The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Catholic World, Vol. 22, October, 1875, to March, 1876, by Various.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by Rev. I. T. Hecker, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

MR. TENNYSON’S QUEEN MARY.[1]

Mr. Tennyson has achieved a great reputation as a lyric poet. He urges now a higher claim. In the sunset of a not inglorious life, when we should have expected his lute to warble with waning melodies and less impassioned strains, he lays it aside as too feeble for his maturer inspirations, and, as though renewed with the fire of a second youth, he draws to his bosom a nobler instrument, and awakes the echoes of sublimer chords. He has grown weary of the lyric

and with some confidence claims the dramatic bays. Nay, he even invites a comparison with Shakspere. True to the temper of the times, his prestige follows him in so hazardous a competition, the accustomed wreaths are showered upon him with unreflecting haste, and the facile representatives of the most incapable of critics—public opinion—have already offered him that homage as a dramatist which had already been too lavishly offered to his idyllic muse.

It is an ungrateful task to go against the popular current, and it is an ungracious one to object to crowns which the multitude have decreed. But there is no help for it, unless we would stoop to that criticism of prestige which is so characteristic of the age, and would follow in the wake of the literary rabble, criticising the works by the author, instead of the author by his works.

We may as well say, at once, that we have never felt it in our power to acknowledge the poetical supremacy of the English poet-laureate.[2] It has always appeared to us that there is, in his poetry, a lack of inspiration. To borrow a too familiar but expressive metaphor, the coin is highly burnished, glitters brightly, and has the current stamp, but one misses the ring of[2] the genuine metal. He sits patiently on the tripod, dealing forth phrases as musical as Anacreon’s numbers, and as polished as those of a Greek sophist, spiced with a refined humor, which has a special charm of its own. But his soul does not kindle at the sacred fire. We miss the divine frenzy. A passionateness of love of the beautiful does not appear to be the quickening inspiration of his creations. All alike show signs of extreme care and preparation. We do not forget the counsel of Horace. But that only refers to a distant revision of creations which an unchecked genius may have produced under the divine influence. Whereas, Mr. Tennyson’s poetry bears evidence of infinite toil in production. All his thoughts, ideas, and images, down to words and phrases, are too evidently, instead of the happy inspirations of genius, the labored workmanship of a polished, refined, and fastidious mind. They something resemble the tout ensemble of a petit maître who has succeeded in conveying to his dress an appearance of such consummate simplicity and unexceptionable taste that every one notices the result of hours before the mirror. His diction is pure and polished, his phrases simple and nervous, and the English language owes him much for what he has done towards neutralizing the injury inflicted on it by the gaudy phraseology of the “correct” poets, and the antithetical sesquipedalianism of such prose writers as Johnson and Gibbon, and for preserving it in its pure and nervous simplicity. But his soul is dull to the poetic meanings of nature. His natural scenery is rather descriptive than a creation, much as artists, of whom there are not a few, who reproduce with consummate skill of imitation objects in detail, and bestow infinite care upon color, shade, perspective, grouping, and all the other technical details of a picture, whilst comparatively indifferent to the subject, which ought to be the poetic meaning of creations of genius. And what are they but only fruitful manifestations of the love of the beautiful, and echoes of its creative word, not the mere manipulations of an artificer? Mr. Tennyson’s descriptions of nature owe their vividness to the brilliance of word-painting and a certain refined delicacy of touch; sometimes, even, and indeed very often, to a certain quaint humor which is inconsistent with the highest art—it is not a passionate love which regards the object beloved from a ridiculous point of view—as when he describes the willows living adown the banks of a streamlet as “shock-headed pollards poussetting down the stream.”

The sensations provoked by his poetry resemble those of one who has sauntered through a museum of precious stones of rare workmanship and purest water. Our æsthetic taste has been pleased by the glitter and the color and the brilliance, but our mind and heart have not been deeply moved. His poems are ablaze with detached thoughts of lofty meaning, and of a multitude of others whose meaning is not obvious, all alike expressed in vivid imagery, in the purest phraseology, and in rare melody of rhythm. But they are confused and cabalistic. He seems to be always laboring to be incomprehensible. He calls it “the riddling of the bards.” And he succeeds. The problem of the Sphinx, the emblematic warning sent by the Scythians to their Persian invader,[3] the mute counsel sent by the Samian to the Corinthian tyrant, a Delphic oracle, all were clear and easy by comparison with Mr. Tennyson’s lyrics, alike in detached passages and in entire poems. None of woman born can fathom the meaning of the Idylls of the King.

This defect alone is fatal to poetry. So keenly did Spenser feel it that although the meaning of his allegory, The Faerie Queene, is obvious enough to any ordinary intelligence, he is careful to explain it in full in a letter dedicated to Sir Walter Raleigh.

Mr. Tennyson, on the contrary, involves himself in the thickest mystery he can contrive, and expects his worshippers to take it for inspiration. Take the following, for example, from “The Coming of Arthur”:

These are, no doubt, “riddling triplets,” as he himself calls them. The riddling of Shakspere’s fools, even the wanderings from the night of distraught Ophelia’s brain, are light itself by the side of them. We may well echo his invocation of “Sun, rain, and sun! and where is he who knows?” Whatever inspiration may be evident here, it is not that of the beautiful. And yet even this has snatches of meaning which many passages we might adduce have not; as the following, from “Gareth and Lynette”:

It is almost a pity that the bard did not complete his “riddling” while he was about it. Another couplet:

There is no resemblance in this studied concealment of meaning, if meaning there be, to that

of which he sings. It is more like the melodious confusion of the Æolian harp. Even if the poet have a definite meaning in his own mind, if he so express it that I cannot even guess it, to me it is nonsense; and nonsense, however melodious, although it may enchant my sense, cannot move my heart. Here and there, however, our poet sings snatches of real poetry, as Sir Bedivere’s answer to his king in “The Coming of Arthur”:

Upon the whole, Mr. Tennyson excels in a certain underlying vein of exquisitely refined humor. And when his subject admits of it, he is unrivalled. His is the poetry of humor. We would name as examples “The Northern Farmer” and the satirical poem, “Locksley Hall,” perhaps the most vigorous of all his productions; and, of his longer poems, The Princess. It is for this reason we think he is more likely to excel, as a dramatist, in comedy than in tragedy.

If our readers would estimate the full force of our remarks, we would invite them to read the works of any of the principal of our earlier lyrical poets, as, for example, Collins. We name him because he[4] too excels in that melody of versification for which Mr. Tennyson is so distinguished. At times, as in his “Sonnet on Evening,” he surpasses the Laureate in that respect, although for sustained and unfailing rhythmical melody the latter bears away the palm from him, and perhaps from every other rival. But in profound sympathy with nature, in the fidelity of his creations, in the echoes of the beautiful which he provokes within the soul of the reader, the Poet-Laureate must yield to the Demy of Magdalen. Like Shakspere, he peopled inanimate nature with a fairy world, and amongst elves and genii and other dainty spirits he abandoned himself to that power of impersonation which is almost an attribute of a true poet.

Our space does not admit of illustrative quotations, but we would refer the reader inclined to institute the comparison suggested to the elegy over Fidele, in the play of Cymbeline, and to his Eclogues.

Mr. Tennyson’s poetry has beauties of its own peculiar kind of so remarkable and striking a description that we might have hesitated to take any exceptions whatsoever to his poetical genius. But his new poem, his first effort in dramatic poetry, seems to us to set all doubt at rest. It convinces us that, for whatever reasons, of the highest flights of poetic inspiration Mr. Tennyson is incapable. We are convinced that he lacks that which constitutes a great poet. However beautiful his poetry, we feel that it wants something which, however keenly we may be sensible of it, it is not easy either to analyze or explain.

For what is the inspiration of poetry but the echoes of the beautiful within the soul of man? The universe of things is the visible word of God. It is his essential beauty projected by an energy of creative love—the quickening spirit opening his wings over chaos—into an objective existence, on which its generator looked with complacency as “very good,” and which he generated in order that his creature, whom he had made in his own image, might, with himself, rejoice in its contemplation. He did not, at first, endow him with the power of beholding himself “face to face,” but only his reflex. We have the right to believe that, whilst in union with his Maker, he read at a glance the meaning of the word, he felt instantaneously the beauty of the image. His nature, into which no discord had as yet been introduced, uncondemned to the judgment of painful toil, did not acquire charity and knowledge by long and laborious processes, disciplinary and ratiocinative, but by intuition. Incapable as yet of the Beatific Vision, he comprehended the whole of the divine beauty as revealed in creation, and the comprehension itself was a transport of love. He saw, and knew, and loved, and the three were one simultaneous energy of the sonship of his nature. But, as now, “the greatest of these was charity.” It was the result and sum and end of the sight and knowledge. It was the feeling they inevitably and unremittingly occasioned. To speak as we can only speak in our actual condition, it was as those thuds of loving admiration with which our hearts throb when we look upon some surpassing embodiment of innocent and modest female loveliness. When the mind, jealous of pre-eminence, led captive, so to speak, the heart in revolt against the revealed law,[5] the human being was no longer in union with himself, a war of impulses and of energies was set up within him, the image of God was defaced, his perception of created beauty became more and more obscure as he went further away from his original abode of innocence, until, finally, it was all but lost. The emotion, if we may describe it as such, which it was of its nature to suggest, could not perish, for it is imperishable. But it had lost its true object, and surveyed knowledge in a form more or less degraded.

Now out of this very faint and rapid sketch of a psychological theory which would require a volume for its development, we hope to be able to convey some idea, however vague, of the nature of the poetic spirit.

It is certain that the remains of the divine image have not since been alike and equal in all the individuals of the race. It may be asserted, on the contrary, that there are no two human microcosms in which the elements of the confusion introduced into them by the original infidelity exist in the same proportion. Those in whom the intelligence is the quickest to see, and the mind, heart, and soul to love in unison, the image of divine beauty revealed in creation—those, that is, in whom the divine image remains the most pronouncedly—are the truest poets.

When this echo of the soul to the beautiful does not go beyond the physical creation, the inspirations of love express themselves in lyric or idyllic poetry. The poet imitates the divine Creator in reproducing, even creating, images of his lower creation so faithful and suggestive that they who look upon them experience similar sensations and emotions to those provoked within them by the divine creation itself, nay, not unseldom, even profounder ones. He reveals the beautiful in similar images to those in which The Beautiful revealed himself to his creature; he is thus himself a ποιητὴς, or creator, and his work is a ποίησις, or creation. When his forms derive their inspiration only from the inferior creation, they are exclusively some form of idyls or lyrics. But when, soaring above the grosser medium of the merely material universe, and poising himself on wings tremulous with reverent joy at the confines of the invisible, his soul echoes the music of the beautiful issuing from that invisible creation; and that imitative energy which is of its essence, inspired by these reawakening inspirations, calls into being psychical individualities with their precise bodily expression and proper destinies—that is to say, with all the causes and results, ebb and flow, action and reaction, in human affairs, of every volition and energy, he reproduces the highest energy of the divine creative power, he evokes into sensible existence whole multitudes of fresh creatures made in the image of God, and, what is even yet more sublime, he evokes into equally sensible being the particular providence which overrules each and all—the one difference between the two creations being that one is original, the other imitative; one imaginary—that is, merely sensible; the other, not only sensible, but real also, and essential. Yet are the accidents of the former produced occasionally with such extraordinary fidelity that they have sometimes, as in the creations of Shakspere, for example, the same effect upon those who become acquainted with them as if they were in truth the latter.

Who that has ever studied the creations of that immortal dramatist has not them all, from high to low, treasured within his inner being as vividly as any other of his absent acquaintances, whom he has met in society, to whom he has been formally introduced, with whom he has eaten, drank, laughed, wept, walked, and conversed? Has not that remarkable genius transgressed even the imitative faculty—imitative, that is, of all the original creative energy that is known—produced original creations, and peopled the preter- rather than supernatural with beings which have no known existence, but whom nevertheless he surrounds with a distinct verisimilitude which ensures them easy admission into our minds and hearts, which presents them to our senses as concrete beings with as much positiveness, and even as clearly defined individuality, as if they were solid creatures of flesh and bone, and which makes us feel that if such beings did really exist, they would be none other than precisely those he has represented?

Of such sort, we take it, is the highest, or dramatic, poetry. And of it there is a manifest deficiency in this work, which its author terms, indeed, a drama, but which is in fact a tragedy.

Mr. Tennyson has not enough of the divine afflatus to write tragedy. If he has not sufficient love of the beautiful in inanimate nature for his soul to echo to it, and his heart to throb with the sense of it, with the rapidity of an intuition, so as to make unattainable to him the highest excellence in lyric poetry, how much more out of his reach must be a first rank in the tragic drama; where, if anywhere, an intuition of the beautiful amounting to an inspiration is demanded in that supreme creation of God which, as the consummation of his “work” and word, he has embodied in his own substance! In that profound and intuitive perception of the workings of man’s inner being, of the passions, emotions, feelings, appetites, their action and reaction, ebb and flow; of the struggle of the two natures, its infinite variety and play of life, under all conceivable conditions and vicissitudes, with much more than can be detailed here included in these, Mr. Tennyson is strikingly deficient.

In the tragedies of Shakspere, as in all his dramas, the distinct personality of every one of the characters, high and low, is impressed upon us with vivid distinctness. But the principal personages in the tragedies dilate before us in heroic proportions as the portentous struggle progresses. Whether it be King Lear, or King John, or King Richard, or Othello, or Lady Macbeth, or Lady Constance, or the widowed Princess of Wales, or Ophelia, or whoever else, we look on with bated breath, as did the spectators of the boat-race with which Æneas celebrated the suicide of his regal paramour, and we come away at its close a prey to the storm of emotions which the magic art of the island sorcerer has conjured up within us.

But the drama, or tragedy, as we prefer to call it, we read with but languid interest. The psychical struggle is neither very obvious nor very critical, there is no very striking revelation of the sublime beauty or tragic overthrow of human nature, and although the canvas is crowded with figures, not one of them impresses any very distinct image of his or her individuality on our mind[7] and heart. Instead of, as Shakspere’s creations, retaining every one of them as a distinct and intimate acquaintance, whom we may summon into our company at will, we rise from the perusal of Queen Mary without having received any very definite impression of any, even the principal, personages, and we forget all about them almost as soon as we have read the play.

This vital defect in a drama the author has rendered doubly fatal through his having carried his imitation of Shakspere to the extent of adopting his simplicity of plot. Shakspere could afford to do this. The inspired verisimilitude of the struggle of the two natures in every one of his human creations, the profoundness of his development of the innermost working of the human microcosm, often by a few master-touches, surround every one of his dramatis personæ with all the rapt suspense and sustained interest of a plot. Every one of his characters is, as it were, a plot in itself. But it is quite certain that Mr. Tennyson—and it is no depreciation of him—has not this power. He has, therefore, every right to call to his aid the interest of an elaborate plot, which itself would also, we think, cause him to develop more vividly his characters. It is in this the late Lord Lytton, whose poetical pretensions are very much below Mr. Tennyson’s, achieved whatever success he had as a dramatist. Mr. Tennyson has not to depend on this solely, as was very nearly the case with Lord Lytton, but it would contribute very much to a higher success. The great dramatist he is unwise enough so avowedly to imitate peoples the simplest plot with a whole world of stirring destinies. He moves his quickening wand, and lo! as by the master-will of a creator, appear a Hamlet or a Malvolio, a Lady Macbeth or a Goneril or Miranda, an Ariel or a Caliban, contribute their precise share to the history, which would not have been complete without them, and then disappear from the scene, but never from our memory. A magic word or two has smitten them into it, and they live for aye in our mind and heart. His heroes and his heroines he clothes with such a majesty of poetry that we watch anxiously with bated breath their every gesture, word, or look; we cannot bear their absence, until, entranced into their destiny, and half unconscious, we watch them disappear in the catastrophe, our ears are blank, all voices mute, the brilliant theatre is the chamber of death, and they who, to us, were but now living flesh and blood, in whose destinies our innermost soul was rapt, have passed away, amidst a tempest of emotions, and are no more.

But Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, either of the two great classic epics, or any striking historic passage in even so ungraphic a writer as Lingard, is more dramatic than this drama. The feeble plot gives birth to feebler impersonations. They come and go without making any deep impression upon us, or seizing our attention by any striking originality. Their features are indistinct, their actions insignificant. They are bloodless and colorless. They are ghosts, things of air, whom a feeble incantation has summoned from their slumber, who mutter a few laborious Spartanisms in a renewed life in which they seem to have no concern, and vanish without provoking a regret, nor even an emotion. We observe in them such an absence of verisimilitude, so marked[8] a want of truth to nature, as very much to weaken, when it does not entirely destroy, the dramatic illusion. Nowhere is this more observable than where he intends most manifestly a rivalry of Shakspere. Shakspere not unseldom introduces the multitude into his poetic history. But when he does so, it seizes our interest as forcibly as his more important personages. With a few rapid touches he dashes in a few typical individuals, who reveal to us vividly what the whole kind of thing is of which they are prominent units. They are the mob of the very time and place to which they belong. Whether at Rome in the time of Julius Cæsar, or at Mantua or Verona in the Middle Ages, or in England during the time of the Tudors, we feel that they act and speak just as then and there they might have said and done. Every one, too, has his or her distinct individuality. And such a verisimilitude have they that even an occasional anachronism, such as, in Troilus and Cressida, making a Trojan servant talk of being in the state of grace, does not dispel the charm. But Mr. Tennyson’s mob-types have no more striking features to seize our interest than his more exalted creations, whilst his anachronisms are of a kind which send all verisimilitude to the winds. Joan and Tib, and the four or five citizens, have nothing in them for which they should be singled out of the very ordinary condition of life to which they belong. And we are tempted to sneer when we hear an Elizabethan mob talking like Hampshire or Yorkshire peasants of the present day.

For all that, Mr. Tennyson’s cockneys and rustics are not his most ineffective portraiture. We experience a slight sensation of their having been lugged in, perhaps because of the inevitable comparison with Shakspere they provoke, and we feel them to be too modern; but the poet’s sense of humor here serves him in good stead, and although, in this respect, immeasurably below Shakspere, he gives a kind of raciness to his plebeians which saves them from being an absolute failure.

It is, however, in the principal personages of the drama that we most miss the Promethean fire, and pre-eminently in the hero, if Cranmer is intended for such a dignity, and the heroine. Amongst these, the most lifelike are Courtenay and Sir Thomas Wyatt; because, in their creation, the peculiar vein of quaint irony and exceedingly refined humor, which is Mr. Tennyson’s most eminent distinction, comes to his aid. For the rest, up to the heroine herself and the canting and recanting Cranmer, they are colorless and bloodless. We scarcely know one from the other. And we do not care to. Noailles and Renard are but poor specimens of diplomatists. Their sovereigns, were the time the present, might pick up a dozen such any day in Wall Street. If the poet could embody no greater conception of two such men as Bonner and Gardiner than a couple of vulgar, self-seeking, blood-thirsty knaves, he should have dispensed altogether with their presence. He should have given to them some elevation, whatever history may say about it. A drama is a poem, not a history; and the poet may take the names of historic personages and, within certain limits, fit to them creations of his own. In Cardinal Pole he had an opportunity for a noble ideal. But all we have is an amiable dummy, an old gentleman,[9] as ordinary and ineffective as the rest.

Facts have been so distorted by the influence which for so long had sole possession of literature, that there is plenty of room for taking great liberties with history. Mr. Tennyson has slightly availed himself of this, but in the wrong direction. Shakspere himself could not have made a saint of Cranmer. For poetry, there was nothing for it but to make him a more splendid sinner. To retain all his littlenesses and to array them in seductive virtues, is to present us with some such figure as the dusky chieftains decked in gaudy tinsel that solicit our admiration in front of the tobacconists’ shops. To attempt to give heroic proportions to a man whose profession of faith followed subserviently his self-interest until no hope remained, and then place in the hands of the burning criminal the palm of martyrdom, is to invite the love within us of the beautiful and the true to echo to a psychical impossibility, and that without an element of greatness.

Yet had the front figure of the history been a noble conception grandly executed all this might have been condoned. One might well have looked at them as a few rough accessories to heighten by their contrast the beauty of the central form. There was place for a splendid creation. No more favorable material for a tragic heroine exists than Mary Tudor—with the single exception of that other Mary who fell beneath the Puritans like a lily before the scythe of the destroyer. Around her history and person circle all the elements of the tenderest pathos, which is of the very essence of tragedy. That Shakspere did not use them is a proof he thought so. For “the fair vestal throned in the west” would have resented such a creation as his quickening genius would have called to life. A queen of noble nature gradually swept away by a resistless current of untoward circumstances, is a history capable of the sublimity of a Greek catastrophe, with the added pathos of Christian suffering. But who have we here? A silly woman, devoutly pious, and endowed with a conspicuous share of the family courage. But she is so weak that her piety has the appearance of superstition, and her fits of courage lose their royalty and fail to rescue her from contempt. Unattractive in person, she falls desperately in love with a man much younger than herself, and her woman’s love, ordinarily so quick to detect coldness in a lover, is blind to the grossest neglect; and yet not so blind but that a few words scrawled on a rag of paper, dropped in her way, could open her eyes on the spot. The tenderness of her love and the importunity of cruel-minded men, transform her almost suddenly from a gentle-natured woman to an unrelenting human tigress. And she, who would not allow the law to take its course on her most dangerous enemies, can exclaim of her sister Elizabeth,

This is not the grandness of crime, as in Richard III., or even in Lady Macbeth. It is the petty despotism[10] of a weak and silly woman. There is no greatness of any kind about it. It is the mere triumphant chuckle of an amorous queen, wooing a more than indifferent husband. It is little—little enough for a comedy. There is something approaching the tragic in the desolation of her last moments. Calais is lost, her husband hates her, her people hate her. But the poet has already robbed her of the dignity of her position. She has forfeited our esteem. We experience an ordinary sympathy with her. But her fate is only what was to be expected. And the highest pathos is out of the question. When, following the example of her injured mother in the play of Henry VIII., she betakes herself to lute and song, the author insists on a comparison with Shakspere, and beside the full notes of the Bard of Avon the petty treble of the Laureate pipe shrinks to mediocrity.

But the most unpardonable of Mr. Tennyson’s imitations of Shakspere are those in which he rings the changes on the celebrated passage about “no Italian priest shall tithe nor toll in our dominions,” which inevitably provokes the applause of those amongst a theatrical audience who do not know what it means—unpardonable, because it makes even Shakspere himself as ridiculous as a poor travesty cannot fail to do. He was content with one such passage throughout his many plays. If Terence had filtered the noble sentiment of his celebrated passage, “Ego homo sum, et nihil humanum a me alienum,” through a variety of forms, it would have excited the laughter instead of the plaudits of the Roman “gods.” But the author of Queen Mary is not afraid to pose his sentiment, itself borrowed in no less than three different attitudes in one play; committing the additional absurdity of thrusting it, like a quid of tobacco, into the cheek of two different personages. Gardiner uses it twice, Elizabeth once:

whilst Elizabeth is made to vulgarize it beyond hope of redemption into a mere petty ebullition of splenetic womanly vanity:

It must be owned, indeed, that this play lacks the highest poetry in its expression as much as in its conception. We occasionally come across passages of vivid and vigorous limning, as Count Feria’s reply to Elizabeth towards the end of the play, and Howard’s description to the Lord Mayor of the state of mind of the citizens. But even the force of this latter passage is not dramatic. There is none of the rush and movement of an excited populace. There are a few striking groups. But they are inactive. Theirs is a kind of dead life, if we may be pardoned such an expression. Rather, they are mere tableaux vivants. They inspire us with no fear for Mary’s throne. More near to dramatic power and beauty is Elizabeth’s soliloquy at Woodstock, suddenly lowered in the midst of its poetry, even to nursery familiarity, by the introduction of such a phrase as “catch me who can.”

Even the few snatches of his lyre which he introduces fail to woo us. They are not natural. If they are poetry, it is poetry in a court-dress. It is rich with brocade, and the jewels glitter bravely; it treads delicately, but its movements are artificial and constrained. Compare, for example, the song of the Woodstock milkmaid, wherein labor is visible in every line, with those gushes of nature with which the poet’s soul would seem to be bubbling over the brim of the visible in the various lyrical snatches of Ariel or with the song of Spring at the end of Love’s Labor Lost.

But what has more surprised us than the lack of the poetic inspiration in this drama is the occasional want of correct taste in a writer of such exceeding polish as Mr. Tennyson. Such a speech as

should not have been put in the mouth of a lady, still less a lady of the rank of Elizabeth, and that the less when she appeals to our sympathies from a kind of honorable imprisonment.

Lady Magdalen Dacres may have beat King Philip with a staff for insulting her, and have remained a lady, but we do not want to be told, in the midst of dramatic pathos,

Is our poet, again, so barren of invention that he could find no other way of portraying Philip’s indifference to his Queen than the following:

Whatever may be the character he may have wished to depict in Philip, we expect a Spanish king to be a gentleman. And such an ending of a scene susceptible of the tenderest pathos, where the heroine and another of the principal personages of the drama are in presence, argues a wonderful dulness of perception of the beautiful.

Shakspere puts a few words of Latin into the mouth of Cardinal Wolsey in a scene in Henry VIII., in which he and Cardinal Campeggio are endeavoring to bend the queen to the king’s will. But it is a wonderful touch of nature. It is one of those profound intuitions for which the great dramatist is so distinguished. So seemingly simple an incident reveals, at a touch, as it were, the preoccupation of Wolsey’s mind, and the hollowness at once and difficulty of the duty he had suffered to be imposed upon him. They had paid her ostensibly a private visit, as friends. But Wolsey, oppressed with the difficulty of his undertaking, and meditating how he should set about it, forgets himself, the old habit crops up, and he begins as if he were beginning a formal ecclesiastical document:

It is a slip. The queen stops him. He recollects himself, and we hear no more Latin.

But in this drama the poet literally makes a cardinal, and such a cardinal as Pole, address Queen[12] Mary with the angelic salutation to the Blessed Virgin, and in Latin:

Upon the whole, the defects of this drama are so many and so serious, so radical and fundamental, that no competent criticism can pronounce it other than a failure; and a failure more complete than would have been thought possible to a poet of so great a reputation as Mr. Tennyson.[3]

“O VALDE DECORA!”

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.

CHAPTER IX.

“You must fly from idleness as from sin,” Father Henwick said; “you must never let a regret settle on your mind for an instant. It will often be hard work to resist them; but we are here to fight. You must shut the door in the face of idle thoughts by activity and usefulness. I will help you in this. You must set to work amongst the poor; not so as to fatigue yourself, or interfere with your duties and occupations at home, but enough to keep you busy and interested. At first it will be irksome enough, I dare say; but never mind that. By and by the effort will bring its own reward, and be a pleasure as well as a duty.”

He sat down and wrote out a time-table for her which filled up every hour of the day, and left not one moment for brooding. There were visits to the cottages and a class for children in the morning; the afternoon hours were to be devoted to helping her father, writing and copying for him, sometimes copying MSS. for Father Henwick, with no other purpose than to keep her mind and her fingers occupied.

But when the excitement caused by this change in her daily routine subsided, something of the first heart-sinking returned. Do what she would, thought would not be dumb. The external activity could not silence the busy tongues of her brain or deafen her to their ceaseless whisperings. It was weary work staggering on under her load, while memory tugged at her heart-strings and dragged its longings the other way. It was hard not to yield to the temptation now and then of sitting down by the wayside to rest and look back towards the Egypt that was for ever out of sight. But Franceline very seldom yielded to the treacherous allurement. When she caught herself lapsing into dreams, she would rise up with a resolute effort, and shake off the torpor, and set to work at something. When the torpor changed to a sting of anguish, she would steep her soul in prayer—that unfailing opiate of the suffering spirit, its chloroform in pain.

One day, about three weeks after Father Henwick’s return, she was coming home through the wood after her morning’s round amongst the cottages. She was very tired in mind and body. It was dull work dinning the multiplication-table into Bessy Bing’s thick skull, and teaching her unnimble fingers to turn the heel of a stocking; to listen to the widow’s endless lamentations over “the dear departed” and the good old times when they killed a pig every year, and always had a bit of bacon on the rack. Franceline came to the old spot where she used to sit and listen to the concert of the grove. The songsters were nearly all silent now, for the green was turning gold; but the felled tree was lying in the[14] same place, and tempted her to rest a moment and watch the sun shooting his golden shafts through the wilderness of stems all round. Another moment, and she was in dreamland; but the spell had scarcely fallen on her when it was broken by the sound of footfalls crushing the yellow leaves that made a carpet on every path. She started to her feet, and walked on. A few steps brought her face to face with Father Henwick. He greeted her with a joyous exclamation.

“She has achieved a great conquest; she has arrived at making Bessy Bing apprehend the problem that seven times nine and nine times seven produce one and the same total,” replied Franceline with mock gravity.

Father Henwick laughed; but the tired expression of her face did not escape him.

“I am afraid you will be growing too conceited if this sort of thing goes on,” he said. “But you must not overdo it, my dear child; it won’t do to wear yourself out in gaining arithmetical triumphs.”

“Better wear out than rust out.” And Franceline shrugged her shoulders; she had learned the expressive French trick from her father.

The priest bent his clear eyes on her for a second without speaking. She read, disappointment, and perhaps mild reproach, in them.

“And who bids me be kind? Who teaches me to be patient with you?—poor little bruised lamb!”

“I know it, father; I feel it in the bottom of my heart; but one can’t always be remembering.” There was the slightest touch of impatience in her tone.

“How if God were some day to grow tired of remembering us, and bearing with us, and forgiving us?”

“I know. But I am not rebelling; only sickening and suffering. You have told me there was no sin in that?” The words came tremulous, as if through rising tears; but Franceline raised her head with a defiant movement, and forced the briny drops down. “I cannot help it!” she continued impetuously; “I have tried my best, and I cannot help it!”

Father Henwick heaved an almost inaudible sigh before he said: “What cannot you help, Franceline? Suffering?”

“My poor child! would to God I could help you! I would suffer willingly in your place!” The words came like a gush from his inmost heart. They broke down the sufferer’s proud resistance and let the tears have vent. He turned to walk back with her. For some time neither spoke; only the soft sobs that came unchecked from Franceline broke the temple-like stillness of the wood. Suddenly she cried out in a tone of passionate desperation: “O father! it is dreadful. It will kill me if it lasts much longer! The humiliation is more than I can bear! To feel that I am harboring a feeling that my whole soul rebels against, that is revolting in the eyes of God and of my conscience! And I cannot master it!”

“You will never master it by pride, Franceline; that very pride is your greatest hindrance in setting your heart free. Try and think more of God and less of yourself. There is no sin, as you say, in the suffering, any more than, if you strayed to the edge of a precipice in the dark, and fell over and were killed, you would be guilty of suicide. The sinfulness now is in your rebellion against the suffering simply because it wounds your pride.”

“It is not all pride, father,” she said meekly. Presently she turned and looked up at him through wet lashes. “Father, I must tell you something,” she said, speaking with a sort of timidity that was unusual with her towards him—“a thought that came to me this morning that never came to me before.…”

A dark shadow fell now on Father Henwick’s large, smooth brow. Franceline read his answer in the frown and the averted gaze; but he spoke soon, though he did not look at her.

“That was a sinful thought! You should have cast it behind you with contempt. Has it come to that with you, that you could look forward to the death of any one as a thing to be longed for?”

“You should have hunted it out of your mind like an evil spirit, as it was. You must never let it near you again. He should be to you as if he were already dead. Whether his wife dies or not should not, and does not, concern you. Besides, how do you know whether she is not as young as yourself, and stronger? My child, such a thought as that would lead you to the brink of an abyss, if you listened to it.”

“I never will again, father,” she answered promptly. “I hardly know now whether I listened to it or not; only I could not help telling you.”

“You were right to tell me; and now banish it, and never let it approach you again.”

“Oh! yes. How can you ask me, father?” And Franceline looked up in surprise.

“Yet it cannot remain a secret from him for ever; he is almost certain to hear of it sooner or later, and it might save him a severe shock if he heard it from you. It would set his mind at rest about you?”

“It is quite at rest at present on that score. He has no idea that the discovery would be likely to affect me.”

“You are better able to judge of that, of course, than I am. But it grieves me to see you have a secret from your father; I wish it could be avoided.”

“But it cannot; indeed it cannot!” she repeated emphatically. “You may trust me to speak, if I thought it could be done without injury to both of us. It is much better to wait; perhaps by the time it comes to his ears I may be able to hear him speak of it without betraying myself and paining him.”

Father Henwick acquiesced, but reluctantly. He hoped she was right in supposing M. de la Bourbonais quite blind to what had been so palpable to a casual observer. But, making even the fullest allowance for the absent-minded habits of the studious man, this seemed scarcely probable. Franceline had affirmed it herself more[16] confidently, perhaps, than was warranted. She had, however, succeeded in lulling her father into forgetfulness of his former conjectures and impressions; she was certain of this. It had been done at a terrible price of endurance and self-control; but she had succeeded, and it would be doubly cruel now to revive his suspicions and let him know the truth.

“I will trust you,” said Father Henwick; “it is indeed a mercy that he is not called upon to bear such a trial while he is yet so unprepared.”

There was an earnestness about him as he said this that would have caused Franceline a deeper emotion than curiosity if her mind were not fixed wide of the mark. She replied after a moment’s reflection: “If anything should occur to make it necessary to tell him, will you break it to him, father?”

Franceline had not the least fear of Father Henwick. The severity of his passionless brow did not frighten her; it never checked the outflow of the thoughts and emotions that came surging up from her own perturbed heart. He seemed too far removed from strife himself to be affected by it, except as a pitying angel might, looking down from his calm heaven on poor mortals struggling and striving in the smoke and din of their earthly battle-field.

“Father,” said Franceline suddenly, “I wish I cared more for the poor! I wish I could love them and pity them as you do; but I don’t. I’m so shy of going amongst them. I’m sure I don’t do them any good, and they don’t do me any good, they’re so prosy and egotistical—most of them, at least.”

“There was a time when I thought so too; but persevere, and the love will come after a little while. All that is worth having is bought with sacrifice. Oh! if we could only understand the blessedness of sacrifice! Then we should find the peace passing all understanding that comes of passion overcome, of sorrow generously accepted!”

He held out his hand to say good-by. Franceline laid hers in it; but did not remove it at once. “Father,” she said, with her eyes lifted in childlike fearlessness to his, “one would think, to hear you speak of passion overcome and sorrow accepted, that you knew something about them! I sometimes wish you did. It would make it easier to me to believe in the possibility of overcoming and accepting.”

A change came over Father Henwick’s face for one moment; it was not a cloud nor a tremor, but the shadow of some deep emotion that must pass away before he could answer. Then the words came with grave simplicity, and low, as if they were a prayer:

He turned and walked back into the wood. Franceline stood looking after him through gathering tear-drops. Never had he seemed so far above her, so removed from human weakness, as at this moment, when he so humbly acknowledged kindred with it.

A pleasant surprise met Franceline on her return home. Sir Simon was at The Lilies, and loudly expressing his indignation at not[17] finding her there to greet him. She arrived, however, before he had quite divested himself of a cargo of small boxes which he had carried down himself in order to have the delight of witnessing her curiosity and pleasure in their contents. There was hardly any event which could have given her so much pleasure in her present frame of mind as the sight of her kind old friend; and she satisfied him to the full by her affectionate welcome and her delight in all his presents. He had not forgotten her favorite friandise—chocolate bonbons—and she set to nibbling them at once, in spite of Angélique’s protest against such a proceeding close on dinner-time.

“Va, petite gourmande!” exclaimed the bonne, tramping off to her kitchen, in high glee to see Franceline’s gayety and innocent greediness over the dainty.

Sir Simon was, if possible, in brighter spirits than ever; like Job’s friends, he was “full of discourse,” so that there was nothing to do but listen and laugh as the current rippled on. He had a deal to tell about his rambles in the Pyrenees, and a whole budget of adventures to retail, and anecdotes about odd people he had come across in all sorts of out-of-the-way places. Nothing checked the pleasant flow until M. de la Bourbonais had the unlucky inspiration to inquire for Lady Rebecca’s health; whereupon the baronet raised his right hand and let it fall again with an emphatic gesture, shook his head, and compressed his lips in ominous silence. Raymond, who held the key of the pantomime, gathered therefrom that Lady Rebecca had for the six-and-thirtieth time rallied from the jaws of death, and plunged her long-suffering heir once more into dejection and disappointment. He knew what was in store for his private ear, and heaved a sigh. “But the present hour shall be a respite,” Sir Simon seemed to say; and he quitted the subject abruptly, and proceeded to catechise Franceline on her behavior since his departure. He was surprised and annoyed to find that she had been to no parties; that nothing more exciting than that short visit to Rydal had come of his deep-laid scheme with the dowager; and that there had been no rivalry of gallant suitors attacking the citadel of The Lilies. He had been rather nervous before meeting her; for, though it had been made quite clear to him by Raymond’s letters that he had received no crushing blow of any description, Sir Simon had a lurking fear that recent events might have left a deeper shadow on his daughter’s existence than he was conscious of. Her aspect, however, set him at ease on this score. He could hardly have lighted on a more favorable moment for the confirmation of his sanguine hopes regarding Franceline’s heart-wholeness. True, she had been crying, only half an hour ago, bitter, burning tears enough; but her face retained no trace of them, and it still held the glow of inward triumph that Father Henwick’s last words had called up into her eyes, and her cheeks had got a faint color from the rapid walking. Sir Simon breathed freely as he took note of these outward signs; he could indulge in a little chaffing without remorse or arrière-pensée. He wanted to know, merely as a matter of curiosity, how many hearts she had broken in his absence—how many unfortunates had been mortally struck as they passed within reach of her arrows on the wayside. Franceline protested that she carried no[18] quiver, and had not inflicted a scratch on any one. Humph! Sir Simon invited her to convey that answer to the marines.

“Poor devil! so much the better for him! But he won’t have the sense to keep out of harm’s way; he’ll be at it again before long.”

Franceline gave one of her merry laughs—she was in a mood to enjoy the absurdity of the joke—and went to take off her things; for Angélique put in her head to say that dinner was ready.

Things fell quickly into their old course at the Court. There was a procession of morning callers every day, and pleasant friendly dinners, and a few men down in relays to shoot. Sir Simon insisted on M. de la Bourbonais coming to join them frequently, and bringing Franceline; he had established a precedent, and he was not going to let it drop. Franceline, on the whole, was glad of the excitement; she was determined to use everything that could help her good resolutions; and the necessity for seeming to enjoy soon led to her doing so in reality. After the stillness of her little home-life, filled as it was with restless voices audible to no ear but hers, the gay stir of the Court was welcome. It was a pleasurable sensation, too, to feel herself the object of admiring attentions from a number of agreeable gentlemen, to be deferred to and made much of, as if she were a little queen amongst them all. Sir Simon was more indulgent than ever, and spoiled her to his heart’s content. Father Henwick, who was kept au courant of what was going on, could not find it in his heart to oppose what seemed to be an innocent diversion of her thoughts.

It was, therefore, anything but a welcome break when Lady Anwyll came down one morning, accompanied by Sir Simon, to announce her intention of carrying off her friend the next day to Rydal. Franceline fought off while she could, but Sir Simon pooh-poohed her excuses about not liking to leave her father, and so forth; he was there now to look after him, and she must go. So she went. Rydal had a dreadful association in her mind, and she shrank from going there as from revisiting the scene of some horrible tragedy. She shrank, too, from leaving her father. Of late they had been more bound up in their daily life than ever; she had coaxed him into accepting her services as an amanuensis, and he had quickly grown so used to them that he was sure to miss her greatly at his work.

There was nothing, moreover, in the inmates of Rydal to compensate her for the sacrifice; they were not the least interesting. It was always the same good-natured petting from Lady Anwyll, as if she were a kitten or a baby. She knew exactly what the conversation would be—gossip about local trifles, about the family, especially Ponce, his boots, his eccentricities, his pet dishes, his pranks in the regiment; the old tune played over and over again on the same string. As to Ponce himself, Franceline knew the big hussar already by heart; he would do his best to be entertaining, and would only be awkward and commonplace. Nothing at Rydal, in fact, rose above the dead-level of Dullerton.

The dowager had some few young[19] people in for a carpet-dance, in which Franceline had to take her part, and did without any repugnance. Dancing brought back certain memories that pierced her like steel blades; but her heart was proof against the thrusts, and she defied them to wound her. Lord Roxham was invited, and showed himself cordial and friendly, but nothing more. He said he had been called away to London soon after they last met, or else he would have profited by M. de la Bourbonais’ permission to call at The Lilies; he hoped that the authorization might still hold good.

“Oh! yes; do come. I shall be so glad to see you,” was the frank and unaffected reply.

Lady Anwyll had meantime felt rather aggrieved at Lord Roxham’s behavior. Her little scheme had gone off so swimmingly at first she could not understand why it had suddenly collapsed in its prosperous course, and come to a dead halt. At any rate, she would give him one more chance. The young legislator seemed in no violent hurry to improve it. He danced a couple of times with Franceline, and once with two other young girls, and then subsided to dummy whist with the rector of Rydal and his wife, leaving Franceline to the combined fascinations of Mr. Charlton and Ponce, who usurped her between them. The latter bestowed such an unequal share of a host’s courtesy on the young French girl, indeed, that his mother felt it incumbent on her to explain to the other young ladies that Mlle. de la Bourbonais was a foreigner; therefore Ponce, being so good-natured, paid her particular attention. And he certainly did—not only on that occasion, but while she remained. He was continually hovering about her like a huge overshadowing bird whose wings were always in the way of its movements. He tripped over footstools in attempting to place them under her feet; but then he was always so thankful that it was himself, not her, he nearly upset! He spilt several cups of tea in handing them to her, and was nearly overcome with gratitude when he saw the carpet had got the contents, and that her pretty muslin frock was safe! He would hold an umbrella open over her because it looked so uncommonly like rain; and it was such a mercy to have only spoiled her bonnet and made a hole in her veil, when he might so easily have run the point into her eye. Ponce, like many wiser men, had endless satisfaction in the contemplation of the blunders he might have committed and did not. Yet, with all his boyish awkwardness, Franceline was growing very fond of him. He was so thoroughly kind-hearted, and so free from the taint of conceit; and then there was an undeniable enjoyment in the sense of being cared for, and thought of, and watched over; and it was all done in a naïve, boyish way, and with a brotherly absence of compliment or constraint that left her free to accept it without any sense of undue obligation, or the fear of being called upon to repay it except by being pleased and grateful. When he followed her into the conservatory with a shawl and wrapped it round her unceremoniously, she looked up at his fresh, honest face, and said, almost as if he had been a woman: “I wish I had you for a brother, Captain Anwyll!” He got very red, and was fumbling somewhere in his mind for an answer, when his mother called to him for the watering-pot; Ponce seized it, and,[20] dashing out a sudden shower-bath upon the dowager’s dress, narrowly escaped drenching Franceline’s. But it did escape. What a lucky dog he was!

How pleasant it was riding home in the fresh afternoon! Lady Anwyll came in the carriage, while Franceline and Capt. Anwyll cantered on before. Nothing was likely to have happened at The Lilies during her absence; but as they drew near she grew impatient and rode at a pace, as if she expected wonderful tidings at the ride’s end. The air was so clear that Dullerton, yet a mile off, sent its hum of life towards the riders with sharp distinctness. The panting of the train, as it moved out of the station, sounded close by; every street cry and tinkling cart-bell rang out like a chime. Soon the soft cooing of the doves came wafted above the distant voice of the town; and when the travellers came within sight of The Lilies, the flock flew to greet Franceline, wheeling round high up in the air several times before alighting on her shoulders and outstretched wrist. Then came her father’s delighted exclamation, as he hurried down the little garden-walk, and Angélique’s affectionate embrace. And once more the small, still home-life, that was so sweet and so rich in a restored joy, recommenced. Franceline devoted hours every day now to working with her father, and soon she became almost as much absorbed in the work as he was. Sometimes, indeed, she hindered rather than helped, stopping him in the midst of his dictation to demand an explanation; but Raymond never chided her or grudged the delay. Her fresh young eyesight and diligent, nimble hand were invaluable to him, and he wondered how he had got on so long without them.

Lord Roxham redeemed his promise of calling at The Lilies. He talked a good deal to Raymond about politics and current events, saying very little to Franceline, who sat by, stitching away at some bit of plain sewing. This was just what she liked. Her father was entertained and interested. A breeze from the outer world always refreshed him, though he was hardly conscious of it, still less of needing any such reviving incident in his quiet, monotonous existence; but Franceline always hailed it with thankfulness for him, and was well content to remain in the shade now while the visitor devoted himself to amusing her father. Was it fancy, or did she, on glancing up suddenly from her needle-work, detect an expression, half compassionate, half searching, in Lord Roxham’s face, as he looked fixedly at her? Whether it was fancy or not, her eyes fell at once, and the blood mantled her cheek; she did not venture to let her gaze light on him again, and it was with a sense of shyness that she shook hands with him at parting.

Ponsonby Anwyll was now a frequent visitor at The Lilies, sometimes coming alone, sometimes with Sir Simon; and it was a curious coincidence, if quite accidental, that he generally made his appearance as Franceline was on the point of starting for her ride; and as he was always on horseback, there was no conceivable reason why he should not join the party. The burly hussar was a safer companion in the saddle than in the drawing-room; he rode with the masterly ease of a cavalryman, and, the road being free from the disturbing influence of tea-trays and chairs, he spilt[21] nothing and upset nobody, and Franceline was always glad of his company. She was too inexperienced and too much absorbed in other thoughts to forecast any possible results from this state of things. Ponsonby continued the same familiar, kind, brother-like manner to her; was mightily concerned in keeping her out of the bad bits of road, and out of the way of the cattle that might be tramping to market and prove offensive to her mettlesome pony. He never aimed at making himself agreeable, only useful. But the eyes of Dullerton looked on at all this brotherly attention, and drew its own conclusion. The Langrove young ladies, of whom somehow she had of late seen less than ever, grew excited to the highest pitch about it, and were already discussing how many of them would be bridemaids at the wedding, if bridemaids there were. Most likely Sir Simon would settle that and probably give the dresses. Even discreet Miss Merrywig could not forbear shaking her finger and her barrel curls at Franceline one day when the latter hurried off to get ready for her ride, with the excuse that Sir Simon and Capt. Anwyll were due at three o’clock. But Franceline knew by this time what Dullerton was, and what it could achieve in the way of gossip; spinning a yarn a mile long out of a thread the length of your finger. She only laughed, and mentally remarked how little people knew. They would be marrying her to Sir Simon next, when Ponsonby rejoined his regiment and was seen no more at her saddle-bow.

The three had set out for a ride one afternoon, when, as they were dashing along at full tilt, Sir Simon pulled up with a strong formula of exclamation.

“What’s the matter?” cried Sir Ponsonby, plunging back heavily, while Franceline reined in Rosebud, and turned in some alarm to see what had occurred.

“If I have not actually forgotten all about Simpson, who comes down from London by appointment this afternoon! I dare say he’s waiting for me by this, and he must return by the 5:20. I must leave you, and post home as quick as Nero will carry me.” And with a “by-by” to Franceline and a nod to Capt. Anwyll, coupled with an injunction not to let her ride too fast and to keep her out of mischief, the baronet turned his horse’s head and galloped away, desiring the groom to follow on with the others.

They went on at a good pace until they reached the foot of a gentle ascent, when both of one accord fell into a walk. For the first time in their intercourse Franceline was conscious of a certain vague awkwardness with Capt. Anwyll; of casting about for something to say, and not finding anything. The place was perfectly solitary, the woods on one side, the fields sloping down to the river on the other. The groom lagged respectfully a long way behind, quite out of ear-shot, often out of sight; for the road curved and wheeled abruptly every now and then, and hid the foremost riders from his view. Ponsonby broke the silence:

“Miss Franceline”—he would call her Miss Franceline, because it was easier and shorter—“I have something on my mind that I want badly to say to you. I’ve been wanting to say it for some time. I hope it won’t make you angry?”

“I can’t say till I hear it; but if[22] you are in doubt about it, perhaps it would be safer not to say it,” remarked Franceline, beginning to tremble ominously.

“I wouldn’t vex you for anything in the world! ’Pon my honor I wouldn’t!” protested Ponce warmly. “But, you see, I don’t know whether what I’m going to say will vex you or not.”

“Then don’t say it; you are sure not to vex me then,” was the encouraging advice, and she devoutly hoped he would take it. But he was not so minded.

“That’s true,” he assented; “but then, you see, it might please you. I’m half afraid it won’t, though, only I can’t be sure till I try.” After musing a moment, in obvious perplexity, he resumed, speaking rapidly, as if he had made up his mind to bolt it all out and take the consequences. “I’m not a puppy—my worst enemy won’t accuse me of that; but I’m not a bad fellow either, as my mother and all the fellows in the Tenth will tell you; and the fact is, I’ve grown very fond of you, Miss Franceline, and if you’ll take me as I am I’ll do my best to be a good husband to you and to make you happy.”

He said it quickly, as if he were reciting a lesson got by heart, and then came to a dead halt and “paused for a reply.” He might have paused long enough, if he had not at last turned round and read his fate in Franceline’s scared, white face and undisguised agitation.

“Oh! now, don’t say no before you think it over!” entreated the young man. “I know you’re ten times too good for me; but, for that matter, you’re too good for the best fellow that ever lived. I said so myself to Sir Simon only this morning. But I do love you with all my heart, Franceline; and if only you could care for me ever so little to begin with, I’d be satisfied, and you’d make me the happiest man alive!”

Franceline had now recovered her self-possession, and was able to speak, though she still trembled.

“I am so sorry!” she exclaimed. “I never dreamed of this; indeed I did not! I dare say I have been very selfish, very thoughtless; but it was not wilful. I am very unhappy to have given you pain!”

“Oh! don’t say that. You’ll make me miserable if you say that!” pleaded Ponsonby. “Of course you never thought of it. It’s great impudence of me to think of it, I have so little to offer you! But if you don’t quite hate the sight of me, I’m sure I could make you a devoted husband, and love you better than many a cleverer fellow. I’ve been fond of you from the first, and so has my mother.”

“You are both very good to me; I am very, very grateful!” The tears rose to her eyes, and with a frank, impulsive movement she held out her hand to him. Ponsonby bent from the saddle and raised it to his lips, although it was gloved. If he had not been over-sanguine at heart and a trifle stupid, poor fellow, he would have felt that it was all over with him. The little hand lay with cold, sisterly kindness in his grasp, and Franceline looked at him with eyes that were too kind and pitying to promise anything more than sisterly pity and gratitude.

“I cannot, I cannot. You must never think of it any more. Do you not see that it is impossible? I am a Catholic!”

“Pshaw! as if that mattered a whit! I mean as if it need make any difference between us! I don’t[23] mind it a pin—’pon my honor I don’t! I said so to the count. We’ve settled all that, in fact, and if he’s satisfied to trust me why will not you?”

“Oh! yes; that was the right thing, Sir Simon told me, as he was a Frenchman.”

“He said that if you said yes, he was quite willing to give you to me. I wanted to come to settlements at once—I only wish I was ten times better off!—but he would not hear a word about that until I had consulted you. Only, he said he would be glad to receive me as his son; he did indeed, Franceline!” She was looking straight before her, her eyes dilated, her whole face aglow with some strong emotion that his words seemed to have stirred in her.

“You remember,” continued Ponsonby, “that you said to me once you would like to have me for a brother? Well, it will be nearly the same thing. You would get used to me as a husband after a while; you would, Franceline!”

“Never, never, never!” she repeated, not passionately, but with a calm emphasis that made Ponsonby’s heart die within him. He could not find a word to oppose to the strong, quiet protest.

“No, it is all a mistake,” said Franceline. “I don’t know who is to blame—I suppose I am. I should not have let you come so often; but you were so kind, and I have so few people to care for me; and when one is sad at heart, kindness is so welcome! But I should have thought of you; I have been selfish!”

“No, no, you have not been selfish at all; it’s all my doing and my fault,” affirmed the young man. “I wish I had held my tongue a little longer. My mother will come and see you to-morrow; she will explain it all, and how it sha’n’t make any trouble to you, my being a Protestant.”

“She must not come,” said Franceline with decision; “there is nothing to explain. I am sincerely grateful to her and to you; but I have only gratitude to give you. I hope with all my heart that you may soon forget me and any pain I am causing you, and that you may meet with a wife who will make you happier than I could have done.”

Ponsonby was silent for a few moments, and then he said, speaking with a certain hesitation and diffidence:

“I could be satisfied to wait and to go on hoping, if I were sure of one thing:… that you did not care for anybody else. Do you?”

“What right have you to put such a question to me? I tell you I do not care for you, and that I will never marry you! You have no right to ask me any more.”

Ponsonby recoiled as if a flash of lightning had forked out of the cold, gray sky. “Good heavens! I did not mean to offend you. I declare solemnly I did not!”

But he had touched a vibrating chord unawares, and set every fibre in her heart thrilling and every pulse throbbing; and the disturbance was not to be laid by any words that he could utter. Franceline turned homewards, and they did not exchange a word until they reached The Lilies and Ponsonby was assisting her to alight.

“No, no! It is no use; it is no use! I say again I wish you were my brother, Sir Ponsonby, but, as you care to remain my friend, never speak to me again of this.”

He pressed the hand she held out to him; the groom backed up to take the reins of her horse, and Ponsonby rode away with a thorn in his honest heart.

Miss Merrywig was within, chatting and laughing away with the count. Franceline was not in a mood to meet the garrulous old lady or anybody; so she went straight to her room, and only came down when the visitor was gone.

“Father,” she said, going up behind him and laying a hand on each shoulder, “what is this Sir Ponsonby tells me? That you are tired of your clair-de-lune, and want to get rid of her?”

M. de la Bourbonais drew down the two trembling hands, and clasped them on his breast, and lifted his head as if he would look at her.

“It would not be losing her, but gaining a son, who would take care of her when I am gone! She has not thought of that!”

“No; and she does not wish to think of it! I will live with you while I live. I don’t care to look beyond that; nor must you, petit père. But I am very sorry for Sir Ponsonby. You must write and tell him so, and that he must not come any more—until he has forgotten me; that you cannot give me up.”

“My cherished one! Let us talk about this matter; it is very serious. We must not do anything rashly.” He tried to unclasp her hands and draw her to his side; but she locked them tighter, and laid her cheek on his head.

“Petit père, there is nothing to talk about; I will never marry him or anybody!”

“My child, thou speakest without reflection. Captain Anwyll is a good, honorable man, and he loves thee, and it would be a great comfort to me to see thee married to him, and not to leave thee friendless and almost penniless whenever God calls me away. I understand it has taken thee by surprise, and that thou canst not accept the idea without some delay and getting used to it; but we must not decide so important a matter hastily. Come, sit down, and let us discuss it.”

“No, father,” she answered in a tone of determination that was quite foreign to her now, and reminded him of the wilful child of long ago; “there is no use in discussing what is already decided. I will never marry Ponsonby—or anybody. Why, petit père, do you forget that he is a Protestant?”

“Nay, I have forgotten nothing; that has been all arranged. He is most liberal about it; consents to leave you to … to have everything your own way in that respect, and assures me that it shall make no difference whatever to you, his not being of your religion.”

“No difference, father! No difference to a wife that her husband should be a heretic! You cannot be in earnest. What blessing could there be on such a marriage?”

“But you would soon convert him, my little one; you would make a good Catholic of him before the year was out,” said M. de la Bourbonais. “Think of that!”

“And suppose it were the other[25] way, and that he made a good Protestant of me? It is no more than I should deserve for my presumption. You know what happens to those who seek the danger.…”

“Oh! that is a different thing; that warning applies to those who seek it rashly, from vain or selfish motives,” protested Raymond, moving his spectacles, as he always did instinctively when his argument was weak; and he knew right well that now it was slipping into sophistry.

“I cannot see anything but a selfish motive in marrying against the express prohibition of the church and without any affection for the person, but simply because he could give you a position and the good things of this life,” said Franceline.

“The prohibition is conditional,” persisted Raymond, “and those conditions would be scrupulously fulfilled; and as to there not being the necessary affection, there is enough on his side for both, and his love would soon beget thine.”

“Father, it is no use. I am grieved to contradict you; but I cannot, cannot do this to please you. You must write and say so to Capt. Anwyll; you must indeed.”

Raymond heaved a sigh. He felt as powerless as an infant before this new wilfulness of his clair-de-lune; it was foolish as well as imprudent to yield, but he did not know how to deal with it. There was honest truth on her side; no subterfuges could baffle the instinctive logic of her childlike faith.

“We will let things remain as they are for a few days, and then, if thou dost still insist, I will write and refuse the offer,” he said, seeking a last chance in temporizing.

“No, petit père; if you love me, write at once. It is only fair to Sir Ponsonby, and it will set my mind at rest. Here, let me find you a pen!” She chose one out of a number of inky goose-quills on the little Japan tray, and thrust it playfully between his fingers.

The letter was written, and Angélique was forthwith despatched with it to the pillar at the park gate.

During the remainder of the afternoon Franceline worked away diligently at the Causes of the French Revolution, and spent the evening reading aloud. But M. de la Bourbonais could not so lightly dismiss the day’s incident from his thoughts. He had experienced a moment of pure joy and unutterable thankfulness when Ponsonby had come in and stammered out his honest confession of love, and pleaded so humbly with the father to “take his part with Miss Franceline.” The pleasure was all the greater for being a complete surprise. Sir Simon had cautiously resolved to have no hand in negotiating between the parties; he had let things take their course from the first, determined not to interfere, but clearly foreseeing the issue. Raymond was bewildered by Franceline’s rejection of the proposed marriage. He did not try much to explain it to himself; it was a puzzle that did not come within the rule and compass of his philosophy—a young girl refusing to be married when an eligible husband presented himself for her father’s acceptance. He heaved many a deep sigh over it, as his anxious gaze rested on the golden-haired young head bent over the desk. But he did not ask any questions.

Sir Simon came down next morning in high displeasure. He was angry, disappointed, aggrieved. Here he had been at considerable[26] pains of ingenuity and forethought to provide a model husband for Franceline, a young fellow whom any girl ought to jump at—high-principled, unencumbered rent-roll, good-looking, good-tempered—and the little minx turns up her nose at him, and sends him to the right-about! Such perverseness and folly were not to be tolerated. What did she mean by it? What did she see amiss in Anwyll? Sir Simon was for having her up for a round lecture. But Raymond would not allow this. He might groan in his inmost heart over Franceline’s refusal, but he was not going to let her be bullied by anybody; not even by Sir Simon. He stood up for his child, and defended her as if he had fully approved of her conduct.

“I’ll tell you what it is, Bourbonais, you’re just as great a fool as she is; only she is a child, and knows nothing of life, and can’t see the madness of what she is doing. But you ought to know better. I have no patience with you. When one thinks of what this marriage would do for both of you—lifting you out of penury, restoring your daughter to her proper position in the world, and securing her future, so that, if you were called away to-morrow, you need have no care or anxiety about her! And to think of your backing her up in rejecting it all!”

“I did not back her up in it. I deplore her having done so,” replied Raymond. “But I will not coerce her; her happiness is dearer to me than her interest or my own.”

“What tomfoolery! As if her interest and her happiness were not identical in this case! A man who is fond of her, and rich enough to give her everything in life a girl could wish for! What does she want besides?” demanded Sir Simon angrily.

“I believe she wants nothing, except to be left with her old father. She does not care for Capt. Anwyll,” said Raymond; but his French mind felt this was very weak argument.

“The devil she doesn’t! Who does she care for?” retorted the baronet. But he had no sooner uttered the words than he regretted them; they seemed to recoil on him like a stone flung too near. He seized his hat, and, muttering impatiently something about the nonsense of giving into childish fancies, etc., strode out of the cottage, and did not show himself there for several days.

He was pursued by that question of his own, “Who did Franceline care for?” and made uncomfortable by the persistency with which it kept dinning in his ears. He had made up his mind long ago that the failure of his first matrimonial plot had had no serious effect on her heart or spirits. She was looking very delicate when he came back, but that was the dulness of the life she had been leading during his absence. She had picked up considerably since then. It was plain to everybody she had; her spirits were better. There was certainly nothing wrong in that direction. How could there be when he, Sir Simon, so thoroughly desired the contrary, and did so much to cheer up the child—and himself into the bargain—and make her forget any impression that unlucky Clide might have made? Still, no matter how emphatically he answered it, the tiresome question kept sounding in his ears day after day. He could stand it no longer. He must go and see them at The Lilies—see Franceline,[27] and read on her innocent young face that all was peace within, and cheer up his own depressed spirits by a talk with Raymond. Nobody listened to him and sympathized with him as Raymond did. He had no worries of his own to distract him, for one thing; and if he had, he was such a philosophical being he would carry them to the moon and leave them there. Sir Simon was blessed with no such happy faculty. He could forget his troubles for a while under the stimulating balm of cheerful society and generous wine; but as soon as he was alone they were down on him like an army of ants, stinging and goading him. Things were very gloomy just now, and he could less than ever dispense with the opiate of sympathetic companionship. Lady Rebecca had taken a fresh start, and was less likely to depart than she had been for the last ten years. The duns, who watched her ladyship’s fluctuations between life and death with almost as sincere and breathless an interest as her heir, had got wind of this, and were up and at him again, hunting him like a hare—the low, grasping, insolent hounds! His revived money annoyances made him the more irascible with Franceline for throwing away her chance of being for ever saved and protected from the like. But he would harp no more on that string.

He had been into Dullerton on horseback, and, overtaking the postman on his way home, he stopped to take his letters, and then asked if there were any for The Lilies. He was going there, and would save the postman the walk that far.

“Thank you, sir! There is one for the count.” And the man held up a large blue envelope, like a lawyer’s letter, which Sir Simon thrust into his pocket. He left his horse at the Court, and walked on through the park, reading his letters as he went. Their contents were not of the most agreeable, to judge by the peevish and angry ejaculations that the reader emitted in the course of their perusal. He had not done when he reached the cottage.

“Here’s a letter for you, Bourbonais; I’ll finish mine while you’re reading it.” He handed the blue envelope to his friend, and, flinging himself into a chair, became again absorbed and ejaculatory.

M. de la Bourbonais, meanwhile, proceeded to open his official-looking communication. He surveyed it with uplifted eyebrows, examined well the large red seal, and scrutinized the handwriting of the address, before he tore it open. His eye ran quickly over the page. A nervous twitch contracted his features; his hand shook as if a string at his elbow had been rudely pulled; but he controlled all further sign of emotion, and, after reading the contents twice over, silently folded the letter and replaced it in the envelope. Sir Simon had seen nothing; he was deep in suppressed denunciations of some rascally dun.

“Hang me if I know what’s to be the end of it, or the end of me—an ounce of lead in my skull, most likely!” he burst out, ramming the bundle of offending documents into his coat-pocket. “The brutes are in league to drive me mad!”

“Has anything new happened?” inquired the count anxiously. “I hoped things had arranged themselves of late?”

“Not they! How can they when these vampires are sucking the blood of one? It’s pretty much[28] like sucking a corpse!” he laughed sardonically. “The fools! If they would but have sense to see that it is their own interest not to drive me to desperation! But they will goad me to do something that will make an end of their chance of ever being paid!”

M. de la Bourbonais ought to have been hardened to this sort of thing; but he was not. The vague threats and dark innuendoes always alarmed him. He never knew but that each crisis which called them out might be the supreme one that would bring about their fulfilment. At such moments he had not the heart to rebuke Sir Simon and add the bitterness of self-reproach to his excited feelings. His look of keen distress struck Sir Simon with compunction.

“Oh! it will blow off, as it has done so often before, I suppose,” he said, tossing his head. “Here’s a letter from L—— to say he is coming down next week with a whole houseful of men to shoot. I’ve not seen L—— for an age. He’s a delightful fellow; he’ll cheer one up.” And the baronet heaved a sigh from the very depths of his afflicted spirit.

“Mon cher, is it wise to be asking down crowds of people in this way?” asked Raymond dubiously.

“I did not ask them! Don’t I tell you they have written to invite themselves?”

It was true; but Sir Simon forgot how often he had besought his friends to do just what they were now doing—to write and say when they could come, and to bring as many as they liked with them. That had always been the way at the Court; and he was not the man to belie its old traditions. But Raymond, who had also his class of noble traditions, could not see it.

“Why not write frankly, and, without explaining the precise motive, say that you cannot at present receive any one?”

“Nonsense, my dear Bourbonais, nonsense! As if a few fellows more or less signified that”—snapping his fingers—“at the end of the year! Besides, what the deuce is the good of having a place at all, if one can’t have one’s friends about one in it? Better shut up at once. It’s the only compensation a man has; the only thing that pulls him through. And then the pheasants are there, and must be shot. I can’t shoot them all. But it’s no use trying to make you take an Englishman’s view of the case. You simply can’t do it.”

M. de la Bourbonais agreed, and inwardly hoped he never might come to see the case as his friend did. But, notwithstanding this, Sir Simon went on discussing his own misfortunes, denouncing the rascality and rapacity of the modern tradesman, and bemoaning the good old times when the world was a fit place for a gentleman to live in. When he had sufficiently relieved his mind on the subject, and drew breath, M. de la Bourbonais poured what oil of comfort he could on his friend’s wounds. He spoke confidently of the ultimate demise of Lady Rebecca, and expressed equal trust in the powers of Mr. Simpson to perform once again the meteorological feat known to Sir Simon as “raising the wind.” Under the influence of these soothing abstractions the baronet cheered up, and before long Richard was himself again. He overhauled Raymond’s latest work; read aloud some notes on Mirabeau which Franceline had taken down at his dictation the[29] previous evening, and worked himself into a frenzy of indignation at the historian’s partiality for that thundering demagogue. Raymond waxed warm in defence of his hero; maintained that at heart Mirabeau had wished to save the king; and almost lost his philosophical self-control when Sir Simon called him the master-knave of the Revolution, a traitor and a bully, and other hard names to the same effect.

“I wash my hands of you, if you are going to play panegyrist to that pock-marked ruffian!” was the baronet’s concluding remark; and he flung out his hands, as if he were shaking the contamination from his fingers. Suddenly his eye fell upon the great blue letter, and, abruptly dismissing Mirabeau, he said: “By the way, what a formidable document that is that I brought you just now! Has it anything to do with the Revolution?”

“My dear Bourbonais, what is it? Nothing seriously amiss, I hope?” exclaimed Sir Simon, full of alarmed interest.

“Nearly two hundred—the savings of the last fourteen years,” replied M. de la Bourbonais calmly.

“My dear fellow, I’m heartily sorry!” exclaimed his friend in an accent of sincere distress; “with all my heart I’m sorry! And to think of you having read this and said nothing, and I raving away about my own troubles like a selfish dog as I am! Why did you not tell me at once?”

“What good would it have done?” Raymond shrugged his shoulders, and with another involuntary sigh threw the letter on the table. “It’s hard, though. I was so little prepared for it; the house bore such a good name.…”

“I should have said it was the safest bank in the country. So it was, very likely; only one did not reckon with the dishonesty of this scheming villain of a partner—if it be true that he is the cause of it.”

“No doubt it is; why should they tell lies about it? The whole affair will be in the papers one of these days, I suppose.”

“What good would cursing him do? It would not bring back my poor scrapings.” Raymond laughed gently. “I dare say his own conscience will curse him before long—the unhappy man! But who knows what terrible temptation may have driven him to the deed? Perhaps he got into some difficulty that nothing else could extricate him from, and he may have had a wife and children pulling at his conscience by his heart-strings! Libera nos a malo, Domine!” And looking upwards, Raymond sighed again.

“What a strange being you are, Raymond!” exclaimed Sir Simon, eyeing him curiously. “Verily, I believe your philosophy is worth something after all.”

M. de la Bourbonais laughed outright. “Well, it’s worth nearly the money to have brought you to that!”

“To see you stand there coolly and philosophize about the motives that may possibly have led an unprincipled scoundrel to rob you of every penny you possessed! Many a man has got a fit from less.”

“Many a fool, perhaps; but it[30] would be a poor sort of man that such a blow would send into a fit!” returned the count with mild contempt. “But I must not be forgetful of the difference of conditions,” he added quickly. “It all depends on what the money is worth to one, and what its loss involves. I don’t want it at present. It was a little hoard for the rainy day; and—qui sait?—the rainy day may never come!”

“No; Franceline may marry a rich man,” suggested the baronet, not with any intent to wound.

“Just so! I may never want the money, and so never be the poorer for losing it.”

“And supposing there was at this moment some pressing necessity for it—that your child was in absolute need of it for some reason or other—what then?” queried Sir Simon.

“Thank heaven there is no necessity to answer that,” he said. “We were taught to pray to be delivered from temptation; let us be thankful when we are, and not set imaginary traps for ourselves.”

“Some men are, I believe, born proof against temptation; I should say you are one of them, Bourbonais,” said his friend, looking steadily at him.

“You are mistaken,” replied Raymond quietly. “I don’t know whether any human being may be born with that sort of fire-proof covering; but I know for certain that I was not.”

“Can you, then, conceive yourself under a pressure of temptation so strong as that your principles, your conscience, would give way? Can you imagine yourself telling a deliberate lie, for instance, or doing a deliberate wrong to some one, in order to save yourself—or, better, your child—from some grievous harm?”

Raymond thought for a moment, as if he were poising a balance in his mind before he answered; then he said, speaking with slow emphasis, as if every word was being weighed in the scales: “Yes, I can fancy myself giving way, if, at such a crisis as you describe, I were left to myself, with only my own strength to lean on; but I hope I should not be left to it. I hope I should ask to be delivered from it.”

The humility of the avowal went further to deepen Sir Simon’s faith in his friend’s integrity and in the strength of his principles than the boldest self-assertion could have done. It informed him, too, of the existence of a certain ingredient in Raymond’s philosophy which the careless and light-hearted man of the world had not till then suspected.

“One thing I know,” he said, taking up his hat, and extending a hand to M. de la Bourbonais: “if your conscience were ever to play you false, it would make an end of my faith in all mankind—and in something more.”

QUESTIONS CONCERNING THE SYLLABUS.
DOCTRINAL AUTHORITY OF THE SYLLABUS.
FROM LES ETUDES RELIGIEUSES, ETC.

We enter on a work whose practical usefulness no one, we suspect, will dispute, since it concerns perhaps the most memorable act of the reign of Pius IX.—the Syllabus. There has been a great deal of discussion about the Syllabus—much has been written on it in the way both of attack and defence—but it is remarkable that it has scarcely been studied at all. The remark was made by one of the editors of this review, Father Marquigny, in the General Congress of Catholic Committees at Paris; and, so true was it felt to be, that it provoked the approving laughter of the whole assembly. But to pass by those who busy themselves about this document without having read it, how many are there, even among Catholics, who, after having read it, have only the most vague and confused notions about it—how many who, if they were asked, “What does the Syllabus teach you; what does it make obligatory on you?” would not know what to answer! Thus is man constituted. He skims willingly over the surface of things; but he has no fancy for stopping awhile and digging underneath. If he is pleased with looking at a great many things, he does not equally concern himself to gain knowledge; because there is no true science without labor, and labor is troublesome. Yet nothing could be more desirable for him than to come by this luminous entrance from the knowledge to the possession of truth. Christian faith, when it is living and active, necessarily experiences the desire of it; for, according to the beautiful saying of S. Anselm, it is, by its very nature, a seeker of science—of knowing: Fides quærens intellectum.

But, not to delay ourselves by these considerations, is it possible to exaggerate the importance of the study of the Syllabus in the critical circumstances in which we are placed? The uncertainty of the future; the impossibility of discovering a satisfactory course in the midst of the shadows which surround us; the need of knowing what to seize a firm hold of in the formidable problems whose obscurity agitates, in these days, the strongest minds; above all, the furious assaults of the enemies of the church, and the authority belonging to a solemn admonition coming to us from the chair of truth—all these things teach us plainly enough how culpable it must be for us to remain indifferent and to neglect the illumination offered to us. The teachings of the Vicar of Jesus Christ deserve to be meditated on at leisure. It is this which inspires us with a hope that our work will be favorably received. Truth, moreover, claims the services of all, even of the feeblest, and we must not desert her cause for fear our ability may not suffice for her defence.

Certainly, no one will expect us,[32] here, to give an analytical exposition of the eighty propositions condemned by Pius IX. Several numbers of the Etudes would scarcely suffice for that. General questions dominate all others; it is to the careful solution of these that we shall devote ourselves. They have always appeared to us to need clear and decisive explanation. Often they are incorrectly proposed, oftener still they are ill-defined. The object of our efforts will be to point out with precision the limits within which they must be restrained, the sense in which they must be accepted, and their necessary import; then, to give them, as clearly as we are able, a solution the most sure and the most conformable to first principles. If it should be objected that in this we are entering on a wide theological field, we shall not deny it. Proudhon, who desired anarchy in things, in principles—everywhere, in fact, except in reasoning—averred that rigorous syllogism lands us inevitably at theology. How, then, would it be possible not to find it in the Syllabus? They, on the other hand, who are unceasing in their violent attacks on this pontifical act, are they not the first to provoke theological discussions? We are compelled to take their ground. As Mgr. Dupanloup judiciously observed, in his pamphlet on the Encyclical of the 8th December: “It is needful to recur to first principles in a time when thousands of men, and of women even, in France talk theology from morning to night without knowing much about it.”

The first and fundamental question to be determined is: What is the precise weight to be ascribed to the Syllabus, or, rather, what is its doctrinal authority? On the manner in which we reply to this depends the solution of numerous practical difficulties which interest consciences, and which have more than once been the subject of the polemic of the journals themselves. For example, are the decisions of the Syllabus unchangeable; is it not possible that they should be modified some day; is it certain they will never be withdrawn; are Catholics obliged to accept them as an absolute rule of their beliefs, or may they content themselves with doing nothing exteriorly in opposition to them? It is understood, in fact, that if we are in presence of an act wherein the successor of S. Peter exercises his sovereign and infallible authority, the doctrine is irrevocably, eternally, fixed without possible recall; and, by an inevitable corollary, the most complete submission, not of the heart only, but also of the intelligence, becomes an obligation binding on the conscience of the Catholic which admits of no reserve or subterfuge. If, on the contrary, the step taken by the Pope is merely an act of good administration or discipline, the door remains open for hopes of future changes, the constraint imposed on the minds of men in the interior forum is much less rigorous; a caviller would remain in Catholic unity provided that, with the respectful silence so dear to the Jansenists, he should also practise proper obedience. Now, the question, in the terms in which we have stated it, although treated of at various times by writers of merit, has not always been handled in a complete manner. Writers have been too often contented with generalities, with approaching only the question, and nothing has been precisely determined.

Some have asserted, with much[33] energy, the necessity of this submission, but they have not sufficiently defined its extent and nature. Others have dwelt upon the deference and profound respect with which every word of the Holy Father should be received, but, not having given any further explanation, they have left us without the necessary means for ascertaining what precisely they intended. Others have ventured to insinuate that the Syllabus was perhaps merely an admonition, a paternal advice benevolently given to some rash children, to which such as are docile are happy to conform, without feeling themselves under the absolute necessity of adopting it. Others, more adventurous still, have been unwilling to see more in it than a mere piece of information, an indication. According to these, Pius IX., wishing to notify to all the bishops of Christendom his principal authoritative acts since the commencement of his pontificate, had caused a list of them to be drawn out, and to be forwarded to them. The Syllabus was this illustrious catalogue, neither more nor less.

Is there any excuse to be found for this indecision on one hand, presumption on the other? We do not think so; but they do, we must confess, admit of a plausible explanation. And here, let it be observed, we come to the very marrow of the difficulty. The Syllabus was drawn out in an unusual form. It resembles no pontifical documents hitherto published. When, in other times, the sovereign pontiffs wished to stigmatize erroneous propositions, they did not content themselves with reproducing the terms of them, in order to mark them out for the reprobation of the people. They were always careful to explain the motives of the judgment they delivered, and above all to formulate with clearness and precision the judgment itself. Invariably, the texts they singled out for condemnation were preceded by grave and weighty words, wherein were explained the reasons for and the nature of the condemnation. In the Syllabus, there is nothing of the kind. The propositions, stated without commentary, are classified and distributed under general titles; at the end of each of them we read the indication of the Encyclical Letter, or pontifical Allocution, in which it had been previously rebuked. For the rest, there is no preamble, no conclusion, no discourse revealing the mind or intention of the pontiff, unless it be the following words, inscribed at the head of the document, and which we here give both in the Latin and in English: Syllabus complectens præcipuos nostræ ætatis errores, qui notantur in Allocutionibus consistorialibus, in Encyclicis, aliisque Apostolicis Litteris sanctissimi Domini Papæ Pii IX.—Table, or synopsis, containing the principal errors of our epoch, noted in the consistorial Allocutions, the Encyclicals, and other Apostolic Letters of our most Holy Father, Pope Pius IX.

We may add, that nowhere does the Pope formally express an intention of connecting the Syllabus with the bull Quanta cura, although he issued them both on the same day, at the same hour, under the same circumstances, and upon the same subjects. He left it to the public common sense and to the faith of Christians to decide whether these two acts are to be taken together, or whether they are to be considered as isolated acts having no common tie between them.

Such are the facts. Minds, either troubled or prejudiced, or, may be,[34] too astute, have drawn from them consequences which, if we lay aside accessory details of not much importance here, we may reduce to two principal ones.

It has been stated—and they who hold this language form, as it were, the extreme group of opposers—that the Apostolic Letters mentioned in the Syllabus are the only documents which have authoritative force; that the latter, on the contrary, has no proper weight of its own—absolutely none, whether as a dogmatic definition, or as a disciplinary measure, or even as a moral and intellectual direction. To these assertions, not a little hazardous, have been added others whose rashness would fain be hidden under the veil of rhetorical artifices. We will lift the veil, and expose the naked assertions. The meaning of the Syllabus, it is stated, must not be looked for in the Syllabus, but in the pontifical letters whence it is drawn. The study of the letters may be useful; not only is that of the Syllabus not so, but it is dangerous, because it often leads to lamentable exaggerations. To know the true doctrines of Rome, we must search the letters for them, not the Syllabus. In fact, to sum up all in a few words, as a condemnation of error and a manifestation of truth, the letters are all, the Syllabus nothing.

The other group, which we may describe as the moderates, knows how to guard itself against excess. It does not diminish the authority of the Syllabus to the extent of annihilation. Very far from it—it recognizes it and proclaims it aloud; but, struck with the peculiar form given to the act, it asserts that it is impossible to discover in it the marks of a dogmatic definition, and, to borrow a stock expression, of a definition ex cathedra. The Syllabus, it is said, is undoubtedly something by itself—to deny it would be ridiculous and absurd. It has a weight of its own; who would venture to dispute it? It may be termed, if you please, an universal law of the church, so only that its pretensions be not carried further, and that it does not claim to be considered an infallible decision of the Vicar of Jesus Christ.

What, then, have we to do but to demonstrate that the Syllabus is by itself, and independently of the pontifical acts which supply the matter of it, a veritable teaching; that this teaching obliges consciences because it issues from the infallible authority of the head of the church? We shall not have omitted, it seems to us, any of the considerations calculated to throw light on this important subject if, after having thus followed it through all its windings and discussed all its difficulties, we succeed in illustrating the triple character of the pontifical act—its doctrinal character, its obligatory character, and its character of infallibility.

To assert that Pius IX., when he denounced with so much firmness to the Christian world the errors of our time, did not propose to teach us anything, that he had no intention of instructing us, was, even at the time of the appearance of the Syllabus, to advance a sufficiently hardy paradox; but to state it, to maintain it, at this time of day, when we are the fortunate witnesses of the effects produced by that immortal act, is to speak against evidence. Undoubtedly—we stated it at the commencement—the Syllabus is not sufficiently known nor sufficiently studied. Little known as it may be, however, it cannot be denied that it has already set right[35] many ideas, and corrected and enlightened many minds. Thanks to it, not learned men only and those who are close observers of events, but Catholics generally, perceive more clearly the dangers with which certain doctrines threaten their faith. They have been warned, they keep themselves on their guard, they see more distinctly the course they must follow and the shoals they must avoid. Pius IX. has lighted a torch and placed it in their hands.

That being the case, what is the use of playing with words, as if vain subtleties could destroy the striking evidence of this fact? Let them say, as often as they please, “The Syllabus is only a list, a catalogue, a table of contents, a memorial of previously condemned propositions”—what good will they have done? What matter these denominations, more or less disrespectful, if it be otherwise demonstrated that this list, catalogue, or table of contents explains to us exactly what we must believe or reject, and is imposed upon us as a rule to which we owe subjection. The imprudent persons who speak thus would seem never to have studied the monuments of our beliefs. Had they considered their nature more attentively, would they have allowed themselves to indulge in such intemperance of language? If they would more closely examine them, their illusions would soon be dissipated. Are not all the series of propositions condemned by the Popes, veritable lists? Did not Martin V. and the Council of Constance, Leo X. and S. Pius V., when they smote with their anathemas the errors of Wycliffe, John Huss, Luther, Baïus, draw out catalogues? Are not the canons of our councils tables in which are inscribed an abridgment, summary, or epitome of the impious doctrines of heretics? Is not every solemn definition, every symbol of the faith, a memorial designed to remind the Christian what he is obliged to believe? It is, then, useless to shelter one’s self behind words of doubtful meaning, and which can only perplex the mind without enlightening it. It is to assume gratuitously the air of men who wish to deceive others and to deceive themselves. What is the use of it?

They are much mistaken who imagine themselves to be proposing a serious difficulty when they demand how the Syllabus, which, before its publication, existed already in the letters of the Holy Father, can possibly teach us anything new? Let us, for the sake of argument, since they ask it, reduce it to the humble rôle of echo or reverberator, if we may be pardoned such expressions. Let us suppose that its whole action consists in repeating what has been already said. We ask if an echo does not often convey to the ear a sound which, without it, would not have been heard—if it does not sometimes send back the sound stronger, more resounding, and even more distinct than the original voice? It is not a new voice it brings to us. Be it so. But it does bring it to us in fact, and is able to give it to us again fuller and more sonorous.

Comparison, it is true, is not reason. We will therefore abandon the redundancy of figurative language, and reply directly to the question put to us. What is wanted is to know what the Syllabus is in itself, independently of the pontifical letters which are its original sources. It is as follows:

It is, at least, a new promulgation, more universal, more authentic, and[36] therefore more efficacious, of previous condemnations. Now, it is well known, it is a maxim of law, that a second promulgation powerfully confirms and, in case of need, supersedes the first. The history of human legislation is full of instances of this. When, by reason of the negligence of men, of the difficulty of the times, of the inconstancy or waywardness of peoples, a law has fallen into partial neglect and oblivion, they in whom the sovereign power resides re-establish its failing authority by promulgating it anew. It revives thus, and if it has been defunct it receives a second life. What can the greater number of Christians know of so many scattered condemnations, buried, one may say, in the voluminous collection of pontifical encyclicals, if the Syllabus had not revealed them? How could they respect them, how obey them? It was necessary that they should hear them resound, in a manner, a second time, in the utterance of the great Pontiff, in order to be able to submit anew to their authority, and to resume a yoke of which many of them did not know the very existence. The salvation of the church required this.

The Syllabus is, however, not only a new promulgation, it is often a luminous interpretation of the original documents to which it relates; an interpretation at times so necessary that, should it disappear, from that moment the meaning of those documents would become, on many points, obscure or at least doubtful. It is worthy of remark that in order to deny the doctrinal value of the Syllabus the following fact is relied on—that it is unaccompanied with any explanation, with any reflections. “It is a dry nomenclature,” it has been said, “of which we cannot determine either the character or the end.” Now, it happens to be exactly here that brevity has brought forth light. The eighty-four propositions, in fact, isolated from their context, appear to us more exact, in stronger relief, more decidedly drawn. One may perceive that in the bulls their forms were, as yet, slightly indistinct; here they detach themselves vividly, and with remarkable vigor. And we wish that all our readers were able to judge of this for themselves. They would better understand, possibly, wherefore certain men insist with so much energy on our abandoning the Syllabus and applying ourselves exclusively to the sources—an excellent mode of preventing certain questions from becoming too clear.

The second paragraph of the Syllabus has for its object the condemnation of moderate rationalism. Some of the seven propositions contained in it reproduce the doctrine of a man little known in France, but much thought of in Germany—a kind of independent Catholic, who, before he opposed himself to the church, from which he is now, we believe, quite separated, having transferred his allegiance to the pastoral staff of the aged Reinkens, wrote some works destined to sow among the students of the university of Munich the damaged grain of infidel science. We allude to M. Froschammer, a canon who has lost his hood, professor of misty philosophy, as befits a doctor on the other side of the Rhine. Pius IX. rebuked his errors in a letter addressed to the Archbishop of Munich the 12th December, 1862. We will lay aside the Syllabus, and take merely the[37] letter. We shall find in it only the condemnation of M. Froschammer and his works; nothing whatever else. But who, in this our country, France, has ever opened the works of M. Froschammer? The Catholic Frenchman who might read the letter of Pius IX. knowing nothing of the condemned works, would say to himself: “This Munich professor has doubtless written according to his own fancy; he must have been rash, as every good German is bound to be who loses himself in the shadowy mazes of metaphysics. After all, there is nothing to show that he has written exactly my opinions. Why should I trouble myself about the letter of Pius IX.? It does not concern me.”

Another example. In Paragraph X. we find the same principle of modern liberalism enunciated in the following manner: “In this our age, it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be considered as the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all others.” “Ætate hac nostra, non amplius expedit religionem Catholicam haberi, tanquam unicam status religionem, cæteris quibuscumque cultibus exclusis.” The document to which we refer is a consistorial Allocution pronounced the 26th July, 1855, and it commences with these words, Nemo vestrum. What is this Allocution? A solemn protest against the criminality of the Spanish government, which, in contempt of its word and oath, of the rights of the church and the eternal laws of justice, had dared to perjure itself by abrogating, of its own single authority, the first and second articles of the concordat. Pius IX., full of grief, speaks in these terms: “You know, venerable brethren, how, in this convention, amongst all the decisions relative to the interests of the Catholic religion, we have, above all, established that this holy religion should continue to be the only religion of the Spanish nation, to the exclusion of every other worship.” The proposition of the Syllabus is not expressed in any other way in the Allocution. A man of great ability, or a scientific man, taking into account the facts, and weighing carefully the expressions of the Pontiff, might perhaps detect it therein. But how many others would it wholly escape! How many would not perceive it, or, if they should chance to catch sight of it, would remain in suspense, uncertain which was rebuked, the application of the doctrine or the doctrine itself! How many, in short, would be unwilling to recognize, in these words, aught but the sorrowful complaint of the Vicar of Jesus Christ outraged in his dearest rights! Return, however, to the Syllabus, and that which was obscure comes to light and manifests itself clearly. The two propositions we have cited do not appear, in it, confused or uncertain. Detached, on the contrary, from the particular circumstances which were calculated to weaken their meaning, and clad in a form more lofty, more universal, more abstract, they receive an unspeakable signification. No hesitation is possible. It is no longer the doctrine of M. Froschammer, nor the sacrilegious usurpations of the Spanish government, which are rebuked; it is but the doctrine considered in itself and in its substance. And since the Roman Pontiff, after having isolated it, fixes on it a mark of reprobation by declaring it erroneous, he denounces it to all ages and all people as deserving the everlasting censure of the church.

It is for this reason, as far as ourselves, at least, are concerned, we shall never accept without restriction a phrase which we find, under one form or other, in all directions, even from the pen of writers for whom we entertain, in other respects, the highest esteem: “The Syllabus has only a relative value, a value subordinate to that of the pontifical documents of which it is the epitome.” No! We are unable to admit an appreciation of it, in our opinion, so full of danger. We must not allow ourselves to weaken truth if we would maintain its salutary dominion over souls. They talk of the value of the Syllabus. What is meant by this? Its authority? It derives that most undoubtedly from itself, and from the sovereign power of him who published it. It is as much an act of that supreme authority as the letters or encyclicals to which it alludes. The meaning of the propositions it contains? Doubtless many of these, if we thus refer to their origin, will receive from it a certain illustration. Others, and they are not the fewest, will either lose there their precision, or will rather shed more light upon it than they receive from it. Between the two assertions—The pontifical letters explain the Syllabus, and, The Syllabus explains the pontifical letters—the second is, with a few exceptions, the most rigorously true. A very simple argument demonstrates it. Suppose that, by accident or an unforeseen catastrophe, one or other of these documents were to perish and not leave any trace of its existence, which is the one whose preservation we should most have desired, in order that the mind of Pius IX. and the judgment of the church concerning the errors of our age might be transmitted more surely to future generations?

Most fertile in subtleties is the mind of man when he wishes to escape from a duty that molests him. We must not, consequently, be astonished if many opponents of the Syllabus have lighted on ingenious distinctions which allow of their almost admitting, in theory, the doctrines we have just explained, whilst contriving to elude their practical consequences. For that, what have they done? They have acknowledged the real authority of this grand act in so far as it is a doctrinal declaration, or, if it is preferred, a manifestation of doctrine; adding, nevertheless, that the Pope has not imposed it on us in the way of obligation, but only in the way of guidance. The expression, only in the way of guidance, would have been a happy enough invention, had it been possible, in matter so important, and in an act so solemn, to imagine a guidance truly efficacious—such, for instance, as the Pope could not but wish it to be—which would not be an obligation. But we ourselves must avoid reasoning with too much subtlety, and content ourselves with opposing a difficulty more specious than solid with a few positive proofs.

We interpose, in the first place, the very title of the Syllabus: “Table, or abridgment, of the principal errors of our time, pointed out in consistorial Allocutions,” etc. To which we add the titles of various paragraphs: “Errors in relation to the church”; “Errors in relation to civil society”; “Errors concerning natural and Christian morals,” etc. For the Pope, the guardian and protector of truth, obliged by the duty of his office to hinder the church from suffering any decline or any alteration, to[39] denounce to the Christian world a doctrine by inflicting on it the brand of error, is evidently to forbid the employment of it, and to command all the faithful to eschew it. What communion is there between light and darkness, between life and death? There can be no question about guidance or counsel when the supreme interest is at stake. The duty speaks for itself. It is imposed by the nature of things. When Pius IX. placed at the head of his Syllabus the word “error,” and intensified it by adding words even more significant, when he expressed himself thus, “Principal errors of this our age,” he as good as said, “Here is death! Avoid it.” And if, in order still to escape from the consequences, a distinction is attempted to be drawn between an obligation created by the force of circumstances and an obligation imposed by the legislator, we would wish it to be remembered that the same Pius IX. uttered, in reference to the Syllabus, the following memorable sentence: “When the Pope speaks in a solemn act, it is to be taken literally; what he has said, he intended to say.” For our part, we would say, “What the Pope has done, he intended to do.”

