly encounters, in which the weaker
antagonist usually was left scalpless on the field. Hatchet and
knife made the last stages of the combat swift release for the weaker
man.
" Then would it sharply behoove the friends of the conqueror
to throw themselves between him and the enemy, whose resent-
ment at the death or defeat of their champion might work him
deadly ill. Experienced warriors, viewing the combat close at hand,
usually could foresee who would be victor, and so took early pre-
cautions to rescue him. Occasions have happened on which the
defeat of a chief in such single combat led immediately to the re-
treat of his tribe. Sometimes the victors, satisfied with the tri-
umph of their champion, did not follow the enemy; but most often
great slaughter ensued.
" I give you these details because I would have you know
that it was not the play and mimic war of children when Mic-
mac met Pequot in battle. I wish you also to be able to under-
stand in advance how easily the minds on both sides lent themselves
to such gage of battle, in order that you may better comprehend
the great fight between our young chief Azoa and his rival, a war-
rior chief of the Pequots. It is one of the famous memories of
our tribe. You will bear in mind also when, as the fight pro-
gresses, you are casting up his chances, that Azoa was the eldest
son of Guesca, and that his father was a Mohawk : the best fight-
ing blood of two warrior tribes flowed within him. His father,
Waghinethe the sorcerer, was a giant of a man, and so was Azoa
in turn. Two noted deeds did this great chief in his time: he
defeated the champion of the Wampanoags in single combat when
he was a young man, and when he was older he led our warriors
down the Mississippi as escort to La Salle. His name lives fresh
in our memory, and yet his son Talistoga was even a greater chief.
" It was during one of those rare intervals of amity between
ourselves and the Abenaki of Chenascot that opportunity for
rivalry was given between Azoa and the Pequot. How it came
about that our young chief was enamored of the daughter of
the war chief of the Armouchiquois, the old people never told
1914.] THE PASSING OF THE PEQUOT 765
me; believing no doubt that such occurrences explain themselves.
He first met her, I believe, when she visited a relative who was
a wife in our tribe. They were both too young at the time to talk
of marriage, even if the girl had been willing; for there is no word
left that she was unduly willing to accept the awkward growing
cub of a young man. Moreover, Azoa had not yet built his war
lodge or gone out in search of adventure. He was as yet too young.
But he carried the girl in his mind, and no doubt she thought at
times of him.
" When then he grew older, and gave promise of being a great
warrior, his mother Guesca bade him think of getting a wife for
himself; it would settle him and make a wise man of him sooner.
He had seen Tamoha, the Abenaki girl, a few times in the interval,
but she had been strangely reticent and coy; and her father ap-
peared not to be pleased with his visits. Still Azoa's purpose was
set on the young girl, and when his mother grew insistent as was
her way he set out with a few chosen friends to visit the encamp-
ment at Chenascot. There he was surprised to find a number of
Pequot chiefs ahead of him, and he soon learned that, amongst other
purposes, they had come to ask the hand of the war chief's daughter
for the son of their principal sachem. This young Pequot was
himself on hand to urge his suit. He was a young man who
measured up to the best physical standards of his tribe; being the
son of a powerful ally, his chances were much better of winning
the girl than were those of the son of a half-hostile neighbor.
No love was lost, of course, between the rivals, nor for that matter
between the Pequots and our visiting warriors. They were pre-
vented from open enmity only through the demands of neighborly
courtesy towards their common host. Once beyond the territory
of Chenascot, there would at once be war between them; for our
people never made a treaty of peace with the Pequots.
" The girl herself appeared to be uncertain of her choice.
She afterwards protested that she was influenced by her father
to be in no hurry in her decision; he would prefer her to take
the Abenaki were not the Pequots such stout friends and unfor-
giving foes. In fact, a girl was not allowed to have much choice
in such matter among the tribes; her husband usually was chosen
for her ; yet since Guesca established the right of a maid to choose
for herself, this custom was dying out among us.
" Now had Azoa been of the same metal as his son Talistoga
was in the years after (a story which I will tell you some other
time), he would have run off with the girl, and braved her rescue;
766 THE PASSING OF THE PEQUOT [Mar.,
but he was rather of the calculating sort; he would rather fight
out his own feuds himself without committing his tribe. He waited,
therefore, with more or less patience the wishes of the girl; he
paid scant attention to the presence of his rival, yet was ready to
throw him into the sea or meet him at single-stick any moment.
The tribal police knew this, and were on the alert to prevent hos-
tilities between the two lovers and their followers.
" Had the Pequot known that his rival was half Iroquois by
birth, he might have been less contemptuous and defiant; but, ac-
customed to his tribal idea of seeking only for worthy foes among
the Micmacs, he was insolent, and overbearing in his relations
with our young chief. Azoa was of a birch-bark temper, like
his mother Guesca, and could not easily brook impertinence. When,
then, at a game of ball, played between the young men, the rivals
met accidentally in a scrimmage, no police on earth could prevent
what followed. The two had come together with much force,
neither seeing the other very well at the time, and the Pequot had
been thrown to the ground. Recognizing his adversary at once,
he gave expression to some disparaging remark about the other's
awkwardness. Azoa, hot under the insult, made at him at once, and
they clinched. Immediately the field was in an uproar, and our
warriors, old and young, ranged themselves in a way to be of
service if needed; but Azoa did not think of needing them.
Already taught some of the finer secrets of wrestling by French-
men, with whom he had consorted from early youth, he allowed his
adversary no time to plan a defence, but with an adroit movement,
which gave him the purchase he wanted, he threw the Pequot over
his shoulder into the air. The latter landed heavily on his head and
left shoulder, and came near breaking his neck. He was so sharply
injured by the fall that his friends were glad to carry him off the
field. The game, of course, came to an end at once. The police
were blamed for the occurrence ; but, as I have said, they could not
have prevented it, so sudden and unlocked for was the accidental
meeting of the young men. As to the Pequot, he was disfigured
for life. That evening the girl smiled on Azoa, and he began to
have hopes. But her father was grave and cold, and chided him for
his temper. Azoa said little in reply, but enough to warn the
older chief to rid himself as soon as possible of his Pequot visitors
for the young man was as fearless and outspoken as his mother.
" Now, in those days, bushment, deception, and every sort
of wile was considered lawful in warfare. It is strange, neverthe-
less, that both of the hostile parties should contemplate practising
1914-] THE PASSING OF THE PEQUOT 767
the identically same wile, one against the other. Things had reached
such a pass that the Abenaki chief was compelled to urge each party
to return to its tribe. He was in a tight place, ana could hardly
have acted otherwise. His own -warriors had taken sides, some
for Azoa and our people, others for the Pequots. There was a
strong current of hostility gathering force, one way or the other,
which if unchecked was likely to work great damage to the Abenaki
themselves. Each party therefore departed, with a day's interval
between. First Azoa and his men, for he was at heart peaceful,
and knew the embarrassment of his host. Then, when twenty-
four hours had passed, the disfigured Pequot and his warriors
slumped out of the encampment on their way homeward. Yet it
was a long way from the purposes of either to continue at once on
their direct journey. Each had resolved to ambush or entrap the
other. So that Azoa, instead of hurrying onward back to the St.
Croix, made a detour around and behind the encampment of the
Abenaki, and placed himself and his few warriors directly across
the path which the Pequots would follow. In fact, to prevent
interference by the Abenaki, he pushed on several miles to the west
and south. The Pequots, making a long bend around the encamp-
ment of their allies, likewise ambushed themselves for the destruc-
tion or capture of their rivals.
" Now it happened that tidings of the active feud between the
hot-headed young chiefs had in the interim reached their fathers,
so that a war party had gone out from both Pequot and our home
encampments for the purpose of succoring each its own warriors.
Thus the detachment from our camps, finding the Pequots in front
of them, attacked and captured the whole band, with a few casual-
ties; while the band sent out to rescue the young Pequot and his
men, in turn fell in with Azoa and made him prisoner. Each de-
tachment then pushed on to the encampment of their neutral hosts,
the Abenaki, and met there to their great astonishment both sides
marching in triumph from opposite points of the compass at prac-
tically the same moment. It was an odd situation, at which even
these confirmed enemies were forced to laugh. The joke of the
affair brought on a good-humored view of the situation, and the
Abenaki chiefs had little difficulty in arranging an exchange of pris-
oners. Thus Azoa and his men were exchanged for the Pequot and
his followers, and both parties returned homeward.
" But the Pequots were going home in great dudgeon, for they
had found the Abenaki chief rather inclined to favor the suit of
their enemy, our young Azoa; the girl Tamoha had at once pro-
;68 THE PASSING OF THE PEQUOT [Mar.,
claimed her choice of our Quoddy chief when she found him a
prisoner; moreover, the Pequots rightly interpreted this intended
marriage as a sign that their former allies were deserting them.
They went away, therefore, grutching and grumbling openly, and
when at some distance from the encampment shot an arrow back
into it as a sign of war. Milinocket the Abenaki at once began
setting his encampment in a state of preparation, for he knew how
ruthless would be the resentment of his late allies; a large body of
women and children, including his daughter Tamoha, were estab-
lished in a safe encampment nearer to us; and himself with a
deputation of his warriors came in to us to complete the pact of
alliance. It was immediately decided to send runners to the Mic-
macs and to the Malicetes, our constant allies, and to make a united
raid down into the country of the Pequots.
" Befell it, therefore, that we raided across New England, at
a short distance from the bay. Although we were not friends of
the snarling English folk who were perched on its rocky edges, we
had had as yet no quarrel with them. Our scouts brought in
amazing stories of this grim people, who went armed to their daily
toil, and whose spectral council-lodges carried heavy guns on their
roofs. We did not stop to satisfy our curiosity, but went swiftly
across to the hunting grounds of our enemies the Pequots. It
might have been better for all concerned if we had stopped to dis-
cover what the drilling and ordering of men in the open place
meant. We might have thought better and turned back. The
English, as we learned later, were going on the same warpath as we
ourselves, they were about to attack the same enemy. They had
found the Pequots hopelessly vicious and hostile, and had secured
the assistance of all the seaboard tribes that cherished a grudge
against them. Possibly if we had known in time that our enemies
would be so beset, we might not have gone down there to harry
them; but there was a sort of understanding that we should
fight it out, and Azoa wanted to meet his rival. Had we known,
however, that our enemies would be set upon by such a powerful
combination, we certainly would have stayed at home. There were
amongst our tribes those alert enough to foresee that the Pequot's
fight for his hunting grounds to-day, might be ours to-morrow.
But, as I said, we knew all this when it was too late.
" In our headlong way, we ran into the rear of the tribes which
were assisting the English, at the moment when they were seeking
to turn the left flank of the Pequots. We went through them with
a rush, and scalped at our will. Taken at a disadvantage, and mis-
1914.] THE PASSING OF THE PEQUOT 769
taking us for a strategic body of the enemy (of whom they stood
in great fear), they fled across the field of battle to their English
allies, hotly pursued by our warriors. The English in turn, who
were conducting their battle in their own way, being thus taken
in the rear by a formidable body of unreliable allies behind whom
our men opened out an interminable line of victorious enemies
were at a great disadvantage, but had sense enough to back out
until they could get a better position.
" It was, indeed, an odd situation, and it became still odder
and more distracting when our warriors, after putting to flight
the Narragansetts and Niantics, and having driven the English
from position, stepped into the gap and attacked the Pequots.
Our ancient enemies were evidently doomed, and we wanted to end
our feuds with them before they disappeared. It was a gallant
fight. The Pequots were as fresh as we were, and as eager for
battle now that they recognized our war cries. Moreover, our
chiefs perceived that quick work was necessary, for there was no
knowing when we should be taken in the rear by the whites and their
allies. It was battle-axe and knife, therefore, and man to man.
We willingly yielded the advantage that firearms necessarily gave
us, being in too great hurry to use them. The battle gradually
edged into an open meadow, and as the terms were fairly even,
there was no need of ambuscade. The only precaution our leaders
took was to station our new allies, the Armouchiquois, so as to
protect our flank and rear from the enemy behind.
"Of the battle and how it raged back and forth from meadow
to bush and back again to the open, I can give you only a general
notion. When our warriors returned to the St. Croix their story
centred in the single combat between our young chief Azoa and
his Pequot enemy. When they met in the clash of battle, after
seeking each other out, there was a truce to further fighting else-
where. Both sides knew of the intense personal feud between
those two warriors, and were eager to see its outcome. Both were
stripped to their loin cloths, and physically both were evenly
matched. Time had added to the hideousness of the Pequot's dis-
figurement; beside him Azoa shone in manly beauty. The echoes
of the battle suddenly ceased like the swishing of boughs in the
calm after a great wind, and the warriors of both sides drew up in
opposing lines. The two combatants had been in deadly conflict
for a short while before the fact was known, so that it was neces-
sary to interrupt their play of arms, and arrange, as it were, the
VOL. xcvm. 49
7/o THE PASSING OF THE PEQUOT [Mar.,
terms and details of the encounter. Our chiefs welcomed the sug-
gestion, which came from the Pequots, that the issue between the
tribes should be determined by this single fight. It was very dis-
concerting to have an enemy in the rear, of whose purposes they
could have no certain knowledge.
" While the chiefs on both sides were arranging the simple pre-
liminaries of the fight, Azoa, ignoring his enemy, was giving a clever
exhibition of his skill in juggling with his knife and tomahawk.
It was done of course for the benefit of his opponent, and was
a pretty bit of sleight of hand. He had learned it from French
officers who were skilled in that sort of thing, and who had shown
him its value in a combat where an opponent was likely to cast his
knife edgewise at him. Both knife and hatchet appeared to be
in the air at the same moment, and yet came duly to hand when
needed. It was evident that the Pequots were struck with this
performance, from the wide-mouthed attention they gave it. There
was much babblement among them, and Azoa had the satisfaction
of perceiving that his rival halted as if unwilling to resume the fight.
" The combatants advanced into the open space between the
lines, while silence and expectancy possessed the onlookers. Each
carried his tomahawk in his hand and his knife in his belt. It was
not customary to appeal to the knife until the axe had been dis-
carded. They circled warily around each other looking for an
opening; twice they jumped in to strike, and twice the blows were
foiled; their axes glanced against each other in the air, and slid
harmlessly backward from the strokes. Then began the circling
again, each eyeing the other sharply, lest he should throw his toma-
hawk at an unguarded moment. This might have gone on for
sometime longer, had not Azoa caught the glint of colors and of
steel in the branches of some distant trees. The English were
directly in their rear, watching the duel. He took his inspiration
from the danger his tribe was in from this enemy in the rear, and
so with a rush he bounded in on his adversary as if to strike him
to the ground. The other raised his arm to ward off the blow,
when Azoa, being left-handed, sent his tomahawk whizzing past
the other's guard. It struck the Pequot fair on the forehead, and
he dropped like a log. Azoa was upon him in a moment, knife in
hand, and the tense crowd expected to see him scalp his enemy.
He bent over him, instead, and with his knife clipped a handful
of hairs from the scalplock. Then standing erect, he cried out so
that all could hear him, 'I will carry these hairs to the girl: she
will understand. Take your son, O chief, I do not want his
1914.] THE PASSING OF THE PEQUOT 771
blood.' Then turning, he made a gesture of his arm in the direc-
tion of the trees, where the English were spying out the fight. 'Red
man should not kill red man/ he cried, 'when the white man rallies
in his rear.' All eyes went at once to the hills behind them, and
Pequot and Abenaki saw their danger. 'Our brothers may not
see their homes again, if we do not help them,' the chief of the
Pequots called across the lines. 'But for the young sachem's sake,
who saved where he could have destroyed, we will help.' And
then both sides sank under cover, the one to the right, the other to
the left, as if the earth had suddenly swallowed them.
" We picked up our Armouchiquois allies in the rear, but were
immediately after confronted by the English troops. We did not
wait to be attacked, but opened fire at once to give notice to our new
allies, and thus the fight was on once more. But it is hard to
corner Indian warriors in . the woods, and we gradually worked
around the flank of the enemy, while the Pequots occupied him in
front. Here we ran into the Narragansetts once more, and again
we trampled over them. Only the Pequots themselves could with-
stand our Micmacs when their blood was up. The Narragansetts
once more fled in disorder, while we, yelling behind them, drove
them again in upon the English. How the day went after that
we did not wait to see. We had come hundreds of miles to fight
our ancient enemies : we wanted as little trouble as we could with
the white men. But a day or two later, when on our retreat, we met
the Mohicans under their sachem Uncas on their way to help the
English, we thanked our manitou that we were well out of the
trap into which our foolhardiness had led us. You know how that
war ended. The Pequots were wiped out as a people, after a battle
the fiercest in the history of red men. Weeks after, when we were
safely in our encampments by the sea, a straggling band of wasted
and dispirited Pequots came to us, and we gave them shelter, yet
always, as I have already told you, with a glance askance at their
character for undying grimness and lawlessness. The young Pe-
quot chief was among them more fearfully disfigured than ever
and he took a morose part in the rejoicings that followed the wed-
ding of Azoa with the Armouchiquois girl.
" The Pequot is ever a Pequot," Peol continued after a pause.
: ' You cannot blame him. No doubt he brought his misfortunes on
himself, for he was hated equally by Dutch and English; but we
found him a gallant enemy, towards whom, in his misfortune, we
could but show friendly commiseration. His race is not extinct."
CHRISTIAN ASCETICISM IN THE FIRST THREE
CENTURIES. 1
BY BERTRAND L. CONWAY, C.S.P.
URING the last fifty years rationalistic scholars have
devised a number of arbitrary theories on the origin
of monasticism. They have all attempted, by a vast
array of pseudo-erudition, to prove that the monastic
life cannot be traced in any way to Jesus Christ
and the Twelve Apostles, but owes its origin to the Buddhistic
monks of India; 2 the recluses of the temples of Serapis; 3 the
Jewish Essenians; 4 the Therapeutse of Lake Mareotis, 5 or the
ascetics of Mithraism. 6
The Abbe Martinez has just published, under the auspices of
the Catholic Institute of Paris, a scholarly treatise in refutation
of these five a priori hypotheses. In a brief introduction 7 he points
out their inconsistency, while in the body of his work 8 he gives us
a most detailed account of the asceticism of the first three cen-
turies, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt its Christian origin.
Chapter I. treats of asceticism in the New Testament and in
the Apostolic Age. Harnack 9 and Dobschiitz 10 both maintain that
" Jesus Himself did not live the life of an ascetic." It is true that
He practised celibacy and poverty, but they were required by reason
of His special mission. There is nothing in His teaching, nor in
that of the Apostles, to justify the extraordinary development of
the ascetic life. Indeed it goes directly counter to the very prin-
ciples of Christianity. This is clearly proved by the fact that the
progress of asceticism and the development of Christianity did not
go hand in hand. The primitive Christian communities were in no
sense communities of ascetics; their success depended on their
*L' Ascet\c\sme Chretien pendant les trois premiers siecles de l'glise. By Abbe
F. Martinez, S.M. Paris : Gabriel Beauchesne. 5 frs.
*Hilgenfeld, Zeitschrift fur wiss. Theol., 1867, p. 163.
'Weingarten, Zeitschrift fur Kirchengeschichte, 1877, pp. 1-35, 545-547.
'Staudlin, Geschichte der Sittenlehre Jesu; Gfrorer, Philo und die Alex.
Theosophie.
Amenilineau, cited in Ladeuze, tude sur le Cenobitisme Pakhomien, p. 169.
Reinach, Orpheus, p. 102; Cumont, Textes et Monuments, vol. i., p. 338 et seq.
'Pages 1-18. 'Pages 19-204.
*Sitzungber. der Kon. preuss Akad. der Wiss., 1891, vol. i., p. n.
"Die Urchristlichen Gemeinden, p. 261.
I9H-] ASCETICISM IN THE FIRST CENTURIES 773
making Christianity a practical matter of everyday life. The early
apologists, instead of appealing to the heroism of the Christian
ascetics in their defence of Christianity, commend rather the spirit
of charity which filled every true Christian heart.
This in brief is the rationalistic thesis, which the Abbe Mar-
tinez refutes by a thorough study of all the passages of the New
Testament which refer in any way to the place of asceticism in the
teaching of our Savior. Our opponents make no distinction what-
ever between the orthodox asceticism of the Catholic Church and the
Gnostic pseudo-asceticism, which was strongly denounced by the
early Fathers on account of its false dogmatic basis and its pagan
excesses. We will not be guilty of such a mistake.
Our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true Man in one divine
personality, was not, we readily admit, a mere ascetic. His divine
mission far surpassed the narrow outlook of the continentes of the
primitive Christian communities. But it is evident from even a
cursory study of the Gospels, that He both preached and practised
the principles of the ascetic life from the beginning to the end of
His earthly ministry.
We know that our Savior prepared for His public ministry by
fasting forty days in the desert among wild beasts. 11 Not only was
He the model of the virgin life, but He was most careful to guard
against the slightest suspicion in the matter of purity. The disciples
were astonished even to find Him talking with a woman. 12 He
practised poverty to such an extent that " He had not where to lay
His head," 13 and He did not even possess the stater for the tribute
money. 14 He often retired apart from the multitude, and spent
whole nights in prayer after days of most fatiguing preaching. 15
Virginity, absolute poverty, and the love of solitude and prayer
these have ever been the characteristic virtues of the true ascetic.
It is true that we find no mention of our Lord's bodily mortifica-
tions, but their lack is made up by His continual and laborious
preaching from city to city, 16 and His patient endurance of hunger,
thirst, and bodily fatigue. We do not wonder, therefore, to find the
early Fathers and ecclesiastical writers calling Jesus Christ " the
Prince of Virgins," 17 alluding to His great poverty, 18 and referring
to the perfect " asceticism of the Lord." 19
It is true that the ascetic teaching of Jesus does not hold the
"Matt. iv. 2 ; Mark i. 13. "John iv. 27. "Matt. viii. 20. "Matt. xvii. 26.
"Matt. xiv. 23; Mark vi. 31, 32; Luke v. 16; ix. 10, 18, 28; xi. i; xxii. 39.
"Luke viii. i. "Methodius, Bishop of Olympia, Convivium, Orat. X., iii.
"Tertullian, De Panitentia, vii. "Clement of Alexandria, Strom., iii., 6.
774 ASCETICISM IN THE FIRST CENTURIES [Mar.,
predominant place in the Gospels that our rationalistic critics seem
to think necessary for our defence of monasticism. But our Lord
did not come to establish a community of monks pledged to the
highest degree of perfection, but to found a Church for all men. 20
Our Lord's moral teaching addressed to all His followers was un-
doubtedly most sublime. Christians are to be perfect as their Heav-
enly Father is perfect; they are all called upon to live a life of self-
denial, sacrifice, renouncement, and suffering. His words are : " I
came not to send peace but the sword He that taketh not up his
cross is not worthy of Me." " He that shall lose his life for My
sake shall find it." "If any man come to Me and hate not his father
and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea.,
and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple." 21 Self-denial is
an essential characteristic of the true follower of Jesus, and in
times of persecution, such as He evidently had in mind in the
above texts, this self-denial was to be heroic even unto death.
But there are other teachings of our Savior which He intended
only for an elite few. They are in no sense commandments for
the multitude, but counsels left to the free choice of those who
were to follow Him more intimately in the way of perfection.
Protestantism, ever cursed with the worldly taint of a human gos-
pel, has always ignored our Lord's teaching on the counsels. That
is one reason among many of its bitter hatred of monasticism and
the religious life. That is why its followers of the critical school
of to-day do their utmost to trace the origin of asceticism to a
pagan philosophy or a pagan religion.
Jesus mentioned the counsel of chastity in the nineteenth
chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel. He restored marriage to its
primitive purity, and prohibited divorce even in the case of adultery.
When in view of this strict teaching, the disciples declared : " It
is not expedient to marry," Jesus took occasion of their remon-
strance to set forth clearly the practice of celibacy " for the kingdom
of heaven." The prohibition of divorce is a commandment for all
Christians; the practice of celibacy is a counsel for the elite few.
" He that can take, let him take it." 22 Some non-Catholic scholars
arbitrarily try to show that these last words of our Lord refer to
the indissolubility of marriage, 23 while others think it strange that
our Lord should recommend celibacy while extolling marriage. 24
"Page 22. "Matt. x. 34-38; Mark viii. 35; Luke ix. 24; xiv. 26.
"Matt. xix. 12. 2n Zahn, Komment. zum N. T. Ev. Matt., p. 389 et seq.
"Allen, A Critical and Exegeticel Commentary of St. Matthew, p. 205.
1914.] ASCETICISM IN THE FIRST CENTURIES 775
The first theory does violence to the context, while the second
sees opposition where in reality none exists. It is unquestionably
true that our Lord's counsel of celibacy marks the beginnings of
asceticism, for virginity is its basic and essential element. Ascet-
icism is possible even when the other practices that generally ac-
company virginity are absent ; but without virginity it does not and
cannot exist.
Jesus counselled poverty even more explicitly. He said : " Do
not possess gold, nor silver, nor money in your purses." " Take
nothing for your journey, neither staff, nor scrip, nor bread, nor
money." " Sell what you possess and give alms." " Everyone
that doth not renounce all that he possesseth cannot be My dis-
ciple." "If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast, and
give to the poor." 25 He did not give a command to the rich
young man, but clearly made an appeal to his generosity. " If
thou wilt be perfect " are His words. 26 Finally, Jesus asked
His chosen ones to renounce their own wills, " to deny themselves
and to take up their cross." 27 Harnack 28 is wrong in declaring
that the Catholic Church teaches two different moral codes, one for
the multitude, and another for the monk who stands for a higher
type of perfection. The difference between them is merely a dif-
ference of degree, or rather of means. Both have the same end
in view, viz., the love of God and love of the neighbor for God's
sake. 29
St. John the Baptist, who stands midway between the Old
Law and the New, is a character well worthy of study from the
viewpoint of asceticism. He is at once a Jewish prophet and a
Christian ascetic. He led a solitary life in the desert of Juda,
practised the most rigorous penance, and insisted upon his disciples
fasting. 30 His ascetic life explains the veneration and love the
people had for him. 31
The example and teaching of Jesus were the inspiration of
His Apostles. Were the Apostles married men or celibates? St.
Peter tells us that the Apostles left all things to follow Jesus, 3 -
but we are hardly justified in deducing much from so indefinite a
statement. We know that St. Peter was married, 33 and that St.
**Matt. x. 9; Luke ix. 3; xii. 33; xiv. 33; Matt. xix. 21.
"Knabenbauer, Comm. in Matt., p. 158. "Matt. xvi. 24.
**Das Wesen des Christ enthitms, p. 51. "Page 26.
"Matt. iii. 4 ; Mark i. 6 ; Lev. xi. 22 ; Matt. ix. 14.
"Matt. xi. 9; Luke vii. 26; John v. 35; Luke iii. 15.
"Mark x. 28. "Mark i. 30.
776 ASCETICISM IN THE FIRST CENTURIES [Mar.,
Paul was not. 34 The witness of the early ecclesiastical writers does
not help us much, for their testimony is rather late, and St. Cle-
ment of Alexandria 35 contradicts Tertullian. 36
Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History describes the austere
asceticism of St. James, the first Bishop of Jerusalem, and mentions
the virgin daughters of the evangelist Philip, " who did prophesy." 38
St. Clement of Alexandria speaks of the deacon Nicholas, who lived
apart from his wife, and whose daughters were virgins. Mayer 39
is right in recognizing the germ of asceticism in the primitive Chris-
tian community of Jerusalem. 40 The communism which they prac-
tised like the monks of the fourth century, was by no means ob-
ligatory, as we learn from St. Peter's words to Ananias, 41 but a
matter of free choice. The Acts say nothing, however, of the
practice of virginity, which later on was to become the very essence
of the ascetical life.
St. Paul's teaching on celibacy is set forth in the seventh
chapter of his first letter to Corinth. Virginity is, absolutely speak-
ing, a good state in itself; it is indeed preferable to marriage,
because it enables the Christian to serve God better, and " to be
holy both in body and in spirit." It is not intended for all, for
" everyone has his proper gift from God, one after this manner
and another after that."
In his letter to the Colossians, the Apostle discusses the as-
ceticism of certain communities of Asia Minor, which was inspired
by either Jewish or Pagan influences. 42 He does not find fault
with their abstaining from meat and drink, as some ignorant con-
troversialists have maintained, but on the contrary recognizes in
their practices " a show of wisdom in their not sparing the body." 43
He does, however, absolutely condemn the human motives of their
ascetic practices as conducing to pride. 44 Some Catholic writers
have tried to make St. Paul a witness for the vow of virginity,
by a forced interpretation of i Tim. x. 12: " Having damnation,
because they have made void their first faith." 45 But the Abbe
Martinez rightly rejects their hypothesis, as well as Achelis' 46 theory
M i Cor. vii. 7. **Strom., iii., 6.
*De Monog., viii. Cf. Leclercq, Diet. d'Archeologie, Celibat.
"II., ch. xxiii., 3, 5, 10; III., ch. xxxix., 9.
"Acts xxi. 9. Duchesne, Hist. Anc. de l'glise, vol. i., p. 135.
"Z?t> Christliche Asceze, p. 6. *Acts ii. 44, 45 ; v. 4.
*Acts. v. 4. Prat, La Theologie de St. Paul, p. 391.
"Col. ii. 13. "Col. ii. 18.
**Bigelmair. Archiv. fur kath. Kirchcnrecht, 1896, p. 85.
"Realencyclopadie, vol. xiii., p. 215.
1914.] ASCETICISM IN THE FIRST CENTURIES 777
of the Subintroductce*" 1 supposedly mentioned in I Cor. vii.
36-38.
St. John in the Apocalypse speaks with the greatest enthusiasm
of the state of virginity. " They sang as it were a new canticle.
These are they ( 144,000) who were not defiled with women :
for they are virgins. These follow the Lamb whithersoever He
goeth. These were purchased from among men, the first fruits to
God and to the Lamb : and in their mouth was found no lie : for
they are without spot before the throne of God." 48 It is probable
that he mentions Sardis as the home of some of these ascetics. 49
No Catholic, of course, would expect to find in the Sacred
Scriptures a complete and detailed account of asceticism or of the
religious life. But the few passages to which we have called the
attention of our readers, are ample enough to prove that the
anchorites and cenobites of the fourth century are to be traced
to the teachings of Jesus and His Apostles.
We have next to consider the testimony of the ecclesiastical
writers of the first three centuries, studying as we do so the pseudo-
asceticism of Gnosticism, Encratism, and Montanism, and the in-
fluence of Neo-Platonism on the orthodox asceticism of Alexandria.
The Apostle St. John was still living when St. Clement of
Rome addressed his words of counsel to the ascetics of the Church
of Corinth. Are not the following words an echo of St. Paul's
propium donumf 50 " Let him who is chaste in body not glory
therein, for he knows that it is Another Who bestows upon him
the gift of continence. 51
St. Ignatius, on his road to Rome to be martyred for the
faith, sends greetings to the virgins of Smyrna. 52 Even at this
early date virginity was recognized as a permanent state, and was
highly honored by the faithful. So much so, indeed, that some of
these ascetics considered themselves superior to the bishop. St.
Ignatius warns them against this spirit of pride, saying, " Ascet-
icism is good; it honors the flesh of the Savior; but the ascetic
is subject to the bishop, who is the head of the community." 53
"The Subintroducta were those virgins who, while desirous of remaining true
to tneir profession, lived with men who had also pledged themselves to the virgin
life. They were united in a spiritual bond. With the one exception of the marital
relation, they lived in the closest possible intimacy. There is very little agreement
among scholars as to their first appearance in history, their aim, or their relations
with the ecclesiastical authorities, (p. 34.)
**Apoc. xiv. 3-5. **Apoc. iii. 4. ""Proper gift, i Cor. vii. 7.
n Epis. ad Cor., xxxviii., 2. "Ad Smyrn., xiii., i.
**Ad Polyc., v., 2; Duchesne, Hist. Anc. de l'glise, vol. i., p. 531.
778 ASCETICISM IN THE FIRST CENTURIES [Mar.,
The Didachc speaks of a special type of ascetics, known as
apostles or prophets. They traveled from city to city of Syria
preaching the Gospel like modern Catholic missionaries, never
staying long in any one place. They practised poverty, never ac-
cepting money for their labors. Indeed those who did accept
money were by the very fact excluded from the rank of prophets.
Even though their celibacy is not expressly mentioned, it may reas-
onably be inferred from their mode of life. Harnack 55 interprets
a rather difficult passage of the Didache to mean, that they were
models of virginity and continence. They were held in such honor
by the people, that the author of the Didache feels called upon
to remind them, as St. Ignatius had done, of the rightful authority
of the bishops and deacons. 57 Some of the bishops of this period
also lived the ascetical life. Polycrates of Ephesus says of
Bishop Melito of Sardis that he was " a eunuch, who lived entirely
in the Holy Spirit." 58
The aim of Hernias in his Shepherd is to preach penance, and
to renew the fervor of those who had grown lax during the
bitter trials of persecution. Although he does not address the
ascetics directly, he cannot avoid alluding to them. He tells us
that his wife was as a sister to him, and that his continence has
gained for him the grace of God. He is totally opposed to all
idea of encratism ; he admits that a widow may marry again without
sin, although he believes widowhood more honorable in the sight
of God. He speaks of the ascetics of Rome as little children,
who have not been "stained by sin ; they do not know what sin is,
for they have always remained pure. He says that they are happy,
inasmuch as their reward is great in the sight of God. 59
There has been a great deal of controversy about the meaning
of a certain passage in the Shepherd, viz., Sim. ix., 10, 6. Funk
and Achelis believe that it refers clearly to the Subintrodiictc?,
while Zahn and Harnack think that they did not come into being
until the third century. Most probably the disputed passage does
not refer to any real occurrence at all. 60
About the middle of the second century the Apologists Justin,
Tatian, Athenagoras, Minucius Felix, and others began to write
to the pagan emperors their eloquent apologies of the Christian
faith. One of their strongest arguments was to contrast the simple
14 A. D. 50-160. K Lehre der zu'dlf Apostel., p. 44 et seq.
"XI-, ii. "XV., 2. "Eusebius, Hist. Eccles., V., xxvi., 5.
"Vis. i., 2-4; ii., 2, 3; Mand. iv., 4; Sim. ix., 29; xi., 29, 31.
"Page 41.
I9I4-] ASCETICISM IN THE FIRST CENTURIES 779
and pure lives of the Christians with the corruption of an immoral
and a debased paganism. If the ascetic life had attained a more
perfect development, they might have insisted more on the heroism
of these superior souls. But the ascetics still lived in the world,
and were in no way distinguishable from the body of the faithful.
However they were far from neglecting so powerful an argument.
They were proud of the number of those who lived the virgin
life, and they defied the pagans to produce anyone comparable to
them in virtue.
St. Justin Martyr, after painting a vivid picture of pagan
immorality, says : " When we marry, we marry to bring forth chil-
dren; when we renounce marriage, we are perfectly continent." 61
In two other passages he speaks of the great number of Christians
who are practising celibacy and poverty. 62 Both Tatian and Athena-
goras insist on the purity of the Christian women of their day, the
latter saying that they were pure body and soul, shunning even
evil thoughts and desires. He also declares with St. Paul, that the
many men and women who remain virgins to extreme old age, do so
for the sole purpose of uniting themselves more intimately with
God. 63 The Gospel origin of asceticism could not be more clearly
put. Minucius Felix at the close of the second century writes:
" Many are possessed of a body spotless by a perpetual virginity,
although they do not boast of it. So far removed is incest from our
hearts, that some regard even the marriage bond with a sense of
shame." 64
It is clear from the few documents that remain to us of this
second century, that asceticism was honored everywhere, both in the
East and in the West; in Syria, in Asia Minor, in Greece, and in
Rome. Wherever Christianity spread, generous souls by the thou-
sands spontaneously followed, not merely the commands of the
Lord, but also his free counsels of virginity and poverty. 65
These virgins did not live apart from their families. They
were regarded as superior to the average Christian, though like
them subject to their legitimate pastors. Their influence for good
was felt not only by the faithful about them, but by the pagan world
outside, which often bore tribute to " their purity, mastery of soul,
and passionate love of virtue." 66 Their asceticism was in no way
n l. Apol., xxix. */. Apol. xiv., 2 ; xv., 6.
"Tatian, Oratio, 33 ; Athenagoras, Legatio, 33. "Oct. xxxix.
"Minucius Felix mentions poverty in Oct. xxxvi.
"Galien, quoted by Harnack, Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christenthums,
9- IS7-
780 ASCETICISM IN THE FIRST CENTURIES [Mar.,
dependent upon false dualistic theories of Gnosticism, but was
prompted by the idea of following more closely in the footsteps
of the Lord Jesus Christ. Among the causes that explain the main-
tenance and development of the ascetic life, the chief are: First,
the expectation of the second coming of the Savior; 67 second, the
constant menance of persecution; 68 and, third, the natural reaction
that meets one extreme by another. The corrupt paganism of the
day needed the corrective of purity, poverty, and self-denial. Every
Christian in a certain sense was more or less an ascetic by his
very profession.
No greater mistake can be made by the student of early Church
history than to confound the orthodox asceticism of the Christian
Church with the exaggerated and erroneous asceticism of Gnosti-
cism, Encratism, and Montanism. 69 Gnosticism taught that matter
was intrinsically evil. This theory logically produced a shameless
licentiousness on the one hand, and a most rigorous asceticism on the
other. The Nicolaites, Simon Magus and his followers, the Va-
lentinians, the Basilidians and the Carpocratians belonged to the
first class, while Saturninus, Cerdon, and Marcion were the leaders
of the second. Marcion, for example, forbade his followers to
marry, and refused to baptize the married unless they separated.
He also prohibited the use of meat and wine even for the Eu-
charist. His excessive austerity attracted thousands of adherents. 70
His practical mind discarded most of the metaphysical subtleties
that appealed only to the elite in Gnosticism, and he modelled his
sect upon the organization of the Christian Church. 71 Still his
influence on the development of orthodox asceticism was absolutely
nil. The Fathers of the Church unanimously condemned the Gnos-
tic teaching, that matter was eternal and essentially evil. All that
God has created is good; there is nothing evil but sin. 72 Marriage
and procreation, instead of being the work of the devil, were sacred.
" Natura veneranda est, non erubescenda. Concubitnm libido, non
condicio foedavit. Excessus, non status, est impudicus, siquidem
benedictus status apud Deum: Crescite et in multitudinem pro-
ficite." 18 Christians also abstain and fast, but their motive is the
love and following of Jesus; meat and drink are not evil in them-
"i Cor. vii. 29-31; Ep. Barn., iv., 3, 9; Did., x., 5, 16; Tert. Ad Uxor., i. 3, 5
De Jejunio, xii. ; De Fuga, xii.
"Batiffol, I'Eglise naissante et le Cath., p. 22. "Pages 54-72.
"St. Justin, Apol., i., 26, 58 ; Eusebius, Hist. Eccles., vi., 1 1 ; Clement of
Alexandria, Strom., iii., 4.
"Tertullian, Adv. Marc., iv., 5. "Clement of Alexandria, Strom., ii., 12.
"Tertullian, De Anima, xxvii.
1914.] ASCETICISM IN THE FIRST CENTURIES 781
selves. It is false to hold that every Christian must be an ascetic.
On the contrary, virginity is a matter of free choice, and not of
universal obligation. 74
Encratism, which existed in the first days of Christianity, 75
endeavored to impose asceticism upon every Christian. At the
outset the encratitai 76 were not out and out heretics; they be-
lieved everything that the Church taught about God and about
Jesus Christ. But they departed from the orthodox teaching by
their obstinate adherence to an ultra rigorous asceticism. They
condemned marriage, drank nothing but water, and would not eat
anything possessed of life. 77 Later on it became identified with
Gnosticism and Montanism. 78 Encratism was especially powerful
in the Eastern Church, where its teachings were spread by means
of religious romances like the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, the
Gospel of the Hebrews, the Acts of Paul, the Acts of John, and the
Martyrdom of Peter. Now and again encratism gained some fol-
lowing among the simple faithful, but it never became the official
teaching of the Church. The Fathers of the first three centuries
are unanimous in asserting the absolute freedom of virginity, and
the other practices of the ascetic life. 80
The rigorous asceticism of Montanism was energetically com-
bated by the Church from the beginning. Apollinaris, Melito,
Alcibiades, and others wrote special treatises against it, while
synods were held all throughout Asia Minor to condemn it. Rome,
which at first hesitated, finally banned it in the name of Popes
Victor and Zephyrinus. 81
Tertullian tells us that ascetics were very numerous at Car-
thage. 82 Men and women vied with one another in the practice of
the virgin life. Many kept their bodies spotless to extreme old
age. 83 Even married folks often renounced their marital rights. 84
The people venerated the virgins, and the clergy probably re-
served for them the first place in the church near the altar. 85 Ter-
tullian praises virginity, but never to the detriment of marriage.
He declares with St. Paul that marriage is good, but that virginity is
T4 Duchesne, Hist. Anc. de I'tglise, vol. i., p. 487.
"i Tim. iv. 1-5. "Hippol. Philos., viii.
"Batiffol, tudes d'Hist. et de Theol.; Leclercq, Diet. d'Arch., col. 2,605.
"Harnack, Dogmengcschichtc, p. 226. "Pages 65-70.
w Cf. Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth, in Eusebius, Hist. Eccles., IV., xxiii., 7, and
the martyrs of Lyons in ibid., V., iii., 2.
M Funk, Kirchenlexicon, viii., col. 1,831.
"De Ress. Carnis., Ixi. "De Vel. Virg., x. ; Apol., ix.
**Ad Uxorem, \'\. w De Vel. Virg., xi. ; xiv.
782 ASCETICISM IN THE FIRST CENTURIES [Mar.,
better. The great merit of virginity lies in its being embraced
freely. 86 It is the highest form of sanctity; a gift of God, to be
guarded without boasting, and in all humility. 87 Its reward is the
kingdom of God. 88
The virgins continued to live in the midst of their families,
although for the first time we begin to hear of various abuses that
arose from their not living the common life. Making due allow-
ance for Tertullian's vehement invectives, we still must admit that
quite a number of the virgins of Carthage were given to vanity
or even immorality. 89 The scandals alluded to were rare indeed,
but they point to the safeguards afforded later on by the common
life.
The fourteenth chapter of the De Velandis Virginibus is said
by some scholars to refer to the Subintrodiictce. But this is a mere
hypothesis incapable of proof. 90
Tertullian says nothing about the practice of poverty. But
his words on that subject may reasonably be referred to the ascetics
of his time. He declares money " the cause of injustice, and the
lord of the world." 91 He holds up the example of poverty given
by the Savior, and calls especial attention to the invitation of Jesus
to the rich young man to sell all he possessed, if he would be
perfect. 92
The ascetics of Carthage practised mortification, chiefly in the
form of abstinence from meat and wine. Their only motive was to
humble themselves in God's sight, and to preserve their chastity by
mortifying their love of eating and drinking. 93
Some Catholic scholars like Wilpert, 94 Schiwietz, 95 Dom
Besse, 96 and Heimbucher 97 maintain that Tertullian not only speaks
of the vow of virginity in his De Velandis Virginibus?* but that he
distinguishes between private and public vows of virginity. But
the Abbe Martinez has no difficulty in refuting such an arbitrary
reading of the text. 99 He declares that there is no passage in
Tertullian which mentions clearly the existence of a public vow;
further, there is no passage that proves even the fact of a private
vow in the strict sense of the word. But there are some texts
which probably refer to a private vow, especially if they are viewed
"Adv. Marc., i. 29. "De Ex. Cast., i. ; De Vel. Virg., xiii.
"Ad Uxorem, vi. "De Vel. Virg., xiv. ""Page 78.
"Adv. Marc., IV., xxiii. "'De Panitentia, vii. ; Adv. Marc., iv., 36.
"De Cult Fcem., ii., 9. "Die Gottgeweihten Jungfrauen, p. 20.
"Das Morgenl. Monchtum, p. 19. M Le Monachisme Africain, p. 37.
"Die Orden und Congregationem der Kat. Kirche, p. 157.
*Chs. iii., xiv., xv. "Pages 82-85.
I9I4-] ASCETICISM IN THE FIRST CENTURIES 783
in connection with the special terms Tertullian uses when speaking
of the virgin state, viz., Nupsisti Christo, illi carncm tuam tra-
didisti; age pro mariti tui disciplina. Si nnptas alien-as velari jubet,
snas utique multo magis. He calls the virgins in other passages
z'irgines sacra; mrgincs sancta; maritata Christo, etc. 100
With St. Cyprian the ascetic life takes on a new phase. We
know from a letter that he wrote to Bishop Pomponius, 101 that
the virgin of his time made a vow of virginity, which was not an
ordinary promise, but a sacred vow that made her a spiritual bride
of Christ. He regarded the violation of this vow as a serious crime
involving excommunication, and he exacted a rigorous penance
before he admitted the guilty one to communion.
Amidst the many cares of a most onerous episcopate, St.
Cyprian always manifested a special affection for the virgins of Car-
thage. 102 He speaks of them continually in his works, and, in fact,
wrote himself the first complete treatise we possess on the ascetic
life. He tells us that they were very numerous, and that every class
of society were represented in their ranks. 103 He styles them " the
chosen portion of the flock of Christ," and ranks them immediately
after the martyrs. That they were worthy of his praise is seen
by their love of martyrdom. 104 Virginity is a free state, embraced
in order to attain perfection, and to acquire the virtues of justice,
religion, faith, humility, patience, and mercy. Its reward is the
kingdom of heaven. 103
There is still no mention of the practice of poverty. The
virgins kept enough money to supply their wants, and those of
noble birth lived according to their state of life, although the bishop
did not praise them for this. 106 However, he contents himself
with giving them some good advice about despising the world and
its pleasures. Above all they are to avoid all luxurious dressing
in silk and purple, the use of gold and precious stones, and any
outward adornment calculated to attract the looks of lascivious
young men. 107 He quotes, like his predecessors, the words of our
Lord to the rich young man of the Gospel. 103
He says little about mortification, save to cite the words of
St. Paul, 109 and to insist upon moderation in eating and drinking,
"'De Oratione, 22 ; De Vc\. Virg., iii., xi., xiii., xvi. ; De Ress. Camis., xli.
n Epis., Ixii. l< *De Habit. Virg., iii.
"Epis. ad Antonianttm, DC Hab. virg., vii.
^Epis., Ixix., Ixxvii. ; De Lapsis., ii.
"De Hab. Virg., xxiii. Ibid., vii.
ltfl lbid., viii., ix., xi., xiii., xvi., etc.
l *Matt. xix. 21. 10 *Gal. v. 24; vi. 14.
;S 4 ASCETICISM IN THE FIRST CENTURIES [Mar.,
in order to obtain a better command over the passions, and to de-
vote oneself more ardently to prayer. 11
Although there is still no evidence of the virgins living the
common life, the constant exhortations of the Bishop of Carthage
to lead a more recollected life, and to shun promiscuous gatherings
at banquets and the public baths, prepared the way for the com-
mon life of a later period. 111 The scandals of the Subintroducta
which are spoken of plainly in the sixty-second letter of St. Cy-
prian, also pointed in that direction.
Outside of the Shepherd of Hermas and the writings of Hip-
polytus, we know hardly anything of the ascetic life in Rome dur-
ing the first three centuries. Hippolytus mentions ascetic prac-
tices and meditation, and condemns the marriage of clerics. 112
He speaks of the ascetics living a life apart from the world, and
meditating only upon the things of heaven. 113
The frescoes of the catacombs give us a good idea of the
ceremonies of a religious profession in the fourth, or perhaps at the
close of the third, century. The bishop presided, while the virgin
pronounced before him the formula of consecration. He then
laid hands upon her, and preached a sermon on the excellence and
dignity of the virgin state. The faithful came in great numbers
to witness what the Fathers called " a spiritual marriage." The
virgin was then clothed with a special tunic or habit, as in the
profession of a nun in a convent to-day. 114
These consecrated virgins spent a great part of the day in
prayer; they practised mortification under the form of fasting;
they studied the Sacred Scriptures; they engaged in man-
ual labor; they observed a rule of silence, and lived apart from
the world. All these practices prove the identity of the asceticism
of Rome in the fourth century with the asceticisrh of other parts
of the Christian world. As early as A. D. 350 the cloister was
already in existence, for at that date St. Marcella founded the
first monastery in Rome.
We know scarcely anything of the progress of Christianity
in Spain during the first three centuries. A couple of letters of St.
Cyprian, and a chance allusion in St. Irenaeus and Tertullian, are
all that we possess. 115 There is one clear reference, however, to
m Epis., vii. "'Page 102.
J "In Proverbia, P. G. x., col. 617; La Theologie de St. Hipp., p. 53.
""In Gen., P. G. x., col. 601.
U4 C/. Fresco of the Catacomb of St. Priscilla, Wilpert, Die Gottgeweihten
Jungfrauen, p. 52 et seq. Adv. Her., i., 10; Adv. Jud., vii.
1914.] ASCETICISM IN THE FIRST CENTURIES 785
the virgins of Spain in the thirteenth canon of the Council of
Elvira. 116 The Council is legislating in regard to those virgins
who had broken their vows, either by marrying, or by falling into
sins of impurity. If they continue in their sins, they are never to
be admitted to communion, even at the hour of death; if they do
penance, and do not relapse, they are to be reconciled on their
deathbed.
Such legislation proves conclusively that asceticism had reached
the same development in Spain as in North Africa. That is not at
all surprising, when we remember the close communion between
the Church in Spain and the Church in Carthage.
Many non-Catholic scholars like Keim, 117 Zockler, 118 and
Harnack 119 assert that Neo-Platonism played a considerable part in
the origin of monasticism. This theory of course is merely a
part of their general thesis concerning the " catholicizing," t. e.,
the Hellenization or paganizing of Christianity. They hold, with
many rationalistic thinkers, that under the influence of Greek phil-
osophy the spiritual liberty of the first two centuries gave way to
the authoritative and bureaucratic spirit of Catholicism. Mon-
signor Batiffol has refuted this theory at length in his work on
Primitive Catholicism. We are concerned with this theory only
in so far as it affects asceticism.
The Abbe Martinez shows clearly that though great teachers
like Clement of Alexandria and Origen made use of the Greek
philosophy of their day the better to reach their age, it by no
means affected their ascetic teaching. 120
Clement of Alexandria declares, with St. Paul, that virginity
is superior to marriage; that it is a grace of God to be gratefully
received; that it should be practised especially by those who wish
to work efficaciously for their brethren. 121 He lays more stress
though upon the dignity and sanctity of the married state, because
the great evil of his time was the low birth rate due to the current
pagan immorality. He seems, indeed, to prefer the Christian
who marries, has children, and then lives the virgin life with his
wife. 122
He declares that riches are in themselves neither good nor evil ;
they are merely an instrument; all depends on how they are used. 128
Extreme poverty is not a good thing, for it often prevents a man
"'Leclercq, L'Espagne Chr&tienne, i., pp. 2, 5.
"'Aus der Urchristentum, p. 215. u *Ascese und Monchtum, p. 144.
""Dogmengeschichte, p. 252. ""Pages 104-169. ^Strom., iii., iv., xii.
lts Strom., iii., i, 16; vii. 12. M Quis Dives Salvetur. xiv.
VOL. xcvin. 50
786 ASCETICISM IN THE FIRST CENTURIES [Mar.,
from considering the higher things of the spirit in his constant
struggle to make a living. One may be without riches, and yet be
guilty of sin, because he is most desirous of them in his heart. True
poverty, therefore, is poverty of spirit; this alone frees a man from
all affection for the things of this world. 124 The truly great soul
always despises riches. 125
He recommends mortification as a means of strengthening
the soul patiently to endure suffering, and to keep the Christian
ever in the path of righteousness. An austere life will safeguard
one from temptations, and prevent grievous falls. 126 He also
insists on the mortification of the senses and abstinence from meat
and wine, that the body might be kept pure from every stain.
He urges the ascetic to pray continually, both in Church, at the
canonical hours, and alone in his room by meditating upon the
eternal truths. The true gnostic is rarely to ask God for temporal
favors ; his heart must be bent entirely on celestial things. There
is no mention in Clement's writings of any public vow of virginity,
and probably no reference even to private vows.
Origen continued and perfected the teaching of Clement of
Alexandria on asceticism. History tells us very little of the life
of Clement, but a great deal about his disciple. Origen was, indeed,
a perfect type of the Christian ascetic. At eighteen years of age
he was already head of the great Christian school of Alexandria.
Realizing the danger of falling away from true fervor because
of the motley body of men and women who crowded to his lectures,
he determined to lead a most austere life. He went to the extreme
of making himself a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven. 127 He
also lived in the most absolute poverty. He sold his valuable library
in exchange for four obols a day, which he considered enough for
his immediate wants. He always walked barefooted, and wore but
one garment. He abstained from wine, fasted frequently, slept but
little, and on the bare ground, and exposed his body relentlessly
to cold. In fact every moment which he did not spend in study
or teaching, he devoted to the practices of austerity. Sickness at
last forced him to discontinue these ascetic practices.
His teaching therefore is simply a commentary upon his own
manner of life. He recognized the lawfulness of marriage, and
insisted on the freedom of virginity. He was rather rigoristic
in his views on these matters, for we find him comparing the
Quis Dives Salvetur, xii. m Pad., ii., 3.
**P<ed., ii., i ; Strom., vii., 7. m Eusebius, Hist. Eccles., vi., 3.
1914.] ASCETICISM IN THE FIRST CENTURIES 787
slavery of the marriage bond with the liberty of the virgin life.
He was even ready to pardon the error of those widows who did
not marry the second time for fear of hell. Those who married
a second time might be saved, but they would not be crowned by
Christ. 128 He speaks of virgins as " flowers that ornament the
Church of Christ," and ranks them immediately after the martyrs.
Virginity is superior to marriage, because it allows one to worship
God without ceasing. 129 He warns the ascetics against vanity,
telling them that chastity is valueless unless accompanied by the
other virtues. In a word purity of body is of no avail without
purity of soul. 130 Jesus Christ is the model of every ascetic, who
must live not for himself, but for Christ Whose footsteps he must
follow, and Whose cross he must bear. This distinguishes him
at once from the philosophers of paganism. By their chastity
the ascetics become like little children, and merit the kingdom of
God. Origen, therefore, preaches asceticism not in the name of his
philosophical principles, but in the name of the Gospel, which is
for him, as for all the early Church writers, the unique source of
the perfect life. 131
It is pretty certain that Origen speaks of the vow of virginity
more than once in his writings. The clearest text of all is. the
following, quoted by Schiwietz in his Asceticism in the First Three
Centuries, p. 1 7 : " Et nos ergo, cum venimus ad Deum et vovemus
ei nos in castitate servire, pronuntiamus labiis nostris et juramus
nos castigare carnem nostram vel male ei facere atque in seruitutem
cam redigere, ut spiritum salvum facere possimus."