But what need is there of so much discussion? The proof of what we have urged is written in express terms in the letter accompanying the Syllabus—a letter signed by his eminence Cardinal Antonelli, secretary of state, and intended to make known to the bishops the will of His Holiness. It is sufficient to quote this decisive document, which we do in full, on account of its importance:

This Syllabus, placed by the order of the Holy Father “before the eyes of all the bishops,” what else is it, we ask, than the text of the law brought under the observation of the judges charged with the duty of causing it to be executed? What is it except a rule to which they owe allegiance, and from which they must not swerve? They must not lose sight of it. Wherefore? Because it is their duty to be careful to promulgate its doctrine in their own teaching, because it is their duty to repress every rash opinion which should dare to raise itself against and contradict it. It is thus that all have understood the commandment given to them. The fidelity and unconquerable courage of their obedience prove it. What has taken place in France? In[40] the midst of the universal emotion produced by the appearance of the Syllabus, the government, abusing its power, had the sad audacity to constitute itself judge of it. Through the instrumentality of the keeper of the seals, minister of justice and of public worship, it forbade the publication of the pontifical document in any pastoral instruction, alleging that “it contained propositions contrary to the principles on which the constitution of the empire rests.” What was the unanimous voice of the episcopate? Eighty-four letters of bishops are in existence to bear witness to it. All, united in the same mind, opposed to the ministerial letter the invincible word of the apostles, Non possumus. All declared that they must obey God rather then man; and two amongst them, ascending courageously their cathedral thrones, braved the menaces of a susceptible government by reading before the assembled people that which they had been forbidden to print. Could they have acted all alike with this power truly episcopal, if they had not been inspired by the conviction that they were fulfilling a duty, and putting into practice the adage of the Christian knights, “I do my duty, happen what may”?

We will insist no further on this point. We approach, lastly, the question which might well supersede all the others. Let us enquire whether the Syllabus is an infallible decision of the Vicar of Jesus Christ.

It appears to us that, in reality, we have already settled this question. Can a definition ex cathedra be anything else than an instruction concerning faith and morals addressed to, and imposed on, the whole church by her visible head upon earth? How can we recognize it except by this mark, and is not that the idea given to us of it by the Council of the Vatican? Read over the words, so weighty and selected with so much care by the fathers of that august assembly, and you will find that nothing could express more accurately the exact and precise notion of it. After that, all doubts ought to disappear. The Syllabus emanates from him who is the master and sovereign doctor of Catholic truth. It belongs exclusively to faith and morals by the nature of the subjects of which it treats. It has received from the circumstances which have accompanied its publication the manifest character of an universal law of the church. What is wanting to it to be an irreformable decision, an act without appeal, of the infallible authority of Peter?

We know the objection with which we shall be met. Peter may speak, it will be urged, and not wish to exert the plenitude of his doctrinal power. Yes; but when he restrains thus within voluntary limits the exercise of his authority, he gives us to understand it clearly. He is careful, in order not to overtax our weakness, to apprise us that, notwithstanding the obligation with which he binds consciences, it is not in his mind, as yet, to deliver a definitive sentence upon the doctrine. Frankly, does the Syllabus offer to us an indication, however faint, of any such reserve? What more definitive than a judgment formulated in these terms: “This is error, that is truth”? Is any revision possible of such a judgment? Is it possible to be revoked or abrogated? Does it not settle us necessarily in an absolute conclusion which excludes all possibility of diminution or of change? In a word, can the assertion be[41] ever permissible—“Error in these days, truth in others”? It may be added that, by the admission of all, friends and enemies—an admission confirmed by the declaration of the cardinal secretary of state, the Syllabus is an appendix to, and as it were a continuation of, the bull Quanta cura, to which no one can reasonably refuse the character of a definitive and irreformable decree; and it will be understood how unreasonable it would be to despise the evidence of facts, in order to cling to an objection without consistency, and which falls of itself for want of a solid foundation.

For the rest, the mind of the Holy Father is not concealed, as has been at times suggested, under impenetrable veils. It appears the moment we look for it; and we find it, for example, in the preparation of the Syllabus. It should be known that the Syllabus was not the work of a day. Pius IX. has often asserted this. He had early resolved to strike a signal blow, and to destroy from top to bottom the monstrous edifice of revolutionary doctrines. To this end, immediately after the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, he transformed the congregation of cardinals and theologians who had aided him in the accomplishment of that work into a congregation charged with the duty of singling out for the Apostolic See the new errors which, for a century, had been ravaging the church of God. Ten years passed away; encyclicals were published, allocutions pronounced; the theologians multiplied their labors. At length, on the 8th of December, 1864, the moment of action appearing to have arrived, Pius IX. addressed to the world that utterance whose prolonged echoes we all have heard. The bull Quanta cura and the Syllabus were promulgated. It is obvious that an act so long prepared, and with so much anxiety, cannot be likened to an ordinary act. The object of the Pontiff was not simply to check the evil—it was to uproot it. The object of such efforts could not have been to determine nothing. Who is there, then, who will venture to assert that the whole thought of an entire reign, and of such a reign as that of Pius IX., should miserably collapse in a measure without authority and without effectiveness? To believe it would be an outrage; to affirm it would be an insult to the wisdom and prudence of the most glorious of pontiffs.

But what need is there for searching for proofs? A single reflection banishes every difficulty. We have in the church two means for ascertaining whether a pontifical act is, or is not, a sovereign definition, an infallible decision. We have to enquire of the pontiff who is the author of it, or the people who subordinate themselves to his teaching. Neither one nor the other can deceive us in the answer they give. The divine promise continues equally assured in both: in the former, when he teaches; in the latter, when they listen and obey. It is what the theologians call active and passive infallibility. Admit that Pius IX. had left us in ignorance; that he published the Syllabus, but did not tell us what amount of assent he required of us. Well, none of us are in any doubt as to that. How many times has not this people said, how many times has it not repeated with an enthusiasm inspired by love, that this Syllabus, despised, insulted by the enemies of the church, they accept as the rule of their beliefs, as the very word[42] of Peter, as the word of life come down from heaven to save us. Is it not thus that have spoken, one after the other, bishops, theologians, the learned and the ignorant, the mighty and the humble? Who amongst us has not heard this language? A celebrated doctor, Tanner, has said that in order to distinguish amongst the teachings of the church those which belong to its infallible authority, we must listen to the judgment of wise men, and above all consult the universal sentiment of Christians. If we adhere to this decision, it reveals to us our duties in regard to the sovereign act by which Pius IX. has withdrawn the world from the shadow in which it was losing its way, and has prepared for it a future of better destinies.

We have the more reason for acting thus as hell, by its furious hatred, gives us, for its part, a similar warning, and proclaims, after its fashion, the imperishable grandeur of the Syllabus. Neither has it, nor have those who serve it, ever been under any illusion in this respect. They have often revealed their mind both by act and word. What implacable indignation! what torrents of insults! what clamor without truce or mercy! And when importunate conciliators interfered to tell them they were mistaken, that the Syllabus was nothing or next to nothing, and need not provoke so much anger, how well they knew how to reply to them and to bury them under the weight of their contempt! At the end of 1864, at the moment when the struggle occasioned by the promulgation of the Encyclical and Syllabus was the most furious, an agency of Parisian publicity, the agency Bullier, could insert the following notice: “The Encyclical is not a dogmatic bull, but only a doctrinal letter. It is observable that the Syllabus does not bear the signature of the Pope. This Syllabus has besides been published in a manner to allow us to believe that the Holy Father did not intend to assign to it a great importance. One may conclude, therefore, that the propositions which do not attack either the dogma or morals of Catholics, and do not at all impeach faith, are not condemned, but merely blamed.” To these words, poor in sense, but crafty and treacherous in expression, the journal Le Siècle replied as follows:

“There are now people who tell us that the Encyclical is not a dogmatic bull, but a doctrinal letter; that the eighty propositions are not condemned, because they do not figure in the Encyclical, but only in the Syllabus; that this Syllabus does not bear the signature of the Pope; that it has been composed only by a commission of theologians, etc. These people would do better to be silent. Encyclical or Syllabus, the fact is that the theocracy has just hurled as haughty a defiance against modern ideas as it was possible for it to do. We shall soon see what will be the result.”

We will leave them to settle their quarrels between themselves. For ourselves, listening to these voices of heaven and of hell, of the church and of the world, which coincide in exalting the work eternally blessed by Pius IX., we repeat with profounder conviction than ever: “Yes, the Syllabus is the infallible word of Peter; and if our modern society is within the reach of cure, it is by the Syllabus that it is to be saved!”

SIR THOMAS MORE.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

In a sumptuous apartment, whose magnificent furniture and costly adornings announced it as the abode of kings, in a large Gothic arm-chair—whose massive sides were decorated with carvings in ebony and ivory of exquisite delicacy, and which was in itself, altogether, a model of the most skilful workmanship—there reclined the form of a stately and elegant woman.

Her small feet, but half-concealed beneath the heavy folds of a rich blue velvet robe, rested on a footstool covered with crimson brocade, embroidered with golden stars. Bands of pearls adorned her beautiful neck, contrasted with its dazzling whiteness, and were profusely twined amid the raven tresses of her luxuriant hair. An expression of profound melancholy was imprinted upon her noble features; her eyes were cast down, and the long, drooping lashes were heavy with tears which she seemed vainly endeavoring to repress, as she sat absorbed in thought, and nervously entwining her snowy fingers with the silk and jewelled cord which, according to the fashion of that day, she wore fastened at her girdle and hanging to her feet. This royal personage was Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, wife of Henry VIII., and queen of England.

The king himself was hurriedly pacing to and fro in the apartment, with contracted brow, a deeply troubled expression gleaming from his dark eyes and obscuring, with a shade of gloomy fierceness, the naturally fine features of his face. The ordinary grace of his carriage had disappeared; his step was hurried and irregular; and every movement denoted a man laboring under some violent excitement. From time to time he approached the window, and gazed abstractedly into the distance; then, returning to Catherine, he would address her abruptly, with a sharp expression or hurried interrogation, neither waiting for nor seeming to desire a reply.

While this strange scene was being enacted within the palace at Greenwich, one of an entirely different nature was occurring in the courtyard. From the road leading from Greenwich a cavalcade approached, headed by a personage invested with the Roman purple, and apparently entitled to and surrounded by all the “pomp and circumstance” of royalty. He was mounted on a richly caparisoned mule with silver-plated harness, adorned with silver bells and tufted with knots of crimson silk. This distinguished personage was no other than the Archbishop of York, the potent minister, who united in his person all the dignities[44] both of church and state—the Cardinal Legate, the king’s acknowledged favorite, Wolsey. To increase his already princely possessions, to extend his influence and authority, had been this man’s constant endeavor, and the sole aim of his life. And so complete had been his success that he was now regarded by all as an object of admiration and envy. But how greatly mistaken was the world in its opinion!

In his heart, Wolsey suffered the constant agony of a profound humiliation. Compelled to yield in all things, and bow with servile submission to the haughty will of his exacting and imperious master—who by a word, and in a moment, could deprive him of his dignities and temporalities—he lived in a state of constant dread, fearing to lose the patronage and favor to secure which he had sacrificed both his honor and his conscience.

He was accompanied on this journey by a numerous retinue, composed of gentlemen attached to his household and young pages carrying his standard, all of whom were eagerly pressing upon him the most obsequious attentions. They assisted him to dismount, and as he approached the palace the guards saluted and received him with the utmost military deference and respect; and with an air of grave dignity Wolsey passed on, and disappeared beneath the arch of the grand stairway.

Let us again return to the royal apartments. The king, seeing Wolsey arrive, immediately turned from the window and, confronting Catherine, abruptly exclaimed:

“Come, madam, I wish you to retire; the affairs of my kingdom demand instantly all my time and attention.” And hastily turning to the window, he looked eagerly into the courtyard.

Catherine arose without uttering a word, and approaching the centre of the apartment she took from the table a small silver bell, and rang it twice.

On this table was a magnificent cloth cover that she had embroidered with her own hands. The design represented a tournament, in which Henry, who was devoted to chivalrous amusements, had borne off the prize over all his competitors. In those days her husband received such presents with grateful affection and sincere appreciation, and, as the souvenir recalled to her mind the joy and happiness of the past, tears of bitterness flowed afresh from the eyes of the unhappy princess.

In answer to her signal, the door soon opened, the queen’s ladies in waiting appeared, and, arranging themselves on either side, stood in readiness to follow their royal mistress. She passed out, and was slowly walking in silence through the vast gallery leading to the king’s apartments, when Wolsey appeared, advancing from the opposite end of the gallery, followed by his brilliant retinue.

Catherine, then, instantly understood why the king had so abruptly commanded her to retire. Suddenly pausing, she stood transfixed and immovable, her soul overwhelmed with anguish; but, with a countenance calm and impassible, she awaited the approach of the cardinal, who advanced to salute her. In spite of all her efforts, however, she could no longer control her feelings.

“My lord cardinal,” she exclaimed in a low voice, trembling with emotion, “go, the king waits for you!” And as she uttered these[45] words, the unhappy woman fell senseless to the floor.

The hardened soul of the ambitious Wolsey was moved to its very depths with compassion as he silently gazed on the noble woman before him, who possessed the unbounded love and grateful esteem of all her household, not only as their sovereign, but also as their beneficent mother.

The cloud of ambition that forever surrounded him, darkening his soul and obscuring his perceptions, was for the moment illuminated, and for the first time he realized the enormity of Henry’s proceedings against the queen.

As this sudden light flashed on him, he felt remorse for having encouraged the divorce, and resolved that henceforward all his influence should be used to dissuade his sovereign from it.

At the approach of the royal favorite the ushers hastily made their salutations (although the queen had been permitted to pass them with scarcely the slightest mark of respect), and seemed to consider the most humble and servile attitude they could assume before him as only sufficiently respectful. They hastened to throw open the doors before him as he advanced, and Wolsey soon found himself in the presence of the king, who awaited his arrival in a state of almost angry impatience.

“Well! what do you come to tell me?” he cried. “Do you bring me good news?”

Wolsey, whose opinions had so recently undergone a very great change, for a moment hesitated. “Sire,” he at length replied, “Campeggio, the cardinal legate, has arrived.”

“Has he indeed?” said Henry, with an ironical smile. “After so many unsuccessful applications, we have then, at last, obtained this favor. Well, I hope now this affair will proceed more rapidly; and, Wolsey, remember that it is your business so entirely to compromise and surround this man, that he shall not be able even to think without my consent and sanction. And, above all, beware of the intrigues of the queen. Catherine is a Spaniard, with an artful, unyielding nature and fierce, indomitable will. She will, without doubt, make the most determined and desperate effort to enlist the legate in favor of her cause.”

“Is the decision of your majesty irrevocable on the subject of this divorce?” replied Wolsey, in a hesitating and embarrassed manner. “The farther we advance, the more formidable the accumulating difficulties become. I must acknowledge, sire, I begin myself to doubt of success. Campeggio has already declared that, if the queen appeals to Rome, he will not refuse to present her petition, and defend her cause; that he himself will decide nothing, and will yield to nothing he cannot conscientiously approve.”

On hearing Wolsey express these sentiments, Henry’s face flushed with rage, and a menacing scowl contracted his brow.

“Can it be possible,” he cried, “that you dare address me in this manner? I will castigate the Pope himself if he refuses his sanction. He shall measure his power with mine! He trembles because Charles V. is already on his frontier. I will make him tremble now, in my turn! I will marry Anne Boleyn—yes, I will marry her before the eyes of the whole world!”

“Yes, Anne Boleyn!” replied the king, regarding Wolsey with his usual haughty and contemptuous expression. “You know her well. She is attached to the service of Catherine.”

“Lady Anne Boleyn!” again cried Wolsey after a moment’s silence, for astonishment had almost for the time rendered him speechless and breathless. “Lady Anne Boleyn! The King of England, the great Henry, wishes, then, to marry Anne Boleyn! Why, if contemplating such a marriage as that, did you send me to seek the alliance of France, and to offer the hand of your daughter in marriage to the Duke of Orleans? And why did you instruct me to declare to Francis I. that your desire was to place on the throne of England a princess of his blood? It was only by these representations and promises that I succeeded in inducing him to sign the treaty which deprived Catherine of all assistance. You have assured me of your entire approval of these negotiations. This alliance with France was the only means by which to secure for yourself any real defence against the Pope and the Emperor. Do you suppose that Charles V. will quietly permit you to deprive his aunt of her position and title as queen of England?” Here Wolsey paused, wholly transported with indignation.

“Charles!” replied the king, “Charles? I can easily manage and pacify him by fine promises and long negotiations. As to our Holy Father, I will stir up strife enough to fill his hands so full that he will not be able to attend to anything else. The quarrels of Austria and France always end by recoiling on his head, and I imagine he will not soon forget the sacking Rome and his former imprisonment.”

“Yes, but you forget,” said Wolsey, “that the King of France will accuse you of flagrant bad faith: and will you bring on yourself their abhorrence in order to espouse Anne Boleyn?”

The minister pronounced these last words with an expression and in a tone of such contemptuous scorn as to arouse in a fearful degree the indignation of the king, accustomed only to the flattery and servile adulation of his courtiers. At the same time, he was compelled to feel the force of the cardinal’s reasoning, although the truth only served still more to irritate and enrage him.

“Cease, Wolsey!” cried Henry, fixing his flashing eyes fiercely upon him; “I am not here to listen to your complaints. I shall marry whom I please; and your head shall answer for the fidelity with which you assist me in executing my will.”

“My head, sire,” replied Wolsey courageously, “has long belonged to you; my entire life has been devoted to your service; and yet I shall most probably, in the end, have bitter cause to repent having always made myself subservient to your wishes. But your majesty will surely reflect more seriously on the dishonor you will necessarily incur by such a choice as this. The queen’s party will grow stronger and stronger, and I tell you frankly, I fear lest the legate be inflexible.”

“Wolsey,” cried Henry, elevating his voice in a threatening manner, “I have already declared my intentions—is that not sufficient? As to the legate, I repeat, he must be gained over to my cause. Gold and flattery will soon secure to us that[47] tender conscience whose scruples you now so sorely apprehend. Bring him to me to-morrow.”

“He is suffering too much, sire. The cardinal is aged and very infirm; I have no idea he will be in a condition to see your majesty for several days yet.”

“Too long, entirely too long to wait!” replied the king. “I must see him this very day; he shall be compelled to make his appearance. I wish you to be present also, as we shall discuss affairs of importance, and then I shall depart.”

With these words Henry withdrew and went to look for a casket, of which he alone carried the key, and in which he usually kept his most valuable and important papers.

During his absence, Wolsey remained leaning on the table, before which he was seated, absorbed in deep and painful reflections. He feared Henry too much to oppose him long in any of his designs; besides, he saw no possible means to induce him to change his resolution. He had felt, as we have seen, a momentary compassion for the misfortunes of the queen, but that impression had been speedily effaced by considerations of far greater moment to himself.

As a shrewd diplomatist, he regretted the alliance with France; besides, he was really too much interested in the welfare of the king not to deplore his determination to contract such a marriage.

But the cause of his deepest anxiety was the knowledge he possessed of Anne’s great dislike for him, and the consciousness that her family and counsellors were his rivals and enemies; in consequence of which he clearly foresaw they would induce her to use all the influence she possessed with the king in order to deprive him of Henry’s favor and patronage. He was suffering this mental conflict when the king reappeared, bearing a bronze casket carved with rare perfection. Placing it on the table, he unlocked it. Among a great many papers which it contained was a very handsome book, the printing beautifully executed, and every page ornamented with arabesques exquisitely tinted and shaded. The cover, formed of two metal plates, represented in bass-relief the figures of Faith, Hope, and Charity as young virgins, bearing in their hands and on their foreheads the allegorical emblems of those sublime Christian virtues. Emeralds of immense value, surrounded by heavy gold settings, adorned the massive gold clasps, and also served to hold them firmly in their places.

On the back of this book, deeply engraven in the metal, were the following words: The Seven Sacraments. Henry had written this work in defence of the ancient dogmas of the Catholic Church, when first attacked by the violent doctrines of a monk named Luther. Whether the king had really composed it himself, or whether he had caused it to be secretly done by another, and wished to enjoy the reputation of being the author, he certainly attached great importance to the work. Not only had he distributed it throughout his own kingdom, but had sent it to the Pope and to all the German princes, through the Dean of Windsor, whom he instructed to say that he was ready to defend the faith, not only with his pen but, if need be, with his sword also. It was at that time that he asked and obtained from the court of Rome the title of “Defender of the Faith.”

Now he was constantly busy with a manuscript, which he took from the mysterious casket, containing a Treatise on Divorce, and to which he every day devoted several hours. Greatly pleased with a number of arguments he had just found, he came to communicate them to Wolsey. The latter, after urging several objections, at length reminded him of the fraudulent and persistent means that had been employed to extract from the University of Oxford an opinion favorable to divorce. “And yet,” added the cardinal, “it has been found impossible to prevent them from increasing the number of most important restrictions, and thus rendering your case exceedingly difficult, if not entirely hopeless.”

“What!” said the king, “after the good example of the University of Cambridge, are we still to encounter scruples? Consider it well, cardinal, in order not to forget the recompense, and, above all, the punishment, for that is the true secret of success! You will also take care to write to the Elector Frederick, and say that I wait to receive the humble apologies of that man Luther, whom he has taken so entirely under his protection.”

“Sire,” replied the cardinal, “I have received frequent intelligence with regard to that matter which I have scarcely dared communicate to you.”

“And why not?” demanded the king. “Do you presume, my lord cardinal, that the abuse of an obscure and turbulent monk can affect me? And besides, to tell you the truth, I do not know but this man may, after all, be useful to me. He has attracted the attention of the court of Rome, and may yet have to crave my protection.”

“Well, sire, since you compel me to speak, I will tell you that, far from making humble apologies, his violence against you has redoubled. I have just received a tract he has recently published. In it I find many passages where, in speaking of you, he employs the most abusive epithets and expressions. For instance, he repeatedly declares that your majesty ‘is a fool, an ass, and a madman,’ that you are ‘coarser than a hog, and more stupid than a jackass.’ He speaks with equal scurrility of our Holy Father the Pope, addressing him, in terms of the most unparalleled effrontery, this pretended warning, which is of course intended simply as an insult: ‘My petit Paul, my petit Pope, my young ass, walk carefully—it is very slippery—you may fall and break your legs. You will surely hurt yourself, and then people will say, “What the devil does this mean? The petit Pope has hurt himself.”’ Further on, I find this ridiculous comparison, which could only emanate from a vile and shameless pen: ‘The ass knows that he is an ass, the stone knows that it is a stone, but these asses of popes are unable to recognize themselves as asses.’ He concludes at length with these words, which fill the measure of his impiety and degradation: ‘If I were ruler of an empire, I would make a bundle of the Pope and his cardinals, and throw them altogether into that little pond, the Tuscan Sea. I pledge my word that such a bath would restore their health, and I pledge Jesus Christ as my security!’”

“What fearful blasphemy!” cried Henry. “Could a Christian possibly be supposed to utter such absurd, blasphemous vulgarities? I trow not! This pretended ‘reformer’ of the ‘discipline and abuses of[49] the church’ seems to possess any other than an evangelical character. No one can doubt his divine mission and his Christian charity! A man who employs arguments like these is too vile and too contemptible to be again mentioned in my presence. Let me hear no more of this intolerable apostate! Proceed now with business.”

“Sire,” then continued the cardinal, presenting a list to the king, “here are the names of several candidates I wish you to consider for the purpose of appointing a treasurer of the exchequer. Thomas More has already filled, most honorably, a number of offices of public trust, and is also a man of equal ability and integrity. I recommend him to your majesty for this office.”

“I approve your selection most unhesitatingly,” replied the king. “I am extremely fond of More, and perfectly satisfied with the manner in which he has performed his official duties heretofore. You will so inform him from me. What next?”

“I would also petition your majesty that Cromwell be confirmed as intendant-general of the monasteries latterly transformed into colleges.”

“Who is this Cromwell?” inquired Henry. “I have no recollection of him.”

“Sire,” replied Wolsey, “he is of obscure birth, the son of a fuller of this city. He served in the Italian wars in his youth; afterwards he applied himself to the study of law. His energies and abilities are such as to entitle him to the favorable consideration of your majesty.”

“Let him be confirmed as you desire,” replied the king very graciously, as he proceeded to sign the different commissions intended for the newly appointed officials.

“I wish,” he added, regarding Wolsey with a keen, searching glance, “that you would find some position for a young ecclesiastic called Cranmer, who has been strongly recommended to me for office.”

The brow of the cardinal contracted into a heavy frown as he heard the name of a man but too well known to him. He immediately divined that it was from Anne Boleyn alone the king had received this recommendation.

In the meantime, the queen had been carried to her apartments. The devoted efforts of the ladies of her household, who surrounded her with the tenderest ministrations, soon recalled her to the consciousness and full realization of her misery.

Now the night has come, and found Catherine still seated before the grate, absorbed in deep thought. Born under the soft skies of Spain, she had never become acclimated, nor accustomed to the humid, foggy atmosphere of England. Like a delicate plant torn from its native soil, she sighed unceasingly for the balmy air and the golden sunlight of her own genial southern clime. Such regrets, added to the sorrows she had experienced, had thrown her into a state of habitual melancholy, from which nothing could arouse her, and which the slightest occurrence sufficed to augment. For a long time her firmness of character had sustained her; but her health beginning to fail, and no longer able to arouse the energy and courage which had before raised her above misfortune, she sank beneath the burden and abandoned herself to hopeless sorrow.

As she sat all alone in her chamber, she held in her hand a letter but recently received from her native country. Reading it slowly, she mused, dreaming of the days of her happy childhood, when suddenly the door was opened, and a young girl, apparently ten or twelve years of age, ran in and threw her arms around the neck of the queen. The figure of the child was slight and graceful; around her waist was tied a broad sash of rose-colored ribbon, with long ends floating over her white muslin dress; her beautiful blonde hair was drawn back from her forehead and fastened with bows of ribbon, leaving exposed a lovely little face glowing with animation and spirit, and a frank, ingenuous expression, at once prepossessing and charming. This was the Princess Mary, the daughter of Henry, the future consort of a Spanish prince, to whom the shrewd diplomatist Wolsey had promised her hand, in order to deprive the unfortunate mother of this her only remaining consolation.

“Why is it, my dearest mamma,” she exclaimed, “that you are again in tears?” And, laughingly, she took the handkerchief from the queen and put it to her own eyes, pretending to weep.

“See now, this is the way I shall do when I am grown up, for it seems to me grown-up people are always weeping. Oh! I wish I could always remain a child, and then I should never be miserable! Listen, my dear mamma,” she continued, again twining her arms around her mother’s neck, “why is it that you are always weeping and so sad? It must surely do you harm. Everybody is not like you, constantly sighing and in tears, I do assure you. Only this morning, I was at St. James’ Park with Alice, and there I met Lady Anne Boleyn; she was laughing gaily as she promenaded with a number of her friends. I ran immediately to her to say good morning, for I was really very glad to see her. How is it, mamma—I thought you told me she had gone to Kent to visit her father?”

“My child,” replied the queen, her tears flowing afresh, “what I told you was true; but she has since returned without my being informed.”

“But, mamma, since this is your own house, why has she not yet presented herself? I am very sorry she has acted so, for I love her better than any of the other ladies. She told me all she saw in France when she travelled with my aunt, the Duchess of Suffolk. Oh! how I would love to see France. Lady Anne says it is a most beautiful country. She has described to me all the magnificent entertainments that King Louis XII. gave in honor of my aunt. Mamma, when I marry, I want the King of France to be my husband.”

“Oh! yes, mamma, very much, very much indeed!” innocently answered the child. “I am very sorry she is no longer to be here, she is so amiable, and when she plays with me she always amuses me so much!”

“Well, my dear child,” replied the queen, “I will tell you now why people weep when they are grown up, as you say: it is because they very often love persons who no longer return their affection.”

“And do you believe she no longer loves me?” replied the impulsive little Mary with a thoughtful expression. “And yet, mamma,[51] I kissed her this morning and embraced her with all my heart. However, I now remember that she scarcely spoke a word to me; but I had not thought of it before. She seemed to be very much embarrassed. But why should she no longer love me when I still love her so dearly?”

As Mary uttered these words, a woman entered the room and, whispering a moment in the ear of the queen, placed a note in her hand.

Catherine arose and approached the light; after reading the note, she called the young princess and requested her to retire to her chamber, as she had something to write immediately that was very important.

Mary ran gaily to her mother, and, after kissing and embracing her fondly and tenderly again and again, she at last bade her good-night, and with a smiling face bounded from the room in the same light and buoyant manner that she had entered it.

“Leonora,” said the queen, “my dear child, you have left for my sake our beautiful Spain, and have ever served me with faithful devotion. Listen, now, to the request I shall make—go bring me immediately the dress and outer apparel belonging to one of the servant women.”

“Ask no questions—I have use for them; you will accompany me; I must go to London this night.”

“Good heaven! my dear mistress, what are you saying?” cried Leonora in great alarm. “Go to London to-night? It is five miles; you will never be able to walk it, and you well know it would be impossible to attempt the journey in any other way—they would detect us.”

“Leonora,” answered the queen, “I am resolved to go. Faithful friends inform me that the legate has arrived. Henry will now redouble his vigilance. I have but one day—if I lose this opportunity, I shall never succeed. My last remaining hope rests upon this. If you refuse to accompany me, I shall go alone.”

“Alone!—oh! my beloved mistress,” cried Leonora, her hands clasped and her eyes streaming tears, “you can never do this! Think of what you are going to undertake! If you were recognized, the king would be at once informed, and we would both be lost.”

“Even so, Leonora; but what have I to lose? Is it possible for me to be made more wretched? Shall I abandon this, my last hope? No, no, Leonora; I am accountable to my children for the honor of their birth. Go now, my good girl! fly—there is not a moment to lose. Fear nothing; God will protect us!”

Leonora, shrewd and adroit like the women of her country, was very soon in possession of the desired habiliments. Her actions might have excited suspicion, perhaps; but entirely devoted to the queen as she was she felt no fear, and would, without hesitation, have exposed herself to even greater danger, had it been necessary, in the execution of her mistress’ wishes.

Catherine feigned to retire; and, after her attendants had been dismissed, she left the palace, closely enveloped in a long brown cloak, such as was habitually worn by the working-women of that period. The faithful Leonora tremblingly followed the footsteps of her mistress. They breathed more freely when they found themselves at last beyond the limits of the[52] castle. Leonora, however, when they entered the road leading to London, anxiously reflected on the danger of meeting some one who would probably recognize them. Her excited imagination even began to conjure up vague apprehensions of the dead, to blend with her fears of the living. She also dreaded lest the strength of the queen should prove unequal to the journey—in fine, she feared everything. The sighing winds, the rustling leaves, the sound of her own footsteps as she walked over the stones, startled and filled her with apprehension. Very soon there was another cause for alarm. The wind suddenly arose with violence; dark clouds overspread the heavens; the moon disappeared; large drops of rain began to fall, and soon poured in torrents, deluging the earth and drenching their garments.

In vain they increased their speed; the storm raged with such fury they were compelled to take refuge under a tree by the roadside.

“My poor Leonora,” said the queen, supporting herself against the trunk of the tree, whose wide-spread branches were being lashed and bent by the fury of the storm, “I regret now having brought you with me. I am already sufficiently miserable without the additional pain of seeing my burdens laid upon others.”

“My beloved lady and mistress,” cried Leonora, “I am not half so unhappy at this moment as I was when I feared my brothers would prevent me from following you to England. It seems to me I can see the vessel now, with its white sails unfurled, bearing you away, whilst I, standing on the shore, with frantic cries, entreated them to let me rejoin you. That night, I remember, being unable to sleep, I went down into the orange-grove, the perfume of whose fruits and flowers embalmed the air of the palace gardens. Wiping away the sad tears, I fixed my eyes upon your windows, which the light of our beautiful skies rendered distinctly visible even at night. In Spain, at that hour, we can walk by the light of the stars; but in this land of mud and water, this horrid England, one has to be wrapped to the ears in furs all the year round, or shiver with cold from morning till night. This is doubtless the reason why the English are so dull and so tiresome to others. In what a condition is this light mantle that covers our heads!” said Leonora, shaking the coarse woollen cloak dripping with water, that enveloped Catherine. “These Englishwomen,” she resumed, “know no more about the sound of a guitar than they do about the rays of the sun; they are all just as melancholy as moles. There is not one of them, except the Princess Mary, who seems to have the slightest idea of our beautiful Spain.”

“Ah!” sighed the queen, “she is just as I was at her age. God forbid that her future should resemble that of her mother!”

In the meantime the storm had gradually abated; time pressed, and Catherine again resumed her journey with renewed courage and accelerated speed. In spite of the mud, in which she sank at every step, she redoubled her efforts. For what cannot the strong human will accomplish, when opposed to feeble, physical strength alone, or even when the obstacles interposed proceed from the elements themselves? She at length arrived at the gate of the palace of Lambeth, situated on the banks of the[53] Thames, where the cardinal Campeggio, according to the intelligence conveyed to her, would hold his court.

The courtyards, the doors, the ante-chambers, were thronged with servants and attendants, eager and active in the performance of their duties, for Henry had ordered that the cardinal should be entertained in a style of princely munificence, and entirely free from personal expense. All these valets, being strangers to their new masters, and unaccustomed to their new employments, permitted the queen to pass without question or detention, not, however, without a stare of stupid curiosity at her muddy boots and draggled garments.

Catherine, being perfectly familiar with the interior of the palace, had no difficulty in finding the legate’s cabinet.

The venerable prelate was slightly lame, and in a feeble and precarious state of health. She found him seated before the fire in a large velvet arm-chair, engaged in reading his Breviary. His face was pale and emaciated; a few thin locks of snow-white hair hung about his temples. Hearing the door open, he rested the book on his knee, casting upon the queen, as she entered, a keen, penetrating glance.

Without hesitation, Catherine advanced towards him. “My lord cardinal,” she exclaimed, removing the hood from her face, “you see before you the queen of England, the legitimate spouse of Henry VIII.”

Hearing these words, Campeggio was unable to suppress an exclamation of surprise. He arose at once to his feet, and, perceiving the extraordinary costume in which Catherine was arrayed, he cast upon her a look of incredulous astonishment. He was about to speak when she, with great vehemence, interrupted him.

“Yes,” she cried, raising her hands towards heaven, “I call upon God to witness the truth of what I say—I am Queen Catherine! You are astonished to see me here at this hour, and in this disguise. Know, then, that I am a prisoner in my own palace; my cruel husband would have prevented me from coming to you. They tell me you are sent to sit in judgment on my case. Surely, then, you should be made acquainted with my bitter woes and grievances. Lend not your aid to the cause of injustice and wrong, but be the strength of the weak, the defence of the innocent. A stranger in this country, I have no friends; fear of the king drives them all from me. I cannot doubt it—no, you will not refuse to hear my appeal. You will defend the cause of an injured mother and her helpless children. What! would you be willing to condemn me without first hearing my cause—I, the daughter of kings? Have I been induced to marry Henry of Lancaster to enjoy the honors of royalty, when all such honors belong to me by my birthright? Catherine of Aragon has never been unfaithful to her husband; but to-day, misled by a criminal passion, he wishes to place upon the throne of England a shameless woman, to deny his own blood, and brand his own children with the stigma of illegitimacy! Yes, I solemnly declare to you that nothing can shake my resolution or divert me from my purpose! Strong in my innocence and in the justice of my cause, I will appeal to the whole world—aye, even to God himself!”

The cardinal stood motionless,[54] regarding Catherine with reverence, as an expression of haughty indignation lighted up her noble features. He was struck with admiration at her courage and filled with compassion for her woes.

“No, madam,” he replied, “I am not to be your judge. I know that it is but too true that you are surrounded by enemies. But let me assure you that in me, at least, you will not find another. I shall esteem myself most happy if, by my counsel or influence, I may be of service to your cause, and it is from the depths of my heart that I beg you to rely upon this assurance.”

Catherine would have thanked him, but a noise was that moment heard of the ushers throwing the doors violently open and announcing, in a loud voice, “His Eminence Cardinal Wolsey!”

“Merciful heaven!” cried Catherine, “must this odious man pursue me for ever?” She hurriedly lowered her veil, and took her place at the left of the door, and the moment he entered passed out behind him. Wolsey glanced at her sharply, the appearance of a woman arousing instantly a suspicion in his mind, but, being compelled to respond with politeness to the legate’s salutations, he had no time to scrutinize, and Catherine escaped without being recognized.

Wolsey was passionately fond of pomp and pageant. The principal positions in his house were filled by barons and chevaliers. Among these attendants were numbered the sons of some of the most distinguished families, who, under his protection and by the aid of his all-powerful patronage and influence, aspired to civil or military preferment.

On this occasion, he considered it necessary to make an unusual display of luxurious magnificence. It was with great difficulty and trepidation that the queen threaded her way through the crowd of prelates, noblemen, and young gentlemen who awaited in the ante-chambers the honor of being presented by the king’s favorite to the cardinal-legate.

The courtyard was filled with their brilliant equipages, conspicuous among which were observed a great number of mules, richly caparisoned, and carrying on their backs immense chests, covered with crimson cloth, trimmed with fringe and embroidered with gold.

A crowd of idle valets were engaged in conversation at the foot of the stairs. The queen, in passing them, attracted their attention, exciting their ridicule and coarse gibes, and she heard them also indulge in the most insolent conjectures regarding her.

“Who is that woman?” said one. “See how dirty she is.” “She looks like a beggar, indeed,” cried another, addressing himself to one of the new-comers engaged to attend the legate. “Your master receives strange visitors; we, on the contrary, have nothing to do with people like that, except quickly to show them the door.”

“Ha! ha! you will have your hands full,” exclaimed the most insolent of the crowd, “if your master gives audience to such rabble as that.” Emboldened by these remarks, one of the porters approached the queen, and, rudely pushing her, exclaimed with an oath: “Well, beldame, what brought you here? Take yourself off quickly. My lord is rich, but his crowns were not made for such as you.” These words excited the loudest applause from the whole crowd, who clapped their[55] hands and cheered vociferously. Catherine trembled with mortification.

“It is thus,” she mentally exclaimed, “that the poor are received in the palaces of the rich. And I myself have probably more than once, without knowing it, permitted them to sigh in vain at the gates of my own palace—mothers weeping for their children, or men, old and helpless, making a last appeal for assistance.”

The queen, entirely absorbed in these reflections, together with the impression made upon her by the appearance of the venerable legate, the sudden apparition of Wolsey, the snares that had been laid for her, and the temptations with which they had surrounded her, mechanically followed Leonora, to whom the fear that her mistress might be pursued and arrested seemed to have given wings.

“Leonora,” at length cried the queen, “I feel that I can go no farther. Stop, and let us rest for a moment; you walk too quickly.” Exhausted with fatigue, she seated herself on a rock by the roadside.

She had scarcely rested a moment when a magnificent carriage passed. The silken curtains were drawn back, and the flaming torches, carried by couriers, who surrounded the carriage, completely illuminated the interior. Seated in this princely equipage was a young girl, brilliant in her youthful beauty and the splendor of her elegant dress and jewelled adornings. At a glance, Catherine recognized Anne Boleyn, who was returning from a grand entertainment given her by the Lord Mayor of London.

She passed like the light; the carriage rapidly whirling through the mud and water, that flew from the wheels and covered anew the already soiled garments of the hapless queen.

Catherine, completely overcome by painful emotions, felt as though she were dying.

“Leonora, listen!” she said in a faint voice, scarcely audible—“Leonora, come near me—give me your hand; I feel that I am dying! You will carry to my daughter my last benediction!”

She sought in the darkness the hand of Leonora; the film of death seemed gathering over her eyes; she did not speak, her head sank on her shoulder, and poor Leonora thought the queen had ceased to breathe. She at first held her in her arms; but at length, overcome by fatigue, she sank upon the earth as she vainly endeavored to revive her by breathing into her mouth her own life-breath. But seeing all her efforts to restore animation useless, she came to the terrible conclusion that Catherine was indeed dead.

“My dear mistress,” she cried wildly, wringing her hands, “my good mistress is dead! What will become of me? It is my fault: I should have prevented her from going. Ah! how miserable I am!” And her tears and cries redoubled. At length she heard in the distance the sound of approaching footsteps, and was soon able to distinguish a litter, borne by a number of men. “Help!” she cried, her hopes reviving at the sight, and very soon they were near her—“help! come to my assistance; my mistress is dying!” Seeing two women, one lying on the ground supported in the arms of another, who appeared half-deranged, the person who occupied the litter commanded the men to stop immediately, and he quickly alighted. It was the king! He also was going to London to[56] see the legate; to prevent his anxious haste from being known, and commented on, he had adopted this secret conveyance. When she saw him, Leonora was paralyzed with apprehension and alarm. The king instantly recognized the queen and the unhappy Leonora. In a furious voice, he demanded what she was doing there and where she had been. But in vain she endeavored to reply—her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth—she was unable to articulate a word. Transported with rage at her silence, and by what he suspected, he immediately had the queen placed in the litter, and ordering the men to walk slowly, he followed them on foot to the palace.

Catherine was carried to her own apartment, and soon restored to consciousness; but on opening her eyes she looked around, vainly hoping to behold her faithful Leonora. She never saw her again! She had been taken away, and the punishment that was meted out to her, or the fate that befel the unfortunate girl, was for ever involved in mystery.

While discord filled the royal palace with perplexity and sorrow a statesman, simple and peaceful, awaited, with happiness mingled with impatience, the arrival of a friend. In his house, all around him seemed possessed of redoubled activity. The family table was more elegantly spread, fresh flowers decorated all the apartments, the children ran to and fro in the very excess of their joy and delight, until at length, in every direction, the glad announcement was heard, “He has come! he has come!” The entire family eagerly descended to the court-yard to meet and welcome the visitor, and Sir Thomas, with feelings of inexpressible joy, folded in his embrace the Bishop of Rochester, the wise and virtuous Fisher, whom he loved with the purest and tenderest sentiments of friendship.

“At last you are here,” he exclaimed; “how happy I am to see you once more!”

While the good bishop was ascending the stairs, surrounded by a troop of Sir Thomas’ youngest children, Margaret, the eldest daughter, came forward and saluted him, accompanied by Lady More, her step-mother, and young William Roper, her affianced husband. They all entered the drawing-room together, and, after engaging a short time in general conversation, Sir Thomas bade the children retire, that he might converse with more freedom.

“My dear friend,” he exclaimed, taking the bishop’s hand again in his own, “I cannot express the joy I feel at your return. I have been so long deprived of your presence, and I have so many things to say to you. But my heart is too full at this moment to permit me to express all I feel or would say! But why have you not answered my letters?”

“Your letters!” replied the bishop. “Why, it has been more than a month since I received one from you.”

“How can that be possible unless they have been intercepted?” replied More. “The king every day becomes more and more suspicious. If this continues, it will soon be considered high treason for a man to think.”

“I cannot tell what has become of your letters. I only know I have not received them, and it has caused me a great deal of anxiety and apprehension. But my friend, since I[57] find you full of life and health, I am quite satisfied and happy. Now, let me hear all that has happened at court; but let me begin by first telling you that the king has sent me, through Cardinal Wolsey, a document he has written on the subject of divorce, asking my opinion and advice. I have answered him with all frankness and candor, expressing myself strongly against his views. Certainly, there is nothing more absurd than the idea of the king’s wishing to repudiate, after so many years of marriage, a princess so virtuous and irreproachable, to whom he can find no other objection than that she was betrothed to his brother, Prince Arthur. Besides, a dispensation was obtained on that account at the time of his marriage, therefore it would seem his conscience ought to be perfectly satisfied.”

“Yes, yes, his conscience should be entirely at rest,” replied Sir Thomas. “And if he sincerely believes the marriage has been void until this time, why does he not make the effort to have it rendered legitimate, instead of endeavoring to annul it entirely? It is because he wishes to marry one of the queen’s ladies—the young Anne Boleyn!”

“Oh! horrible,” cried Fisher. “Are you sure, my friend, of what you say? Gracious heaven! If I had only suspected it! But I assure you I have had entire confidence in him. I have, therefore, examined the subject conscientiously and with the greatest possible diligence before giving him my reply. Had I suspected any such scheme as this, I should never have had the patience to consider the arguments he has presented with so much duplicity.”

“Well, my dear Fisher,” replied Sir Thomas, “such is the sad truth, and such are the ‘scruples’ that disturb the tender conscience of the king. To repudiate the queen and the Princess Mary, his daughter, is his sole aim, his only desire. I also have received an order to read and give my opinion on the divorce question; but I have asked to be excused, on the ground of my very limited knowledge of theological matters. Moreover, all these debates and hypocritical petitions for advice are entirely absurd and unnecessary. Cardinal Campeggio, the Pope’s legate, has already arrived from Rome, and the queen will appear before a court composed of the legate and Wolsey, together with several other cardinals.”

“The queen brought to trial!” cried the Bishop of Rochester. “The queen arraigned to hear her honor and her rank disputed? What a shame upon England! Who will speak for her? I would give my life to be called to defend her! But how is it that Wolsey—the all-powerful Wolsey—has not diverted the king from his unworthy purpose?”

“He is said to have tried; but he stands in awe of the king. You know an ambitious man never opposes him to whom he owes his power. Nevertheless,” added More, “I cannot believe he will dare to pronounce the Princess Mary illegitimate. For, all laws aside, supposing even that the marriage were annulled, the good faith in which it was contracted invests her birth with an inalienable right.”

“I hope it may be so,” said Fisher; “but what immense calamities this question will bring on our unhappy country!”

“I fear so, my friend,” replied More. “At present, the people are pledged to the queen’s cause;[58] it could not be otherwise, she is so much beloved and esteemed; and they declare, if the king does succeed in repudiating Catherine, that he will find it impossible to deprive his daughter of her right to reign over them.”

“And Wolsey,” replied the bishop thoughtfully, “will be called to sit in judgment on his sovereign! He will be against her! And this Campeggio—what says he in the matter?”

“We believe,” replied More, “that he will sustain the queen; he seems to possess great firmness and integrity of character. His first interview with the king gave us great hopes. Henry has overwhelmed him with protestations of his entire submission, but all his artifices have been frustrated by the discernment and prudence of the Italian cardinal. His impenetrable silence on the subject of his own personal opinions has plunged the king into despair. Since that day he has honored him with incessant visits, has offered him the rich bishopric of Durham, and worked unceasingly to corrupt his integrity by promises and flattery.”

“How keenly the queen must suffer,” said Fisher—“she that I saw, at the time of her arrival in the kingdom, so young, so beautiful, and so idolized by Henry!”

“Alas! I think so,” said More. “For some time I have found it impossible to approach her. However, she appears in public as usual, always gracious and affable; there is no change in her appearance. The queen is truly a most admirable woman. During your absence, an epidemic made its appearance called the ‘sweating sickness,’ which made terrible ravages. Wolsey fled from his palace, several noblemen belonging to his household having died very suddenly of the disease. The king was greatly alarmed; he never left the queen for a moment, and united with her in constant prayers to God, firmly believing that her petitions would avail to stay the pestilence. He immediately despatched Anne Boleyn to her father, where she was attacked by the disease, and truly we would have felt no regret at her loss if the Lord in taking her had only deigned to show mercy to her soul. At one time we believed the king had entirely reformed, but, alas! the danger had scarcely passed when he recalled Anne Boleyn, and is again estranged from the queen.”

“Death gives us terrible lessons,” replied the Bishop of Rochester. “In his presence we judge of all things wisely. The illusions of time are dissipated, to give place to the realities of eternity!” As the bishop said these words, several persons who had called to see Sir Thomas entered the room. Conspicuous among them was Cromwell, the protégé of Wolsey. This man was both false and sinister, who made use of any means that led to the acquisition of fortune. He possessed the arts of intrigue and flattery. To a profound dissimulation he added an air of politeness and a knowledge of the world that, in general, caused him to be well received in society. A close scrutiny of his character, however, made it evident that there was something in the depths of this man’s soul rendering him unworthy of any confidence. To him, vice and virtue were words devoid of any meaning. When he found a man was no longer necessary to his designs, or that he could not in some manner use him, he made no further effort to conciliate or retain[59] his friendship. He saluted Sir Thomas and the Bishop of Rochester with a quiet ease, and seated himself beside young Cranmer—“with whom I am very well acquainted,” he remarked. For Cromwell, like all other intriguers, assumed intimacy with all the world.

Scarcely had he uttered the words when a Mr. Williamson was ushered in, who had returned to London a few days before, after a long absence on the Continent.

“And so you are back, Mr. Williamson,” cried More, taking his hand. “You are just from Germany, I believe? Well, do tell us how matters stand in that country. It seems, from what we hear, everything is in commotion there.”

“Your supposition is quite correct, sir,” replied Williamson in a half-serious, half-jesting manner. “The emperor is furious against our king, and has sent ambassadors to Rome to oppose the divorce. But the empire is greatly disturbed by religious dissensions, therefore I doubt if he will be able to give the subject as much attention as he desires. New reformers are every day springing up. The foremost now is Bacer, a Dominican monk; then comes Zwingle, the curate of Zürich—where he endeavored to abolish the Mass, to the great scandal of the people—and there is still another, named Œcolampadius, who has joined Zwingle. But strangest of all is that these reformers, among themselves, agree in nothing. The one admits a dogma, the other rejects it; to-day they think this, to-morrow that. Every day some new doctrine is promulgated. Luther has a horror of Zwingle, and they mutually damn each other. The devil is no longer able to recognize himself. They occasionally try to patch up a reconciliation, and agree altogether to believe a certain doctrine, but the compact is scarcely drawn up before the whole affair is upset again.”

Cranmer, while listening to this discourse, moved uneasily in his chair, until at length, unable to restrain himself longer, he interrupted Williamson in a sharp, cutting manner that he endeavored to soften.

“In truth, sir, you speak very slightingly of these learned and distinguished men. And only, it seems, because they demand a reform in the morals of the clergy, and preach against and denounce the abuses of the church in the matter of indulgences.”

“Beautiful reformers!” cried Williamson. “They protest to-day against an abuse which they alone have felt as such, and that but for a very short time. And permit me to insist on your observing a fact, which it is by no means necessary or expedient to forget, that this quarrel originated in the displeasure felt by Luther because it was not to his own order, but to that of the Dominicans, to whom the distribution of indulgences was entrusted.”

“That may be possible, sir,” interrupted Cranmer, “but at least you will not deny that the immorality of the German clergy imperatively demanded a thorough reformation.”

“It is quite possible, my dear sir, that I may not be ready at once to agree with you in your opinions. But if the German church has become relaxed in morals, it is the fault of those only who before their elevation to the holy office had not, as they were bound to have, the true spirit of their vocation. But I pray you, on this[60] point of morals, it will not do to boast of the severity of these new apostles. The disciples of Christ left their wives, when called to ‘go into all the world and preach the Gospel,’ but these men begin by taking wives. Luther has married a young and beautiful nun, an act that has almost driven his followers to despair, and scandalized and excited the ridicule of the whole city. As to Bucer, he is already married to his second wife!”

“What!” cried the bishop, “these men marry! Marry—in the face of the holy church! Do they forget the solemn vows of chastity they have made?—for they are all either priests or monks.”

“Their vows! Oh! they retract their vows, they say. These ‘vows’ are what they call abuses; and the priests of this so severely reformed church will hereafter enjoy the inestimable privilege of marrying.”

Whilst this conversation had been going on, Sir Thomas kept his eyes closely fixed on Cranmer, trying to discover, from the expression of his pale, meagre face, the impression made on him by the conversation. He was well convinced that latterly Cranmer, although he had already taken orders, maintained the new doctrines with all the influence he possessed. And the reason why he had so thoroughly espoused them was because of a violent passion conceived for the daughter of Osiander, one of the chief reformers.

Born of a poor and obscure family, he had embraced the ecclesiastical state entirely from motives of interest and ambition, and without the slightest vocation, his sole aim being to advance his own interests and fortunes by every possible means, and he had already succeeded in ingratiating himself with the Earl of Wiltshire, who, together with all the family of Anne Boleyn, were his devoted patrons and friends. It was by these means that he was afterwards elevated to the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury, where we will find him servilely devoting himself to the interests of Henry VIII., and at last dying the death of a traitor.

Influenced by such motives, Cranmer warmly defended the new doctrines, bringing forward every available argument, and ended by declaring he thought it infinitely better that the priests should be allowed to marry than be exposed to commit sin.

“Nothing obliges them to commit sin,” cried the Bishop of Rochester, who was no longer able to maintain silence. “On the contrary, sir, every law and regulation of the discipline and canons of the church tends to inspire and promote the most immaculate purity of morals. These rules may seem hard to those who have embraced the ecclesiastical state from motives of pride and an ambitious self-interest, and without having received from God the graces necessary for the performance of the duties of so exalted and holy a ministry. This is why we so often have to grieve over the misconduct of so many of the clergy. But if they complain of their condition now, what will it be when they have wives and families to increase their cares and add to their responsibilities? The priest!” continued the bishop, seeming to penetrate the very depths of Cranmer’s narrow, contracted soul, “have you ever reflected upon the sublimity of his vocation? The priest is the father of the orphan, the brother of the[61] poor, the consoler of the dying, the spiritual support of the criminal on the scaffold, the merciful judge of the assassin in his dungeon. Say, do you not think the entire human race a family sufficiently large, its duties sufficiently extended, its responsibilities, wants, and cares sufficiently arduous and pressing? How could a priest do more, when his duty now requires him to devote, and give himself entirely to, each and every one of the human family? No; a priest is a man who has made a solemn vow to become an angel. If he does not intend to fulfil that vow, then let him never pronounce it!”

“O Rochester!” cried Sir Thomas More, greatly moved, “how I delight to hear you express yourself in this manner!”

And Sir Thomas spoke with all sincerity, for the bishop, without being conscious of it, had faithfully described his own life and character, and those who knew and loved him found no difficulty in recognizing the portrait.

As Sir Thomas spoke, the door again opened, and all arose respectfully on seeing the Duke of Norfolk appear—that valiant captain, to whom England was indebted for her victory gained on the field of Flodden. He was accompanied by the youngest and best-beloved of his sons, the young Henry, Earl of Surrey. Even at his very tender age, the artless simplicity and graceful manners of this beautiful child commanded the admiration of all, while his brilliant intellect and lively imagination announced him as the future favorite and cherished poet of the age.

Alas! how rapidly fled those golden years of peace and happiness. Later, and Norfolk, this proud father, so happy in being the parent of such a son, lived to behold the head of that noble boy fall upon the scaffold! The crime of which Henry VIII. will accuse him will be that of having united his arms with those of Edward the Confessor, whose royal blood mingled with that which flowed in his own veins.

Sir Thomas approached the duke and saluted him with great deference. The Bishop of Rochester insisted on resigning him his chair, but the duke declined, and seated himself in the midst of the company.

“I was not aware,” said he, turning graciously towards the bishop, “that Sir Thomas was enjoying such good company. I congratulate myself on the return of my Lord of Rochester. He will listen, I am sure, with lively interest to the recital I have come to make; for I must inform you, gentlemen, I am just from Blackfriars, where the king summoned me this morning in great haste, to assist, with some of the highest dignitaries of the kingdom, at the examination of the queen before the assembly of cardinals.”

He had scarcely uttered these words when an expression of profound amazement overspread the features of all present. More was by no means the least affected.

“The queen!” he cried. “Has she then appeared in person? And so unexpectedly and rudely summoned! They have done this in order that she might not be prepared with her defence!”

“I know not,” replied the duke; “but I shall never be able to forget the sad and imposing scene. When we entered, the cardinals and the two legates were seated on a platform covered with purple cloth; the king seated at their right. We[62] were arranged behind his chair in perfect silence. Very soon the queen entered, dressed in the deepest mourning. She took her seat on the left of the platform, facing the king. When the king’s name was called he arose, and remained standing and in silence. But when the queen was in her turn summoned, she arose, and replied, with great dignity, that she boldly protested against her judges for three important reasons: first, because she was a stranger; secondly, because they were all in possession of royal benefices, which had been bestowed on them by her adversary; and, thirdly, that she had grave and all-important reasons for believing that she would not obtain justice from a tribunal so constituted. She added that she had already appealed to the Pope, and would not submit to the judgment of this court. Having said these words, she stood in silence, but when she heard them declare her appeal should not be submitted to the Pope, she passed before the cardinals, and, walking proudly across the entire hall, she threw herself at the feet of the king.

“It would be impossible,” continued Norfolk, “to describe the emotion excited by this movement.

“‘Sire,’ she cried, with a respectful but firm and decided tone, ‘I beg you to regard me with compassion. Pity me as a woman, as a stranger without friends on whom I can rely, without a single disinterested adviser to whom I can turn for counsel! I call upon God to witness,’ she continued, raising her expressive eyes towards heaven, ‘that I have always been to you a loyal, faithful wife, and have made it my constant duty to conform in all things to your will; that I have loved those whom you have loved, whether I knew them to be my enemies or my friends. For many years I have been your wife; I am the mother of your children. God knows, when I married you, I was an unsullied virgin, and since that time I have never brought reproach on the sanctity of my marriage vows. Your own conscience bears witness to the truth of what I say. If you can find a single fault with which to reproach me, then will I pledge you my word to bow my head in shame, and at once leave your presence; but, if not, I pray you in God’s holy name to render me justice.’

“While she was speaking, a low murmur of approbation was heard throughout the assembly, followed by a long, unbroken silence. The king grew deadly pale, but made no reply to the queen, who arose, and was leaving the hall, when Henry made a signal to the Duke of Suffolk to detain her. He followed her, and made every effort to induce her to return, but in vain. Turning haughtily round, she said, in a tone sufficiently distinct to be heard by the entire assembly:

“‘Go, tell the king, your master, that until this hour I have never disobeyed him, and that I regret being compelled to do so now.’

“Saying these words, she immediately turned and left the hall, followed by her ladies in waiting.

“Her refusal to remain longer in the presence of her judges, and the touching, unstudied eloquence of the appeal she had made, cast the tribunal into a state of great embarrassment, and the honorable judges seemed to wish most heartily they had some one else to decide for them; when suddenly the king arose, and, turning haughtily towards them, spoke:

“‘Sirs,’ he said, ‘most cheerfully and with perfect confidence do I present my testimony, bearing witness to the spotless virtue and unsullied integrity of the queen. Her character, her conduct, in every particular, has been above reproach. But it is impossible for me to live in the state of constant anxiety this union causes me to suffer. My conscience keeps me in continual dread because of having married this woman, who was the betrothed wife of my own brother. I will use no dissimulation, my lords; I know very well that many of you believe I have been persuaded by the Cardinal of York to make this appeal for a divorce. But I declare in your presence this day, this is an entirely false impression, and that, on the contrary, the cardinal has earnestly contended against the scruples which have disturbed my soul. But, I declare, against my own will, and in spite of all my regrets, his opinions have not been able to restore to me the tranquillity of a heart without reproach. I have, in consequence, found it necessary to confer again with the Bishop of Tarbes, who has, unhappily, only confirmed the fears I already entertain. I have consulted my confessor and many other prelates, who have all advised me to submit this question to the tribunal of our Holy Father, the Sovereign Pontiff. To this end, my lords, you have been invested by him with his own supreme authority and spiritual power. I will listen to you as I would listen to him—that is to say, with the most entire submission. I wish, however, to remind you again that my duty towards my subjects requires me to prevent whatever might have the effect in the future of disturbing their tranquillity; and, unfortunately, I have but too strong reasons for fearing that, at some future day, the legitimacy of the right of the Princess Mary to the throne may be disputed. It is with entire confidence that I await your solution of a question so important to the happiness of my subjects and the peace of my kingdom. I have no doubt that you will be able to remove all the obstacles placed in my way.’

“Saying these words, the king retired, and started instantly for his palace at Greenwich. The noblemen generally followed him, but I remained to witness the end of what proved to be a tumultuous and stormy debate. Nevertheless, after a long discussion, they decided to go on with the investigation, to hear the advocates of the queen, and continue the proceedings in spite of her protest.”

“He has not yet been appointed,” replied Norfolk. “It seems to me it would only be just to let the queen select her own counsel.”

“But she will refuse, without a doubt,” replied Cromwell, “after the manner she has adopted to defend herself.”

They continued to converse for a long time on this subject, which filled with anxious apprehension the heart of Sir Thomas, as well as that of his faithful friend, the good Bishop of Rochester.

THE BIRTH-PLACE OF S. VINCENT DE PAUL

The Landes—that long, desolate tract on the western coast of France between the Gironde and the Adour, with its vast forests of melancholy pines, its lone moors and solitary deserts, its broad marshes, and its dunes of sand that creep relentlessly on as if they had life—appeal wonderfully to the imagination, that folle du logis, as Montaigne calls it, but which, in spite of him, we love to feed. One may travel for hours through these vast steppes covered with heather without discovering the smoke of a single chimney, or anything to relieve the monotonous horizon, unless a long line of low sand-hills that look like billows swayed to and fro in the wind; or some low tree standing out against the cloudless heavens, perhaps half buried in the treacherous sands; or a gaunt peasant, the very silhouette of a man, on his stilts, “five feet above contradiction,” like Voltaire’s preacher, perhaps with his knitting-work in his hands, or a distaff under his arm, as if fresh from the feet of Omphale, driving his flock before him—all birds of one feather, or sheep of one wool; for he is clad in a shaggy sheepskin coat, and looks as if he needed shearing as much as any of them. Or perhaps this Knight of the Sable Fleece—for the sheep of the Landes are mostly black—is on one of the small, light horses peculiar to the region, said to have an infusion of Arabian blood—thanks to the Saracen invaders—which are well adapted to picking their way over quaking bogs and moving sands, but unfortunately are fast degenerating from lack of care in maintaining the purity of the breed.

During the winter season these extensive heaths are converted by the prolonged rains into immense marshes, as the impermeable alios within six inches of the surface prevents the absorption of moisture. The peasant is then obliged to shut himself up with his beasts in his low, damp cottage, with peat for his fuel, a pine torch for his candle, brackish water relieved by a dash of vinegar for drink, meagre broth, corn bread, and perhaps salt fish for his dinner. Whole generations are said to live under one roof in the Landes, so thoroughly are the people imbued with the patriarchal spirit. Woman has her rights here—at least in the house. The old dauna (from domina, perhaps) rules the little kingdom with a high hand, including her sons and her sons’ wives down to the remotest generation, with undisputed sway. It is the very paradise of mothers-in-law. The paterfamilias seldom interferes if his soup is ready at due time and she makes both ends meet at the end of the year, with a[65] trifle over for a barrel of pique-pout to be indulged in on extraordinary occasions. From La Teste to the valley of the Gave this old house-mother is queen of the hive, active, thrifty, keen of eye, and sharp of tongue. The slightest murmur is frozen into silence beneath the arctic ray of her Poyser-like glance. She is a hawk by day and an owl by night. She directs the spinning and weaving of the wool and flax, orders the meals, and superintends the wardrobe of the whole colony. The land is so poor that it is seldom divided among the children. The oldest heir becomes head of the family, and they all fare better by sharing in the general income. In unity there is safety—and economy.

At every door is the clumsy machine for breaking the flax that is spun during the long winter evenings for the sail-makers of Bayonne or the weavers of Béarn, whose linen, if not equal to that of Flanders, is as good as that of Normandy. Before every house is also the huge oven where the bread is baked for general consumption. Flocks of geese paddle from pool to pool in the marshes, and wild ducks breed undisturbed in the fens. In the villages on the borders of the Landes you hear in the morning a sharp whistle that might serve for a locomotive. It is the swineherd summoning his charge, which issue in a gallop, two or three from each house, to seek their food in the moors. They all come back in the evening, and go to their own pens to get the bucket of bran that awaits them. Feeding thus in the wild, their meat acquires a peculiar flavor. Most of these animals go into the market. The hams of Bayonne have always been famous. We might say they are historic, for Strabo speaks of them.

When the rainy season is at an end, these bogs and stagnant pools give out a deadly miasma in the burning sun, engendering fevers, dysentery, and the fatal pellagra. The system is rapidly undermined, and the peasant seldom attains to an advanced age. He marries at twenty and is old at forty.

A kind of awe comes over the soul in traversing this region, and yet it has a certain mysterious attraction which draws us on and on, as if nature had some marvellous secret in store for us. The atmosphere is charged with a thin vapor that quivers in the blazing sun. Strange insects are in the air. A sense of the infinite, such as we feel in the midst of the ocean, comes over us. We grow breathless as the air—grow silent as the light that gilds the vast landscape before us. One of the greatest of the sons of the Landes—the Père de Ravignan—says: “Solitude is the patrie des forts: silence is their prayer.” One feels how true it is in these boundless moors. It is the only prayer fit for this realm of silence, where one is brought closer and closer to the heart of nature, and restored, as it were, at least in a degree, to the primeval relation of man with his Creator.

Carlyle says the finest nations in the world, the English and the American, are all going away into wind and tongue. We recommend a season in the Landes, where one becomes speedily impressed that “silence is the eternal duty of man.”

We wonder such a region should be inhabited. The daunas, we hope, never have courage enough to raise their still voices in the open air. We fancy wooing carried on in true Shaksperian style:

However this may be, the Landes are peopled, though thinly. Here and there at immense distances we come to a cottage. The men are shepherds, fishermen, or résiniers, as the turpentine-producers are called. Pliny, Dioscorides, and other ancient writers speak of the inhabitants as collecting the yellow amber thrown up by the sea, and trafficking in beeswax, resin, and pitch. The Phœnicians and Carthaginians initiated them into the mysteries of mining and forging. The Moors taught them the value of their cork-trees. They still keep bees that feed on the purple bells of the heather, and sell vast quantities of wax for the candles used in the churches of France—cierges, as they are called, from cire vierge—virgin wax, wrought by chaste bees, and alone fit for the sacred altars of Jesus and Mary.

They are devoting more and more attention to the production of turpentine by planting the maritime pine which grew here in the days of Strabo, and thereby reclaiming the vast tracts of sand thrown up by the sea. A priest, the Abbé Desbiez, and his brother are said to have first conceived the idea of reclaiming their native deserts and staying the progress of the quicksands which had buried so many places, and were moving unceasingly on at the rate of about twenty-five yards a year, threatening the destruction of many more. That was about a hundred years ago. A few years after M. Brémontier, a French engineer, tested the plan by planting, as far as his means allowed, the maritime pine, the strong, fibrous roots of which take tenacious hold of the slightest crevice in the rock, and absorb the least nutriment in the soil. But this experiment was slow to lead to any important result, as the pinada, or pine plantations, involve an outlay that makes no return for years. It was not till Louis Philippe’s time that the work was carried on with any great activity. Napoleon III. also greatly extended the plantations—the importance of which became generally acknowledged—not only to arrest the progress of the sands, but to meet the want of turpentine in the market, so long dependent on imports.

In ten years the trees begin to yield an income. Each acre then furnishes twelve or fifteen thousand poles for vineyards or the coalman. The prudent owner does not tap his trees till they are twenty-five years old. By that time they are four feet in circumference and yield turpentine to the value of fifty or sixty francs a year. Then the résinier comes with his hatchet and makes an incision low down in the trunk, from which the resin flows into an earthern jar or a hollow in the ground. These jars are emptied at due intervals, and the incision from time to time is widened. Later, others are made parallel to it. These are finally extended around the tree. With prudence this treatment may be continued a century; for this species of pine is very hardy if not exhausted. When the poor tree is near its end, it is hacked without any mercy and bled to death. Then it is only fit for the sawmill, wood-pile, or coal-pit.

Poor and desolate as the Landes are, they have had their share of great men. “Every path on the[67] globe may lead to the door of a hero,” says some one. We have spoken of La Teste. This was the stronghold of the stout old Captals de Buch,[4] belonging to the De Graillys, one of the historic families of the country. No truer specimen of the lords of the Landes could be found than these old captals, who, poor, proud, and adventurous, entered the service of the English, to whom they remained faithful as long as that nation had a foothold in the land. Their name and deeds are familiar to every reader of Froissart. The nearness of Bordeaux, and the numerous privileges and exemptions granted the foresters and herdsmen of the Landes, explain the strong attachment of the people to the English crown. The De Graillys endeavored by alliances to aggrandize their family, and finally became loyal subjects of France under Louis XI. They intermarried with the Counts of Foix and Béarn, and their vast landed possessions were at length united with those of the house of Albret. Where would the latter have been without them? And without the Albrets, where the Bourbons?

And this reminds us of the Sires of Albret, another and still more renowned family of the Landes.

Near the source of the Midou, among the pine forests of Maremsin, you come to a village of a thousand people called Labrit, the ancient Leporetum, or country of hares, whence Lebret, Labrit, and Albret. Here rose the house of Albret from obscurity to reign at last over Navarre and unite the most of ancient Aquitaine to the crown of France. The history of these lords of the heather is a marvel of wit and good-luck. Great hunters of hares and seekers of heiresses, they were always on the scent for advantageous alliances, not too particular about the age or face of the lady, provided they won broad lands or a fat barony. Once in their clutches, they seldom let go. They never allowed a daughter to succeed to any inheritance belonging to the seigneurie of Albret as long as there was a male descendant. Always receive, and never give, was their motto. Their daughters had their wealth of beauty for a dowry, with a little money or a troublesome fief liable to reversion.

The Albrets are first heard of in the XIth century, when the Benedictine abbot of S. Pierre at Condom, alarmed for the safety of Nérac, one of the abbatial possessions, called upon his brother, Amanieu d’Albret, for aid. The better to defend the monk’s property, the Sire of Albret built a castle on the left bank of the Baïse, and played the rôle of protector so well that at last his descendants are found sole lords of Nérac, on the public square of which now stands the statue of Henry IV., the most glorious of the race. The second Amanieu went to the Crusades under the banner of Raymond of St. Gilles, and entered Jerusalem next to Godfrey of Bouillon, to whom an old historian makes him related, nobody knows how. Oihenard says the Albrets descended from the old kings of Navarre, and a MS. of the XIVth century links them with the Counts of Bigorre; but this was probably to flatter the pride of the house after it rose to importance. We find a lord of Albret in the service of the Black Prince with a thousand[68] lances (five thousand men), and owner of Casteljaloux, Lavazan, and somehow of the abbey of Sauve-Majour; but not finding the English service sufficiently lucrative, he passed over to the enemy. Charles d’Albret was so able a captain that he quartered the lilies of France on his shield, and held the constable’s sword till the fatal battle of Agincourt. Alain d’Albret made a fine point in the game by marrying Françoise de Bretagne, who, though ugly, was the niece and only heiress of Jean de Blois, lord of Périgord and Limoges. His son had still better luck. He married Catherine of Navarre. If he lost his possessions beyond the Pyrenees, he kept the county of Foix, and soon added the lands of Astarac. Henry I. of Navarre, by marrying Margaret of Valois, acquired all the spoils of the house of Armagnac. Thus the princely house of Navarre, under their daughter Jeanne, who married Antoine de Bourbon, was owner of all Gascony and part of Guienne. It was Henry IV. of France who finally realized the expression of the blind faith of the house of Albret in its fortune, expressed in the prophetic device graven on the Château de Coarraze, where he passed his boyhood: “Lo que ha de ser no puede faltar”—That which must be will be!

But we have not yet come to the door of our hero. There is another native of the Landes whose fame has gone out through the whole earth—whose whole life and aim were in utter contrast with the spirit of these old lords of the heather. The only armor he ever put on was that of righteousness; the only sword, that of the truth; the only jewel, that which the old rabbis say Abraham wore, the light of which raised up the bowed down and healed the sick, and, after his death, was placed among the stars! It need not be said we refer to S. Vincent de Paul, the great initiator of public charity in France, who by his benevolence perhaps effected as much for the good of the kingdom as Richelieu with his political genius. He was born during the religious conflicts of the XVIth century, in the little hamlet of Ranquine, in the parish of Pouy, on the border of the Landes, a few miles from Dax. It must not be supposed the particule in his name is indicative of nobility. In former times people who had no name but that given them at the baptismal font often added the place of their birth to prevent confusion. S. Vincent was the son of a peasant, and spent his childhood in watching his father’s scanty flock among the moors. The poor cottage in which he was born is still standing, and near it the gigantic old oak to the hollow of which he used to retire to pray, both of which are objects of veneration to the pious pilgrim of all ranks and all lands. Somewhere in these vast solitudes—whether among the ruins of Notre Dame de Buglose, destroyed a little before by the Huguenots, or in his secret oratory in the oak, we cannot say—he heard the mysterious voice which once whispered to Joan of Arc among the forests of Lorraine—a voice difficult to resist, which decided his vocation in life. He resolved to enter the priesthood. The Franciscans of Dax lent him books and a cell, and gave him a pittance for the love of God; but he finished his studies and took his degree at Toulouse, as was only discovered by papers found after his death, so unostentatious was his life. He partly defrayed his expenses at[69] Toulouse by becoming the tutor of some young noblemen of Buzet. Near the latter place was a solitary mountain chapel in the woods, not far from the banks of the Tarn, called Notre Dame de Grâce. Its secluded position, the simplicity of its decorations, and the devotion he experienced in this quiet oratory, attracted the pious student, and he often retired there to pray before the altar of Our Lady of Grace. It was there he found strength to take upon himself the yoke of the priesthood—a yoke angels might fear to bear. It was there, in solitude and silence, assisted by a priest and a clerk, that he offered his first Mass; for, so terrified was he by the importance and sublimity of this divine function, he had not the courage to celebrate it in public. This chapel is still standing, and is annually crowded with pilgrims on the festival of S. Vincent of Paul. It is good to kneel on the worn flag-stones where the saint once prayed, and pour out one’s soul before the altar that witnessed the fervor of his first Mass. The superior-general of the Lazarists visited this interesting chapel in 1851, accompanied by nearly fifty Sisters of Charity. They brought a relic of the saint, a chalice and some vestments for the use of the chaplain, and a bust of S. Vincent for the new altar to his memory.

Every step in S. Vincent’s life is marked by the unmistakable hand of divine Providence. Captured in a voyage by Algerine pirates, he is sold in the market-place of Tunis, that he might learn to sympathize with those who are in bonds; he falls into the hands of a renegade, who, with his whole family, is soon converted and makes his escape from the country. S. Vincent presents them to the papal legate at Avignon, and goes to Rome, whence he returns, charged with a confidential mission by Cardinal d’Ossat. He afterwards becomes a tutor in the family of the Comte de Gondi—another providential event. The count is governor-general of the galleys, and the owner of vast possessions in Normandy. S. Vincent labors among the convicts, and, if he cannot release them from their bonds, he teaches them to bear their sufferings in a spirit of expiation. He establishes rural missions in Normandy, and founds the College of Bons-Enfants and the house of S. Lazare at Paris.

A holy widow, Mme. Legros, falls under his influence, and charitable organizations of ladies are formed, and sisters for the special service of the sick are established at S. Nicolas du Chardonnet. Little children, abandoned by unnatural mothers, are dying of cold and hunger in the streets; S. Vincent opens a foundling asylum, and during the cold winter nights he goes alone through the most dangerous quarters of old Paris in search of these poor waifs of humanity.[5] Clerical[70] instruction is needed, and Richelieu, at his instance, endows the first ecclesiastical seminary. The moral condition of the army excites the saint’s compassion, and the cardinal authorizes missionaries among the soldiers. The province of Lorraine is suffering from famine. Mothers even devour their own children. In a short time S. Vincent collects sixteen hundred thousand livres for their relief. Under the regency of Anne of Austria he becomes a member of the Council of Ecclesiastical Affairs. In the wars of the Fronde he is for peace, and negotiates between the queen and the parliament. The foundation of a hospital for old men marks the end of his noble, unselfish life. The jewel of charity never ceases to glow in his breast. It is his great bequest to his spiritual children. How potent it has been is proved by the incalculable good effected to this day by the Lazarists, Sisters of Charity, and Society of S. Vincent of Paul—beautiful constellations in the firmament of the church!

In the midst of his honors S. Vincent never forgot his humble origin, but often referred to it with the true spirit of ama nesciri et pro nihilo reputari. Not that he was inaccessible to human weakness, but he knew how to resist it. We read in his interesting Life by Abbé Maynard that the porter of the College of Bons-Enfants informed the superior one day that a poorly-clad peasant, styling himself his nephew, was at the door. S. Vincent blushed and ordered him to be taken up to his room. Then he blushed for having blushed, and, going down into the street, embraced his nephew and led him into the court, where, summoning all the professors of the college, he presented the confused youth: “Gentlemen, this is the most respectable of my family.” And he continued, during the remainder of his visit, to introduce him to visitors of every rank as if he were some great lord, in order to avenge his first movement of pride. And when, not long after, he made a retreat, he publicly humbled himself before his associates: “Brethren, pray for one who through pride wished to take his nephew secretly to his room because he was a peasant and poorly dressed.”

S. Vincent returned only once to his native place after he began his apostolic career. This was at the close of a mission among the convicts of Bordeaux. During his visit he solemnly renewed his baptismal vows in the village church where he had been baptized and made his First Communion, and on the day of his departure he went with bare feet on a pilgrimage to Notre Dame de Buglose, among whose ruins he had so often prayed in his childhood, but which was now rebuilt. He was accompanied, not only by his relatives, but by all the villagers, who were justly proud of their countryman. He sang a solemn Mass at the altar of Our Lady, and afterwards assembled the whole family around the table for a modest repast, at the end of which he rose to take leave of them. They all fell at his feet and implored his blessing. “Yes, I give you my blessing,” replied he, much affected, “but I bless you poor and humble, and beg our Lord to continue among you the grace of holy poverty. Never abandon the condition in which you were born. This is my earnest recommendation, which I beg you to transmit as a heritage to your children. Farewell for ever!”

His advice was religiously kept. By mutual assistance his family might have risen above its original obscurity. Some of his mother’s family were advocates at the parliament of Bordeaux, and it would have been easy to obtain offices that would have given them, at least, prominence in their own village; but they clung to their rural pursuits. The advice of their sainted relative was too precious a legacy to be renounced.

Not that S. Vincent was insensible to their condition or unambitious by nature, but he knew the value of the hidden life and the perils of worldly ambition. We have on this occasion another glimpse of his struggles with nature. Hardly had he left his relatives before he gave vent to his emotion in a flood of tears, and he almost reproached himself for leaving them in their poverty. But let us quote his own words: “The day I left home I was so filled with sorrow at separating from my poor relatives that I wept as I went along—wept almost incessantly. Then came the thought of aiding them and bettering their condition; of giving so much to this one, and so much to that. While my heart thus melted within me, I divided all I had with them. Yes, even what I had not; and I say this to my confusion, for God perhaps permitted it to make me comprehend the value of the evangelical counsel. For three months I felt this importunate longing to promote the interests of my brothers and sisters. It constantly weighed on my poor heart. During this time, when I felt a little relieved, I prayed God to deliver me from this temptation, and persevered so long in my prayer that at length he had pity on me and took away this excessive tenderness for my relations; and though they have been needy, and still are, the good God has given me the grace to commit them to his Providence, and to regard them as better off than if they were in an easier condition.”

S. Vincent was equally rigid as to his own personal necessities, as may be seen by the following words from his own lips: “When I put a morsel of bread to my mouth, I say to myself: Wretched man, hast thou earned the bread thou art going to eat—the bread that comes from the labor of the poor?”

Such is the spirit of the saints. In these days, when most people are struggling to rise in the world, many by undue means, and to an unlawful height, it is well to recall this holy example; it is good to get a glimpse into the heart of a saint, and to remember there are still many in the world and in the cloister who strive to counterbalance all this ambition and love of display by their humility and self-denial.

Immediately after S. Vincent’s canonization, in 1737, the inhabitants of Pouy, desirous of testifying their veneration for his memory, removed the house where he was born a short distance from its original place, without changing its primitive form in the least, and erected a small chapel on the site, till means could be obtained for building a church. The great Revolution put a stop to the plan. In 1821 a new effort was made, a committee appointed, and a subscription begun which soon amounted to thirty thousand francs; but at the revolution of 1830 material interests prevailed, and the funds were appropriated to the construction of roads.

The ecclesiastical authorities at length took the matter in hand, and formed the plan, not only of building a church, but surrounding it with the various charitable institutions founded by S. Vincent—a hospital for the aged, asylums for orphans and foundlings, and perhaps a ferme modèle in the Landes.

In 1850 the Bishop of Aire appealed to the Catholic world for aid. Pius IX. blessed the undertaking. On the Festival of the Transfiguration, 1851, the corner-stone was laid by the bishop, assisted by Père Etienne, the superior-general of the Lazarists. Napoleon III. and the Empress Eugénie largely contributed to the work, and in a few years the church and hospice were completed. The consecration took place April 24, 1864, in the presence of an immense multitude from all parts of the country. From three o’clock in the morning there were Masses at a dozen altars, and the hands of the priests were fatigued in administering the holy Eucharist. Among the communicants were eight hundred members of the Society of S. Vincent de Paul, from Bordeaux, who manifested their joy by enthusiastic hymns. At eight in the forenoon Père Etienne, surrounded by Lazarists and Sisters of Charity, celebrated the Holy Sacrifice at the newly-consecrated high altar, and several novices made their vows, among whom was a young African, a cousin of Abdel Kader. A châsse containing relics of S. Vincent was brought in solemn procession from the parish church of Pouy, where he had been held at the font and received the divine Guest in his heart for the first time. The road was strewn with flowers and green leaves. The weather was delightful and the heavens radiant. At the head of the procession was borne a banner, on which S. Vincent was represented as a shepherd, followed by all the orphans of the new asylum and the old men of the hospice. Then came a long line of Enfants de Marie dressed in white, carrying oriflammes, followed by the students of the colleges of Aire and Dax. Behind were fifteen hundred members of the Society of S. Vincent de Paul, and a file of sisters of various orders, including eight hundred Sisters of Charity, with a great number of Lazarists in the rear. Then came thirty relatives of S. Vincent, wearing the peasant’s costume of the district, heirs of his virtues and simplicity—Noblesse oblige. Then the Polish Lazarists with the flag of their nation, beloved by S. Vincent, and after them the clergy of the diocese and a great number from foreign parts, among whom was M. Eugène Boré, of Constantinople, now superior-general of the two orders founded by the saint. The shrine came next, surrounded by Lazarists and Sisters of Charity. Behind the canons and other dignitaries came eight bishops, four archbishops, and Cardinal Donnet of Bordeaux, followed by the civil authorities and an immense multitude of people nearly two miles in extent, with banners bearing touching devices.

This grand procession of more than thirty thousand people proceeded with the utmost order, to the sound of chants, instrumental music, and salutes from cannon from time to time, to the square in front of the new church, where, before an altar erected at the foot of S. Vincent’s oak, they were addressed by Père Etienne in an eloquent, thrilling discourse, admirable in style and glowing with imagery,[73] suited to the fervid nature of this southern region. He spoke of S. Vincent, not only as the man of his age with a providential mission, but of a type suited to all ages.

The man who loved his brethren, reconciled enemies, brought the rich and poor into one common field imbued with a common idea of sacrifice and devotion, fed the orphan, aided the needy, and wiped away the tears of the sufferer, is the man of all times, and especially of an age marked by the fomentation of political passions.

The old oak was gay with streamers, the hollow was fitted up as an oratory, before which Cardinal Donnet said Mass in the open air, after which thousands of voices joined in the solemn Te Deum Laudamus, and the thirteen prelates terminated the grand ceremony by giving their united benediction to the kneeling crowd.

A whole flock of Sisters of Charity, with their dove-like plumage of white and gray, took the same train as ourselves the pleasant September morning we left Bayonne for the birth-place of S. Vincent of Paul. They seemed like birds of good omen. They were also going to the Berceau (cradle), as they called it, not on a mere pilgrimage, but to make their annual retreat. What for, the saints alone know; for they looked like the personification of every amiable virtue, and quite ready to spread their white wings and take flight for heaven. It was refreshing to watch their gentle, unaffected ways, wholly devoid of those demure airs of superior sanctity and repulsive austerity so exasperating to us worldly-minded people. They all made the sign of the cross as the train moved out of the station—and a good honest one it was, as if they loved the sign of the Son of Man, and delighted in wearing it on their breast. Some had come from St. Sebastian, others from St. Jean de Luz, and several from Bayonne; but they mingled like sisters of one great family of charity. Some chatted, some took out their rosaries and went to praying with the most cheerful air imaginable, as if it were a new refreshment just allowed them, instead of being the daily food of their souls; and others seemed to be studying with interest the peculiar region we were now entering. For we were now in the Landes—low, level, monotonous, and melancholy. The railway lay through vast forests of dusky-pines, varied by willows and cork-trees, with here and there, at long distances, an open tract where ripened scanty fields of corn and millet around the low cottages of the peasants. The sides of the road were purple with heather. The air was full of aromatic odors. Each pine had its broad gash cut by some merciless hand, and its life-blood was slowly trickling down its side. Passing through this sad forest, one could not help thinking of the drear, mystic wood in Dante’s Inferno, where every tree encloses a human soul with infinite capacity of suffering, and at every gash cut, every branch lopped off, utters a despairing cry:

Though the sun was hot, the pine needles seemed to shiver, the branches swayed to and fro in the air, and gave out a kind of sigh which sometimes increased into an inarticulate wail. We look up, almost expecting to see the harpies sitting

Could we stop, we might question these maimed trees and learn some fearful tragedy from the imprisoned spirits. Perhaps they recount them to each other in the wild winter nights when the peasants, listening with a kind of fear in their lone huts, start up from their beds and say it is Rey Artus—King Arthur—who is passing by with his long train of dogs, horses, and huntsmen, from an old legend of the time of the English occupation which says that King Arthur, as he was hearing Mass on Easter-day, attracted by the cries of his hounds attacking their prey, went out at the elevation of the Host. A whirlwind carried him into the clouds, where he has hunted ever since, and will, without cessation or repose, till the day of judgment, only taking a fly every seven years. The popular belief that he is passing with a great noise through space when the winds sweep across the vast moors on stormy nights probably embodies the old tradition of some powerful lord whose hounds and huntsmen ruined the crops of the poor, who, in their wrath, consigned them to endless barren hunting-fields in the spirit-land—a legend which reminds us of the Aasgaardsreja of whom Miss Bremer tells us—spirits not good enough to merit heaven, and yet not bad enough to deserve hell, and are therefore doomed to ride about till the end of the world, carrying fear and disaster in their train.

In a little over an hour we arrived at Dax, a pleasant town on the banks of the Adour, with long lines of sycamores, behind which is a hill crowned with an old château, now belonging to the Lazarists. The place is renowned for its thermal springs and mud-baths, known to the Romans before its conquest by the Cæsars. It was from Aquæ Augustæ, the capital of the ancient Tarbelli (called in the Middle Ages the ville d’Acqs, or d’Acs, whence Dax), that the name of Aquitaine is supposed to be derived. Pliny, the naturalist, speaking of the Aquenses, says: Aquitani indè nomen provinciæ. The Bay of Biscay was once known by the name of Sinus Tarbellicus, from the ancient Tarbelli. Lucan says:

S. Vincent of Saintonge was the first apostle of the region, and fell a martyr to his zeal. Dax formed part of the dowry of the daughter of Henry II. of England when she married Alfonso of Castile, but it returned to the Plantagenets in the time of Edward III. The city was an episcopal see before the revolution of 1793. François de Noailles, one of the most distinguished of its bishops, was famous as a diplomatist in the XVIth century. He was sent to England on several important missions, and finally appointed ambassador to that country in the reign of Mary Tudor. Recalled when Philip II. induced her to declare war against France, he landed at Calais, and, carefully examining the fortifications, his keen, observant eye soon discovered the weak point, to which, at his arrival in court, he at once directed the king’s attention, declaring it would not be a difficult matter to take the place. His statements made such an impression on King Henry, who had always found him as judicious as he was devoted to the interests of the crown, that he resolved to lay siege to Calais, notwithstanding the opposition of his ministers, and the Duke of Guise[75] began the attack January 1, 1558. The place was taken in a week. It had cost the English a year’s siege two hundred and ten years before. Three weeks after its surrender Cardinal Hippolyte de Ferrara, Archbishop of Auch (the son of Lucretia Borgia, who married Alphonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara) wrote François de Noailles as follows: “No one can help acknowledging the great hand you had in the taking of Calais, as it was actually taken at the very place you pointed out.” French historians have been too forgetful of the hand the Bishop of Dax had in the taking of a place so important to the interests of the nation, which added so much to the glory of the French arms, and was so humiliating to England, whose anguish was echoed by the queen when she exclaimed that if her heart could be opened the very name of Calais would be found written therein!

This great churchman was no less successful in his embassy to Venice, where he triumphed over the haughty pretensions of Philip II., and, as Brantôme says, “won great honor and affection.” After five years in Italy he returned to Dax, where he devoted most of his revenues to relieve the misery that prevailed at that fearful time of religious war. Dax, as he said, was “the poorest see in France.” In 1571 he was appointed ambassador to Constantinople by Charles IX. Florimond de Raymond, an old writer of that day, tells us the bishop was at first troubled as to his presentation to the sultan, who only regarded the highest dignitaries as the dust of his feet, and exacted ceremonies which the ambassador considered beneath the dignity of a bishop and a representative of France. He resolved not to submit to them, and, thanks to his pleasing address, and handsome person dressed for the occasion in red cramoisie and cloth of gold, he was not subjected to them. Moreover, by his fascinating manners and agreeable conversation, he became a great favorite of the sultan, and took so judicious a course that his embassy ended by rendering France mistress of the commerce of the Mediterranean, and giving her a pre-eminence in the East which she has never lost.

It was after his return from the Levant that, in an interview with Henry III., the sagacious bishop urged the king to declare war against Spain, as the best means of delivering France from the horrors of a civil war. De Thou says the king seemed to listen favorably to the suggestion; but it was opposed by the council, and it was not till ten years later that Henry IV. declared war against that country, as Duruy states, “the better to end the civil war.”

The Bishop of Dax seems to have been poorly remunerated for his eminent services. Like Frederick the Great’s father, he said kings were always hard of hearing when there was a question of money, and complained that, notwithstanding his long services abroad, he had never received either honors or profit. Even his appointments as ambassador to Venice, amounting to more than thirty thousand livres, were still due. Many of his letters to the king and to Marie de Médicis have been preserved, which show his elevation of mind, and his broad political and religious views, which give him a right to be numbered among the great churchmen of the XVIth century.

At Dax we took a carriage to the Berceau of S. Vincent, and, after half an hour’s drive along a level road bordered with trees, we came[76] in sight of the great dome of the church rising up amid a group of fine buildings. Driving up to the door, the first thing we observed was the benign statue of the saint standing on the gable against the clear, blue sky, with arms wide-spread, smiling on the pilgrim a very balm of peace. Before the church there is a broad green, at the right of which is the venerable old oak; at the left, the cottage of the De Pauls; and in the rear of the church, the asylums and hospice—fine establishments one is surprised to find in this remote region. We at once entered the church, which is in the style of the Renaissance. It consists of a nave without aisles, a circular apsis, and transepts which form the arms of the cross, in the centre of which rises the dome, lined with an indifferent fresco representing S. Vincent borne to heaven by the angels. Directly beneath is the high altar where are enshrined relics of the saint. Around it, at the four angles of the cross, are statues of four S. Vincents—of Xaintes, of Saragossa, of Lerins, and S. Vincent Ferrer. The whole life of S. Vincent of Paul is depicted in the stained-glass windows. And on the walls of the nave are four paintings, one representing him as a boy, praying before Our Lady of Buglose; the second, his first Mass in the chapel of Notre Dame de Grâce; in the third he is redeeming captives, and in the fourth giving alms to the poor.