The ascetics of his time did not practise absolute poverty.
Monasteries were not yet in existence, so that every Christian
had to provide for his own necessities. Origen insists on the true
ascetic renouncing all superfluities, quoting the words of Christ. 132
He extols on page after page the virtue of poverty, calling it "a
true holocaust upon the altar of the Lord." The goods of eternal
life will compensate for the loss of present possessions. 138
Origen's whole life proves the important place of mortification
in asceticism, although he alludes to it directly in but few passages.
Mortification is really an imitation of the Passion of Christ, and
lu Cont. Cels., xx., 192; in Epis. ad Rom., vi., 12; vii., 295, 395; Horn. xix.
in Jer., xv., 366.
""Horn. iii. in Gen.; Horn. ii. in Numb; Horn, xxiii. in Numb.
""In Epis. ad Rom.; Bornemann, in Invest, man. Origine, p. 28.
1M In Epis. ad Rom.; Horn. xxiv. in Numb.; Horn. vi. in Ezech. ; Cont. Cels.,
xx., 77 ; in Matt, iii., 238.
" 2 Luke xiv. 33. m Hom. ix. in Lev.; in Psal., xii., 171.
7 88 ASCETICISM IN THE FIRST CENTURIES [Mar.,
a means of purification for the soul which consecrates itself entirely
to God. It is a preservative of chastity, and helps the Christian
especially in the study of the Holy Scriptures. He recommends
abstinence, meditation, prayer, vigils, and fasting as various means
of mastering the lower nature. 184
Contemplation in his eyes is the height of perfection. It
separates the ascetic from everything earthly and material, and
makes him think only of God. The true ascetic must live in the
world, but just as much apart from it as if he were living in the
desert. Outside of the demands of apostolic zeal, he should not
engage in worldly affairs. He should imitate the Savior, Who
loved to retire frequently apart from His disciples.
In his commentary on St. Matthew, 135 Origen expresses his
desire that the ascetics live the common life, but there is no proof
that this desire of his was realized in his lifetime. We know from
Eusebius that a few years later, after the persecution of Diocletian,
Peter, Bishop of Alexandria, passed the remainder of his life in
ascetic practices in common with others. 138 Paul of Thebes, An-
thony, and Hilarion were contemporaries or even predecessors of
Bishop Peter of Alexandria.
The Ep'istola ad Virgines is the first document in ecclesiastical
literature that treats ex professo of the ascetic life. It was written
originally in Greek in the first decade of the third century. 137
The critics assign it to a Christian of Egypt, and say that it was
addressed to the ascetics of Syria or Palestine. The writer praises
virginity as " the blessed seed of God, the royal priesthood, the
holy nation, and the people of God." The ascetic must have in
view his own sanctification, and follow Jesus Christ as his model.
He must practise an apostolate both of prayer and of action. He
must not only preach the Gospel from city to city, but visit the
orphans and widows, exorcize the possessed, and care for the sick.
He still lives like other Christians in the cities and villages, but he is
always known as an ascetic; in his journeyings he must stay with
the ascetics of the town. The Subintroducta are mentioned more
than once, and clearly mark the tendency towards community life.
Poverty and mortifications of various sorts are strongly recom-
mended. Certain abuses are mentioned, such as the sins of vanity,
idleness, avarice, and immorality.
"'In Matt, iii., 171; De Prin., xxi., 327; in Matt, iii., 238; Horn. xiii. in Ex.
m IH., 36i. M Hist. Eccles., VII., xxxii., 31.
"'Harnack, Sitzungsberichte, vol. i.
1914-] IN SPIRIT AND IN TRUTH 789
Our last witness is Bishop Methodius of Olympia in Lycia.
His Convivium gives us a picture of asceticism in Asia Minor,
which is strikingly like conditions in Carthage a few years before.
The development of asceticism in Asia Minor and Africa is not
quite so advanced as in Egypt and the Orient.
The Abbe Martinez concludes this detailed account of the
asceticism of the first three centuries by showing how naturally
monasticism arose from asceticism. It is true that both institutions
coexisted for many years, but gradually asceticism disappeared,
being absorbed by monasticism and the Benedictine Order. 188 A
few words on the causes that led to the great development of
monasticism conclude this most interesting and scholarly volume.
1M Duchesne, Hist. Anc. de glise, ii., p. 520.
IN SPIRIT AND IN TRUTH.
BY FRANCIS P. DONNELLY, SJ.
NOT where His stars are spilt as golden dust,
Not in the stately march from hour to hour
Of myriad suns, nor where the dark clouds lower,
Masking the flash, the peal, the storm's swift gust,
Nor on great seas, nor where land's quaking crust
Spurts lava and spouts death in ashy shower,
Not there alone, in His gigantic power,
Do we revere the God in Whom we trust ;
Nay, He is God of fruits and sunlit day,
God of the flowers and clasping hands of earth,
Who moulds the marvels of a mother's heart.
Yet, Love all beauteous, in created clay
Thou couldst not set a semblance of Thy worth,
Only a silhouette of what Thou art.
ETHNOLOGY AND MISSIONARY WORK.
A CONGRESS AT LOU VAIN.
BY C. C. MARTINDALE, S.J.
HE Reverend T. J. Hardy, in a brilliant book, written
from the Anglican standpoint upon The Religious
Instinct, has lately said : " It is extraordinary to
find a great missionary body like the Church of
England apparently so indifferent to the assistance
of science in the understanding of other religions. In 1892 the
late Professor Max Miiller made an urgent appeal for the study
of comparative religion in missionary colleges, and Professor Tylor
(Primitive Culture, i., 24) anticipates a time 'when it will be
thought as unreasonable for a scientific student of theology not to
have a competent acquaintance with the principles of the religions of
the lower races, as for a physiologist to look with the contempt of
fifty years ago on evidence derived from the lower forms of life.'
Where, in the present day, are the fruits of such appeals as these? "
Of course nothing is further from my intention than to make
Professor Tylor's sentiments my own, tels-quels, for a Catholic
would probably differ from that great man in his view of what
was required in a student of theology, and even of what theology
is or should be. Still less, presumably, would the assumptions
underlying Professor Tylor's words be those of a Catholic theo-
logian, for they appear to imply that the relation between spiritual
and biological processes is more than analogical, thereby losing the
proper amount of distinction between the natural and supernatural,
and effacing the role in history, as Catholics perceive it, of revela-
tion.
There is one element, however, in Professor Tylor's ideal, with
which we are unreservedly in sympathy, and that is, that it is utterly
impossible for anyone whose perceptions are, even humanly speak-
ing, at all refined, to look with contempt upon the so-called " lower
forms " of anything. Only the shoddy-minded are contemptuous.
It is not the genuine aristocrat who hustles his inferiors, and shows
off his muscles (as Aristotle puts it) against a weakling. Is it
not of Arthur's knights that Tennyson tells us, that among them
the flower of manhood as they were scorn at any rate was not
permitted? Only in the deformed, crippled or undeveloped, scorn
1914.] ETHNOLOGY AND MISSIONARY WORK 791
\vas tolerated as part of his infirmity. Therefore with human
modesty we will approach our " lower " races and their strange
religious rites and aspirations, knowing ourselves of one poor
clay with them; and with a divine reverence no less, knowing that
they, with ourselves, are sons of one Father, and have a like voca-
tion to which we have no better claim than they. Indeed the
Christian, in view of his own conduct in a world lit up for him by
the great light of Christ, must more than anybody order himself
lowly and reverently to his fellows from twilit pagandom,
Studiously the humbler for that pride,
Professedly the faultier that he knows
God's secret.
There remains, however, Professor Max Miiller's prayer that
missionary colleges should loyally undertake the study of the re-
ligious assets of those races they propose to evangelize, before ac-
tually addressing themselves to them. Here, as everywhere, sym-
pathy is the needful preliminary of success. Sheer destruction is
wanton and wicked. If you are not going to give to a native the
true worship of the true God, do not take from him what frag-
mentary and inadequate stimulus he may have towards an ethic
and worship of whatever kind. Doubtless there are worships which
are cruel and obscene. To eliminate these would seem an act of
civilization and of piety. Yet let us beware. The harvest is not
yet. We, alas, are not the Angels whom alone our Lord, in His
parable, deemed capable of separating the tares from the wheat.
I here preach no programme, nor construct any theory of action.
Only let us be careful and not headlong. From Egypt and
Algeria, from Turkey, Persia, Ceylon, China, and India, I have
received the assurances of careful men oh, not by any manner
of means all of them " paid emissaries of the pagan English gov-
ernment," nor even laymen, but priests and students of long expe-
rience that the convert may be in a hundred ways less satisfactory
than the heathen; the shock which destroyed his innate, historic
belief may well have weakened the whole vitality of his religious
instinct; and in how high a percentage of cases do our large
mixed colleges supply to the native a European culture without any
Catholic coefficient, so that he is left an agnostic at heart,
a hypocrite in action, when indeed he does not flaunt his contempt
for traditional creed and code as part of his educational acquire-
ment and emancipation. I repeat, I make here no suggestions ; few
(I would like to think) are more devoted to the ideal foreign
mission than I am; yet I believe, with conviction, that to tamper
792 ETHNOLOGY AND MISSIONARY WORK [Mar.,
with the human soul, even for good, is always and everywhere
a terrific responsibility.
Whatever be the value of these general considerations, whole-
hearted delight is being felt by everybody, missionary and student
alike, in the steady growth and success of the " Week " at
Louvain, devoted to the study of religious ethnology. It
will be remembered that three years ago a kind of preliminary
conference of forty Catholic savants, under the presidency of
Monsignor A. Leroy, Bishop of Alinda, and Superior General of
the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, was arranged at Louvain,
largely under the impetus given by the Rev. Father Schmidt, S.V.D.,
editor of the international review, Anthropos, and by the Rev.
F. Bouvier, S.J., the Professor of Apologetics at Hastings in Eng-
land. At once a divergent tendency manifested itself, which, how-
ever, ultimately contributed to the extension and further efficient
work of the "Week" of ethnological conferences. Father Bouvier's
idea was perhaps the larger in its scope, for he wished to see
some sort of regular summer school established, in which all ques-
tions relating to Comparative Religion, or shall I say the History of
Religions, should be discussed. Father Schmidt, on the other
hand, thought that more solid and immediately fruitful work could
be done if the subject matter were more frankly circumscribed
within the ethnological area, and if research into the religious,
social, moral, and artistic habits of savages or of races, as they
are called, of " lower " civilization was regarded as the immediate
and paramount concern of these gatherings.
In the end, neither section of research was excluded ; a certain
predominance was assured to the missionary aspect of the "Week,"
which by now was definitely outlined, by the adoption of the name
Semaine d' Ethnologic Religiouse sanctioned (I believe), if not
actually suggested, by very high authority indeed. Anyhow, Rome
now cordially welcomed the new enterprise; His Eminence Car-
dinal Mercier flung over it the sweep of his scarlet robe, and has
been one of its loyalist supporters; Monsignor Ladeuze, Rector
Magnificus of Louvain University, offered to these gatherings, from
the very first, a hospitality thoroughly in keeping with his title.
Later on the " Week " hopes to become migratory, and to settle in
other towns of German or French speech for its scene of operation ;
and why not, we dare to ask, Oxford some day, Liverpool, or
London? Why not the Georgetown University, or some other
Catholic centre of that land which includes in itself so many of the
mission fields whence come so much evidence and such expert
I9I4-] ETHNOLOGY AND MISSIONARY WORK 793
missionaries? But I will at once describe in no minute detail,
but undertaking its general characteristics and its upshot the
" Week " held a few months ago in Belgium.
Nothing, to begin with, was more picturesque than the parti-
colored crowd of clerics who attended the meetings in the gray old
Belgian town. Each wore his religious or his academic costume,
and these were of the most varied description. Running my eye
rapidly down the list of those present at the meeting of 1913, I
recall delegates from the Congo (as is natural) in considerable
numbers; missionaries, too, from Shanghai, the Madura Mis-
sion, Montreal, Warsaw, Madagascar, Bombay, New Pomerania,
the Marshall Islands, Algeria, Batticaloa, Mongolia, while nearly
every European country is represented ; England, alas, having sent
too few members in proportion to her Catholic spirit of enterprise
and her interest in foreign missions.
Delightful, too, it was to see the intentness with which the
courses of lectures were followed papers fluttered, pens scratched,
notes were eagerly taken. All those present had in one way or
another the foundation of theology, and general knowledge neces-
sary to prevent the discourses being mere popular harangues. Per-
sonal experience or personal research, or, best of all, these two in
combination, were the passports readily offered by those who occu-
pied the benches no less than by the speakers. There was, no need,
then, to tune the discourse to unaccustomed ears; to modify this,
omit that; orthodoxy and open-mindedness could alike be relied
upon, and keen interest could be assumed. What moral atmosphere
more delightful could be imagined for a Catholic theologian and
scientific speaker? Indeed, so hot was the enthusiasm that it was
agreed, at least by the Frenchmen present, that more must be done,
at future " Weeks," to mitigate the strenuous observances of these
days. No doubt, even as it is, a merciful disposition of the pro-
gramme allots the last hour of each day's work to a " practical "
conference, in which not theory, statistics, or arguments are offered,
but objective considerations based upon the immediate and first-
hand experience of the lecturer, helped out by all manner of material
exhibits, such as sketches, photographs, clothing, weapons, native
art, idols, and the like. I remember on another occasion seeing
a lecturer so eager to impress the imagination of his audience, that
he spoke for an hour in a heated European room dressed in the
Alaskan winter furs which he used in that terrible climate. Noth-
ing quite so heroic was volunteered by the evening speakers at
Louvain, still their talks were definitely a recreative item, and so
794 ETHNOLOGY AND MISSIONARY WORK [Mar.,
was the visit to the Museum of Tervueren, with which the first
part of the " Week " concluded. This was ample relaxation for
the indefatigable enthusiasm of the Germans, Poles, Austrians,
Hungarians, and Russians. " Give us time for one pipe ! " they
begged, " between the lectures, and then go on all day, if you like,
and all night too." As a matter of fact, five hours daily in the
lecture-room was what was asked of delegates.
In every " Week " a concrete topic, and another more gen-
eral and abstract, are proposed for discussion. In 1915, China and
Japan will be discussed. This year Islam was dealt with almost from
every conceivable point of view. After all what European country
can disinterest itself from the terrific problem of Mohammedanism?
For only ignorance not so much of the theory of Islam, as of
Islam as an active factor in Morocco, Algiers, Tangier, the Tripoli
district, Egypt, and inland towards the Sahara; and again in the
near East, European or Asiatic, in the vast Indian Empire, in the
invaded districts of China, and further still can condemn this
system of ethics, worship, and philosophy as root and branch bad,
and fit to be abolished even if never replaced. The missionaries who
spoke did not think this, and the speaker on the mystic, Al Ghazzati,
Dom Miguel Asin Y Palacios, was far from thinking so either.
The personality and doctrine of the prophet, and his historical
background, were vigorously discussed by Dr. E. Power of Beirut.
Mohammedanism in French Indo China, in northern Africa, in
negro Africa, and again in India (three lectures) was put before
European eyes in a concentrated light rarely, I imagine, so thor-
oughly focussed and of so pure a ray. The Mongolian Lamas,
Buddhism, and some Pomeranian religious rites, were also spoken
of in this part of the " Week," which dealt, as you perceive, with
existing worships; but the point to be driven home is this, that
here we now have in Europe a group of experts such as exists
nowhere among the "savants de cabinets et historiens en pantoufles,"
as M. Th. Van Tichelen wittily put it in a Belgian journal for
these are men of personal experience who balance every grain of
theory with a mighty weight of fact, and to whose vital interest it
is that they should be accurate. These experts focus, as I said, the
rays of light they bring upon one given object, till it stands out in
utterly manifested detail. At the great International Congresses
for the study of the History of Religions, as they have been wit-
nessed by us at Oxford and elsewhere, nothing of this sort hap-
pens; and theorists theorize about a hundred different subjects,
and, as all unprejudiced observers confess, as they leave the result
1914.] ETHNOLOGY AND MISSIONARY WORK 795
is Babel. Still more confusing in these non-Catholic congresses,
than their lack of variety of topic, was their complete lack of
method.
What is so deplorable, in this matter of the study of religions,
is that practically each individual student starts with first principles
of his own, often but half-guessed even by himself, unclarified,
uncodified, and sometimes intrinsically contradictory. Everybody
must have first principles, of course, and nobody objects to a theo-
rist starting from whatever first principles he may choose, provided
always he is quite clear about them himself, and makes them quite
clear to his listeners. In one or two cases, a man like M. Salomon
Reinach is compelled by his lucid and logical soul to make his first
principles perfectly plain to the ordinary listener, and sometimes,
as in his case, that suffices, almost of itself, to discredit them.
Thus when he tells students that they are " bound " to fill up gaps
in the evidence for what concerns one race or age by evidence trans-
ported from another race or age assumed to be at a similar plane
in an evolutionary scale, the student protests, and says he is bound
to nothing of the sort, and that at least half a dozen pure assump-
tions are being thrust upon him as ascertained facts, which carry
with their certainty an obligation. M. Foucart, M. Toutain, and
others manfully resisted this injunction of M. Reinach's, and started,
themselves, for quite different and much sounder principles. The
point is, that while all hypotheses are permissible as such, they be-
come noxious directly their true character is forgotten, and they
are held to be the expression of a law which must control the facts.
It is when that happens that we see facts twisted, supplemented,
eliminated, and invented to suit the tyranny of the hypothesis.
Now this question of method, of which it may be said that
the non-Catholic congresses scarcely dared to approach, and
that when they did it was relegated to an insignificant place and
poorly treated, was in the forefront of the Louvain conferences,
where after all the speakers had been trained in the logical ordering
of their thoughts by the priceless years spent upon the study of
scholastic philosophy. It was, need I say, Father Schmidt who
most authoritatively tackled this problem, and opened the first
session of the " Week," unless I am mistaken, with a magnificent
conspectus of the various methods which had hitherto been adopted
in the formation of ethnological science. He followed this review
by an exposition of his own method, of which this is not the place
to speak in detail. It is generally known, I may briefly recall,
as the cyclo system, and is, roughly speaking, non-evolutionary in
796 ETHNOLOGY AND MISSIONARY WORK [Mar.,
the rigid and academic style of its predecessors. Little known in
England, it is gaining wide fame on the Continent, and museums are
being arranged in accordance with its interpretation of the evidence.
Father Hestermann followed up his chief's discourse with a further
application of the system in a circumscribed area. I would em-
phasize these contributions to methodology, as displaying, to all who
will observe it, the fact that the formation of hypothesis is not
forbidden to Catholics.
The application of this hypothesis to the observed facts, or
rather the observation that it spontaneously emerges from groups
of given facts, was carried further by Father Schmidt, who spoke
with authority on Astral Mythology in general, and on that of the
Australians in particular, while closely connected with this were
the more directly objective lectures upon Mexican astral mythology
and calendar, and one, by the Abbot of Farnborough, Dom Cabrol,
on the influence of paganism at Rome, from the fourth to the
seventh centuries, on the Christian calendar.
Complementary to this was the study of opposing systems.
Dr. Frazer and Professor Burkheim were here severely handled.
Father Bouvier, one of the co-founders of the " Week," wrote an
extraordinary learned paper on Totemism, which as a master-key
for the unlocking of every lock, is being found yearly less service-
able. Animism, magic, and fetichism were in turn examined.
I hope I am not rash in saying that on this austere concentra-
tion upon methodology, the Catholic " Week " is giving an object
lesson to its forerunners and rivals of no slight value. We leave
the perusal of its records, convinced that at last we may be destined
to get somewhere. We are learning how to walk, and we see, at any
rate, that a number of roads which once beckoned to us, won't do.
We are the more likely, pro tanto, some day to achieve our goal.
Nobody nowadays of any serious importance treats these
studies as, if not intrinsically unorthodox, at least savoring of heter-
odoxy. There was a time when they were in bad odor, partly
owing to a few unlucky adventures ; partly because the experts of
the time were non-Catholics ; chiefly because the critics of " com-
parative religion" (to use that hideous and inexpressive label)
held omne ignotum pro malefico. Father H. Finaro, whose work in
two great French dictionaries now appearing is well known, traced
with a sure touch the history of the Church's attitude towards the
study of religions from antiquity to the nineteenth century ; the psy-
chological approach to this complex topic was admirably dealt with
by a Dominican, Father de Munnynck, and by M. de Grandmaison,
IQI4-] ETHNOLOGY AND MISSIONARY WORK 797
editor of the tudes. The relations of religion to ethics and
sociology, and to mysticism were also evaluated, and the part to be
permitted to sheer phonetics the objective study of religions was
also discussed.
That we have not, as a body, been long ago awake to the im-
portance of this enterprise, is profoundly regrettable. In Belgium
it is satisfactory to learn that "as to the thinking public, we may rest
assured that the 'Week' will concentrate its attention on problems
peculiar to the history of religions. Sometime ago, one of the
pioneers of this science in our country, M. Jean Capart, went to
work in this very place to shake the general public out of its torpor.
He is convinced that this apathy is now definitely vanquished, and
that in the future it will be precisely and preeminently the Catholic
public which will interest itself in this line of research."
Undoubtedly the famous Egyptologist of Liege is correct.
For of course it is to his Catholic public he refers when he speaks
of apathy. Elsewhere interest had long and often disastrously been
active. To-day we are as keen as anybody. He speaks for Bel-
gium; but Father Schmidt comes from Austria; France shared
nobly in the initiation of the work; Holland was splendidly repre-
sented. In England the phenomenal sale of so modest a publication
as the five Catholic Truth Society volumes on the History of Re-
ligions, proves how keen an interest is taken by those who, not long
since, were considered impermeable by ideas in this most actual of
subjects. We may, therefore, confidently hope from this great
enterprise, not only learned monographs, special articles, and even
magisterial volumes, not only a new fellowship and unanimity
among experts, and a more general circulation of knowledge,
but a stronger and richer apologetic, and a popular apologetic too,
simple in style, without fanfaronade, flimsy talk, rickety argu-
ments or personal abuse. Finally, and above all, a fuller apprecia-
tion that our Divine Lord is, as the "Week's" motto recalls, " The
Light of the World;" and that His Heart, which Its badge por-
trays, yearns in love for the scattered millions of our race who
as yet have no explicit knowledge of His Name. From the East
and from the West, from the North and from the South, we may
see them trooping, destined to sit down, when once they under-
stand our invitation, at the marriage supper. And from Louvain
we not only learn the better how to speak to them, but to long the
more ardently to do so.
THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE.
BY KATHARINE TYNAN.
CHAPTER XIX.
A NEW ACQUAINTANCE.
'D be inclined myself," said Algy Rosse, " to catch an
Earl of Turloughmore and shut him up and make him
die in his bed. That would put an end to the curse."
" So it would," said Meg, laughing. She found
that Algy Rosse often made her laugh, took her out of
herself into a certain impersonal pleasure and amuse-
ment. He was so neat, so clean, so shining ; everything that belonged
to him was so fresh and dainty.
They had modest picnics and little outings of one sort or another,
but kept exclusively to themselves now that Miss Trant had come.
Sometimes Lady Turloughmore joined the party; sometimes she let the
young people go off together. She was preoccupied with old Julia,
who had taken a chill and set up bad bronchitis. She was always at the
old woman's beck and call, as though, said Kate, bitterly, there were
not enough servants to wait on the old bag of bones, who never had
a word of thanks for anybody, and was always ramblin' on about what
girls were like when she was young, and the dirty, idle, careless ways
they had contracted now that she was old. Kate should know how
aggravating Julia was, since she had the attendance on the sick room,
and was assiduous in her care of the patient for all her grumbling.
Miss Trant's beauty had been something of a shock to poor Meg
at first sight. She was so tall ; her eyes were so beautiful ; her
voice was music itself; she had such an exquisite caressing way of
looking at those she liked. She was beautifully although quietly
dressed; above all she was simple. Her maid behaved as a much
more important person, and with her English accent and her airs and
graces picked up in Paris, to say nothing of a Parisian elegance in
her garments, she fluttered the hearts of the men servants; setting
the maids to indignant sniffs and wonderings as to what the world
was coming to at all and the foolishness of men, and what they
could see in that " gazabo " to be following her about.
Miss Trant increased the brightness Algy had brought with him.
She laughed at the golden youth, alternately snubbing and petting
him. Algy declared that he could not fall in love with her the dec-
1914.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 799
laration was private, for Meg's ear. With such beauty one always
found coldness.
But for loving, why you would not, Sweet,
Though one paid you,
Flayed you, brayed you
In a mortar, for you could not, Sweet,
he quoted at the top of his happy young voice, going on to declare
that if any girl loved him he simply could not resist her; that he was
made like that; and looking at Meg with melting blue eyes which
implored her to try the experiment.
At the first sight of Miss Trant, Meg felt that her dreams were
at an end. What man who had loved such a goddess could decline
on Meg Hildebrand? She adored beauty, and she found Miss Trant
dreadfully complete and satisfying. There was not a jarring note in
her, from her golden head to her delicate feet. One could hardly
have said if she looked more beautiful in simplicity or splendor, in
rustling silks or the linens and muslins which Meg suspected cost as
much as the silks, so perfect was their simplicity.
There was a strong west wind blowing outside, and they were
going on one of their expeditions. She put on her hat, tying it
down with a little scarf of old lace which had belonged to her mother.
She hardly cared that the lace became her, saying to herself that
so she would wear it when the wrinkles came ; that it would soften the
leanness of her neck and the shadows of her cheeks, dimming the lines
about her eyes. It was part of her pleasure in pressing her breast
upon a thorn that made her run on to meet her age. She would not
care how soon age came, if only luck came to the Turloughmores ;
if she could think of those who had been good to her as happy without
her; above all if the happiness might come about through anything
of her doing. As though that were likely; as though anything she
could do would lift the doom from the family. She began to see now
why it was that Lord Erris was resigned to slipping out of life without
handing on the burden of Biddy Pendergast's curse, allowing his mantle
to fall on Algy Rosse's debonair shoulders. Algy had expressed his
own personal contempt for the cause, with a good common sense be-
hind the flippancy which prevented its jarring.
Fastening the lace about her head Meg somehow let fall an old tur-
quoise ring of two hearts joined, which had belonged to her mother. It
rolled out of sight beneath the bed. Down went Meg on her hands and
knees searching for it. She could find it nowhere. It must have rolled
under the carpet somewhere. While she felt about near the wall, she
was startled by a sound like a cough close at hand. She listened and it
8oo THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Mar.,
was not repeated. It must have been fancy, she said to herself, as
she emerged from under the bed to the empty room. Or a dog perhaps
had made a sound outside the door which she had mistaken for a cough.
She put the matter out of her mind, and hurried to join the others
who were waiting for her downstairs. As she opened her door some-
thing thumped against it. It was Prince who had been waiting pa-
tiently for her, and was demonstrating his pleasure at her coming
at last.
They were to have a picnic tea on Dooras Mountain, in woods
that enclosed a gable of an old monastery of St. Benedict. Lady Tur-
loughmore was to have made one of the party, but she cried off at the
last moment, and the three young people started, Meg driving the fat
little pony, Pasha, in the old-fashioned basket-phaeton which carried
the tea equipage, and leaving the others to follow. She had taken
to accentuating her dependent position, somewhat to Lady Turlough-
more's grief and perplexity.
They set out for Dooras Mountain and as the road was steep,
where it began to climb Meg descended, and led the pony by the bridle.