We next visited the asylums, admiring the clean, airy rooms, the intelligent, happy faces of the orphans, and the graceful cordiality of the sister who was at the head of the establishment—a lady of fortune who has devoted her all to the work.

At length we came to the cottage—the door of the true hero to which our path had led. The broad, one-story house in which S. Vincent was born is now a mere skeleton within, the framework of the partitions alone remaining, so one can take in the whole at a glance. There is the kitchen, with the huge, old-fashioned chimney, around which the family used to gather—so enormous that in looking up one sees a vast extent of blue sky. Saint’s house though it was, we could not help thinking—Heaven forgive us the profane thought!—it must have been very much like the squire’s chimney in Tylney Hall, the draught of which, like the Polish game of draughts, was apt to take backwards and discharge all the smoke into his sitting-room! The second room at the left, where the saint was born, is an oratory containing an altar, the crucifix he used to pray before, some of the garments he wore, shoes broad and much-enduring as his own nature, and many other precious relics. Not only this, but every room has an altar. We counted seven, all of the simplest construction, for the convenience of the pilgrims who come here with their curés at certain seasons of the year to honor their sainted countryman who in his youth here led a simple, laborious life like themselves. We found several persons at prayer in the various compartments, all of which showed the primitive habits and limited resources of the family, though not absolute poverty. The floor was of earth, the walls and great rafters only polished with time and the kisses of the pilgrims, and above the rude stairway, a mere loft where perchance the saint slept in his boyhood. Everything in this cottage, where a great heart was cradled, was from its very simplicity[77] extremely touching. It seemed the very place to meditate on the mysterious ways of divine Providence—mysterious as the wind that bloweth where it listeth—the very place to chant the Suscitans à terrâ inopem: et de stercore erigens pauperem; ut collocet eum cum principibus, cum principibus populi sui.

S. Vincent’s oak, on the opposite side of the green, looks old enough to have witnessed the mysterious rites of the Druids. It is surrounded by a railing to protect it from the pious depredations of the pilgrim. It still spreads broad its branches covered with verdure, though the trunk is so hollowed by decay that one side is entirely gone, and in the heart, where young Vincent used to pray, stands a wooden pillar on which is a statue of the Virgin, pure and white, beneath the green bower. A crowd of artists, savants, soldiers, and princes have bent before this venerable tree. In 1823 the public authorities of the commune received the Duchess of Angoulême at its foot. The learned and pious Ozanam, one of the founders of the Society of S. Vincent of Paul, came here in his last days to offer a prayer. On the list of foreign visitors is the name of the late venerable Bishop Flaget of Kentucky, of whom it is recorded that he kissed the tree with love and veneration, and plucked, as every pilgrim does, a leaf from its branches.

There is an herb, says Pliny, found on Mt. Atlas; they who gather it see more clearly. There is something of this virtue in the oak of S. Vincent of Paul. One sees more clearly than ever at its foot the infinite moral superiority of a nature like his to the worldly ambition of the old lords of the Landes. Famous as the latter were in their day, who thinks of them now? Who cares for the lords of Castelnau, the Seigneurs of Juliac, or even for the Sires of Albret, whose ancient castle at Labrit is now razed to the ground, and, while we write, its last traces obliterated for ever? The shepherd whistles idly among the ruins of their once strong holds, the ploughman drives thoughtlessly over the place where they once held proud sway, as indifferent as the beasts themselves; but there is not a peasant in the Landes who does not cherish the memory of S. Vincent of Paul, or a noble who does not respect his name; and thousands annually visit the poor house where he was born and look with veneration at the oak where he prayed.

Charity is the great means of making the poor forget the fearful inequality of worldly riches, and its obligation reminds the wealthy they are only part of a great brotherhood. Its exercise softens the heart and averts the woe pronounced on the rich. S. John of God, wishing to found a hospital at Granada, and without a ducat in the world, walked slowly through the streets and squares with a hod on his back and two great kettles at his side, crying with a loud voice: “Who wishes to do good to himself? Ah! my brethren, for the love of God, do good to yourselves!” And alms flowed in from every side. It was these appeals in the divine name that gave him his appellation. “What is your name?” asked Don Ramirez, Bishop of Tuy. “John,” was the reply. “Henceforth you shall be called John of God,” said the bishop.

And so, that we may all become the sons of God, let us here, at the foot of S. Vincent’s oak, echo the words that in life were so often on his lips:

LORD CASTLEHAVEN’S MEMOIRS.[6]

In the year 1638 the Earl of Castlehaven, then a young man, made the Grand Tour, as became a nobleman of his family in that age. Being at Rome, whither the duty of paying his respects to the Holy Father had carried him—for this lord was the head of one of those grand old families which had declined to forswear its faith at the behest of Henry or Elizabeth—he received a letter from King Charles I., requiring him to attend the king in his expedition against the Scots, then revolted and in arms. With that instant loyalty which was the return made by those proscribed families to an ungrateful court from the Armada down, Lord Castlehaven, two days after the messenger had placed the royal missive in his hands, took post for England. Near Turin he fell in with an army commanded by the Marquis de Leganes, Governor of Milan for the King of Spain, who was marching to besiege the Savoy capital. But the siege was soon raised, and Lord Castlehaven entered the town. There he found her Royal Highness the Duchess of Savoy in great confusion, as if she had got no rest for many nights, so much had she been occupied with the conduct of the defence; for even the wives of this warlike and rapacious family soon learned to defend their own by the strong hand, and could stretch it out to grasp still more when occasion served. But as yet the ambition of the House of Savoy stopped short of sacrilege—or stooped to it like a hawk on short flights—nor dreamed of aggrandizing itself with the spoils of the whole territory of the church. When Lord Castlehaven came to take leave of the duchess, her royal highness gave him a musket-bullet, much battered, which had come in at her window and missed her narrowly, charging him to deliver it safely to her sister, the Queen of England—as it proved, a present of ill omen; for of musket-balls, in a little time, the English sister had more than enough.

Arriving in London, Lord Castlehaven followed the king to Berwick, where he found the royal army encamped, with the Tweed before it, and the Scotch, under Gen. Leslie, lying at some distance. A pacification was soon effected, and both armies partially disbanded. After this the earl passed his time “as well as he could” at home till 1640. In that year the King of France besieged Arras, and Lord Castlehaven set out to witness the siege. Within was a stout garrison under Owen Roe O’Neal, commanding for the Prince Cardinal, Governor of the Low Countries. This was the first meeting of Castlehaven with the future victor of Benburb, with whom he was afterwards brought into closer relations in the Irish Rebellion. The French pressed Arras close, and the confederates being defeated, and the hope of the siege being raised grown[79] desperate, the town was surrendered on honorable terms. This action over, Lord Castlehaven returned to England and sat in Parliament till the attainder of the Earl of Strafford. When that great nobleman fell, deserted by his wavering royal master, and the king’s friends were beginning to turn about—they scarce knew whither—to prepare for the storm that all men saw was coming, Lord Castlehaven went to Ireland, where he had some estate and three married sisters. While there the Rebellion of 1641 broke out. Although innocent of any complicity in the outbreak, his faith made him suspected, and he was imprisoned on a slight pretext by the lords-justices. Escaping, his first design was to get into France, and thence to England to join the king at York, and petition for a trial by his peers. But coming to Kilkenny, he found there the Supreme Council of the Confederate Catholics just assembled—many of them being of his acquaintance—and was persuaded by them to throw in his lot with theirs, seeing, as they truly told him, that they were all persecuted on the same score, and ruined so that they had nothing more to lose but their lives. From that time till the peace of 1646 he was engaged in the war of the Confederate Catholics, holding important commands in the field under the Supreme Council. His Memoirs is the history of this war.

After the peace of 1646, concluded with the Marquis of Ormond, the king’s lord-lieutenant, but which shortly fell through, Lord Castlehaven retired to France, and served as a volunteer under Prince Rupert at the siege of Landrecies. Then, returning to Paris, he remained in attendance on the Queen of England and the Prince of Wales (Charles II.) at St. Germain till 1648. In that year he returned to Ireland with the lord-lieutenant, the Marquis of Ormond, and served the royal cause in that kingdom against the parliamentary forces under Ireton and Cromwell. The battle of Worcester being lost, and Cromwell the undisputed master of the three kingdoms, Castlehaven again followed the clouded fortunes of Charles II. to France. There he obtained permission to join the Great Condé. In the campaigns under that prince he had the command of eight or nine regiments of Irish troops, making altogether a force of 5,000 men. Thus we find the Irish refugees already consolidated into a brigade some years before the Treaty of Limerick expatriated those soldiers whose valor is more commonly identified with that title.

Lord Castlehaven returned to England at the Restoration. In the war with Holland he served as a volunteer in some of the naval engagements. In 1667, the French having invaded Flanders, he was ordered there with 2,400 men to recruit the “Old English Regiment,” of which he was made colonel. The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle ended this war. Peace reigned in the Low Countries till the breaking out, in 1673, of the long and bloody contest between the Prince of Orange and the confederate Spaniards and Imperialists on the one side, and Louis XIV. on the other. This was the age of grand campaigns, conducted upon principles of mathematical precision by the great captains formed in the school of M. Turenne, before the “little Marquis of Brandenburg”[7] and the “Corsican[80] corporal” in turn revolutionized the art of war. Castlehaven entered the Spanish service, and shared the checkered but generally disastrous fortunes of the Duke of Villahermosa and the Prince of Orange (William III.) against Condé and Luxembourg, till the peace of Nymegen put an end to the war in 1678.

Then, after forty years’ hard service, this veteran retired from the field, and returning to England, like another Cæsar, set about writing his commentaries on the wars. Thus he spent his remaining years. First he published, but without acknowledging the authorship, his Memoirs of the Irish Wars. This first edition was suppressed. Then, in 1684, appeared the second edition, containing, besides the Memoirs, his “Appendix”—being an account of his Continental service—his “Observations” on confederate armies and the conduct of war, and a “Postscript,” which is a reply to the Earl of Anglesey. And right well has the modern reader reason to be thankful for his lordship’s literary spirit. His Memoirs is one of the most authentic and trustworthy accounts we have of that vexed passage of Irish history—the Rebellion of 1641. Its blunt frankness is its greatest charm; it has the value of an account by an actor in the scenes described; and it possesses that merit of impartiality which comes of being written by an Englishman who, connected with the Irish leaders by the ties of faith, family, and property, and sympathizing fully with their efforts to obtain redress for flagrant wrongs was yet not blind to their mistakes and indefensible actions.

Castlehaven, neglected for more than a century, has received more justice at the hands of later historians. He is frequently referred to by Lingard, and his work will be found an admirable commentary on Carte’s Life of Ormond. There is a notice of him in Horace Walpole’s Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors (vol. iii.)

“If this lord,” says Walpole, “who led a very martial life, had not taken the pains to record his own actions (which, however, he has done with great frankness and ingenuity), we should know little of his story, our historians scarce mentioning him, and even our writers of anecdotes, as Burnet, or of tales and circumstances, as Roger North, not giving any account of a court quarrel occasioned by his lordship’s Memoirs. Anthony Wood alone has preserved this event, but has not made it intelligible. … The earl had been much censured for his share in the Irish Rebellion, and wrote the Memoirs to explain his conduct rather than to excuse it; for he freely confesses his faults, and imputes them to provocations from the government of that kingdom, to whose rashness and cruelty, conjointly with the votes and resolutions of the English Parliament, he ascribes the massacre. There are no dates nor method, and less style, in these Memoirs—defects atoned for in some measure by a martial honesty. Soon after their publication the Earl of Anglesey wrote to ask a copy. Lord Castlehaven sent him one, but denying the work as his. Anglesey, who had been a commissioner in Ireland for the Parliament, published Castlehaven’s letter, with observations and reflections very abusive of the Duke of Ormond, which occasioned first a printed controversy, and this a trial before the Privy Council; the event of which was that Anglesey’s first letter was voted a scandalous libel, and himself removed from the custody of the Privy Seal; and that the Earl of Castlehaven’s Memoirs, on which he was several times examined, and which he owned, was declared a scandalous libel on the government—a censure that seems very little founded; there is not a word that can authorize that sentence from the Council of Charles II. but the imputation on the lords-justices of Charles I.; for I suppose the Privy Council did not pique themselves on vindicating[81] the honor of the republican Parliament! Bishop Morley wrote A True Account of the Whole Proceeding between James, Duke of Ormond, and Arthur, Earl of Anglesey.”

Immediately after the Restoration, as it is well known, an act was passed, commonly called in that age “the Act of Oblivion,” by which all penalties (except certain specified ones) incurred in the late troublous and rebellious times were forgiven. So superfine would have been the net which the law of treason would have drawn around the three kingdoms, had its strict construction been enforced, that it was quite cut loose, a few only of the greatest criminals and regicides being held in its meshes. So harsh had been Cromwell’s iron rule that there were few counties of England in which the stoutest squires, and even the most loyal, might not have trembled had the king’s commission inquired too closely into the legal question of connivance at the late tyrant’s rule. And in the great cities, London especially, the tide of enthusiasm which now ran so strongly for the king could not hide the memory of those days when the same fierce crowds had clamored for the head of the “royal martyr.” Prudent it was, as well as benign, therefore, for the “merry monarch” to let time roll smoothly over past transgressions. But though the law might grant oblivion, and even punish the revival of controversies, the old rancor between individuals and even parties was not so easily appeased after the first joyful outburst. Books and pamphlets by the hundred brought charges and counter charges. But these “authors of slander and lyes,” as Castlehaven calls them, outdid themselves in their tragical stories of the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Nor have imitators been wanting in this age, as rancorous and more skilful, in the production of “fictions and invectives to traduce a whole nation.” To answer those calumnies by “setting forth the truth of his story in a brief and plain method” was the design of Castlehaven’s work.

Then, as now, it was the aim of the libellers of the Irish people to make the whole nation accountable for the “massacre,” so called, of 1641, and to confound the war of the Confederate Catholics and the later loyal resistance to Cromwell in one common denunciation with the first sanguinary and criminal outbreak. Lord Castlehaven’s narrative effectually disposes of this charge. In a singularly clear and candid manner he narrates the rise and progress of the insurrection, and shows the wide difference between the aims and motives of those who planned the uprising of October 23, 1641, and of those who afterwards carried on the war under the title of the Confederate Catholics of Ireland. The former he does not hesitate to denounce as a “barbarous and inhumane” conspiracy, but the responsibility for it he fixes in the right quarter—the malevolent character of the Irish government and the atrocious spirit of the English Puritan Parliament, which, abandoning all the duties of protection, kept only one object in view—the extirpation of the native Irish.

With the successful example of the Scotch Rebellion immediately before them, it was a matter of little wonder to observant and impartial minds in that age that the Irish should have seized upon the occasion of the growing quarrel between the king and Parliament as the opportune moment for the[82] redress of their grievances. For in the year 1640, two years after the pacification of Berwick, the Scotch Rebellion, primarily instigated by the same cause as the Irish—religious differences—broke out with greater violence than ever. The Scots’ army invaded England, defeated the king’s troops at Newburn, and took Newcastle. Then, driven to extremity by those Scotch rebels, as mercenary as they were fanatical,[8] and his strength paralyzed by the growing English sedition, Charles I. called together “that unfortunate Parliament” which, proceeding from one violence to another, first destroyed its master, and then was in turn destroyed by its own servant. Far from voting the Scotch army rebels and traitors, the Parliament at once styled them “dear brethren” and voted them £300,000 for their kindness. Mr. Gervase Holles was expelled from the House for saying in the course of debate “that the best way of paying them was by arms to expel them out of the kingdom.” The quarrel between King and Commons grew hotter, until finally it became evident that, notwithstanding Charles’ concessions, a violent rupture could not be long delayed.

No fairer opportunity could be hoped for by the Irish leaders, dissatisfied with their own condition, and spurred on by the hope of winning as good measure of success as the Scotch. The plan to surprise the Castle of Dublin and the other English garrisons was quickly matured; but failing, some of the conspirators were taken and executed, and the rest forced to retire to the woods and mountains. But the flame thus lighted soon spread over the whole kingdom, and occasioned a war which lasted without intermission for ten years.

The following reasons are declared by Castlehaven to have been afterwards offered to him by the Irish as the explanation of this insurrection:

First, that, being constantly looked upon by the English government as a conquered nation, and never treated as natural or free-born subjects, they considered themselves entitled to regain their liberty whenever they believed it to be in their power to do so.

Secondly, that in the North, where the insurrection broke out with the greatest violence, six whole counties had been escheated to the crown at one blow, on account of Tyrone’s rebellion; and although it was shown that a large portion of the population of those counties was innocent of complicity in that rising, nothing had ever been restored, but the whole bestowed by James I. upon his countrymen. To us, who live at the distance of two centuries and a half from those days of wholesale rapine, these confiscations still seem the most gigantic instance of English wrong; but who shall tell their maddening effect upon those who suffered from them in person in that age—the men flying to the mountains, the women perishing in the fields, the children crying for food they could not get?

Thirdly, the popular alarm was[83] heightened by the reports, current during Strafford’s government in Ireland, that the counties of Roscommon, Mayo, Galway, and Cork, and parts of Tipperary, Limerick, and Wicklow, were to share the fate of the Ulster counties. It hardly needs the example of our own Revolution to prove the truth of Castlehaven’s observation upon this project: “That experience tells us where the people’s property is like to be invaded, neither religion nor loyalty is able to keep them within bounds if they find themselves in a condition to make any considerable opposition.” And this brings to his mind the story related by Livy of those resolute ambassadors of the Privernates, who, being reduced to such extremities that they were obliged to beg peace of the Roman Senate, yet, being asked what peace should the Romans expect from them, who had broken it so often, they boldly answered—which made the Senate accept their proposals—“If a good one, it shall be faithful and lasting; but if bad, it shall not hold very long. For think not,” said they, “that any people, or even any man, will continue in that condition whereof they are weary any longer than of necessity they must.”

Fourthly, it was notorious that from the moment Parliament was convened it had urged the greatest severities against the English Roman Catholics. The king was compelled to revive the penalties of the worst days of Edward and Elizabeth against them. His own consort was scarce safe from the violence of those hideous wretches who concealed the vilest crimes under the garb of Puritan godliness. Readers even of such a common and one-sided book as Forster’s Life of Sir John Eliot will be surprised to find the prominence and space the “Popish” resolutions and debates occupied in the sittings of Parliament. The popular leaders divided their time nearly equally between the persecution of the Catholics and assaults upon the prerogative. The same severities were now threatened against the Irish Catholics. “Both Houses,” says Castlehaven, “solicited, by several petitions out of Ireland, to have those of that kingdom treated with the like rigor, which, to a people so fond of their religion as the Irish, was no small inducement to make them, while there was an opportunity offered, to stand upon their guard.”

Fifthly, the precedent of the Scotch Rebellion, and its successful results—pecuniarily, politically, and religiously—encouraged the Irish so much at that time that they offered it to Owen O’Conally as their chief motive for rising in rebellion; “which,” says he (quoted by Castlehaven), “they engaged in to be rid of the tyrannical government that was over them, and to imitate Scotland, who by that course had enlarged their privileges” (O’Conally’s Exam., October 22, 1641; Borlace’s History of the Irish Rebellion, p. 21).

To the same purpose Lord Castlehaven quotes Mr. Howell in his Mercurius Hibernicus in the year 1643; “whose words, because an impartial author and a known Protestant, I will here transcribe in confirmation of what I have said and for the reader’s further satisfaction”:

“Thus,” continues Castlehaven, “concludes this learned and ingenious gentleman, who, as being then his majesty’s historiographer, was as likely as any man to know the transactions of those times, and, as an Englishman and a loyal Protestant, was beyond all exception of partiality or favor of the Papists of Ireland, and therefore could have no other reason but the love of truth and justice to give this account of the Irish Rebellion, or make the Scotch and their wicked brethren in the Parliament of England the main occasion of that horrid insurrection.”

As for the “massacre,” so called, that ensued, Lord Castlehaven speaks of it with the abhorrence it deserves. But this very term “massacre” is a misnomer plausibly affixed to the uprising by English ingenuity. In a country such as Ireland then was—in which, though nominally conquered, few English lived outside the walled towns—an intermittent state of war was chronic; and therefore there was none of that unpreparedness for attack or absence of means of defence on the part of the English settlers which, in other well-known historical cases, has rightfully given the name of “massacre” to a premeditated murderous attack upon defenceless and surprised victims. To hold the English as such will be regarded with contemptuous ridicule by every one acquainted with the system of English and Scotch colonization in Ireland in that age. The truth is, the cruelties on both sides were very bloody, “and though some,” says Lord Castlehaven, “will throw all upon the Irish, yet ’tis well known who they were[85] that used to give orders to their parties sent into the enemies’ quarters to spare neither man, woman, nor child.” And as to the preposterous muster-rolls of Sir John Temple—from whom the subsequent scribblers borrowed all their catalogues—giving fifty thousand (!) British natives as the number killed, Lord Castlehaven’s testimony is to the effect that there was not one-tenth—or scarcely five thousand—of that number of British natives then living in Ireland outside of the cities and walled towns where no “massacre” was committed. Lord Castlehaven also shows that there were not 50,000 persons to be found even in Temple’s catalogue, although it was then a matter of common notoriety that he repeats the same people and the same circumstances twice or thrice, and mentions hundreds as then murdered who lived many years afterwards. Some of Temple’s, not the Irish, victims were alive when Castlehaven wrote.

But the true test of the character of this insurrection is to be found, not in the exaggerated calumnies of English libellers writing after the event, but in the testimony of the English settlers themselves when in a position where lies would have been of no avail. We will therefore give here, though somewhat out of the course of our narrative, an incident related by Castlehaven to that effect.

Shortly after he had been appointed General of the Horse under Preston, Commander-in-Chief of the Confederate Catholics in Leinster, that general took, among other places, Birr, in King’s County. Here Castlehaven had the good fortune, as he says, to begin his command with an act of charity. For, going to see this garrison before it marched out, he came into a large room where he found many people of quality, both men and women. They no sooner saw him but, with tears in their eyes, they fell on their knees, desiring him to save their lives. “I was astonished,” says Castlehaven, “at their posture and petition, and, having made them rise, asked what the matter was? They answered that from the first day of the war there had been continued action and bloodshed between them and their Irish neighbors, and little quarter on either side; and therefore, understanding that I was an Englishman, begged I would take them into my protection.” It is enough to say that Lord Castlehaven, with some difficulty, and by personally taking command of a strong convoy, obtained for them the protection they prayed for from the exasperated and outraged population around them. But what we wish to point out is this: that here are those victims of Sir John Temple’s “massacre”—not the garrison of the fort, observe, but the English settlers driven in by the approach of Preston’s army, after terrorizing the country for months—now, with the fear of death before them, confessing on their knees that from the first day of the war they had arms in their hands, and that little quarter was given on either side!

How well the English were able to take care of themselves at this time, and what their “massacres” were like, are shown by the following extract from a letter of Colonel the Hon. Mervin Touchett to his brother, Lord Castlehaven. Col. Touchett is describing a raid made by Sir Arthur Loffens, Governor of Naas, with a party of horse and dragoons, killing such of the Irish as they met, to punish an attack[86] upon an English party a few days before: “But the most considerable slaughter was in a great strength of furze, scattered on a hill, where the people of several villages (taking the alarm) had sheltered themselves. Now, Sir Arthur, having invested the hill, set the furze on fire on all sides, where the people, being a considerable number, were all burned or killed, men, women, and children. I saw the bodies and the furze still burning.”

We remember the horror-stricken denunciations of the English press some years ago when it was stated, without much authentication, that some of the French commanders in the Algerine campaigns had smoked some Arabs to death in caves. But it would seem from Col. Touchett’s narrative that the English troopers would have been able to give their French comrades lessons in the culinary art of war some centuries ago. A grilled Irishman is surely as savory an object for the contemplation of humanity as a smoked Arab!

But whatever the atrocities on the English side, we will not say that the cruelties committed by the Irish were not deserving of man’s reprobation and God’s anger. Only this is to be observed: that whereas the “massacres” by the Irish were confined to the rabble and Strafford’s disbanded soldiers, those committed by the English side were shared in, as the narratives of the day show, by the persons highest in position and authority. They made part of the English system of government of that day. On the other hand, the leading men of the Irish Catholic body not only endeavored to stay those murders, but sought to induce the government to bring the authors of them on both sides to punishment. But in vain! On the 17th of March, 1642, Viscount Gormanstown and Sir Robert Talbot, on behalf of the nobility and gentry of the nation, presented a remonstrance, praying “that the murders on both sides committed should be strictly examined, and the authors of them punished according to the utmost severity of the law.” Which proposal, Castlehaven shrewdly remarks, would never have been rejected by their adversaries, “but that they were conscious of being deeper in the mire than they would have the world believe.”

Now, as to the inception of the war of the Confederate Catholics, and its objects, Lord Castlehaven’s narrative is equally convincing and clear.

Parliament met in the Castle of Dublin, Nov. 16, 1641. The Rebellion was laid before both Houses by the lords-justices, Sir William Parsons and Sir John Borlace. Concurrent resolutions were adopted, without a dissenting voice, by the two Houses, declaring their abhorrence of the Rebellion, and pledging their lives and fortunes to suppress it. Castlehaven had a seat in the Irish House of Lords as an Irish peer, and being then in Ireland, as before related, took his seat at the meeting of Parliament. Besides Castlehaven, most of the leaders of the war that ensued were members of the Irish House of Lords. These Catholic peers were not less earnest than the rest in their unanimous intention to put down the Rebellion. Both Houses thereupon began to deliberate upon the most effectual means for its suppression. “But this way of proceeding,” says Castlehaven, “did[87] not, it seems, square with the lords-justices’ designs, who were often heard to say that ‘the more were in rebellion, the more lands should be forfeit to them.’” Therefore, in the midst of the deliberations of Parliament on the subject, a prorogation was determined on. The lords, understanding this, sent Castlehaven and Viscount Castelloe to join a deputation from the commons to the lords-justices, praying them not to prorogue, at least till the rebels—then few in number—were reduced to obedience. But the address was slighted, and Parliament prorogued the next day, to the great surprise of both Houses and the “general dislike,” says Castlehaven, “of all honest and knowing men.”

The result was, as the lords-justices no doubt intended, that the rebels were greatly encouraged, and at once began to show themselves in quarters hitherto peaceful. The members of Parliament retired to their country-houses in much anxiety after the prorogation. Lord Castlehaven went to his seat at Maddingstown. There he received a letter, signed by the Viscounts of Gormanstown and Netterville, and by the Barons of Slane, Lowth, and Dunsany, containing an enclosure to the lords-justices which those noblemen desired him to forward to them, and, if possible, obtain an answer. This letter to the lords-justices, Castlehaven says, was very humble and submissive, asking only permission to send their petitions into England to represent their grievances to the king. The only reply of the lords-justices was a warning to Castlehaven to receive no more letters from them.

Meanwhile, parties were sent out from Dublin and the various garrisons throughout the kingdom to “kill and destroy the rebels.” But those parties took little pains to distinguish rebels from loyal subjects, provided they were only Catholics, killing promiscuously men, women, and children. Reprisals followed on the part of the rebels. The nobility and gentry were between two fires. A contribution was levied upon them by the rebels, after the manner of the Scots in the North of England in 1640. But although to pay that contribution in England passed without reproach, in Ireland it was denounced by the lords-justices as treason. The English troopers insulted and openly threatened the most distinguished Irish families as favorers of the Rebellion. “This,” says Castlehaven, “and the sight of their tenants, the harmless country people, without respect to age or sex, thus barbarously murdered, made the Catholic nobility and gentry at last resolved to stand upon their guard.” Nevertheless, before openly raising the standard of revolt against the Irish government, which refused to protect them, they made several efforts to get their petitions before Charles I. Sir John Read, a Scotchman, then going to England, undertook to forward petitions to the king; but, being arrested on suspicion at Drogheda, was taken to Dublin, and there put upon the rack by the lords-justices to endeavor to wring from him a confession of Charles I.’s complicity in the Rebellion. This Col. Mervin Touchett heard from Sir John Read himself as he was brought out of the room where he was racked. But that unfortunate monarch knew not how to choose his friends or to be faithful to them when he found them. He referred the whole conduct of Irish affairs[88] to the English Parliament, thus increasing the discontent to the last pitch by making it plain to the whole Irish people that he abandoned the duty of protecting them, and had handed them over to the mercy of their worst enemies—the English Parliament. That Parliament at once passed a succession of wild votes and ordinances, indicating their intention of stopping short at nothing less than utter extirpation of the native race. Dec. 8, 1641, they declared they would never give consent to any toleration of the Popish religion in Ireland. In February following, when few of any estate were as yet engaged in the Rebellion, they passed an act assigning two million five hundred thousand acres of cultivated land, besides immense tracts of bogs, woods, and mountains, to English and Scotch adventurers for a small proportion of money on the grant. This money, the act stated, was to go to the reduction of the rebels; but, with a fine irony of providence upon the king’s weak compliance, every penny of it was afterwards used to raise armies by the English rebels against him. “But the greatest discontent of all,” says Castlehaven, “was about the lords-justices proroguing the Parliament—the only way the nation had to express its loyalty and prevent their being misrepresented to their sovereign, which, had it been permitted to sit for any reasonable time, would in all likelihood, without any great charge or trouble, have brought the rebels to justice.”

Thus all hopes of redress or safety being at an end—a villanous government in Dublin intent only upon confiscation, a furious Parliament in London breathing vengeance against the whole Irish race, and a king so embroiled in his English quarrels that he could do nothing to help his Irish subjects, even had he wished it—what was left those loyal, gallant, and devoted men but to draw the sword for their own safety? The Rebellion by degrees spread over the whole kingdom. “And now,” says Castlehaven, “there’s no more looking back; for all were in arms and full of indignation.” A council of the leading Catholic nobles, military officers, and gentry met at Kilkenny, and formed themselves into an association under the title of the Confederate Catholics of Ireland. Four generals were appointed for the respective provinces of the kingdom—Preston for Leinster, Barry for Munster, Owen Roe O’Neale for Ulster, and Burke for Connaught. Thus war was declared.

When the Rebellion first broke out in the North, Lord Castlehaven had immediately repaired to Dublin and offered his services to the lords-justices. They were declined with the reply that “his religion was an obstacle.” After the prorogation of Parliament, as we have seen, he retired to his house in the country. Then, coming again to Dublin to meet a charge of corresponding with the rebels which had been brought against him, he was arrested by order of the lords-justices, and, after twenty weeks of imprisonment in the sheriff’s house, was committed to the Castle. “This startled me a little,” says Castlehaven—as it well might do; for the state prisoner’s exit from the Castle in Dublin in those days was usually made in the same way as from the Tower in London, namely, by the block—“and brought into my thoughts the proceedings against the Earl of Strafford, who, confiding in his own innocence, was voted out of his life by an unprecedented[89] bill of attainder.” Therefore, hearing nothing while in prison but rejoicings at the king’s misfortunes, who at last had been forced to take up arms by the English rebels, and knowing the lords-justices to be of the Parliament faction, and the lord-lieutenant, the Marquis of Ormond, being desperately sick of a fever, not without suspicion of poison, and his petition to be sent to England, to be tried there by his peers, being refused, he determined to make his escape, shrewdly concluding, as he says, that “innocence was a scurvy plea in an angry time.”

From this time the war of the Confederate Catholics was carried on with varying success until the cessation of 1646, and then until the peace of 1648, when the Confederates united, but too late, with the Marquis of Ormond to stop the march of Cromwell.

A SWEET SINGER: ADELAIDE ANNE PROCTER.

THE COLPORTEURS OF BONN.

I was very stupid in my youth, and am still far from being sharp. I could not master knotty questions like other boys; so this natural deficiency had to be supplemented by some plan that would facilitate the acquisition of knowledge. The advantage to be derived from a garrulous preceptor, whose mind was stored with all sorts of learning without dogmatism or hard formularies, were fully appreciated by my parents. John O’Neil was a very old man when I was a boy, and he was just the person qualified to impart an astonishing quantity of all sorts of facts, and perhaps fancies. I hold him in affectionate remembrance though he be dead over twenty-five years, and rests near the remains of his favorite hero, O’Connell, in Glasnevin Cemetery. When he became the chief architect of my intellectual structure, I thought him the most learned man in the world. On account of my dulness, he adopted the method of sermonizing to me instead of giving me unintelligible lessons to be learned out of books. I took a great fancy to him, because I found him exceedingly interesting, and he evinced a strong liking for me because I was docile. We became inseparable companions, notwithstanding the great discrepancy in our years. His tall, erect, lank figure and lantern jaw were to me the physiological signs of profundity, firmness, and power, and his white head was the symbol of wisdom. Our tastes—well, I had no tastes save such as he chose to awaken in me, and hence there came to be very soon a great similitude in our respective inclinations. I was like a ball of wax, a sheet of paper, or any other original impressionable thing you may name, in his hands for ten years, after which very probably I began to harden, though I was not conscious of the process. However, the large fund of knowledge that he imparted to me crystallized, as it were, and became fixed in my possession as firmly as if it had been elaborately achieved by a severe mental training. After I went to college he was still my friend, and rejoiced in my subsequent successes, and followed me with a jealous eye and a sort of parental anxiety in my foreign travels, and even in death he did not forget me, for he made me the custodian of his great heaps of literary productions, all in manuscript, embracing sketches, diaries, notes of travel, learned fragments on scientific and scholastic topics, essays, tales, letters, the beginnings and the endings and the middles of books on history, politics, and polemics, pieces of pamphlets and speeches, with a miscellaneous lot of poetry in all measures. He was a great, good man, who never had what is called an aim in life, but he certainly had an aim after life; and yet no one could esteem the importance of this pilgrimage more than he did. He would frequently boast of being heterodox on that point. “You will hear,” he would remark, “people depreciating this life as a matter of little concern. Don’t allow their sophistry[91] to have much weight with you. The prevalent opinions which are flippantly spoken thereon will not stand the test of sound Christian reasoning. That part of human existence which finds its scene and scope of exertion in this life is filled with eternal potentialities. You have heard it said that man wants but little here below. Where else does he want it? Here is where he wants everything. Then do not hesitate to ask, but be careful not to ask amiss. When the battle is over, it will be too late to make requisitions for auxiliaries. If you conquer, assistance will not be wanted; if you are defeated, assistance cannot reach you. The fight cannot be renewed; the victory or defeat will be final. This life is immense. You cannot think too much of it, cannot estimate it too highly. A minute has almost an infinite value. Man wants much here, and wants it all the time.” I thought his language at that time fantastical; now I regard it as profound. From a survey of his own aimless career, it is evident he did not reduce the good of earthly existence of which he spoke to any sort of money value. Those elements and forces of life to which he attached such deep significance and importance could not have their equivalent in currency, nor in comforts, nor in real estate, nor even in fame. My old preceptor had spent most of his youth in travelling, and the picturesque meanderings of the Rhine furnished subjects for many of his later recollections. I recall now with a melancholy regret the many pleasant evenings I enjoyed listening to his narratives of travel on that historic river, and in imagination sat with him on the Drachenfels’ crest, looking down upon scenes made memorable by the lives and struggles of countless heroes and the crowds of humanity that came and went through the course of a hundred generations—some leaving their mark, and others erasing it again; some leaving a smile behind them on the face of the country, and others a scar. He loved to talk about the beautiful city of Bonn, where he had spent some years, it being the most attractive place, he said, from Strasbourg to the sea—for learning was cheap there, and so were victuals—the only things he found indispensable to a happy life. He would glide into a monologue of dramatic glow and fervor in reciting how he procured access to the extensive library of its new university, and, crawling up a step-ladder, would perch himself on top like a Hun, who, after a sleep of a thousand years, had resurrected himself, gathered his bones from the plains of Chalons, and having procured a second-hand suit of modern clothes from a Jew in Cologne, traced with eager avidity the vicissitudes of war and empire since the days of Attila. It was there, no doubt, he discovered the materials of this curious paper, which I found among his literary remains. Whether he gathered the materials himself, or merely transcribed the work of some previous writer, I am unable to determine. Without laying any claim to critical acumen, I must confess it appears to me to be a meritorious piece, and I picked it out, because I thought it unique and brief, for submission to the more extensive experience and more impartial judgment of The Catholic World’s readers. Having entire control of these productions of my friend and preceptor, I took the liberty of substituting modern phraseology for what was antique, and of putting the sketch[92] in such style that the most superficial reader will have no difficulty in running it over. Objection may be raised to the title on the score of fitness. I did not feel authorized to change it, believing the one chosen by the judgment of my old friend as suitable as any I could substitute.

In the year 1250 the mind of man was as restless and impatient of restraint as now, and some people in Bonn, under a quiet exterior, nursed in their bosoms latent volcanoes of passion, and indulged the waywardness of rebellious fancy to a degree that would have proved calamitous to the placid flow of life and thought could instrumentality for action have been found. There is indubitable proof that the principle of the Reformation, which three hundred years later burst through the environment of dogma and spread like a flood of lava over Europe, existed actively in Bonn in the year named, and would have arrived at mature strength if nature had not interposed an impassable barrier to the proceeding. It is hard to rebel against nature, and it is madness to expect success in such a revolt. Fourteen men, whose names have come down to us, gave body and tone, and a not very clearly defined purpose, to this untimely uprising against the inevitable in Bonn. How many others were in sympathy or in active affiliation with them is not shown. Those fourteen were bold spirits, who labored under the misfortune of having come into the world three or four centuries too soon. They were great men out of place. There is an element of rebellion in great spirits which only finds its proper antidote in the stronger and more harmonious principle of obedience. Obedience is the first condition of creatures. Those fourteen grew weary of listening to the Gospel preached every Sunday from the pulpit of S. Remigius, when they attended Mass with the thousands of their townsmen. The Scriptures, both New and Old, were given out in small doses, with an abundant mixture of explanation and homily and salutary exhortation. Their appetites craved a larger supply of Scripture, and indeed some of them were so unreasonable as to desire the reading of the whole book, from Genesis to Revelations, at one service. “Let us,” said Giestfacher, “have it all. No one is authorized to give a selection from the Bible and hold back the rest. It is our feast, and we have a right to the full enjoyment thereof.”

“Well,” said Heuck, his neighbor, to whom he addressed the remonstrance; “go to the scrivener’s and purchase a copy and send your ass to carry it home. Our friend Schwartz finished a fine one last week. It can be had for sixteen hundred dollars. When you have it safe at home, employ a reader, who will be able to mouth it all off for you in fifty hours, allowing a few intervals for refreshment, but none for sleep.” And Heuck laughed, or rather sneered, at Giestfacher as he walked away.

Giestfacher was a reformer, however, and was not to be put down in that frivolous manner. He had been a student himself with the view of entering the ministry, but, being maliciously charged with certain grave irregularities, his prospects in that direction were seriously clouded, and in a moment of grand though passionate self-assertion he threw up his expectations and abandoned the idea of entering the church, but instead took to the[93] world. He was a reformer from his infancy, and continually quarrelled with his family about the humdrum state of things at home; was at enmity with the system of municipal government at Bonn; and held very animated controversies with the physicians of the place on the system of therapeutics then pursued, insisting strongly that all diseases arose from bad blood, and that a vivisection with warm wine would prove a remedy for everything. He lacked professional skill to attempt an experiment in the medical reforms he advocated; besides, that department would not admit of bungling with impunity. For municipal reforms he failed in power, and the reward in fame or popular applause that might follow successful operations in that limited sphere of action was not deemed equivalent to the labor. But in the field of religion there was ample room for all sorts of tentative processes without danger; and, in addition to security, notoriety might be obtained by being simply outré. He had settled upon religious reform, and his enthusiasm nullified the cautionary suggestions of his reason, and reduced mountains of difficulty to the insignificant magnitude of molehills; even Heuck could be induced to adopt his views by cogent reasoning and much persuasion. Enthusiasm is allied to madness—a splendid help, but a dangerous guide.

Giestfacher used his tongue, and in the course of a year had made twelve or fourteen proselytes. Those who cannot enjoy the monotony of life and the spells of ennui that attack the best-regulated temperaments, fly to novelty for relief. The fearful prospect of an unknown and nameless grave and an oblivious future drives many restless spirits into experiments in morals and in politics as well as in natural philosophy, in the vain hope of rescuing their names from the “gulf of nothingness” that awaits mediocrity. The new reformers, zealous men and bold, met in Giestfacher’s house on Corpus Christi in 1251, the minutes of which meeting are still extant; and from that record I learn there were present Stein the wheelwright, Lullman the baker, Schwartz the scrivener, Heuck the armorer, Giestfacher the cloth merchant, Braunn, another scrivener, Hartzwein the vintner, Blum the advocate, Werner, another scrivener, Reudlehuber, another scrivener, Andersen, a stationer, Esch the architect, Dusch the monk, discarded by his brethren for violations of discipline, and Wagner the potter. Blum was appointed to take an account of the proceedings, and Giestfacher was made president of the society.

“We are all agreed,” said Giestfacher, “that the Scriptures ought to be given to the people. From these divine writings we learn a time shall come when wars shall cease, and the Alemanni and the Frank and the Tartar may eat from the same plate and drink out of the same cup in peace and fraternity, and wear cloth caps instead of brass helmets, and plough the fields with their spears instead of letting daylight through each other therewith, and the shepherds shall tend their flocks with a crook and not with a bow to keep off the enemy. How can that time come unless the people be made acquainted with those promises? I believe we, who, like the apostles, number fourteen, are divinely commissioned to change things for the better, and initiate the great movements which will bring about the millennium. Let us[94] rise up to the dignity of our position. Let us prove equal to the inspiration of the occasion. We are called together by heaven for a new purpose. The time is approaching when universal light will dispel the gloom, and peace succeed to all disturbance. Let us give the Scriptures to the people. They are the words of God, that carry healing on their wings. They are the dove that was sent out from the ark. They are the pillar of light in the desert. They are the sword of Joshua, the sling of David, the rod of Moses. Let us fourteen give them to the people, and start out anew, like the apostles from Jerusalem, to overturn the idols of the times and emancipate the nations. We have piled up heaps of stones in every town and monuments of brass, and still men are not changed. We see them still lying, warring, hoarding riches, and making gods of their bellies—all of which is condemned by the word of God. What will change all this? I say, let the piles of stone and the monuments of brass slide, and give the Scriptures a chance. Let us give them to the people, and the reign of brotherhood and peace will commence, wars shall cease, nation will no longer rise up against nation, rebellion will erect its horrid front no more. Men will cease hoarding riches and oppressing the poor. There will be no more robbing rings in corporate towns, and men in power will not blacken their character and imperil the safety of the state by nepotism. The whole world will become pure. No scandals will arise in the church, and there will be no blasphemy or false swearing, and Christian brethren shall not conspire for each other’s ruin.”

“We see,” remarked Heuck, “that those who have the Scriptures are no better than other people. They too are given to lying, hoarding riches, warring one against another, and making gods of their bellies. How is that?”

“Yes,” said Blum, “I know three scriveners of this town who boast of having transcribed twenty Bibles each, and they get drunk thrice a week and quarrel with their wives; and there’s Giebricht, the one-legged soldier, who can repeat the Scriptures until you sleep listening to him, says he killed nine men in battle and wounded twenty others. The Scriptures did not make him very peaceful. The loss of a leg had a more quieting effect on him than all his memorizing of the sacred books.”

“We did not get together,” said Werner, “to discuss that phase of the subject. It was well understood, and thereunto agreed a month ago, that the spread of the Scriptures was desirable; and to this end we met, that means wise and effective may be devised whereby we can supply every one with the word of God, that all may search therein for the correct and approved way of salvation.”

“We are subject to one spirit,” said Hartzwein the vintner, “and all moved by the same inspiration. Discord is unseemly. We must not dispute on the subject of drunkenness. Let us have the mature views of Brother Giestfacher, and his plans. The end is already clear if the means be of approved piety and really orthodox. In addition to the Scriptures, I would rejoice very much to see prayer more generally[95] practised. We ought to do nothing without prayer. Let us first of all consult the Lord. What says Brother Blum?”

Blum rose and said it was a purely business meeting. He had no doubt it ought to have been opened with prayer. It was an old and salutary practice that came down from the days of the apostles, and Paul recommended it. But as they were now in the midst of business, he thought it would be as wise and as conformable with ancient Christian and saintly practice to go on with their work, and rest satisfied with mental ejaculation, as to inaugurate a formal prayer-meeting.

Reudlehuber meekly said that the Scriptures showed there was a time for everything, whence it was plain that prayer might be out of place as well as penitential tears on some occasions. It would not look well for a man to rise up in the midst of a marriage feast and, beating his breast, cry out Mea culpa.

“We have too many prayers in the church,” said Giestfacher, “and not enough of Scripture; that is the trouble with us. Brethren must rise above the weaknesses of the mere pietist. Moses was no pietist; he was a great big, leonine character. We must be broad and liberal in our views; not given to fault-finding nor complaining. Pray whenever you feel like it, and drink when you have a mind to. Noah got drunk. I’d rather be the prodigal son, and indulge in a hearty natural appetite for awhile, than be his cautious, speculating, avaricious brother, who had not soul enough most likely to treat his acquaintances to a pint of wine once in his lifetime. Great men get tipsy. Great nations are bibulous. We are not here to make war on those who drink wine and cultivate the grape, nor are we authorized in making war on weavers because Dives was damned for wearing fine linen. It is our mission to spread the Scriptures. The world wants light. He is a benefactor of mankind who puts two rays where there was only one before.”

“Let us hear your plans, Brother Giestfacher,” cried out a number of voices simultaneously.

In response, Brother Giestfacher stated that there were no plans necessary. All that was to be done was to circulate the Scriptures. Let us get one hundred thousand sheets of vellum to begin with, and set a hundred scriveners to work transcribing copies of the Bible, and then distribute these copies among the people.

The plan was plain and simple and magnificent, Braunn thought, but there were not ten thousand sheets of vellum in the town nor in the whole district, and much of that would be required for civil uses; besides, the number of sheep in the neighborhood had been so reduced by the recent war that vellum would be scarce and costly for ten years to come.

Werner lamented the irremediable condition of the world when the free circulation of the word of God depended on the number of sheep, and the number of sheep was regulated by war, and war by the ambition, jealousy, or pride of princes.

“It is painfully true,” said Heuck, “that the world stands in sad need of reform, if souls are to be rescued from their spiritual perils only by the means proposed in the magnificent sheep-skin scheme of Brother[96] Giestfacher.” It was horrible to think that the immortal part of man was doomed to perish, to be snuffed out, as it were, in eternal darkness, because soldiers had an unholy appetite for mutton.

Braunn said the work could be started on three or four thousand hides, and ere they were used up a new supply might arrive from some unexpected quarter.

Esch said that they ought to have faith; the Hand that fed the patriarch in the desert would provide vellum if he was prayerfully besought for assistance. He would be willing to commence on one sheet, feeling convinced there would be more than enough in the end.

Blum did not take altogether so sanguine a view of things as Brother Esch. He was especially dubious about that vellum supply; not that he questioned the power of Providence at all, but it struck him that it would be just as well and as easy for the society to prayerfully ask for an ample supply of ready-made Bibles as to expect a miracle in prepared sheep-skin; and he was still further persuaded that if the books were absolutely necessary to one’s salvation, they would be miraculously given. But he did not put the movement on that ground. It is very easy for men, and particularly idiotic men, to convince themselves that God will answer all their whims and caprices by the performance of a miracle. We are going upon the theory that the work is good, just as it is good to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. We expect to find favor in heaven because we endeavor to do a work of charity according to our honest impression.

“How many persons,” inquired Heuck, “do you propose to supply with complete copies of the Scriptures?”

“Brother Dusch,” continued Heuck, “how many heads of families are there in the district? Your abbot had the census taken a few month’s ago, while you were yet in grace and favor at the monastery.”

Brother Dusch said he heard there were twenty-two thousand from the Drachenfels to within six miles of Cologne, but all of them could not read.

“We will send out,” said Giestfacher enthusiastically, “an army of colporteurs, who will distribute and read at the same time.”

“I perceive,” said Blum, “that this discussion will never stop. New avenues of thought and new mountains of objection are coming to view at every advance in the debate. Let us do something first, and talk afterwards. To supply twenty-two thousand persons with expensive volumes will require considerably more than mere resolves and enthusiasm. I propose that we buy up all the vellum in the city to-day, and that we all go security for the payment. I propose also that we employ Brothers Braunn, Schwartz, Werner, and Reudlehuber to commence transcribing, and that we all go security for their pay. Unless we begin somewhere, we can never have anything done. What says Brother Giestfacher?”

Giestfacher said it did not become men of action, reformers who proposed to turn over the world and inaugurate a new era and a new life and a new law, to stop at trifles or to consider petty difficulties. The design that had been developed at that meeting contemplated a sweeping change. Instead of having[97] a few books, here and there, at every church, cathedral, monastery, and market-place, learnedly and laboriously expounded by saints of a thousand austerities and of penitential garb, every house would be supplied, and there should be no more destitution in the land. The prophecies and the gospels and the mysteries of revelation would be on the lips of sucking babes, and the people who stood at the street-corners and at the marts of trade, the tiller of the soil, the pedler, the sailor, the old soldier, and the liberated prisoner, together with the man who sold fish and the woman who sold buttermilk, would stand up and preach the Gospel and display a mission, schoolboys would discuss the contents of that book freely, and even the inmates of lunatic asylums would expound it with luminous aptitude and startling fancy. The proposition of Brother Blum met his entire approval. He would pledge everything he had, and risk even life itself, to start the new principle, so that the world might bask in sunshine and not in shadow. It was about time that men had their intellects brightened up some. Even in the days of the apostles those pious men did not do their whole duty. They labored with much assiduity and conscientiousness, but they neglected to adopt measures looking to the spread of the Scriptures. He had no doubt but they fell a long way short of their mission, and were now enduring the pangs of a peck of purgatorial coal for their remissness. There were good men who perhaps found heaven without interesting themselves in the multiplication of copies of the Bible. They were not called to that work; but what was to be thought of those who had the call, the power, the skill, and yet neglected to spread the word. He believed SS. Gregory Nazianzen, Athanasius, Jerome, Chrysostom, Augustine, and others of those early doctors of the church, had a fearful account to render for having neglected the Scriptures. S. Paul, too, was not free from censure. It was true he wrote a few things, but he took no thought of multiplying copies of his epistles.

“How many copies,” inquired Heuck, “do you think S. Paul ought to have written of his letters before you would consider him blameless?”

“He ought,” said Giestfacher, “to have written all the time instead of making tents. ‘How many copies’ is a professional question which I will leave the scriveners to answer. I may remark that it would evidently be unprofitable for us to enter on a minute and detailed discussion on that point here. It is our duty to supplement the shortcomings of those early workers in the field, and finish what they failed to accomplish. They were bound to give the new principle a fair start. The plan suggested was the best, simplest, and clearest, and he hoped every one of the brethren would give it a hearty and cordial support.”

The principle of communism, or the right of communities to govern themselves in certain affairs and to carry on free trade with certain other communities, had been granted the previous century, and Bonn was one of the towns that enjoyed the privilege; but the people still respected religion and did no trafficking on holydays. Giestfacher could not therefore purchase the vellum on Corpus Christi, but had to wait till next day, at which[98] time he could not conveniently find the other members of the new Bible society, and, fearing that news of their project would get abroad and raise the price of the article he wanted, he hastened to the various places where it was kept for sale, and bought all of it up in the course of two hours, paying his own money in part and giving his bond for the balance. The parchment was delivered to the four scriveners, who gathered their families about them, and all the assistants (journeymen) that could be found in the town, and proceeded with the transcribing of the Bible. At the next meeting each scrivener reported that he had about half a book ready, that the work was going rapidly and smoothly forward, and that the scribes were enthusiastic at the prospect of brisk business and good pay. The report was deemed very encouraging. It went to show that the society could have four Bibles every two weeks, or about one hundred a year, and that in the course of two hundred and twenty years every head of a family in the district could be provided with a Bible of his own. The scriveners stated, moreover, that they had neglected their profane business, for which they could have got cash, to proceed in the sacred work, and as there were several people depending on them for means of living, a little money would be absolutely necessary with the grace of God.

Giestfacher also stated that he spent all the money he had in part payment for the parchment, and pledged his property for the balance. His business was somewhat crippled already in consequence of the outlay, and he expected to have part of the burden assumed by every one of the society.

Werner said he had fifteen transcribers working for him, and each one agreed to let one-third of the market value of his work remain in the hands of the society as a subscription to the good work, but the other two-thirds would have to be paid weekly, as they could not live without means. They were all poor, and depending solely on their skill in transcribing for a living.

Blum made a motion that the bishop of the diocese and the Pope be made honorary members of the society. Giestfacher opposed this with eloquent acrimony, saying it was a movement outside of all sorts of church patronage; that it was designed to supersede churches and preaching; for when every man had the Bible he would be a church unto himself, and would not need any more teaching. He also had a resolution adopted pledging each and every member to constitute himself a colporteur of the Bible, and to read and peddle it in sun and rain; and it was finally settled that a subscription should be taken up; that each member of the society be constituted a collector, and proceed at once to every man who loved the Lord and gloried in the Gospel to get his contribution.

At the next meeting the brethren were all present except Dusch, who was reported as an absconder with the funds he had collected, and was said to be at that moment in Cologne, drunk perhaps. Four complete Bibles were presented as the result of two weeks’ hard labor and pious effort and the aggregate production of forty-five writers. The financial reports on the whole were favorable; and the scriveners were provided with sufficient means and encouragement to begin another set[99] of four Bibles. Brother Giestfacher was partially secured in his venture for the parchment, while it was said that the article had doubled in price during the past fortnight, and very little of it could be got from Cologne, as there was a scarcity of it there also, coupled with an extraordinary demand. It was also stated that the monks at the monastery had to erase the works of Virgil in order to find material for making a copy of the homilies of S. John Chrysostom which was wanted for the Bishop of Metz. In like manner, it was decided to erase the histories of Labanius and Zozirnus, as being cheaper than procuring original parchment on which to transcribe a fine Greek copy of the whole Bible, to take the place of one destroyed by the late war. The heavy purchase that Brother Giestfacher had made created a panic in the vellum market that was already felt in the heart of Burgundy. The scriveners’ business had also experienced a revulsion. People of the world who wanted testamentary and legal documents, deeds, contracts, and the like properly engrossed, were offering fabulous sums to have the work done, as most of the professionals of that class were now engaged by the society, and had no time to do any other sort of writing. A debate sprung up as to the proper disposition to be made of the four Bibles on hand, and also as to the manner of beginning and conducting the distribution. In view of the demand for the written word, and of the scarcity of copies and the high price of parchment, it was suggested by Heuck to sell them, and divide the proceeds among the poor and the cripples left after the late war. Five hundred dollars each could be readily got for the books, he said, and it was extremely doubtful whether those who would get them as gifts from the society would resist the temptation of selling them to the first purchaser that came along. In addition to this heavy reason in favor of his line of policy, Heuck suggested the possibility of trouble arising when they should come to grapple with the huge difficulties of actual distribution; to give one of those volumes, he said, would be like giving an estate and making a man wealthy for life.

Giestfacher said it would be impracticable to make any private distribution among the destitute for some time. The guilds of coopers, tailors, shoemakers, armorers, fullers, tanners, masons, artificers, and others should be first supplied; and in addition to the Bible kept chained in the market-place for all who wished to read, he would have one placed at the town-pump and one at the town-house, so that the thirsty might also drink the waters of life, and those who were seeking justice at the court might ascertain the law of God before going in.

Blum said another collection would have to be raised to erect a shed over the Bibles that were proposed to be placed at the town-pump and at the town-house and to pay for suitable chains and clasps to secure them from the depredations of the pilfering.

Esch was of opinion that another subscription could not be successfully taken up until their work had produced manifest fruit for good. The people have much faith, but when they find salt mixed with their drink instead of honey, credulity is turned into disgust. A Bible chained to the town-pump will be a sad realization of their extravagant hopes. Every man[100] who subscribed five dollars expects to get a book worth five hundred, an illuminated Bible fit for a cathedral church. He warned them that they were getting into a labyrinth, and that they would have to resort to prayer yet to carry them through in safety. Werner thought it would be wisest to pursue a quiescent policy for some time, and to forego the indulgence of their anxious desire for palpable results until they should be in a condition to make an impression. He advocated the wisdom of delay. They also serve, he said, who only stand and wait, and it might prove an unwise proceeding to come out with their public exhibition just then. In a few months, when thirty or forty Bibles would be on hand, a larger number than could be found in any library in the world, they might hope, by the show of so much labor, to create enthusiasm.

“But still,” urged Heuck, “you will have the difficulty to contend with—who is to get them?”

“There will,” remarked Blum, “be a greater difficulty to contend with about that time: the settlement of obligations for parchment and the pay of the scriveners who are employed in transcribing. Our means at present, even if we pay the scriveners but one-third their wages, will not suffice to bring out twenty volumes. So we are just in this difficulty: in order to do something, we must have means, and in order to get means, we must do something. It is a sort of vicious circle projected from logic into finance. It will take the keen-edged genius of Brother Giestfacher to cut this knot.”

“The work,” said Giestfacher, “in which we are engaged is of such merit that it will stand of itself. I have no fears of ultimate triumph. If you all fail, God and I will carry it on. Heaven is in it. I am in it. It must succeed. I am a little oldish, I confess, but there is twenty years of work in me still. I feel my foot sufficiently sure to tread the perilous path of this adventure to the goal.”

“Let us,” interposed Schwartz, “stop this profitless debate, and give a cheer to Brother Giestfacher. He is the blood and the bone of this movement. We are in with him. We are all in the same boat. If we have discovered a pusillanimous simpleton among us, it is not too late to cast him out. I feel my gorge and my strength rise together, and I swear to you by S. Remigius, brethren, that I am prepared to sink or swim, and whoever attempts to scuttle the ship shall himself perish first.”

Two or three other brethren, feeling the peculiar inspiration of the moment, rose up and, stamping their feet on the floor, proclaimed their adherence to the principles of the society, and vowed to see it through to the end.

There is no minute of any subsequent meeting to be found among the manuscripts that I have consulted, but I discovered a statement made by Heuck, dated six months later, who, being called before the municipal authorities to testify what he knew about certain transactions of a number of men that had banded themselves together secretly for the purpose of creating a panic in the vellum market, and of disturbing the business of the scriveners, said he was one of fourteen citizens interested in the promulgation of the Gospel free to the poor. That, after five or six meetings, he left the society in company with two others; that two of[101] the members became obnoxious, and were expelled—the one, Dusch, for embezzling money collected for Scripture-writing and Scripture-diffusing purposes, the other, Werner, for having retained one of their volumes, and disposed of it to the lord of Drachenfels for four hundred dollars; that they did not pursue and prosecute these delinquents for fear of bringing reproach on the project; and then he went on to state: “I left the society voluntarily and in disgust. We had fourteen Bibles on hand, but could not agree about their distribution. They were too valuable to give away for nothing, and it was discovered that they were all written in Latin, and not in the vernacular, and they would prove of as little value to the great mass of people for whom they were originally designed as if they had been written in Hebrew. In addition to this I found, for I understand the language perfectly, that no two of them were alike, and, in conjunction with scrivener Schwartz, I minutely examined one taken at random from the pile, and compared it with the volume at the Cathedral. We found fifteen hundred discrepancies. In some places whole sentences were left out. In others, words were made to express a different sense from the original. In others, letters were omitted or put in redundantly, in such a way as to change the meaning; and the grammatical structure was villanously bad. Seeing that the volumes were of no use as a representation of the word of God, and being conscientiously convinced that the books contained poison for the people instead of medicine, I made a motion in meeting to have them all burned. Schwartz opposed it on the ground that they were innoxious anyhow, there being none of the common people capable of understanding the language in which they were written, and, though they were a failure as Bibles, the vellum might be again used; and as the scriveners were not paid for their labor, they had a claim upon the volumes. The scriveners got the books, to which, in my opinion, they had no just claim, for the villanous, bad work they did on them deserved censure and not pay. I have heard since that some of those scriveners made wealth by selling the books to Englishmen for genuine and carefully prepared transcripts from authorized texts. The president and founder of the society, Giestfacher, is now in jail for debt, he having failed to meet his obligations for the vellum he purchased when he took it into his head to enlighten mankind—more especially that portion of it that dwells on the Rhine adjacent to the city of Bonn—by distributing corrupt copies of Latin Bibles to poor people who are not well able to read their own language. The ‘good work’ still occupies the brains and energies of three or four enthusiasts, who have already arrived at the conclusion that the apostles were in league with hell to keep the people ignorant, because they did not give every man a copy of the Bible. The founder sent me a letter two days ago, in which he complains of being deserted by his companions in his extremity. His creditors have seized on all his goods, and there is a considerable sum yet unpaid. He blames the Pope and the bishop in unmeasured terms for this; says it is a conspiracy to keep the Bible from the people. He sees no prospect of being released unless the members of the society come to his speedy relief. The principles, he[102] says, for which he suffers will yet triumph. The time will come when Bibles will be multiplied by some cheap and easy process. Until then, the common run of humanity must be satisfied to be damned, drawing what little consolation they may from the expectation that their descendants a few centuries hence will enjoy the slim privilege of reading Bibles prepared with as little regard to accuracy as these were. I am sorry to see such a noble intellect as Giestfacher undoubtedly possesses show signs of aberration. The entire failure of his project was more than he could bear. He had centred his hopes upon it. He indulged dreams of fame and greatness arising out of the triumph of his idea. Esch has become an atheist. He says the Christian’s God would not have given a book to be the guide and dependence of man for salvation, and yet allow nature, an inferior creation, to interpose insuperable barriers to its promulgation. Every time a sheep-skin is destroyed, says Esch, a community is damned. The dearness and scarcity of parchment keep the world in ignorance. Braunn says the world cannot be saved except by a special revelation to every individual, for there is hardly a copy of the Bible without errors, so that whether every human creature got one or not, they would be still unsafe. One of the common herd must learn Latin and Greek and Hebrew well, and then spend a lifetime tracing up, through all its changes, transcriptions, and corruptions of idiom, one chapter, or at most one book, and die before he be fully assured of the soundness of one text, a paragraph, a line, a word. In fact, says Braunn, there can be no certainty about anything. Language may have had altogether a different meaning twelve hundred years ago to what it has now. Braunn and Schwartz and myself wanted to have a committee of five of our number appointed to revise and correct the text of each book that was produced by comparing it with such Greek and Hebrew copies as were represented of sound and correct authority; but Giestfacher laughed at us, saying we knew nothing of Greek or Hebrew; that we would have to hire some monks to do the job for us, which would be going back again to the very places and principles and practices against which we had revolted and protested. Moreover, continued Giestfacher, we cannot tell whether the oldest, most original copies that can be found are true in every particular. How can we know from any sort of mere human testimony that this copy or that is in accordance with what the prophets and apostles wrote. The whole Bible may be wrong as far as our knowledge, as such, is able to testify. We are reduced to faith in this connection and must rest on that alone.

“I thought, and so did Schwartz, that the faith of Giestfacher must be peculiar when it could accept copies as good enough and true enough after we had discovered hundreds of palpable and grievous errors in them. A book of romance would do a person of Giestfacher’s temper as well as the Bible—faith being capable of making up for all deficiencies. I saw that an extravagance of credulity, called faith, on the part of Giestfacher, led to monomania; and a predominance of irrational reason on the part of Esch had led to utter negation. I did not covet either condition, and I concluded to remain safe at anchor where I had been before, rather than longer follow those adventurers[103] in a wild career after a fancied good—a mere phantom of their own creation. I lost twenty-five dollars by the temporary madness. That cannot be recalled. I rejoice that I lost no more, and I am grateful that the hallucination which lasted nearly a year has passed away without any permanent injury.”

The remainder of Heuck’s statement had partially faded from the parchment by time and dampness, and could not be accurately made out. Sufficient was left visible, however, to show that he expressed a desire to be held excusable for whatever injuries to souls might result from the grave errors that existed in the Bibles disseminated by the cupidity of the scriveners with the guilty knowledge of such errors.

I interested myself in rescuing from oblivion such parts of the record of those curious mediæval transactions as served to show to the people of later times what extraordinary mental and religious activity existed in those ages, when it was foolishly and stupidly thought there were but henchmen and slaves on the one side, and bloody mailed despots on the other. The arrogance of more favored epochs has characterized those days by the epithet of “dark.” Pride is apt to be blind. The characterization is unjust. All the lights of science could not come in one blaze. The people of those days looked back upon a period anterior to their own as “dark,” and those looked still further backward upon greater obscurity, as they thought. The universal boastfulness of man accounts for this increasing obscurity as we reach back into antiquity. Philosophers and poets and men of learning, thinking themselves, and wishing to have other people think them, above personal egotism, adopted the method of praising their age, and thus indirectly eulogizing, themselves; and as they could not compare their times with the future of which they knew nothing, they naturally fell into the unfilial crime of drawing disparaging comparisons with their fathers. There is an inclination, too, in the imperfection of human nature to belittle what is remote and magnify what is near at hand. Even now, men as enthusiastic and conscientious and religious as Heuck and Giestfacher and Schwartz find themselves surrounded by the same difficulties, and as deeply at a loss to advance a valid reason for their revolt and their protest.

EARLY PERSECUTIONS OF THE CHRISTIANS.

In one of his bold Apologies [9] the great African writer Tertullian said to the rulers of the Roman Empire that “it was one and the same thing for the truth [of Christianity] to be announced to the world, and for the world to hate and persecute it.” This persecution of the church began on the very spot that was her birth-place; for soon after the ascension of our Lord the wicked Jews tried by every means to crush her. “From the days of the apostles,” wrote Tertullian in the IIId century, “the synagogue has been a source of persecutions.” At first the church was attacked by words only; but these were soon replaced by weapons, when Stephen was stoned, the apostles were thrown into prison and scourged, and all the East had risen in commotion against the Christians. The Gentiles soon followed the example of the Jews, and those persecutions which bore an official character throughout the Roman Empire, and lasted for three centuries, are commonly called the Ten General Persecutions. Besides these, there were partial persecutions at all times in some part or other of the empire. Nero, whose name is synonymous with cruelty, was the first emperor to begin a general persecution of the Christians; and Tertullian made a strong point in his favor when he cried out to the people (Apol. v.), saying, “That our troubles began at such a source, we glory; for whoever has studied his nature knows well that nothing but what is good and great was ever condemned by Nero.” This persecution began in the year 64, and lasted four years. Its pretext was the burning of Rome, the work of the emperor himself, who ambitiously desired, when he would have rebuilt the city and made it still more grand, to call it by his own name; but the plan not succeeding, he tried to avert the odium of the deed from his own person, and accused the Christians. Their extermination was decreed. The pagan historian Tacitus has mentioned, in his Annals (xv. 44), some of the principal torments inflicted on the Christians. He says that they were covered with the skins of wild beasts and torn to pieces by savage hounds, were crucified, were burned alive, and that some, being coated with resinous substances, were put up in the imperial garden at night to serve as human torches. The Roman Martyrology makes a special commemoration, on the 24th of June, of these martyrs for having all been disciples of the apostles and the firstlings of the Christian flock which the church in Rome presented to the Lord. In this persecution S. Peter was crucified with his head downwards; S. Paul was beheaded; and among the other more illustrious victims we find S. Mark the Evangelist, S. Thecla, the first martyr of her sex, SS. Gervase and Protase at Milan, S. Vitalis at Ravenna, and S. Polycetus at Saragossa in Spain. The number of the slain, and the hitherto unheard-of[105] cruelties practised upon them, moved to pity many of the heathen, and the sight of so much fortitude for a principle of religion was the means, through divine grace, of many conversions. After this, as after every succeeding persecution, the great truth spoken by Tertullian was exemplified: that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of Christians.

By a law of the empire, which was not revoked until nearly three hundred years afterwards, under Constantine, the profession of the Christian religion was made a capital offence. This law, it is true, was not enforced at all times, especially under benign or indifferent rulers; but it hung continually suspended over the heads of the Christians like a sword of Damocles.

The second persecution was that of Domitian, from 94 to 96. Tertullian calls him “a portion of Nero by his cruelty.” At first he only imposed heavy fines upon the wealthy Christians; but, thirsting for blood, he soon published more cruel edicts against them. Among his noblest victims were his cousin-german, Flavius Clemens, a man of consular dignity; John the Evangelist, who was thrown into a caldron of boiling oil (from which, however, he miraculously escaped unhurt); Andrew the Apostle, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Onesimus, S. Paul’s convert. Hegesippus, quoted by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History, has recorded a very interesting fact about the children of Jude, surnamed Thaddeus in the Gospel, telling us that, having confessed the faith under this reign, they were always honored in the church of Jerusalem, not alone as martyrs, but as relatives of Jesus Christ according to the flesh.

The third persecution was Trajan’s, from 97 to 116. In answer to a letter from his friend Pliny the Younger, who had command in Asia Minor, the emperor ordered that the Christians were not to be sought out, but that, if accused, and they remained obstinate in their faith, they were to be put to death. Under an appearance of mercy a large field was opened for the cruelty and exactions of Roman officials, which they were not slow to work. A single circumstance attests the severity of the persecution. This was that the Tiberian governor of Palestine wrote to the emperor complaining of the odious duty imposed upon him, since the Christians were forthcoming in greater numbers than he could, without tiring, have executed. The persecution was particularly severe in the East. Simeon, bishop of Jerusalem, Ignatius of Antioch, and the virgin Domitilla, who was related to three emperors, are among the more illustrious martyrs of the period.

Next came the persecution of Hadrian, lasting from 118 to about 129. We have the authority of S. Jerome for saying that it was very violent. This emperor was a coward and, perhaps as a consequence, intensely superstitious. One of his particular grievances against the Christians was that they professed a religion in which he had no share. Under him perished, with countless others, Pope Alexander I. and his priests, Eventius and Theodulus; Eustace, a celebrated general, with his wife and little children; Symphorosa and her seven sons; Zoe, with her husband and two children.

The fifth was the persecution of Marcus Aurelius. Although he was by nature well inclined, he was certainly the author of much innocent bloodshed, which may be in part ascribed to the powerful influence[106] of the so-called philosophers whose company and tone he affected. The persecution raged most severely among the Gauls; and elsewhere we find the illustrious names of Justin the great Apologist, Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, and Felicitas and her seven children.

Followed the persecution of Septimius Severus, which lasted from 200 to 211, and was so extremely violent that many Christians believed Antichrist had come. It reaped from the church such distinguished persons as Pope Victor at Rome; Leonidas, father of the great Origen, at Alexandria; Irenæus and companions at Lyons; Perpetua and Felicitas in Mauritania. Egypt was particularly rich in holy martyrs.

After this one came the persecution of Maximinus, from 235 to 237. It was in the beginning more especially directed against the sacred ministers of the church. Several popes were put to death; and among the inferior clergy we find the deacon Ambrose, who was the bosom friend of Origen and one of his principal assistants in his work on the Holy Scriptures.

The persecution of Decius lasted from 249 to 251. The Christians, in spite of all repressive measures, had steadily increased in numbers; but this emperor thought to do what his predecessors had failed in, and was hardly seated on the throne before he published most cruel edicts against them. Among the more celebrated names of this persecution are those of Popes Fabian and Cornelius; Saturninus, first bishop of Toulouse; Babylas, bishop of Antioch; the famous Christopher in Lycia, about whom there is a beautiful legend; and the noble virgin Agatha in Sicily. The great scholar Origen was put to the torture during this persecution, but escaped death. Like Maximinus, this emperor singled out the heads of the various local churches, the most active and learned ministers, the highest of both sexes in the social scale, aiming less at the death than the apostasy of Christians, hoping in this way to destroy the faith; whence S. Cyprian laments in one of his epistles that the Christians suffer atrocious torments without the final consolation of martyrdom. One effect of this persecution was of immense benefit to the church in the East; for S. Paul, surnamed First Hermit, took refuge from the storm in Upper Egypt, where he peopled by his example the region around Thebes with those holy anchorites since called the Fathers of the Desert.

The ninth persecution was that of Valerian, who, although at first favorable to the Christians, became one of their greatest opposers at the instigation of their sworn enemy, Marcian. At this date we find upon the list of martyrs the eminent names of Popes Stephen and Sixtus II., Lawrence the Roman deacon, and Cyprian, the great convert and bishop of Carthage.

The persecution of Diocletian was the last and the bloodiest of all. It raged from 303 to 310. Maximian, the emperor’s colleague, had already put to death many Christians, and among others, on the 22d of September, 286, Maurice and his Theban legion, before the persecution became general throughout the Roman Empire. It began in this form at Nicomedia on occasion of a fire that consumed a part of the imperial palace, and which was maliciously ascribed to the Christians; and it is remarkable[107] that the two extreme persecutions of the early church should both have begun with a false charge of incendiarism. Diocletian used to sit upon his throne at Nicomedia, watching the death-pangs of his Christian subjects who were being burned, not singly, but in great crowds. Many officers and servants of his household perished, and, to distinguish them from the rest, they were dropped into the sea with large stones fastened about their necks. A special object of the persecutors was to destroy the churches and tombs of earlier martyrs, to seize the vessels used in the Holy Sacrifice, and to burn the liturgical books and the Holy Scriptures. The Roman Martyrology makes a particular mention on the 2d of January of those who suffered death rather than deliver up these books to the tyrant. Although innumerable copies of the Scriptures perished, not a few were saved, and new copies multiplied either by favor of the less stringent executors of the law, or because the privilege was bought by the faithful at a great price. Some years ago the German Biblical critic Tischendorf discovered on Mount Sinai a Greek codex of extraordinary antiquity and only two removes from an original of Origen. It is connected with one of the celebrated martyrs of this persecution, and bears upon what we have just said of the Sacred Scriptures. In this codex, at the end of the Book of Esther, there is a note attesting that the copy was collated with a very ancient manuscript that had itself been corrected by the hand of the blessed martyr Pamphilus, priest of Cæsarea in Palestine, while in prison, assisted by Antoninus, his fellow-prisoner, who read for him from a copy of the Hexapla of Origen, which had been revised by that author himself. The touching spectacle of these two men, both of whom gave their blood for the faith, occupied, in the midst of the inconveniences, pain, and weariness of captivity, in transcribing good copies of the Bible, is one of the many instances, discovered in every age, showing the care that the church has had to multiply and guard from error the holy written Word of God.

Among the petty sources of annoyance during this persecution, was the difficulty of procuring food, drink, or raiment that had not been offered to idols; for the pagan priests had set up statues of their divinities in all the market-places, hostelries, and shops, and at the private and public fountains. They used also to go around city and country sprinkling with superstitious lustral water the gardens, vineyards, orchards, and fields, so as to put the Christians to the greatest straits to obtain anything that had not been polluted in this manner. We learn from the Acts of S. Theodotus, a Christian tradesman of Ancyra, the obstacles he had to surmount at this time to procure pure bread and wine to be used by the priests in the Mass. We can appreciate the intense severity of this persecution in many ways; but one of the most singular proofs of it is that pagans in Spain inscribed upon a marble monument, erected in Diocletian’s honor, that he had abolished the very name of Christian. This emperor had also the rare but unenviable privilege of giving his name to a new chronological period, called by the pagans, in compliment to his bloody zeal for their rites, the Era of Diocletian; but the Christians called it the Era of the Martyrs. It began[108] on the 29th of August, 284, and was long in use in Egypt and Abyssinia. Some of the more renowned victims of this persecution are Sebastian, an imperial officer; Agnes, a Roman virgin; Lucy, a virgin of Syracuse, and the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste.

It may be interesting to note briefly the chief causes of so much cruel bloodshed, even under princes of undoubted moderation in the general government of affairs, as were Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Antoninus the Pious, and a few others.

The most continual, if not the deepest, source of persecution were the passions of the populace. Calumny of the subtlest and most popular kind, and pressed at all times with patient effort, had so inflamed the minds of the brutal lower classes that only a word or a sign was required to set them upon the Christians. These were called disloyal to the empire, unfriendly to the princes, of a foreign religion, people who refused to fall into the ways of the majority, and enemies of the human race. From the remains of ancient histories, from the Acts of martyrs, from pagan inscriptions, and from other sources, more than fifty-seven different opprobrious qualifications, applied to the Christians as a body, have been counted up. But when particular calumnies became any way stale, the Christians could always be accused as the cause of every calamity that befell the state; so that, in the words of Tertullian (Apol. xl.), “If the Tiber exceeded its limits, if the Nile did not rise to irrigate the fields, if the rain failed to fall, if the earth quaked, if famine or pestilence scourged the land, at once the cry was raised, Christians to the lions!”

The next most constant source of trouble was the pernicious influence of the Philosophers—a set of men who pretended to be seekers after wisdom, and distinguished themselves from the vulgar by a certain style of dress. Puffed up as they were with their own knowledge, nothing irritated their pride so much as that men of the despised Christian class should presume to dispute their doctrines and teach that profane philosophy was naught, since man could not be made perfect by human wisdom, but only by the testimony of Christ who was crucified. Among the Christians, too, a special order of men whom we call Apologists, and among whom we count Justin, Tertullian, Tatian, Arnobius, Minutius Felix, Origen, Aristides, Quadratus, Athenagoras, and Miltiades the chief, exposed in their eloquent writings the vanity, contradictions, and vices of their opponents, succeeding sometimes in silencing false accusations, and even in arresting the course of persecution. Their apologies and memorials form one of the most instructive branches of early Christian literature, and are a considerable compensation for the loss of so many Acts of martyrs and other venerable documents destroyed by the pagans or which have otherwise perished.

The third great cause of persecution was found (to use a comparatively modern word) in the Erastianism of the Roman Empire. The emperor was, by right of the purple, high-pontiff, and no religion was recognized that did not profess its existence and authority dependent upon the state. Naturally, a religion whose followers would reply to every iniquitous command, “We ought to obey God rather than men,” could expect no mercy, but only continual war.

Sometimes the Christians were put to death in the same manner as the common malefactors, such as by decapitation, crucifixion, or scourging; sometimes in the manner reserved for particular classes of criminals, as being hurled down a precipice, drowned, devoured by wild beasts, left to starve. But sometimes, also, the exquisite cruelty of the persecutors delighted to feed upon the sufferings of its victims, and make dying as long and painful as possible. Thus, there are innumerable examples of Christians being flayed alive, the skin being neatly cut off in long strips, and pepper or vinegar rubbed into the raw flesh; or slowly crushed between two large stones; or having molten lead poured down the throat. Some Christians were tied to stakes in the ground and gored to death by wild bulls, or thinly smeared with honey and exposed under a broiling sun to the insects which would be attracted; some were tied to the tails of vicious horses and dragged to pieces some were sewed up in sacks with vipers, scorpions, or other venomous things, and thrown into the water; some had their members violently torn from the trunk of the body; some were tortured by fire in ways almost unknown to the most savage Indians of America; some were slowly scourged to death with whips made of several bronze chainlets, at the extremity of each of which was a jagged bullet; while jerking out of the teeth in slow succession; cutting off the nose, ears, lips, and breasts; tearing of the flesh with hot pincers; sticking sharp sticks up under the finger-nails; being held suspended, head downward, over a smoking fire; stretching upon a rack, and breaking upon the wheel, were some only of the commonest tortures that preceded the final death-stroke by sword or lance. Many instruments used in tormenting the martyrs have been found at different times, and are now carefully preserved in collections of Christian antiquities; and from these, from early-written descriptions, and from the rude representations on the tombs of martyrs in the Catacombs, it is known positively that over one hundred different modes of torture were used upon the Christians.

From the earliest period particular pains were taken by the pastors of the church to have the remains of the martyrs collected and some account of their sufferings consigned to letters; and Pope S. Clement, a disciple of the Apostle Peter, instituted a college of notaries, one for each of the seven ecclesiastical districts into which he had divided Rome, with the special charge of collecting with diligence all the information possible about the martyrs. They were not to pass over even the minutest circumstances of their confession of faith and death. This attendance on the last moments of the martyrs was often accompanied by great personal risk, or at least a heavy expense in the way of buying the good-will of venal officers; but it was a thing of the utmost importance, in view of the church’s doctrine concerning the veneration and invocation of saints, that nothing should be left undone which prudence would suggest to leave it beyond a doubt that the martyrs had confessed the true faith, and had suffered death for the faith. The pagans soon discovered the value that was set upon such documents, and very many of them were seized and destroyed. The fact that the Act[110] of the martyrs were objects of careful search is so well attested—as is also the other fact, that an immense number perished—that it is a wonder and a grace of divine Providence how any, however few comparatively, have come down to us. It has been calculated that at least five million Christians—men, women, and children—were put to death for the faith during the first three centuries of the church.

The French historian Ampère has very justly remarked that amidst the moral decay of the Roman Empire, when all else was lust and despotism, the Christians alone saved the dignity of human nature; and the Spaniard Balmes, when treating of the progress of individuality under the influence of Catholicity (European Civilization, ch. xxiii.), remarks that it was the martyrs who first gave the great example of proclaiming that “the individual should cease to acknowledge power when power exacts from him what he believes to be contrary to his conscience.” The patience of the martyrs rebuked the sensualism of the pagans; and their fearless assertions that matters of conscience are beyond the jurisdiction of any civil ruler proved them to be the best friends of human liberty; while their constancy and number during three hundred years of persecution, that only ceased with their triumph, is one of the solid arguments to prove that the Catholic Church has a divine origin, and a sustaining divinity within her.

THE UNREMEMBERED MOTHER.

DURATION.

Time and duration are usually considered synonymous, as no duration is perceived by us, except the duration of movement, or of such things as are subject to movement; and such duration is time. But, rigorously speaking, time and duration are not synonymous; for they are to one another in the same relation as place and space. As no place is possible without real absolute space, so no time is possible without real absolute duration; and as place consists of intervals in space, so time consists of intervals in duration. Yet there may be duration independently of time, just as there may be space independent of places; and for this reason the nature of duration must be determined apart from the nature of time. In treating of this subject we shall have to answer a series of questions altogether similar to those which we have answered in treating of space and place. Hence we shall follow the same order and method in our present treatise which we have followed in our articles on space, with this difference, however: that, to avoid useless repetitions, we will omit the development of some of those reasonings which the reader himself can easily transfer from space to duration.

Duration is commonly defined as “the permanence of a being in its actuality”—Permanentia rei in esse. The duration of a being which perseveres in existence without any intrinsic change is called “standing duration”—Duratio stans. The duration of a being which is actually subject to intrinsic mutations is called “flowing duration”—Duratio fluens.

Flowing duration evidently implies succession, and succession involves time; for succession is a relation between something which follows and something which precedes. On the other hand, time also involves succession; whence it would seem that neither time nor succession can be defined apart from one another, the definition of the latter presupposing that of the former, and that of the former presupposing the notion of the latter. Although we need not be anxious about this point (for time and succession really involve one another, and therefore may well be included under the same definition), we must observe that the notion of succession, though ordinarily applied to duration, extends to other things also whenever they follow one another in a certain order. Thus the crust of the earth is formed by a succession of strata, the Alps by a succession of mountains, the streets of the city by a succession of houses, etc. Hence the notion of succession is more general than the notion of time, and consequently there must be some means of defining it independently of the consideration of time.

Balmes explains succession, without mentioning time, in the following manner: “There are things which exclude one another from the same subject, and there are other things which do not exclude one another from the same subject. The existence of those things which exclude one another implies succession.[112] Take a line ABC. A body placed in A cannot pass over to the place B without ceasing to be in A, because the situation B excludes the situation A, and in a similar manner the situation C excludes the situation B. If, then, notwithstanding this mutual exclusion, the three places are really occupied by the same body, there is succession. This shows that succession is really nothing else than the existence of such things as exclude one another. Hence succession implies the existence of the thing that excludes, and the non-existence of the things that are excluded. All variations involve some such exclusion; hence all variations involve succession.… To perceive the existence of things which exclude one another is to perceive succession and time; to measure it is to measure time.” Thus far Balmes.[10]

But, if the flowing duration can be easily conceived as the existence of such things as exclude one another, the case is very different with regard to standing duration. For, since we measure all duration by time or by successive intervals, we can scarcely conceive that there may be duration without succession. Even the word “permanence” which we employ in the definition of duration, and which seems to exclude all notion of change, is always associated in our thought with succession and time. The difficulty we experience in forming a concept of standing duration is as great at least as that which we find in conceiving absolute space without formal extension and parts. In fact, formal extension is to absolute space what formal succession is to absolute standing duration. To get over this difficulty we shall have to show that there is a duration altogether independent of contingent changes, as there is a space altogether independent of existing bodies, and that the succession which we observe in the duration of created things is not to be found in the fundamental reason of its existence, as our imagination suggests, but only in the changes themselves which we witness in created things.

The following questions are to be answered: Is there any standing duration? and if so, is it an objective reality, or a mere negation of movement? Is standing duration anything created? What sort of reality is it? Is it modified by the existence of creatures? What is a term of duration? What is relative duration? What is an interval of duration, and how is it measured? These questions are all parallel to those which we have answered in our first and second articles on space, and they admit of a similar solution.

First question.—“Is there any duration absolutely standing?” Certainly. For if there is a being whose entity remains always the same without any intrinsic change, its duration will be absolutely standing. But there is such a being. For there is, as we have proved, an infinite reality absolutely immovable and unchangeable—that is, absolute space. Its permanence is therefore altogether exempt from succession; and consequently its duration is absolutely standing.

Again: As there is no movement in space without immovable space, so there is no flowing in duration without standing duration. For as a thing cannot change its ubication in space unless there be a field for real ubications between the initial and the final term of[113] the movement, so a thing cannot change its mode of being (the when) in duration, unless there be a field for real modes of being between the initial and the final term of its duration. Now, this real field, owing to the fact that it is, in both cases, prerequired for the possibility of the respective changes, is something necessarily anterior to, and independent of, any of such changes. Therefore, as the field of all local movements is anterior to all movements and excludes movement from itself, so also the field of all successive durations is anterior to all successivity and therefore excludes succession.

Although these two arguments suffice to establish our conclusion, what we have to say concerning the next question will furnish additional evidence in its support.

Second question.—“Is standing duration an objective reality or a mere abstract conception?” We answer that standing duration is an objective reality as much as absolute space. For, as movement cannot extend in space, if space is nothing real, so movement cannot extend in duration, if the field of its extension is nothing real. But we have just seen that the field through which the duration of movement extends is standing duration. Therefore standing duration is an objective reality.

Secondly, a mere nothing, or a mere fiction, cannot be the foundation of real relations. But standing duration is the foundation of all intervals of real succession, which are real relations. Therefore standing duration is not a fiction, but an objective reality. The major of this argument is well known. The minor is proved thus: In all real relations the terms must communicate with each other through one and the same reality; and therefore the foundation of a real relation must reach by one and the same reality the terms related. But the terms of successive duration are before and after. Therefore the foundation of their relation must reach both before and after with one and the same reality, and therefore it has neither before nor after in itself. Had it before and after in itself, its after would not be its before; and thus the reality by which it would reach the terms of succession would not be the same. It is therefore manifest that the foundation of all real intervals of succession is a reality whose duration ranges above succession.

This proof may be presented more concisely as follows: Succession is a relation between two terms, as past and present. Its foundation must therefore reach all the past as it reaches the present. But what reaches the past as well as the present, is always present; for if it were past, it would be no more, and thus it could not reach the past and the present. Therefore the foundation of succession has no past, but only an invariable present. Therefore there is a real standing duration, a real field, over which successive duration extends.

Thirdly, in all intervals of succession the before is connected with the after through real duration. But this real duration has in itself neither before nor after. For if it had before and after, it would fall under the very genus of relation of which it is the foundation; which is evidently impossible, because it would then be the foundation of its own entity. It is therefore plain that the real connection between the before and the after is made by a reality which transcends all before and all after, and which is nothing[114] else than absolute standing duration.

Fourthly, if standing duration were not an objective reality, but a mere fiction or a mere negation of movement, there would be no real length of duration. For the terms of successive duration are indivisible, and consequently they cannot give rise to any continuous quantity of duration, unless something lies between them which affords a real ground for continuous extension. That the terms of successive duration are indivisible is evident, because the same term cannot be before itself nor after itself, but is wholly confined to an indivisible instant. Now, that according to which an interval of successive duration can be extended from one of these terms to another, is nothing but absolute and standing duration. For, if it were flowing, it would pass away with the passing terms, and thus it would not lie between them, as is necessary in order to supply a ground for the extension of the interval intercepted. In the same manner, therefore, as there cannot be distance between two ubicated points without real absolute space, there cannot be an interval between two terms in succession without real absolute duration.

A fifth proof of the same truth may be drawn from the reality of the past. Historical facts are real facts, although they are all past. There really was a man called Solomon, who really reigned in Jerusalem; there really was a philosopher called Plato, whose sublime doctrines deserved for him the surname of Divine; there really was a man called Attila, surnamed the Scourge of God. These men existed in different intervals of duration, and they are no more; but their past existence and their distinct duration constitute three distinct facts, which are real facts even to the present day, and such will remain for ever. Now, how can we admit that what has wholly ceased to exist in successive duration is still a real and indelible fact, unless we admit that there is an absolute duration which is, even now, as truly united with the past as it is with the present, and to which the past is not past, but perpetually present? If there is no such duration, then all the past must have been obliterated and buried in absolute nothingness; for if the succession of past things extended upon itself alone, without any distinct ground upon which its flowing could be registered, none of past things could have left behind a real mark of their existence.

Against this conclusion some will object that the relation between before and after may be explained by a mere negation of simultaneous existence. But the objection is futile. For the intervals of successive duration can be greater or less, whilst no negation can be greater or less; which shows that the negation of simultaneous existence must not be confounded with the intervals of succession.

The following objection is more plausible. The duration of movement suffices to fill up the whole interval of succession and to measure its extent; and therefore the reality which connects the before with the after is movement itself, not standing duration. To this we answer that the duration of movement is essentially successive and relative; and therefore it requires a real foundation in something standing and absolute. In fact, although every movement formally extends and measures its own duration,[115] nevertheless it does not extend it upon itself, but upon a field extrinsic to itself; and this field is permanently the same. It is plain that the beginning and the end of movement cannot be connected in mutual relation through movement alone, because movement is always in fieri, and when it passes through one term of its duration it loses the actuality it had in the preceding term; so that, when it reaches its last term, it has nothing left of what it possessed in its initial term or in any other subsequent term. This suffices to show that, although the duration of the movement fills up the whole interval, yet, owing to its very successivity, it cannot be assumed as the ground of the relation intervening between its successive terms.

Third question.—“Is absolute and standing duration a created or an uncreated reality?” This question is easily answered; for, in the first place, standing duration is the duration of a being altogether unchangeable; and nothing unchangeable is created. Hence standing duration is an uncreated reality. On the other hand, all that is created is changeable and constantly subject to movement; hence all created (that is, contingent) duration implies succession. Therefore standing duration is not to be found among created realities. Lastly, standing duration, as involving in itself all conceivable past and all possible future, is infinite, and, as forming the ground of all contingent actualities, is nothing less than the formal possibility of infinite terms of real successive duration. But such a possibility can be found in God alone. Therefore the reality of standing duration is in God alone; and we need not add that it must be uncreated.

Fourth question.—“What reality, then, is absolute standing duration?” We answer that this duration is the infinite virtuality or extrinsic terminability of God’s eternity. For nowhere but in God’s eternity can we find the reason of the possibility of infinite terms and intervals of duration. Of course, God’s eternity, considered absolutely ad intra, is nothing else than the immobility of God’s existence; but its virtual comprehension of all possible terms of successive duration constitutes the absolute duration of God’s existence, inasmuch as the word “duration” expresses a virtual extent corresponding to all possible contingent duration; for God’s duration, though formally simultaneous, virtually extends beyond all imaginable terms and intervals of contingent duration. Hence standing duration is the duration of God’s eternity, the first and fundamental ground of flowing duration, the infinite range through which the duration of changeable things extend. In other words, the infinite virtuality of God’s eternity, as equivalent to an infinite length of time, is duration; and as excluding from itself all intrinsic change, is standing duration. This virtuality of God’s eternity is really nothing else than its extrinsic terminability; for eternity is conceived to correspond to all possible differences of time only inasmuch as it can be compared with the contingent terms by which it can be extrinsically terminated.

Secondly, if nothing had been created, there would have been no extrinsic terms capable of extending successive duration; but, since God would have remained in his eternity, there would have remained the reality in which all extrinsic terms of duration have their virtual[116] being; and thus there would have remained, eminently and without formal succession, in God himself the duration of all the beings possible outside of God. For he would certainly not have ceased to exist in all the instants of duration in which creatures have existed; the only change would have been this: that those instants, owing to a total absence of creatures, would have lacked their formal denomination of instants, and their formal successivity. Hence, if nothing had been created, there would have remained infinite real duration without succession, simply because the virtuality of God’s eternity would have remained in all its perfection. It is therefore this virtuality that formally constitutes standing duration.

From this the reader will easily understand that in the concept of standing duration two notions are involved, viz.: that of eternity, as expressing the standing, and that of its virtuality, as connoting virtual extent. In fact, God’s eternity, absolutely considered, is simply the actuality of God’s substance, and, as such, does not connote duration; for God’s substance is not said to endure, but simply to be. The formal reason of duration is derived from the extrinsic terminability of God’s eternity; for the word “duration” conveys the idea of continuation, and continuation implies succession. Hence it is on account of its extrinsic terminability to successive terms of duration that God’s eternity is conceived as equivalent to infinite succession; for what virtually contains in itself all possible terms and intervals of succession virtually contains in itself all succession, and can co exist, without intrinsic change, with all the changes of contingent duration. Balmes, after defining succession as the existence of such things as exclude one another, very properly remarks: “If there were a being which neither excluded any other being nor were excluded by any of them, that being would co-exist with all beings. Now, one such being exists, viz.: God, and God alone. Hence theologians do but express a great and profound truth when they say (though not all, perhaps, fully understand what they say) that God is present to all times; that to him there is no succession, no before or after; that to him everything is present, is Now.”[11]

We conclude that standing duration is infinite, all-simultaneous, independent of all contingent things, indivisible, immovable, formally simple and unextended, but equivalent to infinite intervals of successive duration, and virtually extending through infinite lengths. This duration is absolute.

Fifth question.—“Does the creation of a contingent being in absolute duration cause any intrinsic change in standing duration?” The answer is not doubtful; for we have already seen that standing duration is incapable of intrinsic modifications. Nevertheless, it will not be superfluous to remark, for the better understanding of this answer, that the “when” (the quando) of a contingent being has the same relation to the virtuality of God’s eternity as has its “where” (the ubi) to the virtuality of God’s immensity. For, as the “where” of every possible creature is virtually precontained in absolute space, so is the “when” of all creatures virtually precontained in absolute duration. Hence the creation of any number of contingent[117] beings in duration implies nothing but the extrinsic termination of absolute duration, which accordingly remains altogether unaffected by the existence in it of any number of extrinsic terms. The “when” of a contingent being, as contained in absolute duration, is virtual; it does not become formal except in the contingent being itself—that is, by extrinsic termination. Thus the subject of the contingent “when” is not the virtuality of God’s eternity any more than the subject of the contingent “where” is the virtuality of God’s immensity.

This shows that the formal “when” of a contingent being is a mere relativity, or a respectus. The formal reason, or the foundation, of this relativity is the reality through which the contingent being communicates with absolute standing duration, viz.: the real instant (quando) which is common to both, although not in the same manner; for it is virtual in standing duration, whilst it is formal in the extrinsic term. Hence a contingent being, inasmuch as it has existence in standing duration, is nothing but a term related by its “when” to divine eternity as existing in a more perfect manner in the same “when.” But, since the contingent “when” of the creature exclusively belongs to the creature itself, God’s standing duration receives nothing from it except a relative extrinsic denomination.

The relation resulting from the existence of a created term in standing duration consists in this: that the created term by its formal “when” really imitates the eminent mode of being of God himself in the same “when.” This relation is called simultaneousness.

Simultaneousness is often confounded with presence and with co-existence. But these three notions, rigorously speaking, differ from one another. Presence refers to terms in space; simultaneousness to terms in duration; co-existence to terms both present and simultaneous. Thus presence and simultaneousness are the constituents of co-existence. Presence is to be considered as the material constituent, because it depends on the “where,” which belongs to the thing on account of its matter or potency; simultaneousness must be considered as the formal constituent, because it depends on the “when,” which belongs to the thing on account of its act or of its resulting actuality.

Before we proceed further, we must yet remark that in the same manner as the infinite virtuality of divine immensity receives distinct extrinsic denominations from the contingent terms existing in space, and is thus said to imply distinct virtualities, so also the infinite virtuality of God’s eternity can be said to imply distinct virtualities, owing to the distinct denominations it receives from distinct terms of contingent duration. It is for this reason that we can speak of virtualities of eternity in the plural. Thus when we point out the first instant of any movement as distinct from any following instant, we consider the flowing of the contingent “when” from before to after as a passage from one to another virtuality of standing duration. These virtualities, however, are not distinct as to their absolute beings, but only as to their extrinsic termination and denomination; and therefore they are really but one infinite virtuality. As all that we have said of the virtualities of absolute space in one of our past articles equally applies to the virtualities[118] of absolute duration, we need not dwell here any longer on this point.

Sixth question.—“In what does the ‘when’ of a contingent being precisely consist?” From the preceding considerations it is evident that the “when” of a contingent being may be understood in two manners, viz., either objectively or subjectively. Objectively considered, the “when” is nothing else than a simple and indivisible term in duration formally marked out in it by the actuality of the contingent being. We say a simple and indivisible term, because the actuality of the contingent being by which it is determined involves neither past nor future, neither before nor after, but only its present existence, which, as such, is confined to an indivisible Now. Hence we do not agree with those philosophers who confound the quando with the tempus—that is, the “when” with the extent of flowing duration. We admit with these philosophers that the “when” of contingent things extends through movement from before to after, and draws, so to say, a continuous line in duration; but we must remind them that the before and the after are distinct modes of being in duration, and that every term of duration designable between them is a distinct “when” independent of every other “when,” either preceding or following; which shows that the tempus implies an uninterrupted series of distinct “whens,” and therefore cannot be considered as synonymous with quando.

If the “when” is considered subjectively—that is, as an appurtenance of the subject of which it is predicated—it may be defined as the mode of being of a contingent thing in duration. This mode consists of a mere relativity; for it results from the extrinsic termination of absolute duration, as already explained. Hence the “when” is not received in the subject of which it is predicated, and does not inhere in it, but, like all other relativities and connotations, simply connects it with its correlative, and intervenes or lies between the one and the other.

But, although it consists of a mere relativity, the “when” still admits of being divided into absolute and relative, according as it is conceived absolutely as something real in nature, or compared with some other “when”; for, as we have already explained when treating of ubications, relative entities may be considered both as to what they are in themselves, and as to what they are to one another.

If the “when” is considered simply as a termination of standing duration, without regard for anything else, it is called absolute, and is defined as the mode of being of a thing in absolute duration. This absolute “when” is an essential mode of the contingent being no less than its dependence from the first cause, and is altogether immutable so long as the contingent being exists; for, on the one hand, the contingent being cannot exist but within the domain of divine eternity, and, on the other, it cannot have different modes of being with regard to it, as the standing duration of eternity is all uniform in its infinite virtual extension, and the contingent being, however much we may try to vary its place in duration, must always be in the very middle of eternity. Hence the absolute “when” is altogether unchangeable.

If the “when” of a contingent being is compared with that of another contingent being in order[119] to ascertain their mutual relation, then the “when” is called relative, and, as such, it may be defined as the mode of terminating a relation in duration. This “when” is changeable, not in its intrinsic entity, but in its relative formality; and it is only under this formality that the “when” (quando) can be ranked among the predicamental accidents; for this changeable formality is the only thing in it which bears the stamp of an accidental entity.

The before and the after of the same contingent being are considered as two distinct relative terms, because the being to which they refer, when existing in the after, excludes the before; though the absolute “when” of one and the same being is one term only. But of this we shall treat more fully in the sequel.

Seventh question.—“What is relative duration?” Here we meet again the same difficulty which we have encountered in explaining relative space; for in the same manner as relations in space are usually confounded with space itself, so are the intervals in duration confounded with the duration which is the ground of their extension. But, as the reasonings by which we have established the precise notion of relative space can be easily brought to bear on the present subject by the reader himself, we think we must confine ourselves to a brief and clear statement of the conclusions drawn from those reasonings, as applied to duration.

Relative duration is the duration through which any movement extends; that is, the duration through which the “when” of anything in movement glides from before to after, and by which the before and the after are linked in mutual relation. Now, the duration through which movement extends is not exactly the duration of the movement itself, but the ground upon which the movement extends its own duration; because movement has nothing actual but a flowing instant, and therefore it has no duration within itself except by reference to an extrinsic ground through which it successively extends. This ground, as we have already shown, is standing duration. And therefore relative duration is nothing else than standing duration as extrinsically terminated by distinct terms, or, what amounts to the same terminated by one term which, owing to any kind of movement, acquires distinct and opposite formalities. This conclusion is based on the principle that the foundation of all relations between before and after must be something absolute, having in itself neither before nor after, and therefore absolutely standing. This principle is obviously true. The popular notion, on the contrary, that relative duration is the duration of movement, is based on the assumption that movement itself engenders duration—which assumption is false; for we cannot even conceive movement without presupposing the absolute duration upon which the movement has to trace the line of its flowing existence.

Thus relative duration is called relative, not because it is itself related, but because it is the ground through which the extrinsic terms are related. It is actively, not passively, relative; it is the ratio, not the rationatum, the foundation, not the result, of the relativities. In other terms, relative duration is absolute as to its entity, and relative as to the extrinsic denomination derived from the relations of which[120] it is the formal reason. Duration, as absolute, may be styled “the region of all possible whens,” just as absolute space is styled “the region of all possible ubications”; and, as relative, it may be styled “the region of all possible succession,” just as relative space is styled “the region of all local movements.” Absolute standing duration and absolute space are the ground of the here and now as statical terms. Relative standing duration and relative space are the ground of the here and now as gliding—that is, as dynamically considered.

Eighth question.—“What is an interval of duration?” It is a relation existing between two opposite terms of succession—that is, between before and after. An interval of duration is commonly considered as a continuous extension; yet it is primarily a simple relation by which the extension of the flowing from before to after is formally determined. Nevertheless, since the “when” cannot acquire the opposite formalities, before and after, without continuous movement, all interval of duration implies movement, and therefore may be considered also as a continuous quantity. Under this last aspect, the interval of duration is nothing else than the duration of the movement from before to after.

We have already noticed that the duration of movement, or the interval of duration, is not to be confounded with the duration through which the movement extends. But as, in the popular language, the one as well as the other is termed “relative duration,” we would suggest that the duration through which the movement extends might be called fundamental relative duration, whilst the relation which constitutes an interval between before and after might be called resultant relative duration.

The philosophical necessity of this distinction is obvious, first, because the standing duration, through which movement extends, must not be confounded with the flowing duration of movement; secondly, because the relation and its foundation are not the same thing, and, as we have explained at length when treating of relative space, to confound the one with the other leads to Pantheism. Intervals of relation are not parts of absolute duration, though they are so conceived by many, but they are mere relations, as we have stated. Absolute duration is all standing, it has no parts, and it cannot be divided into parts. What is called an interval of duration should rather be called an interval in duration; for it is not a portion of standing duration, but an extrinsic result; it is not a length of absolute duration, but the length of the movement extending through that duration; it is not a divisible extension, but the ground on which movement acquires its divisible extension from before to after. In the smallest conceivable interval of duration there is God, with all his eternity. To affirm that intervals of duration are distinct durations would be to cut God’s eternity to pieces by giving it a distinct being in really distinct intervals. Hence it is necessary to concede that, whilst the intervals are distinct, the duration on which they have their foundation is one and the same. The only duration which can be safely confounded with those intervals is the flowing duration of the movement by which they are measured. This is the duration which can be considered as a continuous quantity divisible[121] into parts; and this is the duration which we should style “resultant relative duration,” to avoid all danger of error or equivocation.

The objections which can be made against this manner of viewing things do not much differ from those which we have solved in our second article on space; and therefore we do not think it necessary to make a new answer to them. The reader himself will be able to see what the objections are, and how they can be solved, by simply substituting the words “eternity,” “duration,” etc., for the words “immensity,” “space,” etc., in the article referred to.

Yet a special objection can be made against the preceding doctrine about the duration of movement, independently of those which regard relations in space. It may be presented under this form. “The foundation of the relation between before and after is nothing else than movement itself. It is therefore unnecessary and unphilosophical to trace the duration of movement to the virtuality of God’s eternity as its extrinsic foundation.” The antecedent of this argument may be proved thus: “That thing is the foundation of the relation which gives to its terms their relative being—that is, in our case, their opposite formalities, before and after. But movement alone gives to the when these opposite formalities. Therefore movement alone is the foundation of successive duration.”

We answer that the antecedent of the first argument is absolutely false. As to the syllogism which comes next, we concede the major, but we deny the minor. For it is plain that movement cannot give to the absolute when the relative formalities before and after, except by flowing through absolute duration, without which it is impossible for the movement to have its successive duration. And surely, if the movement has no duration but that which it borrows from the absolute duration through which it extends, the foundation of its duration from before to after can be nothing else than the same absolute duration through which the movement acquires its before and after. Now, this absolute duration is the virtuality of God’s eternity, as we have proved. It is therefore both philosophical and necessary to trace the duration of movement to the virtuality of God’s eternity, as its extrinsic foundation. That movement is also necessary to constitute the relation between before and after, we fully admit; for there cannot be before and after without movement. But it does not follow from this that movement is the foundation of the relation; it merely follows that movement is a condition necessary to give to the absolute when two distinct actualities, according to which it may be compared with itself on the ground of standing duration. For, as every relation demands two opposite terms, the same absolute when must acquire two opposite formalities, that it may be related to itself.

The only other objection which may perhaps be made against our conclusions is the following: The foundation of a real relation is that reality through which the terms related communicate with one another. Now, evidently, the before and the after, which are the terms of the relation in question, communicate with one another through the same absolute when; for they are the same absolute when under two opposite formalities. Hence it follows that the foundation of[122] the relation between before and after is nothing else than the absolute when of a moving being.

To this we answer that the foundation of the relation is not all reality through which the terms related communicate with one another, but only that reality by the common termination of which they become formally related to one another. Hence, since the before and the after do not receive their relative formalities from the absolute when, it is idle to pretend that the absolute when is the foundation of the interval of duration. The before and the after communicate with the same absolute when not as a formal, but as a material, cause of their existence—that is, inasmuch as the same when is the subject, not the reason, of both formalities. The only relation to which the absolute when can give a foundation is one of identity with itself in all the extent of its flowing duration. But such a relation presupposes, instead of constituting, an interval in duration. And therefore it is manifest that the absolute when is not the foundation of the relation between before and after.

Having thus answered the questions proposed, and given the solution of the few difficulties objected, we must now say a few words about the division and measurement of relative duration, whether fundamental or resultant.

Fundamental or standing duration is divided into real and imaginary. This division cannot regard the entity of standing duration, which is unquestionably real, as we have proved. It regards the reality or the unreality of the extrinsic terms conceived as having a relation in duration. The true notion of real, contrasted with imaginary, duration, is the following: Standing duration is called real when it is really relative, viz., when it is extrinsically terminated by real terms between which it founds a real relation; on the contrary, it is called imaginary when the extrinsic terms do not exist in nature, but only in our imagination; for, in such a case, standing duration is not really terminated and does not found real relations, but both the terminations and the relations are simply a figment of our imagination. Thus standing duration, as containing none but imaginary relations, may justly be called “imaginary,” though in an absolute sense it is intrinsically real. Accordingly, the indefinite duration which we imagine when we carry our thought beyond the creation of the world, and which is also called “imaginary,” is not absolute but relative duration, and is not imaginary in itself, but only as to its denomination of relative, because, in the absence of all real terms, there can be none but imaginary relations.

It is therefore unphilosophical to confound imaginary and indefinite duration with absolute and infinite duration. This latter is not an object of imagination, but of the intellect alone. Imagination cannot conceive duration, except in connection with some movement from before to after; hence absolute and infinite duration, which has no before and no after, is altogether beyond the reach of imagination. Indeed, our intellectual conception of infinite standing duration is always accompanied in our minds by a representation of indefinite time; but this depends, as we have stated in speaking of space, on the well-known connection of our imaginative and intellectual operations, inasmuch as our imagination strives to follow the intellect, and[123] to represent after its own manner what the intellect conceives in a totally different manner. It was by confounding the objective notion of duration with our subjective manner of imagining it that Kant came to the conclusion that duration was nothing but a subjective form or a subjective condition, under which all intuitions are possible in us. This conclusion is evidently false; but its refutation, to be successful, must be based on the objectivity of absolute standing duration, without which, as we have shown, there can be no field for real and objective succession.

Resultant relative duration—that is, an interval of flowing duration—admits of the same division into real and imaginary. It is real when a real continuous flowing connects the before with the after; in all other suppositions it will be imaginary. It may be remarked that the “real continuous flowing” may be either intrinsic or extrinsic. Thus, if God had created nothing but a simple angel, there would have been no other flowing duration than a continuous succession of intellectual operations connecting the before with the after in the angel himself, and thus his duration would have been measured by a series of intrinsic changes. It is evident that in this case one absolute when suffices to extend the interval of duration; for by its gliding from before to after it acquires opposite formalities through which it can be relatively opposed to itself as the subject and the term of the relation. If, on the contrary, we consider the interval of duration between two distinct beings—say Cæsar and Napoleon—then the real continuous flowing by which such an interval is measured is extrinsic to the terms compared; for the when of Cæsar is distinct from, and does not reach, that of Napoleon; which shows that their respective whens have no intrinsic connection, and that the succession comprised between those whens must have consisted of a series of changes extrinsic to the terms compared. It may seem difficult to conceive how an interval of continuous succession can result between two terms of which the one does not attain to the other; for, as a line in space must be drawn by the movement of a single point, so it seems that a length in duration must be extended by the flowing of a single when from before to after. The truth is that the interval between the whens of two distinct beings is not obtained by comparing the when of the one with that of the other, but by resorting to the when of some other being which has extended its continuous succession from the one to the other. Thus, when Cæsar died, the earth was revolving on its axis, and it continued to revolve without interruption up to the existence of Napoleon, thus extending the duration of its movement from a when corresponding to Cæsar’s death to a when corresponding to Napoleon’s birth; and this duration, wholly extrinsic to Cæsar and Napoleon, measures the interval between them.

As all intervals of duration extend from before to after, there can be no interval between co-existent beings, as is evident. In the same manner as two beings whose ubications coincide cannot be distant in space, so two beings whose whens are simultaneous cannot form an interval of duration.

All real intervals of duration regard the past; for in the past alone can we find a real before and a real after. The present gives no interval,[124] as we have just stated, but only simultaneousness. The future is real only potentially—that is, it will be real, but it is not yet. What has never been, and never will be, is merely imaginary. To this last class belong all the intervals of duration corresponding to those conditional events which did not happen, owing to the non-fulfilment of the conditions on which their reality depended.

As to the measurement of flowing duration a few words will suffice. The when considered absolutely is incapable of measuring an interval of duration, for the reason that the when is unextended, and therefore unproportionate to the mensuration of a continuous interval; for the measure must be of the same kind with the thing to be measured. Just as a continuous line cannot be made up of unextended points, so cannot a continuous interval be made up of indivisible instants; hence, as a line is divisible only into smaller and smaller lines, by which it can be measured, so also an interval of duration is divisible only into smaller and smaller intervals, and is measured by the same. These smaller intervals, being continuous, are themselves divisible and mensurable by other intervals of less duration, and these other intervals are again divisible and mensurable; so that, from the nature of the thing, it is impossible to reach an absolute measure of duration, and we must rest satisfied with a relative one, just as in the case of a line and of any other continuous quantity. The smallest unit or measure of duration commonly used is the second, or sixtieth part of a minute.

But, since continuous quantities are divisible in infinitum, it may be asked, what prevents us from considering a finite interval of duration as containing an infinite multitude of infinitesimal units of duration? If nothing prevents us, then in the infinitesimal unit we shall have the true and absolute measure of duration. We answer that nothing prevents such a conception; but the mensuration of a finite interval by infinitesimal units would never supply us the means of determining the relative lengths of two intervals of duration. For, if every interval is a sum of infinite terms, and is so represented, how can we decide which of those intervals is the greater, since we cannot count the infinite?

Mathematicians, in all dynamical questions, express the conditions of the movement in terms of infinitesimal quantities, and consider every actual instant which connects the before with the after as an infinitesimal interval of duration in the same manner as they consider every shifting ubication as an infinitesimal interval of space. But when they pass from infinitesimal to finite quantities by integration between determinate limits, they do not express the finite intervals in infinitesimal terms, but in terms of a finite unit, viz., a second of time; and this shows that, even in high mathematics, the infinitesimal is not taken as the measure of the finite.

Since infinitesimals are considered as evanescent quantities, the question may be asked whether they are still conceivable as quantities. We have no intention of discussing here the philosophical grounds of infinitesimal calculus, as we may have hereafter a better opportunity of examining such an interesting subject; but, so far as infinitesimals of duration are concerned, we answer that they are still quantities, though they bear no[125] comparison with finite duration. What mathematicians call an infinitesimal of time is nothing else rigorously than the flowing of an actual “when” from before to after. The “when” as such is no quantity, but its flowing is. However narrow the compass within which it may be reduced, the flowing implies a relation between before and after; hence every instant of successive duration, inasmuch as it actually links its immediate before with its immediate after, partakes of the nature of successive duration, and therefore of continuous quantity. Nor does it matter that infinitesimals are called evanescent quantities. They indeed vanish, as compared with finite quantities; but the very fact of their vanishing proves that they are still something when they are in the act of vanishing. Sir Isaac Newton, after saying in his Principia that he intends to reduce the demonstration of a series of propositions to the first and last sums and ratios of nascent and evanescent quantities, propounds and solves this very difficulty as follows: “Perhaps it may be objected that there is no ultimate proportion of evanescent quantities; because the proportion, before the quantities have vanished, is not the ultimate, and, when they are vanished, is none. But by the same argument it may be alleged that a body arriving at a certain place, and there stopping, has no ultimate velocity; because the velocity, before the body comes to the place, is not its ultimate velocity; when it has arrived, is none. But the answer is easy; for by the ultimate velocity is meant that with which the body is moved, neither before it arrives at its last place and the motion ceases, nor after, but at the very instant it arrives; that is, the velocity with which the body arrives at its last place, and with which the motion ceases. And in like manner, by the ultimate ratio of evanescent quantities is to be understood the ratio of the quantities, not before they vanish, not afterwards, but with which they vanish. In like manner, the first ratio of nascent quantities is that with which they begin to be.” From this answer, which is so clear and so deep, it is manifest that infinitesimals are real quantities. Whence we infer that every instant of duration which actually flows from before to after marks out a real infinitesimal interval of duration that might serve as a unit of measure for the mensuration of all finite intervals of succession, were it not that we cannot reckon up to infinity. Nevertheless, it does not follow that an infinitesimal duration is an absolute unit of duration; for it is still continuous, even in its infinite smallness; and accordingly it is still divisible and mensurable by other units of a lower standard. Thus it is clear that the measurement of flowing duration, and indeed of all other continuous quantity, cannot be made except by some arbitrary and conventional unit.

THE STARS.

WILLIAM TELL AND ALTORF.

Brunnen, the “fort of Schwytz,” standing at that angle of the lake of Lucerne where it turns abruptly towards the very heart of the Alps, has always been a central halting-place for travellers; but since the erection of its large hotel the attraction has greatly increased. We found the Waldstätterhof full to overflowing, and rejoiced that, as usual, we had wisely ordered our rooms beforehand. Our surprise was great, as we threaded the mazes of the table-d’hôte room, to see Herr H—— come forward and greet us cordially. We expected, it is true, to meet him here, but not until the eve of the feast at Einsiedeln, whither he had promised to accompany us. An unforeseen event, however, had brought him up the lake sooner, and he therefore came on to Brunnen, in the hope of finding us. A few minutes sufficed to make him quit his place at the centre table and join us at a small one, where supper had been prepared for our party, and allow us to begin a description of our wanderings since we parted from him on the quay at Lucerne. Yes, “begin” is the proper word; for before long the harmony was marred by George, who, with his usual impetuosity, and in spite of Caroline’s warning frowns and Anna’s and my appealing looks, betrayed our disappointment at having missed the Hermitage at Ranft, and the reproaches we had heaped on Herr H——’s head for having mismanaged the programme in that particular. The cheery little man, whose eyes had just begun to glisten with delight, grew troubled.

“I am so sorry!” he exclaimed. “But the ladies were not so enthusiastic about Blessed Nicholas when I saw them. And as for you, Mr. George, I never could have dreamt you would have cared for the Hermit.”

“Oh! but he is a real historical character, you see, about whom there can be no doubt—very unlike your sun-god, your mythical hero, William Tell!” replied George.

“Take care! take care! young gentleman,” said Herr H——, laughing. “Remember you are now in Tell’s territory, and he may make you rue the consequences of deriding him! Don’t imagine, either, that your modern historical critics have left even Blessed Nicholas alone! Oh! dear, no.”

“But he is vouched for by documents,” retorted George.“No one can doubt them.”

“Your critics of this age would turn and twist and doubt anything,” said Herr H——. “They cannot deny his existence nor the main features of his life; yet some have gone so far as to pretend to doubt the most authentic fact in it—his presence at the Diet of Stanz—saying that probably he never went there, but only wrote a letter to the deputies. So much for their criticism and researches! After that specimen you need not wonder that I have no respect for them. But I am in an unusually patriotic mood to-day; for I have[128] just come from a meeting at Beckenried, on the opposite shore, in Unterwalden. It was that which brought me here before my appointment with you. It was a meeting of one of our Catholic societies in these cantons, which assembled to protest against the revision of the constitution contemplated next spring. Before separating it was suggested that they should call a larger one at the Rütli, to evoke the memories of the past and conform themselves to the pattern of our forefathers.”

“Why do you so much object to a revision?” inquired Mr. C——. “Surely reform must sometimes be necessary.”

“Sometimes, of course, but not at present, my dear sir. ‘Revision’ nowadays simply means radicalism and the suppression of our religion and our religious rights and privileges. It is a word which, for that reason alone, is at all times distasteful to these cantons. Moreover, it savors too much of French ideas and doctrines, thoroughly antagonistic to all our principles and feelings. Everything French is loathed in these parts, especially in Unterwalden, in spite of—or I should perhaps rather say in consequence of—all they suffered from that nation in 1798.”

“I can understand that,” said Mr. C——, “with the memory of the massacre in the church at Stanz always in their minds.”

“Well, yes; but that was only one act in the tragedy. The desolation they caused in that part of the country was fearful. Above all, their total want of religion at that period can never be forgotten.”

“As for myself,” remarked Mr. C——, “though not a Catholic, I confess that I should much rather rely on the upright instincts of this pious population than on the crooked teachings of our modern philosophers. I have always noticed in every great political crisis that the instincts of the pure and simple-minded have something of an inspiration about them; they go straight to the true principles where a Macchiavelli is often at fault.” Herr H—— completely agreed with him, and the conversation soon became a deep and serious discussion on the tendencies of modern politics in general, so that it was late that evening before our party separated.

The first sound that fell upon my ear next morning was the splashing of a steamer hard by. It had been so dark upon our arrival the night before that we had not altogether realized the close proximity of the hotel to the lake, and it was an unexpected pleasure to find my balcony almost directly over the water, like the stern gallery of a ship of war. A small steamer certainly was approaching from the upper end of the lake, with a time-honored old diligence in the bows and a few travellers, tired-looking and dust-stained, scattered on the deck, very unlike the brilliant throngs that pass to and fro during the late hours of the day. But this early morning performance was one of real business, and the magical words “Post” and “St. Gothard,” which stood out in large letters on the yellow panels of the diligence, told at once of more than mere pleasure-seeking. What joy or grief, happiness or despair, might not this old-fashioned vehicle be at this moment conveying to unknown thousands! It was an abrupt transition, too, to be thus brought from pastoral Sarnen and Sachslen into immediate contact with the mighty Alps. Of[129] their grandeur, however, nothing could be seen; for, without rain or wind, a thick cloud lay low upon the lake, more like a large flat ceiling than aught else. Yet, for us, it had its own peculiar interest, being nothing more nor less than the great, heavy, soft mass which we had noticed hanging over the lake every morning when looking down from Kaltbad, whilst we, revelling in sunshine and brightness above, were pitying the poor inhabitants along the shore beneath. There was a kind of superiority, therefore, in knowing what it meant, and in feeling confident that it would not last long. And, as we expected, it did clear away whilst we sat at our little breakfast-table in the window, revealing in all its magnificence the glorious view from this point up the Bay of Uri, which we have elsewhere described. Huge mountains seemed to rise vertically up out of the green waters; verdant patches were dotted here and there on their rugged sides; and, overtopping all, shone the glacier of the Urirothstock, more dazzlingly white and transparent than we had ever yet beheld it.

“Now, ladies!” exclaimed Herr H——, “I hope you have your Schiller ready; for the Rütli is yonder, though you will see it better by and by.”

“Why, I thought you disapproved of Schiller,” retorted the irrepressibly argumentative George.

“To a certain degree, no doubt,” replied Herr H——. “But nothing can be finer than his William Tell as a whole. My quarrel with it is that the real William Tell would have fared much better were it not for this play, and especially for the opera. They have both made the subject so common—so banale, as the French say—that the world has grown tired of it, and for this reason alone is predisposed to reject our hero. Besides, the real history of the Revolution is so fine that I prefer it in its simplicity. Schiller is certainly true to its spirit, but details are frequently different. For instance, the taking of the Castle of the Rossberg, which you passed on the lake of Alpnach: Schiller has converted that into a most sensational scene, whereas the true story is far more characteristic. That was the place where a young girl admitted her betrothed and his twelve Confederate friends by a rope-ladder at night, which enabled them to seize the castle and imprison the garrison “without shedding a drop of blood or injuring the property of the Habsburgs,” in exact conformity with their oath on the Rütli. You will often read of the loves of Jägeli and Ameli in Swiss poetry. They are great favorites, and, in my opinion, far more beautiful than the fictitious romance of Rudenz and Bertha. And so in many other cases. But every one does not object to Schiller as I do; for in 1859, when his centenary was celebrated in Germany, the Swiss held a festival here on the Rütli, and subsequently erected a tablet on that large natural pyramidal rock you see at the corner opposite. It is called the Wytenstein, and you can read the large gilt words with a glass. It is laconic enough, too; see: ‘To Frederick Schiller—The Singer of Tell—The Urcantone.’ The original cantons! Miss Caroline! let me congratulate you on being at last in the ‘Urschweiz’—the cradle of Switzerland,” continued Herr H——, as we sauntered out on the quay, pointing at the same time to some bad frescos of Swen and Suiter on a[130] warehouse close by. Stauffacher, Fürst, and Van der Halden also figured on the walls—the presiding geniuses of this region. “Brunnen is in no way to be despised, I assure you, ladies; you are treading on venerated soil. This is the very spot that witnessed the foundation of the Confederacy, where the oath was taken by the representatives of Uri, Schwytz, and Unterwalden the day after the battle of Morgarten. They swore ‘to die, each for all and all for each’—the oath which made Switzerland renowned, and gave the name of ‘Ridsgenossen,’ or ‘oath-participators,’ to its inhabitants. The document is still kept in the archives at Schwytz, with another dated August 1, 1291. Aloys von Reding raised his standard against the French here in 1798; and he was quite right in beginning his resistance to them at Brunnen. It is full of memories to us Swiss, and is a most central point, as you may see, between all these cantons. The increase in the hotels tells what a favorite region it also is with tourists.”

On this point Mr. and Mrs. C——’s astonishment was unbounded. They had passed a fortnight at Brunnen in 1861, at a small inn with scanty accommodation, now replaced by the large and comfortable Waldstätterhof, situated in one of the most lovely spots imaginable, at the angle of the lake, one side fronting the Bay of Uri and the other looking up towards Mount Pilatus. The pension of Seelisberg existed on the heights opposite even then—only, however, as a small house, instead of the present extensive establishment, with its pretty woods and walks; but Axenstein and the second large hotel now building near it, with the splendid road leading up to them, had not been thought of. The only communication by land between Schwytz and Fluelen, in those days, was a mule-path along the hills, precipitous and dangerous in many parts. The now famed Axenstrasse was not undertaken until 1862; and is said to have been suggested by the French war in Italy. With the old Swiss dread of the French still at heart, the Federal government took alarm at that first military undertaking on the part of Napoleon III., and, seeing the evil of having no communication between these cantons in case of attack, at once took the matter seriously in hand. This great engineering achievement was opened to the public in 1868. It looked most inviting to-day, and we quickly decided to make use of it by driving along it to Fluelen, and thence to Altorf, returning in the evening by the steamer. Some were anxious to visit the Rütli; but Mr. and Mrs. C—— had been there before, and knew that it was more than an hour’s expedition by boat, so that the two excursions on the same day would be quite impossible; consequently, we chose the longer one.

It was just ten o’clock when we started; Mrs. C——, Caroline, Herr H——, and myself in one carriage, with George on the box, the others following us in a second vehicle. We had not proceeded far when Herr H—— made us halt to look at the Rütli, on the shore right opposite. We distinctly saw that it was a small meadow, formed by earth fallen from above on a ledge of rock under the precipitous heights of Seelisberg, and now enclosed by some fine chestnut and walnut trees. Truly, it was a spot fitted for the famous scene. So unapproachable is it, except by water,[131] that even that most enterprising race—Swiss hotel-keepers—have hitherto failed to destroy it. Some years ago, however, it narrowly escaped this fate; for Herr Müller, of Seelisberg, is said to have been on the point of building a pension on the great meadow. But no sooner did this become known than a national subscription was at once raised, the government purchased it, and now it has become inalienable national property for ever.

“You may well be proud of your country, Herr H——,” exclaimed Mr. C—— from the other carriage. “I always look on that tiny spot with deep reverence as the true cradle of freedom. Look at it well, George! It witnessed that wonderful oath by which these mountaineers bound themselves ‘to be faithful to each other, just and merciful to their oppressors’—the only known example of men—and these men peasants, too—binding themselves, in the excitement of revolt, not to take revenge on their oppressors.”

“Well, it has borne good fruit,” returned Herr H—— in gleeful tones; “for here we are still free! Except on the one occasion of the French in ’98, no foreign troops have ever invaded this part of Switzerland since those days. Yes, there are three springs at the Rütli, supposed to have jutted forth where the three heroes stood; but I do not pledge my word for that,” he answered smilingly to Caroline, “nor for the legend which says that their spirits sleep in the rocky vale under Seelisberg, ready to come forth and lead the people in moments of danger.”

“I hope their slumbers may never be disturbed,” she replied; “but I wish some one would prevent these cattle from frightening the horses,” as a large drove swept past our carriages, making our steeds nervous. Splendid animals they were, with beautiful heads, straight backs, light limbs, and of a grayish mouse color.

“All of the celebrated Schwytz breed,” said Herr H——. “This part of the country is renowned for its cattle. Each of these probably cost from five to six hundred francs. The Italians take great advantage of this new road, and come in numbers to buy them at this season, when the cattle are returning from the mountains. These are going across the St. Gothard to Lombardy. Those of Einsiedeln are still considered the best. Do you remember, Miss Caroline, that the first mention of German authority in this land was occasioned by a dispute between the shepherds of Schwytz and the abbots of Einsiedeln about their pasturage—the emperor having given a grant of land to the abbey, while the Schwytzers had never heard of his existence even, and refused to obey his majesty’s orders?”

“Ah! what historical animals: that quite reconciles me to them,” she answered, as we drove on again amongst a group that seemed very uneasy under their new masters, whose sweet language George averred had no power over them.

Who can describe the exquisite beauty of our drive?—winding in and out, sometimes through a tunnel; at others along the edge of the high precipice from which a low parapet alone separated us; at another passing through the village of Sisikon, which years ago suffered severely from a fragment of rock fallen from the Frohnalp above. Time flew rapidly, and one hour[132] and a half had glided by, without our perceiving it, when we drew up before the beautiful little inn of “Tell’s Platte.”

“But there is no Platform here,” cried George. “We are hundreds of feet above the lake. The critics are right, Herr H——, decidedly right! I knew it from the beginning. How can you deny it?”

“Wait, my young friend! Don’t be so impatient. Just come into the inn first—I should like you to see the lovely view from it; and then we can look for the Platform.” Saying which, he led us upstairs, on through the salon to its balcony on the first floor. This is one of the smaller inns of that olden type which boast the enthusiastic attachment of regular customers, and display with pride that old institution—the “strangers’ book”—which has completely vanished from the monster hotels. It lay open on the table as we passed, and every one instinctively stopped to examine it.

“The dear old books!” exclaimed Mrs. C——. “How they used to amuse me in Switzerland! I have missed them so much this time. Their running fire of notes, their polyglot verses—a sort of album and scrap-book combined, full, too, of praise or abuse of the last hotel, as the humor might be.”

“Yes,” said Mr. C——, “I shall never forget the preface to one—an imprecation on whoever might be tempted to let his pen go beyond bounds. I learned it by rote:

“How very amusing!—a perfect gem in its way,” cried Anna. “Lord Sir John, M.P., must have been the model of large-pursed Britons in his time.” Here, however, everything seemed to be couleur de rose. The book’s only fault was its monotony of praise. Two sisters keep the hotel, and “nowhere,” said its devoted friends, “could one find better fare, better attendance, and greater happiness than at Tell’s Platform.” The testimony of a young couple confessedly on their bridal tour had no weight. We know how, at that moment, a barren rock transforms itself into a paradise for them; but three maiden ladies had passed six weeks of unalloyed enjoyment here once upon a time, and had returned often since; English clergymen and their families found no words of praise too strong; while German students and professors indulged in rhapsodical language not to be equalled out of fatherland.

Duchesses, princesses, and Lords Sir John, M.P., were alone wanting amongst the present guests. “But they come,” said Herr H——, “by the mid-day steamers, dine and rest here awhile, and return in the evenings to the larger hotels in other places.”

And standing on the balcony of the salon, facing all the grand mountains, with the green lake beneath, it truly seemed a spot made for brides and bridegrooms, for love and friendship. So absorbed were we in admiration of the enchanting view that we did not at first notice two little maidens sitting at the far end. They were pretty children, of nine and thirteen, daughters of an English family stopping here, and their countenances brightened as they heard our exclamation of delight; for Tell’s Platte was to them a paradise. Like true Britons, however, they said nothing until George and Caroline commenced[133] disputing about the scenery. Comment then was irresistible. “No,” said the youngest, “that is the Isenthal,” pointing to a valley beneath the hills opposite; “and that the Urirothstock, with its glacier above, and the Gütschen. Those straight walls of rock below are the Teufel’s-Münster.”

“But I see no Platform here,” remarked George with mischief in his eye, as he quickly detected the young girl’s faith in the hero.

“It would be impossible to see it,” she rejoined, “as it is three hundred feet below this house.”

“But we can show you the way, if you will come,” continued the younger child, taking George’s hand, who, partly from surprise and partly amusement, allowed himself to be led like a lamb across the road and through the garden to the pathway winding down the cliff, followed by us, under guidance of the elder sister, Emily.

“Yes,” the children answered, “they had spent the last two years in France and Germany.” And certainly they spoke both languages like natives. Emily was even translating William Tell into English blank verse. “Heigho!” sighed Mr. C——, “for this precocious age.” But the lake of the Forest Cantons was dearer to them than all else. They had climbed one thousand feet up the side of the Frohnalpstock that very morning with their father; knew every peak and valley, far and near, with all their legends and histories; even the ranz des vaches and the differences between them—the shepherds’ calls to the cows and the goats. Annie, our smaller friend, entertained George with all their varieties, as she tripped daintily along, like a little fairy, with her tiny alpenstock. Very different was she from continental children, who rarely, if ever, take interest in either pastoral or literary matters. She knew the way to the platform well; for did she not go up and down it many times a day? A difficult descent it was, too—almost perpendicular—notwithstanding the well-kept pathway; but not dangerous until we reached the bottom, when each one in turn had to jump on to a jutting piece of rock, in order to get round the corner into the chapel. Most truly it stands on a small ledge, with no inch of room for aught but the small building raised over it. The water close up to the shore is said to be eight hundred feet deep, and it made one shudder to hear Herr H——’s story of an artist who a few years ago fell into the lake while sketching on the cliffs above. Poor man! forgetful of the precipice, he had thoughtlessly stepped back a few steps to look at his painting, fell over, and was never seen again. His easel and painting alone remained to give pathetic warning to other rash spirits.

The chapel, open on the side next the water, is covered with faded frescos of Tell’s history, which our little friends quaintly described; and it contains, besides, an altar and a small pulpit. Here Mass is said once a year on the Friday after the Ascension, when all the people of the neighborhood come hither, and from their boats, grouped outside, hear Mass and the sermon preached to them from the railing in front. This was the[134] feast which my Weggis guide so much desired to see. It is unique in every particular, and Herr H—— was eloquent on the beauty and impressiveness of the scene, at which he had once been present, and which it was easy to understand amidst these magnificent surroundings. Nor is it a common gathering of peasants, but a solemn celebration, to which the authorities of Uri come in state with the standard of Uri—the renowned Uri ox—floating at the bows. As may be supposed, the sermon is always national, touching on all those points of faith, honor, and dignity which constitute true patriotism. Mr. C—— had Murray’s guide-book in his hand, and would not allow us to say another word until he read aloud Sir James Macintosh’s remarks on this portion of the lake, which there occur as follows:

“All very well,” said George, “if there really had been a Tell; but this seems to me a body without a soul. Why, this very chapel is in the Italian style, and never could have been founded by the one hundred and twenty contemporaries who are said to have known Tell and to have been present at its consecration.”

“I never heard that any one insisted on this being the original building,” said Herr H——. “It is probably an improvement on it; but it was not the fashion in those times—for people were not then incredulous—to put up tablets recording changes and renovations, as nowadays at Kaltbad and Klösterle, for instance. But speaking dispassionately, Mr. George, it seems to me quite impossible that the introduction of any legend from Denmark or elsewhere could have taken such strong hold of a people like these mountaineers without some solid foundation, especially here, where every inhabitant is known to the other, and the same families have lived on in the same spots for centuries. Why is it not just as likely that the same sort of event should have occurred in more than one place? And as to its not being mentioned in the local documents, that is not conclusive either; for we all know how careless in these respects were the men of the middle ages, above all in a rude mountain canton of this kind. Transmission by word of mouth and by religious celebrations is much more in character with those times. I go heart and hand with your own Buckle,[135] who places so much reliance on local traditions. The main argument used against the truth of the story is, you know, that it was first related in detail by an old chronicler called Ægidius Tschudi, a couple of hundred years after the event. But I see nothing singular in that; for most probably he merely committed to writing, with all the freshness of simplicity, the story which, for the previous two hundred years, had been in the hearts and on the lips of the peasants of this region. No invention of any writer could have founded chapels or have become ingrained in the hearts of the locality itself in the manner this story has done. It was never doubted until the end of the last century, when a Prof. Freudenberger, of Bern, wrote a pamphlet entitled William Tell: a Danish Fable.”

“Yes,” broke in little Emily, latest translator of Schiller, and who had been listening attentively to our discussion, “and the people of the forest cantons were so indignant that the authorities of Uri had the pamphlet burned by the common hangman, and then they solemnly proclaimed its author an outlaw.”

“I told you, Mr. George, that you were on dangerous ground here,” said Herr H——, laughing.

“I must make him kiss this earth before he leaves,” said Mrs. C——, “as I read lately of a mother making her little son do when passing here early in this century, regarding it as a spot sacred to liberty. She little thought a sceptic like you would so soon follow.”

“Well! I am almost converted,” he answered, smiling, “but I wish Miss Emily would tell us the story of Tell’s jumping on shore here,” trying to draw out the enthusiastic little prodigy.

“Oh! don’t you remember that magnificent passage in Schiller where, after the scene of shooting at the apple, Gessler asked Tell why he put the second arrow into his quiver, and then, promising to spare his life if he revealed its object, evades his promise the instant he hears that it was destined to kill him if Tell had struck his son instead of the apple? He then ordered him to be bound and taken on board his vessel at Fluelen. The boat had no sooner left Fluelen than one of those sudden storms sprang up so common hereabouts. There was one two days ago. Annie and I tried to come down here, but it was impossible—the wind and waves were so high we could not venture, so we sat on the pathway and read out Schiller. Oh! he is a great genius. He never was in Switzerland. Yes! just fancy that; and yet he describes everything to perfection. Well! Tell was as good a pilot as a marksman, and Gessler, in his fright, again promised to take off his fetters if he would steer the vessel safely. He did, but steered them straight towards this ledge of rock, sprang out upon it, climbed up the cliff, and, rushing through the country, arrived at the Hohle-Gasse near Küssnacht before the tyrant had reached it.”

“Schiller decidedly has his merit, it must be confessed, when he can get such ardent admirers as these pretty children,” said Herr H—— when we bade farewell to our dear little friends.

“Yes,” answered the incorrigible George from the box seat, “poetry, poetry!—an excellent mode of transmitting traditions, making them indelible on young minds; but I am so far converted, Herr H——,” continued he, laughing, “that I am[136] sorry the doubts were ever raised about the Tell history. It is in wonderful keeping with the place and people, and it will be a great pity if they give it up. ‘Se non è vero, è ben trovato,’[12] at least.”

Hence onwards to Fluelen is the finest portion of the Axenstrasse, and the opening views of the valley of the Reuss and the Bristenstock, through the arches of the galleries or tunnels, every minute increased in beauty. Several of us got out the better to enjoy them, sending the carriages on ahead. The Schwytz cattle had quite escaped our memories, when suddenly a bell sounded round a sharp angle of the road and a large drove instantly followed.

A panic seized us ladies. The cliff rose vertically on the inner side, without allowing us the possibility of a clamber, and in our fright, before the gentlemen could prevent us, we leaped over a low railing, which there served as a parapet, on to a ledge of rock, a few yards square, rising straight up from the lake hundreds of feet below. All recollection of their historical interest vanished from our minds; for, as the cattle danced along, they looked as scared and wild as ourselves, and it was not until they had passed without noticing us, and that their dark-eyed masters had spoken some soft Italian words to us, that we fully realized the extent of our imprudence. Had any one of these animals jumped up over the railing, as we afterwards heard they have sometimes done, who can say what might not have happened? Fortunately, no harm ensued beyond a flutter of nerves, which betrayed itself by Anna’s turning round to a set of handsome goats that soon followed the cattle, crying out to them in her own peculiar German: “Nix kommen! nix kommen!”

Fluelen has nothing to show beyond the picturesqueness of a village situated in such scenery and a collection of lumbering diligences and countless carriages, awaiting the hourly arrival of the steamers from Lucerne. The knell of these old diligences, however, has tolled, for the St. Gothard Railway tunnel has been commenced near Arnsty, and though it may require years to finish it, its “opening day” will surely come. Half an hour’s drive up the lovely valley brought us to Altorf, at the foot of the Grünwald, which, in accord with its name, is clothed with a virgin forest, now called the “Bann forest,” because so useful is it in protecting the town from avalanches and landslips that the Uri government never permits it to be touched. Altorf, like so many of the capitals in these forest cantons, has a small population, 2,700 inhabitants only, but it has many good houses, for it was burnt down in 1799 and rebuilt in a better manner. Tell’s story forms its chief interest, and certainly did so in our eyes. We rushed at once to the square, where one fountain is said to mark the spot where Tell took aim, and another that upon which his boy stood. Tradition says that the latter one replaced the lime-tree against which the son leant, portions of which existed until 1567. A paltry plaster statue of the hero is in the same square, but the most remarkable relic of antiquity is an old tower close by, which Herr H—— assured us is proved by documents to have been built before 1307, the date of Tell’s history.[137] Had the young friends we left at “Tell’s Platform” accompanied us hither, Emily might have quoted Schiller to us at length. But George, having recently bought a Tauchnitz edition of Freeman’s Growth of the English Constitution, which opens with a fine description of the annual elections of this canton, he earnestly pleaded a prolongation of our drive to the spot where this takes place, three miles further inland. Accordingly, after ordering dinner to be ready on our return at a hotel which was filled with Tell pictures, and an excellent one of the festival at the Platform, we left the town and proceeded up the valley. Soon we crossed a stream, the same, Herr H—— told us, in which Tell is said to have been drowned while endeavoring to save a child who had fallen into it. He also pointed out to us Bürglen, his home, and an old tower believed to have been his house, attached to which there is now a small ivy-clad chapel. It stands at the opening of the Schächen valley, celebrated to this day for its fine race of men—likewise corresponding in this respect with the old tradition. But more modern interest attaches to this valley, for it was along its craggy sides and precipices that Suwarow’s army made its way across the Kinzig-Kulm to the Muotta. The whole of this region was the scene of fearful fighting—first between the French and the Austrians, who were assisted by the natives of Uri, in 1799, and then, a month later, between the Russians coming up from Lombardy and the French.

“That was the age of real fighting,” said Herr H——, “hand-to-hand fighting, without mitrailleuses or long ranges. But the misery it brought this quarter was not recovered from for years after. Altorf was burnt down at that time, and everything laid waste. The memory of the trouble lingers about here even yet. What wonder! Certainly, in all Europe no more difficult fighting ground could have been found. In the end, the French General Lecourbe was all but cut off, for he had destroyed every boat on the lake; in those days a most serious matter, as neither steamers nor Axenstrasse existed. When he therefore wished to pursue the Russians, who by going up this Schächen valley intended to join their own corps, supposed to be at Zürich, he too was obliged to make a bold manœuvre. And then it was that he led his army by torchlight along the dangerous mule-path on the Axenberg! Sad and dreadful times they were for these poor cantons.”

Herr H—— showed us Attinghausen, the birth-place of Walter Fürst, and the ruins of a castle near, which is the locality of a fine scene in Schiller, but the last owner of which died in 1357, and is known to have been buried in his helmet and spurs. Shortly after, about three miles from Altorf, we reached the noted field, and George, opening Freeman, read us the following passage aloud:

The grand forms of the Windgälle, the Bristenstock, and the other mighty mountains, surrounded us as we stood in deep silence on this high green meadow, profoundly impressed by this eloquent tribute to a devout and liberty-loving people, all the more remarkable as coming from a Protestant writer. There was little to add to it, for Herr H——’s experience could only confirm it in every point. Dinner had to be got through rapidly on our return to Altorf, as we wished to catch the steamer leaving Fluelen at five o’clock. Like all these vessels, it touched at the landing-place beside Tell’s Platform, whence our young friends of the morning, who had been watching for our return, waved us a greeting. Thence we sat on deck, tracing Lecourbe’s mule-path march of torch-light memory along the Axenberg precipices, and finally reached the Waldstätterhof at Brunnen in time to see the sun sink behind Mont Pilatus, and leave the varied outlines clearly defined against a deep-red sky.

S. PHILIP’S HOME.[13]

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Whilst our ears are deafened and our feelings shocked by the calumnies and lying vituperation heaped upon all that is most worthy of love and veneration upon earth by the Satanic societies which the Popes have smitten with repeated excommunications, it is consoling to be supplied—by limners, too, who are themselves no mean exemplars of the noble development which the Church can give to virtue when it follows her counsels—with lifelike portraits of Christian athletes in times gone by. We do not know how soon our courage, patience, and charity may be put to a similar test. Multitudes of our fellow-Catholics are already subjected to every suffering but the martyrdom of death; and this seed of the Church our enemies, more wily than the sanguinary heretics of the age of Elizabeth, seem to be unwilling to sow. But they will not long be able to restrain their passion. The word of persecution has gone forth; and so bitter is the hatred of the very name of Christ, that before very long nothing but the blood of Christians will satiate its instincts.

The persecution of the Church in England in the time of Elizabeth resembled the persecution which is now raging against it, in the political complexion given to it. But there were far stronger grounds for it then than now. The superior claims of Mary to the throne, her virtues, and her surpassing beauty, were a just subject of jealousy and uneasiness to Elizabeth, and she might very naturally suppose that her Catholic subjects were not likely to regard with any fondness the usurpation of an illegitimate daughter of her apostate and tyrannical father.

In the present persecutions there is no political pretext, but one is made under cover of which to extirpate from among mankind the religion and very name of Christ.

This volume is the second of a series which promises to supply us with a whole gallery of Christian heroes, which we of this age of worldliness, cowardice, and self-seeking will do well to study attentively. As is often the case, it is to the untiring zeal of the Society of Jesus we owe so interesting as well as edifying a work. Father Morris, formerly Secretary to Cardinal Wiseman, but who joined the Society after the death of that eminent prelate, is its author, and he appears to us to have executed his task with rare judgment. By allowing his characters to speak in great part for themselves, the biographies and relations he presents us with have a dramatic interest which is greatly increased by the quaint and nervous style of the time in which they express themselves. We feel, too, that it is the very innermost soul and mind of the individual that is being revealed to us; and certainly in most of them the revelation is so beautiful that we should possibly have ascribed something of this to the partiality of a panegyrist, or to his descriptive skill, if the picture had been sketched by the pen of any other biographer than themselves. It is, indeed, the mean opinion they evidently have of themselves, and the naïve and modest manner in which they relate incidents evoking heroic virtue, their absolute unconsciousness of aught more than the most ordinary qualities, which fascinate us. It bears an impress of genuineness impossible to any description by the most impartial of historians. They express a beauty which could no more be communicated in any other way than can the odor of the flower or the music of the streams be conveyed by any touch, how ever magic, of the painter.

The present volume of the series contains the “Life of Father William Weston, S.J.,” and “The Fall of Anthony Tyrrell,” by Father Persons; for “our wish is,” says Father Morris, “to learn[142] not only what was done by the strong and brave, but also by the weak and cowardly.”

We are much struck in this history with the resemblance between those times and the present in the unsparing calumny of which the purest and the holiest men were made the victims.

For confirmation of these remarks, we refer the reader to the book itself. But we cannot refrain from quoting, in spite of its length, the following incident related by Father Weston. It is a remarkable example of the salutary effect of the Sacrament of Penance:

“For there lay in a certain heretical house a Catholic who, with the consent of his keeper, had come to London for the completion of some urgent business. He had been committed to a prison in the country, a good way out of London. He was seized, however, and overpowered by a long sickness which brought him near to death. The woman who nursed him, being a Catholic, had diligently searched the whole city through to find a priest, but in vain. She then sent word to me of the peril of that person, and entreated me, if it could be contrived, to come to his assistance, as he was almost giving up the ghost. I went to him when the little piece of gold obtained for me the liberty to do so. I explained that I was a priest, for I was dressed like a layman, and that I had come to hear his confession. ‘If that is the reason why you have come, it is in vain,’ he said; ‘the time for it is passed away.’ I said to him: ‘What! are you not a Catholic? If you are, you know what you have to do. This hour, which seems to be your last, has been given you that by making a good and sincere confession you may, while there is time, wash away the stains of your past life, whatever they are.’ He answered: ‘I tell you that you have come too late: that time has gone by. The judgment is decided; the sentence has been pronounced; I am condemned, and given up to the enemy. I cannot hope for pardon.’ ‘That is false,’ I answered, ‘and it is a most fearful error to imagine that a man still in life can assert that he is already deprived of God’s goodness and abandoned by his grace, in such a way that even when he desires and implores mercy it should be denied him. Since your faith teaches you that God is infinitely merciful, you are to believe with all certitude that there is no bond so straitly fastened but the grace of God can unloose it, no obstacle but grace has power to surmount it.’ ‘But do you not see,’ he asked me, ‘how full of evil spirits this place is where we are? There is no corner or crevice in the walls where there are not more than a thousand of the most dark and frightful demons, who, with their fierce faces, horrid looks, and atrocious words threaten perpetually that they are just going to carry me into the abyss of misery. Why, even my very body and entrails are filled with these hateful guests, who are lacerating my body and torturing my soul with such dreadful cruelty and anguish that it seems as if I were not so much on the point merely of going there, as that I am already devoted and made over to the flames and agonies of hell. Wherefore, it is clear that God has abandoned me for ever, and has cast me away from all hope of pardon.’

“When I had listened in trembling to all these things, and to much more of a similar kind, and saw at the same time that death was coming fast upon him, and that he would not admit of any advice or persuasion, I began to think within myself, in silence and anxiety, what would be the wisest course to choose. There entered into my mind, through the inspiration, doubtless, of God, the following most useful plan and method of dealing with him: ‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘if you are going to be lost, I do not require a confession from you; nevertheless, recollect yourself just for a moment, and, with a quiet mind, answer me, in a few words, either yes or no to the questions that I put to you; I ask for nothing else, and put upon you no other burden.’ Then I began to question him, and to follow the order of the Commandments. First, whether he had denied his faith. ‘See,’ I said, ‘do not worry yourself; say just those simple words, yes or no.’ As soon as he had finished either affirming or denying anything, I proceeded through four or five Commandments—whether he had killed any one, stolen anything, etc. When he had answered with tolerable calmness, I said to him, ‘What are the devils doing now? What do you feel or suffer from them?’ He replied: ‘They are quieter with me; they do not seem to be so furious as they were before.’ ‘Lift up your soul to God,’ I said, ‘and let us go on to the rest.’ In the same fashion and order I continued to question[143] him about other things. Then I enquired again, saying, ‘How is it now?’ He replied; ‘Within I am not tormented. The devils stand at a distance; they throw stones; they make dreadful faces at me, and threaten me horribly. I do not think that I shall escape.’ Going forward as before, I allured and encouraged the man by degrees, till every moment he became more reasonable, and at last made an entire confession of all his sins, after which I gave him absolution, and asked him what he was suffering from his cruel and harassing enemies. ‘Nothing,’ he said; ‘they have all vanished. There is not a trace of them, thanks be to God.’ Then I went away, after strengthening him by a few words, and encouraging him beforehand against temptations which might return. I promised, at the same time, that I would be with him on the morrow, and meant to bring the most Sacred Body of Christ with me, and warned him to prepare himself diligently for the receiving of so excellent a banquet. The whole following night he passed without molestation from the enemy, and on the next day he received with great tranquillity of mind the most Holy Sacrament, after which, at an interval of a few hours without disturbance, he breathed forth his soul, and quietly gave it up to God. Before he died, I asked the man what cause had driven him into such desperation of mind. He answered me thus: ‘I was detained in prison many years for the Catholic faith. Nevertheless, I did not cease to sin, and to conceal my sins from my confessor, being persuaded by the devil that pardon must be sought for from God, rather by penances and severity of life, than by confession. Hence I either neglected my confessions altogether, or else made insincere ones; and so I fell into that melancholy of mind and that state of tribulation which has been my punishment.’”

Mr. Earle has undoubtedly a facility in writing sonnets; and a good sonnet has been well called “a whole poem in itself.” It is also, we think, peculiarly suitable for didactic poetry. The present sonnets are in advance, we consider, of those we first saw from Mr. Earle’s pen. But we still observe faults, both of diction and of verse, which he should have learnt to avoid. His model seems to be Wordsworth—the greatest sonneteer in our language; but, like him, he has too much of the prosaic and the artificial.

We wish we could bestow unqualified praise upon the ideas throughout these sonnets. And were there nothing for criticism but what may be called poetic subtleties—such as the German notion of an “ether body,” developed during life, and hatched at death, for our intermediate state of being—we should have no quarrel with Mr. Earle. But when we meet two sonnets (XLVIII. and XLIX.) headed “Matter Non-Existent,” and “Matter Non-Substantial,” we have a philosophical error serious in its consequences, and are not surprised to find the two following sonnets teach Pantheism. In Sonnet XLVIII. the author’s excellent intention is to refute materialism:

Sonnet L. is headed, “As the Soul in the Body, so is God in the Universe.” Surely, this is the old “Anima Mundi” theory! Then, in Sonnet LI., the poet says of nature, and addressing God:

Now, of course, Mr. Earle is unconscious that this is rank Pantheism. He has a way of explaining it to himself which makes it sound perfectly orthodox. But we do call such a blunder inexcusable in a Catholic writer of Mr. Earle’s pretensions. The title of his volume, “Light leading unto Light,” has little to do with the contents, as far as we can see; and, certainly, there are passages which would more fitly be headed “Darkness leading unto Darkness.”

We are sorry to have had to make these strictures. The great bulk of the sonnets, together with the remaining poems, are very pleasant reading, and cannot fail to do good.

We are glad to see Father Noethen’s familiar hand thus charitably and characteristically engaged. These are the first documents of the kind we have observed under the improving state of things in this country, in which the priest of the Church is seen occupied in one of his most important duties—reclaiming the erring; and in doing this the means which he employs will doubtless be found more efficacious than any the state has at its command. Did the state fully appreciate its highest interest as well as duty, it would afford the Church every facility, not only in reclaiming such of her children as have fallen into the temptations by which they are surrounded, but also in the use of those preventive measures involved in parish schools, which would save multitudes from penitentiaries and houses of correction. Our over-zealous Protestant friends throw every obstacle in the way of the adequate moral and religious training of the class most exposed to the temptations arising from poverty and lack of employment, and then blame the Church for the result. We heartily welcome these signs of a better time coming.

After quoting this full, descriptive title-page, it will suffice to say that the notes which form the commentary have in the present edition been considerably enlarged. The work was originally published under the approbation of the Holy Father, the late Cardinals Barnabo and Wiseman, and the present venerable Archbishop of Tuam.

BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS RECEIVED.

THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXII., No. 128.—NOVEMBER, 1875.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by Rev. I. T. Hecker, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

FREEMASONRY.[14]

The saints have all, whilst yet in the flesh, foretastes of heavenly bliss. But in these the closing days of time all the elect have a presentiment of coming judgment. And that presentiment is strong in proportion to their faith; stronger still in proportion to their charity. Let our readers be assured at the outset. We are not about to imitate the irreverence of the Scotch Presbyterian minister who, some few years ago, pretended that he had discovered in the prophetic visions of S. John the year in which will come to pass that event of stupendous awfulness, of which He, before whom all mankind will then be judged, said: “Of that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.”

One fearful catastrophe, however, to befall mankind before the general judgment is insisted on so often and with such solemn emphasis by the Holy Spirit that the love of God seems to be, as it were, trembling for his redeemed creature, and longing to reveal to him more than is consistent with his own designs in the trial of his faith. For it must be remembered that faith is a merit, and the absolutely indispensable condition of our receiving the benefits of the divine atonement. Although the gift of God, it is the part we ourselves, by co-operating with the gift, contribute towards our own salvation. And what we are required to believe is so beautiful and ennobling to the moral sense, and so satisfying to the reason, that, supported as it is by the historical evidence of the divinity of Christ and of his church, no one can refuse to believe but those who deliberately choose darkness rather than light, sin rather than virtue, Satan rather than God.

Yet so formidable was to be that last trial of the faith of Christians, so crucial that conclusive test of their charity, which was to “deceive,[146] if it were possible, even the very elect,”[15] that the Spirit of Love, yearning for the safety of his regenerate ones, and compassionating the weakness of human nature, revealed its marks and signs in the fullest and most circumstantial detail; so that, warned of the danger, and recognizing it when it arrived, they might pass through it unhurt, whilst those who succumbed to it might be without excuse before the divine justice. It is the yearning of the heart of Christ towards his children, whom he foresees will fail by thousands in that decisive trial, which prompts the ejaculation that sounds almost like a lament over his own inability to put any pressure on their free-will: “When the Son of man cometh, will he find faith on the earth?” It is his anxiety, as it were, about the fate of his elect amidst the seductions of that appalling apostasy, which urged him, after he had indicated the signs that would accompany it, to be on the perpetual, sleepless lookout for them. “Be ever on the alert. Lo! I have foretold you all.”[16]

“Be ever on the alert, watch and pray. For you do not know when the time may be.”[17]

“Watch, then, lest when he (the head of the family) shall have come on a sudden, you be found sleeping.”[18]

Throughout all the ages that have elapsed since those words of solemn import fell from the lips of Jesus Christ it has been the plain duty of all Christians—nay, of all to whose knowledge they were brought—to narrowly scrutinize events, to keep their attention fixed upon them, watching for the signs he foretold, lest they should appear unheeded, and they be seduced from the faith; or be the cause, through their indifference, of others being carried away in the great misleading.

But who now can be insensible to the predicted portents? So notorious are they, and so exactly do they answer to the description of them handed down to us from the beginning, that they rudely arouse us from sleep; that they force our attention, however indifferent to them we may be, however dull our faith or cold our charity. And when we see a vast organization advancing its forces in one united movement throughout the entire globe in an avowed attack, as insidious as it is formidable, upon altars, thrones, social order, Christianity, Christ, and God himself, where is the heart that can be insensible to the touching evidence of loving solicitude which urged Him whom surging multitudes of his false creatures were deliberately to reject in favor of a fouler being than Barabbas, to iterate so often the warning admonition, “Be ever on the watch”?

To study, therefore, the signs of the times, cannot be without profit to all, but especially to us who have but scant respect for the spirit of the age, who are not sufficiently enlightened by it to look upon Christ as nothing more than a remarkable man, the sublime morality he taught and set an example of as a nuisance, and his church as the enemy of mankind, to be extirpated from their midst, because it forbids their enjoying the illumination of[147] the dagger-guarded secrets of the craft of Freemasonry.

To fix the date of the Dies iræ is completely out of our power. It is irreverent, if not blasphemous, to attempt it. It is of the counsels of God that it should come with the swiftness of “lightning” and the unexpectedness of “a thief in the night”; and that expressly that we may be ever on the watch. But the signs of its approach are given to us in order to help those who do not abandon “watching” in indifference, to escape the great delusion—the imposition of Antichrist—which is to immediately precede it. It is these signs we propose to study in the following pages.

The predictions of Christ himself on this subject are far more obscure than those subsequently given to us by his apostles. But this has always been God’s way of revelation to his creature. To Moses alone, in the mount, he revealed the moral law and that wondrous theocratic polity which remained even after the perversity of his people had given it a monarchical form; and Moses communicated it to the people. To the people Christ spoke in parables, “and without a parable spake he not unto them. But when he was alone with them, he explained all to his disciples.”[20] “To you,” he said, “it is given to have known the mystery of the kingdom of God; but to those without everything is a parable.”[21] The apostles themselves, who were to declare the revelation, in order to increase the merit of their faith, were not fully illuminated before the coming down of the Holy Spirit. “You do not know this parable?” he said; “and how are you going to understand all parables?”[22] To their utterances, therefore, it is we shall confine ourselves, as shedding as much light as it has seemed good to the Holy Ghost to disclose to us upon the profounder and more oracular predictions of God himself in the flesh.

Besides SS. Peter, Paul, and John, S. Jude is the only other apostle, we believe, who has bequeathed to the church predictions of the terrible apostasy of Antichrist which is to consummate the trial of the faith of the saints under the very shadow of the coming judgment. We will take them in the order in which they occur. The first is in a letter of S. Paul to the church at Thessalonica, where, exhorting them not to “be terrified as if the day of the Lord were at hand,” he assures them that it will not come “before there shall have first happened an apostasy, and the man of sin shall have been revealed, the son of perdition—he who opposes himself to, and raises himself above, all that is called God, or that is held in honor, so that he may sit in the temple of God, showing himself as if he were God.… And you know what now is hindering his being revealed in his own time. For the mystery of iniquity is already working; only so that he who is now keeping it in check will keep it in check until he be moved out of its way. And then will the lawless one be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will slay with the breath of his mouth, and destroy with the illumination of his coming; whose coming is after the[148] manner of working of Satan, with all strength and symbols, and lying absurdities, and in every enticement of iniquity in those who perish; for the reason that they did not receive the love of the truth that they might be saved. So God will send them the working of error, that they may believe falsehood; that all may be judged who have not believed the truth, but have consented to iniquity.”[23]

In a letter to Timothy, Bishop of Ephesus, S. Paul writes: “Now, the Spirit says expressly that, in the last times, some shall apostatize from the faith, giving heed to spirits of error and to doctrines of demons, speaking falsehood in hypocrisy, and having their own conscience seared.”[24]

In a second letter to the same bishop he writes: “Know this, moreover: that in the last days there will be a pressure of perilous times; men will be self-lovers, covetous, lifted up, proud, blasphemous, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, malicious, without affection, discontented, calumniators, incontinent, hard, unamiable, traitors, froward, fearful, and lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God, having indeed a form of piety, but denying its power.”[25] S. Peter writes that “there will come in the last days mockers in deception, walking according to their own lusts.”[26]

S. Jude describes them as “mockers, walking in impieties according to their own desires. These are they who separate themselves—animals, not having the Spirit.”[27]

It would seem from the expressions of S. John-who of all the apostles appears to have had most pre-eminently the gift of prophecy—as well as from the manner in which the last days of Jerusalem and the last days of the world appear to be mingled together in the fore-announcement of Christ, that powerful manifestations of Antichrist were to precede both events; although the apostasy was to be far more extensive and destructive before the latter. “Little children,” writes the favorite apostle, “it is the last time; and as you have heard that Antichrist comes, so now many have become Antichrists; whence we know that it is the last time.… He is Antichrist who denies the Father and the Son.”[28]

“Every spirit who abolishes Jesus is not of God. And he is Antichrist about whom we have heard[149] that he is coming, and is even now in the world.”[29]

We believe that these are the only passages wherein the Holy Ghost has vouchsafed to give us distinct and definite information as to the marks and evidences by which we are to know that there is amongst us that Antichrist whose disastrous although short-lived triumph is to precede by only a short space the end of time and the eternal enfranchisement of good from evil.

The prophetic utterances on this subject in the revelations of S. John are veiled in such exceedingly obscure imagery that we do not propose to attempt any investigation of their meaning in this article. It is our object to influence the minds of such Protestants as believe in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and of Catholics whose faith is so dull and whose charity is so cold that they can listen to the blasphemies of Antichrist without emotion.

We may remark here, however, that if we succeed in supplying solid reasons for believing that Antichrist is already amongst us, and that his dismal career of desolating victory has already begun, the duty of studying those utterances of the Holy Ghost, so darkly veiled that the faith of those who stand firm may have more merit in the trial of that great tribulation, will have assumed a position of importance impossible to be overrated. That they are to be understood, the Holy Ghost himself implies. He intimates that their meaning is accessible to the spiritually minded, and would even seem to make dulness of apprehension of it a reproach, a lack of spiritual discernment. “If any one has the ear, let him hear,”[30] he writes. And again: “This is wisdom. Let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast.”[31]

It is not necessary to the object we have in view that we should identify “the beast” of the Apocalypse, seven-headed and having ten horns crowned with diadems, with Antichrist. The question we propose to answer is simply, “Are there under our eyes at this moment evidences of a present Antichrist, or of his being close at hand?” In other words, “Is what is called ‘the spirit of the age’ the spirit of Antichrist?”

For us, that we may be on our guard against his wiles, and armed to the teeth to fight against him to the death, it is comparatively unimportant whether we decide him to be actually amongst us or only just about to appear. His marks and characteristics, his badges or decorations—these are all we require.

If the Antichrist of the prophecies is a single, separate impersonation of the demoniac attributes described by the Holy Ghost—if, in short, he is an individual man, then he has not yet been revealed. In that case, our identification of Antichrist will only have exposed that temper and spirit with which “the red dragon”—“the devil”—“Satan”—“the ancient serpent”—has possessed such vast multitudes of the human race throughout the entire globe as to afford ground for calling it “the spirit of the age,” and which is to culminate in some terrible personal embodiment—a typical personage, as men speak. But if the prophecies do not designate an individual man, but only the[150] impersonation of a multitude of individuals organized into a unity and animated with the same spirit, then we think we shall be able to point the finger of horror and loathing at the very Antichrist at present amongst us, and in the midst of victory, as decisively and as clearly as the prophet of penance pointed the finger of adoring love towards the Lamb of God.

We incline, and strongly, to the latter view. We must withhold our reasons, partly because, as we have said, our object is equally subserved by either view; but more because to do so would leave us too little space for treating the main subject. We will content ourselves with stating that those reasons are founded on the internal evidence supplied by the several predictions; and also on our aversion to admit the possibility of a more depraved individual impersonation of evil than that unhappy man whom God in human flesh pronounced a devil!

Whether, however, Antichrist be or not an individual man, one thing is certain: that if we can point out an immense army of men, co-extensive with the globe, highly organized, animated with the same spirit, and acting with as much unity of purpose as if their movements were directed by one head, who exhibit precisely those marks and characteristics described in the predictions of Antichrist, we may expect even on the supposition that they are to have a visible head, an individual leader, who has yet to make his appearance; and that they are his hosts, who have already achieved a great part of his victories.

What is first noticeable is that the stigma which is to be deeply branded on the front of the Antichristian manifestation which is to precede the close of time is “Apostasy”.

The day of the Lord will not come, “nisi venerit discessio primum; Spiritus dicit quia in novissimis temporibus quidam a fide discedunt.”

There can be no need of dwelling on this. It is sufficiently obvious that the great apostasy inaugurated by Luther was the first outbreak of Antichristian victory. The success of that movement assured the spirit of error of a career of victory. He was lurking in the fold, watching for his opportunity, and snatching away stray souls, as S. John tells us, in the time of the apostles. For a millennium and a half has he been preparing his manifestation. He inspired Julian, he inspired the Arians, he inspired all the heresies against which the definitions of the faith were decreed. But when he had seduced men away from the church, whole nations at a time, “dominationem contemnentes” (2 S. Peter ii. 10), and captivated them to the irrational opinion that there is no higher authority for the obligatory dogmas of the Christian Church than the conviction of every individual, solvere Jesum, and then God, was merely a matter of time. What human passion had begun human reason would complete. The life of faith could not be annihilated at a blow. It has taken three centuries for the sap of charity to wither away in the cut-off branches. But sooner or later the green wood could not but become dry; and reason, void of charity, would be forced to acknowledge that if the Bible has no definite meaning other than what appears to be its meaning to every individual, practically it has no definite meaning at all; that God[151] cannot have revealed any truth at all, if we have no means of ascertaining what it is beyond our own private opinions; that a book the text of which admits of as many interpretations as there are sects cannot, without an authoritative living expositor, reveal truths which it is necessary to believe in order to escape eternal punishment. The claim of the Catholic Church to this authority having been pronounced an usurpation, the progress, although slow, was sure and easy towards pronouncing Christianity itself an usurpation. God himself cannot survive Christianity. And we have now literally “progressed” to so triumphant a manifestation of Antichrist that the work of persecution of God’s Church has set in with a vengeance, and men hear on all sides of them the existence of God denied without horror, even without surprise.

The first mark of a present Antichrist we propose to signalize is that distinctly assigned to him by S. Paul—ὁ ἄνομος. This epithet is but feebly rendered by the Latin ille iniquus, or the English “that wicked one.” “The lawless one” better conveys the force of the Greek. For the root νόμος includes in its meaning not only enacted law of all kinds, but whatever has become, as it were, a law by custom; or a law of nature, as it were, by the universal observance of mankind.

The first marked sequel of the apostasy, the first outbreak of success of Antichrist in the political order, was the first French Revolution, during which a harlot was placed for worship upon the altar of Notre Dame.

That fearful outbreak may have sat for its portrait to S. Peter in the following description of the members of the Antichrist of the “last times”: “Who walk after the flesh in the lust of concupiscence, and despise authority; … irrational beasts, following only their own brute impulses, made only to be caught and slain; … having eyes full of adultery and of ceaseless sin; … speaking proud things of vanity, enticing, through the desires of the luxury of the flesh, those who by degrees go away from the truth, who become habituated to error; promising them liberty, whereas they themselves are the slaves of corruption” (2 Pet. ii. 10, 12, 14, 18, 19).

That saturnalia of lawlessness, which Freemason writers have ever since dared to approve, was the work of the “craft” of Freemasonry, to whose organization and plan of action does indeed, in an especial sense, apply S. Paul’s designation of τὸ μυστήριον τῆς ανομίας “the mystery of lawlessness.” Mirabeau, Sieyès, Grégoire, Robespierre, Condorcet, Fauchet, Guillotine, Bonneville, Volney, “Philippe Egalité,” etc., had all been initiated into the higher grades.

Louis Blanc, himself a Freemason, writes thus: “It is necessary to conduct the reader to the opening of the subterranean mine laid at that time beneath thrones and altars by revolutionists, differing greatly, both in their theory and their practice, from the Encyclopedists. An association had been formed of men of every land, every religion, and every class, bound together by mysterious signs agreed upon amongst themselves, pledged by a solemn oath to observe inviolable secrecy as to the existence of this hidden bond, and tested by proofs of a terrible description.… Thus we find Freemasonry to have been widely diffused immediately[152] before the outbreak of the Revolution. Spreading over the whole face of Europe, it poisoned the thinking minds of Germany, and secretly stirred up rebellion in France, showing itself everywhere in the light of an association resting upon principles diametrically opposed to those which govern civil society.… The ordinances of Freemasonry did indeed make great outward display of obedience to law, of respect to the outward forms and usages of profane society, and of reverence towards rulers; at their banquets the Masons did indeed drink the health of kings in the days of monarchy, and of presidents in the time of republics, such prudent circumspection being indispensable on the part of an association which threatened the existence of the very governments under whose eyes it was compelled to work, and whose suspicion it had already aroused. This, nevertheless, did not suffice to counteract the radically revolutionary influence continually exercised by the craft, even while it professed nothing but peaceful intentions.”[32]

In the work from which the above and the greater part of our materials in this article are borrowed, we read as follows: “It was precisely these revolutionary designs of the secret society which induced its Provincial Grand Master, the Prussian Minister Count von Haugwitz, to leave it. In the memorial presented by him to the Congress of Monarchs at Verona, in 1830, he bids the rulers of Europe to be on their guard against the hydra. ‘I feel at this moment firmly persuaded,’ writes the ex-grand master, ‘that the French Revolution, which had its first commencement in 1788, and broke out soon after, attended with all the horrors of regicide, existed heaven knows how long before, having been planned, and having had the way prepared for it, by associations and secret oaths.’”[33]

“After the events of February, 1848, the ‘craft’ sang songs of triumph at the open success of its secret endeavors. A Belgian brother, Van der Heym, spoke thus: ‘On the day following the revolution of February a whole nation rose as one man, overturned the throne, and wrote over the frontal of the royal palace the words Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, all the citizens having adopted as their own this fundamental principle of Freemasonry. The combatants had not to battle long before the victory over their oppressors was gained—that freedom won which for centuries had formed the theme of Masonic discourses. We, the apostles of fraternity, aid the foundation-stone of the Republic.’”[34]

And another master of the Freemasons, one Peigné, said about the same time: “In our glorious Revolution of 1792 the Lodge of the Nine Sisters gave to the world such men as Garat, Brissot, Bailly, Camille Desmoulins, Condorcet, Champfort, Petion; the Lodge of the Iron Mouth gave to it Fauchet, Goupil de Prefeln, Sieyès; the Lodge of Candor, Custine, the two Lameths, and Lafayette.”

The horrors of that Revolution occasioned a temporary reaction and checked the triumphs of the Freemasons. But well they know how to repair their broken fortunes, bide their time, and reappear with renewed force.

Barruel, who was an eye-witness of the events of the period, and also himself intimately acquainted with many Freemasons in Paris, relates that the brethren, considering that the time had come when they were free to publish the secret they had sworn to keep, shouted aloud: “At last our goal is reached; from this day France will be one vast lodge, and all Frenchmen Freemasons.”

A strong reaction of disgust and terror at the satanic orgies of Freemasonry in the ascendant, moderated for a while this shout of triumph. But in the disasters inflicted on France by the conquering Germans, the “craft” thought to find a recurring opportunity. If the Communist attempt at Paris in 1871 was not originally planned by the Freemasons, they openly and officially joined it. “A procession composed of at least five thousand persons, in which members of all the grades took part, wearing their insignia, and in which one hundred and fifty lodges of France were represented, wended its way to the town hall of Paris. Maillet, bearing the red flag as a token of universal peace, headed the band, and openly proclaimed, in a speech which met with the approval of all present, that the new Commune was the antitype of Solomon’s temple and the corner-stone of the social fabric about to be raised by the efforts of the craft. The negotiations carried on with the government of Versailles on behalf of the socialists, and the way in which they planted the banners of the craft on the walls of the capital, accompanying this action with a threat of instantly joining the ranks of the combatants if a single shot were fired at one of those banners (of which a graphic account appeared in the Figaro at the time), was all of a piece with the sentiments they expressed” (The Secret Warfare of Freemasonry, p. 172).

Figaro closed its account of these strange events with the following reflections: “But when posterity shall be informed that in the middle of the XIXth century, in the midst of an unbelieving generation, which openly denied God and his Christ, under the very guns of an enemy in possession of all the French fortresses, hostilities were all at once suspended, and the course of a portentous and calamitous civil war interrupted because, forsooth, Brother Thirifoque, accompanied by two Knights Kadosch, went to offer to M. Thiers’ acceptance the golden mallet of supreme command (in the craft)—when, I say, this story is told to those who come after us, it will sound in their ears as a nursery tale, utterly unworthy of credence.”[35]

In Révélations d’un Franc-maçon[154] au lit de mort, pièce authentique, publicé, par M. de Hallet (Courtrai, 1826, p. 10), we find the following: “We must restore man to his primeval rights, no longer recognizing rank and dignity—two things the mere sight of which offends the eye of man and wounds his self-love. Obedience is a mere chimera, and has no place in the wise plans of Providence.”

In the Astræa, Taschenbuch für Freimaurer, von Bruder Sydow (1845), an orator thus speaks: “That which is destined to destruction must in the course of things be destroyed; and if human powers resist this law, at the behest of fate, a stronger power will appear upon the scene to carry out the eternal decrees of Providence. The Reformation of the church, as well as the French Revolution, proves the existence of this law.… Revolution is a crisis necessary to development.”

The Révélations says: “The poison must be neutralized by means of its antidote, revolution must succeed to obedience, vengeance follow upon effeminacy, power must grapple with power, and the reign of superstition yield before that of the one true natural religion.”

Barruel, who had been a master Mason, states that the oath administered to him was: “My brother, are you prepared to execute every command you may receive from the Grand Master, even should contrary orders be laid on you by king or emperor, or any other ruler whatever?”

“The grade of Kadosch”—the thirtieth grade—writes Barruel (p. 222), “is the soul of Freemasonry, and the final object of its plots is the reintroduction of absolute liberty and equality through the destruction of all royalty and the abrogation of all religious worship.”

“Socialism, Freemasonry, and communism have, after all, a common origin” (The Latomia—an organ of the craft—vol. xii. p. 237).

Le Libertaire, a Masonic journal published in this city, had the following in 1858: “The Libertaire knows no country but that which is common to all. He is a sworn foe to restraints of every kind. He hates the boundaries of countries; he hates the boundaries of fields, houses, workshops; he hates the boundaries of family.”

Is it within the power of the human mind to conceive of any possible individual or spiritual incarnation more deeply, vividly, and distinctly branded with the note-mark or sign of Antichrist, given to us by the Holy Spirit some two thousand years ago, by which we might recognize him when he appeared—“the lawless one,” “spurning authority”—ὁ ἄνομος, qui contemnunt dominationem?

And when we add to this, the one special and most wicked and lawless characteristic of the “craft”—its portentous mystery—to our thinking, they must willingly, and of set purpose, close their eyes who fail to detect in it the very Antichrist whom the apostle declares shall be manifested in the last days, after the apostasy, and whom he designates by the epithet τὸ μυστήριον τῆς ἀνομίας—“the mystery of lawlessness”—which he tells us had even then, at the very cradle of the church, begun to put in movement its long conspiracy against the salvation of mankind: τὸ γὰρ μυστηριον ἢδη ενεργεῖται τῆς ἀνομίας—“for the mystery of lawlessness is even now already working.”

No sooner was Christ born than[155] his infant life was sought; no sooner did he begin to teach than “the ancient serpent” sought his ruin; just before the triumph of his resurrection the enemy of mankind seemed to have finally and completely triumphed in his crucifixion; no sooner had his church, brought to life by his resurrection, begun her work of saving mankind than the devil was at work with his “mystery of lawlessness” for her destruction. All along it is Antichrist dogging the steps of Christ; before the second coming of Christ there is to be the second coming of Antichrist; before the final triumph over evil and revelation of the sons of God, Antichrist is to have that his last open and avowed manifestation—ἀποκάλυψις—and success, which the craft of Freemasonry is already so far on the road to compassing.

Whether or no he is to receive a serious check before that terrific triumph over all but the few remaining elect we know not. But so unmistakable is his present manifestation that it is woe to those who blink their eyes and follow in his wake! Woe to those whose judicial blindness causes them to “believe a lie”! Woe to those who are caught napping!

The next of the indications given us by the Holy Spirit of the Antichrist is his modus operandi—his method—the way in which he will effect his purposes, “whose coming is according to the way of working of Satan”—cujus est adventus secundum operationem Satanæ.

The beast with seven heads and ten horns crowned with diadems described in the Apocalypse is, we are there told, fully commissioned with his own power by the red dragon, whom we are distinctly informed is the old serpent, who is called the devil (διάβολος, or slanderer), “Satan, who deceives the whole world.”

Now, Satan is designated as “the prince of darkness” in opposition to Christ, “who is the true light, enlightening every one that cometh into the world”; he is the father of those who “hate the light because their deeds are evil.” When he would destroy Christ, “night was his hour and the power of darkness.” But in taking a survey of the craft of Freemasonry, what first seizes our attention? Is it not the profound darkness in which all its operations are veiled? Those terrible oaths of secrecy, made under the assured menace of assassination, attended with all that sanguinary gibberish, the lie involved in which is not known until the “seared conscience” is already in the chains of hell—surely, if anything is, these are “secundum operationem Satanæ.”

In the Vienna Freemason’s Journal, MSS. for circulation in the craft, second year of issue, No. 1, p. 66, is the following: “We wander amidst our adversaries, shrouded in threefold darkness. Their passions serve as wires, whereby, unknown to themselves, we set them in motion and compel them unwittingly to work in union with us.”

In a work written in High-German, the authorship of which is ascribed to a Prof. Hoffman of Vienna, the contents of which are supported by documentary evidence, and of which a Dutch translation was published in Amsterdam in 1792, which was reprinted at the Hague in 1826, the method of working of this “mystery of lawlessness” is thus summed up:

“2. To effect this, a literary association[156] must be formed to promote the circulation of our writings, and suppress, as far as possible, those of our opponents.

“3. For this end we must contrive to have in our pay the publishers of the leading literary journals of the day, in order that they may turn into ridicule and heap contempt on everything written in a contrary interest to our own.

“4. ‘He that is not with us is against us.’ Therefore we may persecute, calumniate, and tread down such an one without scruple; individuals like this are noxious insects which one shakes from the blossoming tree and crushes beneath one’s foot.

“5. Very few can bear to be made to look ridiculous; let ridicule, therefore, be the weapon employed against persons who, though by no means devoid of sense, show themselves hostile to our schemes.

“6. In order the more quickly to attain our end, the middle classes of society must be thoroughly imbued with our principles; the lower orders and the mass of the population are of little importance, as they may easily be moulded to our will. The middle classes are the principal supporters of the government; to gain them we must work on their passions, and, above all, bring up the rising generation in our ideas, as in a few years they will be in their turn masters of the situation.

“7. License in morals will be the best means of enabling us to provide ourselves with patrons at court—persons who are nevertheless totally ignorant of the importance of our cause. It will suffice for our purpose if we make them absolutely indifferent to the Christian religion. They are for the most part careless enough without us.

“8. If our aims are to be pursued with vigor, it is of absolute necessity to regard as enemies of enlightenment and of philosophy all those who cling in any way to religious or civil prejudices, and exhibit this attachment in their writings. They must be viewed as beings whose influence is highly prejudicial to the human race, and a great obstacle to its well-being and progress. On this account it becomes the duty of each one of us to impede their action in all matters of consequence, and to seize the first suitable opportunity which may present itself of putting them entirely hors du combat.

“9. We must ever be on the watch to make all changes in the state serve our own ends; political parties, cabals, brotherhoods, and unions—in short, everything that affords an opportunity of creating disturbances must be an instrument in our hands. For it is only on the ruins of society as it exists at present that we can hope to erect a solid structure on the natural system, and ensure to the worshippers of nature the free exercise of their rights.”

If this method of working, operatio, is not secundum adventum Satanæ, we should be glad to know what is. Herein we find every feature of Antichrist and his hosts which the Holy Ghost has drawn for our warning. They are heaped together in such hideous combination throughout this summary as scarcely to need particularizing. Our readers may not, however, be unwilling that we should single them out one by one as they appear more or less prominently in the several paragraphs; premising that throughout one characteristic reigns and prevails, and, indeed, lends its color to all the rest, that special attribute[157] of “the father of lies”—falsehood!

We will take the paragraphs in order, and photograph their most prominent Antichristian features.

The first.—Spurning authority. Giving ear to spirits of error and doctrines of demons.

Mockers, walking according to their own desires; animals, not having the Spirit.

The second and third.—Lovers of themselves, lawless, proud, malicious, traitors, froward, discourteous, fearful, mockers in deception.

The seventh.—Traitors, walking in impieties, walking according to their own lusts, incontinent.

It must be borne in mind, moreover, that these are not merely repulsive infirmities of individuals, but the essential and inevitable characteristics deliberately adopted by the craft of Freemasons, and which it cannot be without, if they are the brand which the finger of God has marked upon the loathsome brow of the Antichrist of “the last time.”[36]

In illustration of the former of these we quote the words of Brother Gotthold Salomon, D.Ph., preacher at the new Synagogue at Hamburg, member of the lodge entitled “The Dawn in the East,” in Frankfort-on-Main, who thus writes in his Stimmen aus Osten, MSS. for the brethren: “Why is there not a trace of anything appertaining to the Christian Church to be found in the whole ritual of Freemasonry? Why is not the name of Jesus once mentioned, either in the oath administered, or in the prayers on the opening of the lodges, or at the Masonic banquets? Why do Masons reckon time, not from the birth of Christ, but from the creation[158] of the world, as do the Jews? Why does not Freemasonry make use of a single Christian symbol? Why have we the compasses, the triangle, the hydrometer, instead of the cross and other emblems of the Passion? Why have wisdom, beauty, and strength superseded the Christian triad of faith, hope, and charity?”[37]

Brother Jochmus Müller, president of the late German-Catholic Church at Berlin, says in his Kirchenreform (vol. iii. p. 228): “We have more in common with a free-thinking, honest paganism than with a narrow-minded Christianity.”[38]

“The laws of the Mosaic and Christian religions are the contemptible inventions of petty minds bent on deceiving others; they are the most extravagant aberrations of the human intellect.