The other two walked with her for a time. Soon they got ahead. By
the time she had lost a few minutes getting a stone out of Pasha's
shoe, an operation during which they had not discovered that she was
not following, they had turned a corner, round a clump of bushes,
and were lost to sight. They were wrangling if the word were not
too harsh a one to describe anything such gracious creatures could do :
disagreeing, perhaps on a question of poetry. Algy Rosse had been
more than commonly flippant, and Miss Trant had been indignant;
their divergence seemed to engage them as much as other people's
love-making, for they never looked back to discover Meg's absence.
She felt a little forlorn, and was sharp with herself. The Turlough-
mores were spoiling her. She reminded herself that other employers
would be very different. Must she fancy slights because she re-
ceived none?
There was a certain glade where the blackberries grew thick in
autumn, where there was already lavish promise of the fruit. It
lay warm and scented on the hillside, delicious singing streamlets mak-
ing a wet sweetness in the air of the hot day. Midway of the glade
was a little well cool and clear, hooded with a stone arch, overhung
by a fine chestnut tree. It was the spot on which they were to picnic.
Arrived on the spot she found no trace of the other two. They had
wandered away, too engrossed in their disagreement to notice that they
were on the wrong track. She unharnessed Pasha and set him free
to browse on the grass; then set out her tea equipage. She made
her fire of sticks and put the kettle to boil, expecting momentarily that
the other two would arrive. Once or twice she thought she heard
1914-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 801
their voices ; but though she hallooed no answer came. There was no
sign of life beyond the grazing sheep and cattle on the sun-warmed
hillside, and the wild life of birds and rabbits and such creatures as
hardly disturbed the solitude. It was warm in the sun. She was
glad they had not made the trysting-place where the abbey gable
flung a dark shadow.
From where she sat, dreaming, with her knees almost up to her
chin, her hands clasping them, in the attitude of him in Rossetti's
poem who recognized that the wood-spurge had a cup of three, she
could see the chimneys of Carrick through a break in the woods. Cold
and smokeless .they looked in the afternoon sunshine, while Castle
Eagle further away was hardly visible for the silver haze which came
up from the sea. She waited to make the tea till the others should
arrive. The shadows grew long on the hillside while she waited;
time passed, and of a sudden an eerie feeling began to creep over her
the place was so very lonely. She wondered what on earth had become
of them. They must have missed her somehow. Perhaps they had
gone home without her. How had they missed her? The wood was
not so very extensive that they could have lost her easily. She began
to feel vexed and hurt because they had not cared to discover her.
They had forgotten. Her lip quivered at the slight, and it was really
very lonely.
It was almost a relief when a shock-headed, wild-looking urchin
appeared in the glade, and began calling his cattle. Discovering her
he forgot the cattle, and stood staring at her shyly from under his mane
of hair, his thumb stuck childishly in his mouth. She was quite glad
to see him or anything human. Forgetting that she might be leading
him from the path of duty, she called him to her, and asked if he would
like some tea. He nodded his head, never withdrawing his thumb
from his mouth or his eyes from her face. Perhaps he was a fairy,
she said to herself, mocking her fears. The kettle had boiled itself
almost empty. It was half-past five o'clock, and there was not a sign
of the truants. She began to wonder what she ought to do. How
had they missed her? They would hardly come now. She would have
to go home without them, else Lady Turloughmore would be alarmed.
Perhaps they would be at home before her. She remembered now
to have heard that the mountain woods were puzzling to those who did
not know them well. Pooka-haunted, someone had said; and the
pooka led the unwary queer dances sometimes over Dooras Mountain.
She made the tea, and poured out a cup for herself and one for
the boy ; then refilled the kettle and set it again to boil in case the others
should come after all. She took out her stores of tea cakes and bread
and honey and jam and sandwiches, making the boy's eyes open wide,
with a famished delight. She cut him a great slice of bread and
VOL. xcvm. 51
802 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Mar.,
heaped it high with honey. He almost snatched it from her, though
he made a curtsey as he took it. He ate quickly enough, yet with a
certain greediness, giving all his attention to it like the browsing
cattle he was neglecting. He drank his tea in great gulps, and accepted
the offer of a second cup with sparkling eyes, eating and drinking with
such ecstasy of enjoyment that Meg could not but enjoy seeing him
feast. She was glad she had brought abundance, making allowance for
healthy appetites in the open air. She noticed pitifully that he looked
half-fed. The face under its fell of hair was pinched: the little
body in its rags seemed like that of a small animal within a heavy coat.
She had a feeling that he was so light that she could lift him like
a feather-weight. Yet the thinness was not the result of natural ill-
health, else he would hardly have eaten so greedily. She had to check
him at last, fearing he would over-eat himself. She wrapped the
remnants of the feast in a paper and gave it to him; she was pretty
sure the lost ones would not now come in time for their tea. She had
better be going home.
" Keep it till you are hungry again," she said handing him the
packet.
The boy had not yet spoken a word. Now he jerked his finger
downwards, pointing down the hill.
"She'll take it from me," he said.
"Who is she?"
" Biddy Mulcahy. I never had enough to ate since I come to
her from the poorhouse. She has all she can be doin' to feed her own."
A nurse-child, and in a poor cabin overflowing with children, as
often happens, through somebody's ignorance or neglect.
" I'd better be goin' home now wid Mr. Kelly's cows," he said.
" I've sixpence a week for drivin' them up the mountain an' home again.
He's a terrible cross man. He'll hit me for delayin' ; but Mrs. Kelly,
when his back is turned, gives me a bit o' bread wid sugar on it."
"Oh, I mustn't keep you," said Meg. "I think I'd better be
going myself."
She stood up.
" Good-bye," she said : " I don't know your name ; but if you'll
come to see me sometimes to that house down there," she indicated
Castle Eagle in the haze, " I shall be glad. Ask for Miss Hildebrand.
Can you remember that name? Miss Hildebrand. I'll see you have
a good meal and something to take away with you. Lady Turlough-
more is very kind. So good-bye, for the present."
" Johnny Flynn's my name," said the urchin, suddenly talkative.
" Good-bye, Johnny Flynn. Don't forget to ask for Miss Hilde-
brand. I wish I could carry you down the mountain; but you must
drive the cattle."
I9H-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 803
" They'll go home rale aisy before me. If I was to help you ketch
the pony it wouldn't take me much longer."
From somewhere, down in the plain, there rang out the Angelus
bell. Six o'clock. She must be home by seven. And Pasha occa-
sionally showed a disinclination to be caught.
" Very well, Johnny Flynn," she said. " You shall help me to
catch and harness the pony, and we will go down the mountain together.
Perhaps^! could speak for you to Mr. Kelly so that he wouldn't be
angry."
" He'll be mad enough when he sees me comin', for he'll think
I've strayed the cows on him. But I don't mind him hittin' me. I
don't like goin' through the wood whin the evenin' is fallin'. It isn't
that I'd be mindin' the ould monks. I'm afeard o' fairies. The moun-
tain is full o' fairies, so it is."
Pasha was caught and harnessed with Johnny Flynn's help.
They started off down the mountain side at a leisurely pace, the cows
going in front. Before them the wood hid the wide plain, which lay
covered with a haze of heat.
When they had left the wood behind and were descending between
the fields of corn, Johnny Flynn pointed towards Carrick, over which
a long flight of rooks was going in a black line.
" I think th' ould lady's dead," he said. " I brought her a hatchin'
o' duck-eggs she wanted on Monday, and not a sign o' life was there
in the place. I wint agin yesterday, an' the ould hins was scratchin'
about for what they could pick up betune the stones o' the yard. I
said to meself then she must be dead. I told Biddy Mulcahy an' she
hit me a welt, tellin' me not to be troublin' me foolish head over other
people's business."
CHAPTER XX.
THE POISONED HOUSE.
Meg heard Johnny Flynn with a horrified amazement. Monday!
It was now Friday. They had not been thinking of Miss Roche.
Lady Turloughmore had been engrossed with Julia's illness. She had
been helping to entertain the visitors, taking all manner of small duties
and cares off Lady Turloughmore's shoulders. While they forgot her,
the poor little old spinster, who somehow, despite her oddity, made
a warm place for herself in her friends' hearts, might have been dying
in loneliness. Horrible! Terrors rushed over Meg's mind in a flood.
She remembered that Miss Roche lived utterly alone, not even a dog
to keep her company since Ranger's death. Supposing she had been
taken ill suddenly? Meg's imagination ran away with her. She
pictured the helpless old woman lying unable to move hand or foot,
804 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Mar.,
dying of hunger and thirst, while her friends occupied themselves after
their fashions. It was too terrible.
" There's Biddy's cabin up the boreen," said Johnny Flynn, indi-
cating a boulder-like erection at the top of which seemed a heap of
straw. "You can be lettin' me down now! If ye wait long enough
ye'll hear me bawlin' whin Biddy lays the stick on me for not getting
the cows home earlier."
" Tell her she is not to beat you," said Meg ; " tell her I am
coming to see her to-morrow to explain how I kept you. And listen.
I want you to do something for me after you've driven home the cows."
" I'd do anything for you," said Johnny fervently. "Aren't you
like an angel in heaven to me? I'm stronger nor I look, if it's any-
thing big ye want me to do."
" I want you, as soon as you've driven the cows home, to run
to Castle Eagle as fast as you can and leave a message for Lady Tur-
loughmore that I've gone to Carrick, that if I don't come back it means
that Miss Roche is very ill; that the necessary things and a doctor
are to be sent. You'll remember all that ? "
She was wishing that Lord Erris was there. She felt he would
have known what to do. Johnny repeated the message, his eyes blink-
ing up at her where he stood by the phaeton.
" I'll get off as quick as I can," he said. " Maybe I'll be able to
do it without Biddy ketchin' me at all. I'll have it worse later on,
but I don't mind it at all, at all."
She drove off at as fast a pace as Pasha could compass, and a
much faster one than he was accustomed to. However he shook his
little head, and with a memory of his youth trotted away briskly.
The road was all down-hill, and it was not very long before they
arrived at the gates of Carrick. Meg found the gate half open;
and numerous animals which she was sure did not belong to Miss
Roche wandering about inside. Tinkers' (i. e., gypsies) donkeys and
goats and cattle. She knew that Miss Roche waged war on such:
and that there was hardly a Petty Sessions held at Lahort at which she
had not the tinkers "summonsed." The open gate, the wandering rag-
ged beasts, struck her heart with a forlorn sense of calamity. She left
Pasha to stand, fastening up his reins, and trusting him not to wander.
You could leave Pasha by the roadside any day of the week, and
feel sure that he wouldn't get into any mischief. As she looked back
before turning the wall of the house, she saw him amicably rubbing
noses with the " commonality " pony.
She was not minded to stand at the hall door and ring. She felt
it would be useless. She must effect an entrance some other way
if the kitchen door was not open. As she made her way round to
the back of the house, she noticed that the hens were wandering
I9I4-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 805
about the shrubberies, picking up a living for themselves. The strange
silence and desolation of it all the walled garden which she had taken
on her first coming for a graveyard, oppressed her with a sense of
gloom. She found herself wishing for the society of Prince, and
was glad of the intrusion of the tinkers' animals, because it meant
the tinkers themselves following at some time or another.
The kitchen door was closed against her; but, after a search,
she found a window which had lost its hasp, and entered by that.
Along the dark and echoing passages, up the stairs, she went, through
the hall, where the sun, now near its setting, made a red blotch on
the wall, falling on the stuccoed classical head of a flying love, and
suffusing it as though with blood. All the time she was aware of a
strange, bitter, terrible smell in the house, indescribably evil. Above
her stretched the hollow vastness of the house, with its interminable
corridors and wings, all empty, all silent, not a trace of human life
anywhere, but a strange oppressive heaviness over all.
She went from room to room, oppressed and stifling, finding only
a mouldy and shuttered darkness, the gaunt shapes of furniture like
ghosts looking out of the gloom. But at last she opened a door, and
had the sensation, though the room was as dark and mouldy-smelling
as the others, that there was someone in the room ; someone, something,
in the bed like a catafalque which took up the centre of the floor.
She had to make her way to one of the shuttered windows, and open
it before she could see what else the room contained. The bars
fell with a clang: the shutters came back: the evening light poured
into the room. She knew without thinking of it that the room
was full of old finery of all sorts, so that it resembled an old clothes
shop. Open wardrobes revealed shelves and pegs crowded to their
utmost capacity. The door was so hung with garments that its purpose
was entirely concealed. Every chair, every table in the room and it
was crammed with furniture were piled and hung with wearing ap-
parel. Not exclusively feminine, for a pile of men's beaver hats,
dating from the thirties, heaped an armchair in one corner.
She noticed these things automatically. She had gone straight
to the bedside. It was a big bed ; and there was a very small shriv-
elled-up form lying under a heap of clothes. The face was sharply
peaked. The skin hung loose, yet it was strained tightly back, showing
the bones in a horrible prominence. Leaning over the piteous thing
Meg did not need to ask what this horrible aspect meant. It meant
starvation. The sheer horror of it for the moment, drove out fear;
yet fear was waiting for her, ready to rush in upon her in an over-
whelming tide.
She looked to right and left. Somewhere in the great, empty
house a door slammed. The air of the room was certainly close,
806 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Mar.,
stifling. She went to the window and unhasped it. It was not easy
to open, and she kept looking over her shoulder towards the bed
while she tried to do it. At last she succeeded. She lifted the window
and it came down with a crash, the rope that hung it being broken.
A pane smashed in the fall, and a west wind, strong and revivifying,
rushed like a great river into the sickly poisonous atmosphere. She
thought she heard a movement in the bed and turned about. Was it
possible that it was not death after all ? With the hope fear fled from
her for the moment. The oppressive weight on her lungs, on her
heart, seemed lifted by the fresh wind, by the hope. She went quickly
to the bedside. The form was as rigid as before. She stooped to
look into the terrible face and saw an eyelid quiver. Immediately she
was tense, braced, alert. She wanted twenty things, if the life that was
just lingering in the starved body was to be kept there and strengthened.
Water: she wanted water first of all. The open mouth had a dry,
terrible look with its cracked lips. Brandy : she wondered if she could
find brandy; and a fire! Oh, if she only had anyone to help her!
She did not dare leave the house in search of help lest the life should
flicker out. How long would it be before help came? She turned
an imploring glance towards the window. There was nothing in sight,
except the tinkers' beasts and Pasha, placidly grazing.
As she turned, her foot struck something on the floor an empty
water-bottle lying by a broken glass. How long had they been there ?
For how long had the poor soul endured thirst as well as hunger till
endurance came to an end. The thought of the basket in the phaeton
came to her with an immense relief. There were supplies there beyond
what she had given to Johnny Flynn: milk, water, she could be sure
of; a kettle, a spirit stove and spirit, a box of matches. She ran
through the silent house where the air was poisoned as though by death
itself, and, since she could not unbar the front door unaided, she
opened one of the long windows of the dining-room that gave on the
terrace and stepped out; out into the cool, beautiful evening full of
the west wind. Pasha was nibbling the shrubs of the lawn, and looked
round with a friendly recognition as she came.
She found what she wanted in a heavy iron seat which was
almost buried in the overgrown grass, and secured her steed. Then
she took the basket. As she did this the sun dropped behind the
mountains, leaving the world cold. She hurried back through the
house of which dusk had already taken possession. The corners were
full of shadows. The strange, heavy, bitter smell was all about her.
She scurried along up the stairs and down the corridor to Miss Roche's
room. Presently, unless help came, she would have to go down into
the lower regions in search of various things. The thought daunted
her. How evil-smelling the house was! Again she had the sense of
I9I4-] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 807
faintness as she hurried along. She did not like to think of those
lower regions. She paused to throw up a long window on the landing
and let the air in. She felt no one could live long in that terrible
foulness.
She poured a little water into the dry, strained mouth, and could
not be sure it was swallowed, some of it at least was returned, running
out of the corners of the lips. She tried milk then, almost drop by
drop, lifting the face that looked so surely a dead face on her arm.
Brandy if she only had brandy. She dare not give much milk lest
that too should be spilled out. She laid the head back on its pillow
and went down to the dining-room. She hunted frantically through
the cupboards of the sideboard and the wall cupboards. They were
stuffed with all manner of things which made the search more difficult,
but there was no brandy. While she searched the room was growing
dark. The dining-room was on the north side of the house, and the
windows were obscured. There was yet a cold twilight outside, but the
shadow of the mountains had darkened the western sky and made pre-
mature night in the house, which was always dark because of its trees.
She must search further. There might be a cellar downstairs.
She stood at the head of the stairs hesitating. It was very dark be-
low, and there was an evil air ascending; she was aware of a curious
rustling going on down there in the darkness. After all was it likely
she would find brandy? The cellars would have been empty this
many a year. She must try giving a little more milk. If that failed
she must make a further search. She was afraid of the cellars, and
the evil-smelling lower story from which the poison seemed to ascend.
She went upstairs. To her immense relief the milk was retained,
though she could detect no act of swallowing. Light, she must have
light. The room was steadily growing darker. She must find candles
or fuel, or something to light her before the darkness came altogether.
She was afraid of the darkness. She must have light to see what she
could do for the woman, who she was convinced now had a spark of
life in her. Would help never come? Surely Johnny could have
reached Castle Eagle by this time? Panic seized her as she began
to imagine the many things which might have interfered with Johnny's
delivery of her message. Supposing the woman who housed him
had kept him back, not listening to his explanation ! Supposing !
She thought she heard a low sigh from the motionless figure in the
bed. She must have light: she must find restoratives: she must de-
scend to the darkness underground, if needs be, to find fuel, or she must
go outside and find derelict wood, brambles and sticks, anything at all
to build a fire. But before that she would take her courage in both
hands, and explore the cellars underneath. She would never forgive
herself if her cowardice should be the cause of losing a life.
8o8 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Mar.,
Meg had need for carefulness. The box only held a few matches.
She lamented that she had not taken a full box in the basket, and
not one half empty. There must be light ; there must be matches and
candles and coal and wood somewhere, if only she could find them.
Summoning up all her courage she went downstairs. Before descend-
ing into the darkness underneath, she looked for candles in the cande-
labra of the dining-room and found none ; then in the drawing-room
where the blinds were all down shutting out the pale sky.
After a somewhat prolonged search she lit upon a remnant of
candle, so small that the time it would last before it burnt out might
be counted by minutes. She thought it would just light her through
the cellars and kitchens, enable her with good luck to discover the
things she wanted and get upstairs again, before it went out. She
lit the candle end on the stairs going down to the kitchen, where there
was hardly a glimmer of light. There seemed miles of underground
kitchens and cellars to explore, and nothing in any of them to help her.
All the time she felt she could hardly endure the air of the place.
At last in the corner of a kitchen she found a little heap of dry
twigs, some old newspapers, and a basket with a few sods of turf in it.
Her heart lifted with the discovery. She set down her snuff of candle
on the edge of the kitchen table, while she gathered the things together.
Here was life, courage, safety. With a fire and light she thought
she might even leave the sick woman while she went in search of help,
which she felt sure now was not coming in response to her urgent
message. What could they be thinking of her? Lady Turloughmore
would be frightened about her absence. They would be searching for
her everywhere while she needed the help that did not come.
She stood up from her cramped position and reached for the
candle. It was getting to its end. Would it last her the way up ? How
sickening the air of the place was ! It made her heart beat heavily and
her head throb with a dull feeling of congestion. She must not faint.
If she fainted she would die. The weight of the basket dragged at her
arm. She stumbled. Out in the passage the air was fresher. There
must be a window open somewhere. Suddenly the scrap of candle she
was holding sputtered and went out. She was enveloped in darkness
or semi-darkness, and she was aware that she was afraid of the empty
house, of the yawning cavernous kitchens and cellars on every side
of her that were so many pits of darkness. Down fell the basket with
a clatter. She had dropped the precious matches with the rest. She
went fumbling about, feeling oddly faint and sick, while she reminded
herself that she must, she must keep her wits together for the sake
of the life that had yet to be saved upstairs. She would never forgive
herself if through cowardice she were to fail now.
1914.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 809
CHAPTER XXL
THE WRONG MAN.
While she groped for the matches, not finding them, she heard a
new sound in the house the sound of footsteps overhead. She forgot
her search, standing bolt upright to listen. The feet came with a steady
yet light tread across the hall above, and began ascending the stairs.
Unhinged as her nerves were by the faint sickening smell of the house,
she was more terrified at first by the sound than the silence. Was it a
friend or a foe upstairs in the darkness ? She found the kitchen stair-
case after some groping and went up, letting the swing door at the top
slam behind her. She heard its echoes reverberate through the silent
house, and was frightened at the noise she herself had made. As she
stood in the hall there was not a sound to be heard. Had she imagined
the footsteps overhead ? Were they living footsteps or the feet of some
dead and gone Roche, who returned by night to the house of its earthly
habitation? Did ghosts walk with a light, firm tread? Did a ghost
wear boots? The fantastic questions crowded upon her. She stood
in the outer hall looking up the staircase. Not a sound. But stay
someone was coming down. Oh relief! Oh joy! A voice spoke
Algy Rosse's easy, pleasant voice.
" Is it you, you poor little thing ? And are you in the dark all
alone? What's the matter with Miss Roche? What a pestilential
atmosphere! Some drain must be leaking into the house! Or is it
dead rats ? or what is it ? "
He had come down the stairs. He was close to her.
" I've been horribly frightened," she sobbed, in an ecstasy of
relief. " It's all right now you've come. I suppose the house is
poisoned."
" I should just think it was. The windows are all shut, I suppose,
and the poison has got thoroughly in. Why, you are trembling ! "
he slipped his arm about her, with a kind protecting pressure.
" Don't mind me," she said, her teeth chattering. " I'm all right
now you've come. I can't find any candles, and I've just dropped
the wood and coal in the passage downstairs. How dark it has
become ! I've been looking for brandy. It's horrible. The poor soul
upstairs has been almost starved to death. She is still just living,
I think. If we only had some brandy ! "
" I've brought some from the village pub. I came upon your
messenger as I was going up the mountain in search of you. I can't
forgive myself. There are surely fairies in that wood. I sent the
queer boy was he a fairy, too! with word to Castle Eagle, and I
8io THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Mar.,
left a message at Dr. Doherty's. He was out with a case up the
mountains. We shall have to do what we can without him. Now,
about that coal. Let us break a window first so that this confounded
stench can escape."
He had some difficulty in letting down the bars of the hall door,
but he succeeded at last, and set it open. How sweet the wind was,
smelling of dews that blew in their faces !
" That is better," Algy Rosse said. " No wonder you were un-
nerved. I should have been here with you. Now for the coal."
It was quite a different matter returning down the dark staircase
with him by her side. She felt quite light-hearted, the relief was in-
tense. They gathered the coal and wood together, their hands meeting
over it in the darkness. She guided him upstairs, opening windows
everywhere as they went. In the bedroom she bent to listen for any
sign of breathing from the sick woman. She thought she felt an
almost imperceptible breath upon her cheek. While Algy Rosse lit
the fire, she mixed a little brandy with the milk, and as well as she
could in the gloom she poured some into Miss Roche's mouth; the
wood sprang into a blaze. She thought she saw a change in the face
something less rigid, less terrible. Were the eyes opening? The fire-
light was rising and falling. She thought the lids were lifted for an
instant, but could not be sure. Algy Rosse came and held a lit match
to look at Miss Roche.
" Good Lord ! " he said, under his breath.
Then unmistakably the eyes opened. She attempted speech, but
it was incoherent. The match went out.
" I'll tell you what," he said. " Let us get her out of this. The
whole place is poisoned. The moon is rising. I saw poor Pasha
waiting patiently outside. The pure air of the night will do her good
and not harm. Can you wrap her in the blankets? I can carry her
down easily. Let us give her some more of the milk. If she's not
thoroughly poisoned already, she'll recover more quickly in clean sur-
roundings."
Meg was amazed at the capacity, the quick decision, the deftness
of the golden youth, once the decision had been made. He put
her aside quietly, gently.
" Perhaps you don't know that I had an invalid mother," he
explained, when he had carried Miss Roche in her blankets downstairs.
" I used to do a great many things for her. She said I was better than
any nurse."
He was settling the little body as comfortably as might be in the
phaeton, when suddenly, as it seemed, it came to life. The voice in
which Miss Roche spoke was the merest whisper.
"You're not leaving my house open to any rogue or robber?"
1914.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 8n
" No, no, that's all right," Algy Rosse said soothingly. " I'll shut
the dining-room window and come out by the hall door, closing it after
me. The house will be quite safe."
" You're hurting me abominably "
"Oh, I am so sorry," he said. "I didn't know. What is it?"
" A broken leg I fell."
" There. You'll tell me another time. I'll try not to hurt you
more than I can help."
He led the patient Pasha, while Meg sat in the phaeton, steadying
the swathed little figure as well as she could. And so they arrived
at Castle Eagle, just in time to intercept Lady Turloughmore as her
carriage turned out of the gates. The doctor arrived presently and
discovered that there was a bad fracture of one leg. He shook his
head over it. The starvation, the poison, the fracture " she may have
broken it in bed," he said ; " old bones are brittle " were going to
make a long job. He suggested a trained nurse.
" Let me," said Meg eagerly. " I know just what to do. I nursed
my small brother when he had a broken leg. I'm sure I could
manage."
She carried her point. She had been feeling that she had too little
to do, too much time for brooding and introspection. She said to
herself that she was not cut out for a fine young lady. If the time came
that she could leave Lady Turloughmore, she must find something to
do in the world which would keep her incessantly occupied.
With two invalids in the house their hands were full. Miss Trant
and Mr. Rosse were left to entertain each other, which they did,
so far as Meg could judge, by a succession of little quarrels, half-
play, half in earnest. They found so many subjects on which they
disagreed. Presently Miss Trant took her gracious presence off
the scene. She was due in Scotland at a country-house party for the
grouse-shooting. The tenderness of her parting with Lady Turlough-
more was noticeable. She was to come again in the spring, when
Lord Erris should be well again, she said, and able to entertain her.
She ran back from the carriage to kiss Lady Turloughmore a second
time " like a daughter," said Meg to herself, " like a daughter."
She had teased Algy Rosse to the end, and had flung back a satirical
speech at him as she went off, between her soft calls to Lady Tur-
loughmore, sweet as the calls of a thrush. Algy went a day or two
later. " No one had any time for him," he said, with dissatisfaction,
and his career called him. He had been quite comfortably forgetting
his career for several weeks. Before he went he had an interview
with Meg, the purport of which amazed her.
" I never suspected such a thing," she said, in answer to him when
he said with a boyish heat and vexation that she must have known,
812 THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE [Mar.,
have understood, his hopes. " How could I think that anyone would
look at me when Miss Trant was by ? "
He flushed suddenly.
" Miss Trant is there is something lacking in her which you have
got. She is a moon-maiden, a big, beautiful, cold child."
Oddly Meg was nettled. She did not want to have for Algy
Rosse the thing which Miss Trant had not got.
" Don't be vexed with me," he said humbly. " I misunderstood,
that's all. Think it over, will you, till I come again ? "
Miss Roche crept back to life slowly. Despite the doctor's fore-
boding, the bone had knitted. There had been no serious result of the
poisoning. Carrick was in the hands of workmen who had discovered
dreadful things in connection with the drainage of the house, and the
things that lay hidden in its dark corners underground. It was a
marvel she was alive. Only her constant life out-of-doors before her
accident had kept her in health. She occupied the room next door to
Meg. At first Meg had slept in the room, like a nurse, to be ready
at the first signal that she was needed. Presently the patient was doing
so well that she had returned to her own room. September passed, and
October came. Lord Erris was expected home some time about the
end of October. A night came when, after Meg had seen her patient
comfortably in bed, and was in her own room, she heard a tapping
at her door. Opening it she saw Lady Turloughmore standing there,
the pigeon on her shoulder. He was very often on her shoulder or
the back of her chair.