“The selfishness of priests and the despotism of the great have for centuries upheld this system (Christianity), since it enabled them to rule mankind with a rod of iron by means of its rigid code of morality, and to confirm their power over weak minds by means of certain oracular utterances, in reality the product of their own invention, but palmed off on the world as the words of revelation.”[39]

In a review of Kirchenlehre and Ketzerglaube by Dr. A. Drechsler in vol. iv. of the Latomia, we find: “The last efforts made to uphold ecclesiastical Christianity occasioned its complete expulsion from the realm of reason; for they proved but too plainly that all negotiations for peace must result in failure. Human reason became aware of the irreconcilable enmity existing between its own teachings and the dogmas of the church.”

At a congress of Masons held at a villa near Locarno, in the district of Novara, preparatory to a socialistic demonstration to be held in the Colosseum at Rome, in answer to the sapient question, “What new form of worship is to supersede Catholicism?” the equally sapient answer was returned, “Communist principles with a new religious ideal.”

From a document published, the author of Secret Warfare of Freemasonry tells us,[40] by the Orient of Brussels, “to the greater glory of the Supreme Architect of the world, in the year of true light 5838” (1838), we quote the following:

“1. That at the head of every document issued by the brethren, in an individual or corporate capacity, should stand a profession of faith in our lawgiver Jesus, the son of Mary Amram (the Josue of the Old Testament), the invariable formula to be employed being, ‘To the glory of the Great Architect of the Universe,’ … to expose and oppose the errors of pope and priest, who commence everything in the name of their Trinity.

“3. That in remembrance of the Last Supper or Christian love-feast of Jesus, the Son of Mary Amram, an account of which is given in the Arabic traditions and in the Koran, a solemn festival should be held, accompanied by a distribution of bread, in commemoration of an ancient custom observed by the slaves of eating bread together, and of their deliverance by means of the liberator (Josue). The distribution is to be accompanied by these memorable words: ‘This is the bread of misery and oppression[159] which our fathers were forced to eat under the Pharaos, the priests of Juda; whosoever hungers, let him come and eat; this is the Paschal sacrifice; come unto us, all you who are oppressed; yet this one year more in Babylon, and the next year shall see us free men!’ This instructive, and at the same time commemorative, supper of the Rosicrucians is the counterpart of the Supper of the Papists.”

Dr. Dupuy, indeed, informs us of the corrupt portion of the Order of Templars, that “Receptores dicebant illis quos recipiebant, Christum non esse verum Deum, et ipsum fuisse falsum, non fuisse passum pro redemptione humani generis, sed pro sceleribus suis”—“They who received said to those whom they received that Christ was not really God; that he was himself false, and did not suffer for the redemption of the human race, but for his own crimes.”

In harmony with all this was the offensively blasphemous utterance of Mr. Frothingham at the Masonic hall in this city some weeks ago, at which the New York Tablet expressed a just indignation—an indignation which must have been shared by all who believe, in any way or form, in Jesus Christ, Redeemer of the world: “Tom Paine has keyed my moral being up to a higher note than the Jesus of Nazareth.”

The argument we have advanced seems to us to be convincing enough as it stands. Could we have taken a historical survey of the μυστήριον τῆς ανομίας in the two hemispheres from the “apostasy” up to the present time, but especially during the last fifteen years, it would have acquired the force of a logical demonstration. The limits to which we are necessarily restrained in a monthly periodical put this completely out of our power. Whoever he may be who has intelligently appreciated the political events of the latter period will be able to supply the deficiency for himself. Merely hinting, therefore, at the impossibility of getting anti-Freemason appreciations of contemporary events before the public—well known to all whose position has invited them to that duty—as an illustration of the plan of action laid down in the second clause of the above summary; at the recent unconcealed advocacy of the “craft” by the New York Herald, and the more cautious conversion of the London Times,[41] of that in the third; at the ribaldry of the press under Freemason influence directed against the bishops, clergy, and prominent laymen, as well as against the Pope; the nicknames they are for ever coining, such as “clericals,” “ultramontanes,” “retrogrades,” “reactionists”; their blasphemous travesties of the solemnities of religion in theatres and places of public resort, and so on, of that in the fourth and fifth; at the world-wide effort to induce states to exclude religious influences from the education of youth, of that of the sixth; at Victor Emanuel, the Prince of Wales, etc., of that of the seventh; at the assassination of Count Rossi at the beginning of the present Pope’s reign, the quite recent assassination of the President of Ecuador, the repeated attempts at assassination of Napoleon III., the deposition of so many sovereigns, even of the Pope himself—so far as it was in their power to depose him—of that[160] of the eighth; and at the whole area of Europe strewn with the wreck of revolution, of that of the ninth; we pass on to the last two marks of Antichrist with which we brand the Freemason confraternity—Qui solvit Jesum (Who abolishes Christ) and Qui adversatur et extollitur supra omne quod dicitur Deus, aut quod colitur, ita ut in templo Dei sedeat ostendens se tanquam sit Deus (Who opposes himself to, and raises himself above, all that is called God, or is worshipped, so that he may sit in the temple of God, making himself out to be, as it were, God).

Barruel, who was completely versed in Freemasonry, and who had been himself a Mason, states (p. 222) that “the grade of Kadosch is the soul of Freemasonry, and the final object of its plots is the reintroduction of absolute liberty and equality through the destruction of all royalty and the abrogation of all religious worship.” And he backs this statement by a tragic incident in the history of a friend of his, who, because he was a Rosicrucian, fancied himself to be “in possession of the entire secret of Freemasonry.” It is too long to admit of our quoting it. The reader anxious for information we refer to The Secret Warfare of Freemasonry (pp. 142-144).

Le Libertaire, a New York paper, in the interests of Freemasonry, about the year 1858 had the following: “As far as religion is concerned, the Libertaire has none at all; he protests against every creed; he is an atheist and materialist, openly denying the existence of God and of the soul.”

Those of our readers who have some acquaintance with modern philosophy we need here only remind of the natura naturans and natura naturata of Spinoza, born a Jew, but expelled from the synagogue for his advocacy of these principles of Freemasonry: “The desire to find truth is a noble impulse, the search after it a sacred avocation; and ample field for this is offered by both the mysterious rites peculiar to the craft and those of the Goddess Isis, adored in our temples as the wisest and fairest of deities.”—Vienna Freemason’s Journal (3d year, No. 4, p. 78 et seq.)

In the Rappel, a French organ of Freemasonry, was the following passage a few weeks ago: “God is nothing but a creation of the human mind. In a word, God is the ideal. If I am accused of being an atheist, I should reply I prefer to be an atheist, and have of God an idea worthy of him, to being a spiritualist and make of God a being impossible and absurd.”

In short, the craft is so far advanced in its course of triumph as to have at length succeeded in familiarizing the public ear with the denial of the existence of a God; so that it is now admitted as one amongst the “open questions” of philosophy.

Our illustration of the crowning indications of the satanic mark of Antichrist afforded by the Freemasons—the sitting in the temple of God, so as to make himself out to be, as it were, God—will be short but decisive.

The well-known passage in the last work of the late Dr. Strauss, to the effect that any worship paid to a supposed divine being is an outrage on the dignity of human nature, goes far enough, we should have thought, in this direction; but they go beyond even this.

A Dutch Mason, N. J. Mouthan, in a work entitled Naa een werknur in’t Middenvertrek Losse Bladzijde; Zaarboekje voor Nederlandsche Vrijmetselaren (5872, p. 187 et seq.), says: “The spirit which animates us is an eternal spirit; it knows no division of time or individual existence. A sacred unity pervades the wide firmament of heaven; it is our one calling, our one duty, our one God. Yes, we are God! We ourselves are God!”

In the Freemasons’ periodical “for circulation amongst the brethren” (Altenberg, 1823, vol. i., No. 1) is the following: “The idea of religion indirectly includes all men as men; but in order to comprehend this aright, a certain degree of education is necessary, and unfortunately the overweening egoism of the educated classes prevents their taking in so sublime a conception of mankind. For this reason our temples consecrated to the worship of humanity can as yet be opened only to a few.[42] We should, indeed, expose ourselves to a charge of idolatry, were we to attempt to personify the moral idea of humanity in the way in which divinity is usually personified.… On this account, therefore, it is advisable not to reveal the cultus of humanity to the eyes of the uninitiated, until at length the time shall come when, from east to west, this lofty conception of humanity shall find a place in every breast, this worship shall alone prevail, and all mankind shall be gathered into one fold and one family.”

The principles of this united family, “seated in the temple of God,” the Masonic philosopher Helvetius expounds to us; from whom we learn that “whatever is beneficial to all in general may be called virtue; what is prejudicial, vice and sin. Here the voice of interest has alone to speak.… Passions are only the intensified expression of self-interest in the individual; witness the Dutch people, who, when hatred and revenge urged them to action, achieved great triumphs, and made their country a powerful and glorious name. And as sensual love is universally acknowledged to afford happiness, purity must be condemned as pernicious, the marriage bond done away with, and children declared to be the property of the state.”[43] The father of such a “one fold and one family” no one not himself signed with the “mark of the beast” could hesitate to point out. The consummation above anticipated we are bid to expect. Nor is it now far off. They who are not “deceived” have, however, the consoling assurance that our Lord will “slay him with the spirit of his mouth, and destroy him with the illumination of his coming.”

SIR THOMAS MORE.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

II.

“You understand, M. de Soria,” said Wolsey to one of his secretaries, in whom he placed the greatest confidence. “As soon as you see him, present yourself before him, give the usual password, and then conduct him through the subterranean passage that leads to the banks of the Thames. Bring him here by the secret stairway. He will be dressed in a cloak and suit of brown clothes, wearing a black felt hat tied round with a red ribbon.”

“My lord, you may feel perfectly satisfied,” replied the secretary with a self-sufficient air, “that all your orders will be punctually executed. But he cannot possibly arrive for an hour yet; I will vouch for that, my lord.”

“Go, however, sir,” replied the minister, impatiently; “I fear being taken by surprise. Have less confidence in your own calculations, sir, and be more prompt in your actions.” And saying this he made a sign for him to go at once.

The door had scarcely closed on Soria, when the cardinal, who sat writing in silence, heard in the court of the chancellor’s palace an unusual noise. For some time he continued his work; but the tumult increasing, and hearing loud bursts of laughter, he arose, opened the window and went out on a high balcony, whence he had a view of all that was passing in the principal court.

There a crowd of servants had assembled, and formed a circle around an old woman who was apparently the object of their ridicule. Her large felt hat, around which was tied a band of red ribbon, had fallen to the ground leaving uncovered, not the head of an old woman, as they had supposed, but one thickly covered with short hair, black and curling.

On seeing this head-dress the crowd redoubled their cries, and one of them advancing suddenly, raised the mask concealing the features. What was their surprise to find under that disguise a great rubicund face, the nose and cheeks of which were reddened with the glow that wine and strong drink alone produce, and giving sufficient evidence of the sex to which it belonged. The man, seeing he was discovered, defended himself with vigor, and, dealing sharp blows with his feet and hands, endeavored to escape from his tormentors; but he was unable to resist their superior numbers. They threw themselves upon him, tearing off his brown cloak, and one of his blue cotton petticoats. The wretched creature cried out vociferously, loudly threatening them with the indignation of the cardinal; but the valets heard nothing, vain were all his efforts to escape them. Nevertheless, being exceedingly robust, he at length succeeded in overthrowing[163] two of his antagonists, and then, dashing across the courtyard, he sprang quickly into the second court, where, finding a ladder placed at the window of a granary, he clambered up with all the dexterity of a frightened cat, and hid himself under a quantity of straw which had been stored there. In the meantime, the cardinal had recognized from his elevated position on the balcony the red ribbon that announced the messenger for whom he awaited with so much anxiety. Greatly enraged at the scene before him, and forgetting his dignity, he hurried from the balcony, rushing through the apartments that led from his own room (in which were seated the numerous secretaries of state, engaged in the work of the government). Without addressing a word to them, he descended the stairs so rapidly that in another instant he stood in the midst of his servants, who were stupefied at finding themselves in the presence of their master, all out of breath, bareheaded, and almost suffocated with indignation. He commanded them in the most emphatic terms to get out of his sight, which they did without waiting for a repetition of the order. From every direction the pages and secretaries had assembled, among them being M. de Soria, who was in great trepidation, fearing some accident had happened to the individual whom he had been instructed to introduce with such great secrecy into the palace. His fears were more than realized on seeing the cardinal, who cast on him a glance of intense anger, and in a loud voice exclaimed: “Go, sir, to the assistance of this unfortunate man who is being subjected to such outrages in my own house. Not a few of those who have attempted to drive him off shall themselves be sent away!” Then the cardinal, giving an authoritative signal, those around him understood that their presence was no longer desired, and immediately ascended the stairs and returned to their work.

Wolsey himself quickly followed them; and M. de Soria, greatly confused, in a short time appeared and ushered into the minister’s cabinet the messenger, who was still suffering from the effects of the contest in which he had been compelled to engage.

“Your letters! your letters!” said Wolsey eagerly, as soon as they were alone. “All is right, Wilson. I am satisfied. I see that you are no coward, and all that you have just now suffered will be turned to your advantage. Nevertheless, it is quite fortunate that I came to your rescue when I did, for I really do not know what those knaves might have done to you.”

“They would have thrown me into the water, I believe, like a dog,” said Wilson, laughing. “Oh! that was nothing though. I have been through worse than that in my life. All I was afraid of was, that they might discover the package of letters and the money.”

As he said this, the courier proceeded to unfasten the buckles of an undervest, made of chamois leather, that he wore closely strapped around his body. After he had taken off the vest he unfastened a number of bands of woollen cloth which were crossed on his breast. In each one of these bands was folded a great number of letters, of different forms and sizes. Then he unstrapped from his waist and laid on the table a belt that contained quite a large sum of money in gold coin, that Francis I. had sent to the minister.[164] The avarice of Wolsey was so well understood by the different princes and sovereigns of Europe that they were accustomed to send him valuable presents, or to confer on him rich annuities, whenever they wished to gain him over to their interests. Wolsey had for a long time been engaged in a correspondence with France. He carried it on with the utmost secrecy, for he well understood if discovered by Henry he would never be pardoned. His apprehensions were still greater, now that he was endeavoring to direct the influence of his political schemes, and that of the paid agents whom he had at the different courts of Europe, towards bringing about a reconciliation between the Emperor Charles V. and the King of France; hoping by such an alliance to prevent the marriage of the king with Anne Boleyn, and thus to destroy the hopes of that ambitious family. He saw with intense satisfaction his intrigues succeeding far beyond his most sanguine expectations.

Francis I. anxiously entreated him to use his influence with the King of England, in order to dispose him favorably toward the treaty of peace which he was determined to make with Charles V. “I assure you,” he wrote, “that I have so great a desire to see my children, held so long now as hostages, that I would without hesitation willingly give the half of my kingdom to ensure that happiness. If you will aid me in removing the obstacles that Henry may interpose to the accomplishment of this purpose, you may count on my gratitude. The place of meeting is already arranged; we have chosen the city of Cambrai; and I have felt great pleasure in the assurance that you prefer, above all other places, that the conference should be held in that city.” Charmed with his success, the cardinal sent immediately in quest of Cromwell, whom he found every day becoming more and more indispensable to him, and to whom he wished to communicate the happiness he experienced in receiving this joyful intelligence; but, at the same time, closely concealing the manner in which he had obtained the information.

On a terrace of Windsor Castle a tent had been erected of heavy Persian cloth interwoven with silk and gold. Voluminous curtains of royal purple, artistically looped on each side with heavy silk cords, descended in innumerable folds of most graceful drapery. Rare flowers embalmed the air in every direction with exquisite perfumes, which penetrated into an apartment of the royal palace, through the open windows of which were seen the richness and elegance of the interior.

In this apartment were seated three persons apparently engaged in an animated conversation.

“So there is yet another difficulty!” cried a young girl, a charming and beautiful blonde, who seemed at this moment in an extremely impatient and excited mood. “But what say you?” she added presently, addressing herself with vivacity to a gentleman seated immediately in front of her; “speak now, Sir Cromwell; say, what would you do in this desperate situation? Is there no way in which we can prevent this treaty from being concluded?”

“Well truly, madam,” he replied, “it will be useless to attempt it. The Duchess of Angoulême has at this moment, perhaps, already arrived at[165] Cambrai, for the purpose of signing the treaty; and we cannot reasonably hope that the Archduchess Margaret, who accompanies her, will not agree with her on every point, since the preliminaries have already been secretly concluded between the Emperor and the King of France.”

“Well, my dear Cromwell,” she replied, in a familiar and angry tone, “what shall we do then?”

“If I have any counsel to give you, madam,” answered Cromwell, with an air of importance, “it is to begin by preventing the king from consenting to the departure of Cardinal Wolsey; because his greatest desire now is to be sent as envoy to the congress at Cambrai, and you may be well assured, if he wishes to go there, it is certainly not with the intention of being useful to you, but, on the contrary, to injure you.”

“Do you think so?” replied Lady Anne. “Then I shall most certainly endeavor to prevent him from making his appearance there. But has he told you nothing about the letter I wrote him the other day?”

“Excuse me, madam,” replied Cromwell, “he has shown me the letter; in fact, he conceals nothing from me.”

“Well! and did it not give him pleasure? It seemed to me it ought to please him, for I made protestations of friendship sufficient to reassure him, and remove all apprehensions he may have felt that I would injure him in the estimation of the king.”

“He has said nothing to me on the subject,” replied Cromwell, “but I remarked that he read the letter over several times, and when he handed it to me it was with a very ominous shake of the head. Understanding so well his every gesture and thought, I comprehended perfectly he was but little convinced of what you had written, and that he has no confidence in it. Moreover, madam, it is necessary that you should know that Wolsey has been most active in his endeavors to forward the divorce so long as he believed the king would espouse a princess of the house of France; but since he knows it is you he has chosen, his mind is entirely changed, and he tries in every possible manner to retard the decision and render success impossible.”

“It is clear as day, my dear sister!” exclaimed Lord Rochford, earnestly interrupting Cromwell. “You know nothing about the affairs you are trying to manage; therefore you will never be able to rid yourself of this imperious minister. I have already told you that all your efforts to flatter or appease him will be in vain. He believes you fear him, and he likes you no better on that account. What Cromwell says is but too true, and is verified by the fact that nothing advances in this affair. Every day some new formalities are introduced, or advantages claimed, or they wait for new instructions and powers. They tell us constantly that Campeggio is inflexible; that nothing will induce him to deviate from his instructions and the usages of the court of Rome. But whom has he chosen—with whom has he conferred? Is it not Wolsey? And he has certainly prevented us from obtaining anything but what he himself designed to accomplish.”

“You are right, brother!” cried Anne Boleyn, with a sudden gesture of displeasure. “It is necessary to have this haughty and jealous[166] minister removed. Henceforth all my efforts shall be directed to this end. It may, perhaps, be less difficult than we suppose. The king has been violently opposed to this treaty, which Wolsey has so earnestly labored to bring about—or at least the king suspects him of it—and he told me yesterday that it was vain for the king of France to address him as ‘his good brother and perpetual ally,’ for he regarded as enemies all who presumed to oppose his will. ‘Because,’ he added, ‘I understand very well, beforehand, what their terms will be. Once become the ally of Charles V., Francis will use all his efforts to prevent the repudiation of his aunt; but nothing under heaven shall divert me from my purpose. I will resist all the counsels he may give me!’”

“He is much disappointed,” said Lord Rochford, “that the Pope should have been raised, as it were, from the dead. His death would have greatly lessened these difficulties; for he holds firmly to his opinions. I am much deceived, or the commission of legates will pass all their time, and a very long time too, without coming to any decision.”

As Lord Rochford made this remark, his wife, the sister-in-law of Anne Boleyn, entered the apartment, accompanied by the young wife of Lord Dacre. Now, as Lady Rochford belonged entirely to the queen’s adherents, and Lady Anne was very much in fear of her, the tone of conversation was immediately changed, becoming at once general and indifferent.

“The Bishop of Rochester has returned to London,” carelessly remarked Anne Boleyn, as she stooped to pick up a little embroidered glove.

“Yes, madam,” replied Cromwell. “I have seen him, and I find him looking quite old and feeble.”

“Ah! I am truly sorry to hear it,” replied Lady Anne; “the king is very much attached to him. I have often heard him say he regarded him as the most learned and remarkable man in England, and that he congratulated himself on possessing in his kingdom a prelate so wise, virtuous, and accomplished.”

“What would you wish, madam?” replied Cromwell, who never could suffer any one to be eulogized in his presence; “all these old men should give place to us—it is but just; they have had their time.”

“Ah! Sir Cromwell,” replied Lady Boleyn, smiling, “you have no desire, I am sure, to be made bishop; therefore, the place he will leave vacant will not be the one for you.”

“You have decided that question very hastily, madam. Who knows? I may one day, perhaps, be a curate. It has been predicted of me.”

“Oh! that would indeed be a very strange sight,” she replied, laughing aloud. “You certainly have neither the turn nor the taste for the office. How would you ever manage to leave off the habit of frequenting our drawing-rooms? Truly we could not afford to lose you, and would certainly get up a general revolt, opposing your ordination, rather than be deprived of your invaluable society.”

“You are very kind, madam,” said Cromwell; “but I should perhaps not be so ridiculous as you imagine. I should wear a grave and severe countenance and an air of the greatest austerity.”

“Oh! I understand you now,” she replied; “you would not be[167] converted; you would only become a hypocrite!”

“And I also,” replied Lady Anne. “I have a perfect detestation of hypocrites; it is better to be bad out and out!”

“Yes, madam,” replied Cromwell; “but it was suppressed on the spot. It was only a hundred wool-spinners, carders, and drapers, who declared they were no longer able to live since the market of the Netherlands has been closed, and that they would soon starve if their old communications were not re-established. The most mutinous were arrested, the others were frightened and quickly dispersed.”

“Oh!” said Lord Rochford, “there is nothing to fear from such a rabble as that; they are too much afraid of their necks. Let them clamor, and let us give ourselves no uneasiness on the subject. I met Sir Thomas More this morning going to the king with a petition which they had addressed to him yesterday.”

“He constitutes, then, part of our city council?” she replied. “He is a man I have the greatest desire to know; they say such marvellous things of him, and I find his poetry full of charming and noble thoughts.”

“I see,” replied Cromwell, “you have not read the spirited satire just written by Germain de Brie? It points out the perfectly prodigious faults of More’s productions. It is certainly an anti-Morus!”

“I am inclined to think your opinion is prompted by a spirit of jealousy, Sir Cromwell,” answered Lady Rochford, sharply. “Read, madam,” she continued, addressing young Lady Sophia Dacre, “his History of Richard III.; I suppose Sir Cromwell will, at least, accord some merit to that work?”

“Entirely too light, and superficial indeed, madam,” said Cromwell; “the author has confined himself wholly to a recital of the crimes which conducted the prince to the throne. The style of that history is very negligent, but, at the same time, very far above that of his other works, and particularly of his Utopia, which is a work so extravagant, a political system so impracticable, that I regard the book simply as a wonderful fable, agreeable enough to listen to, but at which one is obliged to laugh afterwards when thinking of the absurdities it contains.”

“Your judgment is as invidious as it is false!” exclaimed Lady Rochford, who always expressed her opinions bluntly, and without dissimulation. “If it is true,” she continued, “that this philosophical dream can never be realized, yet it is nevertheless impossible not to admire the wise and virtuous maxims it contains. Above all others there is one I have found so just, and so beautifully conceived, I could wish every young girl capable of teaching it to her future husband. ‘How can it be supposed,’ says the author, ‘that any man of honor and refinement could resolve to abandon a virtuous woman, who had been the companion of his bosom, and in whose society he had passed so many days of happiness;[168] only because time, at whose touch all things fade, had laid his destroying hand upon the lovely features of that gentle wife, once so cherished and adored? Because age, which has been the first and most incurable of all the infirmities she has been compelled to drag after her, had forcibly despoiled her of the charming freshness of her youth? Has that husband not enjoyed the flower of her beauty and garnered in the most beautiful days of her life, and will he forsake his wife now because she has become feeble, delicate, and suffering? Shall he become inconstant and perjured at the very moment when her sad condition demands of him a thousand sacrifices, and claims a return to the faithful devotion and vows of his early youth? Ah! into such a depth of unworthiness and degradation we will not presume it possible for any man to descend! It was thus the people of the Utopian Isle reasoned, declaring it would be the height of injustice and barbarity to abandon one whom we had loved and cherished, and who had been so devoted to us, at the moment when suffering and affliction demanded of us renewed sympathy and a generous increase of our tenderest care and consolations!’[44] And now, my dear sister,” she added, fixing her eyes steadfastly on Lady Boleyn, “what do you think of that passage? Are you not forcibly struck by the truth and justice of the sentiment? Let me advise you when you marry to be well satisfied beforehand that your husband entertains the same opinions.”

As she heard these last words the beautiful face of Anne Boleyn became suddenly suffused with a deep crimson, and for some moments not a word was uttered by any one around her. They understood perfectly well that Lady Rochford’s remarks were intended to condemn in the most pointed manner the king’s conduct towards the queen, whose failing health was entirely attributable to the mortification and suffering she endured on account of her husband’s ingratitude and ill-treatment.

In the meantime, the silence becoming every moment more and more embarrassing, Anne Boleyn, forcibly assuming an air of gayety, declared her sister was disposed to look very far into the future; “but,” she added, “happily, my dear sister, neither you nor I are in a condition to demand all those tender cares due to age and infirmity.”

“Come, ladies, let us go,” said Cromwell in a jesting tone, hoping to render himself agreeable to Lady Anne by relieving the embarrassment the conversation had caused her. “I am unable to express my admiration for Lady Rochford. She understands too well the practice of the Utopian laws not to wish for the position of Dean of the Doctors of the University of Oxford.”

“You are very complimentary and jocose, sir,” replied Lady Rochford; “and if you wish it, I will introduce you to one who will be personally necessary if you should ever aspire to fill a position in that kingdom. You must know, however, that their wise law-giver, Utopia, while he accorded to each one liberty of conscience, confined that liberty within legitimate and righteous bounds, in order to prevent the promulgation of the pernicious doctrines of pretended philosophers, who endeavor to debase the dignity of our exalted human[169] nature; he also severely condemned every opinion tending to degenerate into pure materialism, or, what is more deplorable still, veritable atheism. The Utopians were taught to believe in the reality of a future state, and in future rewards and punishments. They detested and denounced all who presumed to deny these truths, and, far from admitting them to the rank of citizens, they refused even to class among men those who debased themselves to the abject condition of vile animals. ‘What,’ they asked, ‘can be done with a creature devoid of principle and without faith, whose only restraint is fear of punishment, who without that fear would violate every law and trample under foot those wise rules and regulations which alone constitute the bulwark of social order and happiness? What confidence can be reposed in an individual purely sensual, living without morals and without hope, recognizing no obligation but to himself alone; who limits his happiness to the present moment; whose God is his body; whose law, his own pleasures and passions, in the gratification of which he is at all times ready to proceed to the extremity of crime, provided he can find means of escaping the vigilant eye of justice, and be a villain with impunity? Such infamous characters are of course excluded from all participation in municipal affairs, and all positions of honor and public trust; they are veritable automatons, abandoned to the “error of their ways,” wretched, wandering “cumberers of the earth” on which they live!’ You perceive, Sir Cromwell,” continued Lady Rochford ironically, “that my profound knowledge and retentive memory may prove very useful to you, should you ever arrive at the Utopian Isle, for you must be convinced that your own opinions would meet with very little favor in that country.”

Cromwell, humiliated to the last degree, vainly endeavored to reply with his usual audacity and spirit. Finding all efforts to recover his self-possession impossible, he stammered forth a few incoherent words, and hastily took his leave.

The desire of winning the approbation of Anne Boleyn at the expense of her sister-in-law had caused him to commit a great blunder, and he received nothing in return to remove the caustic arrows from his humiliated and deeply wounded spirit. Extremely brilliant and animated in conversation, Lady Rochford was accustomed to “having the laugh entirely on her own side,” which, knowing so very well, Anne had pretended not to understand the conversation, although the remarks had been so very piquant.

As soon as he had retired Cromwell became the subject of conversation, and Anne timidly, and with no little hesitation, ventured to remonstrate with her sister-in-law, expressing her regret that the conversation should have been made so personal, as she liked Cromwell very much.

“And that is just what you are wrong in doing,” replied Lady Rochford; “for he is a deceitful and dangerous man! He pretends to be extremely devoted to you, but it is only because he believes he can make you useful to himself; and he is full of avarice and ambition. This you will discover when it is perhaps too late, and I advise you to reflect seriously on the subject. It is so cruel to be mistaken in the choice of a friend that, truly, the surer and better way[170] would seem to be, to form no friendships at all! There are so few, so very few, whose affections are pure and disinterested, that they scarcely ever withstand the ordeal of misfortune, or the loss of those extraneous advantages with which they found us surrounded.”

“You speak like a book, my dear sister,” cried Lady Boleyn, laughing aloud; “just like a book that has been sent me from France, with such beautiful silver clasps.”

Saying this, she ran to fetch the book, which she had opened that evening in the middle, not having sufficient curiosity to examine the title or inquire the name of the author of the volume. She opened it naturally at the same place, and read what follows, which was, as far as could be discovered, the fragment of a letter:

“You ask me for the definition of a friend! In reply, I am compelled to declare that the term has become so vague and so obscure, it has been used in so many senses, and applied to so many persons, I shall first be obliged to give you a description of what is called a friend in the world—a title equivalent, in my estimation, to the most complete indifference, intermingled at the same time with no insignificant degree of envy and jealousy. For instance, I hear M. de Clèves speaking of his friend M. Joyeuse, and he remarks simply: ‘I know more about him than anybody else; I have been his most intimate friend for a great many years; he is meanly avaricious—I have reproached him for it a hundred times.’ A little further on, and I hear the great Prof. de Chaumont exclaim, ‘Valentino d’Alsinois is a most charming woman; everybody is devoted to her. But this popularity cannot last long—she is full of vanity; intolerably conceited and silly; it really amuses me!’ I go on still further, and meet a friend who takes me enthusiastically by both hands: ‘Oh! I expected a visit from you yesterday, and was quite in despair that you did not come! You know how delighted I always am to see you, and how highly I appreciate your visits!’ But I happen to have very keen eyes, and an ear extremely acute and delicate; and I distinctly heard her whisper to her friend as I approached them, ‘How fortunate I have been to escape this visit!’ What a change! I did not think it could last long. Well, with friends like these you will find the world crowded; they will obstruct, so to speak, every hour of your life; but it is rare indeed to encounter one who is true and loyal, a friend of the heart! A man truly virtuous: and sincerely religious is alone capable of comprehending and loving with pure and exalted friendship. A man of the world, on the contrary, accustomed to refer everything to himself, and consulting his own desires, becomes his own idol, and on the altar of self offers up the only sincere worship of which his sordid soul is capable. And you will find he will always end by sacrificing to his own interests and passions the dearest interests of the being who confided in his friendship.

“But with the sincere and earnest friend, love and gratitude are necessities of his nature; they constitute the unbroken chain which links all pure and reasonable friendship. He will assist his friend in all emergencies, for he has assumed in a manner even his responsibilities. He will never flatter; his counsel and advice, on the contrary, may be severely administered, because it is impossible to be happy without being[171] virtuous, and the happiness of his friend is as dear to him as his own. He is ready to sacrifice his own interests to those of his friend, and none would dare attack his friend’s reputation in his presence; for they know he will defend and sustain him under all circumstances, sympathizing in his misfortunes, mingling tears with his tears—in a word, that it is another self whom they would presume to attack.

“Death itself cannot dissolve the ties of such an affection—the soul, nearer to God, will continue to implore unceasingly for him the divine benediction. Oh! what joy, what happiness, to participate in a friendship so pure and exalted! He who can claim one such friend possesses a source of unbounded joy, and an inexhaustible consolation of which cruel adversity can never deprive him. If prosperity dazzles him with its dangerous splendor, if sorrow pierce him with her dart, if melancholy annihilate the life of his soul, then ever near him abides this friend, like a precious gift which God alone had power to bestow!”

Queen Catherine was walking in that portion of the vast grounds of Greenwich called the Queen’s Garden, which in happier days had often been her favorite retreat. Jets of limpid water (conveyed by means of pipes through the grounds) burst in every direction, and then fell in silvery showers among the lovely parterres of flowers, and covered the green velvet turf with a glittering veil of diamond-like spray. On the bosom of the murmuring waters floated myriads of leaves and flowers, flung with gentle hand by the wooing breeze, while thousands of gold fishes sported amid their crystal depths. The eye of the stranger was at once arrested and ravished by these marvels of nature and art, admiring the power and riches thus united; but the queen, with slow and painful steps, only sought this solitude for liberty there to indulge her tears in silence and oblivion.

At no great distance Mary, full of joy, engaged in the sportive plays of the ladies of the queen. A golden insect or a brilliant butterfly was the only conquest to which she aspired. Gaily flitting from place to place, with step so light that her little feet scarcely impressed the delicate white sand covering the walks, her shouts of expectation and happiness were still powerless to rejoice the maternal heart.

Catherine hastily withdrew from the scene. Fatigued and worn with suffering, she regarded with painful indifference all that surrounded her.

In the meantime one of the gardeners advanced towards her and presented a bouquet.

“Give it,” said she, “to one of my ladies.” And she turned away; but the gardener would not withdraw. “The queen does not recognize me,” he said at length in a low voice.

“Ah! More,” exclaimed Catherine, greatly agitated. “Friend always faithful! But why expose yourself thus to serve me? Go on. I will follow!” And Catherine continued her walk until she reached a wide and extended avenue planted with venerable old lindens.

“More,” she exclaimed, trembling with fear, yet still indulging a slight hope, “what have you to tell me? Speak, oh! speak quickly! I fear we may be observed; every step of mine is watched.”

“Madam,” cried More, “a general peace has been concluded. The emperor’s difficulty with the Holy See is ended; he consents to surrender all the conquered territory originally belonging to the Ecclesiastical States. He binds himself to re-establish the dominion of the Medici in Florence; he abandons Sforza, leaving the Pope absolute master of the destiny of that prince and the sovereignty of the Milanese. Urged on by these concessions, the two princesses cut short their negotiations, and the treaty between France and Austria was concluded immediately. Your appeal and protestation have been despatched, and conveyed safely out of the kingdom. The messenger to whom they were entrusted was most rigorously searched, but the papers were so securely and adroitly concealed they were not discovered. They were carried to Antwerp by Peter Gilles, the ‘friend of my heart,’ and from thence he despatched them to Rome. Hope, therefore hope; let us all hope!”

“Ah! More,” replied the queen, who had listened with deep anxiety, “would that I were able to acknowledge your services as I appreciate them. Your friendship has been my only consolation. But I know not why it is, hope every day grows more and more faint in my heart. And so utterly insensible to joy have I become that it seems now I am incapable of aught but suffering, and that for me I fear greater sorrow is to be added.”

“What do you say, madam?” replied More. “How sadly discouraging and painful to your servants to hear such reflections from you at the very moment when everything becomes favorable to your cause. The emperor will use his influence at the court of Rome, and Francis, between the two allies, will at least be forced to remain neutral.”

“They were very hard and exacting,” replied More. “The king of France entirely renounces his pretensions to Burgundy and Italy; thus nine years of war, the battle of Pavia, and a humiliating captivity, become of no avail. He sacrifices all, even his allies. Fearing to add to these harsh conditions the reconciliation of their interests, he abandoned to the mercy of the emperor, without the slightest stipulation, the Venetians, the Florentines, the Duke of Ferrara, and the Neapolitan barons who were attached to his arms.”

“What a cruel error!” exclaimed the queen. “The prince has surely forgotten that even in political and state affairs, he who once sacrifices his friends cannot hope to recall them ever again to his support. It is very evident that he has not more prudent nor wise counsellors in his cabinet than skilful and accomplished generals in the field. Who now among them all can be compared with Pescaire, Anthony de Lêve, or the Prince of Orange?”

“He might have had them, madam, if his own negligence and the wickedness of his courtiers had not alienated and driven them away. The Constable of Bourbon, Moran, and Doria would have powerfully counterbalanced the talents and influence of the chiefs you have just named, had the king of France engaged them in his own cause, instead of having to encounter them in the ranks of his enemies. His undaunted courage and personal[173] valor, however, have alone caused the unequal and hopeless contest to be so long continued.”

“That is just as I suspected,” replied the queen. “Yes, it is because he foresees new obstacles to the unjust divorce he is prosecuting with so much ardor. O More!” she continued, bursting into tears, “what have I done to merit such cruel treatment? When I look back on the happy years of my youth, the years when he loved me so tenderly; when I recall the devoted and affectionate demonstrations of those days, and compare them with the actual rudeness and severity of the present, my bleeding heart is crushed by this sorrow! What have I done, More, to lose thus so suddenly and entirely my husband’s affection? It is true, the freshness of my early youth has faded, but was it to such ephemeral advantages alone I owed his devotion? Can a marriage be contracted by a man with the intention of dissolving it as soon as the personal attractions, the youthful charms, of his wife have faded? Oh! it seems to me it should be just the contrary, and that the hour of affliction should only call forth deeper proofs of affection. No, More, no! neither you nor any other of my friends will be able to accomplish anything for me. I feel that my life is rapidly ebbing away; that my spirit is crushed and broken for ever. For admitting, even, that Henry will not be successful in his attempt to sever the sacred bonds of our union, what happiness could I ever hope to enjoy near one to whom I had become an object of aversion—who would behold in me only an invincible obstacle to his will and the gratification of his criminal and disorderly passions?”

“Alas! madam,” replied More, “we are all grieved at the contemplation of the great affliction by which you are overwhelmed, and how much do we wish the expression of our sympathy and devotion had power to relieve you. But remember the Princess of Wales—you will surely never cease to defend her rights.”

“Never, never!” exclaimed the queen passionately. “That is the sole inducement I have once more to arouse myself—it sustains my courage and animates my resolution, when health and spirits both fail. O More! could you but know all that passes in the depths of my soul; could you but realize, for one moment, the anguish and agony, the deep interior humiliation, into which I am plunged! Oh! fatal and for ever unfortunate day when I left my country and the royal house of my father! Why was I not born in obscurity? Would not my life then have passed quietly and without regret? Far from the tumult of the world and the éclat of thrones, I should have been extremely happy. Now I am dying broken-hearted and unknown.”

“Is it really yourself, madam,” answered More, “who thus gives way to such weakness? Truly, it is unworthy of your rank, and still more of your virtues. When adversity overtakes us, we should summon all our courage and resolution. You are our queen, and you should remember your daughter is born sovereign of this realm, beneath whose soil our buried forefathers sleep. No, no! Heaven will never permit the blood of such a race to be sullied[174] by that of an ambitious and degraded woman. That noble race will triumph, be assured of it; and in that triumph the honor of our country will shine forth with renewed glory and splendor. I swear it by my head, and hope it in my heart!” As he said these words, footsteps were heard, and Catherine perceived the king coming towards them. She turned instantly pale, but, remaining calm in the dangerous crisis, made a sign for More to withdraw. The king immediately approached her, and, observing with heartless indifference the traces of recent tears on her cheek, exclaimed:

“Always in tears!” Then, assuming a playful manner, he continued: “Come, Kate, you must confess that you are always singularly sad and depressed, and the walls of a convent would suit you much better than this beautiful garden. You have in your hand a fine bouquet; I see at least you still love flowers.”

“Well,” said Henry, “I do not mean to reproach you, but it would be advisable not to hold those roses so close to your cheek; the contrast might be unfavorable—is it not so, my old Kate? Have you seen the falcons just sent me from Scotland? They are of a very rare species, and trained to perfection. I am going out now to try them.”

“Adieu, Kate,” he continued, proceeding on his way, and giving in the exuberance of his spirits a flourish with his trumpet. Very soon the notes of the hunting-horns announced his arrival in the outer courtyard. He found there assembled a crowd of lords and pages, followed by falconers, carrying the new birds on their wrists. These birds were fettered, and wore on their heads little leathern hoods, which were to be removed at the moment they mounted in the air in search of their accustomed prey.

In a very short time the party rode off, and Catherine thoughtfully entered the palace, thinking it was a long time since the king had shown himself so indulgent and gracious towards her.

“Are you well assured of the truth of these statements?” said the king, returning Cromwell a letter he had just read. “No! I will not believe it,” he cried, stamping his foot violently on the richly-tessellated floor of his cabinet. “I certainly hoped to have gained the legate over.”

“But your majesty may no longer indulge in this illusion,” replied Cromwell, who stood before the king in an attitude the most humble and servile possible to assume. “You are furnished with incontrovertible proof; Campeggio, in order to escape your imperious commands, urges the Pope to evoke the trial to his own tribunal. Of this there is no doubt, for this copy of his letter I received from the hand of his confidential secretary.”

“You are very adroit, sir,” replied the king, haughtily. “Later, I will consider the manner of rewarding you. But I declare to you your patron is on the brink of ruin. I shall never pardon him for permitting that protest and appeal of the queen to reach Rome.”

“That was truly an unfortunate affair,” replied Cromwell; “but it was perhaps not the fault of my lord, Cardinal Wolsey.”

“Whose fault was it then?” demanded Henry in the imperious[175] tone he used to disconcert this spy whenever his reports displeased him.

“The queen has friends,” replied Cromwell, whilst on his thin, colorless lips hovered a false and treacherous smile, worthy of the wicked instinct that prompted and directed all his suspicions, and made him foresee the surest plan of injuring those whom he envied or destroying those whose reputation he intended to attack.

“And who are they?” demanded the king, his ill-humor increasing with the reflection. “Why do you not name them, sir?”

“Well, for instance, Sir Thomas More, whom your Majesty loads with favors and distinctions, the Bishop of Rochester, the Duke of Norfolk, and the.…”

“You will soon accuse my entire court, and each one of my servants in particular,” cried the king; “and in order still more to exasperate and astound me, you have taken particular pains to select and name those whom I most esteem, and who have always given me the sincerest proofs of their devoted affection. Go!” he suddenly cried in a furious tone; and he fell into one of those wild transports of rage that frequently attacked him when his will clashed against obstacles which he foresaw he could neither surmount nor destroy. He often passed entire days absorbed in these moods of violence, shut up in his own apartments, suffering none to speak to or approach him nor on any account to attempt to divert him.

Abashed and alarmed, Cromwell hastily withdrew, stammering the most humble apologies, none of which, however, reached the ear of Henry VIII., who, on returning to his chamber, raving in a demoniacal manner, exclaimed:

“Vile slaves! you shall be taught to know and to respect my power. I will make you sorely repent the hour you have dared to oppose me!”

Just as he had uttered this threatening exclamation, Cardinal Wolsey appeared. He could not have chosen a more inauspicious moment. The instant he beheld him, the king, glaring on him with flashing eyes, cried out:

“Traitor! what has brought you here? Do you know the ambassadors of Charles and Ferdinand, fortified by the queen’s appeal and protest, have overthrown all I had accomplished at Rome with so much precaution and difficulty? Why have you not foreseen these contingencies, and known that the Pope would prove inflexible? Why have you not advised me against undertaking an almost impossible thing, which will sully the honor of my name and obscure for all time the glory of my reign.”

“Stop, sire,” replied Wolsey; “I do not deserve these cruel reproaches. You can readily recall how earnestly I endeavored to dissuade you from your purpose, but all my efforts were vain.”

“It is false!” cried the king, giving vent to his rage in the most shocking and violent expressions he could command, to inflict upon his minister. “And now,” he continued, “remember well, if you fail to extort from your legate such a decision as I require, you shall speedily be taught what it is to deride my commands.”

The sun had scarcely risen above the horizon when already Cardinal Campeggio (whose age and infirmities had not changed the long habits of an austere and laborious life) was silently kneeling in the[176] midst of the choir of the palace chapel.

The velvet cushions of his prie-dieu protected him from the cold marble of the sacred pavement, while the rays of the rising sun, descending in luminous jets through the arches of the antique windows, fell on the head of the venerable old man, giving him the appearance of being surrounded by a halo of celestial light. His eyes were cast down, and he seemed to be entirely absorbed in pious and profound meditation.

Other thoughts, however, intruded on his agitated mind, and filled him with anxious apprehension. “The hour rapidly approaches,” he mentally exclaimed—“the hour when it will be essential to come to a decision. I have still hoped to receive a reply—it has not yet arrived. I alone am made responsible, and doubtless the wrath of the king will burst upon my head. His vengeance will be terrible. More than once already he has taken occasion to manifest it. What cruel incertitude! What dreadful suspense! Yet what shall be done? Speak! O my conscience!” he exclaimed, “let me listen, and be guided by thy voice alone!”

“Despise the power of the king who demands of thee an injustice,” immediately replied that faithful monitor whose stern and inflexible voice will be summoned to testify against us at the last judgment. “Sayest thou, thou art afraid? Then thou hast forgotten that the last even of those gray hairs still remaining to thee cannot fall without the permission of him who created the universe. Know that the anger of man is but as a vain report—a sound that vanishes in space; and that God permits thee not to hesitate for one instant, O judge! when the cause of the feeble and the innocent claims all the strength of thy protection.”

Irrevocably decided, Campeggio continued his prayer, and waited without further apprehension the decisive moment, so rapidly approaching.

In the meantime, another cardinal, Wolsey, in great anguish of mind, contemplated with terror the approaching day when he would be compelled to decide the fate of the queen. Weary after passing a sleepless night, spent in reflecting on the punishment threatening him if the will of the king was not accomplished, he had scarcely closed his eyes when a troop of valets entered the chamber to assist at his toilet. They brought his richest vestments, with all the insignia of his elevated rank. Wolsey regarded them with a feeling of terror. And when they presented him the ivory rod which the high-chancellor is alone empowered to carry, he seized it with convulsive eagerness, grasping it in his hand, as though he feared they would tear it from him; and with that fear the reflection overshadowed his soul that yesterday he had made a last effort to ascertain and influence the decision of the legate, without being able to succeed!

Followed by his pages and gentlemen, and still harassed by these misgivings, he arrived at Blackfriars, where the court awaited him. The assembly of cardinals arose deferentially as he entered, though all remarked with astonishment the pallor of his countenance and his extreme embarrassment of manner, so invariably composed and assured. A portion of this visible restraint was communicated to the assembly, on learning that the king[177] himself had arrived, and was resolved to sit in the adjoining apartment, where he could see and hear the entire proceedings.

Dr. Bell, his advocate, after a long preamble, began a discourse, and during its delivery hurried exclamations and hasty comments were constantly indulged in by the excited assembly, so different in their hopes, desires, and opinions.

“O Rochester,” cried More, invested with the grand official robes of the king’s exchequer, “do you think this man will succeed with his arguments in carrying the crown by storm?”

“No, no,” replied Rochester, “and especially as he wishes to place it upon such a head.”

“But listen, listen!” exclaimed More, “he declares the brief of dispensation to have been a fraud.”

“What answer can they make to that?” said Viscount Rochford, in another part of the hall, addressing the lords belonging to Anne Boleyn’s party. “It is certainly encouraging; we cannot doubt of our success now.”

But at length the arguments, principally dictated by Henry himself, were closed; his advocate demanding, in the most haughty and authoritative manner, that a decision should at once be rendered, and that it should be as favorable as it was prompt. The king during this time, in a state of great excitement, paced to and fro before the entrance of the hall, the door being left open by every one in passing, as if he were afraid to close it behind him. He surveyed from time to time, with a glance of stern, penetrating scrutiny, the assembly before him, each member of which tried to conceal his true sentiments—some because they were secretly attached to the queen, others through fear that the cause of Anne Boleyn might ultimately triumph. When the advocate had finished his discourse, each one sat in breathless suspense anxiously waiting the queen’s reply; but not recognizing the authority or legality of the tribunal, she had refused to accept counsel, and no one consequently appeared to defend her. Profound silence reigned throughout the assembly, and all eyes were turned toward Campeggio, who arose and stood ready to speak. The venerable old man, calm and dignified, in a mild but firm and decided tone began:

“You ask, or rather you demand,” he said, “that we pronounce a decision which it would be impossible for us in justice to render.” Here, on seeing the king turn abruptly around and confront him, he paused, looking steadily at him. “Knowing that the defendant hath challenged this court, and refused to recognize in our persons loyal and disinterested judges, I have considered it my duty, in order to avoid error, to submit every part of the proceedings of this council to the tribunal of the Sovereign Pontiff; and we shall be compelled to await his decision before rendering judgment or proceeding further. For myself individually, I will furthermore affirm, that I am here to render justice—strict, entire, and impartial justice, and no earthly power can induce me to deviate from the course I have adopted or the resolutions I have taken; and I boldly declare that I am too old, too feeble, and too ill to desire the favor or fear the resentment of any living being.” Here he sat down, visibly agitated.

Had a thunderbolt fallen in the[178] midst of the assembly, the tumult and astonishment could not have been greater. Anger, joy, fear, hope—all hearts were agitated by the most contradictory emotions; while nothing was heard but the deep murmur of voices, the noise of unintelligible words, as they crossed and clashed in an endless diversity of tones. The Duke of Suffolk, brother-in-law of the king, cried out, beating his fists violently on the table before him, with the gross impetuosity of an upstart soldier, that the old adage had again been verified; “Never did a cardinal do any good in England.” And with flashing eyes and furious gestures he pointed to Cardinal Wolsey. The cardinal at once comprehended his danger, but found it impossible not to resent the insult. He arose, pale with anger, and with forced calmness replied that the duke, of all living men, had the least cause to depreciate cardinals. For, notwithstanding he had himself been a very insignificant cardinal, yet, if he had not held the office, the Duke of Suffolk would not this day actually carry his head on big shoulders. “And you would not now,” he added, “be here to exhibit the ostentatious disdain you have manifested toward those who have never given you cause of offence. If you were, my lord, an ambassador of the king to some foreign power, you would surely not venture to decide important questions without first consulting your sovereign. We also are commissioners, and we have no power to pronounce judgment, without first consulting those from whom we derive our authority; we can do neither more nor less than our commissions permit. Calm yourself, then, my lord, and no more address, in this insulting manner, your best friend. You very well know all I have done for you, and you must also acknowledge that on no occasion have I ever referred to your obligations before.”

But the Duke of Suffolk heard nothing of the last words uttered by Wolsey. Exasperated beyond measure, he abruptly turned his back on the cardinal and went to join the king in the next apartment. He found the latter in the act of retiring, being no longer able to restrain his wrath within bounds; and as his courtiers entered and stood regarding him with a look of hesitation he went out, commanding them in a fierce tone and with an imperious gesture to follow him immediately.

Meanwhile, in the council chamber the utmost confusion prevailed. “God be praised!” cried Sir Thomas More, who in the simplicity of his heart and the excess of his joy was incapable of dissimulation or concealment. “God be praised! Our queen is still queen; and may she ever triumph thus over all her enemies!”

Ensconced in the deep embrasure of a window stood Cromwell, a silent observer of the scene; not permitting a word to escape him, but gathering up every sentence with keen avidity, and cherishing it in his envious and malicious memory. He found himself, nevertheless, in a precarious and embarrassing situation. Foreseeing the downfall and disgrace of Wolsey, he had sought to make friends by betraying his benefactor. But the king treated him with indignant scorn, Viscount Rochford with supreme contempt, and he strongly suspected he had prejudiced his sister, Anne Boleyn, also against him.

Anxious and alarmed, he at once[179] determined to begin weaving a new web of intrigue, and instantly cast about him to discover what hope remained, or what results the future might possibly bring forth from the discord and difficulties reigning in the present.

When selfish, corrupt creatures like Cromwell find themselves surrounded by great and important events, they at once assume to become identified with the dearest interests of the community in which they live, without however in reality being in the slightest degree affected, unless through their own interests—seeking always themselves, and themselves alone. Thus this heartless man, this shameful leprosy of the social body that had nurtured him, regarding the whole world entirely with reference to his own selfish designs, coolly speculated upon his premeditated crimes, revolving in his mind a thousand projects of aggrandizement, which he ultimately succeeded in bringing to a culpable but thoroughly successful termination.

The night had already come, yet all were in a state of commotion in the household of the French ambassador, in consequence of William du Bellay, his brother, having at a late hour received a few hasty lines from the bishop, written in the midst of the assembly at Blackfriars, commanding him to hold himself in readiness to depart.

The young envoy, at once obeying orders, assumed his travelling costume, and had scarcely more than attended to the last instructions of his brother when the latter made his appearance.

“Well, brother,” he exclaimed on entering the chamber, “all is over. Are you ready to set out?” he continued, hurriedly surveying his brother’s travelling attire. “The king is furiously enraged—first against the legate, then against Wolsey. But Campeggio has displayed an extraordinary degree of firmness and courage. After he had refused to pronounce the decision, and just as the king was retiring, the expected courier arrived with instructions from Rome. The queen’s protestation has been received, and the Pope, dissolving the council, revokes the commissioners’ authority, and requires the case to be brought before his own tribunal. The adherents of Catherine, as you may suppose, are wild with delight—the people throng the streets, shouting ‘Long live the queen!’ Our gracious king, Francis I., will be in despair.”

“Well,” replied William, “I am satisfied, for I am in favor of the queen. And now, between ourselves, my dear brother, laying all diplomacy aside—for we are alone, and these walls have no ears—I know as well as you that it matters not to our king whether the wife of Henry VIII. be named Anne or Catherine.

“And yet, after all, it may be the name of this new Helen will become the signal for war,” replied the bishop. “You forget that in marrying Anne Boleyn Henry will be compelled to seek an alliance with France, in order to resist the opposition of the Emperor Charles V.; and as for ourselves, we have use for the five thousand crowns he has promised to assist us in paying the ransom of the children of France. This family quarrel can be arranged so entirely to our advantage that it would really be a misfortune should it come to a sudden termination. I hope, however, such may not be the result.”

“You are right, brother,” said[180] Du Bellay, laughing. “I see I have too much heart to make a skilful diplomatist. I have already let myself become ensnared, you perceive, and drawn over to the cause of this Queen Catherine. But it is nevertheless a veritable fact, while families are engaged in disputing among themselves, they generally leave their neighbors in peace. It would seem, however, the king must have become a madman or a fool, thus to ignore kindred, allies, fortune, and kingdom—all for this Lady Anne.”

“Yes, much more than a madman,” replied his brother, phlegmatically; “after he has married her, he will be cured of his insanity. But come, now, let us leave Lady Anne and her affairs. You must know that immediately after the adjournment of the cardinals, the king sent for me. I found him terribly excited, walking rapidly up and down the great hall formerly used as a chapter-room by the monks. Wolsey alone was with him, standing near the abbot’s great arm-chair, and wearing an air of consternation. The instant he saw me approaching, he cried out, ‘Come, come, my lord, the king wishes to have your advice on the subject we are now discussing.’ And I at once perceived my presence was a great relief to him.

“The king spoke immediately, while his eyes flashed fire. ‘M. du Bellay,’ he exclaimed, ‘Campeggio shall be punished!—yes, punished! Parliament shall bring him to trial! I will never submit to defeat in this matter. I will show the Pope that he has underrated both my will and my power.’

“‘Sire,’ I answered, ‘after mature reflection, it seems to me it would be a mistaken policy in your majesty to resort to such violent measures. Nothing has yet been decided, and the case is by no means hopeless; the wisest course would therefore be to restrain all manifestation of displeasure toward Campeggio. What advantage could you possibly gain by insulting or ill-treating an old man whom you have invited into your kingdom, or how could you then expect to obtain a favorable decision from the Holy See?’

“Delighted to hear me express such opinions, Wolsey eagerly caught at my words, declaring he agreed with me entirely. He also advised that the doctors of the French and German universities should be consulted, opinions favorable to the divorce obtained from them, and afterwards this high authority brought to bear upon the decision of the court of Rome.

“‘What do you think of that?’ demanded the king of me. ‘As for His Eminence Monseigneur Wolsey,’ he added, in a tone of cruel contempt, his counsels have already led me into so many difficulties, or proved so worthless, I shall not trouble him for any further advice.’ And he abruptly turned his back on the cardinal.

“A tear rolled slowly down Wolsey’s hollow cheek, but he made no reply. I at once assured the king that I thought, on the contrary, the cardinal’s advice was most excellent, and doubted not our king, and his honored mother, Madame Louise, might be induced to use their influence in order to secure him the suffrages of the University of Paris. Whereupon he appeared very much pleased with me, and bowed me out in the most gracious manner imaginable.

“Report all these things faithfully to your master; tell him I fear the downfall of Wolsey is inevitable;[181] he is equally disliked by the queen’s adherents and those of Anne Boleyn, and I have every reason for believing he will never again be reinstated in the king’s favor. You will also say to him he need not be astonished that I so often send him despatches by express, as Cardinal Wolsey informs me confidentially that the Duke of Suffolk has his emissaries bribed to open all packages of letters sent by post, and that one addressed to me has been miscarried; which circumstance troubles me very much.”

“I will also inform my master,” replied William, “that the Picardy routes are so badly managed, the gentlemen and couriers he sends are constantly detained and kept a considerable time on the journey. I have complained recently to the authorities themselves, who assure me that their salaries are not paid, and consequently they are unable to keep the routes in better condition.”

The sun descended toward the horizon. Sir Thomas More, seated on a terrace of his mansion at Chelsea, sought temporary quiet and repose from the oppressive burdens of a life every hour of which was devoted to the service of his king and country. His young children formed a joyous group around him, their flaxen heads crowned with blades of wheat and wild flowers they had gathered in the fields, for it was the golden time of harvest. Margaret, assisted by William Roper, directed their games, and was now trying to teach them a Scotch dance, marking the wild, fantastical rhythm with the notes of her sweet, melodious voice. Sir Thomas himself had joined in their play, when suddenly the king made his appearance. He had many times already honored them with such visits since Sir Thomas became a member of the council, having apparently conceived a great affection for him, and every day seeming to become more and more pleased with his conversation.

“I know not why it is,” he would often say, “but when I have been for any length of time in conversation with More I experience a singular tranquillity of soul, and indeed feel almost happy. His presence has the magical effect of lulling my cares to sleep and calming my anxieties.”

On seeing the king, More immediately advanced with great deference to receive him, while the children at once left off their sports.

“Why, what is this?” he exclaimed; “I did not come to interrupt your amusements, but on the contrary to enjoy them with you.” But the wild mirth and abandon of the children had fled at the approach of royalty, and, in spite of these kind assurances, they withdrew in rapid succession, too glad to recover their liberty, and their father was thus left alone with the king.

“He is the affianced husband of my daughter, sire; his name is William Roper,” answered More.

“Yes, sire; the family of Roper has for many years been united to ours by the sincerest ties of friendship, and, strengthening these by ties of blood, we hope greatly to increase our mutual happiness.”

“That is so,” replied the king. “And they will doubtless be happy. In your families you preserve liberty of choice, while we princes, born to thrones, sacrifice our interior happiness to those political combinations[182] demanded by the interests of our subjects.”

“But,” replied Sir Thomas—who understood at once the king’s intention was to introduce the subject of his divorce, a topic he especially wished to avoid—“I believe that happiness depends on ourselves, on our dispositions, and the manner in which we conduct our affairs, a great deal more than on circumstances, or the social position in which we chance to be born. There are some who, possessing every advantage in life, are still unable to enjoy it. We would suppose them to be perfectly happy, and they really should be so; but true happiness consists alone in tranquillity of soul, which is attained by always doing good to others, and suffering with patient submission the trials and afflictions with which life is inevitably beset. Such, it seems to me, is the circumscribed circle in which man is confined; it is well with him so long as he accommodates himself to its legitimate limits, but all is lost the moment he endeavors to venture beyond it.”

“I am every day more entirely convinced that this figure of the circle is a painful reality,” replied the king, with ill-concealed impatience. “I have always hoped to find happiness in the pursuit of pleasure—in the gratification of every desire—and believed it might thus be attained, but never yet have I been able to grasp it.”

“Which means, your majesty expected to pass through the world without trials—a thing utterly impossible,” added More, smiling.

“It is that which makes me despair, my dear Thomas. Reflecting on the bitter disappointments I have experienced, I am often almost transported with rage. No, More, you can never understand me. You are always equally calm and joyous. Your desires are so happily directed that you can feel well assured of a peaceful, quiet future awaiting you.”

“Your majesty is entirely mistaken,” replied More, “if you believe I have never entertained other desires than those I have been able to accomplish. The only secret I possess, in that respect, is, I compel my inclinations to obey me, instead of making my will subservient to them. Nevertheless, they oftentimes rebel and contend bitterly for supremacy, but then, it is only necessary to command silence, and not be disturbed by their cries and lamentations. Ultimately, they become like refractory children, who, constantly punished and severely beaten, at last are made to tremble at the very thought of the chastisement, and no longer dare to revolt.”

“This explanation of your system of self-government is very ingenious,” replied the king; “and hearing you speak in this quiet manner one would be induced to believe it were the easiest thing imaginable to accomplish, rather than the most difficult. Ah!” he continued with a deep sigh, “I understand but too well how difficult.”

“It is true,” replied More with earnest simplicity, “and I would not deny that, far from being agreeable, it is often, on the contrary, exceedingly painful and difficult for a man to impose these violent restraints upon his inclinations. But if he who hesitates on all occasions in the practice of virtue to do this necessary violence to himself and remain faithful to the requirements of duty, would reflect but for a single instant, he will find that although at first he may escape suffering and privation by voluntarily abandoning himself to his[183] passions, yet, later, he will inevitably be made to endure a far more bitter humiliation in the torturing reproaches of conscience; the shame he will suffer in the loss of self-respect and the respect of others; and, in the inevitable course of events, he will at last discover that his passions have carried him far beyond the power of self-control or reformation!”

“Let us banish these reflections, my dear More,” exclaimed the king in a petulant tone, passing his hand across his forehead; “they distress me, and I prefer a change of subject.” Saying this he arose, and, putting his arm around Sir Thomas’ neck, they walked on together toward the extremity of the garden, which terminated in an extensive and beautiful terrace, at the foot of which flowed the waters of the Thames.

The view was an extended one, and the king amused himself watching the rapid movements of the little boats, filled with fishermen, rowing in every direction, drawing in the nets, which had been spread to dry on the reeds covering the banks of the river. Quantities of water-lilies, blue flowers, floating on their large brilliant green leaves, intermingled with the dark bending heads of the reeds, presenting to the distant observer the appearance of a beautiful variegated carpet of flowers. “What a charming scene!” said the king, gazing at the prospect, and pointing to a boat just approaching the opposite side of the river to land a troop of young villagers, who with their bright steel sickles in hand were returning from the harvest fields.

“And the graceful spire of your Chelsea belfry, gleaming in the distance through the light silvery clouds, completes this charming landscape,” he added.

“Would it were possible to transport this view to the end of one of my drives in St. James’ Park,” continued the king.

“Will it be very soon completed?” asked Sir Thomas, at a loss what to say to his royal visitor.

“I hope so,” replied Henry languidly, “but these architects are so very slow. Before going to Grafton, I gave them numerous orders on the subject.”

“Your majesty has been quite pleased with your journey, I believe,” replied Sir Thomas, instantly reflecting what he should say next.

“I should have been extremely well pleased,” he answered, with a sudden impatience of manner, “had Wolsey not persisted so obstinately in following me. I have been much too indulgent,” he continued sharply, “infinitely too indulgent towards him, and am now well convinced of the mistake I have made in retaining the slightest affection for a man who has so miserably deceived me. What would you think, More,” he continued, his manner suddenly changing, “if I appointed you in his place as lord chancellor?” And, turning towards Sir Thomas, he gazed fixedly in his eyes, as if to read the inmost emotions of his soul.

“What would I think?” answered More, calmly—then adding with a careless smile, “I should think your majesty had done a very wrong thing, and made a very bad choice.”

“Well, I believe I could not possibly make a better,” said the king, emphasizing the last words. “But I have not come here to discuss business matters; rather, on the contrary, to get rid of them. Come, then, entertain me with something more agreeable.” But the words designedly[184] (though with seeming unconcern) uttered by the king cast a sudden gloom over the spirit of Sir Thomas he vainly endeavored to dispel.

“Sire, your majesty is greatly mistaken in entertaining such an idea,” he said, stammering and confused; for, with his sincere and truthful nature, More under all circumstances resolutely looked to the end of everything in which he suspected the least dissimulation.

The king whirled round on his heel, pretending not to hear him. “This is a beautiful rose,” he said, stooping down, “a very beautiful variety—come from the seed, no doubt? Are you a gardener? I am very fond of flowers. Oh! my garden will be superb.”

“I must have a cutting of that rose—do you hear me, More?” As he ran on in this manner, to prevent Sir Thomas from speaking, the silvery notes of a bell were heard, filling the air with a sweet and prolonged vibrating sound.

“The bell of our chapel, sire,” replied More, “summoning us to evening prayers, which we usually prefer saying all together. But to-day, your majesty having honored us with a visit, there will be no obligation to answer the call.”

“By all means,” replied Henry. “Let me interfere with nothing. It is almost night: come. We will return, and I will join in your devotions.”

Sir Thomas conducted him through the shrubbery towards the chapel, a venerable structure in the Anglo-Saxon style of architecture. A thick undergrowth of briers, brambles, and wild shrubbery was matted and interlaced around the foundation of the building; running vines clambered over the heavy arches of the antique windows, and fell back in waving garlands upon the climbing branches from which they had sprung. The walls, of rough unhewn stone, were thickly covered with moss and ivy, giving the little structure an appearance of such antiquity that the most scrupulous antiquarian would have unhesitatingly referred its foundation to the time of King Athelstan or his brother Edmund. The interior was adorned with extreme care and taste. A bronze lamp, suspended before the altar, illuminated a statue of the Holy Virgin placed above it. The children of Sir Thomas, with the servants of his household, were ranged in respectful silence behind the arm-chair of his aged father. Margaret knelt beside him with her prayer-book, waiting to begin the devotions.

The touching voice of this young girl as she slowly repeated the sublime words—“Our Father who art in heaven”—those words which men may so joyfully pronounce, which teach us the exalted dignity of our being, the grandeur of our origin and destiny—those sublime words penetrated the soul of the king with a profound and singular emotion.

“What a happy family!” he exclaimed, mentally. “Nothing disturbs their harmony; day after day passes without leaving a regret behind it. Why can I not join in this sweet prayer—why, O my soul, hast thou banished and forgotten it?” He turned from the contemplation of these youthful heads bowed before the Mother of God, and a wave of bitter remorse swept once again over his hardened, hypocritical soul.

After the king had returned to his royal palace and the evening repast was ended, William Roper approached Sir Thomas and said:

“You must consider yourself most fortunate, my dear father, in enjoying so intimately the favor of his majesty—why, even Cardinal Wolsey cannot boast of being honored with such a degree of friendship and familiarity.”

“Know, my son, I can never be elated by it. If this head, around which he passed his royal arm so affectionately this evening, could in falling pay the price of but one single inch of French territory, he would, without a moment’s hesitation, deliver it up to the executioner.”

“What acknowledgments do I not owe you, madam,” said Sir Thomas Cheney to Lady Anne Boleyn, “for the services you have rendered me. But dare I hope for a full pardon from the king?”

“Feel perfectly secure on that point,” replied Lady Anne. “He is convinced that Wolsey had you banished from court because of your disagreement with Cardinal Campeggio, and he considers you now one of his most faithful adherents.”

“And I hope, madam, to have the happiness of proving to you that I am none the less faithfully your servant,” replied Sir Thomas Cheney.

“You must admit now,” said Lady Anne, addressing her father and brother, the Earl of Wiltshire and the Viscount Rochford, who were both present, “that I succeed in doing what I undertake.”

“You succeed in what you undertake,” replied her father humorously, “but you are a long time in deciding what to do. For instance, Cardinal Wolsey finds himself to-day occupying a position in which he has no right to be.”

“Ah! well, he will not remain in it very long,” replied Anne Boleyn, petulantly. “This morning the king told me the ladies would attend the chase to see the new falcons the king of France has sent him by Monsieur de Sansac. I will talk to him, and insist on his having nothing more to do with this horrid cardinal, or I shall at once quit the court. But,” she added, pausing suddenly with an expression of extreme embarrassment, “how should I answer were he to demand what his eminence Monseigneur Wolsey had ever done to me?”

“Here, sister, here is your answer,” replied Viscount Rochford, taking a large manuscript book from his father’s portfolio. “Take it and read for yourself; you will find here all you would need for a reply.”

“That great book!” cried Anne, strongly opposed to this new commission, and pouting like a spoilt child. Taking the book, she read—skipping a great deal, however—a minutely detailed statement, formally accusing Wolsey of having engaged in a secret correspondence with France, and with the most adroit malice misrepresenting every act of his administration as well as of his private life.

“Certainly true,” replied Rochford. “And furthermore, you should know, the cardinal, in order to reward Campeggio for the good services he has rendered you, has persuaded the king to send[186] him home loaded with rich presents, to conciliate the Pope, he says, by his filial submission and pious dispositions, and incline him to a favorable decision. That is the way he manages,” continued Rochford, shrugging his shoulders, “and keeps you in the most humiliating position ever occupied by a woman.”

Hearing her brother speak thus, the beautiful face of Anne Boleyn became instantly suffused with a deep crimson.

“Oh! that odious man,” she cried passionately. “I shall no longer submit to it. It is to insult me he makes such gracious acknowledgments to that old cardinal. I will complain to the king. Oh! how annoying all this is, though,” and she turned the book over and over in her white hands.

“But see, it is time to start,” she added, pointing to a great clock standing in one corner of the apartment. “Good-by; I must go!” And Anne, attired in an elegant riding-habit, abruptly turning to a mirror, proceeded to adjust her black velvet riding-cap, when, observing a small plume in her hat that was not arranged to her taste, she exclaimed, violently stamping her little foot:

“How many contradictions shall I meet this day? I cannot endure it! All those horrid affairs to think of, to talk about and explain; all your recommendations to follow in the midst of a delightful hunting party; and then, after all, this hat which so provokes me! No; I can never fix it.” And she hurried away to find a woman skilled in the arts of the toilet. But after making her sew and rip out again, bend the plume and straighten it, place it forward and then back, she did not succeed in fixing it to suit the fancy of Anne Boleyn, who, seeing the time flying rapidly, ended by cutting off the plume with the scissors, throwing it angrily on the floor and stamping it, putting the offending cap on her head without a plume; then mounting her horse she rode off, accompanied by Sir Thomas Cheney, who escorted her, knowing she was to join the king on the road.

“How impulsive and thoughtless your sister is,” said Earl Wiltshire to his son, after Anne had left them, looking gloomily at the plume, still lying on the floor where she had thrown it. “She wants to be queen! Do you understand how much is comprised in that word? Well, she would accept a crown and fix it on her head with the same eager interest that she would order a new bonnet from her milliner. Yet I firmly believe, before accepting it, she would have to be well assured by her mirror that it was becoming to her style of beauty.”

“I cannot comprehend her,” responded Rochford. “Her good sense and judgment sometimes astonish me; then suddenly a ball, a dress, a new fashion has sufficed to make her forget the most important matter that might be under discussion. I am oftentimes led to wonder whence comes this singular mixture of frivolity and good sense in women. Is it a peculiarity of their nature or the result of education?”

“It is entirely the fault of education, my son, and not of their weakness. From infancy they are taught to look upon ribbons, laces, frivolities, and fashions as the most precious and desirable things. In fact, they attach to these miserable trifles the same value that young men place on a brilliant armor or the success of a glorious action.”

“It may be so,” replied Rochford, “but I think they are generally found as incompetent for business as incapable of managing affairs of state.”

“While very young, perhaps not,” answered Wiltshire; “proud and impulsive, they are neither capable of nor inclined to dissimulation; but later in life they develop a subtle ingenuity and an extreme degree of penetration, that enable them to succeed most admirably.”

“Ah! well, if the truth might be frankly expressed, I greatly fear that all this will turn out badly. Should we not succeed in espousing my sister to the king, she will be irretrievably compromised; and then you will deeply regret having broken off her marriage with Lord Percy.”

“You talk like an idiot,” replied the Earl of Wiltshire. “Your sister shall reign, or I perish. Why should my house not give a queen to the throne of England? Would it not be far better if our kings should select wives from the nobility of their country instead of marrying foreign princesses—strangers alike to the manners and customs as well as to the interests of the people over whom they are destined to reign?”

“You would probably be right,” replied Viscount Rochford, “if the king were not already married; but the clergy will always oppose this second marriage. They do not dare to express themselves openly because they fear the king, but in the end they will certainly preserve the nation in this sentiment. I fear that Anne will yet be very unhappy, and I am truly sorry now she cannot be made Countess of Northumberland.”

“Hold your tongue, my son,” cried Wiltshire, frantic with rage; “will you repeat these things to your sister, and renew her imaginary regrets also? As to these churchmen over whom you make so great an ado,” he continued with a menacing gesture, “I hope soon we shall be able to relieve them of the fortunes with which they are encumbered, and compel them to disgorge in our favor. You say that women are weak and fickle! If so, you certainly resemble them in both respects—the least difficulty frightens you into changing your opinions, and you hesitate in the midst of an undertaking that has been planned with the greatest ability, and which, without you, I confidently believe I shall be able to accomplish.”

IS SHE CATHOLIC?

The claim put forth by the Episcopal Church—or, to use her full and legal title, The Protestant Episcopal Church of the United Slates of America—of being the Holy Catholic Church—Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic—and the acceptance of her theory by a small portion of the Christian world, makes her and her theory, for a little time, worthy our attention.

She is accustomed to use the formula, “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church.” It is but natural to infer that she considers herself to be at least an integral part of that church. We have examined the question, and thus present our convictions as to her status.

We note, in the first place, that her bishops possess no power. They are bishops but in name. There is not one of them, no matter how eminent he may be, who can say to a clergyman in his diocese: “Here is an important parish vacant; occupy it.” He would be met with the polite remark from some member of the parish, “We are very much obliged to you, bishop, but you have nothing to say about it. Mr. M. is the warden.”

Mr. M., the warden, may be, and in many instances is, a man who cares so little about the church that he has never yet been baptized, much less is he a communicant. He and his brother vestrymen, whether baptized or not, may, if the bishop claims an authority by virtue of his office, meet him at the church door, and tell him he cannot come in unless he will pledge himself to do as they wish; and the bishop may write a note of protest, and leave it behind him for them to tear up, as was done in Chicago with Bishop Whitehouse. Some local regulations have occasionally varied the above, but in the majority of parishes the authority is vested as we have stated.

The bishop’s power of appointing extends to none but feeble missionary stations; and even these put on, at their earliest convenience, the airs of full-grown parishes.

We note an instance where a bishop wrote to a lady in a remote missionary station, and asked regarding some funds which had been placed in her hands by parties interested in the growth of the church in that place. It had been specified that the money was to be used for whatever purpose was deemed most necessary. The bishop requested that the money be paid to the missionary toward his salary. The lady declined on the ground that she did not like the missionary. Another request in courteous language, as was befitting a bishop. He also stated his intention of visiting the place shortly in his official character.

The lady’s reply equalled his own in courteous phraseology; but the money was refused and the bishop informed that he “need not trouble himself about making a visitation, as there was no class to be confirmed; besides, the church had been closed for repairs, and would[189] not be open for some months, at least not until a new minister was settled.”

To the bishop’s positive knowledge, no repairs were needed; but he deemed it wise to stay away, and no further steps were taken.

If a presbyter of any diocese chooses for any reason to go from one parish to another for the purpose of taking up a permanent abode, he can do so with or without consulting his bishop. In fact, the bishop has nothing to do with it. Should the presbyter desire to remove to another diocese, it is requisite that he obtain letters dimissory from the bishop, and the bishop is obliged to give them. So also is the bishop in the diocese to which he goes obliged to receive them, unless they contain grave criminal charges.

There is, in reality, but one thing the bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church can do, and that is make an appointment once in three years to confirm. So insignificant is his power in any other direction that certain persons, ill-natured or otherwise, have fastened upon him, whether deserved or undeserved, the name of “confirming machine.” Certain it is that, were the power of confirming in any degree vested in the “priests” of the church, the office of bishop might easily be dispensed with. He would appear only as the ornamental portion of a few occasional services. For he cannot authoritatively visit any parish, vacant or otherwise, except on a confirmation tour; and should this be too frequent in the estimation of the vestry, the doors of the church could be shut against him on any plea the vestry should choose to advance.

3. He cannot prevent a man fixing himself in the diocese if a congregation choose to “call” him, no matter how worthy or unworthy the man may be.

6. He has no church of his own, except as he officiates as rector; and unless invited to some place, he is forced, although a bishop, to sit in the congregation as a layman, if he do not stay at home.

And, lastly, he cannot on any account visit a parish unless the vestry of that parish is willing.

We sum up: That so far as the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America are concerned, they are simply figure-heads, ornaments possessing the minimum of authority—in point of fact, no authority at all.

Their own convention addresses are a virtual confession of the condition of affairs as above laid down. To every one who has ever heard an Episcopal bishop’s address, as delivered before the annual convention of clergymen and laymen, the following sample will not appear as in the least overdrawn:

July 24.—Visited S. Paul’s, and preached and confirmed two in the forenoon. Preached also in the afternoon.

July 29.—Took a private conveyance to Hillstown, and preached in the evening; confirmed one. The rector of this parish is very energetic.

Aug. 7.—Attended the consecration of S. Mark’s Church in Hyde Park. It is hoped that the difficulties in this parish are settled. The Rev. John Waters has resigned and gone to Omaha. Mr. William Steuben is the senior warden. May the Lord prosper him and his estimable lady!

The address each year of a Protestant Episcopal bishop is thoroughly exemplified in the foregoing specimen. It is the same endless list of enteuthen exelauneis, varied only by the number of parasangas. To the lazy grammar-boy it is a most fascinating chapter of ancient history when he reaches the enteuthen section in the Anabasis. There is an immense list of them, and the lesson for that day is easy. When the first phrase is mastered, he knows all the rest, except the occasional figures.

We once saw a reporter for a prominent Daily making a short-hand report of an address before an illustrious diocesan gathering. Having had some experience in the matter, he came to the meeting with his tablets prepared. They were as follows:

Three-quarters of the address was thus prepared beforehand, it only being necessary to leave the lines sufficiently far apart to permit the insertion of occasional notes.

By his extra care he was enabled to present the most complete report of any paper in the city.

The specimen we have given is a fair average. In future generations, when a classical student is given a bishop’s address to read, his labor for that day will be easy.

Almost any bishop’s address will substantiate the statements we have made. We refer to them freely, without wasting time in selection.

We begin a new paragraph: The system of the Protestant Episcopal Church is eminently congregational.

Should the bishop “interfere” and recommend him, the recommendation, without an exception that has ever come to our knowledge, militates against the proposed “call.”

Should a parish desire to get rid of a pastor, it does so with or without the consent of the bishop, as happens, in the estimation of the wardens, to be most convenient. The officers may consult the bishop, and, if he agree with them, well and good. The words of the diocesan are quoted from Dan to Beersheba, and the pastor is made to feel the lack of sympathy—“Even his bishop is against him,” is whispered by young and old.

If the bishop does not agree with them, they do not consult him again. They proceed to accomplish what they desire as if he had no existence, and—they always succeed.

There is a farcical canon of the Protestant Episcopal Church which says, if a parish dismiss its rector[191] without concurrence, it shall not be admitted into convention until it has apologized.

It is a very easy thing for the wardens and vestrymen to address the convention, after they have accomplished their ends, with “Your honorable body thinks we have done wrong, and—we are sorry for it,” or something else equally ambiguous and absurd. The officers of the parish and the laymen of the congregation have done what they wished, and are content. As the convention is composed principally of laymen, the sympathy is naturally with the laymen’s side of the question. The rector is hurriedly passed over, his clerical brethren looking helplessly on.

To get a new parish the dismissed rector must “candidate”—a feature of clerical life most revolting to any man with a spark of manhood in him.

We note, in the next place, an utter want of unity in the Protestant Episcopal Church.

There are High-Church and Low-Church bookstores, where the publications of the one are discarded by the other. There are High-Church and Low-Church seminaries, where a man, to graduate from the one, will be looked upon inimically, at least with suspicion, by the other. There is a High-Church “Society for the Increase of the Ministry,” where the principal thing accomplished is the maintenance of the secretary of the said society in a large brick house in a fashionable city, while he claims to support a few students on two meals a day; and a Low-Church Evangelical Society, where they require the beneficiary to subscribe to certain articles of Low-Churchism before they will receive him.

The one society is thoroughly hostile to the other, and, in point of fact, the latter was created in opposition to the former.

There are High-Church and Low-Church newspapers, in which the epithets used by the one toward the other do not indicate even respect.

Some of the “church’s” ministers would no more enter a “denominational” place of worship than they would put their hand in the fire. Others will fraternize with everything and everybody, and when Sunday comes will close their eyes—sometimes they roll them upward—and pray publicly: “From heresy and schism good Lord deliver us.”

It may be necessary that there should be wranglings and bickerings within her fold, in order to constitute her the church militant; but we cannot forgive hypocrisy.

With some of her ministers the grand object of existence seems to be to prove “Popery” an emanation from hell. With others the effort is equally great to prove the Episcopal Church as a “co-ordinate” branch with the Roman Church, and entitled to the same consideration as is paid by the devotees of Rome to its hierarchy. In both instances—viz., High Church and Low Church—history records failure.

We notice next the relation which the Protestant Episcopal Church holds to the Church of England.

The English Church evidently regards the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America as a weaker sister, and not to be admitted to doubtful disputations. She is courteous toward her, and accepts her present of a gold[192] alms-basin from an unrobed representative with a certain amount of ceremony. She invites her bishops to the Lambeth Conference, and they pay their own fare across the Atlantic; but they confer about nothing. It is true the Protestant Episcopal Church approved the action of the English Church in condemning Colenso; but this was a safe thing for the English Church to present. It would have been hardly complimentary to have their guests go home without doing something, especially as they were not to be invited into Westminster Abbey, and were to have nothing to do with the coming Bible revision.

The bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America were invited to the English conference very much as country cousins are invited to tea, and that was all.

By way of asserting her right to a recognition as an equal with the Church of England, she—the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America—has established, or rather individuals have established and the act has received the sanction of the General Convention, certain rival congregations in a few foreign cities where the English service was already established. If she be of the same Catholic mould as the Church of England, why does she thus in a foreign city attempt to maintain an opposition service? The variations in the Prayer-Book are no answer to the question. If the English Church be Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, and the Protestant Episcopal Church be Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, the two are therefore one; for they both claim that there is but one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic church.

She is in this case unmistakably uncatholic, or else the English Church is. In either case she falls to the ground.

Our attention is directed again to the many laws enacted against her bishops as compared with the laws enacted against the other members of the church. If Mosheim were to be restored to the flesh, and were to write the history of the Episcopal Church, and used as an authority the Digest of Canons, as he has been accustomed in his Ecclesiastical History to use ecclesiastical documents generally, he would style the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church a set of criminals of the deepest dye, and the priests and deacons not much better. The laity would be regarded as all that could be desired in lofty integrity and spotless morality. For why? A glance at their vade-mecum of law—the Digest of Canons—shows an immense bulk of its space to be devoted “to the trial of a bishop.” The laity go scot-free.

We question the propriety, as well as the Catholicity, of covering the higher clergy with laws till they are helpless, while the laity revel in a freedom that amounts, when they choose, to mob-license; but it is done, and the Episcopal Church is degraded to a level lower than any of the denominations around her.

With other bodies who call themselves Christian there is a certain amount of consistency. Their rulers are from among their own members. With the church under consideration, her rulers, in many cases, are any unbaptized heathen who may choose to work themselves into a temporary favor with the pew-holders. It is not necessary that they should even have ever attended church. We note an instance where the chief man of a small parish was a druggist, and kept in the rear of his drug-store a[193] low drinking-room; and this man was elected treasurer year after year by a handful of interested parties, and, when elected, he managed all the finances of the parish according to his own notions of propriety. It was his habit to go to the church near the close of the sermon, and go away immediately after the collection.

We note another instance where a warden visited the rector of his parish, and threatened, with a polite oath, to give him something hotter than a section of the day of judgment if he did not ask his (the warden’s) advice a little more on parish matters. The parish grew so warm that at the end of three weeks the rector was candidating for another.

We note another instance where a warden was so overjoyed at having settled a rector according to his own liking that, on the arrival of the new incumbent, he not only did not go to hear him preach, but stayed at home with certain friends, and enjoyed, to use his own expression, a “dooced big drunk.” Out of consideration for the feelings of his family we use the word “dooced” instead of his stronger expression.

The rector of this happily-ruled parish was imprudent enough to incur the displeasure of his warden after a few months of arduous labor. He received a note while sitting at the bedside of his sick wife, saying that after the following Sunday his services would be dispensed with; that if he attempted to stay, the church would be closed for repairs.

We are well acquainted with a parish where a congregation wished to displace both the senior and junior wardens. These two gentlemen had been shrewd enough to foresee the event. They succeeded, by calculating management, in having vested in themselves the right of selling pews. When Easter Monday came, they sold for a dollar a pew to loafers on the streets, and swarmed the election with men who never had entered the place before. The laws of the parish were such that there was no redress. As a matter of course, the rector was soon candidating.

During the earliest portion of the official life of one of the oldest and most eminent bishops, he was called on to officiate at the institution of a Low-Church rector. At the morning service the bishop took occasion to congratulate the congregation on the assumed fact that they had now “an altar, a priest, and a sacrifice,” and went on to enlarge on that idea. In the evening of the same day the instituted minister, in addressing the congregation, said: “My brethren, so help me God! if the doctrines you heard this morning are the doctrines of the Protestant Episcopal Church, then I am no Protestant Episcopalian; but they are not such”—and essayed substantiating the assertion. All that came of the affair was the publication, on the part of each, of their respective discourses. On the supposition of the bishop’s having any foundation for his ecclesiastical character and for the doctrines he taught, would that have been the end of the matter?

Can it be that the Episcopal Church is Catholic? Is it possible that she is part of the grand structure portrayed by prophets and sung in the matchless words of inspiration as that against which the gates of hell shall not prevail? Rather, we are forced to class her as a “sister” among the very “heretics” from whom in her litany she prays, “Good Lord deliver us.”

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.

CHAPTER X.
Alarming Symptoms.

November had come, and was gathering up the last tints and blossoms of autumn. One by one the garden lights were being put out; the tall archangel lilies drooped their snow and gold cups languidly; the jasmine, that only the other day twinkled its silver stars amidst the purple bells of the clematis, now trailed wearily down the trellis of the porch; the hardy geraniums made a stand for it yet, but their petals dropped off at every puff of wind, and powdered the gravel with a scarlet ring round their six big red pots that flanked the walk from the gate to the cottage door; the red roses held out like a forlorn hope, defying the approach of the conqueror, and staying to say a last good-by to sweet Mother Summer, ere she passed away.

It was too chilly to sit out of doors late of afternoons now, and night fell quickly. M. de la Bourbonais had collapsed into his brown den; but the window stood open, and let the faint incense of the garden steal in to him, as he bent over his desk with his shaded lamp beside him.

Franceline had found it cold, and had slipt away, without saying why, to her own room upstairs. She was sitting on the floor with her hands in her lap, and her head pressed against the latticed window, watching the scarlet geraniums as they shivered in the evening breeze and dropped into their moist autumn tomb. A large crystal moon was rising above the woods beyond the river, and a few stars were coming out. She counted them, and listened to the wood-pigeon cooing in the park, and to the solitary note of an owl that answered from some distant grove. But the voices of wood and field were not to her now what they once had been. There was something in her that responded to them still, but not in the old way; she had drifted somewhere beyond their reach; she was hearkening for other voices, since one had touched her with a power these had never possessed, and whose echoing sweetness had converted the sounds that had till then been her only music into a blank and aching silence. Other pulses had been stirred, other chords struck within her, so strong and deep, and unlike the old childish ones, that these had become to her what the memory of the joys of childhood are to the full-grown man—a sweet shadow that lingers when the substance has fled; part of a life that has been lived, that can never be quickened again, but is enshrined in memory.

She was very pale, almost like a shadow herself, as she sat there in the silver gloom. Mothers who met her in her walks about the neighborhood looked wistfully after the gentle young face, and said with a sigh: “What a pity! And so young too!” Yet Franceline was not ill; not even ailing; she never[195] complained even of fatigue, and when her father tapped the pale cheek and asked how his Clair-de-lune was, she would answer brightly that she had never been better in her life, and as she had no cough, he believed her. A cough was Raymond’s single diagnosis of disease and death; he had a vague but deep-seated belief that nobody, no young person certainly, ever died a natural death without this fatal premonitory symptom. And yet he could not help following Franceline with an anxious eye as he saw her walking listlessly about the garden, or sitting with a book in her hand that she let drop every now and then to look dreamily out of the window, and only resumed with an evident effort. Sometimes she would go and lean her arms on the rail at the end of the garden, and stand there for an hour together gazing at the familiar landscape as if she were discovering some new feature in it, or straining her eyes to see some distant object. He could not lay his finger on any particular symptom that justified anxiety, and still he was anxious; a change of some sort had come over the child; she grew more and more like her mother, and it was not until Armengarde was several years older than Franceline that the disease which had been germinating in her system from childhood developed itself and proved fatal.

M. de la Bourbonais never alluded to Franceline’s refusal of Sir Ponsonby Anwyll, but he had not forgotten it. In his dreamy mind he cogitated on the possibility of the offer being renewed, and her accepting it. As to Clide de Winton, he had quite ceased to think of him, and never for an instant coupled him in his thoughts with Franceline. It did not strike him as significant that Sir Simon had avoided mentioning the young man since his return. After the conversation that Clide had once been the subject of between them, this reticence was natural enough. The failure of his wild, affectionate scheme placed him in a somewhat ridiculous position towards Raymond, and it was no wonder that he shrank from alluding to it.

Sir Ponsonby had left Rydal immediately after the eventful ride we know of. He could not remain in Franceline’s neighborhood without seeing her, and he had sense enough to feel that he would injure rather than serve his cause by forcing his society on her after what had passed. This is as good as admitting that he did not look upon his cause as lost. What man in love for the first time would give up after one refusal, if his love was worth the name? Ponsonby was not one of the faint-hearted tribe. He combined real modesty as to his own worth and pretensions with unbounded faith in the power of his love and its ultimate success. The infallibility of hope and perseverance was an essential part of his lover’s creed. He did not apply the tenet with any special sense of its fitness to Franceline in particular. He was no analyzer of character; he did not discriminate nicely between the wants and attributes of one woman and another; he blended them all in a theoretical worship, and included all womankind in his notions as to how they were individually to be wooed and won. He would let them have their own way, allow them unlimited pin-money, cover them with trinkets, and gratify all their little whims. If a girl were ever so beautiful and ever so good, no man could do more for her than this; and any man who[196] was able and willing to do it, ought to be able to win her. Ponsonby took heart, and trusted to his uniform good luck not to miss the prize he had set his heart on. He would rejoin his regiment for the present, and see what a month’s absence would do for him. He had one certain ground of hope: Franceline did not dislike him, and, as far as he could learn or guess, she cared for no one else. Sir Simon was his ally, and would keep a sharp lookout for him, and keep the little spark alive—if spark there were—by singing his praises judiciously in the ear of the cruel fair one.

She, meanwhile, went on in her usual quiet routine, tending the sick, teaching some little children, and working with her father, who grew daily more enamored of her tender and intelligent co-operation. Lady Anwyll called soon after Ponsonby’s departure, and was just as kind and unconstrained as if nothing had happened. She did not press Franceline to go and stay at Rydal, but hoped she would ride over there occasionally with Sir Simon to lunch. Her duties as secretary to Raymond made the sacrifice of a whole afternoon repugnant to her; but she did go once, just to show the old lady that she retained the same kind feeling towards her as before anything had occurred to make a break in their intimacy. It was delightful when she came home to find that her father had been utterly at sea without her, mooning about in a helpless way amongst the notes and papers that under her management had passed from confusion and chaos into order and sequence. While everything was in confusion he could find his way through the maze, but he had no key to this new order of things. Franceline declared she must never leave him so long again; he had put everything topsy-turvy, he was not to be trusted. The discovery of his dependence on her in a sphere where she had till lately been as useless to him as Angélique or Miss Merrywig was a source of infinite enjoyment to her, and she threw herself into her daily task with an energy that lightened the labor immensely to her father, without, as far as Franceline could say, fatiguing herself. But fatigue for being unconscious is sometimes none the less real. It may be that this sustained application was straining a system already severely tried by mental pressure. She was one day writing away as usual, while Raymond, with a bookful of notes in his hand, stood on the hearth-rug dictating. Suddenly she was seized with a fit of coughing, and, putting her handkerchief quickly to her mouth, she drew it away stained with crimson. She stifled a cry of terror that rose to her lips, and hurried out of the room. Her father had seen nothing, but her abrupt departure startled him; he hastened after her, and found her in the kitchen holding the handkerchief up to Angélique, who was looking at the fatal stain with a face rather stupefied than terrified.

“My God, have pity upon me! My child! My child!” he cried, clasping his hands and abandoning himself to his distress with the impassioned demonstrativeness of a Frenchman.

Woman, it is said truly, is more courageous at bearing physical pain than man; it is true also that she has more self-command in controlling the expression of mental pain. Her instinct is surer too in guiding her how to save others from suffering;[197] let her be ever so untutored, she will prove herself shrewder than the cleverest man on occasions like the present. Angélique’s womanly instinct told her at once that it was essential not to frighten Franceline: that the nervous shock would infallibly aggravate the evil, wherever the cause lay, and that the best thing to do now was to soothe and allay her fears.

“Bless me! what is there to make a row about?” she cried with an angry chuckle, crushing the handkerchief in her fingers and darting a look on her master which, if eyes could knock down, must have laid him prostrate on the spot; “the child has an indigestion and has thrown up a mouthful of bread from her stomach. Hein!”

“How do you know it is from the stomach and not from the lungs?” he asked, already reassured by her confidence, and still more by her incivility.

“How do I know? Am I a fool? Would it be that color if it was from the lungs? I say it is from the stomach, and it is a good business. But we must not have too much of it. It would weaken the child; we must stop it.”

“I will run for the doctor at once!” exclaimed M. de la Bourbonais, still trembling and excited. “Or stay!—no!—I will fly to the Court and they will despatch a man on horseback!” He was hurrying away when Angélique literally shouted at him:

“Wilt thou be quiet with thy doctor and thy man on horseback! I tell thee it is from the stomach; I know what I am about. I want neither man nor horse. It is from the stomach! Dost thou take me for a fool at this time of my life?”

Raymond stood still like a chidden child while the old servant poured this volley at him. Franceline stared at her aghast. In her angry excitement the grenadier had broken through not only all barriers of rank, but all the common rules of civility—she who was such a strict observer of both that they seemed a very part of herself. This ought to have opened their eyes, if nothing else did; but Franceline was only bewildered, Raymond was cowed and perplexed.

“If thou art indeed quite sure,” he said, falling into the familiar “thee and thou” by which she addressed him, and which on her deferential lips sounded so outrageous and unnatural—“if thou art indeed certain I will be satisfied; but, my good Angélique, would it not be a wise precaution to have a medical man?—only just, as thou sayest well, to prevent its going too far.”

“Well, well, if Monsieur le Comte wishes, let it be; let the doctor come; for me, I care not for him; they are an ignorant lot, pulling long faces to make long bills; but if it pleases Monsieur le Comte, let him have one to see the child.” She nodded her flaps at him, as if to say, “Be off then at once and leave us in peace!”

He was leaving the room, when, turning round suddenly, he came close up to Franceline. “Dost thou feel a pain, my child?” he said, peering anxiously into her face.

“No, father, not the least pain. I am sure Angélique is right; I feel nothing here,” putting her hand to her chest.

“God is good! God is good!” muttered the father half audibly, and, stroking her cheek gently, he went.

“Let not Monsieur le Comte go rushing off himself; let him send one of those thirty-six lackeys at[198] the Court!” cried Angélique, calling after him through the kitchen window.

In her heart and soul Angélique was terrified. She had thrown out quite at random, with the instinct of desperation, that confident assurance as to the color of the stain. Her first impulse was to save Franceline from the shock, but it had fallen full upon herself. This accident sounded like the first stroke of the death-knell. No one would have supposed it to look at her. She set her arms akimbo and laughed till she shook at her own impudence to M. le Comte, and how meekly M. le Comte had borne it, and how scared his face was, and what a joke the business was altogether. To see him stand there wringing his hands, and making such a wailing about nothing! But when Franceline was going to answer and reproach her old bonne with this inopportune mirth, she laid her hand on the young girl’s mouth and bade her peremptorily be silent.

“If you go talking and scolding, child, there is no knowing what mischief you may do. Come and lie down, and keep perfectly quiet.”

Franceline obeyed willingly enough. She was weak and tired, and glad to be alone awhile.

Angélique placed a cold, wet cloth on her chest, and made her some cold lemonade to drink. It was making a fuss about nothing, to be sure; but it would please M. le Comte. He was never happier than when people were making a fuss over his Clair-de-lune.

It was not long before the count returned, accompanied by Sir Simon. Angélique saw at a glance that the baronet understood how things were. He talked very big about his confidence that Angélique was right; that it was an accident of no serious import whatever; but he exchanged a furtive glance with the old woman that sufficiently belied all this confident talk. He was for going up to see Franceline with M. de la Bourbonais, but Angélique would not allow this. M. le Comte might go, if he liked, provided he did not make her speak; but nobody else must go; the room was too small, and it would excite the child to see people about her. So Raymond went up alone. As soon as his back was turned, Angélique threw up her hands with a gesture too significant for any words. Sir Simon closed the door gently.

“I am not duped any more than you,” he said. “It is sure to be very serious, even if it is not fatal. Tell me what you really think.”

“I saw her mother go through it all. It began like this. Only Madame la Comtesse had a cough; the petite has never had one. That is the only thing that gives me a bit of hope; the petite has never coughed. O Monsieur Simon! it is terrible. It will kill us all three; I know it will.”

“Tut, tut! don’t give up in this way, Angélique,” said the baronet kindly, and turning aside; “that will mend nothing; it is the very worst thing you could do. I agree with you that it is very serious; not so much the accident itself, perhaps—we know nothing about that yet—but on account of the hereditary taint in the constitution. However, there has been no cough undermining it so far, and with care—I promise you she shall have the best—there is every reason to hope the child will weather it. At her age one weathers everything,” he added, cheerfully. “Come now, don’t despond; a[199] great deal depends on your keeping a cheerful countenance.”

“I know it, monsieur, and I will do my best. But I hear steps! Could it be the doctor already? For goodness’ sake run out and meet him, and tell him, as he hopes to save us all, not to let Monsieur le Comte know there is any danger! It is all up with us if he does. Monsieur le Comte could no more hide it than a baby could hide a pin in its clothes.”

She opened the door and almost pushed Sir Simon out, in her terror lest the doctor should walk in without being warned.

Sir Simon met him at the back of the cottage. A few words were exchanged, and they came in together. Raymond met them on the stairs. The medical man preferred seeing his patient alone; the nurse might be present, but he could have no one else. In a very few minutes he came down, and a glance at his face set the father’s heart almost completely at rest.

“Dear me, Sir Simon, you would never do for a sick nurse. You prepared me for a very dangerous case by your message; it is a mere trifle; hardly worth the hard ride I’ve had to perform in twenty minutes.”

“Would you like to sound them yourself, count? Pray do! It will be more satisfactory to you.” And he handed his stethoscope to M. de la Bourbonais—not mockingly, but quite gravely and kindly.

That provincial doctor missed his vocation. He ought to have been a diplomatist.

Instead of the proffered stethoscope, M. de la Bourbonais grasped his hand. His heart was too full for speech. The reaction of security after the brief interval of agony and suspense unnerved him. He sat down without speaking, and wiped the great drops from his forehead. The medical man addressed himself to Sir Simon and Angélique. There was nothing whatever to be alarmed at; but there was occasion for care and certain preventive measures. The young lady must have perfect rest and quiet; there must be no talking for some time; no excitement of any sort. He gave sundry directions about diet, etc., and wrote a prescription which was to be sent to the chemist at once. M. de la Bourbonais accompanied him to the door with a lightened heart, and bade him au revoir with a warm pressure of the hand.

“Now, let me hear the truth,” said Sir Simon, as soon as they entered the park.

“You have heard the truth—though only in a negative form. If you noticed, we did not commit ourselves to any opinion of the case; we only prescribed for it. This was the only way in which we could honestly follow your instructions,” observed the doctor, who always used the royal “we” of authorship when speaking professionally.

“You showed great tact and prudence; but there is no need for either now. Tell me exactly what you think.”

“It will be more to the purpose to tell you what we know,” rejoined the medical man. “There is a blood-vessel broken; not a large one, happily, and if the hemorrhage does not increase and continue, it may prove of no really serious consequence. But then we must remember the question of inheritance. That is what makes a symptom in itself trifling assume a[200] grave—we refrain from saying fatal—character.”

“You are convinced that this is but the beginning of the end—am I to understand that?” asked Sir Simon. He was used to the doctor’s pompous way, and knew him to be both clever and conscientious, at least towards his patients.

“It would be precipitating an opinion to say so much. We are on the whole inclined to take a more sanguine view. We consider the hitherto unimpaired health of the patient, and her extreme youth, fair grounds for hope. But great care must be taken; all excitement must be avoided.”

They walked on a few yards without further speech. Sir Simon was busy with anxious and affectionate thoughts.

“I should fancy a warm climate would be the best cure for a case of this kind,” he observed, answering his own reflections, rather than speaking to his companion.

“No doubt, no doubt,” assented Dr. Blink, “if the patient was in a position to authorize her medical attendant in ordering such a measure.”

“Monsieur de la Bourbonais is in that position,” replied Sir Simon, quietly.

“Ah! I am glad to know it. I may act on the information one of these days. The young lady could not bear the fatigue of a journey to the south just now; the general health is a good deal below par; the nervous system wants toning; it is unstrung.”

Sir Simon made no comment—not at least in words—but it set his mind on painful conjecture. Perhaps the electric chain passed from him to his companion, for the latter said irrelevantly but with a significant expression, as he turned his glance full upon Sir Simon:

“We medical men are trusted with many secrets—secrets of the heart as well as of the body. We ask you frankly, as a friend of our patient, is there any moral cause at work—any disappointed affection that may have preyed on the mind and fostered the inherited germs of disease?”

“I cannot answer that question,” replied the baronet after a moment’s hesitation.

“You cannot, or you will not? Excuse my pertinacity; it is professional and necessary.”

“I cannot even give a decided answer to that. I had some time ago feared there existed something of the sort, but of late those apprehensions had entirely disappeared. If you had put the question to me yesterday, I should have said emphatically there is nothing to fear on that score; the child is perfectly happy and quite heart-whole.”

“And to-day you are not prepared to say as much,” persisted Dr. Blink. “Something has occurred to modify this change of opinion?”

“Nothing, except the accident that you know of and your question now. These suggest to me that I may have been right in the first instance.”

“Is it in your power or within the power of circumstances to set the wrong right—to remove the cause of anxiety—assuming that it actually exists?”

“Say rather that you hope not. In such cases hope is the best physician; let nothing be done, as far as you can prevent it, to destroy this hope in the patient’s mind; I would even venture to urge that you should do anything in your power to feed and stimulate it.”

“That is impossible; quite impossible,” said Sir Simon emphatically. The doctor’s words fell on him like a sting, and this very feeling increased to conviction what had, at the beginning of the conversation, been only a vague misgiving.

Franceline rallied quickly, and with her returning strength Sir Simon’s fears were allayed. He had not been able to follow the doctor’s advice as to keeping alive any soothing delusions that might exist in her mind, but he succeeded, by dint of continually dinning it into his ears that there was no danger, in convincing her father that there was not; and the cheerfulness and security that radiated from him acted beneficially on her, and proved of great help to the medical treatment. And was Dr. Blink right in his surmise that a moral cause had been at work and contributed to the bursting of the blood-vessel? If Franceline had been asked she would have denied it; if any one had said to her that the accident had been brought on by mental suffering, or insinuated that she was still at heart pining for a lost love, she would have answered with proud sincerity: “It is false; I am not pining. I have ceased to think of Clide de Winton; I have ceased to love him.”

But which of us can answer truly for our own hearts? We do not want to idealize Franceline. We wish to describe her as she was, the good with the evil; the struggle and the victory as they alternated in her life; her heart fluctuating, but never consciously disloyal. There must be flaws in every picture taken from life. Perfection is not to be found in nature, except when seen through a poet’s eyes. Perhaps it was true that Franceline had ceased to love Clide. When our will is firmly set upon self-conquest we are apt to fancy it achieved. But conquest does not of necessity bring joy, or even peace. Nothing is so terrible as a victory, except a defeat, was a great captain’s cry on surveying the bloody field of yesterday’s battle. The frantic effort, the bleeding trophies may inflict a death-wound on the conqueror as fatal, in one sense, as defeat. We see the “good fight” every day leading to such issues. Brave souls fight and carry the day, and then go to reap their laurels where “beyond these voices there is peace.” Franceline had gained a victory, but there was no rejoicing in the triumph. Her heart plained still of its wounds; if she did not hear it, it was because she would not; it still bemoaned its hard fate, its broken cup of happiness.

She rose up from this illness, however, happier than she had been for months. It was difficult to believe that the period which had worked such changes to her inward life counted only a few months; it seemed like years, like a lifetime, since she had first met Clide de Winton. She resumed her calmly busy little life as before the break had come that suspended its active routine. By Dr. Blink’s desire the teaching class was suppressed, and the necessity of guarding against cold prevented her doing much amongst the sick; but[202] this extra leisure in one way enabled her to increase her work in another; she devoted it to writing with her father; this never tired her, she affirmed—it only interested and amused her.

The advisability of a trip to some southern spot in France or Italy had been suggested by Dr. Blink; but the proposal was rejected by his patient in such a strenuous and excited manner that he forebore to press it. He noticed also an expression of sudden pain on M. de la Bourbonais’ countenance, accompanied by an involuntary deep-drawn sigh, that led him to believe there must be pecuniary impediments in the way of the scheme, notwithstanding Sir Simon’s assurance to the contrary. The émigré was universally looked upon as a poor man. Who else would live as he did? Still Sir Simon must have known what he was saying. However, as it happened, the cold weather, which was now setting in pretty sharp, was by no means favorable to travelling, so the doctor consented willingly enough to abide by the patient’s circumstances and wishes. A long journey in winter is always a high price for an invalid to pay for the benefit of a warm climate.

In the first days of December, Sir Simon took flight from Dullerton to Nice. Lady Rebecca was spending the winter at Cannes, and as Mr. Simpson reported that “her ladyship’s health had declined visibly within the last month,” it was natural that her dutiful step-son should desire to be within call in case of any painful eventuality. If the climate of the sunny Mediterranean town happened to be a very congenial winter residence to him, so much the better. It is only fair that a man should have some compensation for doing his duty.

“Raymond,” he said, “you have sustained a loss lately; you must be in want of money; now is the time to prove yourself a Christian, and let others do unto you as you would do unto them. You offered me money once when I did not want it; I offer it to you now that you do.” And he pressed a bundle of notes into the count’s hands.

But Raymond crushed them back into his. “Mon cher Simon! I do not thank you. That would be ungrateful; it would look as if I were surprised, whereas I have long since come to take brotherly kindness as a matter of course from you. But in truth I do not want this money; I give you my word I don’t!”

“If you pledge your word, I must believe you, I suppose,” returned the baronet; “but promise me one thing—if you should want it, you will let me know?”

Sir Simon with a sigh, which Raymond took for reluctance, but which was really one of relief, replaced the notes in his waistcoat pocket. “I had better leave you a blank check all the same,” he said; “you might happen to want it, and not be able to get a letter to me at once. There is no knowing where the vagabond spirit may lead me, once I am on the move. Give me a pen.” And he seated himself at the desk.

Raymond protested; but it was no use, Sir Simon would have his own way; he wrote the blank check and saw it locked up in the count’s private drawer. M. de la Bourbonais argued from this reckless committal of his signature that the baronet’s finances were in a flourishing condition, and was[203] greatly rejoiced. Alas! if the truth were known, they had never been in a sorrier plight. He had offered the bank-notes in all sincerity, but if Raymond had accepted it, Sir Simon would have been at his wit’s end to find the ready money for his journey. But he kept this dark, and rather led his friend to suppose him flush of money; it was the only chance of getting him to accept his generosity.

“Mind you keep me constantly informed how Franceline gets on,” were his parting words; and M. de la Bourbonais promised.

She got on in pretty much the same way for some time. Languid and pale, but not suffering; and she had no cough, and no return of the symptoms that had alarmed them all so much. Angélique watched her as a cat watches a mouse, but even her practised eye could detect no definite cause for anxiety.

One morning, about a fortnight after Sir Simon’s departure, Franceline was alone in the little sitting-room—her father had gone to do some shopping for her in the town, as it was too cold for her to venture out—when Sir Ponsonby Anwyll called. The moment she saw him she flushed up, partly with surprise, partly with pleasure. A casual observer would have concluded this to be a good sign for the visitor; a male friend would have unhesitatingly pronounced him a lucky dog. Ponsonby himself felt slightly elated.

“I heard you were ill,” he said, “and as I am at home on leave for a few days, I could not resist coming to inquire for you. You are not displeased with me for coming?”

“No, indeed; it is very kind of you. I am glad to see you,” Franceline replied with bright, grateful eyes.

“They told me you had been very ill. I hope it is not true. You don’t look it,” he said anxiously.

“I have been frightening them a little more than it was worth; but I am quite well now. How is Lady Anwyll?”

“Thank you, she’s just as usual; in very good health and a tremendous bustle. You know I always put the house topsy-turvy when I come down. Not that I mean to do it; it seems to come of itself as a natural consequence of my being there,” he explained, laughing. “Is M. de la Bourbonais quite well?”

“Quite well. He will be in presently; he is only gone to make a few purchases for me.”

All obvious subjects being now exhausted, there ensued a pause. Ponsonby was the first to break it.

“Have you forgiven me, Franceline?” he said, looking at her tenderly, and with a sort of sheepish timidity.

“Indeed I have; forgiven and forgotten,” she replied; and then blushing very red, and correcting herself quickly: “I mean there was nothing to forgive.”

“That’s not the sort of forgiveness I want,” said Ponsonby, growing courageous in proportion as she grew embarrassed. “Franceline, why can you not like me a little? I love you so much; no one will ever love you better, or as well!”

She shook her head, but said nothing, only rose and went to the window. He followed her.

“You are angry with me again!” he exclaimed, and was going to break out in entreaties to be forgiven; when stooping forward he caught sight of her face. It was streaming with tears!

“I do not hate you. I never hated you! I wish with all my heart I could love you! But I cannot, I cannot! And you would not have me marry you if I did not love you? It would be false and selfish to accept your love, with all it would bring me, and give so little in return?” She turned her dark eyes on him, still full of tears, but unabashed and innocent, as if he had been a brother asking her to do something unreasonable.

“So little!” he cried, and seizing her hand he pressed it to his lips; “if you knew how thankful I would be for that little! What am I but an awkward lout at best! But I will make you happy, Franceline; I swear to you I will! And your father too. I will be as good as a son to him.”

She made no answer but the same negative movement of her head. She looked out over the winter fields with a dreamy expression, as if she only half heard him, while her hand lay passively in his.

“Say you will be my wife! Accept me, Franceline!” pleaded the young man, and he passed his arm around her.

The action roused her; she snatched away her hand and started from him. It was not aversion or antipathy, it was terror that dictated the movement. Something within her cried out and forbade her to listen. She could no more control the sudden recoil than she could control the tears that gushed out afresh, this time with loud sobs that shook her from head to foot.

“Good heavens! what have I done?” exclaimed Ponsonby, helpless and dismayed. “Shall I go away? shall I leave you?”

“Oh! it is nothing. It is over now,” said Franceline, her agitation quieted instantaneously by the sight of his. She dashed the tears from her cheeks impatiently; she was vexed with herself for giving way so before him. “Sit down; you are trembling all over,” said the young man; and he gently forced her into a chair. “I am sorry I said anything; I will never mention the subject again without your permission. Shall I go away?”

“It would be very ungracious to say ‘yes,’” she replied, trying to smile through the tears that hung like raindrops on her long lashes; “but you see how weak and foolish I am.”

“My poor darling! I will go and leave you. I have been too much for you. Only tell me, may I come soon again—just to ask how you are?”

She hesitated. To say yes would be tacitly to accept him; yet it was odious to turn him off like this without a word of kindly explanation to soften the pang. Ponsonby could not read these thoughts, so he construed her hesitation according to the immemorial logic of lovers.

“Well, never mind answering now,” he said; “I won’t bother you any more to-day. You will present my respects to the count, and say how sorry I was not to see him.”

“You will meet him on the road, I dare say,” said Franceline, extending hers. “You will not tell him how I have misbehaved to you?”

The shy smile that accompanied the request emboldened Ponsonby to raise the soft, white hand to his lips. Then turning away he overturned a little wicker flower-stand, happily with no injury to the sturdy green plant, but with considerable damage to the dignity of his exit.

Perhaps you will say that Mlle. de la Bourbonais behaved like a flirt in parting with a discarded lover in this fashion. It is easy for you to say so. It is not so easy for a woman with a heart to inflict unmitigated pain on a man who loves her, and whose love she at least requites with gratitude, esteem, and sisterly regard.

Sir Ponsonby met the count on the road; he made sure of the encounter by walking his horse up and down the green lane which commanded the road from Dullerton to The Lilies. What passed between them remained the secret of themselves and the winter thrush that perched on the brown hedge close by and sang out lustily to the trees and fields while they conversed.

M. de la Bourbonais made no comment on his daughter’s tear-stained cheeks when he came home; but taking her face between his hands, as he was fond of doing, he gave one wistful look, kissed it, and let it go.

“How long you have been away, petit père! Shall we go to our writing now?” she inquired cheerfully.

She sat down at his desk, and nothing was said of Sir Ponsonby Anwyll’s visit.

The excitement of that day’s interview told, nevertheless, on Franceline. It left her nervous, and weaker than she had been since her recovery. These symptoms escaped her father’s notice, and they would have escaped Angélique’s, owing to Franceline’s strenuous efforts to conceal them, if a slight cough had not come to put her on the qui vive more than ever. It was very slight indeed, only attacking her in the morning when she awoke, and quite ceasing by the time she was dressed and down-stairs. Franceline’s room was at one end of the cottage; Angélique slept next to her; and at the other end, with the stairs intervening, was the count’s room. He was thus out of ear-shot of the sound, which, however rare and seemingly unimportant, would have filled him with alarm. Franceline treated it as a trifle not worth mentioning; but when her old bonne insisted on taking her discreetly to Dr. Blink and having his opinion about it, she gave in to humor her. The doctor once more applied his stethoscope, and then, smiling that grim, satisfied smile of his that was so reassuring to patients till they had seen it practised on others and found out it was a fallacy, remarked:

“We are glad to be able to assure you again that there is nothing to be frightened at; no mischief that cannot be forestalled by care, and docility to our instructions,” he added emphatically. “We must order you some tonics, and you must take them regularly. How is the appetite?” turning to Angélique, who stood by devouring the oracle’s words and watching every line of his features with a shrewd, almost[206] vicious expression of mistrust on her brown face.

“Ah! the appetite. She will not be eating many; she will be wanting dainty plates which I cannot make,” explained the Frenchwoman, sticking pertinaciously to the future tense, as usual when she spoke English.

“Invalids are liable to those caprices of the palate,” remarked Dr. Blink blandly; “but Miss Franceline will be brave and overcome them. Dainty dishes are not always the most nourishing, and nourishment is necessary for her; it is essential.”

“That is what I will be telling mamselle,” assented Angélique; “but she will not be believing me. I will be telling her every day the strength is in the bouillon; but she will be making a grimace and saying ‘Pshaw!’”

The last word was uttered with a grimace so expressive that Franceline burst out laughing, and the pompous little doctor joined in it in spite of his dignity. She promised to do her best to obey him and overcome her dislike to the bouillon, Angélique’s native panacea, and to other substantial food.

But she found it very hard to keep the promise. It required something savory to tempt her weak appetite. Angélique saw she was doing her best, and never pressed the poor child needlessly; but she would groan over the plate as she removed it, sometimes untouched. “I used to think myself a ‘blue ribbon’ until now,” she said once to Franceline, with an impatient sigh; “but I am at the end of my talent; I can do nothing to please mamselle.” And then she would long for Sir Simon to come home. It happened unluckily that the professed artist who presided over the kitchen at the Court was taking a holiday during his master’s absence. Angélique would have scorned to invoke the skill of the subaltern who replaced him, but she had a profound admiration for the chef himself, and, though an Englishman, she bowed unreservedly to his superior talents. The belief was current that Sir Simon would spend the Christmas at Dullerton; he always did when not at too great a distance at that time. It was the right thing for an English gentleman to do, and his bitterest foe would not accuse the baronet of failing to act up to that standard.

This year, however, it was not possible. The weather was glorious at Nice and it was anything but that at Dullerton, and the long journey in the cold was not attractive. He wrote home desiring the usual festivities to be arranged according to the old custom of the place; coals and clothing were to be distributed ad libitum; the fatted calf was to be killed for the tenantry, and everybody was enjoined to eat, drink, and be merry in spite of the host’s absence. They conscientiously followed these hospitable injunctions, but it was a grievous disappointment that Sir Simon was not in their midst to stimulate the conviviality by his kindly and genial presence. Pretty presents came to The Lilies, but they did not bring strength to Franceline. She grew more transparent, more fragile-looking, as the days went on. Angélique held private conferences with Miss Merrywig, and that lady suggested that any of the large houses in the neighborhood would be only too delighted to be of any use in sending jellies flavored with good strong wine. There was nothing so nourishing[207] for an invalid; Miss Merrywig would speak to one where there was a capital cook. But Angélique would not hear of it. No, no! Much as she longed for the jelly she dared not get it in this way. M. le Comte would never forgive her. “He will be so proud, M. le Comte! He will be a Scotchman! He will not be confessing even to me that he wants nothing. But Monsieur Simon will be coming; he will be coming soon, and then he will be making little plates for mamselle every day.” Meantime she and Franceline did their best to hide from Raymond this particular reason for desiring their friend’s return. But he noticed that she ate next to nothing, and that she often signed to Angélique to remove her plate on which the food remained untasted. Once he could not forbear exclaiming: “Ah! if we were in Paris I could get some friandise to tempt thee!”

In the middle of January one morning a letter came from Sir Simon, bearing the London postmark.

He had been obliged to come to England on pressing business of a harassing nature.

“Is Sir Simon coming home, petit père?” inquired Franceline eagerly, as her father opened the letter.

“Yes; but only for a day. He will be here after to-morrow, and fly away to Nice the next day.”

“How tiresome of him! But it is better to see him for a day than not at all. Does he say what hour he arrives? We will go and meet him.”

“It will be too late for thee to be out, my child. He comes by the late afternoon train, just in time to dress for dinner and receive us all. He has invited several friends in the neighborhood to dine.”

Raymond’s eyebrows closed like a horseshoe over his meditative eyes as he folded the baronet’s letter and laid it aside. There was more in it than he communicated to Franceline. It was the old story; money tight, bills falling due, and no means of meeting them. Lady Rebecca had taken a fresh start, thanks to an Italian quack who had been up from Naples and worked wonders with some diabolical elixir—diabolical beyond a doubt, for nothing but the black-art could explain the sudden and extraordinary rally; she was all but dead when the quack arrived—so Mr. Simpson heard from one of her ladyship’s attendants. Simpson himself was terribly put out by the news; it overturned all his immediate plans; he saw no possibility of any longer avoiding extremities. Extremities meant that the principal creditor, a Jew who had lent a sum of thirty thousand pounds on Sir Simon’s life-interest in Dullerton, at the rate of twenty per cent, was now determined to wait no longer for his arrears of twenty per cent, but turn the baronet out of possession and sell his life-interest in the estate. This sword of Damocles had been hanging over his debtor’s head for the last ten years. It was to meet this usurious interest periodically that Sir Simon was driven to such close quarters. He had up to this time contrived to answer the demand—Heaven and Mr. Simpson alone knew at what sacrifices. But now he had come to a point beyond which even he declared he could not possibly carry his client. He had tried to negotiate post-obit bills on Lady Rebecca’s fifty thousand pounds, but[208] the Jews were too sharp for that. Lady Rebecca was sole master of her fifty thousand pounds, and might leave it to whom she liked. She had made her will bequeathing it to her step-son, and he was morally as certain of ultimately possessing the money as if it were entailed; but moral security is no security at all to a money-lender. The money was not entailed; Lady Rebecca might take it into her head to alter her will; she might leave it to a quack doctor, or to some clever sycophant of an attendant. There is no saying what an old lady of seventy-five may not do with fifty thousand pounds. Sir Simon pshawed and pooh-poohed contemptuously when Simpson enumerated these arguments against the negotiation of the much-needed P. O. bills; but it was no use. Israel was inexorable. And now one particular member of the tribe called Moses to witness that if he were not paid his “twenty per shent” on the first of February, he would seize upon the life-interest of Dullerton Court and make its present owner a bankrupt. He could sell nothing, either in the house or on the estate; the plate and pictures and furniture were entailed. If this were not the case, things need not have come to this with Sir Simon. Two of those Raphaels in the great gallery would have paid the Jew principal and interest together; but not a spoon or a hearth-brush in the Court could be touched; everything belonged to the heir. No mention has hitherto been made of that important person, because he in no way concerns this story, except by the fact of his existence. He was a distant kinsman of the present baronet, who had never seen him. He was in diplomacy, and so lived always abroad. People are said to dislike their heirs.

If Sir Simon disliked any human being, it was his. He did not dislike Lady Rebecca; he was only out of patience with her; she certainly was an aggravating old woman—living on to no purpose, that he could see, except to frustrate and harass him. Yet he had kindly thoughts of her; he had only cold aversion towards the man who was waiting for his own death to come and rule in his stead. He had never spoken of him to M. de la Bourbonais except to inform him that he existed, and that he stood in his way on many occasions. In the letter of this morning he spoke of him once more. The letter was a long one, and calmer than any previous effusion of the kind that Raymond remembered. There was very little vituperation of the duns, or even of the chief scoundrel who was about to tear away the veil that had hitherto concealed the sores and flaws in the popular landlord’s life. This was what he felt most deeply in it all; the disgrace of being shown up as a sham—a man who had lived like a prince while he had been in reality a beggar, in debt up to his ears, and who was now about to be made a bankrupt. Raymond had never before understood the real nature of his friend’s embarrassment; he was shocked and distressed more than he could express. It was not the moment to judge him; to remember the reckless extravagance, the criminal want of prudence, of conscience, that had brought him to this pass. He only thought of the friend of his youth, the kind, faithful, delightful companion who had never failed in friendship, whatever his other sins may have been. And now he was ruined, disgraced before[209] the world, going to be driven forth from his ancestral home branded as a life-long sham. Raymond could have wept for pity. Then it occurred to him with a strange pang that he was to dine with Sir Simon the next day; the head cook had been telegraphed for to prepare the dinner; there was to be a jovial gathering of friends to “cheer him up.” What a mystery it was, this craving for being cheered up, as if the process were a substantial remedy that in some way helped to pay debts, or postpone payment! The count was too sad at heart to smile. He rose from the breakfast-table with a sigh, and was leaving the room when Franceline linked her hands on his arm, and said, looking up with an anxious face:

“There is hardly any news at all,” he replied evasively. In truth there was not.

“Why dost thou look so pale?” was the reply. And he smiled tenderly and sighed again as he kissed her forehead.

ÆSCHYLUS.

A PRECURSOR OF MARCO POLO.

The merchants and missionaries who were the first travellers and ambassadors of Christian times little thought, absorbed as they were in the object of their quest, how large a share of interest in the eyes of posterity would centre in the quaint observations, descriptions, and drawings which they were able incidentally to gather or make. Marco Polo’s name, and even those of his father and uncle, Niccolo and Matteo Polo, are well known, and are associated with all that barbaric magnificence the memory of which had a great share in keeping alive the perseverance of subsequent explorers. It was fitting that traders in jewels should reach the more civilized and splendid Tartars, and no doubt their store of rich presents, and their garments of ample dimensions as well as fine texture, would prove a passport through tribes so passionately acquisitive as the Tartars seem to have been. Nomads are not always simple-minded or unambitious. The Franciscan whose travels come just between the expedition of the elder Polo and the more famous Marco—Friar William Rubruquis—did not have the good-luck to see the wonders his successor described; but he mentions repeatedly that his entertainers made reiterated and minute inquiries as to the abundance of flocks and herds in the country he came from, and that they wondered—rather contemptuously—at the presents of sweet wine, dried fruits, and delicate cakes which were all he had to offer their great princes.

Rubruquis was traveller, missionary, and ambassador, but in the two pursuits denoted by the last-mentioned titles his success was but small. As a traveller, however, he was hardy, persevering, and observant. Though not bred a horseman, he often rode thirty leagues a day, and half the time at full gallop, he says. His companions, monks like himself, could not stand the fatigue, and both, at different intervals, parted company from him. But Rubruquis was young and strong, though, as he himself says, corpulent and heavy; and, above all, he was enterprising. He was not more than five-and-twenty when he started on his quest of the Christian monarch whom all the rulers of Europe firmly believed in, and whose name has come down to us as Prester John.

Born in 1230, he devoted himself early to the church, and during the Fourth Crusade went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. His real name was Ruysbroek, but, according to the unpatriotic fashion of the times, he Latinized it into Rubruquis. S. Louis, King of France, eager for the Christian alliance which the supposed Prester John would be able to enter into with him, had once already sent an embassy of monks to seek him; but they had failed to perform a sixth part of the journey set down for them, and had heard no tidings of a monarch answering to the description. The king, nothing daunted, determined to send another embassy on a voyage of discovery[211] Vague news of a Christian Tartar chief, by name Sartach, had come to him; probably the toleration extended by the Tartars to Christians—a contrast to the behavior of most Saracenic chiefs—led to this obstinate belief in a remote Christian empire of the East.

William de Rubruquis, Bartholomew of Cremona, and a companion named Andrew, all Franciscan friars, were chosen for this new expedition. On the 7th of May, 1253 (says his narrative, though it has since been calculated that, as S. Louis was a captive at the time, the date 1255 is more likely to be correct), the travellers, having crossed the Black Sea from Constantinople, landed at Soldaia, near Cherson. The king, somewhat unwisely as it proved, had told his envoy to represent himself as a private individual travelling on his own account. But the Tartars were acute and jealous of foreigners; they knew that travelling entailed too much fatigue and danger to be undertaken simply for pleasure, and they had small regard for any stranger, unless the representative of a prince. They guessed his mission, and taxed him with it, till he was obliged to acknowledge that he was the bearer of letters from the Christian King of France to the mighty khan, Sartach. But though the people do not seem to have taken him for a private person, they were puzzled by the poverty of his dress and the scantiness of the presents he offered them. Even small dignitaries expected to be royally propitiated. He explained his vow of poverty to them, but this did not impress the Tartars as favorably as he wished. Still, he met with nothing but civility and hospitality.

Rubruquis says that Soldaia was a great mart for furs, which the Russians exchanged with the merchants of Constantinople for silks, cotton, spices, etc. The third day after his departure he met a wandering tribe, “among whom being entered,” he says, “methought I was come into a new world.”

He goes on to describe their houses on wheels, no despicable or narrow habitations, even according to modern ideas:

“Their houses, in which they sleep, they raise upon a round foundation of wickers artificially wrought and compacted together, the roof consisting of wickers also meeting above in one little roundel, out of which there rises upwards a neck like a chimney, which they cover with white felt; and often they lay mortar or white earth upon the felt with the powder of bones, that it may shine and look white; sometimes, also, they cover their houses with black felt. This cupola … they adorn with a variety of pictures. Before the door they hang a felt curiously painted over; for they spend all their colored felt in painting vines, trees, birds, and beasts thereupon. These houses they make so large that they contain thirty feet in breadth; for, measuring once the breadth between the wheel-ruts, … I found it to be twenty feet over, and when the house was upon the cart it stretched over the wheels on each side five feet at least. I told two-and-twenty oxen in one draught, drawing an house upon a cart, and eleven more on the other side. (Two rows, one in front of the other, we suppose.) … A fellow stood in the door of the house, driving the oxen.”

Sometimes a woman drove, or walked at the head of the leaders to guide them. “One woman will guide twenty or thirty carts at once;[212] for their country is very flat, and they fasten the carts with camels or oxen one behind another. A girl sits in the foremost cart, driving the oxen, and all the rest of themselves follow at a like pace. When they come to a place which is a bad passage, they loose them, and guide them one by one.…”

The baggage was so arranged as to be taken through the smaller rivers of Asia without being injured or wetted. It consisted of square chests of wicker-work, with a hollow lid or cover of the same, “covered with black felt, rubbed over with tallow or sheep’s milk to keep the rain from soaking through, which they also adorn with painting or white feathers.” These were placed on carts with very high wheels, and drawn by camels instead of oxen. The encampment was like a large village, well defended by palisades formed of the carts off which the houses had been taken, and which were drawn up in two compact lines, one in front and one in the rear of the dwellings, “as it were between two walls,” says our traveller. A rich Tartar commonly had one hundred, or even two hundred, such cart-houses. Each house had several small houses belonging to it, placed behind it, serving as closets, store-rooms, and sleeping chambers, and often as many as two hundred chests and their necessary carts. This made immense numbers of camels and oxen for draught necessary; and, besides, there were the animals for food and milk, and the horses for the men. They had cow’s milk and mare’s milk, two species of food which they used very differently, and even made of social and religious importance. Only the men were allowed to milk the mares, while the women attended to the cows; and any interchange of these offices would have been deemed, in a man, unpardonable effeminacy, and in a woman indelicacy. At the door of the houses stood two tutelary deities, monsters of both sexes. The cow’s milk served for the food of women and children, while the mare’s milk was made into a fermented liquor called cosmos. This was supposed to make a heathen of the man who drank it; for the Nestorian Christians found among them, “who keep their own laws very strictly, will not drink thereof; they account themselves no Christians after they have once drunk of it; and their priests reconcile them to the church as if they had renounced the Christian faith.”

This cosmos was made thus: The milk was poured into a large skin bag, and the bag beaten with a wooden club until the milk began to ferment and turn sour. The bag was then shaken and cudgelled again until most of it turned to butter; after which the liquid was supposed to be fit for drinking. Rubruquis evidently liked it; says it was exhilarating to the spirits, and even intoxicating to weak heads; pungent to the taste, “like raspberry wine,” but left a flavor on the palate “like almond-milk.” Cara-cosmos, a rarer quality of the same, and reserved for the chiefs only, was produced by prolonging the beating of the bag until the coagulated portions subsided to the bottom. These drinks were received as tribute or taxes. Baatu, a chief with sixteen wives, received the produce of three thousand mares daily, besides a quantity of common cosmos, a bowl of which almost always stood on the threshold of every rich man’s house. The Tartars often drank of it to excess, and their banquets were relieved by music.

At these feasts, in which both sexes participated, the guests clapped their hands and danced to the music, the men before their host, the women before his principal wife. The host always drank first. The moment he put his lips to the bowl of cosmos, his cup-bearer cried aloud “Ha!” and the musicians struck up. This almost sounds like a mediæval Twelfth-night banquet, when all the guests rose and shouted, “The king drinks!” and then drained their goblets in imitation of the monarch of the night. The Tartars respectfully waited till the lord of the feast had finished his draught, when the cup-bearer again cried “Ha!” and the music ceased. After a pause, the guests, male and female, drank round in turns, each one to the sound of music, with a pause and silence before the next person took up the cup. This fashion of drinking continued unchanged for many centuries, and later travellers, amid the increased pomp of the court of the Tartar emperors of China, found it still in force—music, cries, pauses, and all. We have also seen, not many years ago, on the occasion of the marriage of the late young emperor of China, illustrations of the wedding procession, representing immensely wide carts, drawn by eleven oxen abreast, laden with costly state furniture; and if we take away the pomp and gilding, the picture is not unlike that of the Tartar camp-carts seen by our traveller. Rubruquis hints that the Tartars were not a temperate people; they drank much and not cleanly, and the way of “inviting” a person to drink was to seize his ears and pull them forcibly. The sweet wine, of which the monk had a small supply, pleased them very well, but they thought him not lavish enough in his hospitality; for once, on his offering the master of the house one flagon of this wine, the man gravely drained it and asked for another, saying that “a man does not go into a house with one foot.” In return, however, they did not give him much to eat; but perhaps he suffered hunger rather from his prejudice to the meat they ate than from their niggardliness in giving. He at last learned to eat horse-flesh, but was disgusted at his friends’ eating the bodies of animals that had died of disease. The Tartars were honest enough, and, never even took things by force; but they begged for everything that took their fancy as unblushingly as some of Paul Du Chaillu’s negroes in Africa. It surprised them to be refused anything—knives, gloves, purses, etc.—and, when gratified, never thought it necessary to thank their guests.

After a while Rubruquis met the carts of Zagatai, one of the chieftains, to whom he brought a letter from the Emperor of Constantinople. Here the Tartars asked “what we had in our carts—whether it were gold, or silver, or rich garments”; and both Zagatai and his interpreter were haughtily discontented at finding that at least some garment of value was not forthcoming. This is not wonderful, considering the wealth of their own great khans, of whom a later one, Kooblai, so celebrated in Marco Polo’s travels, gave his twelve lords, twelve times in the year, robes of gold-colored silk, embroidered with gold and precious stones. Zagatai, however, received the ambassador graciously. “He sat on his bed,”[45] says Rubruquis, “holding a musical[214] instrument in his hand, and his wife sat by him, who, in my opinion, had cut and pared her nose between the eyes, that she might seem to be more flat-nosed; for she had left herself no nose at all in that place, having anointed the very scar with black ointment, as she also did her eyebrows, which sight seemed to me most ugly.… I besought him that he would accept this small gift at our hands, excusing myself that I was a monk, and that it was against our profession to possess gold, silver, or precious garments, and therefore that I had not any such thing to give him, unless he would receive some part of our victuals instead of a blessing.” The Tartars were always eager to receive a blessing over and above any present. He was constantly asked to make over them the sign of the cross; but it is to be feared that they looked upon it as a charm, and of charms they couldn’t have too many. From Zagatai, Rubruquis went to Sartach, who said he had no power of treating with him, and sent him on to his father-in-law, Baatu, the patriarch with sixteen wives and several hundred houses. Losing his ox-wagons and baggage on the way—for the independent tribes did not scruple to exact tribute from a traveller, even if he was a friend of their neighbors—he never lost his courage and his determination to sow the seeds of truth in Tartary. He did not know the language at first, and only learnt it very imperfectly at the last. Here and there a captive Christian, mostly Hungarians, or a Tartar who had learnt the rudiments of Christianity during an invasion of his tribe into Europe, acted as interpreter. All were uniformly kind to him. One of them, who understood Latin and psalmody, was in great request at all the funerals of his neighborhood; but the “Christianity” of the natives was but a shred of Nestorianism worked into a web of paganism, so that, the farther he advanced, the farther the great, powerful, united Christian community headed by Prester John seemed to recede. The people took kindly to Christian usages, and had some respect for the forms and ceremonies which the monk and his companions endeavored to keep up; but when it came to doctrine and morality, they grew impatient and unresponsive. One of Rubruquis’ interpreters often refused to do his office. “And thus,” says the traveller, “it caused me great chagrin when I wished to address to them a few words of edification; for he would say to me, ‘You shall not make me preach to-day; I understand nothing of all you tell me.’ … And then he spoke the truth; for afterwards, as I began to understand a little of their tongue, I perceived that when I told him one thing he repeated another, just according to his fancy. Therefore, seeing it was no use to talk or preach, I held my tongue.”

Hard riding was not the only thing that distressed the ambassador of the King of France. His companions gave him meat that was less than half-cooked, and sometimes positively raw. Then the cold began to be severe, and still there were at least four months’ travel before him. The Tartars were kind to him in their rough way, and gave him some of their thick sheepskins and hide shoes. He had insisted on journeying most of the time in his Franciscan sandals, and, full of ardor for his rule, had constantly refused gifts of costly garments. This the Tartars[215] never quite understood, but they respected the principle which caused him to make so many sacrifices for the sake and furtherance of his religion. Wherever he passed, he and his companions endeared themselves to the inhabitants by many little services (doubtless also by cures wrought by simple remedies), and generally by their gentle, unselfish conduct towards all men. Rubruquis observed everything minutely as he passed. The manners and customs of the people interested him, and perhaps he did not consider them quite such barbarians as we of later days are apt to do. When we read the accounts of domestic life among the majority of people in mediæval times, and see that refinement of manner was less thought of than costliness of apparel and wealth of plate and cattle, the difference between such manners and those of the Tartars is not appreciable. Few in those days were learned, and learning it is that has always made the real difference between a gentleman and a boor. The marauding chieftains of feudal times were only romantic and titled highwaymen after all. So were the wandering Tartars. The difference that has since sprung up between the descendants of the marauding barons and those of the Tartar chiefs is mainly one of race. The former are of an enterprising, improving race, the latter of a stagnant one; and while the European nations that then trembled before the invading hordes of Jengis-Khan have now developed into intellectual superiority over every other race in the world, the Tartar is still, socially and intellectually, on the same old level, and his political advantages have vanished with his rude warlike superiority before the diplomacy and the military organization of his former victims.

Rubruquis noticed that among the superstitions common in Tartary was a belief that it was unlucky for a visitor to touch the threshold of a Tartar’s door. Modern travellers assert the same of the Chinese. Whenever our envoy paid a visit, he deferred to this belief by carefully stepping across the threshold of the house or tent, without letting any part of his person or dress come in contact with it. Their dress, on festive occasions, was rich; for they traded with China, Persia, and other southern and eastern countries for “stuffs of silk, cloths of gold, and cotton cloths, which they wear in time of summer; but out of Russia, Bulgaria, Hungaria, and out of Chersis (all which are northern regions and full of woods), … the inhabitants bring them rich and costly skins and furs of divers sorts, which I never saw in our countries, wherewithal they are clad in winter.” The rough sheepskin coats had their place also in their toilet, and a material made of two-thirds wool and one-third horsehair furnished them with caps, saddle-cloths, and felt for covering their wagons.

The women’s dress was distinguished from the men’s simply by its greater length, and they often rode, like the men, astride their horses, their faces protected by a white veil, crossing the nose just below the eyes and descending to the breast. Immense size and flat noses were the great desiderata among them. Marriage was a mere bargain, and daughters were generally sold to the highest bidder. Though expert hunters, the Tartars were scarcely what we should call sportsmen. They hunted on the battue system, spreading[216] themselves in a wide circle, and gradually contracting this as they drove the game before them, until the unfortunate animals being penned in in a small space, they were easily shot down by wholesale. Hawking was also in vogue among the Tartars, and was reduced as much to a science as in Europe. They strenuously punished great crimes with death, as, for instance, murder, theft, adultery, and even minor offences against chastity. This, however, was less the consequence of a regard for virtue per se than of a vivid perception of the rights of property. No code but the Jewish and the Christian ever protected the honor of women for its own sake. In mourning for the dead it is strange that violent howling and lamentation, even on the part of those not personally concerned, should be a form common to almost all nations, not only of different religions, but of various and widely-separated races. The Tartars, as well as the Celts, practised it. Rubruquis mentions that they made various monuments over the graves of their dead, sometimes mere mounds or barrows of earth, or towers of brick and even of stone—though no stone was to be found near the spot—and sometimes large open spaces, paved with stone, with four large stones placed upright at the corners, always facing the four cardinal points.

It was during winter that the envoy arrived at the court or encampment of Mandchu-Khan. He says that it was at the distance of twenty days’ journey from Cataya, or Cathay (China), but it is difficult to say exactly where that was. Here Rubruquis found a number of Nestorian priests peacefully living under the khan’s protection, and among them one who had only arrived a month before the Franciscan friar, and said he had come, in consequence of a vision, to convert the khan and his people. He was an Armenian from the Holy Land. Our missionary describes him thus in his terse, direct way, which has this advantage over the long-winded and minute descriptions of our day, that we seem to see the man before us: “He was a monk, somewhat black and lean, clad with a rough hair-coat to the knees, having over it a black cloak of bristles, furred with spotted skins, girt with iron under his hair-cloth.” Mandchu-Khan was tolerant and liberal, and rather well disposed than otherwise to the Christian religion. His favorite wife, whom he had lately lost, had been a Christian, and so was his first secretary, but both Nestorian Christians. The khan, or his servants—who doubtless expected to be propitiated with the usual gifts if they could only succeed in wearying out the patience of the new-comers—made the envoy wait nine days for an audience. The Tartars thought it strange that a king’s ambassador should come to court bare-foot; but a boy, a Hungarian captive, again gave the required and often-repeated explanation. Before entering the large hall, whose entrance was closed by curtains of gayly-painted felt, the monks were searched, to see if they carried any concealed arms; and then the procession formed, the Christian missionaries entering the khan’s presence singing the hymn A Solis ortus cardine. The khan, like the lesser chieftains Rubruquis had already met, was seated on a “bed” or divan, dressed “in a spotted skin or fur, bright and shining.” The multitudinous bowings and prostrations in use at the Chinese court were very likely[217] exacted, though the envoy says in general terms that “he had to bend the knee.” Such simplicity is, however, very far from the ceremonious Oriental ideal of homage, and it was not then, as it is now, esteemed an honor to receive Frankish envoys in the Frankish manner. Mandchu first offered his guests a drink of fermented milk, of which they partook sparingly, not to offend him; but the interpreter soon made himself unfit for his office by his indulgence in his favorite beverage. Rubruquis stated his mission with modest simplicity. In his quality of ambassador he might have resented the delay in receiving him; he might have complained of the familiarity and want of respect with which he had been often treated, and of the advantage taken of his gentleness and ignorance of the language to plunder him; but he was more than a king’s messenger. He was intent upon preaching the “good tidings” to the Tartars, and only used human means to compass a divine end. He acknowledged that he had no rich presents nor temporal goods to offer, but only spiritual benefits to impart. His practice certainly did not belie his theory. The people never disbelieved him, nor suspected him of being a political emissary. But still, he was unsuccessful. He soon perceived that his interpreter was blundering, and says: “I easily found he was drunk, and Mandchu-Khan himself was drunk also, as I thought.” All he could obtain was leave to remain in the country during the cold season. Inquiries met him on all sides as to the wealth and state of Europe; but of religion, beyond the few forms that pleased their eye, the people did not seem to think. They looked down with lofty indifference on the faith of those various adventurers whom their sovereign kindly sheltered, and ranked the Christian priests they already knew in the same category with conjurers and quack doctors. The Christianity of these Nestorians was even more imperfect than that of the Abyssinians at the time of the late English invasion of the unlucky King Theodore’s dominions. Rubruquis was horrified to find in these priests mere superstitious mountebanks. They mingled Tartar rites with corrupt ceremonies of the Catholic Church, and practised all manner of deceptions, mixing rhubarb with holy water as a medicinal drink, and carrying to the bedside of the sick lances and swords half-drawn from their sheaths along with the crucifix. Upon these grounds they pretended to the power of working miracles and curing the sick by spiritual means alone. The Franciscan zealously tried to reform these abuses and to convert the Nestorians before he undertook to preach to the Tartars; but here again he was unsuccessful. The self-interest of these debased men was in question, and truth was little to them in comparison with the comfort and consideration they enjoyed as leeches.

A curious scene occurred while at this encampment of the khan. There were many Mahometans in the country, and the sovereign, with impartial tolerance, protected them and their commerce as he did the person and property of other refugees. They, the Christians, and some representative Tartars were all assembled one day, by order of Mandchu, to discuss in public the merits of their respective faiths. But even on this occasion no bitterness was evinced, and the meeting, though it turned out useless in[218] a spiritual sense, ended in a friendly banquet. Rubruquis did his best to improve this opportunity of teaching the truth; but the hour of successful evangelization had not yet struck, and much of the indifference of the Tartars is to be attributed to the culpable practices of the Nestorians, whose behavior was enough to discredit the religion they pretended to profess. But if the missionary, notwithstanding all his zeal, was unable to convert the heathens, he at least comforted and strengthened many captive Christians. We have already mentioned a few of these, and in Mandchu’s camp he met with another, a woman from Metz in Lorraine, who had been taken prisoner in Hungary, and been carried back into their own country by the invaders. She had at first suffered many hardships, but ended by marrying a young Russian, a captive like herself, who was skilful in the art of building wooden houses. The Tartars prized this kind of knowledge, and were kind to the young couple, who were now leading a tolerably comfortable life, and had a family of three children. To fancy their joy at seeing a genuine Christian missionary is almost out of our power in these days of swift communication, when nothing is any longer a marvel; but if we could put ourselves in their place, we might paint a wonderful picture of thankfulness, surprise, and simple, rock-like faith. The latter part of Lent was spent in travelling, as the khan broke up his encampment, and went on across a chain of mountains to a great city, Karakorum, or Karakûm, on the river Orchon. Every vestige of such a city has disappeared centuries ago, but Marco Polo mentions it and describes its streets, situation, defences, etc. He arrived there nearly twenty years later, and noticed that it was surrounded by a strong rampart of earth, there being no good supply of stone in those parts.

The passage of the Changai Mountains was a terrible undertaking; the cold was intense and the weather stormy, and the khan, with his usual bland eclecticism, begged Rubruquis to “pray to God in his own fashion” for milder weather, chiefly for the sake of the cattle. On Palm Sunday the envoy blessed the willow-boughs he saw on his way, though he says there were no buds on them yet; but they were near the city now, and the weather had become more promising. Rubruquis had his eyes wide open as he came to the first organized city of the Tartars, as Marco Polo affirms this to have been. It had scarcely been built twenty years when our monk visited it, and owed its origin to the son and successor of Jengis-Khan. “There were two grand streets in it,” says Rubruquis, “one of the Saracens, where the fairs are kept (held), and many merchants resort thither, and one other street of the Cathayans (Chinese), who are all artificers.” Many of the latter were captives, or at least subjects, of the khan; for the Tartars had already conquered the greater part of Northern China. The khan lived in a castle or palace outside the earthen rampart. In Karakorum, again, the monk found many Christians, Armenian, Georgian, Hungarian, and even of Western European origin. Among others he mentions an Englishman—whom he calls Basilicus, and who had been born in Hungary—and a few Germans. But the most important personage of foreign birth was a French goldsmith, William Bouchier, whose wife was a Hungarian,[219] but of Mahometan parentage. This Benvenuto Cellini of the East was rich and liberal, an excellent interpreter, thoroughly at home in the Tartar dialects, a skilful artist, and in high favor at court. He had just finished a masterpiece of mechanism and beauty which Rubruquis thus minutely describes: “In the khan’s palace, because it was unseemly to carry about bottles of milk and other drinks there, Master William made him a great silver tree, at the root whereof were four silver lions, having each one pipe, through which flowed pure cow’s milk; and four other pipes were conveyed within the body of the tree unto the top thereof, and the tops spread back again downwards, and upon every one of them was a golden serpent, whose tails twined about the body of the tree. And one of these pipes ran with wine, another with cara-cosmos, another with ball—a drink made of honey—and another with a drink made of rice. Between the pipes, at the top of the tree, he made an angel holding a trumpet, and under the tree a hollow vault, wherein a man might be hid; and a pipe ascended from this vault through the tree to the angel. He first made bellows, but they gave not wind enough. Without the palace walls there was a chamber wherein the several drinks were brought; and there were servants there ready to pour them out when they heard the angel sounding his trumpet. And the boughs of the tree were of silver, and the leaves and the fruit. When, therefore, they want drink, the master-butler crieth to the angel that he sound the trumpet. Then he hearing (who is hid in the vault), bloweth the pipe, which goeth to the angel, and the angel sets his trumpet to his mouth, and the trumpet soundeth very shrill. Then the servants which are in the chamber hearing, each of them poureth forth his drink into its proper pipe, and all the pipes pour them forth from above, and they are received below in vessels prepared for that purpose.”

This elaborate piece of plate makes one think rather of the XVIth century banquets of the Medici and the Este than of feastings given by a nomad Tartar in the wilds of Central Asia. The goldsmith was not unknown to fame even in Europe, where he was called William of Paris. Several old chroniclers speak of him, and his brother Roger was well known as a goldsmith “living upon the great bridge at Paris.” This clever artist very nearly fell a victim to the quackery of a Nestorian monk, whereupon Rubruquis significantly comments thus: “He entreated him to proceed either as an apostle doing miracles indeed, by virtue of prayer, or to administer his potion as a physician, according to the art of medicine.” Besides the Tartars and their Christian captives, Rubruquis had opportunities of observing the numerous Chinese, or Cathayans, as they were called, who have been mentioned as the artificers of the town. There were also knots of Siberians, Kamtchatkans, and even inhabitants of the islands between the extremities of Asia and America, where at times the sea was frozen over. Rubruquis picked up a good deal of miscellaneous information, chiefly about the Chinese. He mentions their paper currency—a fact which Marco Polo subsequently verified—and their mode of writing; i.e., with small paint-brushes, and each character or figure signifying a whole word. The standard of value of[220] the Russians, he says, consisted in spotted furs—a currency which still exists in the remoter parts of Siberia.

It was not without good reason, no doubt, that the monk-envoy made up his mind to leave the country he had hoped either to evangelize or to find already as orthodox as his own, and ruled by a great Christian potentate. Such perseverance as he showed throughout his journey was not likely to be daunted by slight obstacles; but finding the object of his mission as far from attainment as when he first entered Tartary, he at last reluctantly left the field. Only one European besides himself had ventured so far—Friar Bartholomew of Cremona; but even he shrank before a renewal of the hardships of mountain and desert travel, and chose rather to stay behind with Master William, the hospitable goldsmith, till some more convenient opportunity should present itself of returning to his own country. Rubruquis accordingly started alone, with a servant, an interpreter, and a guide; but though he had asked for leave to go on Whitsunday, the permission was delayed till the festival of S. John Baptist, the 24th of June. The khan made him a few trifling presents, and gave him a complimentary letter to the King of France; but no definite results were obtained. The homeward journey was long and tedious, and the only provision made for the sustenance of the party was a permission from the khan to take a sheep “once in four days, wherever they could find it.” Sometimes they had nothing to eat for three days together, and only a little cosmos to drink, and more than once, having missed the stations of the wandering tribes whom they had reckoned on meeting, even the supply of cosmos was exhausted. About two months after his departure from Karakorum, Rubruquis met Sartach, the great chief who had sheltered him for some time on his way to the river Don. Some belongings of the mission having been left in Sartach’s care, the envoy asked him to return them, but was told they were in charge of Baatu, Rubruquis’ other friend and protector. Sartach was on his way to join Mandchu-Khan, and was of course surrounded by the two hundred houses and innumerable chests which belonged to the establishment of a Tartar patriarch. If this was not exactly civilization, it was companionship, and the envoy must have been glad of a meeting which replenished his exhausted stores and suggested domestic comfort and abundance. More rough travelling on horseback, more experiences of hunger and cold (for the autumn was already coming on), more fording of rivers, and the monk found himself at Baatu’s court. It was the 16th of September—a year after he had left the chieftain to push on to the court of the Grand-Khan. Here he was joyfully and courteously received, and recovered nearly all his property; but as the Tartars had concluded that the whole embassy must have perished long ago, they had allowed some Nestorian priest, a wanderer under the protection now of Sartach, now of Baatu and other khans, to appropriate various Psalters, books, and ecclesiastical vestments. Three young men, Europeans, whom Rubruquis had left behind, had nearly been reduced to bondage under the same pretext, but they had not suffered personal ill-treatment. The kind offices of some influential[221] Armenians had staved off the evil day, and the timely arrival of the long-missing envoy secured them their freedom. Rubruquis now joined Baatu’s court, which was journeying westward to a town called Sarai, on the eastern bank of the Volga; but the progress of the encumbered Tartars was so slow that he left them after a month’s companionship, and pushed on with his party, till he reached Sarai on the feast of All Saints. After this the country was almost an unbroken desert; but our traveller once more fell in with one of his Tartar friends, a son of Sartach, who was out upon a hawking expedition, and gave him a guard to protect him from various fierce Mahometan tribes that infested the neighborhood.

Here ended his travels in Tartary proper; but his hardships were far from ended yet. Through Armenia and the territories of Turkish and Koordish princes he journeyed slowly and uncomfortably, in dread of the violence of his own guides and guards, as well as of the insults of the populations whose country he traversed. He says these delays “arose in part from the difficulty of procuring horses, but chiefly because the guide chose to stop, often for three days together, in one place, for his own business; and, though much dissatisfied, I durst not complain, as he might have slain me and those with me, or sold us all for slaves, and there was none to hinder it.”

Journeying across Asia Minor and over Mount Taurus, he took ship at last for Cyprus. Here he learnt that S. Louis, who had been in the Holy Land at the time of his departure, had gone back to France. He would very much have wished to deliver his letters and presents of silk pelisses and furs to the king in person; but this was not granted him. The provincial of his order, whom he met at Cyprus, desired him to write his account and send his gifts to the king; and as in those days there was creeping in among the monks a habit of restless wandering, his superior, who was, it seems, a reformer and strict disciplinarian, tried the obedience and humility of the famous traveller by sending him to his convent at Acre, whence, by the king’s order, he had started. Rubruquis stood the test, but could not forbear imploring the king, by writing, to use his influence with the provincial to allow him a short stay in France and one audience of his royal master. Little is known of the great traveller and pioneer after this; and whether he ever got leave to see the king is doubtful. He fell back into obscurity, and it is presumed that Marco Polo did not even know of his previous travels over the same ground as the Polos explored. No record of his embassy remained but the Latin letter addressed to S. Louis, and even in France his fame was unknown for many centuries. It was not till after the invention of printing that his adventures became fairly known to the literary world, although Roger Bacon, one of his own order, had given a spirited abstract of his travels in one of his works. This, too, was in Latin, and after a time became a sealed book to the vulgar; so that it was not at least till the year 1600 that the old traveller’s name was again known. Hakluyt’s Collection of Voyages and Travels contains an English translation of Rubruquis’ letter, and twenty-five years later Purchas reproduced it in toto from a copy found in a college library at Cambridge.[222] Bergeron, a French priest, put it into French, not from the original, but from Purchas’ English version. Since then Rubruquis has taken his place among the few famous voyagers of olden times; but from the vagueness of his language, the lack of geographical science in his day, and perhaps also the mistakes of careless copyists, it is not easy to trace his course upon the map. One fact, however, he ascertained and insisted upon, which a geographical society, had it existed in his time, would have been glad to register, together with an honorable mention of the discoverer—i.e., the nature of the great lake called the Caspian Sea. The old Greeks had correctly called it an inland sea, but an idea had since prevailed that it possessed some communication with the Northern Ocean. Rubruquis proved the contrary, but no attention was paid to his single assertion, and books of geography, compiled at home from ancient maps and MSS., without a reference, however distant, to the facts recorded by adventurous men who had seen foreign shores with their eyes, calmly continued to propagate the old error.

A PARAPHRASE, FROM THE GREEK.

THE LAW OF GOD AND THE REGULATIONS OF SOCIETY.
SUMMARY CONSIDERATIONS ON LAW.

I.—THE MODERN STATE.

Never before was liberty so much talked about; never before was the very idea of it so utterly lost. Tyrants have been destroyed, it is said. This is a false assertion it may be (or rather, is it not certain?) that it has become more difficult for a sovereign to govern tyrannically, but tyranny is not dead—quite the contrary.

All unlimited power is, of its own nature, tyrannical. Now, it is such a power that the modern state desires to wield. The state is held up to us as the supreme arbiter of good and evil; and, if we believe its defenders, it cannot err, its laws being in every case, and at all times, binding.

People have banished God from the government of human society; but they have made to themselves a new god, despotic and blind, without hearing and without voice, whose power knows how to reach its slaves as well in the temple as in the public places, as well in the palace as in the humblest cot.

What is there, indeed, more divine than not to do wrong? God alone, speaking to the human conscience, either directly or by his representatives, is the infallible judge of good and evil. No human power whatsoever can declare all that emanates from it to be necessarily right without usurping the place of God, and declaring itself the sovereign master of the soul as well as of the body. The last refuge of the slaves of antiquity—the human conscience—would no longer exist for the people of modern times, if it were true that every law is binding from the mere fact of its promulgation. Hence the modern state, but lately so boastful, has begun to waver and to doubt its own powers. It encounters two principal obstacles, as unlike in their form as in their origin.

On one hand it beholds Catholics, sustained by their knowledge of law, its origin and its essence, resisting passively, and preparing themselves to submit to persecutions without even shrinking. On the other it meets, in these our days, the most formidable insurrections. There are multitudes, blind as the state representatives—but excusable, inasmuch as their rebellion is against an authority which owes its sway only to caprice or theory—who reply thus to power: “We are as good as you; you have no right over us other than that of brute force; we will endeavor to oppose you with a strength equal to yours; and when we shall have gained the victory, we will make new laws and new constitutions, wherein all that you call lawful shall be called unlawful,[224] and all that you consider crime shall be deemed virtue.”

If it were true that law could spring only from the human will, these madmen would be reasonable in the extreme. Thus the state is powerless against them. It drags on an uncertain existence, constantly threatened with the most terrible social wars, and enjoying a momentary peace only on condition of never laying down arms. Modern armies are standing ones; the modern police have become veritable armies, and they sleep neither day nor night. At this price do our states exist, trade, grow rich, and become satisfied with themselves.

These constant commotions are not alone the vengeance of the living God disowned and outraged; they are also the inevitable consequence of that extremity of pride and folly which has induced human assemblies to believe that it belongs to them to decide finally between right and wrong.

In truth, “if God is not the author of law, there is no law really binding.” We may, for the love of God, obey existing powers, even though they be illegitimate; but this submission has its limits. It must cease the moment that the human law prescribes anything contrary to the law of God. As for people without faith, we would in vain seek for a motive powerful enough to induce them to submit to anything displeasing to them.

II.—MODERN LIBERTY.

The people of our generation consider themselves more free, more unrestrained, than those who have gone before them. It is not to our generation, however, that the glory accrues of having first thrown off the yoke. Our moderns themselves acknowledge that they have had predecessors, and they agree with us in declaring that “the new spirit” made its appearance in the world about the XVIth century.[46]

In truth, the only yoke which has been cast off since then is that of God, which seemed too heavy. All at once thought pronounced itself freed from the shackles of ecclesiastical authority; but, at the outset, it was far from intended to deny the idea of a divine right superior to all human right.

Despite the historical falsehoods which have found utterance in our day, it was chiefly princes who propagated Protestantism; and, most often, they attained their end only by violence. When successful, they added to their temporal title a religious one; they made themselves bishops or popes, and thus became all the more powerful over their subjects. There was no longer any refuge from the abuse of power of the rulers of this world; for it was the interest of these despots to call themselves the representatives of God. By means of this title they secularized dioceses, convents, the goods of the church, and even the ministers of their new religion. This term was then used to express in polite language an idea of spoliation and of hypocritical and uncurbed tyranny.

The moderns have gone farther: they have attempted to secularize law itself. This time, again, the word hides a thought which, if it were openly expressed, would shock; the law has become atheistical,[225] and not all the opposition which the harshness of this statement has aroused can prevent it from still expressing a truth. The inexorable logic of facts leads directly from the Reformation to the Revolution. Princes themselves sowed the seeds of revolt which will yet despoil them of their power and their thrones; while as for the people, they have gained nothing. They are constantly tyrannized over; but their real masters are unknown, and their only resource against the encroachments or the abuse of power is an appeal to arms.

It is not, then, true that liberty finds greater space in the modern world than in the ancient Christian world. To prove this, I need but a single fact which has direct relation with my subject.

While Europe was still enveloped in “the darkness of the Middle Ages,” Catholic theologians freely taught, from all their chairs, that “an unjust law is no law”—“Lex injusta non est lex.” Now, are there, at the present day, many pulpits from which this principle, the safeguard of all liberty and of all independence, the protector of all rights, and the defence of the helpless, might be proclaimed with impunity? Do we not see the prohibitions, the lawsuits, the appels comme d’abus which the boldness of such a maxim would call forth?

Human governments have changed in form, but their tyranny has not ceased to grow; and the free men of the olden society have become the slaves in a new order of things—they have even reached a point at which they know not even in what liberty consists.

III.—DIVINE ORIGIN OF LAW.

I know, and I hear beforehand, the response which the doctors of modern rights will here give me “Yes,” say they, “it is very true that the Catholic Church has always claimed the right of judging laws and of refusing obedience to such as displeased her; but in this is precisely the worst abuse. That which would domineer over human reason, the sovereign of the world, is tyranny par excellence; this, in truth, is the special mark of Catholicity, and it is this which has ever made it the religion of the ignorant and the cowardly.”

Is, then, the maxim I have just recalled the invention of Catholic theologians? Is it true that the teachers of the ultramontane doctrine alone have contended that the intrinsic worth of a law must be sought beyond and above them, beyond and above the human power which proclaims it? Not only has this elementary principle not been devised by our theologians, but even the pagan philosophers themselves had reached it. Cicero but summed up the teaching universally received by philosophers worthy of the name, when he said that the science of law should not be sought in the edicts of the pretor, nor even in the laws of the twelve tables; and that the most profound philosophy alone could aid in judging laws and teaching us their value.[47]

This is not to degrade reason, which this same Cicero has defined, or rather described, in admirable language. He found therein something grand, something sublime; he declared that it is more fit to command than to obey; that it values little what is merely human; that it is gifted with a peculiar elevation[226] which nothing daunts, which yields to no one, and which is unconquerable.[48]

But remark, it is only with regard to human powers and allurements that reason shows itself so exalted and haughty. It requires something greater than man to make it submit; and it obeys only God or his delegates. “Stranger,” said Plato to Clinias the Cretan, “whom do you consider the first author of your laws? Is it a god? Is it a man?”

“Stranger,” replied Clinias, “it is a god; we could not rightly accord this title to any other.”[49]

So, also, tradition tells us that Minos went, every ninth day, to consult Jupiter, his father, whose replies he committed to writing. Lycurgus wished to have his laws confirmed by the Delphian Apollo, and this god replied that he would dictate them himself. At Rome the nymph Egeria played the same rôle with Numa. Everywhere is felt the necessity of seeking above man the title in virtue of which he may command his fellow-men.

If we turn now from the fabulous traditions of the ancient world, we still find an absolute truth proclaimed by its sages; one that affirms the existence of an eternal law—quiddam æternum—which was called the natural law, and which serves as a criterion whereby to judge the worth of the laws promulgated by man.

Cicero declares it absurd to consider right everything set down in the constitutions or the laws.[50] And he is careful to add that neither is public opinion any more competent to determine the right.[51]

The sovereign law, therefore—that which no human law may violate without the penalty of becoming void—has God himself for its author.

The laws of states may be unjust and abominable, and, by consequence, bind no one. There is, on the other hand, a natural law, the source and measure of other laws, originating before all ages, before any law had been written or any city built.[52]

This doctrine, to support which I have designedly cited only pagan authors, is also that of Catholic theologians; for example, S. Thomas and Suarez. But the philosophical school of the last century has so perverted the meaning of the term nature—law of nature, that certain Catholic authors (M. de Bonald, for instance) have scrupled to use the consecrated term. It is necessary, then, to explain its true sense.

IV.—NATURAL LAW ACCORDING TO PAGAN PHILOSOPHERS.

The nature of a being is that which constitutes its fitness to attain its end. The idea, therefore, which a person has of the nature of man, by consequence determines that which he will have of his end, and hence of the rule which should govern his actions.

The materialists, for example, who deny the immortality of the soul, and whose horizon is bounded by the limits of the present life, are able to teach only a purely epicurean or utilitarian morality. They cannot consistently plead a[227] motive higher than an immediate, or at least a proximate, well-being; for, what is more uncertain than the duration of our life? In the strikingly anti-philosophic language of the XVIIIth century, the state of nature was a hypothetical state, at once innocent and barbarous, anterior to all society. It is to society that this theory attributes the disorders of man and the loss of certain primitive and inalienable rights which the sect of pseudo-philosophers boasted of having regained, and by the conquest whereof the corrupted and doting France of 1789 was prostrated.

The philosophers of antiquity, on the contrary, notwithstanding their numerous errors, and despite the polytheism which they exteriorly professed, had arrived at so profound a knowledge of man and his nature that the fathers and doctors of the church have often spoken of the discoveries of their intellect as a kind of natural revelation made to them by God.[53]

We have already heard Cicero say that the natural law is eternal, and superior to all human laws. I shall continue to quote him, because of his clearness, and because he admirably sums up the teaching of the philosophers who preceded him.[54]

The sound philosophy which should guide us—according to him, the science of law—teaches us that it is far more sublime to submit to the divine mind, to the all-powerful God, than to the emperors and mighty ones of this earth; for it is a kind of partnership between God and man. Right reason (ratio recta) is the same for the one and the other; and law being nothing else than right reason, it may be said that one same law links us with the gods. Now, the common law is also the common right, and when people have a common right they belong, in some manner, to the same country. We must, then, consider this world as a country common to the gods and to men. Man is, in truth, like to God. And for what end has God created and gifted man like to himself? That he may arrive at justice.

Human society is bound by one same right, and law is the same for all. This law is the just motive (the right reason, ratio recta) of all precepts and prohibitions; he who is ignorant of it, whether written or not, knows not justice. If uprightness consisted in submission to the written laws and constitutions of nations, and if, as some pretend, utility could be the measure of good, he who expected to profit thereby would be justified in neglecting or violating the laws.

This remark is peculiarly applicable to the present time. It is precisely utility and the increase of wealth or of comforts—in a word, material interests—which the greater number of modern legislators have had chiefly in view; the result is that society scarcely has the right to feel indignant against those who may deem it to their advantage to disturb it. Religion, say they, has nothing in common with politics; the state, inasmuch as it is a state, need not trouble itself about God; the things of this world should be regulated with regard to this world, and without reference to the supernatural. Suppose it so; but then, in virtue of what authority will you impose your laws? There is no human[228] power able to bend or to conquer one human will which does not acknowledge it.[55]

The basis of right is the natural love of our fellow-beings which nature has planted within us. Nature also commands us to honor God. It is not fear which renders worship necessary; it is the bond which exists between God and man. If popular or royal decrees could determine right, a whim of the multitude might render lawful theft, adultery, or forgery. If it be true that a proclamation dictated by fools can change the order of nature, why may not evil become, one day, good? But the sages teach that the human mind did not invent law; it has its birth-place in the bosom of God, and is co-eternal with him; it is nothing else than the unerring reason of Jupiter himself; it is reflected in the mind of the wise man; it can never be repealed.

This “right reason which comes to us from the gods” (recta et a numine deorum tracta ratio) is what is usually termed the natural law; and the beautiful language of Cicero recalls this magnificent verse of the IVth Psalm: “Quis ostendit nobis bona? Signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui, Domine.”

V.—INFLUENCE OF PANTHEISM ON MODERN LAW.

Pagan teaching, how elevated soever it may be, is always incomplete; and this is evident even from the words of Cicero.

Since law comes from God, it is very clear that it will be known more or less correctly according as our idea of God is more or less correct. This it is that gives so great a superiority, first, to the law of Moses, before the coming of Jesus Christ, and to all Christian legislation since.

The Jews had not merely a vague knowledge of the precepts of the divine law. This law, in its principal provisions, had been directly revealed to them. Christians have something better still, since the Eternal Word was made man, and the Word is precisely “the true light which enlighteneth every man coming into this world.”[56] The philosophers of antiquity saw this light from afar off; we have beheld that of which they merely affirmed the existence; the Jews contemplated it as through a veil, and awaited its coming. It was made flesh; it brought us life; “it shone in the darkness, but the darkness did not comprehend it.”[57]

It is not the fault of the Word or of his manifestation, says S. Thomas on this subject, if there are minds who see not this light. There is here, not darkness, but closed eyes.[58]

It is God himself, therefore, whom man refuses to acknowledge when he rejects the fundamental law, which alone deserves the name of law. Human pride and insolence go beyond forgetfulness or simple negation when they have the audacity to put a human law in the place of and above the divine law; which last crime is nothing less than the deification of man. This philosophic consequence of the secularization of the law was inevitable, and is openly displayed in modern doctrines. Atheists, properly so called, are rare; but the present generation is infected with Pantheism. Now, Pantheism proclaims, without disguise[229] and without shame, the divinity of man.

Let us add that this error is the only foundation upon which man may logically rest to defend modern rights. It produces, with regard to constitutions and laws, two principal effects, which it suffices but to indicate, that every honest mind may at once recognize their existence and their lamentable consequences.

Pantheism, firstly, destroys individualities, or, as the Germans call them, subjectivities; it sweeps them away, and causes them to disappear in the Great Whole. Do we not likewise see personality, simple or associated—that is to say, individual liberty, associations, and corporations—little by little reduced to annihilation by the modern idea of the state? Does not modern theory make also of the state another grand whole, beside which nothing private can exist?

To reach this result, they represent the state as expressing the aggregate of all the particular wills, and they seek, in a pretended “general will,” the supreme and infallible source of law. But even were this will as general as theory desires, it would not be the less human, or, by consequence, the less subject to error. Whence comes it, then, that they make it the sovereign arbiter of good and evil, of truth and falsehood, of justice and injustice? The Pantheists reply that “God is in man and in the world; that he is one and the same thing with the world; that he is identical with the nature of things, and consequently subject to change.” The general will, the expression of the universal conscience, is then a manifestation of the divine will; and this would allow it to change without ever erring.

This answers all, in truth; but it may lead us too far. If, as says Hegel, God is subjective—that is to say, if He is in man, or, more exactly still, if He is man himself and the substance of nature—neither right, nor law, nor justice could remain objective. In other words, if man is God, there is no longer any possible distinction between good and evil. And this conclusion has been drawn by the learned German socialist, Lassalle. He denies the notion of an immutable right; he is unwilling that we should any longer speak of the family, property, justice, etc., in absolute terms. According to him, these are but abstract and unreal generalities. There have been, on all these subjects, Greek, Roman, German, etc., ideas; but these are only historical recollections. Ideas change, some even disappear; and if, some day, the universal conscience should decide that the idea of proprietorship has had its day, then would commence a new era in history, during which there could be no longer either property or proprietors without incurring the guilt of injustice.[59] From the stand-point of Pantheism, this reasoning is irrefutable; and, on the other hand, we have just seen that Pantheism alone could justify the modern theory of the general will, the supreme arbiter of law.

VI.—HAS THE GENERAL WILL RULED SINCE 1789?

I have just quoted a socialist whose works, though little known in France, are of extreme importance. Ferdinand Lassalle, a Jew by birth, by nationality a Prussian, is possessed of extensive knowledge, critical genius of the highest order, and unsparing logic. We[230] have seen him draw the theoretical consequences of Pantheism applied to law; and it will not be without interest to know how he judges the practical results of the modern theory of rights, as shown in the French Revolution. The socialists have a special authority for speaking of “immortal principles”; for they admit them without hesitation, and their teaching proved that they comprehend them wonderfully.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man is the most authentic summing up of these famous principles; and it is therein that the modern theory of law will be found most clearly stated. “Law,” says Art. 6, “is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has the right of co-operating in its formation, either personally or by his representatives.”

It would seem, from this solemn proclamation, that since then, or at least in the first fervor of this “glorious” revolution, the majority of the “sovereign people” should have been called to “form the laws.” This has been said; it has even been supported at the mouth of the cannon—for, as has been wittily remarked by M. de Maistre, “the masters of these poor people have had recourse even to artillery while deriding them. They said to them: ‘You think you do not will this law; but, be assured, you do will it. If you dare to refuse it, we will pour upon you a shower of shot, to punish you for not willing what you do will.’ And it was done.”[60]

What then took place, and how did it happen that the general will, which had undertaken to make fundamental and irrevocable laws, should have accepted, in the first five years of its freedom, three different constitutions and a régime like that of the Reign of Terror?

Lassalle replies that it is not at all the people who made the revolution, and that the general will was not even asked to manifest itself. He recalls the famous pamphlet of Sieyès, and corrects its title. It is not true, says he, that the Tiers État was then nothing; the increase of personal property has, since then, brought about a révolution économique, thanks to which the tiers état was, in truth, all. But legally it was nothing, which was not much to its liking; for the former ranks of society still existed by right, although their real strength was not in keeping with their legal condition. The work of the French Revolution was, therefore, to give to the tiers état a legal position suitable to its actual importance.

Now, the tiers, first and foremost, assumed itself to be the equivalent of the entire people. “It considered that its cause was the cause of humanity.” Thus the attraction was real and powerful. The voices raised to protest were unable to make themselves heard. Our author cites, on this subject, a curious instance of clear-sightedness. An anti-revolutionary journal, The Friend of the King, exclaimed, “Who shall say whether or not the despotism of the bourgeoisie shall not succeed the pretended aristocracy of the nobility?”

It is this, indeed, which has come to pass, continues Lassalle; the tiers état has become, in its turn, the privileged class. The proof is that the wealth of the citizen became immediately the legal condition of power in the state.

Since 1791, in the constitution of Sept. 3 we find (chap. i., sects. 1 and 2) a distinction established between active citizens and passive[231] citizens. The former are those who pay a certain quota of direct contribution; and they alone possess the right of voting. Moreover, all hired laborers were declared not active; and this excluded workmen from the right of voting. It matters little that the tax was small; the principle was laid down requiring some amount of fortune in order to exercise a political right. “The wealth of the citizen had become the condition necessary for obtaining power in the state, as nobility or landed property had been in the Middle Ages.”

The principle of the vote-tax held sway until the recent introduction of universal suffrage.

Our socialist, proceeding directly to the question of taxes, proves that the bourgeoisie moderne, without inventing indirect taxation, has nevertheless made it the basis of an entire system, and has settled upon it all the expenses of state. Now, indirect taxes are such as are levied beforehand upon all necessaries, as salt, corn, beer, meat, fuel, or, still more, upon what we need for our protection—the expenses of the administration of justice, stamped paper, etc. Generally, in making a purchase, the buyer pays the tax, without perceiving that it is that which increases the price. Now, it is clear that because an individual is twenty, fifty, or a hundred times richer, it does not follow that he will, on that account, consume twenty, fifty, or a hundred times more salt, bread, meat, etc., than a workman or a person of humble condition. Thus it happens that the great body of indirect taxes is paid by the poorest classes (from the single fact that they are the most numerous). Thus is it brought about, in a hidden way, that the tiers état pay relatively less taxes than the quatrième état.

Concerning the instruction of adults, Lassalle says that, instead of being left to the clergy as heretofore, it now in fact belongs to the daily press. But securities, stamps, and advertisements give to journalism another privilege of capital.[61]

This sketch suffices; and I deem it needless to add that I am far from concluding with the socialists. I am so much the more free to disagree with them as I do not by any means admit the “immortal principles,” but it seems to me to follow evidently from the preceding observations that it is not true, in fact, that the general will has made the laws since 1789.

VII.—DOES UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE EXPRESS THE GENERAL WILL?

Has the introduction of universal suffrage modified, in any great degree, this state of things? Is it any more certain since 1848, than before, that the nation is governed by the general will? We may content ourselves here by appealing to the testimony of honest men. If the general will were truly the master of all the powers in France, our country, which to-day, so it is said, has only the government that it desires, would be a model of union and concord; there could be in the opposition party only an exceedingly small minority (otherwise the term general would be unjustifiable), and we would follow peacefully the ways most pleasing to us.

This would not be saying—mark it well!—that those ways are good. That is another question, to which we will return; but now we are dealing with the question, Are our laws to-day formed or not formed[232] by the general will, according to the formula which I have quoted from the Declaration of the Rights of Man?

Notwithstanding the evidence for the negative, I think it well here to analyze hastily that which M. Taine has just given in a little pamphlet containing many truths.[62] M. Taine, being a free-thinker and a man of the times, cannot be suspected of taking an ultramontane or clerical view of the case.

M. Taine is far from demanding the abolition of universal suffrage. He believes it in conformity with justice; for he does not admit that his money can be demanded or he himself sent to the frontier without his own consent, either expressed or tacit. His only wish is that the right of suffrage be not illusory, and that the electoral law be adapted “to the French of 1791, to the peasant, the workman, etc.,” be he “stupid, ignorant, or ill-informed.” From this M. Taine proves at the outset that the ballot-roll is a humbug; and I believe that no person of sense will contest the point. He immediately enters upon a statistical examination of the composition of the elective world in France; and he arrives at the following result: “Of twenty voters, ten are peasants, four workmen, three demi-bourgeois, three educated men, comfortable or rich. Now, the electoral law, as all law, should have regard to the majority, to the first fourteen.” It behooves us, then, to know who these fourteen are who are called to frame the law; that is to say, to decide, by their representatives it is true, but sovereignly, on good and evil, justice and injustice, and, necessarily, the fate of the country.

M. Taine, in this connection, makes some new calculations which may be thus summed up: The rural population embraces seventy out of one hundred of the entire population, hence fourteen voters out of twenty. Now, in France, there are thirty-nine illiterate out of every hundred males, almost all belonging to the classes which M. Taine numbers among the rural population; which enables him to find that seven out of every fourteen rural voters cannot even read. I may observe, in passing, that a peasant who cannot read, but who knows his catechism, may be of a much sounder morality than M. Taine himself; but I willingly proclaim that the seven electors in question could and should have a mediocre political intelligence.

This agreeable writer recounts, in a spicy way, a number of anecdotes which prove “the ignorance and credulity” of the rural populations on similar matters; and he thence concludes that the peasants “are still subjects, but under a nameless master.” This is precisely what I said at the beginning, not only of peasants, but of all modern people in general. Be there a king on the throne or not, somebody decrees this, somebody decrees that; and the subject depends, in a hundred ways, on this abstract and undetermined somebody—“Through the collector, through the mayor, through the sub-inspector of forests, through the commissary of police, through the field-keeper, through the clerks of justice, for making a door, for felling a tree, building a shed, opening a stall, transporting a cask of wine, etc., etc.”

All this expresses well and depicts admirably the ways of modern liberty; and I cannot refrain[233] from citing this last sketch, equally amusing and true: “The mayor knows that in town, in an elegant apartment, is a worthy gentleman, attired in broidered gown, who receives him two or three times a year, speaks to him with authority and condescension, and often puts to him embarrassing questions. But when this gentleman goes away, another takes his place quite similar and in the same garb, and the mayor, on his return home, says with satisfaction: ‘Monsieur the prefect always preserves his good will towards me, although he has been changed many times.’”

The plébiscite, the appeal to the people, the invitation to vote on the form of government, addressed to this kind of electors—is it not all a cunning trick? M. Taine thinks so, and many others with him; but he supposes that this same elector will be, at least, capable of “choosing the particular man in whom he has most confidence.” It is with him, says he, in the choice of one who shall make the laws, as in the choice of the physician or the lawyer whom one may prefer. Although it is not my intention to discuss here the opinions of this author, I beg him to remark that his comparison is strikingly faulty; we cannot choose whom we please for our physician or for our lawyer. The former is obliged to go through a course of studies in order to merit his diploma; the latter must fulfil the conditions necessary to be admitted to the bar. To frame the laws is another thing; not the slightest preparation is exacted from those eligible to this duty. Apparently it is not considered worth the trouble.

The ballot-roll and plébiscite being disposed of, M. Taine returns to figures, to study what transpires when the electors are called upon to choose a deputy by district. This gives, says he, one deputy for twenty thousand voters spread over a surface of one thousand kilometres square, etc. Of the twenty thousand voters, how many will have a definite opinion of the candidate presented to them? Scarcely one in ten beyond the outskirts of the town; scarcely one in four or five in the whole district. There remains the resource of advice; but “the spirit of equality is all-powerful, and the hierarchy is wanting.”

We touch here the most sorrowful wound of our social state; and this term even, is it not misapplied?—for we have no longer any order, or, by consequence, any social state. “As a general rule,” continues M. Taine, “the country people receive counsel only from their equals.” Therefore it is easy to employ evil means. These evil means may be summed up, according to the same author, in the abuse of governmental influence, and in a corruption whose form varies, but which makes the affair of an election an affair of money.

There should be, and I have alluded to it in passing, many exceptions made with regard to what M. Taine says concerning the rural population. He believes them manifestly less able to vote than the city populations, while I am of quite the contrary opinion; but it still remains true that direct universal suffrage, such as we have, does not allow a person to choose from a knowledge of the case, and that, in reality, the general will has not, up to the present day, been able to find its true expression.

VIII.—IS THE GENERAL WILL COMPETENT TO MAKE LAWS?

This is a still higher question, and one which we must now approach. Admitting that the general will could make itself known, is it an authority competent to make laws?

But before starting let us lay down a first principle which, quite elementary as it is, seems to be as much forgotten as the others: if the natural law exist not anteriorly to enjoin respect for human laws, human power would have no other ground of existence, no other support than force. Without a divine lawgiver, there is, in truth, no moral obligation.[63] The hypothesis of a previous agreement among the members of society would not resolve the difficulty; for an agreement would not be able to bind any one, at least if there were no higher authority to secure it.[64]

Whatever may be the immediate origin of law—be it promulgated by a sovereign, enacted by an assembly, or directly willed by the multitude—it would still be unable to rule, if we do not suppose a law anterior and, as Cicero says, eternal, which, in the first place, prescribes obedience to subjects, and, in the second, fidelity to reciprocal engagements, promises, and oaths. This superior law being the natural law, it is always, and in every case, impossible to suppress or to elude it.