"May I come in, Miss Hildebrand?"
" Do, please, Lady Turloughmore."
It was the first time Lady Turloughmore had visited her like this,
and Meg wondered what it might portend. Lady Turloughmore sat
down in the easy chair by the fire. The pigeon hopped on to the back
of the chair and perched there sleepily, one round eye on the fire.
" What beautiful thick hair you have ! " she said, stretching out her
hand to smooth Meg's hair. " Mine used to be very thick and very
brown. It has grown thin now and it is fast turning gray. I am going
to put it up under a widow's cap."
Meg was startled. Not knowing what to say she uttered an
exclamation under her breath, and turned eyes of compassion on the
delicate worn face.
" My son must take the title," she went on. " I would not stand
in his way. Dr. Kellner is satisfied with his general health. He says
there is a great improvement. If only he can walk "
She looked piteously at Meg.
" If only he can walk ! " she repeated. " Why should he not have
a wife and children like other men? If he would marry Eileen ! She
1914.] THE CURSE OF CASTLE EAGLE 813
has strength and courage as I had. There is not a drop of the morbid
or the nervous in her whole body. Why should not Ulick be happy, as
his father and I were and leave the future to take care of itself ? "
" Why not indeed ? " said Meg ; and in her passionate sympathy
for the grief in the brave, sweet face, she felt that for a time at least
she ardently desired that Lord Erris should be happy with Miss
Trant.
" You are so kind, so sympathetic," said Lady Turloughmore.
" Perhaps if Ulick was happy and did not need us, you and I might
go away together for a time at least till someone claimed you."
She paused and looked at Meg with a meaning in her gaze before
proceeding.
" So you couldn't care for Algy? " she said. " I wonder at that,
Meg. He is really a dear boy, though there have been times when
I've been unjust, hardened my heart against him because he seemed
likely enough to sit in my son's place. Dr. Kellner says there is no
reason why Ulick should not be a very strong man. If only he could
be a quite happy one ! "
Into Meg's mind came back Algy Rosse's whimsical, half-serious
speech :
" The only thing to do would be to catch an Earl of Turloughmore
and shut him up, and make him die in his bed."
Well, she did not want the new Earl of Turloughmore to die
before his years were accomplished. She wanted him to live and be
happy; and for herself to go away out of his life, and all this life
which had grown so dear to her.
"Algy has not much money of his own," said Lady Turloughmore,
watching Meg's face wistfully. " My son, of course, makes him an
allowance. He would increase it in the event of his marriage. If my
son should marry he would feel he owed Algy some reparation."
" Mr. Rosse wouldn't feel it," said Meg quietly. " He wants
Lord Erris to marry, as we all do. Please, I should love to go away
with you, Lady Turloughmore, I should love it."
(TO BE CONCLUDED.)
IRew Books*
THE SAVIOUR'S LIFE. New York : The Paulist Press. Cloth,
50 cents; leather, $1.00; postage, 6 cents extra.
With an exquisite reproduction of Da Vinci's Christ as a
frontispiece, The Paulist Press presents us with The Saviour's Life
in the words of the Four Gospels. The compiler is the Paulist
Father, Gilbert Simmons, whose perfect familiarity with all Scrip-
ture, and especially with the New Testament, is the admiration of
all who are favored with his friendship, as well as his deep and
adoring reverence for the Person of our Saviour. The publishers
have given the book an artistic form, both as to presswork and
binding. It is a book for either the table or the pocket or the
prie-dieu.
The narrative of the events of our Lord's life and the doc-
trines He taught, is given completely and exclusively in the words
of the Evangelists. To each event and each teaching is given a
separate little chapter, with its own appropriate heading ; and these
headings are frequently brief the briefest expositions of mean-
ing, and in themselves are exceedingly conducive to a good grasp
of the main purpose of our Saviour in saying or doing or suffering
what is there recorded. Dates are in each case added; and these
greatly help the feeling of continuity as one goes on with the holy
pilgrimage.
We cannot exaggerate the value of this book for practical
devotional use. It is a handy form of earth's most fascinating
history, given in heaven's own words, arranged under convenient
heads by a master of both the learning and the piety of the Christian
faith. In reading it one is straitened between anxiety to go on
with the flowing stream of the divine story, and an inclination
to stop at every turning of the leaves to dwell upon the scene, and
ponder the words and picture the presence of the beloved Master.
This Gospel history, arranged so conveniently and with such
perfect taste, should be known by heart by every Christian. Boys
and girls should receive premiums for reciting it word for word,
and no premium so appropriate as this beautiful little volume. If
the catechism must be learned by rote, why should not the divinely
written Life of the Saviour? Saturate young minds with this
1914.] NEW BOOKS 815
book, and Jesus Christ will be made both the antidote and correc-
tive of that most poisonous of all influences, the unlicensed literature
of a worldly and unclean generation. The public recitation of these
chapters from the writings of infinite wisdom, and more than
angelic eloquence, if made a feature of school life, will establish
in the memory of the child a standard of truth and of nobility of
expression as high above our literary masterpieces as heaven is
above earth.
We are pleased that the compiler has found use in this work of
his heart's love, for the version of the New Testament of the late
Dominican, Father Spencer, which we believe to be a valuable
help to the right use and understanding of the Scripture a help
by no means adequately appreciated.
MINOR WORKS OF ST. TERESA CONCEPTIONS OF THE
LOVE OF GOD, EXCLAMATIONS, MAXIMS, AND POEMS.
Translated from the Spanish by the Benedictine Nuns of Stan-
brook. Edited, with an Introduction, by Rev. Benedict Zim-
merman, O.C.D., with a short account of the Saint's death
and canonization. New York : Benziger Brothers.
These are called minor works from the little space they
occupy; but as a revelation of the grandeur of St. Teresa's soul
they are major in value, for the volume is second to none of her
works, not even to the Autobiography. The poems, thirty-six in
number, will probably come as a surprise to the reader, for none but
two or three poetical pieces have been commonly known to devout
readers, even to her devoted clients. The others have been found,
after diligent and really age-long research, by generations of St.
Teresa's editors, not the least eminent among whom are Father Zim-
merman and the Stanbrook Nuns. These poems of the great Saint
sprang without preparation from her soul, and in every case are the
expression of the joyful pain of a spirit wounded by the fiery dart of
the Spouse's love. None of them is long, some are very brief, but all
are contagious of that same quality of love, the divine sadness of a
soul longing for heavenly union with God. The translator has
endeavored not without great and patient labor and with eminent
success to give in English the fullness of meaning without injury
to the exquisite poetical sentiment of the original. For most
for nearly all of these pieces she is the pioneer English translator.
And where she is not, she holds her own very well indeed, even
if we compare her version of St. Teresa's Song to Death to that of
816 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
the late Father Caswall. One and all the poems are an exceedingly
lofty and tender expression of loyalty to the divine Spouse, and
aspirations towards eternal union with Him. Never did St. Paul's
yearning words receive so adequate an amplification : " For me to
live is Christ, and to die is gain" (Phil. i. 21). For instance,
the Compact:
Now am I wholly yielded up, foregone,
And this the pact I made,
That the Beloved should be all mine own,
I His alone!
Struck by the gentle Hunter
And overthrown
Within the arms of love
My soul lay prone.
Raised to new life at last
This contract 'tween us passed,
That the Beloved should be all mine own,
I His alone!
With lance embarbed with love
He took His aim
One with its Maker hence
My soul became.
No love but His I crave
Since self to Him I gave,
For the Beloved is mine own,
I His alone!
The poetical tone is heard and felt in the prose portions of this
volume, destined to take its place with the other works of St.
Teresa on a footing of equality the Conceptions and Exclamations
and Maxims. Better prayerful reading, apart from Holy Scripture,
can hardly be found, especially before and after Holy Communion.
The account of the Saint's death is a mosaic of all the various
narratives of the consummation of that heroic soul's longings for
eternal union with God.
The feeling of life in death and death in life voiced in all these
singularly powerful poems, is also expressed in Chapter XXXVIII.
of the Life, section eight :
As our Lord has been pleased to reveal heaven in some
degree, my soul dwells upon it in thought; and it happens oc-
casionally that they who are about me, and with whom I find
1914.] NEW BOOKS 817
consolation, are those whom I know to be living in heaven, and
that I look upon them as the only ones who are really alive;
while those who are on earth are so dead, that the whole world
seems unable to furnish me with companions, particularly when
these impetuosities of love are upon me. Everything seems a
dream, and what I see with the bodily eyes an illusion. What
I have seen with the eyes of the soul is that which my soul
desires; and as it finds itself far away from those things
that is death.
See also Chapter XXXIX., section ten. And in many other
parts of the Saint's writings, notably in Relations I., 3, she attrib-
utes her longing for death to the general influence of the new and
extraordinary intercourse of her soul with heaven. She says that
ever since she " became subject to these supernatural visitations
she has had a great desire to be poor and lonely, and to depart
out of this land of exile in order to see God " (Relations VII., 20).
THE LIFE OF BLESSED HENRY SUSO. By Himself. Trans-
lated by Thomas Francis Knox, Priest of the Oratory, with
an Introduction by W. R. Inge, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's.
London: Methuen & Co. $1.00.
The autobiography of Blessed Henry Suso, a Dominican Friar
(13001365), is one of the best known, as well as one of the most
beautiful works of mediaeval mysticism. The Servitor of Divine
Wisdom, as he calls himself, describes the extreme austerities
he practised in order to overcome his temperament " full of fire
and life." It should be noticed, however, that these macerations
of the flesh were but a phase in the evolution of his soul towards
the Truth, and that they were carried out under the impelling force
of a burning devotion, and by the divine aid. God led the Servitor
by an exceptional path. His vocation and apostolate demanded
that his body first, and then his soul, should pass through the cruc-
ible of suffering, so that he might win the Wisdom he longed for so
ardently, and be able to direct others through his own experience
along the path which leads to perfection. In fact, it is not difficult
to trace the gradual ascent of Blessed Henry Suso's soul towards the
Light through the various degrees of suffering which he endured;
his unflinching faith kept him patient and steady through trials
which it would seem no human existence could bear. He was
afflicted with bodily ills, mental distresses, and darkness of soul;
VOL. xcvm. 52
NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
he was attacked with more than human wickedness by those to
whom he had done good, and threatened with the vengeance of
murder by men to whom he had done no harm ; he was encompassed
on every side by anguish and distress and utter desolation ; and yet
the Servitor remained steadfastly confiding in God, knowing that
" he to whom God wishes well can be harmed by no one."
The tenderness of his heart for every living thing, his sensi-
tiveness to the beauties of nature, and his ardent poetic imagination,
should be remembered when interpreting the maxims which form
one of the later chapters. Intellectually and theologically the teach-
ing of the Servitor proceeds from that of Eckhart and Tauler,
while in the higher flight of metaphysical argument he bases his
conclusions on quotations from St. Thomas Aquinas and Dionysius
the Areopagite. The translator's preface, published originally with
Messrs. Burns & Gates' edition in 1865, has been retained, and
an introduction by Dr. Inge, in which a survey is made of the times
in which Blessed Henry Suso lived. The sympathies of Dr. Inge lie
on the historical and philosophical side of the subject, rather than
on the purely mystical. His open antagonism to the Church, which
alone produces and cherishes saints of the type of Blessed Henry
Suso, seems curiously illogical to those who study mysticism both
experimentally and theoretically from within the fold of the true
Church.
THE FRANCISCAN POETS IN ITALY OF THE THIRTEENTH
CENTURY. By Frederick Ozanam. Translated by A. E.
Nellen and N. C. Craig. London: David Nutt $1.50.
Though appearing only in the first weeks of 1914, no better
memorial of Frederick Ozanam could have been devised for his
centenary as far, at least, as English-speaking nations are con-
cerned, than the issuing of a translation of his enchanting volume
on Les Ponies Franciscains. It is indeed remarkable that with the
extensive output during the last quarter of a century to be pre-
cise, ever since the publication of M. Sabatier's epoch-making Life
of books dealing with the Franciscan legend, no attempt should
have been made until now to translate into English a work which
in France and Italy has enjoyed a high reputation both for sound
scholarship and for a singularly refined appreciation of artistic
values. Written years before the "cult" for things Franciscan
had become a fashion in Europe, and when not a few essential
sources of information were still unavailable, Ozanam's book re-
I9I4-] NEW BOOKS 819
mains one of the most valuable introductions we possess to a study
of the Franciscan period. Indeed, in the face of these brilliant
pages we can no longer flatter ourselves that it has been reserved
for our own day to estimate the artistic significance of the Fran-
ciscan movement in its bearings on European history.
The translators, in their brief preface, very truly say : " No
other book reproduces so sincerely and truly the spirit of the Fran-
ciscan movement, with all the glow of its religious ecstasy and all
the charm of its innocent simplicity; no other book expounds so
clearly the gradual evolution of that spirit, or testifies so convinc-
ingly to its influence on all aspects of human life and art." It is
amazing to reflect that work so mellow, so impregnated with under-
standing not only of art and of history, but also of mystical the-
ology, should have been the outcome of a few brief Italian holidays,
necessitated by ill-health, which formed the only breaks in an excep-
tionally arduous professorial career at the Sorbonne. In Ozanam's
case it was no doubt Dante who led him to the feet of St. Francis,
for we know that his French thesis for his doctorate of literature
treated of the Divine Comedy, and that his public defence of his
thesis was so brilliant as to win him instant renown. And when
we remember that the great work in defence of Catholic truth to
which in his youth Ozanam aspired to devote the best years of his
life, was destined never to be written Ozanam, it will be remem-
bered died in his forty-first year we are all the more grateful for
this brilliant fragment, which almost alone preserves for us the
literary and artistic gifts which in the founder of the St. Vincent
de Paul Conference might easily have been overlooked. Even as it
is, in the centenary sketch, contributed by Mrs. Maxwell Scott to
the Dublin Review (January, 1914), by some strange oversight
no mention is made of Les Poetes Franciscains.
After an introductory chapter tracing the development of
popular religious poetry from the mural inscriptions with which the
early Christians loved to decorate the interior of their churches,
Ozanam points out how " the poetry of the early Franciscans was
produced at that instructive and fascinating moment when art be-
gins to seize popular inspiration." In point of fact it was not long
before the birth of Francis Bernadone that the idiom of the common
people first took on itself sufficient form to emerge as a spoken and
written language. Songs, religious, romantic, and patriotic, were
the common possession of the Italian people, and if the love-songs of
the troubadours came to them from across the Alps, it was Umbria
820 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
that was destined to provide the breath of a purified faith which was
to break forth in laudi and canticles composed in the new half-
formed Italian language spoken by the peasant and the goatherd.
The vital force of the Franciscan revival that, a century later, was
to find a visualized expression through Giotto's brush on the walls of
San Francesco, already in the lifetime of Francis found a more avail-
able outlet in hymn and verse. The Saint himself in early youth
having been a passionate lover of all the romance and chivalry of his
day, with its songs ever on his lips, it is little wonder that in later
years his burning faith broke out in poems of praise and love.
Ozanam writes some singularly attractive pages on this aspect of
the Poverello as poet and troubadour. Of the wonderful Canticle
of the Sun he says very truly : " It is only a cry, but it is the first
cry of a nascent poesy which will develop and make itself heard
through the whole world." Curiously enough, however, the still
more rapturous canticle, " In foco amor mi mise Love has thrust
me in the furnace," of which a very beautiful translation is given,
should have been attributed not, as here, to St. Francis, but to the
greatest of the poets that Francis was to number among his own,
Jacopone da Todi.
For to Ozanam undoubtedly belongs the credit of re-discover-
ing this long neglected poet and mystic. It is to Jacopone he de-
votes his most illuminating chapters, Jacopone, who to outward
appearances was the most mad and disconcerting of all those who,
following in the footsteps of the lover of Poverty, defied the con-
ventions of the society to which they belonged. His stormy career
presents one of those series of astounding contrasts which the
Middle Ages so frequently offer us: successful lawyer, penitent,
poet, friar, excommunicate, prisoner by order of the Pope for six
long years, and in the end a saint, beatified, if not by the Roman
authorities, at least by the unerring veneration of the common
people. Such was the man who, born of a noble family of Todi,
is known only to posterity by a scornful diminutive. His radiant
death effaced the memory of the religious dissensions in which so
many years of his life were unhappily involved. " There remained
of Jacopone only the memory of his penitence, the example of the
love of God revealed in him in the highest possible degree, and,
lastly, his popular songs which stretched like a rainbow over the
mountains of Umbria."
Jacopone stands at the very fountain-head of modern art and
poetry. It was from him that Fra Angelico gained his most ex-
I9I4-] NEW BOOKS 821
quisite inspirations; from him that Dante learned the marvelous
possibilities of the half- formed Italian speech ; it is need we add
to him that all Christendom is indebted for the undying pathos of
the Stabat Mater. Of his songs in the vernacular, Ozanam gives
some examples, exquisite even in a translation, inspired by a mystical
passion that carries all before it, by a joy the more triumphant the
more miserable his outward condition : " O Love, divine Love !
Why hast Thou taken possession of me? " Or again, the song with
the refrain, " O joyous heart that sings of Love ! " written under
circumstances of peculiar depression.
Of the essence of these laudi Ozanam gives a detailed analysis,
pointing out how Jacopone, when he announced his determination
to forsake philosophy, merely entered into the ranks of the
mystics. But, strangely enough, besides being a mystic and
a poet, as enamored of poverty as his master, the friar was also
a satirist who spared the sins and weaknesses of his contemporaries
as little as did Dante. It was this versatility of genius, combined
with his amazing austerity of life, that gave him so great an as-
cendency in his century. That his name should have fallen for so
long almost wholly into oblivion is but one more example of the
way in which, for over three hundred years, the Renaissance
and its achievements have been allowed to crush out of men's mem-
ories all the glories that went before. Jacopone's right to a resus-
citation is surely as irresistible as that of the primitive painters,
whom he forestalled by a few decades.
It is a pleasure to testify to the scholarly care with which
this translation has been produced. The rendering throughout is
fluent and literary; there is almost a superabundance of notes pro-
vided at the end of each chapter, correcting here and there attribu-
tions which, current sixty years ago, have long been abandoned;
also an index and a very full contents table, making the volume
everything that the student could desire. Finally there are some
well-selected and attractive illustrations.
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, THE TRUE CHURCH OF THE
BIBLE. By Very Rev. C. J. O'Connell. St. Louis: B.
Herder. $1.25 net.
Dean O'Connell of Bardstown, Kentucky, has written an ex-
cellent volume on the Scriptural basis of the chief Catholic doc-
trines. In thirty different chapters he sets forth clearly the Biblical
proof of the primacy, the unity of the Church, the Sacraments, the
822 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
invocation of the saints, indulgences, justification, etc. Priests
will find this a most helpful book to give to inquiring "Bible
Christians."
LIFE, SCIENCE, AND ART. Being Leaves from Ernest Hello.
Translated from the French by E. M. Walker. New York:
Benziger Brothers. Leather, $1.00; boards, 50 cents.
We reviewed in THE CATHOLIC WORLD a few months ago a
reprint of the French critic of Hello's book I'Homme, which was
first printed during the siege of Paris in 1871. In it he treated of
Life, Science, and Art, and shows how each, rightly understood,
is a mirror that reflects the Face of God. We are grateful to the
translator for these brief extracts from this well-known work.
Ernest Hello first studied for the Bar, but gave up his profes-
sion, because his fellow barristers decided in conference that it
was quite permissible to defend an unjust cause. He next turned
his attention to journalism, founding, together with his friend,
Georges Seigneur, a newspaper called Le Croise. Ably conducted,
it was at first successful, but came to an end after two years under
circumstances which led to a break with his friend. He retired
soon after (1861) to his country home at Keroman, where he
studied and wrote incessantly until his death in 1885.
As a critic he was original and independent, although a bit
oratorical and dogmatic in tone. We do not agree at all with his
pessimistic views of his age, or his bitter denunciations of medioc-
rity; we are always annoyed at the tone of bitterness and personal
disappointment which loom up so largely in his pages ; still withal
we must admire his talent, his great love of truth, and his strong and
uncompromising Catholicity.
Many of his utterances are well worth quoting, for instance :
To be weary of life is nothing else but to have an immense
need of God.
It is the crime of the age not to hate evil, but to discuss
terms of peace with it and make it proposals.
The gift of self is the condition of life. The more a man
opens his heart the stronger he grows; the more he spends
himself, the more concentrated he becomes ; the more generous
he is, the more master of himself.
The experience of centuries teaches us that men need consol-
ing first, instructing afterwards Begin with argument, and
all will be sterile. Begin with love, and all will be fertile.
1914.] NEW BOOKS 823
In discussion among educated people, the man who tends to
get heated is accused of giving way to hate; he is really the
man who loves.
To listen to some men, one might suppose that Truth was
our property, and that we could give it away when we liked.
Catholicism, because it has sacrificed no dogma, has been able
to rear, maintain, and propagate that chosen race of men which
carries morality to the height of sanctity ; while Protestantism,
though forever talking of morality, has no saints, because it
has been faithless to dogma.
The man of the world is not afraid of doing wrong, but he is
afraid of giving offence. In the world convention takes the
place of harmony.
Envy is such a strong proof of inferiority that it draws back
before an open avowal.
HISTORY OF THE DISCOVERY AND CONQUEST OF COSTA
RICA. By Ricardo Fernandez Guardia. Translated by Harry
Western Van Dyke. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co.
$3.00.
The principal source from which the author of this most fas-
cinating history has taken his material is that treasure-house of
the American historian the archives of the Indies at Seville. He
has ransacked royal decrees and orders, contracts, or capitulaciones,
entered into with the Crown by the intrepid Conquistatores for the
protection of their rights in the conquest of the new American
lands, quaintly phrased complaints from priests and friars, and a
mass of technical legal documents. As late as thirty years ago
the names of many of the first Spanish explorers of Costa Rica
were unknown, and the events of the country's past were shrouded
in darkness. Moreover, a great deal of the history of Spanish
discoveries has been written by ignorant and prejudiced Englishmen,
who never could write of Spain fairly or with an open mind. As
Mr. Van Dyke writes in his preface : " We North Americans get
our conceptions of the conquering Spaniard from such works as
Kingsley's Westward Ho, and the tales of other English romances,
which glorify such arch-pirates as Drake, Raleigh, and Hawkins,
and picture the work of the Conquistatores as wholly one of blood,
rapine, and destruction, inspired by no purpose but the lust for gold.
This is far from the truth. While some of these Spanish explorers
were cruel and avaricious like Pedrarias, Contreras, and Gutierrez,
the great majority obeyed the strict injunctions of the Spanish kings
824
NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
against spoliation and inhumane treatment of the Indians. Every
reader will be impressed by the fortitude, heroic endurance, kind-
ness, justice, and Christian charity of such men as Gonzalez, Davila,
Vasquez de Coronado, Rodrico Maldonado, Alonso Calero, and
Sanchez de Badajoz.
The author describes in detail the different Indian tribes of
Costa Rica, their customs, their modes of dress, their continual
feuds, and shows how the work of exploration was frequently hin-
dered by the cruelty exercised toward them by some of the rapacious
gold seekers. He describes all the expeditions along the coast from
the days of Columbus in 1502, and all the expeditions into the
interior which so often proved disastrous.
The book rather overwhelms us with its mass of details, but
the author has made the sixteenth century live again in his most
interesting pages. The translation is excellent.
SPECIAL METHODS OF INSTRUCTION. By Felix Arnold,
Ph.D. New York: S. Mandel. $1.50.
The majority of educational works dealing with special meth-
ods are too general and indefinite to be of much practical use in the
schoolroom. Dr. Arnold is so convinced of this that he goes to the
opposite extreme, and leaves little or nothing to the initiative of the
teacher. Knowing that the majority of children are eye-minded,
he makes continual use throughout this volume of the visual appeal.
He applies it in all the elementary grades to arithmetic, reading,
language, geography, history, and science.
Most teachers, being devoid of the artistic sense, find black-
board work and diagraming most difficult. After consulting the
crude maps and wondrous drawings entitled "trees, carrots, rabbits"
and the like in this volume, they need no longer come to the black-
board with fear and trepidation. They will at least realize at
once the idea back of every illustration.
We would call special attention to the following points in which
Dr. Arnold improves upon his predecessors : In the chapters on
arithmetic, he is especially good on grading, the use of the motor
appeal for beginners, and his clear, simple, and accurate diagrams.
We noticed in his treatment of phonics that his tongue charts and
directions were more accurate than those usually given, as, for in-
stance, in the Brooklyn Training School, while his complete word
and phrase lists will certainly prove invaluable to the overworked
teacher. Dr. Arnold rightly says (Chapter VII.) that the com-
1914.] NEW BOOKS 825
position period should be used solely for the purpose of developing
expression. The teacher is advised not to load the pupils with the
facts they are to use, and to base the composition only on subject
matter with which they are familiar. Under the different head-
ings of Dramatic Impersonations, Invention and Imagination, Nar-
ration, Description, Exposition and Letters, about two hundred and
fifty topics are suggested for practical school work.
In his chapter on Geography, he groups his subject matter
under the sub-titles: I. Human Activities and Their Products;
II. Human Habitations; III. Surface; IV. Climate and Time;
V. Maps and Graphs; VI. Use of Textbooks. He agrees with
most modern educators in planning the general movement of study
from the home and the home neighborhood outward, then to the
United States, and finally to other countries. He insists upon the
teacher obtaining pictures which deal with the topics of instruction.
They are urged to cut them out of old magazines and geographies,
mount them on cardboard, and arrange them under headings like
the topics in the term plan. These pictures should be reenforced
with a collection of different specimens, such as woods, products,
cereals, fibers, and the like. As a general rule, they should never
give a lesson without using a map or a graph.
Perhaps the most interesting chapters of the entire book are
those devoted to the study of nature, under the headings : I. Plants;
II. Animals; III. Natural Science; IV. Man.
THE CHURCH AND LABOR. By Rev. L. McKenna, S.J. Dub-
lin: Office of the Irish Messenger. 35 cents.
Father McKenna, of Dublin, has written six excellent little
tracts on the social question, namely: The Church and Labor,
The Church and Working Men, The Church and Working Women,
The Church and the Working Child, The Church and Trades-
Unions, and The Church and Social 'Work. He insists throughout
these pamphlets upon the social mission of the Church. As he
puts it : " The Church speaks not merely to the conscience of indi-
viduals, but to men grouped in the societies that men form, the
nation, the city, the family, and the association The object of
the Church's existence is to save man from the evils that afflict man's
soul, and, therefore, indirectly at least, from his bodily evils too,
which drag down and destroy his soul." As good Catholics, " we
should interest ourselves in the conditions of life, and in the pros-
pects and difficulties of our poor brethren. It is more blessed to
826 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
prevent disease than to cure it ; more blessed to give good dwellings
to the poor than to give them hospitals for disease contracted in
bad tenements; more blessed to help the widow rear her children
than to place them in industrial schools; more blessed to give
work than a dinner or two to the starving man; more blessed to
have the young taught a trade than to secure them a job that
will teach them nothing."
Father McKenna says some excellent words on the morality
of strikes, the blessings of trade unions, the obligation of a just
wage, the curse of the sweating system, the duty incumbent upon
Catholics of studying Social Science and the like.
CHART OF IRISH HISTORY. By Charles R. Arlen. Boston:
Arlen & Co. $3.00.
This unique chart enumerates all the chief events of Irish
history from B. c. 1699 to 1913 A. D. The compiler quotes O'Curry
to prove that the earliest Irish records are not so legendary as
many imagine, although he admits that no agreement exists con-
cerning the actual dates or length of the reigns of the early pagan
kings. He himself follows the chronology of the annals of the
Four Masters up to A. D. 1015.
He divides the seven periods of Irish history as follows:
I. Pagan Kings, B. c. 1699 to A. D. 428; II. The Saints, A. D. 432
to 800; III. Dominion of the Dane, 800 to 1152; IV. Anglo-
Roman Lordship, 1154 to 1542; V. Political and Religious Re-
pression, 1542 to 1829; VI. Agitation Against the Union, 1800
to 1858; VII. Fenian Activities, 1858 to 1870; VIII. Modern
Times, 187010 1913.
We noticed a few misprints under the dates A. D. 458, 848,
1874, 1913. Mr. Arlen, who is a member of the Irish Text
Society and the Irish Literary Society of London, is certainly a
firm believer in the modern pedagogical theory of the visual appeal.
THE OLD FRANCISCAN MISSIONS OF CALIFORNIA. By
George Wharton James. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. $1.50.
The California Missions, because of their picturesqueness,
their romantic history, and the noble deeds they have enshrined,
are always of keen interest to an increasingly large number of
travelers.
This volume is an honest and simple attempt to meet a real
and popular demand for an unpretentious work that will give the
1914-] NEW BOOKS 827
ordinary tourist and reader enough of the history of the Missions to
make a visit to them of added interest, and to link their history with
that of the other missions founded elsewhere in the country during
the same or prior epochs of mission activity. The copious illus-
trations, all from photographs especially taken, are very artistic.
The last chapter, How to Reach the Missions, will serve as a
practical guide to the tourist.
THE HOLY CHILD SEEN BY HIS SAINTS. By Margaret Ken-
nedy. New York: Benziger Brothers. 75 cents net.
Miss Kennedy is a born story teller for children. She relates
in a most fascinating manner a number of stories and legends
which tell of the appearances of the Infant Jesus to Saints like
St. Christopher, St. Catherine of Alexandria, St. Paula, St. An-
thony of Padua, St. Bernard, St. Juliana, and St. Teresa. We
know of no better book to put in the hands of a Catholic boy or girl
of ten or twelve years of age.
THE WESTMINSTER HYMNAL. Edited by Richard R. Terry.
New York: Benziger Brothers. $1.25 net.
As the editor tells us in his preface, this collection of hymns
contains a large number of entirely new tunes, and a considerable
quantity of older ones in use among Catholics on the Continent,
which after the test of centuries are still popular. Many other
Catholic tunes, hitherto existing solely in Protestant hymnals, have
been restored in the present volume to the worship of the Catholic
Church. Many popular tunes of little musical worth have been re-
tained, because they have been so long in use both in England and
America. Alternative tunes have been provided for most of them,
so that those who find fault with them on artistic ground may have
no reason to complain. Variations in many of the hymns have been
reduced to uniformity by giving the tune as the composer originally
wrote it, or, where this was not ascertainable, by reverting to the
earliest form of the melody. The keys chosen have been those which
secured the requisite brightness, while at the same time they placed
the tune within the range of the average singer in the congregation.
The plain chant melodies in this book have been taken from the
Vatican Graduate, or from the Solesmes Antiphoner. On the vexed
question of plain chant accompaniments, the editor tells us he has
kept in view four points: simplicity, directness, due regard to the
accentuation of the words, and strict adherence to the mode in
828 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
which the melody was written. We were sorry to notice his mod-
ernization of the Creator alme siderum (No. 2), and his assigning
the Protestant "Old Hundreth " to the Christmas hymn, " Jesu,
Redeemer of the World" (No. 15). Many of the melodies con-
tributed by Mr. Terry himself are excellent, although some critics
are inclined to think the number forty-eight excessive. On the
whole it is one of the best hymnals we possess.
ENGLAND AND THE SACRED HEART. By Rev. G. E. Price.
New York: Benziger Brothers. 90 cents net.
Father Price writes a brief historical sketch of the introduc-
tion into England of the devotion to the Sacred Heart. Father
Colombiere, the spiritual director of Blessed Margaret Mary, came
to England in October, 1676, as confessor to the Duchess of York,
Mary of Modena, afterwards Queen. During his two years stay
in London, we know that he frequently preached on this devotion
in the Chapel Royal, and, through his influence, Queen Mary, a few
years after his banishment, was led to address the first petition
to the Holy See asking for the institution of the Feast of the
Sacred Heart. We hear nothing of this devotion again until the
time of Bishop Milner. He strongly advocated it as a corrective
of the evil influence of Jansenism, and of the un-Catholic spirit that
dominated many of the English Catholics of his day. Although
the author quotes The Eve of Catholic Emancipation, he makes
no mention of the faults and weaknesses of Bishop Milner, so
well brought out in the objective history of Monsignor Ward.
Bishop Milner possessed great qualities, but he was not the saint
that Father Price pictures him.
SELECTED POEMS. By John Boyle O'Reilly. New York: P.
J. Kenedy & Sons. $1.35, postpaid.
Every man with Irish blood in his veins will read with intense
pleasure these old familiar poems of John Boyle O'Reilly. He is
at his best when telling a story like The Amber Whale, or when his
theme is Irish patriotism. A patriot himself, who had suffered im-
prisonment at the hands of the English government, he certainly
had no love for the English Tory. We all remember the lines :
Patrician, aristocrat, Tory whatever his age or name,
To the people's rights and liberties, a traitor ever the same.
The natural crowd is a mob to him, their prayer a vulgar rhyme ;
The freeman's speech is sedition, and the patriot's deed a crime.
1914.] NEW BOOKS 829
Wherever the race, the law, the land, wherever the time or throne,
The Tory is always a traitor to every class but his own.
O'Reilly's great love for Ireland breathes in every line of The
Exile of the Gael, and The Priests of Ireland. The latter poem was
written apropos of the declaration of the bishop and priests of the
diocese of Cloyne in 1873 on the Home Rule question. The last
verse runs as follows:
Priest to priest to sound the summons, and the answer, man to man,
With the people round the standard, and the prelates in the van.
Let the heart of Ireland's hoping keep this golden rule of Cloyne,
Till the Orange fade from Derry and the shadow from the Boyne.
Let the words be carried outward till the farthest lands they reach :
" After Christ, their country's freedom do the Irish prelates preach."
ON A HILL, A ROMANCE OF SACRIFICE. By F. M. Capes.
New York: Benziger Brothers. 50 cents net.
Diana Merton, the artist-heroine of this rather dull and com-
monplace story, on an outing at Hampton Court, falls in love at
first sight with Stephen Egerton. But once she discovers that her
friend Maud San ford had a love affair with him a few years before,
she nobly retires from the field just as he is on the verge of a
proposal, and skillfully arranges a match between her two friends.
Of course, they never realize the sacrifice she has made for their
sakes, and they live forever after in perfect happiness and content.
A tale of sacrifice indeed, but most improbable.
CHIPPEWA MUSIC. By Frances Densmore. Smithsonian In-
stitution. Bureau of American Ethnology. Bulletin 53.
Washington, D. C. : Government Printing Office.
Frances Densmore discusses in a most entertaining fashion
Chippewa music in its relation to tribal life, and gives us a melodic
and rhythmic analysis of all the leading classes of Chippewa songs.
This collection includes the Grand Medicine Song, Dream- Songs,
War-songs, Love-songs, Dance-songs, Songs of the Moccasin Game,
and songs connected with gifts. They were collected with great ac-
curacy from the Indians on the chief Chippewa reservations in
Minnesota, and on the Lac du Flambeau Reservation in Wisconsin.
The excellent illustrations for which the Smithsonian Institution
is famous, add much to the interest of the book. American com-
posers on the lookout for new material will find this volume of
great value.
8 30 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
BY THE BLUE RIVER. By T. Clark. New York: Benziger
Brothers. $1.35 net.
The Blue River is in Algeria, and flows into the Mediterranean.
Hither came Frances de Vernay to her childhood home, seeking
peace and healing. She had married into the family of the Amorys,
with whom Catholicity was as the breath of their lives. Aubrey
Amory, the husband of Frances, the black sheep of the family,
sacrifices wife and child to his colossal selfishness, and her fidelity
and love, with the marvelous development of her son's vocation,
are well portrayed. The brooding mystery of the desert, the dark
lonely forests, the superstition of the Arabs form a background,
in which their " Mektoub It is written," is finely contrasted with
the Christian Fiat voluntas Tua. In the solitude of their Algerian
home they have many adventures.
We heartily recommend the book to those seeking a good
interesting novel.
OLD TESTAMENT RHYMES. By Rev. Robert Hugh Benson.
Illustrated by Gabriel Pippet. New York : Longmans, Green
& Co. 75 cents net.
The versatile Father Benson has written a volume of nursery
rhymes describing for children some of the chief events in Old
Testament history. Anything that comes from Father Benson's
pen is worthy, but we cannot help saying that we like Father Ben-
son better in prose than in poetry.
THE MORNING WATCH. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Igna-
tius proposed by Father Ignatius Diertins. New York : P. J.
Kenedy & Sons. $1.70, postpaid.
Father Diertins was a Belgian Jesuit who died in 1700. His
Explanations of the Exercises of his beloved father and patron have
been translated into English by a brother Jesuit, Father Elder
Mullan. The book contains one hundred and eighty-eight medita-
tions, divided into four weeks, according to the plan of the Saint
himself. It is the fruit of deep and earnest study, of a ripe ex-
perience of fifty-six years of religious life; and what is better
still, a faithful reproduction of spirit which characterized the author.
This volume provides only the framework of the daily meditation
the preludes, points, and colloquy leaving each individual to fill
in these for himself with thought, affection, resolve, and aspiration.
Points are designated by capitals, which seems less of a formal
1914.] NEW BOOKS 831
separation : one part glides more easily into another. The " kin-
dred thought " which heads each meditation is, we think, a new
feature that will prove welcome to many. The form is varied
meditation proper, application of the senses, contemplations, etc.
Repetitions are advised, and in these every side of a subject is pre-
sented. In fine, the meditations are short, averaging a couple of
pages, and suitable not only to priests, religious, seminarians, but to
those who strive to lead an earnestly devout life in the world.
THE COMING STORM. By Francis Deming Hoyt. New York:
P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $1.25.
Mr. Hoyt has written an interesting treatise against Socialism
in the form of a novel of New York life. George Stuart, an
amateur Socialist at Harvard, has come to New York to practise
law. For a time he airs his views enthusiastically among his
friends, until at last he is disillusionized by some bitter experiences
with a band of radical dynamiters of the I. W. W. His friend,
Alfred Drayton, by kindly argument, and the judicious loan of
the works of Father Cathrein, Father Husslein, and Bishop Stang,
makes him realize finally that Socialism is not the unique remedy
for modern industrial unrest. We imagine that his love for Ger-
trude though she is too much in the background for a good love
story had a great deal to do with his seeing the errors of his ways.
She certainly starts him on the road to the Church, and the way
of entering it is made easy by the Superior of the Paulists, who,
according to Drayton, is " one of the most delightful men that I
ever met in all my life." Of course the marriage bells ring out
merrily at the end, but why was the Magnificat sung by the choir
at the wedding?
''THOSE of the faithful who seek to lead prayerful lives in the
* world and who is there who should not? will find great aid
and encouragement in a small volume, entitled Thesaurus Fidelium,
by a Carmelite Tertiary. (New York: Longmans, Green & Co.
80 cents net.) It furnishes much in the way of wise guidance;
helpful suggestions, particularly suited to those who entertain as-
pirations for the conventual life, yet are prevented, through no
fault of their own, from entering it. Selections, both in the matter
of direction, of prayers, of aspirations, are chosen from extended
and varied reading, that has included the best writers on spiritual
subjects.
832 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
It is a thesaurus, a treasury of the prayers, experiences, read-
ings, and books that have helped the compiler, collected and pre-
sented here with the earnest hope that they will contribute to God's
glory, and help other souls desirous of increasing in His love.
The preface is written by Monsignor Benson; and we wish the
little volume the success it deserves.
To one or two things we wish to take exception. " Ones "
is not, we think, a substitute for " unites," and to speak of our
Lord as " tabernacling in our midst " shocks our reverence. Again
we lately read of the advice of an experienced physician, who said,
if he could, he would never allow nerves to be mentioned in the
house. It was, we thought, excellent advice. He also added
that he never knew a saint to be subject to nerves. We think
the advice, " to confess to nerves; to acknowledge them to oneself,
to one's confessor and doctor and bear them in mind, in making a
rule of life " an opening to the very easy road of self-pity, and
a fair way of making oneself a burden to oneself, to one's confessor,
and to one's doctor. Nerves have been made the excuse for more
self-indulgence than this world dreams of. They justify the ex-
emption of self from that severe relentless discipline, particularly
with regard to little things, that is the first requisite for true, spirit-
ual advancement.
And it is a bit disconcerting, to say the least, when reading
of the interior life, to come upon a list of physical exercises useful
for improving the circulation and the digestion. After all if it
is needful or advantageous for us to " sit on ground, and draw each
leg with both hands slowly towards body, pressing the knee as close
to the abdomen as possible," we would like to learn it from a manual
of physical exercises. The interior man seeks to get away from
the noises of the world, and hygiene and physical development are
one of its loudest noises just now. This chapter mars the book,
and we hope it will be omitted in a subsequent edition.
DRACTICAL MANUAL FOR THE SUPERIORS OF RE-
LIGIOUS HOUSES, by Rev. Costanzo Frigerio, S.J., trans-
lated from the Italian by F. Loughran. (New York: P. J. Ken-
nedy & Sons. 40 cents.) This little treatise is the fruit of a wide
experience in the art of directing religious communities of women.
The author has in view the work of forming a superior who, by
means of her own union with God, by her good example, and by the
virtues of vigilance, prudence, charity, and firmness may help her
I9I4-1 NEW BOOKS 833
subjects to progress in the spiritual life. We recommend this
simple, devout, and common-sense manual to all religious superiors.
IN The Chief Sufferings of Life and Their Remedies, by Abbe
Duhaut, and translated by A. M. Buchanan ( New York : Ben-
ziger Brothers. $1.25 net), the author offers for our instruction
reasons for not only willing endurance of that which we cannot
avoid, but even a joyful acceptance of the great and small sorrows
that beset our path. Analytical chapter headings, or an index,
would greatly facilitate the study and use of this volume.
FOREIGN PUBLICATIONS.
L'Atheisme et L'Existence de Dieu, by Abbe E. Catteau. (Paris: Pierre
Tequi. 2frs. 50.) This treatise deals in a popular manner with the causes and
consequences of atheism, and the classical proofs of the existence of God.
There is nothing strikingly original in the author's treatment of these two
questions.
La Femme Chretienne et La Souff ranee, by Abbe H. Morice. (Paris:
Pierre Tequi. 2/rj.) The Abbe Morice in his preface says: "If there is
one moment when the preacher of the Gospel should be silent and allow the
Savior to speak, it is when suffering overwhelms the soul." The Abbe, true to
this dictum, lets the Lord Himself teach us in these papers the mystery, value,
and purpose of suffering in the divine plan.
Soyons Apotres, by Monseigneur J. Tissier. (Paris: Pierre Tequi. 3frs. 50.)
This book is a reprint of twenty-four sermons published in 1901 by the Abbe
Tissier, who is now Bishop of Chalons-sur-Marne. They are all earnest and
eloquent appeals for a lay apostolate to combat the active anticlericalism of
modern France. This is the thread that unites such varied subjects as the
Social Question, the Soldiers of France, St. Anthony, and the Seven Words
of Our Lord on the Cross.
Introduction a I'Union Intime avec Dieu, by Abbe R. Dumas. (Paris:
Pierre Tequi. 3/rj.) This is the third edition of the well-known commentary
of the Abbe Dumas. The author brings out in clear relief the spiritual doctrine
of The Imitation of Christ, one of the best books of devotional reading we
possess outside the Sacred Scriptures. It will prove invaluable to priests who
are called upon to direct souls, and to give retreats to religious.
Retraites Fermees, by Abbe Henri Le Camus. (Paris: Pierre Tequi.
2 frs.) The Abbe Le Camus, Director of Maison de Retraite of Our Lady of
Good Counsel in the diocese of Arras, France, has written an excellent retreat
manual. He describes to the most minute details almost too minute, we think
the exercises of a retreat, and gives some excellent suggestions to spiritual
directors.
Madame de Cosse-Brissac, by Dom M. J. Couturier, O.S.B. (Paris: Pierre
Tequi. 3/ry.) Dom Couturier has written a life of Mother St Louis de
Gongaza, the foundress (1830) and prioress (1830-1870) of the Benedictine Con-
vent of Crayon. Her father was a noble of Louis XVI.'s court, who was exiled
during the French Revolution. He lived with his daughter in Germany and
Russia until the Restoration. Madame de Brissac was not a mystic like St.
Gertrude or St. Teresa, but a devout self-sacrificing religious. Her great love
VOL. xcvin. 53
834 NEW BOOKS [Mar.,
for the poor, and her zeal for Christian education, make her life well worth
reading.
Sur Mon Chemin, by Rene La Houlette. (Paris: Pierre Tequi.) These
short "stories and poems in prose," as the author styles them in his sub-title,
are most charming in their naive simplicity and quaint humor. Some of
the child stories are particularly touching and attractive. He tells of one
youngster in an orphanage who, hearing at Christmas time from the good nuns
that the Infant Jesus was cold, gets up in the middle of the night and puts his
own clothes on the Infant lying in the crib. In another story you will wonder at
first why the good Catholic deputy accepts so readily the challenge to a duel
given by his radical opponent. But your wonder will cease once you discover
that the duel is to consist in their both nursing some cholera patients in a Paris
hospital. Some of the best poems in prose are Souvenir d'Aoste, Avant le
Prin temps, and La Cigale.
Le Miracle et ses Suppleances, by Abbe E. A. Poulpiquet, O.P. (Paris:
Gabriel Beauchesne. 3frs. 50.) The Abbe Poulpiquet has written a scholarly
philosophical treatise on the apologetic value of miracles, which, as the Council
of the Vatican declared, were, together with the argument from prophecy, the
chief criterion of divine revelation. He discusses miracles in their relation to
determinism and the contingency of natural laws, in their social aspect, and in
their relation to the supernatural order. The author, as usual, continually quotes
St. Thomas to support his assertions.
Mission et Vertus Sociales de l'pouse Chretienne, by Abbe F. Lefevre.
(Paris: Pierre Tequi. 2/rr. 50.) If some of the women who are to-day dress-
ing so outrageously and dancing so immodestly, knew French enough to read
the present volume, they might possibly become ashamed of themselves. The
author writes simply and earnestly, and paints a good picture of the perfect type
of Christian womanhood.
Histoire de I'Apparition de La Salette, by Abbe Louis Carlier. (Tournai:
Les Missionaires de La Salette. 7 frs.) This history of the apparition of the
Blessed Virgin of La Salette does not merely repeat what former historians
have written, but is compiled in great part from unedited manuscripts belonging
to the Abbes Perrin, Lagier, Champon, and Bossan. It is divided into three
parts, viz., the history, the authenticity, and the consequences of the apparition.
The interest of this volume is enhanced by scores of excellent illustrations.
Manuel de Sociologie Catholique, by Chanoine P. Poey. (Paris: Gabriel
Beauchesne. 5 frs.) Canon Poey has written the best manual of sociology we
have ever read. It comprises four sections, which treat respectively of social
organization, social or political economy, social morality and social action.
Every question that confronts the social student of our day is treated in these
illuminating pages, whether it be race suicide, alcoholism, Socialism, the
morality of strikes and trade unionism, or the value of workingmen's retreats.
Our social workers will gladly welcome it in an English translation.
jforefon jperfobfcals*
The Epistle to the Romans. By Rev. J. MacRory. What
were the occasion and the object of the writing of this Epistle?
One view, widely held and going back to as early as St. Augustine,
is that St. Paul thought that the Roman Christians had erred re-
garding the gratuitousness of their justification. But the existence
of such an error on a point of faith in the Roman Church, fifteen
years after its foundation by St. Peter, would be exceeding strange ;
had it really existed the Prince of the Apostles would himself
have corrected it. Besides, such error would have been inconsis-
tent with the exceptional and repeated praise which St. Paul gives
to this church. Nowhere in his Epistle does he even allude to
such an error; rather he seems to apologize for writing to the
Romans, implying that no Epistle was necessary. The view of the
Tubingen school, opposing a Pauline to a Petrine conception of
Christianity, is so generally admitted to be a myth as not to deserve
serious consideration. The occasion was probably only St. Paul's
desire to get in touch with the church in Rome, which he desired
exceedingly to visit, and this letter would serve as a sort of intro-
duction. Written during the three months' stay at Corinth, it
could be conveyed to Rome by one of the Deaconesses of Cenchrae,
who was about to journey thither. Its theme was not a complete
exposition of the Christian faith, but such a confirmation and de-
fence of it as seemed most necessary and useful for the Romans.
Irish Theological Quarterly, January.
Divorce in Italy. By Vicomte Combes de Lestrade. The
Italian government has never officially sanctioned divorce. The
courts, however, have been only too ready to declare marriages null,
with little or no inquiry into the facts of the case, and little or no
concern for legal prohibitions. Some unhappy spouses have gone
to France, and acquired citizenship there, in order to secure their
divorce decree, but this required generally ten years, and at least
three years actual residence in France. Others acquired citizenship
in Hungary, which can be done without leaving Italy, simply
becoming the adopted child of a Hungarian. As there is no
limit to the number of children one may adopt, unscrupulous Hun-
garians entered into this nefarious cooperation as a business. It
8 3 6 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Mar.,
was not, however, so easy for the Italian to regain his Italian
citizenship. The law of 1911, however, allows him to do this if,
after three months, the government does not oppose his action.
In such ways is divorce being thrust upon a nation which, as a
nation, does not desire it. Le Correspondent, January 25.
Was St. Peter at Rome? By E. Vacandard. In 1900 M.
Guignebert published a volume attacking the belief, undoubted till
the rise of Protestantism, that St. Peter was in Rome. M. Paul
Monceaux in the Revue d'histoire et de litterature religieuse, second
series, 1910, vol. i., p. 216 ff., has discussed this book in detail,
and in M. Vacandard's opinion conclusively refuted its claims. The
present article is but a summary of that by M. Monceaux. Every-
one admits that at the end of the second century the tradition as to
the coming of St. Peter to Rome and his death there, was firmly es-
tablished. We have the testimony of Denys of Corinth, Irenaeus,
Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, Caius ; these references
show that in spite of local pretensions, and the rivalry of the
churches, the belief was held in Greece, Asia Minor, Gaul, Egypt,
northern Africa, and Rome. An exposition of these testimonies fol-
lows. The conclusion is that the tradition is not only the least im-
probable of all the explanations offered, but could not have so soon
arisen and become so widely spread had it not been based on fact.
Revue du Clerge Franqais, January 15.
Spontaneous Generation. By Dr. Robert Van der Elst. An
English scientist, Charles Bastian, writing in the Revue Sdentifiqne
for September 27, 1913, claimed that in tubes closed and heated
to one hundred and forty-five degrees centigrade, he had obtained
by spontaneous generation a living mould; thereby he argued the
conclusions of Pasteur were disproved, and vitalism and even spir-
itualism overthrown. It is to be noted, however, that, in medical
practice, for example, wherever living germs appear, surgeons al-
ways conclude that the preceding sterilization had not been complete.
Mr. Bastian has not proved that his solutions were sterile ; no one
knows the degree of heat absolutely incompatible with life. Even
admitting spontaneous generation, vitalism and spiritualism are
tenable. St. Thomas believed in spontaneous generation, yet saw
therein no inconsistency with true philosophy or with Catholic
faith. Even if the fortuitous gathering of inorganic atoms should
prove to be the sufficient condition, the occasioning or even deter-
1914-] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 837
mining cause of an organized being, the efficient and the final cause
of its life would still be elsewhere. As for man, even admitting
the evolution of his body from that of the brute, as well as the
brute's coming spontaneously from non-living matter, the question
as to the origin of his principle of life and of thought would still
remain. Science has in no way disproved Genesis. Revue Pra-
tique d'Apologetique, January 15.
The Conversion of St. Augustine. By H. Lesetre. The story
of St. Augustine, and particularly his conversion, as portrayed in
the recent excellent biography of M. Louis Bertrand, has a very
timely interest. The society in which he grew up, resembles in
many points our own. His father was an unbeliever; his mother,
whose influence on his childhood was strong, an ardent and intel-
ligent Christian. The boy had not, however, received any of
the Sacraments, not even baptism, when called to meet the tempta-
tions of life. A pagan education, evil friendships, unrestrained
passions, immoral plays, false science, pride led him away from
virtue and truth. But he never totally forgot his earliest Christian
impressions, and their power was strengthened by St. Monica's
prayers. The Hortensius of Cicero and the works of Plato; the
influence of friends who were or who became Christians; the
preaching of St. Ambrose; his own thought; meditation on the
Scriptures ; the acquiring of humility ; and the practice of prayer
these brought him back and made him a Saint. Revue Pratique
d'Apologetique, January 15.
The Month (February) : Anna T. Sadlier presents the char-
acter and work of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, who did so much by his
writings, speeches, and political activity to bring about a united
Canada. A loyal Catholic and passionately devoted to the Irish
cause, he full deserved the panegyrics uttered after his untimely
and cowardly assassination on April 6, 1868. The land ques-
tion in Tuscany, says Edith Cowell, is solved by the mezzadria
system, wherein the proprietor supplies the capital, and the initia-
tive, and the peasant the labor, while the profits are divided equally
between the two. A beautiful picture of the peasant character,
largely the product of this system, which is not unlike the feudal,
is then given. It encourages stability, family life, and pleasant
relations between master and man, but it is not suitable save where
intensive cultivation, especially of fruits and grapes, is practised, and
838 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Mar.,
where the workers are suitably housed. Rev. Sydney F: Smith
echoes the Bishop of Zanzibar's question, " What does the Anglican
Church stand for?" As regards the reunion of the Eastern
Churches with the Catholic, Father Smith notes that politically the
prospects are far from encouraging. In Russia particularly, how-
ever, there is a growing dissatisfaction with the present condition
of the State Church, which is being somewhat helplessly resisted
by the civil government. The inhabitants of Ukraine, who feel
strongly that they, not the Muscovites, represent the nucleus of
the empire, have Uniat sympathies, and remain in schism only under
compulsion.
Irish Ecclesiastical Record (February) : In A Short Study on
a Great Subject, the Rev. William A. Sutton, S.J., notes how'
falsified history, such as that of Froude, is gradually disproved,
and serves only to enhance the glory of God's kingdom upon earth.
The Rev. T. Gogarty submits to a searching criticism, a recent
pamphlet by Rev. Hugh Jackson Lawlor, of Trinity College, who
undertook to prove continuity between the Anglican bishops in
Ireland to-day and the Irish pre-Re formation bishops.
Irish Theological Quarterly (January) : Rev. Charles J. Cal-
lan, O.P., publishes the first of a series of articles on What is Faith,
here considered as an act rather than as a habit. Rev. J.