Meanwhile, what is understood by the general will? Is it the unanimity of wills? No one, so far as I know, has ever exacted this condition. The question is, then, taking things at their best, of the will of the majority. People grant this, and often give to our modern governments the name of governments of the majority. They deduce then from this principle, that in a population of thirty millions of men, for example, it is lawful that the will of the twenty millions should rule over that of the remaining ten millions. If the constitution of a kingdom, says Burke, is an arithmetical problem, the calculation is just; but if the minority refuse to submit, the majority will be able to govern only by the aid of la lanterne.[65]

Scaffolds, shootings, exile, prison—such are, in truth, the institutions which have chiefly flourished since the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man.

In the eyes of a man who knows how to reason, continues the English orator, this opinion is ridiculous.

It could not be justified, unless it were well proved that the majority of men are enlightened, virtuous, wise, self-sacrificing, and incapable of preferring their own interest to that of others. No one has ever dared to say that legislators should make laws for the sake of making them, and without troubling themselves concerning the welfare of those for whom the laws are made. Now, the laws being made for all, the majority, if it had the qualities necessary for legislating, should concern itself still more about the minority than about itself.

The Comte de la Marck [66] relates that when Mirabeau became too much excited concerning the rights and privileges of man, it happened sometimes that he amused himself by curtailing his accounts. He cut off first women, children, the ignorant, the vicious, etc. Once, the nation being thus reduced to the little portion whose moral qualities[235] it became necessary to estimate, “I began,” says he, “to deduct those who lack reason, those who have false notions, those who value their own interests above everything, those who lack education and knowledge matured by reflection; and I then asked him if the men who merit to be spoken of with dignity and respect would not find themselves reduced to a number infinitely small. Now, according to my principle, I maintained that the government should act for the people, and not by them—that is to say, not by the opinion of the multitude; and I proved, by historical extracts and by examples which we had unfortunately under our eyes, that reason and good sense fly from men in proportion as they are gathered together in greater numbers.”

Mirabeau contented himself with replying that one must flatter the people in order to govern them, which amounts to saying that one must cheat them.

For the rest, this same Mirabeau acknowledged that equality, in the revolutionary sense, is absurd, and the passion which some have for it he called a violent paroxysm. It is he who best characterized the true result of the destruction of all social order. He called it “vanity’s upsetting.” He could not have spoken better; and the vanity which goes so low could have no other result than that which we behold—the premeditated absence or suppression of all true superiority.

This episode on equality is not a digression, for the system of majorities supposes it. Now, it is absolutely anti-natural. According to the beautiful idea of Aristotle:[67] there is in man himself a soul and a body; the one predominating and made to command, the other to obey; the equality or the shifting of power between these two elements would be equally fatal to them. It is the same between man and the other animals, between tame animals and wild. The harmony of sex is analogous, and we even find some traces of this principle in inanimate objects; as, for example, in the harmony of sounds. Therefore S. Augustine defines order thus: “Such a disposition of things similar and dissimilar as shall give to each what is proper to it”—Ordo est parium dispariumque rerum sua cuique tribuens dispositio;[68] and S. Thomas hence concludes that order supposes inequality: Nomen ordinis inæqualitatem importat.[69]

But the “immortal principles” have changed all that, according to Sganarelle; so their work, in its final analysis, results in a disorder without name.

The external disorder is visible and pretty generally acknowledged; but the moral disorder passes unperceived. By means of equality on the one hand, and of the secularization of the law on the other, they arrive at this frightful result: for example, that regicide and parricide are, in justice, but ordinary crimes; if, moreover, regicide profits the people, it is worthy of eulogy. Sacrilege is nothing more than a superstitious fiction. In fine, respect being no longer possible nor even reasonable, according to the prediction of Burke,[70] “the laws have no other guardian than terror, … and in perspective, from our point of view, we see but scaffolds,” or courts-martial, which amount to the same thing.

IX.—CONSEQUENCES OF THE SECULARIZATION OF LAW.

How often do we not hear it said that almost all our misfortunes, and, above all, our inability to repair our losses, come from the little respect we have for the law! This statement, which has become almost trite, indicates most frequently a strange wandering. After having destroyed respect for persons, is it not absurd to claim it for their works? But they have done more: they have denied the mission of a legislator. The secularization of the law—that is to say, the denial of a divine sanction applied to law—has no other meaning. Legislators being no longer the mandataries of God, or not wishing to be such, now speak only in virtue of their own lights, and have no real commission. By what title, then, would you have us respect them? Every one is at liberty to prefer his own lights and to believe that he would have done better.

I hear the reply: “It is to the interest of all that order should reign, were it but materially, and the law is the principal means of maintaining order.” You may hence conclude that it would be more advantageous to see the laws obeyed; but a motive of interest is not a motive of respect, and there is a certain class of individuals who may gain by the disorder. No, you will have the right to claim respect for the law only when you shall have rendered the law truly respectable; and to do this you must prove that you have the mission to make the law, even were you the élite of our statesmen and doctors of the law, and much more if you are but a collection of the most uncultivated tax-payers in the world.

Knowledge is something; it is something also to represent real and considerable interests; and I do not deny the relative importance of the elements of which legislative bodies are composed. But nothing of all this can supply the place of a commission; and you will have that only when you shall have consented, as legislators, to acknowledge the existence of God, to submit yourselves to his laws, and to conform your own thereto.

People have but a very inadequate idea of the disastrous consequences which, one day or other, may ensue from the secularization of law. Until now the only danger of which they have dreamed is that with which extreme revolution menaces us.

This is a danger so imminent, so undisguised, that every one sees it; and some have ended by understanding that without a return to God society is destined to fall. Nay, more, the Assembly now sitting at Versailles has made an act of faith by ordering public prayers; and this first step has caused hope to revive in the hearts of men of good-will. But it is not, perhaps, inopportune to draw the attention of serious men to another phase of the question.

What would happen if modern law should go so far as to enjoin a crime upon Christians? The hypothesis is not purely imaginary; and although, happily, thanks to Heaven, it has not yet come to pass, there is a whole party which threatens to reach this extreme. In other countries there has been something like a beginning of its realization. I would like to speak of the school law and the avowed project of imposing a compulsory and lay education. We know what is meant by lay in such a case; and experience proves that the state schools[237] are often entrusted to men whose avowed intention is to bring up the children in infidelity. What would happen if such a law were passed, which supposes that everywhere, at the same time, parents would be compelled to put their children in imminent danger of losing their faith? The Catholic Church is very explicit in her doctrine on the obligation of obeying even a bad government; she orders that useless, unjust, and even culpable laws be borne with, so long as this can be done without exposing one’s self to commit a sin. Neither plunder nor the danger of death excuses revolt in her eyes. But in this case do we understand to what we would be reduced? To resist passively, and to allow one’s self to be punished by fines, by prison, by torture, or by death, would not remedy the evil; the soul of the child remains without defence, and the father is responsible for it. This kind of persecution is, then, more serious in its consequences, and may lead to deeper troubles, than even the direct persecution, which might consist, for example, in exacting apostasy from adults. In this last case the martyr bears all, and the first Christians have shown us the way; but here the torments of the parents cannot save the children, and the parents cannot abandon them; whatever becomes of the body, the soul must be guarded until death.

It belongs not to me to decide; for in this case, as in all those of a similar kind, the line of conduct to be followed ought to be traced by the only competent authority; but the problem is worth proposing, and by it alone it is already easy to throw great light on the abysses to which the atheism of the law is leading the people by rapid strides.

X.—CHRISTIAN DEFINITION OF NATURAL LAW.

It remains to explain in a few words the great principles which should form the basis of law, and which were never completely ignored until these days of aberration and wretchedness. I could not expect to give here, in these few pages, a course of natural law, nor even to trace its outline; but there are some perfectly incontestable truths which it is very necessary to recall since people have forgotten them. When one has no personal authority, he feels a certain timidity in broaching so grave a subject, and in speaking of it as if he aspired to enlighten his kind; and meanwhile error is insinuated, preached, disseminated, commanded, with a skill so infernal and a success so great that ignorance of truth is almost unbounded. Of such elementary rules we often find influential persons, and sometimes persons of real merit, totally ignorant. In other days they would have known them on leaving school, or even from their catechism.

Let us go back, then, to the definition of the word nature, and it will serve as a starting-point from which to treat of what the laws destined to govern man should be.

The nature of a being is that which renders it capable of attaining its end. This is true of a plant or an animal as well as of man; but there are two kinds of ends subordinate one to the other. The end for which God created the world could be no other than God himself.[71] The Creator could only propose to himself an end worthy of himself, and, he alone being perfect, he could not find outside himself an end proportioned to his[238] greatness. God is, then, the last end of all creatures. But there are particular ends; and it is in their subordination that the order of the world consists. The primary ends are, in a certain sense, but a means for arriving at the last end.

But God being unable to add anything to his infinite perfection, the end which he proposed to himself could not be to render himself more perfect; hence he could seek only an exterior glory, which consists in manifesting himself to his creatures. For this it was necessary that some of these creatures should be capable of knowing him. These reasonable creatures are superior to the others and are their primary end; therefore it is that theologians call man a microcosm, a compendium of the universe, and king of the world.

Man is placed in creation to admire it, and by means of it to render homage to God; for, in his quality of a creature gifted with reason, he knows his end, which is God, and the essential characteristic of his nature is the ability to attain this end. He is, moreover, endowed with an admirable prerogative—liberty, or free-will; that is to say, he is called on to will this end; and God, in his infinite bounty, will recompense him for having willed his own good. But man has need of an effort to will good; for his primitive nature has been corrupted by the original fall. He has, therefore, an inclination to evil, against which he must incessantly struggle; and the greatest number of political and social errors have their source in ignorance or forgetfulness of this perversion of human nature.

This granted, the natural law comprises the obligations imposed on man in order that he may reach his end, together with the prohibition of all that could turn him away from it. This law obliges all men, even those who have no knowledge of the positive divine law—that is to say, the revealed law.

“The natural law is a sign imprinted upon the heart of every man enjoying the right use of reason, and which makes known to him the divine will, in virtue of which the human creature is required to do certain things and to avoid certain others, in order to reach his end.” Among the precepts which God has engraved upon the hearts of all men is found, in the first rank, that which obliges them to refer themselves to God as to their last end.

From this it follows that every law which tends to hinder or prevent the progress of men toward God is a law against nature, and consequently null (lex injusta non est lex); for no human law can change or abrogate the natural law.

XI.—CONTINUATION: THE END OF SOCIETY ACCORDING TO THE NATURAL LAW.

The considerations of the preceding chapter have reference to man considered abstractly from society. But man cannot exist alone. For life and subsistence, during his early childhood, he has need of his kind; so that, from the first moment of his existence, he forms part of a domestic society—the family.

The family being certainly of divine institution, and the duties which it imposes being of the number of those which the natural law commands, we find therein the first elements of all society: authority, hierarchy, consequently inequality, mutual love, and protection—in a word, varied and reciprocal duties.[239] But the family suffices not for man’s social cravings. Man naturally longs after his like; he possesses the marvellous gift of speech for communication with his fellows; he bears engraven on his heart the first precept of his duty towards them: “Do unto others that which you would have others do unto you; and do not unto them that which you would not that they do to you.” The existence of society is, therefore, still a law of nature.

Once formed, society itself has its duties; it has its proper end, which not only should not be opposed to the end of man considered singly, but should moreover contribute to facilitate the attainment of that end. The end of man being God, and this end being attainable only by virtue, the principal end of society will necessarily be to aid men in the practice of virtue; and, that I may not be accused of depending exclusively on theology, I will adduce what Aristotle has said on this subject: “The most perfect state is evidently that in which each citizen, whoever he may be, may, by favor of the laws, best practise virtue and be most secure of happiness.”[72] And what is happiness, according to Aristotle? “We consider it a point perfectly established that happiness is always in proportion to wisdom; … [for] the soul, speaking absolutely and even relatively to us, is more precious than wealth and the body.… Following the laws of nature, all exterior goods are desirable only insomuch as they serve the soul, and wise men should not desire them except for this end; whereas the soul should never be placed in comparison with them.”[73]

We are assuredly far off from this pagan, and he goes still further even than the foregoing; for he lays down as incontestable a principle which is the formal condemnation of the secularization of the law. “The elements of happiness,” says he, “are the same for the individual and for the city.”[74] We have just seen what he understands by happiness; but he adds, in order that he may be the better comprehended, that if the felicity of the individual consisted in wealth, it would be the same for the city. According to Aristotle, therefore, the moral law obliges society as it does the individual. Now, it is precisely this which the partisans of atheistical or merely secular law deny.

XII.—CHRISTIAN LAW.

I have designedly quoted the ancient philosophers, because certain diseased minds who shrink from the authority of the sacred books accept more willingly that of the learned; but I believe that from what precedes one could easily infer the true rule of the relations between church and state. I will not undertake it now; nevertheless, as I address myself, by preference, to those who profess the same faith as myself, I will take the liberty to point out to them some inevitable corollaries of the principles I have just recalled.

The natural law, properly so called, has been confirmed and completed by revelation. Although the precepts whose observance is indispensable to man to reach his end are engraven in the depths of his heart, the blindness and the evil propensities which are the consequences of his fall render him but too forgetful of his duties. Besides,[240] God, having resolved to save man, chose to himself a privileged people, that from it he might cause the Messias to be born; and for the accomplishment of his merciful designs he guided this people and made it the guardian of his law, even to the day on which the promises were fulfilled.

To this end God charged Moses with the promulgation of a positive divine law which contained moral precepts—precepts relating to the ceremonies of the ancient worship—and political precepts; that is to say, precepts relating to the civil government of the Jewish people. The last two classes of precepts no longer oblige; but those which concern morals—that is to say, those of the Decalogue—retain all their force, because they are the precepts of the natural law.

But it is no longer by virtue of the promulgation of Moses that we are bound by the moral obligations contained in the old law. He who is our Judge, our Legislator, our King,[75] has come himself to give us a more perfect law: “Mandatum novum do vobis” (Joan. 13). According to the expression of Suarez, Jesus Christ has made known more perfectly the natural law in completing it by new precepts. Jesus Christ has done still more: he has founded a new kingdom—the church, the mystical body, of which he is the head. He has, therefore, appointed interpreters and guardians of his law, who have the mission to proclaim it to those who know it not; to pardon in his name those who, having violated it, confess and repent; and, finally, to distribute the numberless succors of divine grace—all which have for their object to help us to observe the law as perfectly as possible, and consequently to enable us ourselves to approach perfection. The new precepts added by Christ to those of the natural law are those which enjoin upon us the use of the sacraments and which determine their form; these articles of the new law—if we may be allowed so to term them—are all as obligatory as those of the natural law, because they have God himself for their author. Behold how S. Thomas sums up the whole of the new law, or the law of grace, which Christ came to bring us: “It comprises,” says he, “the precepts of the natural law, the articles of faith, and the sacraments of grace.”

One of the most remarkable characteristics of the Christian law is that it was not written. Jesus Christ spoke his commandments, and, his word being divine, it engraved them upon the hearts of his apostles and disciples;[76] but the Incarnate Word had nothing written during the time he spent upon earth. The first Gospel appeared at least eight years after the death of Jesus Christ. If to this observation we add the common belief of theologians, according to which it was only from the coming of the Holy Ghost—that is to say, from the day of Pentecost and after the Ascension—that the law of Christ became obligatory, we arrive at this conclusion: that the means of oral teaching was expressly chosen by the Word for the transmission of his law and his will.

Nothing throws greater light upon the sovereign importance of the church and its hierarchy; nothing manifests better the extreme necessity of a permanent infallibility residing somewhere in the mystical[241] body of Christ. The Council of the Vatican, conformably to the tradition of all Christian ages, has defined that “the Roman Pontiff enjoys the plenitude of that infallibility with which it was necessary for the church to be provided in defining doctrine touching faith or morals.”

These last words show that the Pope is the unfailing interpreter of the natural law, and the judge, from whom there is no appeal of its violations.

The decisions given by the Sovereign Pontiff upon human laws are not recognized at the present day by the powers of the earth. But neither is God recognized; and thus it is that, little by little violence has overrun the world and law has vanished. Europe is returning to a worse than primitive barbarism; and Catholics are no longer alone in saying it.

At the epoch at which the bishops were gathered together at Rome for the last council, a publicist of great merit, an Englishman and a Protestant, speaking in the name of his co-religionists, addressed an appeal to the Pope entreating him to labor for the re-establishment of the rights of the people.

The rights of the people, or the law of nature, said Mr. Urquhart, is the Ten Commandments applied to society. After having cited Lord Mansfield, who says that this right “is considered to form part of the English law,” and that “the acts of the government cannot alter it,” Mr. Urquhart fears not to add “that it is against their governments that nations should protect this right.” And why did this Protestant appeal to Rome? Because, in sight of the unjust wars which ravage Europe, he hoped that the Ecumenical Council “would lay down a rule enabling Catholics to distinguish the just from the unjust; so that the Pope might afterwards exercise juridical power over communities, nations, and their sovereigns.”[77]

The rule exists; for the natural or divine law engraven by God from the beginning upon the hearts of all men, and more expressly revealed in the Decalogue, was the subject of the teaching of Christ. The juridical power and the tribunal from which there is no appeal equally exist; but the voice of the judge is no longer listened to by those who govern human society. But it is not this which is important, and Mr. Urquhart is right—it is the nations which should invoke against their new tyrants the only efficacious protection; it is the people who should first bend before the beneficent authority of the infallible master of the moral law; there would then be no further need of the consent of governments.

XIII.—CONCLUSION.

I said, in beginning the last paragraph, that it was addressed to Catholics by right of corollary from the preceding considerations. It is certain, indeed, that if all Catholics were truly instructed and well convinced of the truths that I have endeavored to set forth as briefly and clearly as I could, a great step in the right path would already have been taken.

But there is a much-used, widely-spread, and very convenient objection which many excellent men fail not to proffer in such a case. “It is true,” say they, “that if human discussions and quarrels could be referred to the highest moral authority on earth, it would afford[242] great advantages; but this is not practicable. Times have changed, and it is impossible to hope that this authority can ever recover the influence it would require in order to act efficaciously.”

If good men adhere to the fatal habit they have acquired of renouncing beforehand all effort, for fear it will not be successful, nothing can be done; and there remains to us nothing but to veil our faces while awaiting the destruction of our country and of all organized society. But even were we reduced to despair, we never have the right of renouncing our convictions nor of ceasing to act personally according to the prescriptions of our faith. Before concerning ourselves about the doings of others, and without needing to count on success, we must begin by conforming ourselves to the teachings of truth, which is by its nature unchangeable; for there is no progress or civilization which can alter one iota of the divine laws.

Moreover, he is very bold who would dare to predict what Europe will or will not be several years hence. Either it is condemned—and then, for his own peace of mind, a man should allow himself to be guided by his conscience with the full certainty of not doing wrong—or God wills to save Europe still another time; and this can never be, save by truth.

With regard to practical means, of which they make so much at the present day, I see no one who proposes them inspiring any confidence. Every one hesitates, gropes, and most often acknowledges that he can only invent. The present hour is favorable to good, in this sense: that the greater number of practical errors no longer exercise the same seduction as at the beginning of the century.

Evil presses us on all sides, and, according to the expression of one of our most distinguished publicists, “1789 has failed.”[78] After 1789 there is no middle way between social war and the return to good. We meet at every step upright minds who break their idols; there are too many who know not yet with what to replace them, but it is still much to have seen one’s error.

Furthermore, there are untiring seekers, some of whom have found the whole truth, and others who find but the fragments; all help to prepare the way for the reconstruction of the social edifice. He to whom I have dedicated this work [79] will pardon me, I hope, if I quote from him. I do not believe that there is another example of an equal influence so rapidly exercised by a book so serious, so grave in matter, so little attractive to the frivolous reader, as that which he has written upon Social Reform. To rediscover social truth by the method of observation and analysis was already a phenomenon which I consider unique of its kind; to cause it to be adopted by so great a number of minds biassed and filled with hostile prejudices, and most frequently badly prepared by their previous studies, is a fact still more astonishing. Thus, as I said in my dedicatory epistle, it is impossible for me not to see herein one of the most consoling signs of our age. The scientific processes of M. Le Play were, perhaps, the only ones which would find favor with a generation so dialectical and so enamored with the exact sciences as ours.

Notwithstanding the sorrows which oppress us, we must not despair;[243] and, above all, we must not trouble ourselves too much concerning the errors of what people agree to call public opinion.

The errors regarding the general will reproduce themselves, under another form, in the uneasiness which this self-styled queen of the world instils into the minds of men of good-will. If we consider closely what the elements of opinion are, we very quickly perceive that, in general, it merits the name of public only because it proclaims itself very loudly and makes itself known in all the public squares. In reality, a party much less considerable than we suppose announces to the world, and imagines, most frequently in good faith, that it alone is enlightened. Its boldness inspires awe, and by degrees those who compose it succeed in persuading the multitude, and in persuading themselves that they represent the only opinion worthy of note. And who are these? Financiers and journalists who carry on business in common; loud-voiced lawyers; professors much tainted themselves; officers occupying a position, and others wishing to obtain one from them; the idle pleasure-seeking men and women. Is it, then, true that these represent the nation?

Eager for their own interest or for that of others, these pretended echoes of public opinion are wont to say “The people believe, the people wish, the people will never consent, it does not suit the people, etc. What a pity! The people are nothing in revolutions in which they are but passive instruments. France no longer ardently desires anything except repose. At first sight this proposition would seem true—the previous consent of the French is necessary for the re-establishment of the monarchy. Nothing is more false. The multitude never obtains what it wills; it always accepts, it never chooses. We may even notice an affectation of Providence (if I may be allowed the expression), inasmuch as the efforts of the people to attain an object are the very means which it makes use of to withdraw them from it.

“In the French Revolution the people were constantly chained, outraged, ruined, torn by factions; and the factions, in their turn, the sport of one another, constantly drifted (notwithstanding all their efforts), only to be dashed against the rock which awaited them.… In the establishment and the overthrow of sovereignties … the mass of the people enter only as the wood and the cord employed by a machinist. Their chiefs even are such only to strangers; in reality, they are led as they lead the people. When the proper moment shall arrive, the Supreme Ruler of empires will chase away these noisy insects. Then we shall be astonished at the profound nothingness of these men.

“Do people imagine that the political world goes on by chance, and that it is not organized, directed, animated, by the same wisdom which shines in the physical world? Great malefactors who overthrow the state necessarily produce melancholy, internal dismemberments … but when man labors to re-establish order, he associates himself with the Author of order, he is favored by nature—that is to say, by the aggregate of secondary causes which are the instruments of the Divinity. His action has something divine; it is at once gentle and powerful; it forces nothing and nothing resists it.”[80]

DURATION.

All change implies succession. Hence the duration of contingent beings, inasmuch as they are subject to actual change, involves succession. The duration of the changes brought about by purely spiritual operations transcends our experience; for we are not pure spirits. Hence we have no means of measuring such changes by their intrinsic measure. But the duration of the changes which occur in the material world through local movements lies within the range of our apprehensive faculty, and can be measured by us; for we find in nature many movements which, by their constant recurrence and their uniformity, are calculated to serve as terms of comparison for measuring the length of successive duration.

Definitions of time.—The duration of local movement, which we measure by a given standard, is called “time.” And therefore time may be properly and adequately defined as the duration of local movement: Duratio motus. From this definition it immediately follows that where there is no movement there can be no time. Accordingly, there was no time before creation, as there was no movement. It follows also that the duration of created things, inasmuch as it expresses the permanence of those things in their own being, is not time; for it is of the essence of time to be successive, and there is no succession where there is no change, and no change without movement. Hence, when we say that contingent beings exist in time, we do not refer to their essence or substance as such, but to their successive modes of being, by which their duration acquires its accidental successivity. Were the whole world reduced to perfect stillness by impeding or suspending the actions and movements of all creatures, time would at the same instant cease to flow; for time is not the duration of things, but the duration of movement.

Time may be considered either as a relation or as a quantity. In fact, intervals of successive duration are, like distances, real relations; but when we think of the greater or less extent of space which can be measured with a given velocity between two correlated terms of time, these same intervals exhibit themselves under the form of continuous quantities.

Time, as a relation, is defined by S. Thomas and by all the ancients as Ratio prioris et posterioris motus—that is, as the link between the “before” and the “after” of any movement; and, as a quantity, it is defined as Numerus motus—that is, as a number arising from the mensuration of the movement. This movement is always local, as we have already intimated; for we cannot measure successive duration by any other kind of movement. Hence it is that the duration which is predicated of spiritual substances and of their operations differs in kind from our time. For, since such substances are not subjected to[245] local movements, their duration cannot be measured in terms of space and velocity, as our time, but only in terms of intellectual movements, which have nothing common with the periodical revolutions from which we desume the measure of our days, years, and centuries. When we say that angels have existed for centuries, we measure the duration of their existence by a measure which is altogether extrinsic to them; and in the same manner we measure the duration of our own intellectual operations by a measure extrinsic to them—that is, by comparing it with the duration of some movement occurring in our bodies or in the surrounding world.

Since time is the duration of movement, it is plain that when we perceive movement we immediately perceive time; and since movement implies a continuous change, it is plain also that the greater the number of changes we can distinctly perceive in a given succession, the better we realize the flowing of time. It is for this reason that time seems longer in sickness or in a sleepless night than in good health and in a pleasurable occupation; for gladness and amusement distract our minds, and do not allow us to reflect enough on what is going on around us; whilst anything which affects us painfully calls our attention to ourselves and to our sensations, and thus causes us to reflect on a great number of movements to which in other circumstances we would pay no attention at all. It is for this reason, also, that when we are fast asleep we have no perception of the flowing of time. The moment one falls asleep he ceases to perceive the succession of changes, both interior and exterior, from the consideration of which time should be estimated; hence, when he awakes, he instinctively unites the present now with that in which he fell asleep, as if there had been no intermediate time. Thus, in the same manner as there is no time without movement, there is no actual perception of time without the actual perception of movement.

Measure of time.—We have said that time, as a quantity, is measured by movement. The sense of this proposition is that a body moving with uniform velocity describes spaces proportional to the times employed; and therefore, if we assume as a unit of measure the time employed in describing a certain unit of space with a given velocity, the duration of the movement will contain as many units of time as there are units of space measured by that velocity. Thus, if the revolution of the earth around its axis is taken as the unit of movement, and its duration, or the day, as the unit of time, the number of days will increase at the same rate as the number of revolutions. Speaking in general, if the time employed in describing uniformly a space v be taken as a unit of time, and t be the time employed in describing uniformly a space s with the same constant velocity, we have the proportion—

The unit of time is necessarily arbitrary or conventional. For there is no natural unit of measure in continuous quantities whose divisibility has no end, as we have explained in a preceding article.

The space v uniformly described in the unit of time represents the velocity of the movement; and therefore the duration of the movement comprises as many units of time as there are units in the ratio of the space to the constant velocity[246] with which it is measured. In other terms, time is the ratio of the space described to the velocity with which it is described.

We often hear it said that as time is measured by movement, so also movement is measured by time. But this needs explanation. When we say that time is measured by movement, we mean that time is represented by the ratio of the space to the velocity with which it is described, or by the ratio of the material extension to the formal extending of the movement; for the proportion above deduced gives

where s represents the length of the movement in space (which length is its material constituent) and v represents its intensity (which is its formal constituent). On the other hand, when we say that movement is measured by time, we either mean that the ratio of the space to the velocity is represented by the time employed in the movement, and thus we merely interchange the members of our equation, by which no new conclusion can be reached; or we mean that the length and the velocity of the movement are measured by time. But this cannot be; for our equation gives for the length of the movement

and this shows that time alone cannot measure the length of the space described. On the other hand, the same equation gives for the velocity

and this shows that time is not the measure of velocity, as the one diminishes when the other increases.

This suffices to show that the phrase “movement is measured by time” must be interpreted in a very limited sense, as simply meaning that between movement and time there is a necessary connection, and that, all other things remaining equal, the length of the movement is proportional to the length of the time employed. Yet this does not mean that the length of the movement depends entirely on the time employed, for the same length may be described in different times; but it means that the time employed depends on the material and formal extent of the movement, as above explained; for, according as we take different velocities, different lengths will be described in equal time, and equal lengths in different times. It is not the time that extends the movement, but it is the movement that by its extension extends its own time.

The true measure of movement is its velocity; for the measure of any given quantity is a unit of the same kind, and velocity is the unit of movement. Time, as measured by us, is a number which arises from the mensuration of the movement by its velocity; and therefore time results from the movement as already measured. This shows again that time is not the measure of the extent of the movement. We have seen, also, that time is not the measure of the intensity of the movement. It follows, therefore, that the quantity of movement is not measured by time.

Time, being the ratio of two quantities mathematically homogeneous, is represented by an abstract number. Yet the same time may be expressed by different numbers, according as we measure it by different units, as days, hours, minutes, etc. These numbers, however, are only virtually discrete, as time cannot be discontinued.

deduces the consequence that “the velocity is essentially a relation; for it cannot be otherwise expressed than by the ratio of the space to the time.”[81] We think that this conclusion is faulty. Space and time are not homogeneous quantities; hence the mathematical ratio of space to time is not an abstract but a concrete number, and therefore it represents an absolute quantity. Space divided by time is a length divided into equal parts; hence the quotient—viz., the velocity—represents the length of the movement made in the unit of time. And since Balmes admits that the length of the movement is a quantity having a determinate value, we do not see how he can escape the consequence that velocity, too, is a quantity of the same kind, and not a mere relation. “In the expression of velocity,” says Balmes, “two terms enter—space and time. Viewing the former in the real order, abstraction made of that of phenomena, we more easily come to regard it as something fixed; and we comprehend it in a given case without any relation. A foot is at all times a foot, and a yard a yard. These are quantities existing in reality, and if we refer them to other quantities it is only to make sure that they are so, not because their reality depends upon the relation. A cubic foot of water is not a cubic foot because the measure so says, but, on the contrary, the measure so says because there is a cubic foot. The measure itself is also an absolute quantity; and in general all extensions are absolute, for otherwise we should be obliged to seek measure of measure, and so on to infinity” (loc. cit.) This passage shows that a length described in space is, according to Balmes, an absolute quantity. And since the mathematical value of velocity represents a length described in space, as we have just proved, it follows that velocity has an absolute value.

But leaving aside all mathematical considerations, we may show that velocity has an absolute value by reference to metaphysical data. What is velocity but the development in extension of the intensity of the momentum impressed on a material point? Now, the intensity of the momentum is an absolute quantity, equal to the quantity of the action by which it is produced. Hence it is evident that, as the action has an absolute value, greater or less, according to circumstances, so also the momentum impressed has an absolute value; and consequently the velocity also, which is nothing else than the momentum itself as developing its intensity into extension, has an absolute value, and is an absolute quantity.

Balmes thought the contrary, for the following reason: “If the denominator, in the expression of velocity, were a quantity of the same kind as space—that is, having determinate values, existing and conceivable by themselves alone—the velocity, although still a relation might also have determinate values, not indeed wholly absolute, but only in the supposition that the two terms s and t, having fixed values, are compared.… But from the difficulties which we have, on the one hand, seen presented to the consideration of time as an absolute thing, and from the fact that, on the other hand, no solid proof can be adduced[248] to show such a property to have any foundation, it follows that we know not how to consider velocity as absolute, even in the sense above explained” (loc. cit.)

This reason proves the contrary of what the author intends to establish. In fact, if the denominator were of the same kind as the numerator, the quotient would be an abstract number, as we know from mathematics; and such a number would exhibit nothing more than the relation of the two homogeneous terms—that is, how many times the one is contained in the other. It is precisely because the denominator is not of the same kind as the numerator that the quotient must be of the same kind as the numerator. And since the numerator represents space, which, according to Balmes, is an absolute quantity, it follows that the quotient—that is, the number by which we express the velocity—exhibits a quantity of the same nature: a conclusion in which all mathematicians agree. When a man walks a mile, with the velocity of one yard per second, he measures the whole mile yard by yard, with his velocity. If the velocity were not a quantity of the same kind with the space measured, how could it measure it?

True it is that velocity, when considered in its metaphysical aspect, is not a length of space, but the intensity of the act by which matter is carried through such a length. Yet, since Balmes argues here from a mathematical equation, we must surmise or presume that he considers velocity as a length measured in space in the unit of time, as mathematicians consider it; for he cannot argue from mathematical expressions with logical consistency, if he puts upon them construction of an unmathematical character. After all, it remains true that the velocity or intensity of the movement is always to be measured by the extension of the movement in the unit of time; and thus it is necessary to admit that velocity exhibits an absolute intensive quantity measured by the extension which it evolves.

We therefore “know how to consider velocity as absolute,” though its mathematical expression is drawn from a relation of space to time. The measure of any quantity is always found by comparing the quantity with some unit of measure; hence all quantity, inasmuch as measured, exhibits itself under a relative form as ratio mensurati ad suam mensuram; and it is only under such a form that it can be expressed in numbers. But this relativity does not constitute the nature of quantity, because it presupposes it, and has the whole reason of its being in the process of mensuration.

We have insisted on this point because the confusion of the absolute value of velocity with its relative mathematical expression would lead us into a labyrinth of difficulties with regard to time. Balmes, having overlooked the distinction between the mathematical expression and the metaphysical character of velocity, comes to the striking consequence that “if the whole machine of the universe, not excluding the operations of our soul, were accelerated or retarded, an impossibility would be realized; for the relation of the terms would have to be changed without undergoing any change. If the velocity be only the relation of space to time, and time only the relation of spaces traversed, it is the same thing to change them all in the[249] same proportion, and not to change them at all. It is to leave every thing as it is” (loc. cit.) The author is quite mistaken. The very equation

on which he grounds his argument, suffices to show that if the velocity increases, the time employed in measuring the space s diminishes; and if the velocity diminishes, the time increases. This being the case, it is evident that an acceleration of the movements in the whole machine of the universe would be a real acceleration, since the same movements would be performed in less time; and a retardation would be a real retardation, since the same movements would require more time. We are therefore far from realizing an impossibility when we admit that, in the hypothesis of the author, time would vary in the inverse ratio of the velocity of the universal movement.

Division of time.—Philosophers divide time into real and imaginary. We have already explained this division when speaking of flowing duration. The reality of time evidently depends on the reality of movement; hence any time to which no real movement corresponds is imaginary. Thus if you dream that you are running, the time of your running is imaginary, because your running, too, is imaginary. In such a case the real time corresponds to your real movements—say, to your breathing, pulse, etc.—while the dream continues.

Imaginary time is often called also ideal time, but this last epithet is not correct; for, as time is the duration of local movement, it is in the nature of time to be an object of the imagination. And for this reason the duration of the intellectual movements and operations of pure spirits is called time only by analogy, as we have above stated. However, we are wont to think of such a duration as if it were homogeneous with our own time; for we cannot measure it except by reference to the duration of the movements we witness in the material world.

Time is also divided into past, present, and future. The past corresponds to a movement already made, the future to a movement which will be made, and the present to a movement which is actually going on. But some will ask: Is there really any present time? Does not the now, to which the present is confined, exclude all before and all after, and therefore all succession, without which it is impossible to conceive time? We concede that the now, as such—that is, considered in its absolute reality—is not time, just as a point is not a line; for, as the point has no length, so the now has no extension. Yet, as a point in motion describes a line, so also the now, by its flowing from before to after, extends time. Hence, although the now, as such, is not time, its flowing from before to after is time. If, then, we consider the present as the link of the immediate past with the immediate future—that is, if we consider the now not statically, but dynamically—we shall see at once that its actual flowing from before to after implies succession, and constitutes an infinitesimal interval of time.

This may also be shown by reference to the nature of uniform local movement. When a material point describes a line with uniform velocity, its movement being continuous, its duration is continuous; and therefore every flowing instant of[250] its duration is continuous, as no discontinuous parts can ever be reached in the division of continuum. Hence every flowing instant has still the nature of time. This conclusion is mathematically evident from the equation

for, v being supposed constant, we cannot assume t = 0 unless we also assume s = 0. But this latter assumption would imply rest instead of movement, and therefore it is out of the question. Accordingly, at no instant of the movement can we assume t = 0; or, which is the same, every flowing instant partakes the nature of time.

The same conclusion can be established, even more evidently, by the consideration of accelerated or retarded movements. When a stone is thrown upwards, the velocity of its ascent suffers a continuous diminution till at last it becomes = 0; and at the very instant it becomes = 0 an opposite velocity begins to urge the stone down, and increases continually so long as the stone does not reach the ground or any other obstacle. Now, a continuous increase or decrease of the velocity means that there are not two consecutive moments of time in which the stone moves at exactly the same rate; and hence nothing but an instant corresponds to each successive degree of velocity. But since the duration of the movement is made up of nothing but such instants, it is clear that the succession of such instants constitutes time; and consequently, as time is continuous, those instants, though infinitesimal, are themselves continuous; and thus every flowing instant is really time.

From this it is plain, first, that although the now, as such, is not time, yet its actual flowing is time.

Secondly, it follows that infinitesimals of time, as employed in dynamics, are not mathematical figments, but realities, for time flows only through infinitesimal instants; and therefore to deny the reality of such infinitesimals would be to deny the reality of time.

Thirdly, we gather that the absolute now differs from an actual infinitesimal of time; because the former, as such, is only a term of time, whereas the latter is the flowing of that term from its immediate before to its immediate after. Hence an infinitesimal of time is infinitely less than any designable duration. In fact, its before and its after are so immediately connected with the same absolute now that there is no room for any designable length of duration between them.

Fourthly, whilst the absolute now is no quantity, the infinitesimal of time is a real quantity; for it implies real succession. This quantity, however, is nascent, or in fieri only; for the now, which alone is intercepted between the immediate before and the immediate after, has no formal extension.

Fifthly, the infinitesimal of time corresponds to a movement by which an infinitesimal of space is described. And thus infinitesimals of space, as considered in dynamics, are real quantities. To deny that such infinitesimals are real quantities would be the same, in fact, as to deny the real extension of local movement; for this movement flows and acquires its extension through such infinitesimals only. And the same is true of the infinitesimal actions by which the rate of local movement is continually modified. These latter infinitesimals are evidently real quantities, though[251] infinitely less than any designable quantity. They have an infinitesimal intensity, and they cause an infinitesimal change in the rate of the movement in an infinitesimal of time.

Evolution of time.—The preceding considerations lead us to understand how it is that in any interval of time there is but one absolute now always the same secundum rem, but changing, and therefore manifold secundum rationem. S. Thomas, in his opuscule De Instantibus, c. ii., explains this truth in the following words: “As a point to the line, so is the now to the time. If we imagine a point at rest, we shall not be able to find in it the causality of any line; but if we imagine that point to be in movement, then, although it has no dimensions, and consequently no divisibility in itself, it will nevertheless, from the nature of its movement, mark out a divisible line.… The point, however, does in no way belong to the essence of the line; for one and the same real term, absolutely indivisible, cannot be at the same time in different parts of the same permanent continuum.… Hence the mathematical point which by its movement draws a line is neither the line nor any part of the line; but, remaining one and the same in itself, it acquires different modes of being. These different modes of being, which must be traced to its movement, are really in the line, whilst the point, as such, has no place in it. In the same manner, an instant, which is the measure of a thing movable, and adheres to it permanently, is one and the same as to its absolute reality so long as the substance of the thing remains unimpaired, for the instant is the inseparable measure of its being; but the same instant becomes manifold inasmuch as it is diversified by its modes of being; and it is this its diversity that constitutes the essence of time.”[82]

From this explanation we may infer that, as each point, or primitive element, of matter has its own now, one in its absolute reality, but manifold in its mode of being, there are in nature as many nows describing distinct lines of time as there are material points in movement. Accordingly, there are as many particular times as there are elements moving in space. The proposition that in time there is only unum instans in re is, therefore, to be limited to the particular time of one and the same subject of motion. S. Thomas did not think of this limitation, because he believed, according to the old astronomical theory, that the movement of the primum mobile—that is, of the supreme sphere—was the natural measure of time; and for this reason he thought that, as the first movement was one, time also was one, and constituted the common measure of all simultaneous movements.[83] But the truth is that there must be as many distinct particular times as there are things actually[252] moving. This is a manifest consequence of the doctrine which assimilates a flowing now to a point describing a line. For as every point in movement describes a distinct line in space, so also must the absolute now of every distinct being describe by its flowing a distinct line of time.

The general time, which we regard as one successive duration, is the duration of the movement from the beginning of the world to our day, conceived in the abstract—that is, without reference to the particular beings concerned in the movement. Time, when thus conceived, is a mere abstraction; whereas the particular times of particular movements are concrete in their continuous extension, notwithstanding their being represented by abstract numbers. If we knew of any special body created and put in movement before any other body, we might regard it as primum mobile, and take its movement, if uniform, as the natural measure or standard of general time; but as we know of no such particular body, and as we have reason to believe that the creation of all matter was made in one and the same moment, we are led to admit an exceedingly great multitude of prima mobilia, every one of which was from the beginning of time the subject of duration. It is clear that we cannot reduce their distinct durations to one general duration, except by making abstraction of all particular subjects, and considering movement in the abstract.

Nevertheless, as we inhabit the earth, we usually restrict our consideration of time to those periodical intervals of duration which correspond to the periodical movements we witness in, or from, our planet; and thus we take the duration of the diurnal or of the orbital movement of the earth as our standard for the measure of time. If other planets are inhabited by rational beings, it is obvious that their time will be measured by other standards, as their diurnal and orbital movements differ from those of our earth.

To the doctrine that time is evolved by the flowing of a single instant, S. Thomas adds an important remark to the effect that the now of contingent things should not be confounded with the now of eternity. He proposes to himself the following objection: “To stand and to move are not essential differences, but only different manners of being. But the now of eternity is standing, and the now of time is moving. The one, therefore, seems to differ from the other in nothing but in the manner of being. Hence the now of time would be substantially the same as the now of eternity, which is absurd.”[84]

S. Thomas replies: “This cannot be true, according to our doctrine; for we have seen that eternity and time differ essentially. Moreover, when of two things the one depends on the other as an effect from a cause, the two things essentially differ; but the now of eternity (which does not really differ from eternity itself) is the cause of time and of the now of time; therefore the now of time and the now of eternity are essentially different. Furthermore, the now of time unites the past with the future, which the now of eternity does not do; for in eternity there is no past and no future, because eternity is[253] all together. Nor has the objection any force. That to stand and to move do not constitute an essential difference is true of those things which are liable both to stand and to move; but that which always stands without possibility of moving differs essentially from that which always moves without the possibility of standing. And this is the case with the now of eternity on the one hand, and the now of time on the other.”[85]

Beginning of time.—Here the question arises whether time must have had a beginning. Those who believe that the world could have been created ab æterno will answer that time could have existed without a beginning. But we are convinced that the world could not be created ab æterno; and therefore we maintain that time must have begun.

The duration of a contingent being cannot be without a beginning; for the contingent being itself must have had a beginning. In fact, as that cannot be annihilated which has never been in existence, so that cannot be educed from nothing which has never been nothing. It is therefore necessary to admit that every creature had a beginning of its existence, and consequently of its duration also; for nothing endures but inasmuch as it exists.

Nor can this argument be evaded by saying that a contingent being may have initium naturæ, without having initium temporis. This distinction, though suggested and employed by S. Thomas, has no foundation, because the beginning of the created nature is the beginning also of its duration; and he who concedes that there must be an initium naturæ cannot consistently deny the initium temporis. In fact, no contingent being can be said to have been created, if there was no instant in which it was created; in other terms, every creature must be traced to the now of its creation. But the now of its creation is the beginning of its duration no less than of its existence. Surely, whatever has a first now has a beginning of duration; but every creature has its first now—viz., the now of its creation; therefore every creature has a beginning of duration. That the now of creation is the first now is self-evident; for the now of creation is that point of duration in which the passage is made from not being to being; and therefore it marks the beginning of the existence of the created being. And since we cannot say that the duration of the created being preceded its existence, we are bound to conclude that the now of its creation is the beginning of its duration as well as of its existence.

Some will object that we assume what is to be proved—viz., the very now of creation. For, if the world had been created ab æterno, no now of creation could be pointed out. To this we answer that the now of creation, whether we can point it out determinately or not, must always be admitted. To suppress[254] it, is to suppress creation. For, if we assume that a thing had no now of creation, we are compelled to deny that such a thing has ever been created. In other terms, if anything has no beginning of duration, it was always in act, it never lacked actual existence, and it never passed from non-existence to actual existence—that is, it is no creature at all; for to be a creature is to have passed from non-existence to actual existence. And thus we must conclude that to create is to make a beginning of time.

The impossibility of a world created ab æterno has also been argued from the impossibility of an infinite ascending series. The force of this proof does not, however, lie in the absurdity of an infinite series—for such an absurdity, as S. Thomas remarks, has never been demonstrated—but it lies in the necessity of granting a beginning to every term of the series itself; for, if every term of the series has a beginning, the whole series must have a beginning. S. Thomas, as we have just stated, teaches that an infinite ascending series is not to be judged impossible, “even if it were a series of efficient causes,” provided it depend on an extrinsic cause: In infinitum procedere in causis agentibus non reputatur impossibile.[86] This doctrine is universally rejected, and was fiercely attacked even in the time of the holy doctor; but he persisted in maintaining it against all, and wrote a special treatise to defend it contra murmurantes. The reason why S. Thomas embraced this doctrine seems to have been that the creation of the world in the beginning of time was an article of faith; and the saint believed that articles of faith are proved only by authority, and not by natural reason. He was therefore obliged to maintain that the beginning of time could not be demonstrated by reason alone. “The newness of the world,” says he, “cannot be demonstrated from the consideration of the world itself, because the principle of demonstration is the quiddity of things. Now, things, when considered as to their quiddity or species, do not involve the hic et nunc; and for this reason the universals are said to be everywhere and in all time. Hence it cannot be demonstrated that man or any other thing did not always exist.”[87]

To this argument we respectfully reply that, when the necessary conditions of a contingent fact are to be demonstrated, the principle of demonstration is not the abstract quiddity, or intelligible essence, of the things, but the contingency of their actual existence. But it is evident that whatever exists contingently has been educed out of nothing. It is therefore necessary to conclude that all contingent things have had a first moment of existence and of duration.

The Angelic Doctor refers also to a similitude by which some philosophers mentioned by S. Augustine undertook to explain the creation ab æterno. If a foot had been ab æterno pressed on the dust, the impression made by it would be ab æterno. In the same manner the world might have been ab æterno: for God, its maker, is eternal.[88] But[255] we humbly reply that the impression of the foot on the dust cannot be ab æterno if it is contingent. For, if it is contingent, it has necessarily a beginning of its existence, and therefore of its duration also, as we have already shown. Whatever is made has a beginning of duration. Hence the fathers of the church, to prove that the divine Word was not made, thought it sufficient to point out the fact that he was ab æterno like his Father.

S. Thomas, after stating his conclusion that the temporal beginning of the world is not demonstrable, but simply credible, remarks as follows: “And this should be kept in mind, lest, by presuming to demonstrate what is matter of faith by insufficient proofs, we be laughed at by the infidels, who may think that on the strength of such proofs we believe our articles of faith.”[89] This advice is good. But we need not tell our readers that what we hold as of faith we hold on divine authority, irrespective of our philosophical reasons.

Perpetuity of time.—That time may go on without end is an evident truth. But will it go on for ever, or will it cease at last? To this question we answer that time will for ever continue. As long as there will be movement there will be time. There will ever be movement; therefore there will ever be time. The major of this syllogism needs no explanation; for time is nothing but the duration of movement. The minor is quite certain. For not only the rational creatures, but the earth itself and other corporeal things, will last for ever, as is the common doctrine of philosophers, who hold that God will never destroy what he has created. These material things will therefore continue to celebrate God’s glory for ever—that is, will continue to exert their motive power and to bring about divers movements; for such is their nature, and such their manner of chanting the praises of their Creator. Moreover, we know by faith that we shall rise from death and live for ever, and that the glorious bodies of the saints will possess, besides other privileges, the gift of agility, which would evidently be of no use if there were to be no local movement and no succession of time. Hence it follows that time will last for ever.

And let no one say that the Sacred Scriptures teach the contrary. For wherever the Sacred Scriptures mention the end of time, they speak, not absolutely and universally, but only with reference to certain particular periods or epochs of time characterized by some special events or manifestation of divine Providence. Thus we read in the Apocalypse that “there will be time no more”—Tempus non erit amplius—and yet we find that after the end of that time there will be a thousand years; which shows that the phrase “there will be time no more” refers to the time of mercy and conversion. Thus also we read in Daniel that “time has its end”—Quoniam habet tempus finem suum—but we see by the context that he speaks there of the Antichristian epoch, which of course must have an end. And the like is to be said of other similar passages.

The most we can admit in regard to the cessation of time is that, owing to the great catastrophe and the wonderful changes which the consummation of the present epoch shall bring about, the diurnal and[256] the annual revolutions, which serve now as measures of time, may be so modified as to give rise to a new order of things, in which time shall be measured by a different standard. This seems to be the opinion of many interpreters of the Sacred Scriptures; though some of them speak as if after the consummation of the present things there were to be time no more, but only eternity. This manner of speaking, however, is no proof against the continuance of time; for the word “eternity,” when applied to the duration of creatures, means nothing else than sempiternity—that is, time without end, according to the scriptural phrase: Annos æternos in mente habui. We learn from S. Thomas that the word “eternity” is used in three different senses: First, we call eternity the measure of the duration of a thing which is always invariably the same, which acquires nothing from the future, and loses nothing from the past. And this is the most proper meaning of the word “eternity.” Secondly, we call eternity the measure of the duration of a thing which has a fixed and perpetual being, which, however, is subject to accidental changes in its operations. Eternity, when thus interpreted, means what we should call ævum properly; for the ævum is the measure of those things whose being lasts for ever, but which admit of succession in their operations, as is the case with pure intelligences. Thirdly, we call eternity the measure of a successive duration, which has before and after without beginning and without end, or simply without end, though it have a beginning; and in this sense the world has been said to be eternal, although it is really temporal. This is the most improper meaning of the word “eternity”; for the true concept of eternity excludes before and after.[90] Thus far S. Thomas.

We may be allowed to remark on this passage that, according to the principles which we have established in our articles on Substantial Generations,[91] not only the pure intelligences, but all primitive and elementary substances are substantially incorruptible, and have a fixed and permanent being. Hence the distinction made by the holy doctor between ævum and endless time ceases to have a foundation, and the whole difference between the endless duration of spiritual and of material changes will be reduced to this: that the movements of spiritual substances are intellectual, whereas those of the material elements are local.

The phrase “before creation.”—We often hear of such expressions as these: “Before creation there was God alone,” “Before creation there was no time,” etc.; and since such expressions seem to involve a contradiction in terms, we think it will not be superfluous to give their rational explanation. Of course, if the words “before creation” be understood absolutely—that is, excluding any creation either made or imagined—those words will be contradictory. For the preposition[257] before is relative, and implies succession; and it is contradictory to suppose succession without anything capable of succession. When no creature existed there could be nothing flowing from before to after, because there was no movement, there being nothing movable.

Nor can it be said that the now of divine eternity gives us a sufficient ground for imagining any before and after without referring to something exterior to God himself. The now of eternity has in itself neither before nor after; and when we say that it is equivalent to all imaginable time, we do not affirm that it implies succession, but only acknowledge that it is the supreme reason of the possibility of succession in created things. Hence, when we use the phrase “Before creation” in an absolute sense, we in fact take away all real before and all real after; and thus the words “Before creation,” taken absolutely, involve a contradiction. They affirm explicitly what they implicitly deny.

The truth is that, when we use the phrase in question, we express what is in our imagination, and not in our intellect. We imagine that before time there was eternity because we cannot picture to ourselves eternity, except by the phantasm of infinite time. It is for this reason that in speaking of eternity we use the terms by which we are accustomed to express the relations of time. The words “Before creation” are therefore to be understood of a time which was possible in connection with some possible anterior creation, but which has never existed. This amounts to saying that the before which we conceive has no existence except in our imagination.

S. Thomas proposes to himself the question whether, when we say that God was before the world, the term “before” is to be interpreted of a priority of nature or of a priority of duration. It might seem, says he, that neither interpretation is admissible. For if God is before the world only by priority of nature, then it follows that, since God is ab æterno, the world too is ab æterno. If, on the contrary, God is before the world by priority of duration, then, since priority and posteriority of duration constitute time, it follows that there was time before the creation of the world; which is impossible.[92]

In answer to this difficulty the holy doctor says that God is before the world by priority of duration, but that the preposition “before” designates here the priority, not of time, but of eternity. Or else we must answer, he adds, that the word “before” designates a priority, not of real, but of imaginary, time, just as the word “above” in the phrase “above the heavens there is nothing” designates an imaginary space which we may conceive by thinking of some imaginary dimensions superadded to the dimensions of the heavens.[93]

It strikes us that the first of these two answers does not really solve the difficulty. For the priority of eternity cannot mean but a priority of nature and of pre-eminence, by which God’s permanent[258] duration infinitely excels, rather than precedes, all duration of creatures. In accordance with this, the objector might still urge on his conclusion that, if God does not precede the world, the world is ab æterno like God himself. The second answer agrees with what we ourselves have hitherto said. But as regards the objection proposed, it leaves the difficulty entire. For, if God was before the world by a priority, not of real, but of imaginary time, that “before” is imaginary, and not real. And the consequence will be that God was not really “before” the world, but we imagine him to have been so.

We must own that with our imperfect language, mostly fashioned by imagination, it is not easy to give a clear and popular solution of the objection. Perhaps the most summary manner of dealing with it would be to deny the inference in the first horn of the dilemma—viz., that if God is before the world by priority of nature only, then the world will be ab æterno as much as God himself. This inference, we say, is to be denied; for it involves the false supposition that a thing is ab æterno if there is no time before it; whereas that only is ab æterno which has no beginning of duration.

Thus there is no need of saying that God precedes the world in duration; for it suffices to admit that he was before the world by priority of nature and of causality. The duration of eternity has no “before” and no “after,” though we depict it to ourselves as extending into indefinite time. Even the verb was should not be predicated of God; for God, strictly speaking, neither was, nor will be, but permanently is. Hence it seems to us that it would be a contradiction to affirm that God was before the world by the duration of his eternity, while we acknowledge that in his eternity there is no “before.” But enough about this question.

The duration of rest.—Supposing that a body, or an element of matter, is perfectly at rest, it may be asked how the duration of this rest can be ascertained and measured. Shall we answer that it is measured by time? But if so, our reader will immediately conclude that time is not merely the duration of movement, as we have defined it, but also the duration of rest. On the other hand, how can we deny that rest is measured by time, when we often speak of the rest of a few minutes or of a few hours?

We might evade the question by answering that nothing in creation lies in absolute rest, but everything is acting and acted upon without interruption, so that its movement is never suspended. But we answer directly that, if there were absolute rest anywhere in the world, the duration of that rest should be measured by the duration of exterior movements. In fact, rest has no before and after in itself, because it is immovable, but only outside of itself. It cannot therefore have an intrinsic measure of its duration, but it must borrow it from the before and after of exterior movement. In other words, the thing which is in perfect rest draws no line of time; it has only a statical now which is a mere term of duration; and if everything in the world were in absolute rest, time would cease altogether. Hence what we call the duration of rest is simply the duration of a movement exterior to the thing which is at rest.

This will be easily understood by considering that between a flowing[259] and a standing now there is the same relation as between a moving and a standing point.

Now, to change the relation of distance between two points in space, it suffices that one of them move while the other stands still. This change of distance is measured by the movement of the first point; and thus the point which is at rest undergoes, without moving, a continuous change in its relation to the moving point. In a similar manner, two nows being given, the one flowing and the other standing, the time extended by the flowing of the first measures the change of its relation to the second, and consequently, also, the change of the relation of the second to the first. This shows that the time by which we measure the duration of rest is nothing but the duration of the movement extrinsic to the thing at rest.

But, as we have said, nothing in creation is in absolute rest; and therefore what we consider as resting has really some movement imperceptible to our senses—as, v.g., molecular vibrations—by which the duration of its supposed rest is intrinsically measured. In God’s eternity alone there is perfect immobility; but its duration cannot be measured by time, even as an extrinsic measure, because the standing duration of eternity has nothing common with the flowing duration of creatures. As local movement cannot measure divine immensity, so flowing duration cannot measure divine eternity; because, as the ubi of a creature never changes its relation to God’s immensity, so the quando of a creature never changes its relation to God’s eternity.

Continuity of time.—We will conclude with a few remarks on the continuity of time. That time is essentially continuous is evident; but the question has been proposed: What if God were to annihilate all existing creatures, and to make a new creation? Would the instant of annihilation be immediately followed by the instant of the new creation, or could there be an interval of time between them?

The right answer to this question is that between the annihilation and the new creation there would be no time: because there cannot be time without succession, and no succession without creatures. Yet, it would not follow that the instant of the annihilation should be immediately united with the instant of the new creation; in other words, the duration of the new world would not be a continuation of the duration of the world annihilated. The reason of this is that there cannot be a continuation of time, unless the same now continues to flow. For when one flowing now ceases to be, and another begins, the line of time drawn by the first comes to an end, and another line, altogether distinct, begins, and this latter cannot be a continuation of the former. If the English mail, for instance, reaches New York at a given instant, and the French mail at the same instant starts from Paris, no one will say that the movement of the French mail is a continuation of the movement of the English mail. Hence the duration of the movement of the one is not the continuation of that of the other.

Moreover, from what we have seen about the distinct lines of time described by distinct subjects of flowing duration, it is plain that even the durations of simultaneous movements are always distinct from one another, as belonging to distinct subjects; and accordingly,[260] when one of the said movements ceases, the continuation of the others cannot be looked upon as its continuation. Hence, if the present world were annihilated, its duration would cease altogether; and the duration of a newly-created world would draw a new line of time quite distinct from that of the present world, though between the end of the one and the beginning of the other there would be no time. “The two worlds in question,” as Balmes remarks, “would have no mutual relation; consequently there would be neither distance nor immediateness between them.”[94]

Time is formally continuous. Formal continuity we call that of which all the constituent elements have their own formal and distinct existence in nature. In time such elements are those flowing instants which unite the immediate past with the immediate future. This continuity is essentially successive. It is owing to its successivity that time, as well as movement, can be, and is, formally continuous. For no formal continuum can be simultaneous, as we have shown where we refuted the hypothesis of continuous matter.[95] But let this suffice about time.

AN INCIDENT OF THE REIGN OF TERROR.

The close of the XVIIIth century found the good people of these United States in a most amiable mood. The consciousness of all they had achieved, by sustaining their Declaration of Independence in the face of overwhelming difficulties, produced a glow of national self-complacency that has thrown its glamour over the first page of our public annals, which—as history counts her pages by centuries—we are only now preparing to turn. Not until we were drawing near its close was the light of that agreeable illusion obscured by the shadow of a question whether the “glorious Fourth” was not like to prove, after all, a most inglorious failure.

Self-complacency is never an elevating sentiment, and seldom sustained by the merits upon the assumed possession of which it is based. But our people had many substantial virtues, sufficient to atone abundantly for their indulgence in a pleasant foible. Among these was the principle of gratitude, to which none but truly noble natures are subject. That they possessed it was proved by their promptness in hastening to relieve and comfort the French refugees whom the Reign of Terror had driven to our shores when it was devastating that fair realm across the Atlantic which had been the first to extend assistance and sympathy to us in the hour of need.

We have vivid recollections of sitting for hours—patchwork in hand—at the feet of a dear relative in the pleasant home of our childhood, listening to thrilling tales of those times, many of them connected with the French emigrants—of[261] the cordial hospitality with which all the homes of her native city of Hartford, Conn., were thrown open to receive these interesting exiles; of the shifts the inhabitants devised and the discomforts they endured in order to provide comfortable shelter and sustenance for so many from means already impoverished by the drain of the conflict through which we ourselves had but just passed.

Now, this dear relative was the possessor of a small gold locket of antique fashion and exquisite workmanship, which was an object of unceasing admiration to our childish fancy. In form it was an oblong octagon. The border was a graceful tiny pattern in mosaic-gold inlaid with amethyst and pearl. In the centre were two miniatures painted on glass with marvellous distinctness and accuracy: the one a likeness of that most unfortunate queen, Marie Antoinette, the other of her beloved sister-in-law, the amiable Princess Elizabeth. A heavy pebble crystal, perfectly transparent, covered the pictures without in the least obscuring their delicate tints. In the back of the locket was an open space, within which, our relative said, was once laid, upon the ground of dark satin that still remained, a knot formed by two small locks of glossy, silken hair, one a light rose-tinged auburn, the other flaxen with a golden sheen. A glass covered these also.

STORY OF THE LOCKET.

My father was an officer in the Continental army, and, soon after the war of our Revolution closed, returned to his former home in the city of Hartford, Conn., where he accepted an office of high municipal trust. He was moved by the generous impulses of his nature to a life of active benevolence; and when, in 1792-3, the Revolution in France drove thousands of her citizens to take refuge in our republic, none were more zealous and untiring than he in seeking out and providing for the unfortunate strangers. Every apartment in our spacious house was soon filled. Rooms were prepared in the carriage-house and barns for my brothers and the domestics of the household, while my sisters and myself took possession of a small room in the attic which had been a repository for the spare bedding, now called into use.

Among our guests was one lady who was distinguished by having a spacious room set apart for her sole use, and who seldom left it or mingled with her companions in misfortune and exile. Upon the rare occasions when she did appear briefly in their circle, it was striking to observe the ceremonious deference, amounting almost to veneration, with which she was received. Where or how my father found her I never knew; but his manner towards her was so profoundly respectful as to impress us all with feelings akin to fear in her presence. Yet these impressions were produced by the demeanor of others only; for on her own part there was not the slightest self-assertion or assumption of stateliness. Simple and unobtrusive as a child in her manners, she was indescribably affable to all; but her countenance wore an expression which, when once seen, could never be forgotten. More forcibly and clearly than words did it convey the story that some overwhelming deluge of calamity had swept from her life every vestige of earthly hope and joy. By no outward token did[262] she parade her griefs. Her dress, plain, even severe, in its perfect neatness and simplicity, displayed no mourning-badge, but her very smile was an intimate revelation of sorrow.

She was known by the title of “Madame,” though some of our guests would now and then add, when speaking of her in an undertone—not lost upon a small listener like myself—“la Comtesse.” Her waiting-maid, Celeste, was entirely devoted to her, and always served her slight and simple meals to her in her own room.

Soon after her arrival I was sent on some errand to madame’s apartment, and her agitation upon seeing me was a thing to be remembered for a lifetime. She drew me to her bosom, caressing me with many tears, suppressed sobs, and rapid exclamations in her own language. I learned afterwards from Celeste that I was of the same age and bore a striking resemblance in form and face to her daughter, who had been torn from her in the storm and turmoil of their escape. They had been rescued by a faithful servant, and hurried off, more dead than alive, in the fright, confusion, and uproar of a terrible outbreak in Paris, and had discovered, when too late, that her daughter had been separated from them and was missing. Their deliverer promised to make every possible effort to find the child, but Celeste had little hope; for she had heard from the servant of another lady, who escaped later—but had never told her mistress—that one of the women who daily watched the carts which conveyed the victims to the guillotine had averred that she was sure she saw the child among their number.

From the first I was a welcome visitor in the lady’s room. She encouraged me to pass all the time with her which could be spared from household duties; for in those days every child was required to perform a portion of these. The schools in Hartford were, for the most part, closed during that period, that the buildings might be devoted to the accommodation of the strangers, who requited the kindness by teaching the children of each household where they were entertained, daily. I was the chosen pupil of madame. She soon imparted sufficient knowledge of the French to give her instructions in her own language. Never was child blest with a more gentle and painstaking teacher! To a thorough course in the simple branches of study she added many delicate accomplishments then unknown in our country, and the most patient training in all matters connected with dress and deportment. After lessons she would hold long conversations with me, more profitable than the lessons themselves, awakening interest by suggestions and inquiries tending to form habits of thinking, as well as of acquiring knowledge. Then such wonderful fairy tales as she would relate! I used to listen perfectly entranced. Never have I heard in English any fairy lore that would compare with it. Translations we may have, but the fairy charm of the original is lost.

At that time the spirit of infidelity and atheism which laid the train for the horrors of the French Revolution prevailed widely in our own country. When too young to comprehend their import, I had often listened to warm discussions between my father, who was strongly tinctured with those opinions—while in politics he was an ultra-democrat—and my maternal grandfather, a[263] High-Churchman and Tory. The latter always insisted—and it was all I understood of their conversations—that it was impossible for a government founded upon popular unbelief and insubordination to stand. He was utterly hopeless for ours, not because it was democratic in form, but because the people no longer reverenced authority, had ceased to be imbued with the first principle of loyalty to God as Supreme Ruler, and to the “powers that be” as his appointed instruments. These subjects were themes of constant debate, and were treated with a warmth that commanded even the notice of children.

Some of our guests affected a gay and careless indifference to the claims of God and man that amounted to a rejection of both; others vehemently denounced all religion as a figment of priest-craft; while still another class met such questions with the solemnity arising from a conviction of the tremendous temporal and eternal interests which they involved.

It was refreshing to steal away from these evening debates in the drawing-room to the peaceful atmosphere of madame’s apartment. I frequently found her saying her beads, of which I knew nothing, only that they were exceedingly beautiful to the sight, and composed of very costly materials. I used to enter her room very quietly, and take my accustomed seat in silence, until her devotions were closed. Of her religion I knew no more than the name; but its evident influence upon every action of her life left an indelible impression upon my mind that it was a power above and beyond any of the prevailing forms around us. She never spoke expressly of her religion to me, but the purely Christian tone of her instructions upon all the duties of life, social and domestic, exemplified by her own conduct, proved abundantly that it was more than a mere sentiment or a name. I was too young at that time to reason upon these things, but, as I have said, they left an indelible impression, and, as life advanced, furnished food for many reveries which at length ripened into serious thought.

How the weary months must have dragged along for those exiled unfortunates! Yet the cheerfulness, even gayety, with which they endured their misfortunes and the torturing suspense of their position, was a matter of constant marvel to their New England friends. They watched the arrival of every ship from France with intense anxiety, and a renewal of grief and mourning was sure to follow the tidings it brought. Yet the polite amenities and courtesies of their daily life, which seemed a part of their nature, were never for a moment abated, and in the wildest storm of grief even the women never lost that exquisite sense of propriety which distinguishes their nation.

And so the time wore on until a certain memorable night in September, 1794. My father’s residence was situated upon an elevated street which commanded a wide view of the city and its environs. How well I remember standing with my sisters by the window of our attic dormitory, looking out upon the quiet city sleeping under the calm light of the harvest moon, on that never-to-be-forgotten night! The contemplation of the scene was too pleasant to be easily relinquished, and it was late before we could turn away from its fascinations to our rest. We were scarcely lost in sleep when we were awakened[264] suddenly by a thrilling shout in the street, accompanied by the wild huzzahs of an excited multitude. We hastened to the lower rooms, where we found the strangers gathered around the open windows, from which they were waving handkerchiefs, hats, and scarfs, and mingling their shouts with those of the throng outside.

In the street the city crier moved along in advance of the crowd, mounted on a tall white horse, and waving an immense banner. At every crossing he would pause and shout through a speaking-trumpet, “Rejoice! rejoice! Robespierre, the tyrant, has fallen! has fallen!” Then followed the jubilant cheers of the rapidly-increasing crowd. And so they passed on through every street in the city.

I sought madame’s apartment, and found her kneeling in the same reverent attitude of humble devotion with which I had so long been familiar. Strange to say, my first thought upon hearing the news so joyful to others was one of dismal apprehension, and my first emotion one of ineffable sadness! Quick as thought came the painful assurance to my heart that this was the signal for my final separation from the loving friend, the gentle teacher, to whom I had become inexpressibly attached. As she arose and extended her arms towards me, I threw myself into them, and, hiding my face in her bosom, gave way to a burst of uncontrollable grief. Words were not necessary to explain its cause. Understanding it at a glance, she caressed and soothed me with assurances of her undying love, and that she could never forget or cease to pray for the child whom heaven had appointed to be her dearest consolation under her great afflictions.

My apprehensions proved well founded. The same ship which brought tidings of the tyrant’s fall brought letters also to madame from faithful friends, urging her immediate return to France.

My father accompanied her to Boston, in order to make needful preparation for her departure on the next outward-bound vessel. I was thrown into such an agony of grief at the thought of parting with her that madame begged I might be permitted to go with them, urging that the change of scene and a visit to relatives in Boston might divert my thoughts and soothe the bitter anguish of my young heart. He consented, and, when we reached the city, he left us at the house of his sister, where I found my cousins all engaged preparing for an examination and exhibition which was to take place the next day to close the term of the school they were attending, on the same street and near by.

They insisted that I should go with them, and madame dressed me in a white muslin with a blue sash. She then hung the locket you so much admire, suspended from a delicate gold chain, around my neck, and I set off with my cousins.

We found the girls grouped together in great glee, awaiting the opening exercises. In the centre of the group was a fair and graceful girl, near my own age and size, with a large basket containing bouquets of flowers arranged with admirable taste, which the girls were purchasing for themselves and to decorate the school-room.

My cousins replied to my questions about the young stranger: “Oh! we call her the little flower girl. She lives with a farmer just out of the city. The family are very fond of her, and he gives her[265] a little place in the garden to cultivate flowers, and lets her come with him on market days to sell them for herself in the city. She heard of what was going on here, and thought this would be a good market for her bouquets; and so it has been, for she has sold them all.”

For some reason I could not turn my eyes from the child. There seemed to be a mutual fascination which drew us together, and I observed she was looking intently and with much emotion at the locket I wore. I asked her why she was so much interested in it. She answered with a slight French accent: “My mamma had such a locket, and all the ladies of the queen’s household wore them.”

“Alas! I do not know if she is living. I lost her in a great crowd in the streets of Paris, and was so frightened at the horrors around me that I remember nothing until I found myself on board the ship which brought me here. How I came there I never knew. The kind-hearted farmer with whom I live was on the wharf when we landed, and, in great pity for my bewildering loneliness and grief, took me to his home, where I have since received every attention and sympathy.”

Almost sinking under agitation, I turned to my cousins, who had been too much occupied with their own affairs to notice us, and faintly gasped: “She is, she must be, the daughter for whom madame mourns!”

At the bare suggestion all else was forgotten! There was an impetuous huddling of our electrified companions around the bewildered little stranger, and a petition that the school exercises might be delayed until they could escort her to my aunt and learn whether my conjecture was true. So great was their excitement that it was useless to deny the request, and we led our heroine off with hasty steps.

On the way we decided that my aunt should break the matter gently to madame, and introduce the child to her in her room.

There was no need of an introduction! The moment their eyes met the exclamations “Antoinette!” “Mamma!” burst from their lips, and my aunt left them locked in a close embrace. The scene was too sacred for intrusion!

The news flew with the speed of the wind, and there were great rejoicings far and near over the timely discovery brought about by means of the locket, which madame bestowed upon me (after removing the knot of hair, too precious, as a relic of her lamented queen and the Princess Elizabeth, to be relinquished) in memory of this joyful event, and as a souvenir of the beloved friend and teacher with whom I had passed so many happy and profitable hours.

Soon after the reunion of the mother and child they sailed for France, and I returned with my father to a home which was now bereft of a charm that could never be replaced or restored. But my sympathy with their joy was too sincere to be chilled by selfish regrets.

During my father’s stay in Boston he made some final arrangements connected with a large territory of wild lands which he had received from the government in partial requital of his services in the army.

To that distant wilderness he removed his family immediately after our return. The absence of mail[266] communication with such remote districts, in those days, was doubtless the reason why we never received further tidings from one who had placed us among the favored few that “have entertained angels unawares.”

In the loneliness of my forest home, and through a long life marked by many changes and sorrows, I have cherished grateful memories of the early lessons I received from her lips, and they have proved, through their influence upon my religious and moral being, a legacy far more precious than a thousand caskets of gold and precious stones.

THE CHARITIES OF ROME.

The present sacrilegious invaders of Rome have done much to change the religious aspect of the city, and obliterate every trace of the influence of the popes upon the charities once so liberally thrown open to the people of every clime and color. In the true spirit of modern “progress,” philanthropy has usurped the place of charity, and the state, taking possession of institutions founded and hitherto directed in many points by the church, banishes her as far from them as possible. It may be interesting to pass in review some of those magnificent charities which sprang up and flourished so long under pontifical protection, but which have lately either been violently suppressed or are fast disappearing under the difficulties of the political situation. We will write of these charities as they existed in 1869, which was the last year during the whole of which the papal government had control of them. In that year an English Protestant writer, long resident in Rome, was obliged by the clearness of facts to tell his readers that “few cities in Europe are so distinguished for their institutions of public charity as Rome, and in none are the hospitals more magnificently lodged or endowed with more princely liberality. The annual endowments of these establishments are no less than 258,390 scudi, derived from lands and houses, from grants, and from the papal treasury.”

When S. Peter entered Rome for the first time, and looked upon the miserable condition of those to whom the favors of fortune were denied, he recalled to mind the words addressed to his forefathers about to enter into the promised land: “There shall be no poor nor beggar among you: that the Lord thy God may bless thee in the land which he giveth thee to possess” (Deut. xv. 4), and saw before him one of the greatest obstacles to be overcome—involving a change of what was second nature to the Romans (hardness of heart), they being, as S. Paul wrote (Rom. i. 31), “without affection, without mercy”—but knowing that it was also said in the same holy text “Poor will not be wanting in the land: therefore I command thee to open thy hand to thy needy and poor brother,” and having heard the blessed Lord Jesus[267] say of the new dispensation, “The poor ye have always with you,” he understood that God’s object was not to forbid mendicity, but to leave no room for it. Therefore to the rich and powerful, when brought by grace to his apostolic feet, he enjoined: “Deal thy bread to the hungry, and bring the needy and the harborless into thy house” (Isaias lviii. 7). The faith of the Roman Christians was illustrious throughout the world, and so was their charity. From the days of S. Peter it had been customary to take up collections on Sundays in all the congregations of the city for the relief of the confessors condemned to labor in the public mines and other works, or languishing in prison, or wandering in exile; and Eusebius has preserved in his Ecclesiastical History (lib. iv. cap. 23) the testimony of Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth (161-192), in favor of the long-established charitable institutions of the Romans, and in praise, at the same time, of the piety of his contemporary, Pope S. Soter, who not only retained these customs of his people, but surpassed them in sending money to the Christians of other parts of the world, and in receiving, as though they were his own children, all faithful pilgrims to Rome. In the year 236 Pope S. Fabian gave charge of the poor of Rome to seven deacons each of whom superintended two of the fourteen civil divisions or regions, whence they were called regionary deacons. A memorial of their occupation still remains in the dalmatic, or deacon’s vestment, the wide sleeves of which served originally for pockets; and Pope Innocent III., in his treatise on the Mass, remarks that this kind of dress is attributed to deacons because, in the first institution of their order, the distribution of alms was assigned to them. A council of the IVth century, held under Pope Sylvester, decreed that one-fourth part of the church revenues should be set apart for the poor. S. Jerome attests in one of his letters that a noble matron named Fabiola erected a hospital in the year 400; and about the same time S. Gallicanus, a man of consular dignity, who had also been honored with a triumph, becoming a Christian, founded a similar institution at the mouth of the Tiber for the accommodation of pilgrims and of the sick. He waited upon them in person. In 1869 Rome had a population of about 220,000 inhabitants, and, although the climate is not unhealthy, it is hardly one of the most salubrious in the world. The low land upon which a great part of the modern city is built; the turbid Tiber, which, passing through it in a winding course, is apt to overflow its banks; the open position of the city, which is exposed, according to the season, either to the sultry African wind or to the piercing blasts from the neighboring mountains; and the large floating population, which is everywhere a likely subject of disease, combine to make it desirable that Rome should be well provided with institutions of succor and relief. While under papal rule, she was not wanting in this respect, but was even abundantly and excellently supplied.

Man, being composed of spirit and matter, having consequently a soul and a body to look after, has wants of two kinds, corresponding to the twofold claims of his nature. We should therefore divide the charities man is capable of receiving into two classes. He received them in Rome with a generous[268] hand. The first class comprehended relief to the indigent, the sick, the destitute, the insane, the convalescent; possessed hospitals and asylums, brought aid into private families, opened nocturnal retreats, offered work to the honest needy, gave marriage portions to the nubile, shielded widows, protected orphans, advanced money on the easiest terms. These were charities of subsistence. The second class embraced poor schools and other establishments for gratuitous education in trades, arts, and sciences, conservatories for the exposed, hospices for the reformed, and made provision for the legal defence of the weak. These were called charities of education.

There were two institutions in Rome that assisted the poor before they had fallen into misery or become destitute. These were the Monte di Pietà and the savings-bank. The first was a bank of loan and deposit. The idea of such an institution was suggested by a pious and shrewd Franciscan, named Barnabas of Terni, who was painfully struck, during a mission he was giving in Perugia in the year 1462, by the enormous usury (a crime then practised almost exclusively by Jews) which the poor were forced to pay for any advance of money they might need. This practical friar prevailed upon several wealthy persons to mass sums of money into one fund, out of which to lend to the poor at a reasonable (and in some cases merely nominal) rate of interest. Hence the distinctive name of Monte di Pietà, which means literally mountain of mercy. The Roman Monte was the third institution of the sort that was opened. This was in the year 1539. It was to lend money up to a certain amount without taking interest; above this amount for a very small interest. It was to take articles on pawn, and give the appraised value, less one-third. Over $100,000 used, under the papal government, to be annually loaned out on pawns or otherwise without one cent of interest. This establishment occupied a superb public building, and was under the control of the Minister of Finance. Honest visitors were freely admitted into every part of it; and we have heard many (even hard-fisted) English and Americans express themselves surprised, if not satisfied, with this reasonable and conscientious manner of saving the poor from the gripe of usurers and pawn-brokers, while imposing enough restraint to discourage improvidence. No hope was held out of indiscriminate relief. Looking at the Monte in an antiquarian light, it was a perfect museum of modern life, and to go through it was as good as visiting a hundred consolidated old curiosity-shops. Its administration employed, including a detachment of the Swiss Guard, one hundred persons. The capital, which consisted of every kind of property that at various periods and from many benefactors had come to it, was about three million dollars. The most orthodox political economists acknowledge that institutions of this sort were devised only as a lesser evil; and consequently the Roman government was glad to see the business of the Monte fall away considerably after the opening of the savings-bank in 1836. This was a charitable institution, because it was governed gratuitously by an administration of eleven honest and intelligent men, among whom were some of the first nobility, who thus gave a portion of their time and[269] talents to the poor. The cashier, Prince Borghese, gave, besides his services, a part of his magnificent palace to be turned into offices for the business transactions of the bank.

The Apostolic Almonry in the Vatican next claimed our attention in the quiet days of the Pope. From the earliest period the vicars of Christ have made it a practice to visit in person the poor, and distribute alms with their own hands, in love and imitation of Him who “went about doing good.” As the wealth of the church in Rome increased, it was found necessary for the better ordering of things to have some administrative assistance in the distribution of these private charities. S. Conon I., in the VIIth century, employed the arch-priest Paschal to dispense the bounty of the privy purse; and in the year 1271 Blessed Gregory X. created the perpetual office of grand almoner in the papal court. This officer is always an archbishop in partibus, and lives under the same roof as the Holy Father, in order to be ready at all times to receive his commands. Besides the many standing largitions issued from the Grand Almonry, there were occasional ones, such as the largess of $300 which was distributed in the great court-yard of Belvidere on each anniversary of the Pope’s coronation. This sum was doubled the first year. On each of the following civil or religious festivals, Christmas, Easter, and Coronation day, $165 were divided among a certain number of the best-behaved prisoners confined in Rome. About $650 a month were paid out either at the word of the sovereign or on his order; while a sum of $2,000 was annually divided among one hundred poor families. Besides this, the Grand Almonry supported a number of free schools, dispensed food and medicines, and performed many acts of more secret charity. A memorial of the earlier personal distribution of alms by the popes is retained in the Succinctorium, which they wear in solemn pontificals. It is an ornament of silk of the color of the feast, fringed with gold, and suspended down the left side from the girdle. On Good Friday the succinctory is not worn, in execration of the evil use Judas Iscariot made of the purse when he betrayed our Lord for thirty pieces of silver.

Another of the great charities of Rome was the Commission of Subsidies established by Pope Leo XII., in 1826, to give assistance and employment to poor but honest people, willing to help themselves if they could find the opportunity. The whole tendency of Roman charities under the popes was to frown upon sloth and vagrancy, and encourage self-reliance and mutual support; for S. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians (2, iii. 10): “If any man will not work, neither let him eat.” The commission received a yearly subsidy from government of $88,500. In each of the fourteen rioni or wards of the city a physician, surgeon, pharmacist, and midwife rendered gratuitous services under its control. It was by the judicious employment of such men, thrown on the hands of the commission, that within the last thirty years so much was done in making excavations in and about Rome in search of antiquities and in studying its ancient topography. We have sometimes heard English and American sight-seers make brutal remarks about “those dirty, lazy Romans,” as they would stop a moment to look at some party of these poor[270] fellows taking their work so easily in the Forum, on the Palatine, or elsewhere; but we should rather applaud the paternal government that refrained from calling poverty a crime or driving the poor and weak to their work like galley-slaves; and while contributing a generous support, gave them enough to do to save their self-respect.

No such thing as work-houses, in the English sense, have ever been maintained where Catholic influences have predominated; and for this we may thank God.

Another category of Roman charities comprised the confraternities. These associations for purposes of piety and mutual help convey in their name the idea of brotherliness and union. There were no fewer than ninety-one confraternities in Rome under the popes. The oldest and most famous of these was the Annunciation, which was founded in 1460 by the Dominican Cardinal John Torquemada, in Santa Maria-in-Minerva, the head church of his order in Rome.[96] Its particular object was to give portions to poor but virtuous young females, that they might either marry or enter a religious house if they had a vocation. On the 25th of March, Lady-day, the pope, cardinals, and prelates, with the rest of the court, used to assist at Mass in that church, and preside at the distribution of dowers which followed immediately. The girls were always dressed in plain white; such as had signified their choice of the heavenly Spouse being distinguished by a wreath on the head. On this occasion the pontiff gave one hundred golden scudi, and each cardinal present gave one, to the funds of the confraternity. There were fourteen other confraternities that had the same object, although carried out with less solemnity. In this way $42,000 used to be expended annually.

The Confraternity of the Twelve Apostles made it a special point to find out and relieve in a delicate manner those who, having known better days, were fallen into reduced circumstances. The Confraternity of Prayer and Death buried the dead; and if an accident in or about Rome was reported in which life was lost, a party was detailed to go and bring the body in decently for Christian burial. Sometimes a poor herdsman on the Campagna had been gored by an ox, or some fellow had been swept away and drowned in the Tiber, or perhaps a reaper been prostrated by the heat; at whatever hour of the day or night, and at all seasons, a band of this confraternity went out, and returned carrying the unfortunate person on a stretcher upon their shoulders. It must be remarked in this connection that the members of the confraternity always observed the laws concerning deaths of this kind, not interfering with, but merely placing themselves at the disposal of, the officers of justice, to give a body burial at their own expense and in consecrated ground. The Confraternity of Pity for Prisoners was founded in 1575 by Father John Tallier, a French Jesuit. It provided religious instruction for prisoners, distributed objects of piety among them, looked after their families if destitute, and assisted them to pay their debts and fines if they had any. The Confraternity of S. John Baptist was composed exclusively of Florentines and the[271] descendants of Florentines. Its object was to comfort and assist to the last, criminals condemned to death. As decapitation was the mode of judicial punishment, S. John Baptist, who was slain by Herod, was their patron, and his head on a charger the arms of the confraternity. Although there were so many confraternities and other pious associations in Rome, connected by their object with institutions of every kind, sanitary, corrective, etc., they were very careful never to interfere with the regulations of such establishments; and consequently, by minding their own business, they were not in the way of the officials, but, on the contrary, were looked upon as valuable assistants. The Society of S. Vincent of Paul was started in Rome in 1842 by the late venerable Father de Ravignan, S.J. It counted twenty-eight conferences and one thousand active members, clergy and laymen, titled folks and trades-people all working harmoniously together. About $2,100 was annually dispensed by the society. The Congregation of Ladies was founded in 1853 by Monsignor—now Cardinal—Borromeo to give work, especially needle-work, to young women out of employment. A great many ecclesiastical vestments were thus made under the direction of the ladies, and either sent as presents to poor missions, or sold, for what they would bring, at the annual fair held for the purpose of disposing of them.

There were seven public hospitals in Rome, under the immediate direction of a general board of administration composed of twelve members, of whom three belonged to the clergy and the rest to the laity. The oldest, largest, and best-appointed institution of this kind was Santo Spirito, situated in the Leonine quarter of the city, on the border of the Tiber. Its site has been occupied by a charitable institution ever since A.D. 728; the earliest building having been founded there for his countrymen by Ina, King of Wessex. For this reason the whole pile of buildings is called Santo Spirito in Saxia—i.e., in the quarter of the (West) Saxons. There are three distinct establishments under the administration of Santo Spirito—viz., the hospital itself, the Foundling Hospital, and the Lunatic Asylum. The first was founded by Pope Innocent III. in 1198, the Saxons having abandoned this locality for a more central position—the present S. Thomas-of-the-English. It has received since then many additions, until it has assumed the enormous proportions that we now admire. Every improvement was made to keep pace with the advance of hygienic knowledge. This hospital was for men only. It had 1,616 beds and an annual average of 14,000 patients. The wards were twelve in number, in which the cleanliness was refreshing, the ventilation excellent, and the water-supply pure and abundant. The principal parts of the exterior, and some of the interior parts of the building, were by distinguished architects; while some of the wards had their ceilings and upper walls painted in fresco with scenes from Sacred Scripture, such as the sufferings of Job and the miraculous cures made by our Lord. Not only the eye but the ear too of the poor patients was pleased; for three times a week they were entertained with organ music from a lofty choir erected at one end of the largest wards. The spiritual care of the sick was perfect; it was impossible for any one to die without the rites[272] of the church. In the centre of every ward there was a fixed altar, upon which Mass was said daily. The Confraternity of Santo Spirito, composed of clergy and laymen, assisted the regular ministers of religion in attendance day and night. These volunteers brought flowers to the patients, read to them, prepared them for confession and other sacraments, and disposed them to die a good death, besides performing for them the most menial services.

We remember to have read a letter addressed to the New York Post by an eminent Protestant clergyman of New York, in which, after describing this institution (then under papal rule), he said that he could not speak too highly of the excellent attendance the patients received from the kind-hearted religious who were stationed there, and added that if ever he had to come to a hospital, he hoped it would be Santo Spirito. The Foundling Hospital was opened by Pope Innocent III.; and the Lunatic Asylum, for both sexes, was founded in 1548 by three Spaniards, a priest and two laymen. It was called the House of Our Lady of Mercy. A fine garden on the Janiculum Hill was attached to it for the recreation of the patients. We do not know how it is conducted since it has changed hands, but formerly it was managed on the system of kindness towards even the fiercest madmen, using only so much restraint as was positively necessary. It was then under the care of religious. The Hospital of the Santissimo Salvatore, near St. John of Lateran, was founded in 1236 by a Cardinal Colonna. It was for women only. Another Cardinal Colonna founded the Hospital of S. James, for incurables, in 1339. Our Lady of Consolation was a fine hospital near the Forum for the maimed and wounded; while San Gallicano, on the other side of the river, was for fevers and skin-diseases. San Rocco was a small lying-in hospital, with accommodation for 26 women. It was founded at the beginning of the XVIIth century by a Cardinal Salviati. The most delicate precautions were always used there to save any sense of honor that might still cling to a victim of frailty. Guilt could at least blush unnoticed. The Santissima Trinità was founded by S. Philip Neri for convalescents of both sexes and for poor pilgrims. It could lodge 488 patients, had beds for 500 pilgrims, and table-room for 900. In the great refectory of this building the members of the confraternity came on every Holy Thursday evening to wash the feet of the pilgrims and wait on them at table. Of course the two sexes were in different parts of the building, and each was attended by its own. We remember the delightful ardor with which the late Cardinal Barnabo on such occasions would turn up his sleeves, twitch his apron, and, going down on his knees, give some poor man’s feet a better washing than they had had before in a year. There was much raising of soap-suds in that wooden tub, and a real, earnest kiss on one foot when the washing was over. The Hospital of S. John Calabyta was so called from a Spaniard, the founder of the Brothers of Charity (commonly called the Benfratelli), who attended it. It was opened in 1581, on the island of the Tiber; and by a coincidence then perhaps unknown, but since fully brought to light, it stood on the very site of an asclepium which the priests of Esculapius kept near their god’s temple two thousand years ago. The Hospital[273] of Santa Galla was founded in 1650 by the princely Odescalchi family. It gave a night asylum to homeless men. There were 224 beds, distributed through nine dormitories. Another night refuge, called S. Aloysius, was founded about the year 1730 by Father Galluzzi, a Florentine Jesuit. It is for women. We can get some idea of the great charity such refuges are when we know that during the year ending December, 1869, no less than 135,000 persons sought a resting-place at night in the station-houses of New York. Besides these public hospitals, almost every Catholic country had a private national one. One of the picturesque and not least of the Roman charities used to be the daily distribution of food at the gates of monasteries, convents, and nunneries, the portals of palaces, and the doors of seminaries, colleges, and boarding-schools.

With all this liberality, there was still some room for hand-alms. There used to be beggars in Rome; assassins have taken their place. Under the papal government a limit was put to beggary, and we have never seen the sturdy beggar who figures so maliciously in some Protestant books about Rome. Beggary may become an evil; it is not a crime. We confess to liking beggars if they are not too numerous and importunate. Few scenes have seemed to us more venerable, picturesque, and Christian than the double row of beggars, with their sores and crippled limbs, their sticks and battered hats and outstretched hands, imploring per è amore di Dio, as we pass between them to the church or cemetery or other holy place on feast-day afternoons in Rome.

The Hospice of San Michele was founded in 1686 by a Cardinal Odescalchi. In this asylum nearly 800 persons used to be received. They were divided into four classes—old men, old women, boys, and girls. The institution had an annual endowment of $52,000; but some years ago the aged of both sexes were removed elsewhere, and their part of the building was converted into a house of correction for women and juvenile offenders. The hospice, in its strict sense, now consists of a House of Industry for children of both sexes, and a gratuitous school of the industrial and fine arts. The carping author of Murray’s Hand-book (1869), although he acknowledges that this school of arts has produced some eminent men, says that “the education of the boys might be turned, perhaps, to more practically useful objects!” As if, forsooth, it were a lesser charity, in the great home of the arts that Rome is, to help a poor lad of talent to become an architect, for instance, than to make him a tailor! The orphan asylum of Saint Mary of the Angels was near the Baths of Diocletian. The boys numbered 450, under the care of male religious, and the girls 500, under that of female religious. The institution received annually $38,000 from the Commission of Subsidies. In the same quarter of the city is the Deaf and Dumb Asylum. It was opened in 1794 by Father Silvestri, who had been sent to Paris by Pope Pius VI. to receive instruction from the celebrated Abbé de l’Epée in the art of teaching this class of unfortunates. Visitors to the house are made welcome, and are often invited to test the knowledge of the pupils by asking them questions on the blackboard. The first time we called there was in 1862, and, having asked one of the boys, taken at hazard,[274] who was the first President of the United States, we were a little surprised (having thought to puzzle him) to have the correct answer at once. The House of Converts was an establishment where persons who wished to become Catholics were received for a time and instructed in the faith. It was founded in 1600 by a priest of the Oratory. Other interesting hospices were the Widows’ Home and the House for Aged Priests, where the veterans of the Roman clergy could end their days in honorable comfort. A peculiar class of Roman charities were the conservatories. They were twenty-three in number. Some of them were for penance, others for change of life, and others again to shield unprotected virtue. The Infant Asylum was a flourishing institution directed by female religious. Even fashion was made to do something for it, since a noble lady years ago suggested that the members of good society in Rome should dispense with their mutual New Year visits on condition of giving three pauls (a small sum of money) to the asylum, and having their names published in the official journal.