Kelleher continues his studies on Land Reform. Rev. Matthew
A. Power, S.J., writes on the nature and the works of the devil,
and his testing of our Lord as seen in Matt. iv. 3. Rev. Garrett
Pierse calls attention to The Scriptural Theories of a Forgotten
Father of the Irish Church, namely, St. Aileran the Wise of
Clonard, who died there about the year 664. Only a fragment of
his work is extant, and that concerns the mystical interpretation of
the genealogy of our Lord. It is in the exegetical style of Origen,
whom the Saint everywhere cites, and " for its penetration and
erudition, concentrated on a special point of Scripture, resembles
a German monograph of modern days."
Le Correspondant (January 10) : M. Andre points out how
Wagner has changed the story and the character of Parsifal from
that presented by the thirteenth century poet, Wolfram von Eschen-
bach. The changes, he believes, are all for the worse. The whole
second act of the temptation by Kundry is new; the third is an
1914.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 839
unworthy travesty of our Lord and the repentant Magdalen; and
the meaning of the Eucharist is perverted into a defence of vege-
tarianism. Thus the whole Christian lesson is lost, and a purely
naturalistic explanation of redemption substituted. The publica-
tion of the spiritual correspondence between the late Abbe Fremont
and a convert of his from Protestantism begins in this issue.
M. de Teincy, in a study of American novels, devotes especial
attention to those by James Lane Allen, Gertrude Atherton's Sena-
tor North, Mr. Harrison's Queed, Mrs. Wharton's Fruit of the
Tree, and Vaughan Kester's Prodigal Judge. G. Baguenault
de Puchesse contributes a brief appreciation of the late M. Louis
Branchereau, the noted Sulpician teacher and author.
(January 25) : G. Lechartier reviews the collected works of
Cardinal Mercier, and praises his double apostolate, the formation
of minds through the neo-scholastic philosophy which he inaugu-
rated at Louvain, and the formation of characters through his re-
treats, sermons, and pastoral letters. Fortunat Strowski por-
trays the character of Bernardine de Saint Pierre, now remembered
only as the author of Paul and Virginia. The city of Havre, his
birthplace, is about to celebrate the centenary of his death. He was
in turn a traveler, an engineer, a mediocre writer lifted to fame by
this one poetic romance, a ridiculous scientist; an egoist and, until
converted in his old age by his very young wife, an opponent of
the Church.
Revue du Clerge Franqais (January 15) : J. Riviere traces
through the pagan and Jewish religions, the ideas which have
seemed to be a providential preparation for the Redemption, those,
namely, of social solidarity and of vicarious expiation of sin.
A. Bros reprints a paper read at the Congress of Religious Eth-
nology held at Louvain last year. It considers the explanation of
religion given by Tylor in his famous work on Primitive Culture.
The writer shows that Tylor's investigation was dominated through-
out by philosophical principles; he rejected a priori super-
natural, revelation, miracles, and free will. In advocating the
evolution of humanity, he gave such a definition of civilization as
entirely to exclude religion. He assumed, without scientific proof,
that humanity began in moral and religious barbarism. His reas-
onings were mainly by analogy, one of the most insecure types of
proof. He claimed that the idea of God was developed from the
idea of the soul, but even Durkheim admits the abyss between the
840 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Mar.,
two ideas. Finally, the purpose of Tylor's search was to reduce
all religions to the level of the worship among savages, and to
prove them to be nothing more than systematized dreams, a con-
clusion which perverts facts to suit a system. Charles Calippe
discusses the problem of lodging large families, and the associa-
tions established to solve it.
(February i) : Eug. Evrard and G. Planque begin a history
of Catholic emancipation in England (1782-1791), in this article
going as far as the election of Talbot, Berington, and Wilkes
to the Committee in 1788. M. Gonin describes the purposes,
value, and activities of study clubs for working boys, and Jean
Vezere those of similar clubs for girls.
Etudes Frandscaines (February) : A brief biography of Cov-
entry Patmore is presented by P. Ubald d'Alengon, introducing a
brief critical study of Patmore's two leading ideas, the sacredness
of conjugal love, and the fmiteness of this world, by Paul Claudel.
French translations of Toys and Legem Tuam DUexi are given.
P. Hippolyte describes the difficulties met in missionary efforts
to evangelize India ; the strangeness of European customs, the op-
position of native priests, and the unworthy examples set by many
Europeans.
Revue Pratique d'Apologetique (January 15) : Clement Besse
describes the half-joking Pyrrhonism or skepticism of Montaigne
directed against the official education of his day. Pascal and Des-
cartes took this system seriously, and applied it to philosophy,
abandoning it, however, at will. The arguments of skepticism
are easily refutable, and to-day retain only an historic interest.
Besides science, " industry, the practical application of theoretic
truths, is the brutal reply to all skepticism as to the validity of the
mind's activity." J. D. Folghera writes on The Kikuyu Affair.
L'Ami du Pretre notes that while the rupture of relations with
the Vatican has had the good effect of uniting French Catholics
more closely with their bishops and the latter with Rome, it has
none the less lowered the social status of the Church, and drawn
away many who are influenced by the favor shown to the anti-
clerical party. F. Pinardel praises an exhibit of the religious
relics of the Revolution in Touraine. It was recently held at Tours,
and was planned and prepared by Abbe Andard of the Petit Sem-
inaire there; some fifteen hundred people viewed the exhibit.
IRecent Events.
In several ways France is in an unsettled
France. condition. The new Ministry's tenure of
office is very uncertain, and it is doubtful
whether it will last until the next general election in May. It is
by its own supporters that it is threatened. The majority of the
Radicals, and the whole of the Socialist Party, are pledged to go
to the constituencies on the platform of ultimate return to two
years' military service. The Finance Minister gave his adhesion
to the same proposal last autumn at the Radical Congress at Pau.
On the other hand, M. Noulens, the War Minister, has committed
himself to the maintenance of three years' service as an imperative
necessity of national defence. The proposals of M. Caillaux to
tax income and capital, will meet with strong opposition in the
Senate, and it is doubtful whether its assent can be secured. The
income tax, of which M. Caillaux is the advocate, is looked upon
by large numbers as so inquisitorial as to be intolerable. It has
been brought to light that the army is by no means prepared to enter
upon a war with its neighbors, in so far as that conflict may be
waged in the air. While strong in aeroplanes, in airships it is
notably inferior to Germany an inferiority sufficient to cause
considerable anxiety. The trade figures of the last year show a
considerable reaction. Their downward tendency is shown by the
fact that while the increase in 1912 was about one hundred and
sixty millions, and in 1911 about one hundred and fifty millions,
in 1913 they fell to ninety millions. The railway returns also
show a substantial decrease. All these facts, combined with the
huge deficit and the non-recurring expenditure on the army, make
it evident that the citizens of the Republic have no light burdens
to bear.
It must be left to those who have an intimate knowledge of
the tendencies of the French electorate, to form an opinion whether
the birth of a son to Prince Victor Napoleon, the Bonapartist
pretender, is likely to add to the list of France's difficulties. It is
interesting to note, however, that the young child just born is a
cousin of the King of Italy, and of the ex-King Manuel of Portugal,
while through his mother, Princess Clementine of Belgium, he is
842 RECENT EVENTS [Mar.,
related to the Duke of Orleans, the Royalist pretender to the
Crown of France.
The Dreyfus case has been recalled to a remembrance by the
deaths of three prominent actors in it. General Picquart was one
of the few men in our days willing to take an unpopular side,
and to suffer for the sake of justice. He became convinced of
the innocence of the accused: for his efforts in support of this
conviction he was imprisoned more than once, and subjected to
military discipline. In the end he won the day, and himself became
for a time Minister of War, and died as Commander of the
Second Army Corps. M. Francis de Pressense, who died the day
after General Picquart, was also an ardent defender of the inno-
cence of Captain Dreyfus. For many years he was the foreign
editor of the Temps, and was highly distinguished in that capacity.
In later years he became an extreme Socialist, after having passed
through a stage of mysticism, during which period he wrote a sym-
pathetic study of Cardinal Manning. Some ten days after died
an ardent assailant of Captain Dreyfus, and a vigorous defender
of General Boulanger M. Paul Deroulede. He too suffered for
his opinions. For an attempt, in 1899, to overthrow what he
called the Parliamentary Republic in favor of a plebiscitary Re-
public, he was sentenced to ten years exile. In 1905 he was
allowed to return to France. The funeral of M. Deroulede was
made the occasion of an impressive demonstration of patriotism.
Crowds thronged the streets, and showed every mark of reverent
esteem for the founder of the Ligue des Patriots. This demon-
stration must be looked upon as a tribute to the man who for
forty-three years was the living incarnation of the French protest
against the Treaty of Frankfort.
The trials of Lieutenant von Forstner and
Germany. of Colonel von Reuter have resulted, so far
as the military legal proceedings are con-
cerned, in a victory for militarism the Lieutenant's conviction hav-
ing been reversed on appeal, while the Colonel was acquitted at
the first trial. But the evidence remains before the world as a
record of the military pretensions, and of its claim to override the
civil authorities. Lieutenant Schad, one of the witnesses, a youth of
nineteen, testified that he had arrested several civilians whom he
suspected of having laughed at the military. He had not seen them
laugh, but suspected it. Wherever he suspected people of laughing
I9M-] RECENT EVENTS 843
he arrested them, and he broke into a house in order to catch one
delinquent in flagrante. One man whom he wished to arrest ran
away; his flight was evidence of his guilt. The Judges of the
Zabern Civil Tribunal had been arrested because they remained
standing after orders had been given to move on. Colonel von
Reuter cleared out his coal cellar in order to have a place of im-
prisonment, and in it he had put without authorization a dozen or
two citizens. For his justification he brought forward a Prussian
Cabinet Order of 1820, which instructs the military authorities to
assume control of public order in case of need. This order was
made when Prussia was sunk in the depths of absolute rule, nor
could it rightly be extended beyond the limits of Prussia. The
Emperor has appointed a commission to inquire into its force at
the present time, and doubtless it will disappear, or be confined
to its proper sphere.
The acquittal of the Colonel by the military tribunal amounts
to a vindication of the claims of the army to supersede the law
by military caprice. There are some who take an even more
serious view of the whole series of incidents. According to them,
they formed a part of a plan to bring on a war with France.
Many officers and some professors are displeased with the pacific
disposition of the Emperor. By ill-treatment of the Alsatians it
was hoped to produce such anti-German demonstrations in Paris as
would lead to war. Disappointed to-day, it is said in France, they
may succeed to-morrow.
The question of military jurisdiction raised by the Zabern
trials, was the subject of debate in the Reichstag and in the Alsace-
Lorraine Diet. In the Reichstag nothing practical resulted. The
moderate parties decided not to provoke either a constitutional or
a Chancellor crisis, although they recorded their opinion of the
military pretensions in an unmistakable way by passing a motion
calling upon the Federal Council to see that the conditions upon
which the military can intervene in police matters, shall be deter-
mined in such a way as to secure the independence of the civil
authority.
The Diet of Alsace-Lorraine passed a resolution deploring the
events at Zabern, and expressing the opinion that the troubles
would have been prevented if Lieutenant von Forstner had been
promptly punished by the military authorities. Colonel von Reuter,
the resolution declared, went far beyond his rights, and guarantees
were demanded that such things should not occur again, and espe-
844 RECENT EVENTS [Mar.,
daily that the law should be absolutely respected by the military
authorities. The Statthalter and the chief Ministers of the Reichs-
land, feeling the acquittal of Colonel von Reuter incompatible with
their retention of office, sent in their resignations. Colonel von
Reuter has been transferred to the command of a grenadier regi-
ment at Frankfurt-on-Oder, while Lieutenant von Forstner has
been removed to Bromberg, which is considered the dullest town
in the Empire, where he will drill Poles instead of Alsatians.
The proceedings of the Prussian Parliament were perhaps
the most significant. In Prussia the army is supreme, and through
Prussia the army aims at ruling Germany. In the Upper House
of the Prussian Diet, a motion was passed requiring the govern-
ment to see that the position due to Prussia in the Empire should not
be broken down. A speech made in support of this motion alleged
that the Reichstag was interfering in all directions, and trying to
increase its own power at the cost of the Emperor, the Federal
Council, and the separate States. There was danger that the Em-
peror might be brought to be like the King of England, a life
President at the head of a Republic. A Vice-President of the
Reichstag entered a solemn protest against these proceedings of the
Prussian Parliament.
Outside Parliament a movement is on foot to secure or to
maintain the ascendency of Prussia. Among its supporters are the
evangelical clergy. As an instance of its extravagant char-
acter, Lieutenant-General von Kracht may be quoted as an ex-
ample. He is reported to have said that during the fighting at
Orleans in 1870, the defeated Bavarians were rescued by some Prus-
sian battalions ; then he added : "That is about my idea of Prussia's
calling. The Bavarians got their breath again. When we come
they recover their courage." In Munich great indignation has been
aroused by what is called these impudent pretensions, and although
the General has offered explanations, a bad impression has been left.
The Emperor has been celebrating his fifty-fifth birthday amid
the acclamations of his people. The value of his life is so
keenly felt that whenever any rumor is circulated that he
is unwell, the Bourse is affected. Doubtless the conduct of the
heir to the throne may have something to do with the uneasiness
thus manifested. In the course of the Zabern affair the Crown
Prince telegraphed to Colonel von Reuter his warm approval. His
conduct has been the subject of debate in the Reichstag, in the
course of which one of the members declared that his pretensions
1914.] RECENT EVENTS 845
were intolerable, and would lead, if continued, to the people of Ger-
many taking their destinies into their own hands. Many seeds
have been sown within the last few r weeks : how they will germinate
and fructify will be an interesting study. It is worthy of note that
the home of militarism and of absolute government is the Prot-
estant kingdom of Prussia. The parts of the German Empire
which are Catholic are also the parts in which more liberal views
are held, and from which the severest criticism of the recent
manifestations has emanated.
No very marked change has taken place in the foreign relations
of the Empire. The Triple Alliance remains as effective as ever.
The Military Mission to Turkey became a subject of discussion with
Russia a discussion which led to a modification of its terms, but
has not resulted in any alteration in the relations of the two Em-
pires. The events that have taken place in Alsace, owing to the
self-control of the French press, have left the governments of the
two countries in their accustomed attitude one to another. With
Great Britain there is no doubt that considerable improvement has
taken place. It is, indeed, true that Mr. Lloyd George's suggestion
of a limitation of armaments met with no favor in Berlin. But the
German Ambassador to Great Britain is making himself almost as
much at home in that country as Mr. Page has done, giving ad-
dresses at public meetings, opening institutions, and presiding on
convivial occasions ; and everywhere he is trying to foster good will
and peace between the two countries a good will which the co-
operation during the Balkan crisis had greatly furthered.
The German government is satisfied with the social and fiscal
condition of the Empire. Social legislation has been brought to
what the Minister of the Interior declares to be " a sort of end."
There has been a wonderful growth of industry, trade, and wealth,
and the position of the working classes has greatly improved.
Wages have risen more than prices. The economic position is so
satisfactory that no tariff changes are desirable. Financially Ger-
many is stronger than ever. This was shown by the fact that the
recent loan for one hundred millions issued by the Prussian govern-
ment was subscribed for sixty times over; while for the Empire
no loan is required. After a series of mistakes in the management
of her colonies, which in extent reach nearly a million square
miles, Germany, according to experienced observers, is adopting a
sober policy of commercial exploitation, which gives prospect of an
era of prosperity. Instead of trying to exterminate the native
846 RECENT EVENTS [Mar.,
races, an effort is to be made to shape them into skillful and in-
telligent workers, and to increase their numbers for the mutual
benefit.
Several questions still remain to be settled
The Balkans. before anything like stability is established
in the Balkans. The first of these is the
possession of the ^gean Islands. These are now, as the result
of the wars between Italy and Turkey, and Turkey and the Balkan
States, in the possession of Italy and Greece. The Treaty of Lon-
don left it to the Great Powers to decide upon the ultimate pos-
sessors of these islands, with the stipulation, or at least the under-
standing, that none of them should be given to any one of their
number. This prevents the retention of them by Italy, which
ranks now as a Great Power. She claims, however, the right to
retain them until compensation is made by Turkey for the expenses
which have been incurred by their occupation. Turkey, however,
somewhat naturally, objects to being forced both to lose the islands
and to pay for losing them. Italy, while not claiming payment
in money, insists on equivalent concession. It is not yet clear
whether this may not prove a cloak for permanent retention.
It was the British government that took the initiative of the
attempt to solve the question. It proposed that, subject to certain
guarantees, the sovereignty of Greece over the islands which she
occupied during the war should be recognized, except in the cases
of Imbros and Tenedos. These, on account of their being at the
mouth of the Dardanelles, are to be restored to Turkey. As for
the islands in the occupation of Italy, the note assumes that
Italy will, as stipulated by the Treaty of Lausanne, duly deliver
them up to Turkey. When this is done the suggestion is made
that these islands shall receive some form of autonomous govern-
ment. The British proposals were supported warmly by France
and Russia, and in their main features by the Triple Alliance.
Turkey, however, was by no means pleased with the proposals
that all the islands in Greek occupation, with the exception of
Imbros and Tenedos, should be handed over to Greece. The two
islands, Chios and Mytilene, which lie within a few miles of the
Anatolian coast, she declared to be necessary for her self-defence.
At a subsequent date, Turkey expressed a readiness to compensate
Greece for the loss of the two last-named islands by the cession
of most of the islands now in the occupation of Italy upon their
evacuation.
1914.] RECENT EVENTS 847
Albania still presents many questions difficult to solve. Its
southern boundary, as drawn by the Powers, leaves more than
one hundred thousand Greeks within the borders of the new State.
Nor is this district yet evacuated by the Greek troops, which res-
cued the district from the domination of the Turks. Small dif-
ficulty is anticipated in securing the evacuation by the troops, but
the Greeks left behind swear by everything sacred that they will
never submit to Albanian rule. Then the question arises whether
the Albanians themselves will submit to any rule. Within the brief
space since their liberation, five or six different and opposed govern-
ments have been established in various parts of the country. The
Provisional Government established some eighteen months ago has
resigned, having given over its functions to the International Com-
mission of Control. In addition to the internal candidates for the
privilege of ruling within this small State, a vessel arrived not long
ago, bringing Turkish soldiers to establish the rule of an external
claimant, the former Turkish War Minister, Izzet Pasha. This
attempt, however, was frustrated by the arrest of all its members,
The Prince nominated by the Powers has not yet arrived, nor,
when he comes, will he find either a capital or a revenue. A
house is being prepared for him at Durazzo. He is said to have
laid down as a condition of his coming, a guarantee by the Powers
of a loan in order that he may enter upon the task of carrying on
the government.
Bulgaria is rent asunder by an internal conflict, the reasons for
which it is hard for outsiders to understand. The misfortunes
of the country are doubtless the predisposing cause. The govern-
ment, after a resignation which showed that its place could not be
supplied, was reconstructed, but was unable to carry on the neces-
sary business. The Sobranye was therefore dissolved, and Bul-
garia is now on the eve of a new election, which may or may not
bring about a more satisfactory situation. A State trial of mem-
bers of the former Stambolovist Cabinet, including General Savoff,
the Commander-in-Chief during the war with Turkey, adds to the
confusion. King Ferdinand himself is not without enemies who
wish for his abdication.
Upon one thing, however, there is complete agreement, an
agreement shared not only by the Balkan States, but by their enemy
Turkey. They all want money, and they are all seeking to nego-
tiate loans.
RECENT EVENTS [Mar.,
The hope that Turkey would cease to be
Turkey. a source of anxiety has been completely
frustrated. If it had been driven out of
Europe, there was some prospect that a common policy would
have been adopted by the Great Powers; but when Adrianople
was left in Turkey's possession, they all became rival suitors at
her gate for concessions of various kinds which they coveted.
The most important of these is that which has been granted to
Germany. As it was at first constituted, to a German General was
given the command of the First Army Corps which has its head-
quarters in Constantinople, and which in fact forms its garrison.
The French and Russian press declared this to be equivalent to the
conferring of an unlimited military dictatorship. So strong was
the opposition offered by the Russian government, supported by
those of France and Great Britain, that Turkey found it necessary
to restrict, in some degree, the powers of the Military Mission.
General Liman von Sanders, its head, will hand over the actual
command of the First Army Corps to a Turkish General, and will
confine his own functions to the Inspector-Generalship of the army,
and of the military schools, with, it is expected, his headquarters
at either Adrianople or Smyrna. The German Chauvinist press
declare this to have been a defeat of German policy. On the other
hand, there are those who declare that the arrangement, even in its
modified form, gives undue advantage to that country. Germany,
in fact, has become a dominating power over the Turkish Empire,
and has thereby departed from the implicit compact which during
the recent crisis restrained each Power from seeking to gain any
special privileges.
Efforts were made sometime ago by Russia and Ger-
many to secure for the Armenians the reforms which
have been so long promised. Their loyalty although when
used with reference to Turkey, to use this word is almost a dese-
crationduring the Balkan War, gave them a strong claim to
consideration. The state of the Armenians is so unsatisfactory
that unless reforms are made, intervention is inevitable. The pro-
posals of Russia and Germany involved, as an essential condition,
an international administration of the districts inhabited by the
Armenians. To this foreign control, however, the Turkish gov-
ernment is unwilling to give its consent. Low as it has fallen,
it will not accept anything that limits its independence. Any pro-
posal that smacks of intervention will be categorically refused.
1914.] RECENT EVENTS 849
Even the modified proposal, that Turkish governors should be
appointed with two European advisers, has not been accepted. All
that Turkey has up to the present been willing to do, is to place
the gendarmerie of that region under an officer lent by the British
government.
The failure so far to secure an acceptance of these proposals,
is doubtless due to the fact that the extreme party, represented
by the Committee of Union and Progress, has gained complete
control of Turkish affairs. The clearest sign of this is the ap-
pointment of Enver Bey to be Minister of War. To Enver Bey's
hardihood and aggressive spirit was chiefly due the re-taking of
Adrianople, as well as the resistance made to Italy in her compaign
in Tripoli. He is said to have at heart the desire to emulate Napo-
leon, a statuette of whom is the object of his daily contemplation.
He is also a warm friend of Germany, and a man of an uncom-
promising military temperament. No sooner had he entered upon
his duties, than he placed upon the retired list some four hundred
and sixty officers, because they did not come up to his standard
of efficiency, although in the number were included Ghazi Shukri
Pasha, the defender of Adrianople, Torgud Shevket Pasha, and
Mahomed Mukhtar Pasha, some of the most distinguished generals
in the Turkish Army.
Another instance of the aggressive spirit recently manifested
by Turkey, is the purchase of a Dreadnought from the Brazilian
government. The extreme anxiety to secure this accession to the
navy is shown by the fact that in order to pay for it,
money was borrowed, for which twelve and one-half per cent
interest had to be paid. The determination to increase the navy is
also shown by the promulgation of a law authorizing the appropria-
tion for one month of all official salaries for the benefit of the
fleet. The desire is not confined to the government, for great
enthusiasm has been shown by the people throughout the Turkish
Empire. Meetings have been held, and large subscriptions col-
lected, for the purchase of a second Dreadnought.
If it is asked what Turkey has in view in this reorganization
of the army and increase of the navy, it may be said, without much
danger of error, that an attack on Greece is contemplated. The
Committee of Union and Progress was born at Salonika, and it
aspires to regain the possession of that city. It is even possible
that Bulgaria may become an ally, although this is denied. The fact
that money is required for such an attempt, and that this can only
VOL. xcvm. 54
850 RECENT EVENTS [Mar.,
be secured to the amount required by the help of France, and that
France is opposed to every such scheme, may interpose an insur-
mountable obstacle to this ambitious proposal. But it would be a
mistake to think that the Ottoman Power is defunct, or even dor-
mant: it is more likely to take the aggressive.
One solid achievement, and one only, may be credited to the
revolution accomplished by the Young Turks. The great delta of
the Euphrates and Tigris was once one of the most fertile districts
in the world, but the desolating rule of the Turk has reduced it
for centuries to a barren desert. The works which had been
constructed in ancient times for the irrigation of this district,
had been allowed to fall to ruins. In 1911 the Turkish, govern-
ment made a contract with an English firm for the construction of
new works. An important part the Hindia Barrage has just
been completed, and was opened amid scenes of great enthusiasm.
When the whole scheme is carried into effect, an area of twelve
millions of acres will be restored to cultivation.
To the surprise of all, the Ministry of Sen-
PortugaL hor Affonso Costa has fallen. The Premier
felt the desire of the President of the Re-
public to consult with men of all parties, in order to find a remedy
for the difficulties in which the country is involved, as an expression
of want of confidence in himself. He accordingly resigned. Sen-
hor Bernardino Machado has accepted the task of forming a new
Cabinet.
With Our Readers.
TO represent evil as good is the traditional mark of satanic ingenuity.
It would be too pessimistic, and too complimentary to the evil
one, to say that in this he had more imitators to-day than ever before,
but he has enough to constitute a real public danger.
* * * *
AND we will mercifully and very gladly temper our remarks at
the outset by saying, that many apparent imitators know not
what they do. Their propaganda is the outcome of short-sighted sen-
timentalism, or of an unreasoning passion for reform, or a very
limited knowledge of human nature and the institutions that basically
and by natural law are the only sureties of human progress. They
will advocate doctrines that are essentially immoral: for example,
they will maintain, as we lately read in a book that is being sold
by subscription in the homes of the nation, that divorce promotes
a healthy family life ; or they will preach, as the honored Dr. Rainsf ord
did lately, that there is no definite truth contained in Christianity
that it is nothing but a " spirit ;" truth being imperialism which the
world long since repudiated freedom democracy which the world is
ready to embrace. Of course, this sort of thing has too apparently the
ring of the modern advertiser, but it does seek to inculcate the false-
hood, that the absence of definite truth is a blessing.
* * * *
AGAIN we might take as an example some words of that sincere
social worker who has unsparingly spent herself in helping the
needy Miss Jane Addams of Chicago. She declares a certain boy's
downfall all too apparently the result of his own viciousness
to be due to society. And she adds with approval, " Our democracy
is making inroads upon the family, the oldest of human institutions."
In her book, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, Miss Addams
maintains that crime is for the most part merely the result of repres-
sing a wholesome " love for excitement " and " desire for adventure."
Miss Addams does not of course wish to preach that it is good for
boys to indulge their vicious tendencies and passions, or that the
extinction of the family is a blessing yet to be brought about by mod-
ern democracy; but all who know human nature will maintain that
both these conclusions will be taken by many as logical and fair
deductions from her premises.
The effect of all such writing is really to represent evil as good.
When such doctrinaire philosophy becomes voluminous and common
852 WITH OUR READERS [Mar.,
as it has to-day, it begins to create an atmosphere; it robs the soul
of its sense of moral responsibility; it is calculated to take every
bit of character and moral backbone out of those who are affected
by it. And 'of these, many do not recognize the process, nor know
whence the atmosphere comes. They take it as the normal condition.
They have heard certain phrases ; certain sententious pronouncements,
and they accept them as if they were first principles. The last thing
they think of is to go back of them and look a bit deeper or higher.
These conclusions of the " new morality " are as incontrovertible as
the dogma of evolution. No one who wishes to be up-to-date, or keep
abreast of modern social progress, would think of questioning them.
* * * *
THE misrepresentation, the falsehood of which these pronounce-
ments are guilty, is that they lift responsibility from the individ-
ual soul, where alone it can rightly be placed, and put it upon environ-
ment or heredity, or a special class or society in general. Instead
of leaving clean-cut the distinction of good and of evil; of God's
law and man's responsibility; of freedom to mount to the unselfish
and the upright; or to sink to the selfish and the unworthy, they ob-
literate all distinction, destroy freedom, and make good the evil ten-
dencies and the consequent evil deeds of human kind.
To show how prominent has become the doctrine that criminals
are the necessary product of society, we need but mention the fact that
it recently received a public rebuke from a New York Judge of the
Court of General Sessions. He said:
I cannot agree with those who call the gangster the product of social con-
ditions. What more can be done for these boys than has been done? They will
not obey their parents ; they will not go to school ; they cleave to the doc-
trine that the world owes them a living, which means of course without
working.
* * * *
TO teach that democracy is to enter in, and in some mysterious way
supersede the family, would be laughable, if it were not in
line with the vogue of the day the shifting of responsibility off our
own shoulders and on to somewhere or someone else, even if it be
a very impersonal thing like society. Parents are led to ease up
on their rigid sense of parental responsibility; to lessen their esteem
of the home; to believe that in some way old ideals have lost their
efficiency; that the present home or what is left of it is to dis-
appear, and modern democracy, as represented by an increasingly
paternal state, is to supplant it. What healthy tradition of home can
parents so influenced give to their children? And can the state later
on fairly object if it has added millions to care for as the result of
neglected homes, when it now permits the preaching of these home-
destroying falsehoods?
1914-] WITH OUR READERS 853
A NOTHER point well worthy of consideration is that these inno-
-tl cent propagators of fundamentally erroneous teachings are giving
a handsome cloak to many who are really evil at heart, or who at
least unscrupulously appeal to the worst passions in man in order
to make money. Human nature has, for the most part, still enough
good in it to ask for a virtuous pretext. Therefore these unscrupulous
ones will always offer their wares under a pretense of good. It is
doubtful if the American public would allow their nefarious work to go
on as freely and as extensively as it does, unless they had been first
prepared by the inconsequent talk of those who are unquestionably
worthy and sincere. The laws would have been more strictly enforced,
or there would have been a stronger, healthier sentiment back of the
laws.
* * * *
WE have this fearful condition to face to-day a deliberate propa-
ganda of immorality, of evil and indecency, all presented under
the appearance of good. A sincere generation, no matter how evil
it might be, would not have such a terrible problem to face. Our
fathers did not have it; for them evil was evil, sin, sin; good was
good, virtue, virtue. But to-day, under the specious arguments be-
gotten of the lust for money and for pleasure, we are taught, and our
children are taught, that virtue and vice are interchangeable terms.
There is no source of money-making which these unprincipled
deceivers have neglected. In the cheap magazine they publish pic-
tures under the guise of art, which are purposely designed to appeal
to and excite the prurient curiosity of readers. They print stories
wherein the authors use, of set purpose, situations and descrip-
tions thinly veiled, but all the more suggestive and harmful because
they are veiled; and at the end they make the story good, and
defend their evil purpose by tacking on a worthy motive. In this
manner they pervert the right sense of their readers, and cloud the
issue with sentimentalities and artificial problems, till the readers
believe that they have in all truth a fair case against the laws of nature
and of God.
* * * *
IN the theatre they present under the pretense of instruction,
of " saving from ruin," of " uplifting," of " promoting a right
sex knowledge," plays and moving pictures that are nothing else
than vile, indecent productions. They who present them are consciously
playing upon the evil tendencies, the evil passions which many seek
to indulge, and in order to be allowed to present these things to the
public and make money, they maintain with apparent righteous in-
dignation that they are actuated by the purest of motives and the most
unselfish of purposes. They so argue their defence in court when
854 WITH OUR READERS [Mar.,
they are arrested and their plays prohibited. And there are not want-
ing those among us, possessing honored names, who are willing to
defend these purveyors of iniquity, these forerunners of social disaster.
By means of the stage, the magazine, the book, even by organized
societies, evil is being propagated under the semblance of good.
The public taste has become debased; many feel helpless in the
face of it ; others surrender with indifference, and simply say it is the
accepted thing. Meanwhile the evil is affecting the young; robbing
them of all inspiration and of all freshness: poisoning their souls,
and making it impossible for them to fit themselves to be the fathers
and mothers of a strong, worthy race of men and women.
* * * *
A GAINST this present-day curse of making evil good, every clean,
1\ God-fearing soul should exert itself with all its powers. Catho-
lics should be in the vanguard; and we may greatly pride ourselves
that we have been, for through the weekly and monthly press, from
the pulpit, the confessional, through organizations of large member-
ship, warning and protest and appeal are constantly going forth. No
one has any doubt where the Catholic Church stands, and if any of
her children fail in what she asks, they know at least that they are
false to her and to her teachings. Publicly and privately Catholics
ought to give the preeminently effective help of their personal example,
by always standing for the good: by condemning with emphasis the
evil. In this matter there is no compromise between Christ and the
world. Catholics should generously support first of all those move-
ments, headed by the bishops of the country, that seek to promote
a truer, stronger sense of public morality; and also as citizens they
should give their assistance and active cooperation to all public move-
ments, legislation, etc., which have a like end in view.
It is necessary and proper for us to encourage every effort that
is directed against this modern curse, even if the effort should not aim
as high as we might desire. We live in a country that is not Catholic ;
our separated brethren have not been taught and instructed, nor in
many cases have they the same rigid moral sense demanded by our
Church. We should be willing to make allowance for their point of
view : for the differences that must inevitably exist. Our plan should
be not to antagonize but to win: to show that we are the leaders
in all things that make for public morality, but to neglect none of the
agencies that are willing to work for it.
* * * *
PHE proper attitude is well expressed in the Bulletin recently issued
by the Catholic Theatre Movement inaugurated by His Eminence
John Cardinal Farley.
In a most subtle manner, and under many guises, indecency upon the stage
1914.] WITH OUR READERS
is exploited and made profitable. There are those who steal the livery of heaven
in which to serve the devil, and with specious pretexts put forth a propaganda
in behalf of doctrines subversive of morality and religion. So insidiously are
such positions assumed, with attractive shibboleths like " art for art's sake,"
that Christians of intellect and position are often deceived. It is only neces-
sary to uncover and expose such positions to make clear the ground that in
self-defence must be occupied, not alone by Catholics, but by men and women
of all religious beliefs, who have only to see clearly the common danger in
order to realize their common obligation.
The cordial reception and the promise of cooperation made by
the secular press of New York, when the Bulletin first appeared, is
a happy sign of how strong the desire is in all quarters for definite,
intelligent leadership, and an index of what Catholics may achieve
in restoring a right public sense if they give the generous and unquali-
fied support asked by Cardinal Farley, and share with His Eminence
the desire that all God-fearing people will cooperate with the Move-
ment.
* * * *
T EADERSHIP cannot be successful unless it be animated by a real
JLv Catholic charity, and by intelligent judgment and experience. In
our zeal to condemn everything unworthy, to keep our standards high,
we must not allow zeal to become bigotry, nor lay down impossible
standards. In this matter of amusement the example of the Church is
our best guide. She, under the guidance of God, has dealt with the chil-
dren of Adam for two thousand years. She knows them well, and
she knows how to lead them to Christ and to God. She is the Mother
of infinite love, and therefore of infinite patience. She possesses in its
fullness not only the gift of wisdom, but also of temperance. Critics
who have thought themselves more zealous than she for the cause of
God, have sought to teach her a better way, but they have only
brought failure on themselves and upon others. They have been so
stern as never to allow any indulgence to the children of men. Natural
enjoyment, the spontaneity of youth, the delights of poetry and art
these things must be crushed, they have said, because they so easily lead
to evil. The Church has ever stood against such puritanism. The
classics of the world, in spite of the possible and actual evil which
they contain, were by her preserved, and by her courageously given
to her children. She knows well that her children must and should
play, and she would have them play, so long as they play, " round
the foot of the Cross." To adopt a spirit other than hers, with its
divine sympathy with the natural good appetites and desires of men,
is to court disaster. It is to beget a surface morality to sow the
seed whence hypocrites are born. Our Mother the Church would
have us her free and frank and honest children.
8 5 6 WITH OUR READERS [Mar.,
more we study her spirit, the more will we grow in knowledge
1 and in the power of guidance. The stronger and more effective our
appeal will be to those of our own household, and those without, to
enlist themselves in her cause.
We have seen of late lists of books and lists of plays prepared
by Catholics, which do not seem to bear testimony to this
spirit of our Holy Church. These lists have thoughtlessly grouped
with the absolutely unworthy, books and plays that, while
not all a Catholic might ask or desire, still are not bad. They do
not line up with that propaganda of evil under the guise of good.
The authors have evidently nothing but a worthy purpose. They do not
cater to indecent taste or prurient curiosity. Yet here they find their
works listed with productions that are unspeakably bad. And the
result is that sometimes such authors, instead of being encouraged
in their good work, are led to say, " If I have the name I may as well
have the blame." More deplorably still, right judgment is clouded even
among the Catholics for whom the lists are intended ; and a standard
is placed on paper to which nobody lives up, unless he studies to lead
a life that follows the counsels of perfection. Upon outsiders the
whole value of such a list is lost. Discrimination does not mean weak-
ness: still less must it mean intolerance. We have spoken much of
the dangerous teaching of the day to call evil good. Let us not, in the
ardor of our protest, forget the profound sentence of a Catholic poet
and philosopher, Coventry Patmore, " When the tempter can no
longer persuade us to our destruction by representing unclean things
as clean, he perpetually harasses us, and endeavors to delay our pro-
gress by representing clean things as unclean." To call good evil is a
worse crime than to call evil good, because it is a crime against the
Divine Love, as well as against the Divine Light. There is no more
difficult work than this of leading souls to higher standards of vision :
it requires all the intelligence and study all the charity, also that
brave men and women can bring to it.
A M ERIC A has had its Kikuyu apportionment, only that it did not
Tl deal with Africa, and no Episcopalians took part. It was held in
New York, and was participated in by Baptists, Presbyterians, Metho-
dists, and Disciples of Christ. Mexico is the field of operation that was
divided into different zones, and then apportioned to the different de-
nominations. No denomination is to permit its workers to labor or
gather any harvest outside of its particular zone. Cooperation and effi-
ciency are to go even further than this, for schoolhouses, hospitals,
printing presses, and even theological seminaries are to be made com-
mon; or if that is impracticable, handed over to the use of the denomi-
nation that rules the zone in which they are situated. No one can object
1914.] WITH OUR READERS 857
to such a plan of campaign on the part of the Protestant denomina-
tions. Granting the principle of private judgment, it is a perfectly
logical way to proceed. The economic wisdom of the age can teach
us much ; and why waste our forces by sending two rival agents where
one will do? Only it must be remembered that for business success
the goods offered must be genuine, and how can goods be genuine
when the managers of different firms have sacrificed their own stand-
ards, compromised, and bartered the essential qualities for the pur-
pose of cooperation?
* * * *
MOREOVER to exclude, no matter for what purpose, the preaching
'of any brand of Christianity from a particular territory or
people, and to force, by implication at least, that territory and people
to accept a particular interpretation of Christianity, is sadly at odds
with the long-boasted principle of Protestant liberty. Indeed it is not
liberty at all; it is tyranny. When the work has been accomplished
and great success achieved, will not the problem that such conferences
endeavor to solve be greater than ever? In one zone there will be
thousands of Baptists; in another thousands of Methodists; in an-
other Presbyterians ; in another Disciples of Christ, all thoroughly
trained by these pioneer missionaries, and made fast in the faith de-
livered to them. They will be sincerely attached to the Church to
which they owe the light, and which has given them salvation.
Surely from such admirable fidelity to different standards, there
must result honest differences that cannot be broken down unless the
believers are asked to give up all or part of what they were first
taught to be the word of God. So far, therefore, as Christian unity
is concerned, its condition, presupposing the success of these efforts,
will be worse than before. Even during the time of its solution,
and while this generous campaign of mutual sacrifice is being carried
out, what will a newly-made Methodist do when he transfers his home
to Baptist territory? Must he begin all over, or will he be made a
member of the Baptist Church and allowed to retain his Methodism?
Surely the whole question bristles with serious problems for the
honest Christian.
* * * *
TT would be well indeed for these representatives of our separated
I brethren to consider well their responsibility simply as American
citizens. The Mexican situation as it stands, is sufficiently delicate
and critical without adding to the confusion. The nations to the south
of us have surely had enough of our boasting, that we are to them the
self-appointed teachers of justice and righteousness and order. What
would Americans, if they were Mexicans, think of such pompous
talk as this :
858 WITH OUR READERS [Mar.,
There is a deal of quiet talk among informed persons that the real task
in Mexico rests with the American Church rather than with the War or
State Departments. There will never be stable conditions below the Rio
Grande until the people have become enlightened and educated, and infused
with the ideal of a free and intelligent nation.
Every American knows what would be said if any such words
were quoted to us by another nation.
* * * *
'PHE Journal of Race Development for January, 1914, contains a
1 number of articles on Mexico. None is written by a Catholic,
nor does any show sympathy with the Catholic Church. It may be
especially profitable to say some words in review of the articles.
From the paper by Lie. Luis Cabrera, recently Speaker of the
House of Representatives in the Mexican Congress, this oft-forgotten
and really startling truth will be apparent, and it sheds a unique glory
upon Spain and Spanish conquerors. The truth is this they did not
destroy the native race. " Mexico," says the writer, " has no real race
problem." Ninety per cent of the fifteen million inhabitants are of
Indian blood, that is either pure Indians or " mestizos," i. e., mixed.
And " the effects of education upon the native Indians of Mexico
are of a permanent character." We of this country had the problem
of saving and educating a native race. History has chronicled us as
ruthless conquerors. That native race is practically extinct.
* * * *
NEVIN O. WINTER, author of Mexico and the People of To-day,
writes in his paper of the people of Mexico :
They are not inferior to the Anglo-American. They have many inherent
good qualities; they possess some splendid traits of character, which are
difficult to find in the North American. Instead of brusqueness, they have
courtesy; in financial honor they are the equal of our own people.
S. W. Reynolds, formerly President of the Mexican Central
Railway Company, writes:
One must consider that the people in Mexico are no more like ourselves,
naturally, than the people of France, Germany, Spain, China, Japan, or any
other foreign nation, and we must consider their temperament, methods of
life, and of business, their past history, and their personal characteristics in
thinking of and in dealing with them. We would not think of going to Japan
or Germany or Spain and finding conditions or people as we do in the United
States, nor would we expect to reform or change their life and habits to con-
form to our own.
The people of our country have, I think, an entirely erroneous and unjust
opinion of the people of Mexico. While they are unlike us in many ways,
my own experience has found them to be in the main, that is, among the
business people, of high character and integrity, fair and just in their dealings,
and without those barbarous and inhuman proclivities that so many are apt
to attribute to them.
1914-] WITH OUR READERS 859
THE Reverend John Rowland, D.D., President of Colegio Interna-
cional, Guadalajara, Mexico, says:
Democracy still lives in Mexico, not merely enshrined in the hearts of its
people, but as a vital force. When present conditions have been worked out,
the great body of sane, thoughtful Mexican patriots will bring their idolized
country back to her rightful position of respect and confidence. If others will
give Mexico intelligent and sympathetic cooperation instead of misunderstand-
ing, misinterpretation and suspicion, or if they will even let her alone, she
will successfully work out her own salvation.
* * * *
ND finally we quote Rear-Admiral F. E. Chadwick, Chief of
Staff to Admiral Sampson in the Spanish- American War:
A
It is estimated that already in Mexico the population is nineteen-twentieths
Indian. We have thus in our dealings with the regions to the south of us,
to consider powers racially so different from ourselves that our understand-
ing of one another is extremely difficult. The polite and ceremonious South
American of Spanish descent cannot understand our rudeness of manner, our
overbearingness, our want of that courtesy in general on which the Spaniard
lays a stress which the North American mind fails wholly to comprehend.
* * * *
A PROPOS of this proposed extended missionary work in Mexico,
-/i- it is timely and well to call attention to a recent editorial in
The Christian Herald on the work of Theta Phi Alpha Chapter of
Catholic women of New York City, who have planned to give religious
instruction to Catholic school children after school hours. The move-
ment has the approval of Mr. Churchill,' President of the Board
of Education, and Mr. Maxwell, Superintendent of Schools. Refer-
ring to this work, The Christian Herald says:
There is a great object lesson in this, to which the Protestant Churches
of America might well give heed. Religious instruction of children is prohib-
ited in the public schools in a large majority of the States. Our Protestant
Sunday schools, however excellent they may be, are attended by an inconsid-
erable portion of our public school children of Protestant parentage. Religious
instruction at home is still more problematical as a dependence for the
spiritual welfare of the young. The plain truth is that it is largely neglected.
The result of such conditions is that, with the exception of a few denomina-
tions which have their parochial schools in which religious training is a strong
feature, a startling proportion of the children of Protestant parents in this
country are spiritually neglected. The Lutherans have many parochial schools,
and the Episcopalians and possibly a few other denominations, and these are like
spiritual oases in the great desert of neglected American childhood. We
do not regard this as an overdrawn picture. The pity of it is that it is the
truth! Is it a cause for wonder that there should be an ever-increasing
complaint among Protestant Churches of a decline in attendance and a grow-
ing indifference to things spiritual? We spend millions on the heathen in
foreign lands, and it is an excellent work; but how can we justify the neglect
of our own little folks at home, whom we are permitting to grow up to man-
hood and womanhood in ignorance of these vital things that relate to the
86o WITH OUR READERS [Mar.,
spiritual life? How can we expect them to become good citizens and Chris-
tian men and women, unless we provide some system of religious education
for them, worthy of the name?
The Christian Herald is in error when it adds, " We must enter a
solemn protest against this new Catholic scheme to evade the law
and utilize the schools for religious purposes." The Continent, Janu-
ary 29th, states the matter correctly : " Catholic public school teachers
in New York City have formed a league with the purpose of putting
their teaching experience at the disposal of their Church. They have
sent word to the Church authorities that they are prepared to instruct
Catholic children in religion on week days after school hours in parish
churches near their school buildings."
THE following letter of a recent convert to the Faith, written to her
minister, will be of interest to our readers. It has a special value
just now, in view of the fact that events like Caldey and the Kikuyu
compromise are leading many Episcopalians to look to the Church
that has kept intact the definite truth of Jesus Christ.
MY DEAR FATHER:
You will not be surprised, I think, to hear that I have been received
into the Fold of the Blessed Peter. And could you only know how happy I
am and, above all, how sure I am that this step is by Divine Guidance, you
could not have the slightest regret or sorrow through the news. But that.
of course, is something only one's own heart can know in fullness at such
a precious moment, and, indeed, one's heart is far too full for words, even
were it possible to express such transcendent peace and joy such as I have
not believed for a soul to know here on earth.
You know something of my long dissatisfaction, and, at times, distrust
of the Anglican Communion ; and, something too, perhaps, of how, feeling
that this came to me as a temptation, I have fought against disloyalty in any
form, although never able for long to put aside the ardent desire for a Spiritual
Mother whom one could honor more than it seemed one could ever honor the
Anglican no matter how firm one's belief in Anglican Orders.
But, at last, after all the weary waiting for certainty and for the gift
of absolute trust in her, it was all made so suddenly, so sweetly clear to my
soul. And not through reading, or through argument for I have months
ago abandoned both. It has been solely prayer, and its answer which has led
me into this joy whether my own earnest supplications and a daily prayer
to St. Peter, or the loving intercessions of others, and especially of one dear
nun who is very near to our Lord. Or, perhaps, more than all, it was the
intercession of a saintly soul who earnestly desired my conversion, and who
left this life a year ago, for I have been keenly conscious of his prayers,
somewhere, for me.
And so, at last, I have seen the Truth! too clearly, too beautifully sweetly,
to have had, since that day, the suspicion of doubt, or the slightest fear that I
was in any way disloyal to an Anglican Mother. It has been, rather, a perfect
realization that I have found at last my long-waiting and True Mother after
years spent with one who, mistaken in kindness, has endeavored to swamp my
rightful Mother's place in my heart, and who, though giving me all it was
I9I4-] WITH OUR READERS 86 1
within her power to give, could nevertheless not satisfy as a True Mother.
My surrender to her is unreserved, mentally and spiritually. And, oh ! the
unspeakable sweetness of the perfect trust one's soul feels in knowing at last
an Infallible Teacher and Defender of the Faith. No more private judgment in
selecting the Anglican School which best suits temperament and credulity
but the soul simply lost in the Sacred Heart, and all else put into the hands
of those to whom authority was given.
Though long and often weary the waiting for this great moment, I thank
God with all my heart that I have known all the Anglican Communion can give,
both in your parish and in others, even " higher " in teaching and practice.
It makes my certainty irrevocable, and the spiritual joys known heretofore
are as nothing compared with those with which the soul is satisfied within the
safe Fold of Peter. It was only after leaving New York this October, and
finding so many of the Anglican privileges of which I had not only need, but
like the Caldey Fathers, which I could not relinquish, taken from me ("not
for thy harms, but just that thou mightst find them in My arms"), that I began
to see the way Home.
While my spiritual submission has been made for several weeks, it was
only yesterday I was actually received on the Feast of the Holy Name of
Jesus. And myself was given that sweet name of our Blessed Lady, so near
that of my blessed patron, Catherine of Siena (to whom I doubt not that I owe
much in my present joy).
I need not tell you, of course, that Christ Church parish will ever be dear
to me as the place of preparation for the perfect joys which I have found
only the One, True, Holy, Roman Church can give, and that you and the whole
parish will be often in my prayers that you may be " not almost " but alto-
gether as I am to-day.
With a heart full of gratitude for all your many kindnesses,
Faithfully yours in our adorable Lord,
M. K. P. L.
IN the January issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD we published an
article, entitled Canon Sheehan, by John J. Horgan. We regret to
be compelled to state that a large portion of that article was a ver-
batim reprint from an article by the late Father Matthew Russell, S.J.,
which was printed in The Dolphin in 1902 (vol. i., pp. 13-17).
It is needless to say that the Editor of THE CATHOLIC WORLD
knew nothing of this plagiarism when he published the article. Of
the article in the January CATHOLIC WORLD, to which Mr. Horgan's
name was attached, we wish to state that eight lines of page 488
of that issue; all (with the exception of one sentence) of page 489;
all of page 490; about half of page 491, and all of page 494, except the
quotation from Canon Sheehan, were copied word for word from
Father Russell's article.
In answer to our request for an explanation, Mr. Horgan sent us
the following, which in justice to him we publish :
CORK, January 25, 1914.
REVEREND AND DEAR SIR :
Your letters of I2th and I3th received. You are of course entitled to an
862 WITH OUR READERS [Mar.,
explanation as to the similarity between a small portion of my article and
Father Russell's. The explanation is quite simple. In 1905 I was writing a
series of articles for a little Irish paper called C. Y. M., on Catholic Forces.
When I wrote to Canon Sheehan for details of his life, etc., he asked me to
write to Father Russell, to whom he had already given them for the Dolphin
article, and suggested I should get a loan of that article and use as much of it
as I could. I wrote Father Russell, who gladly consented, and sent me the
Dolphin article, which I duly used almost verbatim in the C. Y. M. Father
Russell knew it was Canon Sheehan's wish I should use his article, and I sent
him a copy of the paper at the time. After Canon Sheehan's death the editor
~bf the Irish Monthly (Father Russell's own magazine) asked me to write an
article on Canon Sheehan for the January number. This I did, using part of the
article in C. Y. M. in dealing with details of Canon Sheehan's life, knowing
it was the account he had himself preferred and prepared for Father Russell.
Thinking American readers would like to know something about Canon Shee-
han, I sent it to you, and you cut it down and published it. Most of what you
cut out was my original work, although, of course, that was not your fault.
You will see by enclosed marked copy of the Irish Monthly, which contains the
whole article, how much of the article was mine and how much derived from
Father Russell's article. About three and one-half pages out of twelve are
copied from C. Y. M. (in other words from the Dolphin article which I re-
turned to Father Russell when done with). I could not have got the Dolphin
or known of it save from him, as I did not know of it previously.
You are of course at liberty to make any statement you please in your
magazine, but I trust you will in justice to me state that Father Russell's article
was originally used by me with his knowledge and consent at the request of
Canon Sheehan himself. Yours sincerely,
JOHN J. HORGAN.
In justice to the revered name of the late Father Matthew Russell,
we wish to take exception to a possible inference in this letter. When
Canon Sheehan gave to Father Russell the details of his life, he surely
did not write that part of Father Russell's paper which deals with the
details. Father Russell was not the man to put his name to an article
that he had not written. And when Canon Sheehan directed Mr.
Horgan to use " as much (of Father Russell's article) as he could,"
he claimed no proprietary right to it, but simply wished Mr. Horgan
to learn the facts from it, and then express them in his own way
not surely in Father Russell's way, no matter how excellent that way
was.
TN his recent work, The English Novel, Professor George Saintsbury
traces the origin of Romance to " the marriage of the older East
and the newer (non-classical) West through the agency of the spread
of Christianity, and the growth and diffusion of the Saint's Life."
Professor Saintsbury is treating his subject from a merely secular
standpoint. His added comment is important and interesting. It
might profitably be taken to heart by those who love " literature," yet
know nothing of the biographies of the Saints.
WITH OUR READERS 863
And let it be remembered that these Saints' Lives, which are still infinitely
good reading, are not in the least confined to homiletic necessities. The jejune-
ness and woodenness from which the modern religious story too often suffers,
are in no way chargeable upon all, or even many, of them. They have the
widest range of incident natural as well as supernatural : their touches of
nature are indeed extended far beyond mere incident.
* * * *
''PHIS further comment on much of the work of our own day is very
welcome from a master of the history of English literature such as
Professor Saintsbury. He has been speaking of certain criticisms of
ancient works of some moderns ; then he adds :
And when we are told that they are apt to run too much into grooves and
families, it is sufficient to answer that it really does not lie in the mouth of
an age which produced grime-novels, problem-novels, and so forth, as if they
had been struck off on a hectograph, possessing the not very exalted gift of
varying names and places, to reproach any other age on this score.
'"PHE zealous missionary spirit that is shown by many Councils of
1 the Knights of Columbus, is worthy of special praise. We might
give many evidences of their generous, apostolic mission, but we will
confine ourselves to one that has had remarkable results. The Knights
of Columbus of Evansville, Indiana, under the leadership of Father
Rynes, the pastor of the Church of the Assumption, recently inaugu-
rated and carried out the plans of a city-wide Mission in that city,
which included its nine parishes. Weeks before the opening of the
Mission their activity began. A large hall was engaged; placards
were placed in all the store windows; three thousand special invita-
tions were sent to the prominent non-Catholics of the city; ten thou-
sand announcement cards were distributed in the nine churches, and
the daily press carried notices for two weeks beforehand. When the
Mission opened, and at every service thereafter, the hall was filled to
its utmost capacity. The Mission was conducted by Father Con way
of the Paulist Fathers. An attendance of three thousand, over half of
whom were non-Catholics, continued during the two weeks of the
Mission. Much literature was distributed, including four thousand
copies of the Question Box, and hundreds of The Paulist Press
pamphlets.
The Mission bore extensive fruit, both among Catholics and
non-Catholics. The daily papers were most cordial in giving the lec-
tures due notice, and everyone in the city the population numbers
about eighty thousand was for the two weeks at least discussing
religion 'and the teachings of the Catholic Church.
All expenses of this great work were met by the local Knights of
Columbus, and it is to be hoped that other Councils will imitate this
worthy example of their fellow knights of Evansville.
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