The Society for the Propagation of the Faith was established at Rome in 1834. No city of the size and population of Rome was better supplied with free schools of every description. The night-schools were first opened in 1819. In connection with studies we should mention the liberal presents of books, vestments, and liturgical articles made to young missionaries by the Propaganda, and the books on learned subjects, which, being printed at government expense, were sold at a reduced price to students of every nation on showing a certificate from one of their professors.

It is written (Matthew iv. 4), “Man liveth not by bread alone”; and consequently Rome multiplied those pious houses of retreat in which the soul could rest for a time from the cares of life. There were five such establishments in the city. Another great Roman charity was the missions preached by the Jesuits and Franciscans in and around the city, thus bringing the truths of the Gospel constantly before the people. We have given but a brief sketch of our subject. It has been treated in a complete manner by Cardinal Morichini in a new and revised edition of his interesting work entitled Degl’ Istituti di Pubblica Carità ed istruzione primaria e delle prigioni in Roma.

SONG.

PROGRESS VERSUS GROOVES.

“Very much indeed! He is progressive—is not fixed in any of the old grooves. His mind does not run in those ancient ruts that forbid advance and baffle modern thought.”

How strangely this colloquy between a Methodist and Congregationalist fell upon the Catholic ear of their mutual friend! Comment, however, was discreetly forborne. That friend had learned in the very infancy of a Catholic life, beginning at the mature age of thirty-five by the register, the futility of controversy, and that the pearls of truth are too precious to be carelessly thrown away. Strangely enough these expressions affected one whose habits of thought and conduct had been silently forming in accordance with that life for twenty-five years!

“Old grooves” indeed! Lucifer found them utterly irreconcilable with his “advanced ideas” in heaven. Confessedly, the success of his progressive enterprise was not encouraging; but the battle and its results established his unquestionable claim as captain and leader of the sons and daughters of progress for all time.

“Modern thought!” So far as we can discover, the best it has done for its disciples is to prove to them beyond a doubt that their dear grandpapa of eld was an ape, and that they, when they shake off this mortal coil, will be gathered to their ancestors in common with their brethren, the modern monkeys!

We, who believe the authentic history of the past, can see in this boasted new railroad, upon which the freight of modern science and advanced civilization is borne, a pathway as old as the time when our dear, credulous old grandmamma received a morning call in Eden from the oldest brother of these scientific gentlemen, who convinced her in the course of their pleasant chat that poor deluded Adam and herself were fastened in the most irrational rut—a perfect outrage upon common sense—and that a very slight repast upon “advanced ideas” would lift them out of it, emancipate thought, and make them as “gods knowing good and evil.”

We all know how well they succeeded in their first step on the highway of progress. They lost a beautiful garden, it is true, of limited dimensions, but they gained a world of boundless space, and a freedom of thought and action which was first successfully and completely illustrated by their first-born son when he murmured, “Why?” and killed his brother, who was evidently attached to grooves.

They left the heritage thus gained to a large proportion of their descendants. A minority of them, it is true, prefer to “seek out the old paths” of obedience to the commands of God, “and walk therein”—to shun the “broad road” along which modern civilization is rolling its countless throngs, and to “enter in at the strait gate” which leadeth to life eternal, to the great disgust of the disciples[277] of modern thought, who spare no effort to prove their exceeding liberality by persecuting such with derision, calumny, chains, imprisonment, and death!

Thank God this is all they can do! Rage they never so furiously, He that sitteth in the heavens laughs them to scorn. He will defend and preserve his anointed against all the combined hosts of Bismarcks, kaisers, and robber princes, who illustrate the liberal ideas that govern the march of modern civilization.

TRACES OF AN INDIAN LEGEND.

It has been said of our energetic republic that it had no infancy; that it sprang into a vigorous and complete existence at a bound. However true this may be with respect to its material structure in the hands of the remarkable men who first planted colonies on American soil, there is another view of the picture which presents widely different features.

To the eye of the Christian philosopher the religious and moral aspects of our country to this day afford subjects for anything but satisfactory reflection.

The pioneers of civilization along the northeastern borders of our territory were—whatever their professions to the contrary may have been—worshippers of material prosperity. The worship of God and the claims of religion were indeed important and proper in their place for a portion of the seventh part of each week, but the moment they came in conflict with Mammon there was little question which should yield. It was not to be expected that the saints whom the Lord had specially chosen, and unto whom “He had given the earth,” should be diverted from their pursuit of the great “main chance” by precepts which were applicable only to ordinary and less favored mortals.

Whatever progress the church has yet achieved in this region is the result of appalling labors and sacrifices. The foundation was laid in sufferings, fatigues, and perils, from the contemplation of which the self-indulgent Christians of our day would shrink aghast; laid long before the so-called Pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth, while the savage still roamed through the unbroken forests of New England, and disputed dominion with wild beasts hardly more dangerous than himself to the messengers of the Gospel of peace. Amid the wonderful beauty and variety of the panorama which her mountains, lakes, and valleys unfold to the tourists and pleasure-seekers of to-day, there is scarcely a scene that has not been traversed in weariness, in hunger, and cold by those dauntless servants of God who first proclaimed the tidings of salvation to the wild children of the forest.

Futile, and even foolish, as the toils of these early fathers may appear to the materialist and utilitarian of this day, because of their tardy and apparently inadequate fruits, the designs of Heaven have[278] not been frustrated, and its light reveals a very different history. We read therein how He who causes “the weak and foolish things of this world to confound the wise” and to proclaim his praise, sent his ministering angels to hover over the pathway moistened with the tears and blood of his servants, to note each footprint through the dreary wilderness, to gather the incense of each prayer, and to mark each pain and peril of their sacrificial march for record in the archives of eternity, as an earnest for future good to those regions, and as enduring testimony before the high court of heaven to their fitness for the crown—far surpassing in glory all earthly crowns—which they won by their burning zeal and unwavering patience.

Nor were their efforts in the field of their earthly labors so vain as some of our modern historians would have us suppose. Prayer and exertion in the service of God are never fruitless. If it is true—as the great Champlain was wont to say—“that one soul gained for heaven was of more value than the conquest of an empire for France,” they gained from the roving tribes of the desert many sincere and steadfast adherents to the faith—whose names are recorded in the book of life—and scattered benedictions along their painful pathway which have shed their beneficent influences over the scenes they traversed down to the present day. We hope to illustrate and sustain this assertion in the following sketch, drawn from our memory, of traditions—preserved among the Indians of St. Regis—to which we listened many years ago.

Scattered along the southern shores of the St. Lawrence, from the foot of Lake Ontario to the village of St. Regis—while St. Lawrence County, N.Y., was yet for the most part covered with primitive forests—were many encampments of these Indians. That whole region abounded in game and furnished favorite hunting-grounds, to which they claimed a right in connection with their special reservation in the more immediate neighborhood of St. Regis. At each of these encampments an aged Indian was sure to be found, who, without the title of chief, was a kind of patriarch among his younger brethren, exercised great influence in their affairs, and was treated with profound respect by them. He was their umpire in all disputes, their adviser in doubtful matters, and the “leader of prayer” in his lodge—always the largest and most commodious of the wigwams, and the one in which they assembled for their devotions.

One of the oldest of these sages—called “Captain Simon”—must have been much more than a hundred years of age, judging from the dates of events of which he retained a distinct remembrance as an eye-witness, and which occurred in the course of the French and Indian wars, over a century previous to the time when we listened to his recital. His head was an inexhaustible store-house of traditions and legends, many of them relating to the discovery and settlement of Canada and the labors of the first missionaries. He was very fond of young people, and, gathering the children of the white settlers around him, he would hold them spell-bound for hours while he related stories of those early days in his peculiarly impressive and figurative language. He claimed that his grandfather was one of the party who accompanied Champlain[279] on his first voyage through the lake which bears his name, and that he afterwards acted as guide and interpreter to the first priest who visited the valley of Lake Champlain. When he heard that we were from Vermont, he asked for a piece of chalk, and, marking on the floor an outline of the lake and the course of the Richelieu River, he proceeded to narrate the voyage of Champlain and his party in the summer of 1609.

Embosomed within the placid waters of Lake Champlain, near its northern extremity, is a lovely island, of which Vermonters boast as the “Gem of the Lake,” so remarkable is it for beauty and fertility. Here the party landed, and Champlain, erecting a cross, claimed the lake—to which he gave his own name—its islands and shores, for France and for Christianity. Half a century later one La Motte built a fort upon this island, which he named St. Anne, giving the island his own name; and it is called the Isle La Motte to this day.

Champlain explored the lake as far as Crown Point, where they encountered and defeated a band of Iroquois Indians; but not deeming it wise to adventure further at that time so near such powerful foes, they returned down the lake without delay. This encounter was the first act of that savage drama which so long desolated New France, and threatened it with entire destruction.

Six years later, in the summer of 1615, another party landed on the Isle La Motte. It was made up of a missionary of the Recollect Order and his escort of Indians in two bark canoes. The grandfather of our narrator was one of these. They remained a day or two on the island, and the missionary offered the Christian sacrifice for the first time within the territory now embraced by the State of Vermont.[97]

The object of his journey was to visit scattered bands of hunters who were encamped along the eastern shore of the lake and its vicinity, at different points in the valley of Lake Champlain.

Leaving the Isle La Motte, they steered for the mouth of the Missisque River, which they navigated up to the first falls, where the village of Swanton now stands. Here they found a flourishing encampment, and remained some days for the purpose of instructing the Indians in the truths of Christianity. The missionary found that some dim reports of the Christian teachers had preceded him, and prepared the way for his work, the success of which encouraged and consoled him.

From that place they proceeded on foot for some miles to the base of a line of hills, sketched by the narrator, and corresponding to those east of St. Alban’s. Here they also remained several days, the reverend father toiling early and late in the duties of his vocation. He was now surrounded by a crowd of eager listeners; for not only did his former audience accompany him, but a goodly number from the surrounding hills and from Bellamaqueau and Maquam Bays—distant three and five miles respectively—flocked to hear his instructions and to be taught “The Prayer” revealed to them by the Great Spirit through his servant.

Here they brought to him also[280] the beautiful Indian maiden, of whom her race cherish the legend that her declining health led her people to bring her to these hills, hoping the change from the low lands and damp atmosphere of her home to the bracing mountain air might prove beneficial. Instead of finding relief, she only declined the more rapidly, so that she was soon unable to be carried back. She, too, had heard whispers of holy men who had come to teach her race the path of heaven, and wistfully she had sighed daily, as she repeated the yearning aspiration: “Oh! if the Great Spirit would but let me see and listen to his messenger, I could die in peace!”

The Indians, to this day, tell with what joy she listened to his words; how eagerly she prayed that she might receive the regenerating waters; how, when they were poured upon her head, her countenance became bright with the light of heaven; and how her departure soon after was full of joy and peace. Her burial-place was made on one of those eastern hills. It was the first Christian burial for one of her race in Vermont, and her people thought her intercessions would not fail to bring down blessings upon all that region.

Pursuing their journey by the trail of those who had preceded them through the dense wilderness—for our aborigines were skilled in tracing lines of communication between their different camps with extreme directness by aid of their close observations of nature—the party arrived at another camp on the bank of a river discovered by Champlain, and named by him the Lamoille.

At this place an Indian youth came to the missionary in great distress. His young squaw was lying at the point of death, and the medicine men and women could do nothing more for her. Would not “The Prayer” restore her? Oh! if it would give her back to him, he, with all his family, would gratefully embrace it! The reverend father went to her, and, when he found she desired it, baptized her and her new-born infant in preparation for the death which seemed inevitable. Contrary to all expectation, she recovered. Her husband and his family, together with her father’s family, afterwards became joyful believers.

After some days the Indians of that place accompanied the party in canoes to the lake and along its shores to the mouth of the Winooski River, which they ascended as far as the first falls. Here they remained many days, during which time the missionary visited the present site of Burlington, and held two missions there—one at a camp on the summit of a hill overlooking the valley of the Winooski as it approaches the lake, and one near the lake shore.

If Vermonters who are familiar with the magnificent scenery which surrounds the “queen city” of their State never visit the place without being filled with new admiration at the infinite variety and beauty of the pictures it unfolds from every changing point of view, we may imagine how strangers must be impressed who gaze upon them for the first time. Not less picturesque, and if possible even more striking, were its features when, crowned by luxuriant native forests and fanned by gentle breezes from the lake, it reposed within the embrace of that glorious amphitheatre of hills, in the undisturbed tranquillity of nature. It was not strange that the natives were drawn[281] by its unparalleled attractions to congregate there in such numbers as to require from their reverend visitor a longer time than he gave to any other place in this series of missions.

In the course of three months the party had traversed the eastern border of the lake to the last encampment near its southern extremity. This was merely a summer camp, as the vicinity of the Iroquois made it unsafe to remain there longer than through that portion of the season when the Mohawks and their confederates were too busy with their own pursuits among the hills of the Adirondacks to give much heed to their neighbors. At the close of the mission this camp was broken up for that season, and its occupants joined the reverend father and his party in canoes as far as the mouth of the Winooski River, whence men were sent to convey them to the starting-point at Swanton, where their own canoes were left.

On their way thither they lingered for some days on Grand Isle, then, as now, a vision of loveliness to all admirers of the beautiful, and a favorite annual resort of the natives for the period during which they were safe from the attacks of their merciless foes.

At every mission thus opened the missionary promised to return himself, or send one of his associates, to renew his instructions and minister to the spiritual wants of his converts. This promise was fulfilled as far as the limited number of laborers in this vineyard permitted. The brave and untiring sons of Loyola afterwards entered the field, and proved worthy successors of the zealous Recollects who first announced the Gospel message in those wilds.

Our Indian narrator, when he had finished his recital of missionary labors in this and other regions, would always add with marked emphasis: “And it is firmly believed by our people, among all their tribes, that upon every spot where the Christian sacrifice was first offered a Catholic church will one day be placed.”

There seemed to his Protestant listeners but slight probability of this prediction ever being fulfilled in Vermont—settled for the most part by the straitest sect of the Puritans—as there was not then, or until twenty years from that time, a Catholic priest or church in the State. Yet at this writing—and the fact has presented itself before us with startling effect while tracing these imperfect reminiscences—there is at every point indicated in his narrative a fine church, and in many places flourishing Catholic schools.

The labors of an eminent servant of God—to whom Vermont cannot be too grateful—have been particularly blessed on the Isle La Motte, where the banner of the cross was first unfurled within her territory. A beautiful church has been erected there with a thriving congregation and school.

Much as remains to be accomplished in this field, when we reflect upon all that has been done since the first quarter of this XIXth century, we can see great cause for encouragement and gratitude to Almighty God, who has not withheld his blessing from the work of his servants of the earliest and the latest times. “Going on their way, they went and wept, scattering the seed,” the fruits of which we are now gathering into sheaves with great joy.

FINDING A LOST CHURCH.

The present age is pre-eminently one of discovery. In spite of the wise man’s saying, “Nothing under the sun is new,” mankind, wiser in its own conceit than the wise man, insists upon the newness of its every production. In Rome a different spirit prevails. While the new is not entirely neglected, the great delight of many Romans is to find something old—the older the better. They live so much in the past that they follow with an eager interest the various steps taken to enlighten them on the lives and deeds of the men of old, their ancestors on the soil and in the faith which they profess.

Foremost in the pursuit and discovery of Christian antiquities stands the Commendatore de Rossi. It has been said that poets are born, not made: De Rossi’s ability as a Christian archæologist seems to be more the gift of nature than the result of study. With unwearied industry, with profound knowledge, with an almost unerring judgment, he finds out and illustrates the remains of Christian antiquity scattered around Rome—not on the surface, but in the deeps of the earth. The latest and one of the most important discoveries he has made forms the subject of the present paper.

Tor Marancia is a name not much known out of Rome, yet it designates a place which was of some importance in its day. The traveller who contemplates the works of ancient art collected in the Vatican Museum cannot fail to be interested in two very beautiful black and white mosaics which form the floor of the gallery known as the Braccio Nuovo. Mythological fables and Homeric legends are represented in these pavements, and they come from Tor Marancia. In the Gallery of the Candelabra, and in the library of the same museum, a collection of frescos, busts, statues, and mosaics of excellent workmanship and of great interest, likewise discovered at Tor Marancia, are exhibited. All these objects were found at that place in the course of excavations made there in the reign of Pope Pius VI. In ancient times a villa stood at Tor Marancia, of which these formed the decorations.

At this spot also is found the entrance to a very extensive catacomb which contains three floors, and diverges in long, winding ways under the soil of the Campagna. The catacomb has been called by the name of S. Domitilla, on evidence found during the excavations made there. This lady was a member of the Flavian family, which gave three occupants to the imperial throne—Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. It is a well-known fact that those early Christians who were blessed with wealth were in the habit of interring the bodies of their brethren, of saints, and of martyrs within the enclosure of their villas. Such villas were situated outside the limits of the city; and hence we find the entrance to every catacomb beyond the city walls, with the solitary exception of the catacomb or grottos of the Vatican, and the entrances to all of them are found in sites ascertained to have been the property of Christians.[283] It might be easy to multiply instances of this, taking the facts from the Acts of the Martyrs, wherein the places of sepulture are indicated, and the names of those who bestowed the last rites upon the dead recorded.

Domitilla, or Flavia Domitilla, as she is sometimes termed, was a niece of the consul Flavius Clemens, who was cousin of the Emperor Domitian. She was a Christian, having been baptized by S. Peter; and, after a life spent in charitable works, amongst which was the burial of the martyrs “in a catacomb near the Ardeatine Way,” the same of which we write, she also suffered martyrdom. Her two servants, Nereus and Achilleus, were put to death previously, and their bodies were placed in this catacomb by Domitilla.

In 1854, while De Rossi was pursuing his researches in the catacomb of S. Domitilla, he came upon the foundations of a building which pierced the second floor of the subterranean cemetery. This was a most unusual occurrence, and the eminent archæologist eagerly followed up his discovery. He found a marble slab which recorded the giving up of a space for burial “Ex indulgentia Flaviæ Domitillæ”—a confirmation of the proprietorship of the place.

De Rossi naturally concluded that the building thus incorporated in the Christian cemetery was of great importance. The loculi, or resting-places of the dead, were very large, which indicates great antiquity; the inscriptions likewise were of a very early date; and sarcophagi adorned with lions’ heads, marble columns overturned, and other signs, led the discoverer to the conclusion that he had come upon the foundations of a church constructed within this cemetery. In the course of his excavations he had penetrated into the open air, and found himself in a hollow depression formed by the falling in of the surface. Amongst other objects discovered were four marble slabs containing epitaphs furnished with consular dates of the years 335, 380, 399, and 406; and also a form of contract by which the right of burial in the edifice was sold. The proprietor of the land above the cemetery opposed the continuance of the excavations, and the discoverer, obliged to withdraw, covered up the materials already found with earth, and turned his attention to other recently-discovered objects in another place.

Twenty years after, in 1874, Monsignor de Merode purchased the land overlying the catacomb and church, and the excavations were again undertaken under most favorable circumstances. In vain did the Commission of Sacred Archæology, under De Rossi’s guidance, seek for the four marble columns and the two beautiful sarcophagi that had been seen there twenty years before. The proprietor is supposed to have carried them away. But they found instead the floor of the church or basilica, with its three naves, the bases of the four columns, the apse, the place where the altar stood, and the space occupied by the episcopal chair behind the altar. The basilica is as large as that of San Lorenzo beyond the walls. The left aisle is sixty feet long by thirteen broad; the central nave is twenty-four feet broad; and the right aisle, which is not yet entirely unearthed, is considered to be of the same breadth as the first mentioned; the greatest depth of the apse is fifteen feet. “The church,” says De Rossi, “is of[284] gigantic proportions for an edifice constructed in the bowels of the earth and at the deep level of the second floor of a subterranean cemetery.”

Here, then, was a basilica or church discovered in the midst of a catacomb. That the latter belonged to Flavia Domitilla was well known; and yet another proof, which illustrates archæological difficulties and the method of overcoming them, was found here. It was a broken slab of marble containing a portion of an inscription:

and having the image of an anchor at the point(*). It was concluded that the anchor was placed at an equal distance from both ends of the inscription, and the discoverer, with the knowledge he already has of the place, supplied the letters which he considered wanting to the completion of the inscription, and thus produced the words,

(sepulchre of the Flavii). This reading is very probably the right one, and its probability is greatly strengthened by the position of the anchor, since the full inscription, as here shown, leaves that sign still in the centre.

But to find the name borne by these ruins when the building of which they are the sole remnants was fresh and new presented a task to their discoverer. It was necessary to seek in ancient works—pontifical books and codices—for some account of a basilica on the Ardeatine Way. In the life of S. Gregory the Great it is related that this pontiff delivered one of his homilies “in the cemetery of S. Domitilla on the Ardeatine Way, at the Church of S. Petronilla.” The pontifical books and codices, although they differ in details—some saying in the cemetery of Domitilla, and others in that of Nereus and Archilleus, which is the same place under another name—agree in the principal fact. On the small remnant of plaster remaining on the wall of the apse an unskilled hand had traced a graffito, or drawing scratched on the plaster with a pointed instrument, somewhat resembling those found on the walls of Pompeii. This graffito represents a bishop, vested in episcopal robes, seated in a chair, in the act of delivering a discourse. This rude sketch of a bishop so occupied, taken in conjunction with the fact that S. Gregory did here deliver one of his homilies, is a link in the chain of evidence which identifies the ruin with the ancient basilica of S. Petronilla.

But a still more convincing testimony was forthcoming. A large fragment of marble, containing a portion of what appeared to have been a long inscription, was found in the apse. There were but few complete words in this fragment, and these were chiefly the termination of lines in what seemed to have been a metrical composition. Odd words, selected at random from a poem, standing alone, devoid of preceding or succeeding words, might not seem to furnish very rich materials even to an archæologist. These wandering words were, however, recognized to be the terminal words of a poem or eulogium written by Pope Damasus in honor of the martyrs Nereus and Achilleus. Now the connection between this metrical eulogium and the basilica was to be sought for. In the Einsiedeln Codex the place where this poem was to be seen is stated to[285] have been the sepulchre of SS. Nereus and Achilleus, on the Appian Way, at S. Petronilla. The poem, or rather this fragment of it, being found at this sepulchre, it was natural to conclude that the church was that of S. Petronilla. The Appian Way is the great high-road from which the Ardeatine Way branches off near this spot.

Again, the basilica of S. Petronilla was frequented by pilgrims from many nations in the VIIth century. Among these were Gauls, Germans, and Britons. In their itineraries of the martyrs’ sepulchres in Rome, and in the collection of the metrical epigraphs written at these places, it is proved that the original name of this church was that of S. Petronilla. “Near the Ardeatine Way is the Church of S. Petronilla,” say these old documents, and they likewise inform us that S. Nereus and S. Achilleus and S. Petronilla herself are buried there: “Juxta viam Ardeatinam ecclesia est S. Petronillæ; ibi quoque S. Nereus et S. Achilleus sunt et ipsa Petronilla sepulti.”

A second fragment of the slab containing the metrical composition of Pope Damasus has since been found, and this goes to confirm the testimony furnished by the former fragment. In the following copy of the inscription the capital letters on the right-hand side are those on the fragment first discovered; those on the left belong to the recently-discovered portion:

The date of the church was likewise ascertained. It is known that Pope Damasus, the great preserver of the martyrs’ graves, would never allow the Christian cemeteries to be disturbed for the purpose of building a church therein; and although he himself strongly desired that his remains should repose in one of these sacred places by the side of his predecessors, he abandoned this desire rather than remove the sacred ashes of the dead. It may naturally be concluded, then, that this church was built after his day—he died in 384—as were the churches of S. Agnes, S. Lawrence, and S. Alexander, all of which are beyond the city walls and built in catacombs. The catacombs under the Church of S. Petronilla showed an inscription bearing the date of 390, and in the church itself a monumental slab with the date of 395 has been found. It is thus almost certain that between the highest date found under, and the lowest date found in, the church—that is, between the years 390 and 395—the basilica of S. Petronilla was constructed.

For about three centuries and a half this church was well frequented. We have records of gifts sent to it, precious vestments, etc., by Pope Gregory III., who reigned from 715 to 741. But in 755 the Longobards came down upon Rome; they desecrated the churches and cemeteries around the city, and then began the siege of Rome. After peace was made, the pontiff of the period, Paul I., transferred the relics and remains of the saints to safer custody, and the Church of S. Petronilla became deserted. From unmistakable signs it seems that this desertion was conducted in a most regular manner, and that it was closed and despoiled of its precious[286] objects. The door which entered the left aisle was found walled up; the altar, the seats of the choir, the episcopal chair, and the ambons or marble pulpits ware all removed and transported elsewhere. The floor of the church, so far below the level of the surrounding soil, formed a resting-place for the water which drained through the neighboring lands after rains had fallen, and this undoubtedly formed the strongest reason for the abandonment of S. Petronilla. Nothing was left in it but sarcophagi and sepulchres, the pavements with their marble epitaphs—so valuable to-day in revealing history—some columns with their beautifully-carved capitals, which time or an earthquake has overturned and hidden within the dark bosom of the earth for more than a thousand years.

The hundred pilgrims who came from America, with a hundred new-found friends, assembled on the 14th of June, 1874, to pray in that disentombed old church. They had come from a world unknown and undreamt of by the pilgrims who had formerly knelt within these walls; and as they looked around on the wide and desolate Campagna, and on the monument of Cecilia Metella shining in the distance white and perfect, in spite of the nineteen centuries that have passed away since it received its inmate, and at the blue, changeless sky overhead, and then turned their eyes upon the church, decorated that morning with festoons of green branches and gay flowers, the same as it may have been on other festive occasions a thousand years ago, they may have felt that time has effected almost as little change in the works of man as in those of nature, and that all things in Rome partake of Rome’s eternity.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Le Culte Catholique is another valuable addition to controversial literature, by the author of The Bible and the Rule of Faith.

It is true that the days of controversy seem to be drawing to a close. The Greek schism still holds itself aloof in sullen isolation; but the controversy is exhausted, and all that is left of a church has become the mere unfruitful appanage of a northern despotism.

As to Protestantism, it never had any positive existence as a confession. Three hundred years have exhausted its theological pretensions. As a religion it has ceased to exist, and it lies buried beneath the weight of its own negations. The only formidable enemies of the church now are the disowners both of Christ and God, and they seek her destruction because they know that she alone offers an insuperable obstacle to the universal atheism which they hope to bring about.

Under such circumstances works like Dr. Bégin’s are chiefly useful for the information of Catholics, and for the support they render to their faith.

Le Culte Catholique is, the writer tells us, “an exposition of the faith of the Roman Church in the matters of the worship of the saints and of their relics, of the blessed[287] Virgin Mary, of images, etc., in reply to the objections of Protestantism, followed by a historical and critical dissertation on the celibacy of the clergy.” On these trite subjects little that is new can be said. But the work before us is a terse and lucid summary of Catholic teaching on the above points.

It is the object of the society of Freemasons to effect the universal deification, the rejection, that is, of the belief in any existence higher than the human being, and in any superiority of one man over another. For this they find it convenient to support the foolish Protestant objection to a splendid ritual and costly churches, on the ground that “God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” Dr. Bégin quotes the following telling passage from a contemporary writer in answer to this frivolous objection:

“I know the old tirades about the temple of nature. No doubt the starry vault of heaven is a sublime dome; but no worship exists which is celebrated in the open air. A special place of meeting is required for collective adoration, because our religious sociability urges us to gather together for prayer, as it were to make a common stock of our joys and griefs. Besides, should the time come when we shall have nothing but the cupola of heaven to shelter our religious assemblies, it would require a considerable amount of courage to betake ourselves thither, especially in winter. And the philosophers who find our cathedrals so damp would not be the most intrepid against the inclemency of the sanctuary of nature. Thus do great errors touch on the ridiculous. Reasoning begins their refutation; a smile ends it.”

The second chapter is an admirable exposition of the special worship (hyperdulia) paid to the Blessed Virgin Mary, in the course of which he shows triumphantly that the definition of her Immaculate Conception was no new doctrine, but a mere definite and dogmatic statement of a doctrine which had been all along held implicitly in the church. The following simile, illustrative of this argument, appears to us to be worth quoting: “Modern science, which is daily making such extraordinary progress, discovers, ever and anon, fresh stars, which seem to float in the most distant depths of space, which become more bright as they are more attentively observed, and which end by becoming stars of continually-increasing splendor. These stars are not of recent date; they are not new; they are only perceived. Something analogous takes place in the heavens of the church on the subject of certain truths of our faith. Their light reveals itself and develops by degrees. Sometimes the shock of controversy illuminates them. Then comes a definition to invest them with fresh splendor. But in receiving this supplement of light, destined to make them better understood by the faithful, they lose nothing of their proper nature; their essence is not in the slightest degree changed; only our minds appropriate them with more facility.”

To those who have attempted to form an adequate conception of the charitable and ascetic spirit, the simple record of these saintly lives must have a wonderful fascination. To those, even, who are wholly absorbed in a life of pleasure it will at least possess the merit of a new sensation, if they can forget the silent reproof which such examples convey.

It affords matter of encouragement in these days of combined luxury and destitution to look over the history of those—many of whom were delicately reared—who left all for God, content to do whatsoever he appointed them to do, and to submit to extraordinary mortifications for his sake. The work embraces six brief biographies of Visitation Nuns eminent for their self-sacrificing labors for the moral and intellectual education of their charges, and in other good and charitable offices. Their names, even, may be quite new to English-speaking readers, but that fact is all the more in keeping with their hidden lives. We have said enough to indicate the general character of the volume.

The writer succeeds, in the very opening chapter, in so portraying the character of a child as to make it a living breathing reality to the reader. The story of his humble life in childhood and his struggles and trials in later years is told without any attempt at fine writing—indeed, all the characters are simply and[288] well drawn, and retain their individuality to the end. The heroine, neglected in childhood, and without any guide in matters of faith, is easily persuaded by a suitor that religion is contrary to reason; and thus, left to her own unaided judgment, and notwithstanding her innate love of truth, soon finds herself entangled in a web of deceit and hypocrisy. She only escapes the unhappiness which such a course entails by forsaking it.

The moral of the tale (if that is not an obsolete term) is what the reader would naturally infer—the necessity of early religious instruction, and the advantage, even in this life, of a belief in revealed truth. We are glad to note the absence of the faults which disfigure much of the imaginative literature of the day, not excepting, we are sorry to say, that which emanates from the writer’s own sex. We see no attempt to give false views of life, or to undermine the moral and religious principles of the reader; on the contrary, there is reason to infer much that is positively good, though not so definitely stated as we should have liked.

Protestantism is well-nigh defunct. It is in its last throes. It has not sufficient vitality left to care for its own doctrines, such as they are. As a religion it has almost ceased to exist. Disobedience to the faith has been succeeded by indifference; indifference by the hatred of Christ. Its rickety old doctrines, whose folly has been exposed over and over again thousands of times, have quietly tumbled out of existence. Protestants themselves have almost forgotten them, and certainly do not care enough about them to defend them. Paganism has returned—paganism in its last stage of sceptical development. We have to contend now for the divinity of Christ and the existence of a God. The Bible and the rule of faith are up amongst the lumber.

Yet it may be—as the writer of this work asserts; we much doubt it, however—that there are still “many poor souls in the bosom of Protestantism a prey to the anguish of doubt.” To such the Abbé Bégin’s treatise on the rule of faith may be of the utmost service. The argument is extremely terse and lucid. In short, were the minds of Protestant fanatics open to reason, it could not fail to convince them of the unreasoning folly of their notions about the Bible being the one only rule of faith.

The first part of this work treats of the rule of faith in general, and proves, amongst other things, that such a rule must be sure, efficient, and perpetual to put an end to controversies.

The second part exhibits the logical impossibility of the Protestant rule of faith, remote and proximate. That is to say, that it is impossible for the unexplained text of the Bible to be a sure, efficient, and perpetual rule of faith, and for an immediate inspiration of its meaning to individuals by the Holy Ghost to be its means of explanation.

The third part proves very exhaustively that the Catholic rule of faith is the only possible sure, efficient, and perpetual one; namely, Holy Scripture, the remote rule, and the teaching church, the proximate one.

To any souls “in the bosom of Protestism” who are “a prey to the anguish of doubt,” if indeed there be such, we cordially recommend this treatise. Its tone is kind and gentle, its reasoning irresistible, and, with the blessing of God, is able to put an end to all their doubts on the fundamental question as to the true rule of faith.

This is another of the pleasant “Bric-à-Brac series,” edited by Richard Henry Stoddard. Miss Knight was that nondescript kind of being known as a “lady companion” to the Princess Charlotte of Wales. Her position gave her peculiar facilities for enjoying the privilege, so dear to certain hearts, of a peep behind the scenes of a royal household. Never having been married, she had plenty of time for jotting down her notes and observations on men, women, and things. Many of the men and women she met were famous in their way and in their time. As might be expected, there is much nonsense in her observations, mingled with pleasant glimpses of a kind of life that has now passed away. Mr. Raikes’ journal is similar in character to that of Miss Knight, with the advantage or disadvantage, as may be considered, of having been written by a man.

THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXII., No. 129.—DECEMBER, 1875.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by Rev. I. T. Hecker, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

MR. GLADSTONE AND MARYLAND TOLERATION.

It was supposed that Mr. Gladstone had been so triumphantly refuted, as a polemic, that he would take a prudent refuge in silence. At a moment when neighboring nations were rent with religious dissensions, and when England needed repose from, rather than fuel added to, her internal agitations, a statesman and ex-premier of the British Empire assumes the rôle of a religious agitator and accuser, and startles, as well as offends, the public sense of appropriateness by his useless and baseless indictment against the Catholic Church, to which England owes all that is glorious in her constitution and in her history; against English Catholics in particular, his fellow-subjects, who of all others, by their loyalty and Christian faith and virtues, can preserve the liberties and the institutions of their country, now threatened alike by infidel corruption, Protestant indifference, and communistic malice; and against that saintly and illustrious pontiff whose hand is only raised to bless, whose lips breathe unfaltering prayer, and whose voice and pen have never ceased to announce and defend the eternal truths of religion, to uphold morality, and to refute the crying errors and evils of our times. The unanswerable refutations which Mr. Gladstone’s attacks elicited from Cardinal Manning, Bishops Ullathorne and Vaughan, Drs. Newman and Capel, and Canon Neville, not to speak of the Italian work of Mgr. Nardi and the rebukes administered by the periodical press, had, it was believed, even by impartial Protestants, effectually driven this new champion of the old No-popery party in England from the field of polemics. But, like all new recruits, the ex-premier seems incapable of realizing defeat, or perhaps is anxious, at least, to retire with the honors of war.

Not content with the serial publication of his three tracts, he has just now republished them in one volume, with a Preface, under the title of Rome and the Newest Fashions in Religion—a title as unbecoming the gravity of his subjects as it is unsupported by the contents of[290] the work. The preface to the republication not only reiterates his accusations on all points, but the author, not satisfied with his new part as theologian, essays the rôle of historical critic, and thus gives prominence to a historical question of deep interest and of especial importance to the Catholics of this country.

The same animus which inspired Mr. Gladstone’s attacks against the church, against his Catholic fellow-countrymen, and against the most august and venerable personage in Christendom, has also induced him to deny to the Catholic founders of Maryland the honorable renown, accorded to them heretofore by historians with singular unanimity, of having, when in power, practised religious toleration towards all Christian sects, and secured freedom of conscience, not only by their unwavering action and practice, but also by giving it the stability and sanctions of statute law. This is certainly the only phase in this celebrated controversy upon which it remains for Mr. Gladstone to be answered.

His Eminence Cardinal Manning, in The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance, at page 88 (New York edition), writes:

Again, in his Preface to Rome and the Newest Fashions in Religion, page viii., Mr. Gladstone writes:

Let us first test Mr. Gladstone’s accuracy and consistency as a historical critic. He begins by alleging that the Maryland Toleration Act was a measure of defensive prudence in the interests of the Catholics themselves, and that “its main and very legitimate purpose plainly was to secure the free exercise of the Roman Catholic religion.” He then asserts that this act of toleration was not the work of the Catholics at all, but of a Protestant majority in the legislature which passed it. We have, then, here presented the extraordinary picture of an alleged Protestant legislature passing a law which was really intended to protect Catholics against Protestant ascendency and apprehended Protestant persecution, and whose “main and very legitimate purpose was to secure the free exercise of the Roman Catholic religion.” Surely, the Protestants of that day were liberal and generous, especially as it was an age of persecution, when not only were Catholics hunted down both in England and her Virginia and New England colonies, but even Protestants of different sects were relentlessly persecuting each other. And in what proper sense can they be said to have been Protestants with whom it was “a very legitimate purpose” to legislate in the express interests of Roman Catholics?

Mr. Gladstone also states that the Toleration Act was passed in[292] the apprehension of an influx of Puritans, and to protect the colony “from the grasp of its neighbors in Virginia”; whereas his favorite author, Mr. Bancroft, informs Mr. Gladstone that Lord Baltimore invited both the Episcopalians of Virginia and the Puritans of New England into his domains, offering a gift of lands as an inducement; and it is a historical fact that numbers of them accepted the invitation.

Again, Mr. Gladstone, while apparently treating the Toleration Act as a Catholic measure, animadverts with evident disapproval on that feature in it which “prescribed the punishment of death for any one who denied the Trinity,” and then immediately he claims that the legislature which passed the act was a Protestant body—“two-thirds,” he writes, “appear to have been Protestants”—thus imposing upon his Protestant friends the odium of inflicting death for the exercise of conscience and religious belief; and that, too, not upon Papists, as they were not included in the punishment.

Mr. Gladstone, in The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance (page 83), expressing no doubt the common sentiments of Protestants since the time of Luther and Henry VIII., uses these irreverent words in regard to the Blessed Virgin Mary, that peerless and immaculate Lady whom four-fifths of the Christian world venerate as the Mother of God:

And yet with such sentiments, in which doubtless the Protestants of Maryland in 1649 concurred, he attributes to, and claims for, those Protestants who, he says, constituted two-thirds of the Maryland Colonial Legislature in 1649, the passage of a law which enacted “that whosoever shall use or utter any reproachful words or speeches concerning the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of our Saviour, … shall for the first offence forfeit five pounds sterling, or, if not able to pay, be publicly whipped and imprisoned during pleasure, etc.; for the second offence, ten pounds, etc.; and for the third shall forfeit all his lands and goods, and be banished from the province.”

The following anecdote, related by the Protestant Bozman,[98] is quite pertinent to our subject and to our cause:

The authorities relied upon by Mr. Gladstone, besides Bancroft, whom we shall presently refer to, are Maryland Toleration, by the[293] Rev. Ethan Allen, and Maryland not a Catholic Colony, by E. D. N. The former is a pamphlet of sixty-four pages addressed by the author, a Protestant minister, to his brethren in the ministry in 1855, is purely a sectarian tract, hostile to every Catholic view and interest, and partisan in spirit and in matter. The latter is a few pages of printed matter, consisting of three newspaper articles published last year in the Daily Pioneer of St. Paul, Minnesota, and recently reprinted in the North-Western Chronicle of the same place, the editor of which states that the author of the letters is the Rev. Edward D. Neill, also a Protestant minister, and president of Macalester College. The letters of “E. D. N.” were sharply and ably replied to by Mr. William Markoe, formerly an Episcopal minister, now a member of the Catholic Church. The letters of “E. D. N.” are more sectarian than historical, and cannot be quoted in a controversy in which such names as Chalmers, Bancroft, McSherry, Bozman, etc., figure. The attack of “E. D. N.” on the personal character of Lord Baltimore is enough to condemn his effort.

But Mr. Gladstone’s principal author is Bancroft, from whose pages he claims to have shown that “in the case of Maryland there was no question of a merciful use of power towards others, but simply of a wise and defensive prudence with respect to themselves.” Motives of self-interest are thus substituted for those of benevolence and mercy. If this were correctly stated, why does Mr. Gladstone state that the Act of Toleration was a measure “for which the two Lords Baltimore, father and son, deserve the highest honor”? But our task is now to inquire how far his author sustains Mr. Gladstone in denying to the Catholics of Maryland, who enacted religious toleration, all motives of benevolence and mercy.

Mr. Bancroft, on the contrary, asserts that the “new government [of Maryland] was erected on a foundation as extraordinary as its results were benevolent.”[99] In speaking of Lord Baltimore, the founder of Maryland, its chief statesman and law-giver, he extols his moderation, sincerity of character, and disinterestedness,[100] and proceeds to say:

Referring to the act of taking possession of their new homes in Maryland by the Catholic pilgrims, the same author says, thereby “religious liberty obtained a home, its only home in the wide world, at the humble village which bore the name of St. Mary’s.”[102] And speaking of the progress of the colony, he further says: “Under the mild institutions and munificence of Baltimore the dreary wilderness soon bloomed with swarming life and activity of prosperous settlements; the Roman Catholics who were oppressed by the laws of England were sure[294] to find a peaceful asylum in the quiet harbors of the Chesapeake; and there, too, Protestants were sheltered against Protestant intolerance.”[103] Such, in fine, is the repeated language of an author whom Mr. Gladstone refers to in proof of his assertion that toleration in Maryland was simply a measure of self-defence.

Chalmers bears the following testimony to the same point: “He” (Lord Baltimore) “laid the foundation of his province upon the broad basis of security to property and of freedom of religion, granting, in absolute fee, fifty acres of land to every emigrant; establishing Christianity according to the old common law, of which it is a part, without allowing pre-eminence to any particular sect. The wisdom of his choice soon converted a dreary wilderness into a prosperous colony.”[104]

And Judge Story, with the history of the colony from its beginning and the charter before him, adds the weight of judicial approval in the following words: “It is certainly very honorable to the liberality and public spirit of the proprietary that he should have introduced into his fundamental policy the doctrine of general toleration and equality among Christian sects (for he does not appear to have gone further), and have thus given the earliest example of a legislator inviting his subjects to the free indulgence of religious opinion. This was anterior to the settlement of Rhode Island, and therefore merits the enviable rank of being the first recognition among the colonists of the glorious and indefeasible rights of conscience.”[105]

But there is another view, clearly sustained by an important and certain chain of facts, which has never occurred to the historical writers on Maryland toleration, at least in this connection, though they give the facts upon which the view is based, and which wholly destroys the theory of Mr. Gladstone and his authorities. The latter may dispute in regard to the merits and motives of the statute of 1649, but they do not touch the real question. It is an incontestable fact that the religious toleration which historians have so much extolled in the Catholic colonists and founders of Maryland did not originate with, or derive its existence from, that law of 1649, but, on the contrary, it existed long anterior to, and independent of, it. This great feature in the Catholic government of Maryland had been established by the Catholic lord-proprietary, his lieutenant-governor, agents, and colonists, and faithfully practised for fifteen years prior to the Toleration Act of 1649. From 1634 to 1649 it had been enforced with unwavering firmness and protected with exalted benevolence. This important fact is utterly ignored by Mr. Gladstone and his authors, the Rev. Ethan Allen and the Rev. Edward D. Neill, but the facts related by Bancroft, and indeed by all historians, prove it beyond a question. Bancroft records that the very “foundations” of the colony were laid upon the “basis” of religious toleration, and throughout the eulogiums pronounced by him on the religious toleration of Maryland, which we have quoted above, refers entirely to the period of the fifteen years preceding the passage of the act of 1649. The Toleration Act was nothing else than the declaration of the existing state of[295] things and of the long and cherished policy and practice of the colony—a formal sanction and statutory enactment of the existing common law of the province.

Before proceeding to demonstrate this fact, we will briefly examine how far Mr. Bancroft sustains the theory or views of Mr. Gladstone in regard to the act itself. After extolling the motives and conduct of the Catholics of Maryland in establishing religious toleration, as we have remarked above, during the fifteen years preceding the passage of the act, Mr. Bancroft refers to that statute in terms of highest praise. He barely hints at the possibility that a foresight, on the part of the colonists, of impending dangers to themselves from threatened or apprehended Protestant ascendency and persecution, might have entered among the motives which induced them to pass that act; but he nowhere asserts the fact, nor does he allege anything beyond conjecture for the possibility of the motive. Indeed, his mode of expressing himself indicates that, though he thought it possible, his own impression was that such motive did not suggest in part even the passage of the act; for he writes: “As if, with a foresight of impending danger and an earnest desire to stay its approach, the Roman Catholics of Maryland, with the earnest concurrence of their governor and of the proprietary, determined to place upon their statute-book an act for the religious freedom which had ever been sacred on their soil.” Compare this with the language of Mr. Gladstone, who excludes every motive but that of self-interest, and refers to Bancroft in support of his view, but does not quote his language. Mr. Bancroft, on the other hand, after quoting from the statute, exclaims, such was “its sublime tenor.”

Mr. Griffith does not agree with the suggestion that a sense of fear or apprehension entered into the motives of the Maryland lawgivers, and says: “That this liberty did not proceed from fear of others, on the one hand, or licentious dispositions in the government, on the other, is sufficiently evident from the penalties prescribed against blasphemy, swearing, drunkenness, and Sabbath-breaking, by the preceding sections of the act, and proviso, at the end, that such exercise of religion did not molest or conspire against the proprietary or his government.”[106]

Let us now proceed to examine still further whether Maryland was a Catholic colony, whether it was by Catholics that religious toleration was established there, and whether it had its origin in the act of 1649 or in the long previous practice and persistent generosity and mercy of the Catholic rulers of the province. It is true that while the territory afterwards granted to Lord Baltimore was subject to the Virginia charter, a settlement of Episcopalians was made on Kent Island; but they were very few in numbers, always adhered to Virginia rather than to Maryland in their sympathies, were so turbulent and disloyal that Governor Calvert had to reduce them by force of arms, and no one has ever pretended that they founded a State. We will show what relation they had in point of numbers and political influence to the colony, and that they did not form even the slightest element of power in the founding of the province.

Maryland was founded alone by[296] the Catholic Lord Baltimore and his colonists. Such is the voice of history. It is rather disingenuous in the reverend authors of the pamphlets mentioned by Mr. Gladstone that upon so flimsy a circumstance they assert that Maryland was not settled first by Catholics. Their voices are drowned by the concurrent voice of tradition and of history. It is only the reassertion of the pretensions of these zealous sectarians by so respectable a person as Mr. Gladstone, and that, too, in one of the most remarkable controversies of the age, that renders a recurrence to the historical authorities and their results at all desirable or necessary.

The colony of Maryland was conceived in the spirit of liberty. It was the flight of English Catholics from Protestant persecution in their native country. The state of the penal laws in England against Catholics at this period is too well known. The zealous Protestant Bozman writes that they “contained severities enough to keep them [the Catholics] in all due subjection.”

It was at this hour of their extremest suffering that the Catholics of England found a friend and leader in Sir George Calvert, who held important trusts under the governments of James and Charles, and enjoyed the confidence of his sovereigns and of his country. “In an age when religious controversy still continued to be active, when increasing divisions among Protestants were spreading a general alarm, his mind sought relief from controversy in the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church, and, preferring the avowal of his opinions to the emoluments of office, he resigned his place and openly professed his conversion.”[107] Even after this he was advanced to the peerage under the title of Lord Baltimore—an Irish title—and was appointed one of the principal secretaries under James I. His positions in the government gave him not only an acquaintance with American colonization, but an official connection with it. Of these he now availed himself to provide an asylum abroad for his fellow-Catholics from the relentless persecution they were suffering at home. His first effort was to found a Catholic colony on the shores of Newfoundland. A settlement was begun. Avalon was the name it received, and twice did Lord Baltimore cross the ocean to visit his cherished cradle of liberty. Baffled by political difficulties, the severity of the climate, and an ungenerous soil, he abandoned the endeavor. That his motive all along was to found a place of refuge for Catholics from persecution is certain from the time and circumstances under which the enterprise was undertaken, as well as from the testimony of historians. Oldmixon says: “This gentleman [Lord Baltimore], being of the Romish religion, was uneasy at home, and had the same reason to leave the kingdom as those gentlemen had who went to New England, to enjoy the liberty of his conscience.”[108] Bozman writes that “by their [the Puritans’] clamors for a vigorous execution of the laws against Papists, it became now necessary for them [the Catholics] also to look about for a place of refuge.”[109] The same writer also refers to a MS. in the British Museum, written by Lord Baltimore[297] himself, in which this motive is mentioned. Driven from Avalon by the hardness of the climate, he visited Virginia with the same view; but hence again he was driven by religious bigotry and the presentation of an anti-popery oath from a colony “from which the careful exclusion of Roman Catholics had been originally avowed as a special object.” His mind, filled with the thought of founding a place of refuge for Catholics, next turned to the country beyond the Potomac, which had been embraced originally in the Virginia charter, but which, upon the cancellation of that charter, had reverted to the crown. He obtained a grant and charter from the king, so liberal in its terms that, Griffith says, it became the model for future grants. The name was changed from Crescentia to that of Maryland, in honor of the Catholic queen of Charles; but the devout Catholics of the expedition, in their piety, extended the term Terra Mariæ, the Land of Mary, into an act of devotion and honor to Mary, the Queen of Heaven.

The first Lord Baltimore did not live to see his project carried into effect; he died on the 25th of April, 1632, was succeeded by his son Cecilius, second Lord Baltimore, who, as Bancroft says, was the heir of his intentions no less than of his fortunes; to him was issued the charter negotiated by his father, bearing date the 15th of June, 1632.

Founded by a Catholic, designed as an asylum for persecuted Catholics, is it to be supposed that Lord Baltimore and his brother, Governor Leonard Calvert, who organized and led forth the pilgrims, would be so inconsistent at this moment of their success as to lose sight of the main object of the movement, and carry Protestant colonists with whom to found a Catholic colony? If, as Rev. Edward D. Neill, author of Maryland not a Catholic Colony, says, there were only twenty Catholic gentlemen in the ship, and three hundred servants, mostly Protestants, would it have been deemed necessary to carry two Catholic priests and their assistants along to administer to the souls of so small a number? In point of fact, the Protestants were so few that they brought no minister with them, and it was several years before their entire numbers justified their having either a minister or a place of worship. The voyage on the Ark and Dove was more like a Catholic pilgrimage than a secular expedition. The principal parts of the ship (the Ark), says Father White in his Narrative, were committed to the protection of God especially, and to his Most Holy Mother, and S. Ignatius, and all the guardian angels of Maryland. The vessel was a floating chapel, an ocean shrine of Catholic faith and devotion, consecrated by the unbloody sacrifice, and resounding with Latin litanies; its safety from many a threatened disaster was attributed to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin and the saints, whose mediation was propitiated by votive offerings promised and promptly rendered after their safe arrival at St. Mary’s. The festivals of the saints were faithfully observed throughout the voyage, the feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin was selected for landing, and the solemn act of taking possession was according to the Catholic form. Father White thus describes the scene:

They founded a city, the capital of the colony, and called it St. Mary’s. A Catholic chapel was subsequently erected there; and this too was dedicated to S. Mary. The city has passed away, but the little chapel still stands, preserved alike by Catholic and Protestant hands, as a monument of the faith and zeal of the Catholic pilgrims of Maryland. Mr. Griffith, the historian, uniting his voice to that of Bancroft and other writers, speaking of the object which inspired the settlement from its inception by Lord Baltimore in England, says: “Out of respect for their religion they planted the cross, and, after fortifying themselves, plainly and openly set about to obtain, by the fairest means in their power, other property and homes, where they should escape the persecutions of the religious and political reformers of their native country at that time.”[111]

The church and parish of S. Mary were for many years the headquarters of the Jesuit missions of Maryland. During the succeeding years prior to 1649 there was a steady influx of Catholics into the colony from England, as is evident by the land records and other official documents, and by the fact that the number of Catholic priests required for the settlement increased from two in 1634 to four priests and one coadjutor prior to 1644. The Catholic strength was also increased by numerous conversions, as is shown by Father White’s Narrative, in which, at page 56, he relates that, “among the Protestants, nearly all who came over from England, in this year 1638, and many others, have been converted to the faith, together with four servants … and five mechanics whom we … have in the meantime won to God.” So numerous were these conversions, and they created so great a sensation in England, that measures were taken there to check them.

That the colony was Catholic in its origin, and so continued until after the year 1649, when the Toleration Act was passed, has never been denied, according to our researches, except by Mr. Gladstone and the two Protestant ministers whom he quotes. Bancroft, writing of the religious toleration which prevailed in Maryland during this period, always speaks of it as the work of Catholics. In referring to the original colonists he adds, “most of them Roman Catholic gentlemen and their servants.” Even so unfriendly a writer as Bozman says: “The most, if not all, of them were Catholics.” Chancellor Kent speaks of the colony as “the Catholic planters of Maryland,” and Judge Story says they were “chiefly Roman Catholics.” Father White, in his Narrative, speaks of the few Protestants on board the Ark as individuals, and not as a class. Bozman, alluding to the year 1639, and to “those in whose hands the government of the province was,” says: “A majority of whom were, without doubt,[299] Catholics, as well as much the greater number of the colonists.” Mr. Davis, a Protestant, who drew his information from the official documents of the colony and State, gives unanswerable proofs of the fact for which we are contending. We give a single passage from his work on this point:

Mr. Gladstone seems to favor the view that religious toleration in Maryland was derived from the charter. We are surprised at this, since “E. D. N.” (Rev. Edward D. Neill), whose pamphlet has furnished the substance of the entire passage we have quoted from Mr. Gladstone’s Preface, says in his Maryland not a Roman Catholic Colony, “The charter of Maryland granted to Lord Baltimore was not a charter of religious liberty, but the very opposite.” McSherry, a Catholic historian, says that “the ecclesiastical laws of England, so far as related to the consecration and presentation of churches and chapels, were extended to the colony, but the question of state religion was left untouched, and therefore within the legislative power of the colonists themselves.”[113] And Bozman, a Protestant historian, adopts the same view of the charter, for he regards the “Act for Church Liberties” passed in 1639, enacting that “Holy Church within this province shall have all her rights and privileges,” as an attempt to exercise a control of religion, and says: “We cannot but suppose that it was the intention of the Catholic government to erect a hierarchy, with an ecclesiastical jurisdiction, similar to the ancient Church of England before the Reformation, and to invest it with all its rights, liberties, and immunities.”[114] The same views are expressed by the same author at pages 68 and 350 of his history. While civil liberty was guaranteed by the charter to all within the province, we find no mention of religious toleration in its provisions. Nor do we find that immigration was made free by the charter, as alleged by Mr. Gladstone; the provision to which he refers simply assures to the subjects of England, “transported or to be transported into the province, all privileges, franchises, and liberties of this our kingdom of England,” but the decision of the point as to who should be transplanted or admitted to settle there was left to the lord proprietary and the provincial legislature. The grant by the king to Lord Baltimore[300] of all the lands of the province in itself gave him the full control over immigration, by enabling him to fix the conditions to the grants of land to colonists, which would have kept out all except such as the lord proprietary wished to enter.

We think we have shown that the Catholics were in the majority during the whole period covered by our discussion, and that the charter left them free to protect themselves from intrusion; that they were, consequently, all-powerful to perpetuate their numerical preponderance and control of the government. Why had they not the same motives for practising intolerance as the Puritans? Their positions, respectively and relatively, were the same in this particular, and the same reasons apply to both. No, they were actuated by a different spirit, and guided by different traditions. They possessed the power, and used it with mercy and benevolence; not only permitting but inviting Christians of every shade of opinion to settle in the province, but also offering grants of land on easy terms, and protecting the settlers from molestation on account of their religion. If they had not the power to proscribe, why should Bancroft, Griffith, Chambers, Kent, Story, and nearly all writers on the subject, have bestowed such encomiums on them for doing what they could not have refrained from doing? Why extol the toleration enjoined by Lord Baltimore and proclaimed by Governor Leonard Calvert, and the subsequently enacted Toleration Act of 1649, if the liberty it enacts was already secured by the charter of 1632?

It is not necessary for us to go further into this question, since in either event the honor and credit of religious toleration in Maryland is due to a Catholic source. If the charter secured it, our answer is that the charter itself was the work of a Catholic, for Lord Baltimore is the acknowledged author of that document. “The nature of the document itself,” says Bancroft, “and concurrent opinion, leave no doubt that it was penned by the first Lord Baltimore himself, although it was finally issued for the benefit of his son.”[115] “It was prepared by Lord Baltimore himself,” says McSherry, “but before it was finally executed that truly great and good man died, and the patent was delivered to his son, Cecilius, who succeeded as well to his noble designs as to his titles and estates.”[116] It will be more than sufficient to add here that both Mr. Bozman and the Rev. Ethan Allen concede that Lord Baltimore was the author of the charter.

We propose now to show that the religious toleration which prevailed in Maryland had its origin in the good-will, generosity, and mercy of the Catholic lord proprietary and his Catholic government and colony of Maryland; was practised from the very beginning of the settlement, and that we are not indebted for it to the Toleration Act of 1649, except perhaps as a measure by which its provisions were prolonged. Toleration was the course adopted in organizing the Maryland colony, even in England and before the landing of the pilgrims. Thus we find that some Protestants were permitted to accompany the colonists and share equal rights and protection with their Catholic associates. Father White speaks of them on board the[301] Ark and Dove. The author of Maryland not a Catholic Colony refers to the fact that “Thomas Cornwallis and Jerome Hawley, who went out as councillors of the colony, were adherents of the Church of England,” as evidence in part that Maryland was “not a Catholic colony.” We take the same fact to show that not only were Protestants tolerated in the colony from its inception, but were liberally and generously given a share in its government. The Rev. Ethan Allen relates a succession of proofs of this fact, though not for that purpose, in the following passage: “Witness the fact of so large a portion of the first colonists being Protestants; his invitation to Capt. Fleet; his invitation to the Puritan colonists of Massachusetts to come and reside in the colony in 1643; his constituting Col. Stone his governor in 1648, who was a Protestant, and was to bring five hundred colonists; his admitting the Puritans of Virginia in the same year; and in the year following erecting a new county for Robert Brooke, a Puritan, and his colonists.”[117] McSherry says, speaking of the act of possession on landing in 1634: “Around the rough-hewn cross, on the island of St. Clement’s, gathered the Catholic and the Protestant, hand in hand, friends and brothers, equal in civil rights, and secure alike in the free and full enjoyment of either creed. It was a day whose memory should make the Maryland heart bound with pride and pleasure.”[118] The same author says that the Toleration Act of 1649 was passed “to give additional security to the safeguards which Lord Baltimore had already provided.” Bancroft makes religious toleration commence from the first landing “when the Catholics took possession,” and extend throughout the fourteen years up to the passage of the act of 1649. He says that “the apologist of Lord Baltimore could assert that his government, in conformity with his strict and repeated injunctions, had never given disturbance to any person in Maryland for matter of religion.”[119] The Rev. Ethan Allen relates that the Protestants in the colony were allowed to have their own chapel and to conduct therein the Protestant service. He cites a case in which a Catholic was severely punished for abusive language towards some Protestant servants in respect to their religion, and remarks that “the settling of the case was unquestionably creditable and honorable to the Catholic governor and council.”[120] Mr. Davis, a Protestant, says: “A freedom, however, of a wider sort springs forth at the birth of the colony—not demanded by that instrument [the charter], but permitted by it—not graven upon the tables of stone, nor written upon the paper of the statute-books, but conceived in the very bosom of the proprietary and of the original pilgrims—not a formal or constructive kind, but a living freedom, a freedom of the most practical sort. It is the freedom which it remained for them, and for them alone, either to grant or deny—a freedom embracing within its range, and protecting under its banner, all those who were believers in Jesus Christ.”[121]

Again, the same author writes: “The records have been carefully searched. No case of persecution[302] occurred, during the administration of Gov. Leonard Calvert, from the foundation of the settlement at St. Mary’s to the year 1647.”[122] Langford, a writer contemporaneous with the period of which we are treating, in his Refutation of Babylon’s Fall, 1655, confirms the result of Mr. Davis’ investigation of the records. The Protestants of the colony themselves, in a declaration, of which we will speak again, attribute the religious toleration they enjoyed not solely to the Toleration Act, but also to “several other strict injunctions and declarations of his said lordship for that purpose made and provided.” Gov. Leonard Calvert also enjoined the same by a proclamation, which is mentioned by numerous historians. A case arising under this proclamation is given by Bozman and others in 1638, eleven years before the passage of the Toleration Act. Capt. Cornwallis’ servants, who were Protestants, were lodged under the same roof with William Lewis, a zealous Catholic, who was also placed in charge of the servants. Entering one day the room where the servants were reading aloud from a Protestant book—Mr. Smith’s Sermons—at the very moment the Protestants were reading aloud a passage to the effect “that the pope was Antichrist, and the Jesuits were anti-Christian ministers,” supposing that the passage was read aloud especially for him to hear, he ordered them with great warmth not to read that book, saying that “it was a falsehood, and came from the devil, as all lies did; and that he that writ it was an instrument of the devil, and he would prove it; and that all Protestant ministers were ministers of the devil.” All the parties were tried before the governor and his council; the case against the servants was postponed for further testimony, but Mr. Lewis, the Catholic, was condemned to pay a fine of five hundred pounds of tobacco (then the currency of the colony), and to remain in the sheriff’s custody until he found sufficient sureties in the future. Bozman thus remarks upon this decision: “As these proceedings took place before the highest tribunal of the province, composed of the three first officers in the government, they amply develop the course of conduct with respect to religion which those in whose hands the government of the province was placed, had resolved to pursue.”[123] Not only did the Catholic lord proprietary, in 1648, appoint Mr. Stone, a Protestant, to be the governor of the province, but also he at the same time appointed a majority of the privy councillors from the same faith.

We will close our testimony on this point with the official oath which Lord Baltimore required the governor and the privy councillors to take; it was substantially as follows:

We cannot determine when this oath began to be used. Bancroft places it between 1636 and 1639. Chalmers, Dr. Hawks, and others give the time as between 1637 and 1657. It is certain that this oath was prescribed prior to the passage[303] of the Toleration Act; for Governor Stone and the councillors took the oath in 1648, and there is reason to believe that it was in use at a much earlier period.

Referring to the period anterior to the passage of the Toleration Act, Bancroft says: “Maryland at that day was unsurpassed for happiness and liberty. Conscience was without restraint.”[124] Mr. Davis, in reference to this subject, writes: “The toleration which prevailed from the first, and for fifteen years later, was formally ratified by the voice of the people” (in 1649).

Mr. Gladstone’s view of the subject is evidently superficial; it relates exclusively to the passage of the Toleration Act, and was conceived and published without the knowledge of the fact, which we have demonstrated, that the toleration for which the Catholics of Maryland have been so much praised had been practised for fifteen years before the passage of that act. Surely, there can be no rival claim set forth in behalf of Protestants for the period we have mentioned. Mr. Gladstone sets up his claim for the Protestants under that act. We cannot admit the justice or truth of the pretension. Let us examine it. This law enacted that “no one professing to believe in Jesus Christ shall be troubled, molested, or discountenanced for his religion, or the free exercise thereof, nor compelled to the belief or exercise of any other religion against his consent.” Now here, too, the claim set up by Mr. Gladstone, and by the authors of the pamphlets he quotes, is met by stern facts.

In the first place, the Toleration Act of 1649 was the work of a Catholic. It was prepared in England by Lord Baltimore himself, and sent over to the Assembly with other proposed laws for their action. This fact is related by nearly all writers on Maryland history, including those consulted by Mr. Gladstone, except the writer of Maryland not a Roman Catholic Colony, who does not refer to the subject, except to claim that it was but the echo of a previous and similar order of the English House of Commons in 1645 and of a statute passed by it in 1647. The last-named writer even intimates that the Rev. Thomas Harrison, the former pastor of the Puritans at Providence, afterward Annapolis, in Maryland, suggested the whole matter to Lord Baltimore. We might even admit this pretension without impairing the Catholic claim. It does not destroy the credit due to the Catholics of Maryland in passing the Toleration Act to show that others, even Puritans, entertained in one or two instances similar views and enacted similar measures. We know that the Puritans in England were proscriptive, and that in New England they did not practise the toleration of Maryland. Even if Lord Baltimore had the measure suggested to him by the Puritan Harrison, the act itself, when adopted by him and put in practice, is still his act and that of the Assembly which passed it. It remains their free and voluntary performance. The merit which attaches to the good deeds of men is not destroyed by having been suggested by others. A Puritan might even share in the act without appropriating the whole credit to himself. But whatever merit is claimed for the Puritans in these measures—which we cannot perceive—is lost[304] by their subsequent conduct. They overturned the government of Lord Baltimore in Maryland, and under their ascendency Catholics were persecuted in the very home of liberty to which Catholics had invited the Puritans. But of the existence of the English toleration acts mentioned by the writer referred to and by Mr. Gladstone, we have been supplied with no proof. That the Puritan Harrison suggested the measure to Lord Baltimore is hinted at, not roundly asserted, certainly not sustained by proof.

But public facts give the negative to these pretensions. The Toleration Act of 1649 was the immediate echo of the actual toleration which, under the injunctions of Lord Baltimore, the proclamation of Governor Calvert, and the uniform practice of the colonists, had long become the common law of the colony. Why seek, in the turbulent and confused proceedings of the Long Parliament, a model or example for the Maryland law, when such exemplar is supplied nearer home by the colony itself from its first inception? To the people of Maryland, in 1649, the Toleration Act was nothing new; it was readily and unanimously received; it produced no change in the constitution of the province. Toleration was not the law or the practice of that day, either in England or her colonies; the echo was too remote and too readily drowned by the din of persecution and of strife.

But the Maryland Toleration Act contains intrinsic evidence of a purely Catholic origin. The clause enforcing the honor and respect due to “the blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of our Saviour,” which we have already quoted, gives a Catholic flavor to the whole statute, and excludes the theory of parliamentary or puritanical influence in originating the measure. The claim thus set up is also against the concurrent voice of history, which, with great accord, gives the authorship of the law to Lord Baltimore, who, as he had enjoined and enforced its provisions on the colony for fifteen years, needed no assistance in reducing them to the form of a statute, which we are informed he did.

By the charter the law-making power was vested in Lord Baltimore and the Assembly. It was for some years a matter of contest between them which possessed the right to initiate laws. The lord proprietary, however, finally conceded this privilege to the Assembly. It was not uncommon for the Assembly to reject the laws first sent over by the lord proprietary, and afterwards to bring them forward themselves and pass them. But in 1648, when Governor Stone was appointed, the Toleration Act was among the measures sent by Lord Baltimore, for the action of the Assembly. The government, then, consisted of Cecilius, Lord Baltimore, a Catholic, without whose sanction no law could be enacted, and whose signature to the measure in question was given the following year. The journal of the Maryland legislature was lost or destroyed, but fortunately a fragment of it is preserved, consisting of a report from the financial committee of the Assembly, and the action of that body on the bill of charges. With this document, and the aid of the historical facts recorded by Bozman and other historians, we are enabled to ascertain the names of[305] the members of the Assembly in 1649.

Gov. Stone was lieutenant-governor and president of the council, which was composed of Thomas Green, John Price, John Pile, and Robert Vaughan, commissioned by the lord proprietary; and the remaining councillors were Robert Clarke, surveyor-general, and Thomas Hatton, secretary of the colony, ex-officio members of the council. The other members of the Assembly were the representatives of the freemen, or burgesses, as follows: Cuthbert Fenwick, Philip Conner, William Bretton, Richard Browne, George Manners, Richard Banks, John Maunsell, Thomas Thornborough, and Walter Peake, nine in number. The governor, councillors, and burgesses made sixteen in all; but as Messrs. Pile and Hatton, one Catholic and one Protestant, were absent, the votes actually cast were fourteen. On the memorable occasion in question the councillors and burgesses sat in one “house,” and as such passed the Toleration Act. Of the fourteen thus voting, Messrs. Green, Clarke, Fenwick, Bretton, Manners, Maunsell, Peake, and Thornborough were Catholics, and Messrs. Stone, Price, Vaughan, Conner, Banks, and Browne were Protestants. The Catholics were eight to six Protestants.

But the Assembly was not the only law-making branch of the government. The executive, or lord proprietary, was a co-ordinate branch, and without his co-operation no law could pass. Now, the executive was a Catholic, and a majority of the Assembly were Catholics; so that we have it as a historical fact that in a government composed of two co-ordinate branches, both branches of the law-making power which enacted the Toleration Act were Catholic. It is an important fact that if all the Protestant members of the Assembly had voted against the law, the Catholic majority could and would have passed it, and the Catholic executive was only too ready to sanction his own measure. It cannot, therefore, be said that the Catholics could not have passed the law without the Protestant votes; for we have seen that both of the co-ordinate branches of the government were in the hands of the Catholics.

Waiving, however, the division of the government into two co-ordinate branches, by which method we have the entire government Catholic; and regarding the lord proprietary merely as individual, computing the lawgivers of 1649 simply numerically, we have the following result:

As Catholics we would be quite content with this showing; but we are indebted to several Protestant authors—more impartial than Messrs. Gladstone, Allen, and Neill, who write solely in the interests of sect—for a computation of the respective Catholic and Protestant votes in the Assembly in 1649, which, leaving out Lord Baltimore, and making the number of votes fourteen, gives, according to their just and strictly legal computation, eleven Catholic votes and three Protestant votes for the Act of Toleration.[306] Mr. Davis, in his Day-Star of American Freedom, and Mr. William Meade Addison, in his Religious Toleration in America, both Protestant authors, take this view, and enforce it with strong facts and cogent reasonings. We will quote a passage, however, from only one of these works, the former, showing their views and the method by which they arrive at the respective numbers eleven and three. Mr. Davis writes: “The privy councillors were all of them, as well as the governor, the special representatives of the Roman Catholic proprietary—under an express pledge, imposed by him shortly before the meeting of the Assembly (as may be seen by the official oath), to do nothing at variance with the religious freedom of any believer in Christianity—and removable any moment at his pleasure. It would be fairer, therefore, to place the governor and the four privy councillors on the same side as the six Roman Catholic burgesses. Giving Mr. Browne to the other side, we have eleven Roman Catholic against three Protestant votes.”[125]

We think, however, that if the computation is to be made by numbers, Lord Baltimore must be included, as the act received his executive approval, and could never have become a law without it. Thus, according to the views of Messrs. Davis and Addison, with this amendment by us, the numbers would stand twelve Catholic against three Protestant votes. But we prefer taking our own two several methods of computation, viz., by co-ordinate branches of the government, showing—

This surely is a very different result from that announced by Mr. Gladstone, following the author of Maryland not a Roman Catholic Colony—viz., sixteen Protestant against eight Catholic votes. So far the numbers given by Mr. Gladstone and the writer he follows are mere assertion, unsupported by authority, either as to the composition of the Assembly or the respective religious beliefs of the members. Mr. Davis, however, gives in detail every member’s name, and refers to the proof by which he arrives at their names and number; and the same testimony is open, we presume, to the examination of all. In order that there may be no lack of proof as to the religious faiths they professed, he gives a personal sketch of each member of the Assembly in 1649, and proves from their public acts, their deeds of conveyance, their land patents, their last wills and testaments, the records of the courts, etc., that those named by him as Catholics were incontestably of that faith.

The population of the colony in 1649 was also largely Catholic beyond dispute. We have already shown that it was Catholic by a large majority during the fifteen years preceding and up to that time. The above computations, showing a majority of the legislature to be Catholic, strongly indicates the complexion of the religious faith of their constituents. Up to 1649 St. Mary’s, the Catholic county, was the only county in the State, and Kent, the seat of the Protestant population, was only a[307] hundred of St. Mary’s. Kent was not erected into a county until the year the Toleration Act was passed. While St. Mary’s was populous and Catholic, Kent was Protestant and thinly settled. There were six hundreds in St. Mary’s, all Catholic except perhaps one, and of that one it is uncertain whether the majority was Catholic or Protestant. “But the population of Kent,” says Davis, “was small. In 1639, if not many years later, she was but a hundred of St. Mary’s county.[126] In 1648 she paid a fifth part only of the tax, and did not hold in the Assembly of that year a larger ratio of political power. That also was before the return, we may suppose, of all the Roman Catholics who had been expelled or exported from St. Mary’s by Capt. Ingle and the other enemies of the proprietary. In 1649 she had but one delegate, while St. Mary’s was represented by eight. And this year she paid but a sixth part of the tax, and for many years after as well as before this Assembly there is no evidence whatever of a division of the island (of Kent) or the county, even into hundreds. Its population did not, in 1648, exceed the fifth, nor in 1649 the sixth, part of the whole number of free white persons in the province.”[127] After a thorough examination of the records, Mr. Davis arrives at the conclusion that the Protestants constituted only one-fourth of the population of Maryland at the time of the passage of the Toleration Act, in 1649. His investigations must have been careful and thorough, for he gives the sources of his information, refers to liber and folio, and cites copiously from the public records. He thinks that for twenty years after the first settlement—to wit, about the year 1654—the Catholics were in the majority. He concludes his chapter on this subject with the following passage: “Looking, then, at the question under both its aspects—regarding the faith either of the delegates or of those whom they substantially represented—we cannot but award the chief honor to the members of the Roman Church. To the Roman Catholic freemen of Maryland is justly due the main credit arising from the establishment, by a solemn legislative act, of religious freedom for all believers in Christianity.”[128]

But, fortunately, we have another document at hand, signed in the most solemn manner by those who certainly must have known the truth of the case, as they were the contemporaries, witnesses of, and participators in, the very events of which we are treating. This is what is usually known as the Protestant Declaration, made the year after the passage of the Toleration Act, and shortly after it was known that Lord Baltimore had signed the act and made it the law of the land. This important document is an outpouring of gratitude from the Protestants of the colony to the Catholic proprietary for the religious toleration they enjoyed under his government. It is signed by Gov. Stone, the privy councillors Price, Vaughan, and Hatton—all of whom were members of the Assembly that passed the Toleration Act—by all the Protestant burgesses in the Assembly of 1650, and by a great number of the leading Protestants of the colony. They address Lord Baltimore in these words:

This important document is dated the 17th of April, 1650. It proves that the religious toleration they enjoyed was not due alone to the act of 1649, but to the uniform policy of Lord Baltimore and his government; and that even for the Toleration Act itself, which had recently become a law by his signature, they were indebted to a Catholic. Comment on such testimony is unnecessary.

Chancellor Kent, with the charter, the public policy of Lord Baltimore, of his colonial officers and colonists, and the Toleration Act of 1649, all submitted to his broad and profound judicial inquiry and judgment, has rendered the following opinion and tribute to the Catholic lawgivers of Maryland, to whom he attributes the merit of the generous policy we are considering:

Catholics have written comparatively little upon this subject. The historians of Maryland have been chiefly Protestants. As long as Protestants so unanimously accorded to the Catholic founders of Maryland the chief credit of this great event, it was unnecessary for Catholics to speak in their own behalf. It has remained for Mr. Gladstone and the two sectarian ministers he follows to attempt to mar the harmony of that grateful and honorable accord of the Protestant world, by which Catholic Maryland received from the united voice of Protestant history the enviable title of “The Land of the Sanctuary.”

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.

CHAPTER XI.
A DINNER AT THE COURT, WITH AN EPISODE.

Crossing from the station to his brougham, Sir Simon saw Mr. Langrove issuing from a cottage on the road. The vicar had been detained later than he foresaw on a sick-call, and was hurrying home to dress for dinner. It was raining sharply. Sir Simon hailed him:

“Thank you; I shall be very glad. I am rather late as it is.” And they got into the brougham together.

“And how wags the world with you, my reverend friend? Souls being saved in great numbers, eh?” inquired the baronet when they had exchanged their friendly greetings.

“Humph! I am thankful not to have the counting of them,” was the reply, with a shake of the head that boded ill for the sanctification of Dullerton.

“That’s it, is it? Well, we are all going down the hill together; there is some comfort in that. But how about Miss Bulpit? Don’t her port wine and tracts snatch a few brands from the burning?”

“For the love of heaven don’t speak to me of her! Don’t, I beg of you!” entreated the vicar, throwing up his hands deprecatingly, and moved from the placid propriety that seemed a law of nature to him.

“How so?” cried Mr. Langrove with sudden vivacity. “She’s not going to marry Sparks, is she?”

“Not just yet; but the next best thing to that. She is going to leave the neighborhood.”

“I do indeed. How is it you’ve not heard of it before? She’s been pestering Anwyll these two years about some repairs or improvements she wants done in her house—crotchets, I dare say, that would have to be pulled to pieces for the next tenant. He has always politely referred her to his agent, which means showing her to the door; but at last she threatened to leave if he did not give in and do what she wants.”

“Oh! is that all?” exclaimed the vicar, crestfallen. “I might have waited a little before I hallooed; we are not out of the woods yet. Anwyll is sure to give in rather than let her go.”

“Nothing of the sort. He dislikes the old lady, and so does his mother, and so particularly does your venerable confrère of Rydal Rectory. I met Anwyll this morning at the club, and he told me he had made up his mind to let her go. It happens—luckily for you, I suspect—that he has a tenant in view to take her place. Come, now, cheer up! Is not that good news?”

“Most excellent!” said the vicar emphatically. “I wonder where she will move to?”

“Perhaps I could tell you that too. She is in treaty with Charlton for a dilapidated old hunting lodge of his in the middle of a fir-wood the other side of Axmut Common, about twenty miles the other side of Moorlands; it is as good as settled, I believe, and if so we are all safe from her.”

“Well, you do surprise me!” exclaimed Mr. Langrove, his countenance expanding into a breadth of satisfaction that was absolutely radiant. “Who is the incumbent of Axmut, let me see?” he said, musing.

“There is as good as none; it is a lonely spot, with no church within ten miles, I believe. I shrewdly suspect this was the main attraction; for the life of him, Charlton says, he can’t see any other. It is a tumble-down, fag-end-of-the-world-looking place as you would find in all England. It must be the clear coast for ‘dealing with souls,’ as she calls it, that baited her. There is a community of over a hundred poor people, something of the gypsy sort, scattered over the common and in a miserable little hamlet they call the village; so she may preach away to her heart’s content, and no one to compete or interfere with her but the blacksmith, who rants every Sunday under a wooden shed, or on a tub on the common, according to the state of the weather.”

“Capital! That’s just the place for her!” was the vicar’s jubilant remark.

In spite of the pleasure that lit up his features, usually so mild and inexpressive, Sir Simon, looking closely at the vicar, thought him worn and aged. “You look tired, Langrove. You are overworked, or else Miss Bulpit has been too much for you; which is it?” he said kindly.

“A little of both, perhaps,” the vicar laughed. “I have felt the recent cold a good deal; the cold always pulls me down. I’ll be all right when the spring comes round and hunts the rheumatism out of my bones,” he added, moving his arm uncomfortably.

“You ought to do like the swallow—migrate to a warm climate before the cold sets in,” observed Sir Simon; “nothing else dislodges rheumatism.”

“That’s just what Blink was saying to me this morning. He urged me very strongly to go away for a couple of months now to get out of the way of the east winds. He wants me to take a trip to the South of France.” Mr. Langrove laughed gently as he said this.

“Nonsense, nonsense! Take it first, and afford it afterwards. That’s my maxim.”

“A very convenient maxim for you, but not so practicable for an incumbent with a large family and a short income as for the landlord of Dullerton,” said Mr. Langrove good-humoredly.

“Prudence and economy are all very well,” he replied, “but they may be carried too far; your health is worth more to you than any amount of money. If you want the change, you should take it and pay the price.”

“I suppose we might have most things, if we choose to take them on those terms,” remarked the vicar. “‘Take it and pay the price!’ says the poet; but some prices are too high for any value. Who would do my work while I was off looking after my health? Is that Bourbonais hurrying up the hill? He will get drenched; he has no umbrella.”

“Like him to go out a day like this without one,” said Sir Simon in an accent of fond petulance. “How is he? How is Franceline? How does she look?”

“No; not through my fault, nor indeed through his. We have each our separate work, and these winter days are short. I met him this morning coming out of Blink’s as I went in. I did not like his look; he had his hat pulled over his eyes, and when I spoke to him he answered me as if he hardly knew who I was or what he was saying.”

“And you did not ask if there was anything amiss?” said Sir Simon in a tone of reproach.

“Ha! what did he say?” And the baronet bent forward for the answer with an eager look.

“Nothing very definite—you know his grandiloquent, vague talk—but he said something about hereditary taint on the lungs; and I gathered that he thought it was a mistake not having taken her to a warm climate immediately after that accident to her chest; but whether the mistake was his or the count’s I could not quite see. I imagine from what he said that there was a money difficulty in the way, or he thought there was, and did not, perhaps, urge the point as strongly as he otherwise would.”

“That was perhaps a case where the maxim of ‘take it first and afford it afterwards’ would seem justifiable,” observed Mr. Langrove.

“Of course it was! But Bourbonais is such an unmanageable fellow in those things. The strongest necessity will never extract one iota of a sacrifice of principle from him; you might as well try to bend steel.”

“He has always given me the idea of a man of a very high sense of honor, very scrupulous in doing what he considers his duty,” said Mr. Langrove.

“He is, he is,” assented the baronet warmly; “he is the very ideal and epitome of honor and high principle. Not to save his life would he swerve one inch from the straight road; but to save Franceline I fancied he might have been less rigid.” He heaved a sigh, and they said no more until the brougham let Sir Simon down at his own door, and then drove on to take Mr. Langrove to the vicarage.

A well-known place never appears so attractive as when we look at it for the last time. An indifferent acquaintance becomes pathetic when seen through the softening medium of a last look. It is like breaking off a fraction of our lives, snapping a link that can never be joined again. A sea-side lodging, if it can claim one sweet or sad memory with our passing sojourn there, wears a touching aspect when we come to say “good-by,” with the certainty that we shall never see the place again. But how if the spot has been the cradle of our childhood, the home of our fathers for generations, where every stone is like a monument inscribed with sacred and dear memories? Sir Simon was not a sentimental man; but all the tenderness common to good, affectionate, cultivated natures had its place in his heart.[312] He had always loved the old home. He was proud of it as one of the finest and most ancient houses of his class in England; he admired its grand and noble proportions, its architectural strength and beauty; and he had the reverence for it that every well-born man feels for the place where his fathers were born, and where they have lived and died. But never had the lordly Gothic mansion looked to him so home-like as on this cold January evening when he entered it, in all human probability, for the last time. It was brilliantly lighted up to welcome him. The servants, men and women, were assembled in the hall to meet him. It was one of those old-fashioned patriarchal customs that were kept up at the Court, where so many other old customs survived, unhappily less harmless than this. As Sir Simon passed through the two rows of glad, respectful faces, he had a pleasant word for all, as if his heart were free from care.

The hall was a sombre, cathedral-like apartment that needed floods of light to dispel its oppressive solemnity. To-night it was filled with a festal breadth of light; the great chandelier that hung from the groined roof was in a blaze, while the bronze figures all around supported clusters of lamps that gleamed like silver balls against the dark wainscoting. The dining-room and library, which opened to the right, stood open, and displayed a brilliant illumination of lamps and wax-lights. Huge fires burned hospitably on all the hearths. The table was ready spread; silver and crystal shone and sparkled on the snowy damask; flowers scented the air as in a garden. Sir Simon glanced at it all as he passed. Could it be that he was going to leave all this, never to behold it again? It seemed impossible that it could be true.

As he stood once more in the midst of his household gods, those familiar divinities whose gentle power he had never fully recognized until now, it seemed to him that he was safe. There was an unaccountable sense of security in their mere presence; they smiled on him, and seemed to promise protection for their shrine and their votary.

The baronet went straight to his room, made a hasty toilet, and came down to the library to await his guests.

He was in hopes that Raymond would have come before the others, and that they might have a little talk together. But Raymond was behind them all. Everybody was assembled, the dinner was waiting, and he had not yet arrived.

It was a mere chance that he came at all. Nothing, in fact, but the dread of awakening Franceline’s suspicions had withheld him from sending an excuse at the last moment; but that dread, which so controlled his life in every act, almost in every thought, compelling him to hide his feelings under a mask of cheerfulness when his heart was breaking, drove him out to join the merry-makers. It was all true what Mr. Langrove had said. There had been a return of the spitting of blood that morning, very slight, but enough to frighten Angélique and hurry her off with her charge to the doctor. He had talked vaguely about debility—nervous system unstrung—no vital mischief so far; the lungs were safe. The old woman was soothed, and went home resolved to do what was to be done without alarming her master or telling him what had occurred. She counted, however, without[313] Miss Merrywig. That pleasant old lady happened from the distance to see them coming from the doctor’s house, and, on meeting the count next morning, asked what report there was of Franceline. Raymond went straight to Blink’s.

“I ask you as a man of honor to tell me the truth,” he said; “it is a matter of life and death to me to know it.”

The medical man answered his question by another: “Tell me frankly, are you in a position to take her immediately to a warm climate? I should prefer Cairo; but if that is impossible, can you take her to the South of France?”

“I can take her to Cairo,” he said, speaking deliberately after a moment’s silence. “I will take her at once.”

He thought of Sir Simon’s blank check. He would make use of it. He would save his child; at least he would keep her with him a few years longer. “Why did you not tell me this sooner?” he asked in a tone of quick resentment.

“I did not believe it to be essential. I thought from the first it would have been desirable; but you may recollect, when I suggested taking her even to the South of France, your daughter opposed the idea with great warmth, and you were silent. I inferred that there was some insuperable obstacle in the way, and that it would have been cruel as well as useless to press the matter.”

“No. I give you my word, as far as I can see, it is not. The return of the spitting of blood is a serious symptom, but the lungs as yet are perfectly sound.” M. de la Bourbonais went home, and opened the drawer where he kept the blank check; not with the idea of filling it up there and then—he must consider many things first—but he wanted to see it, to make sure it was not a dream. He examined it attentively, and replaced it in the drawer. A gleam of satisfaction broke out on the worn, anxious face. But it vanished quickly. His eye fell on Sir Simon’s letter of the day before. He snatched it up and read it through again. A new and horrible light was breaking on him. Sir Simon was a ruined man; he was going to be turned out of house and home; he was a bankrupt. What was his signature worth? So much waste paper. He could not have a sixpence at his bankers’ or anywhere else; if he had, it was in the hands of the creditors who were to seize his house and lands. “Why did he give it to me? He must have known it was worth nothing!” thought Raymond, his eyes wandering over the letter with a gaze of bewildered misery.

But Sir Simon had not known it. It was not the first time he had overdrawn his account with his bankers; but they were an old-fashioned firm, good Tories like himself. The Harnesses had banked with them from time immemorial, and there existed between them and their clients of this type a sort of adoption. If Sir Simon was in temporary want of ready money, it was their pleasure as much as their business to accommodate him; the family acres were broad and fat. Sir Simon was on friendly but not on confidential terms with his bankers; they knew nothing of the swarm of leeches that were fattening on those family acres, so there was no fear in their minds as to the security of whatever accommodation[314] he might ask at their hands. When Sir Simon signed the check he felt certain it would be honored for any amount that Raymond was likely to fill it up for. But since then things had come to a crisis; his signature was now worth nothing. Lady Rebecca, on whose timely departure from this world of care he had counted so securely as the means of staving off a catastrophe, had again disappointed him, and the evil hour so long dreaded and so often postponed had come. Little as Raymond knew of financial mysteries, he was too intelligent not to guess that a man on the eve of being made a bankrupt could have no current account at his bankers’. Dr. Blink’s decree was, then, the death-warrant of his child! Raymond buried his face in his hands in an agony too deep for tears. But the sound of Franceline’s step on the stairs roused him. For her sake he must even now look cheerful; love is a tyrant that allows no quarter to self. She came in and found her father busy, writing away as if absorbed in his work. She knew his moods. Evidently he did not want her just now; she would not disturb him, but drew her little stool to the chimney corner and began to read. An hour passed. It was time for her father to dress for dinner; but still the sound of the pen scratching the paper went on diligently.

“Petit père, it is half-past six, do you know?” said the bright, silvery voice, and Raymond started as if he had been stung.

“So late, is it? Then I must be off at once.” And he hurried away to dress, and only looked in to kiss her as he ran down-stairs, and was off.

“Loiterer!” exclaimed Sir Simon, stretching out both hands and clasping his friend’s cordially.

“I have kept you waiting, I fear. The fact is, I got writing and forgot the hour,” said the count apologetically.

They were a snug number, seven in all; the only stranger amongst them being a Mr. Plover, who happened to be staying at Moorlands. He was an unprepossessing-looking man, sallow, keen-eyed, and with a mouth that superficial observers would have called firm, but which a physiognomist might have described as cruel. His hair was dyed, his teeth were false—a shrunken, shrivelled-looking creature, whose original sap and verdure, if he ever had any, had been parched up by the fire of tropical suns. He had spent many years in India, and was now only just returned from Palestine. What he had been doing there nobody particularly understood. He talked of his studies in geology, but they seemed to have been chiefly confined to the study of such stones as had a value in the general market; he had a large collection of rubies, sapphires, and diamonds, some of which he had shown to Mr. Charlton, and excited his wonder as to the length of the purse that could afford to collect such costly souvenirs of foreign lands simply as souvenirs. Mr. Plover had met his host accidentally a week ago, and discovered that he and the father of the latter had been school-fellows. The son was not in a position either to verify or disprove the assertion, but Mr. Plover was so fresh in his affectionate recollection of his old form-fellow that young Charlton’s heart warmed to[315] him, and he then and there invited him down to Moorlands. He could not do otherwise than ask Sir Simon to include him in his invitation to the Court this evening; but he did it reluctantly. He was rather ashamed of his pompous, self-sufficient friend, whose transparent faith in the power and value of money gave a dash of vulgarity to his manners, which was heightened by contrast with the well-bred simplicity of the rest of the company. He had not been ten minutes in the room when he informed them that he meant to buy an estate if he could find an eligible one in this neighborhood; if not, he would rent the first that was to be had on a long lease. He wanted to be near his young friend Charlton. Sir Simon was extremely civil to him—surprisingly so.

The other faces we know: Mr. Langrove, bland, serious, mildly exhilarated just now, like a man suddenly relieved of a toothache—Miss Bulpit was going from the parish; Mr. Charlton running his turquois ring through his curly light hair, and agreeing with everybody all round; Lord Roxham, well-bred and lively; Sir Ponsonby Anwyll, a pleasant sample of the English squire, blond-visaged, good-tempered, burly-limbed, and displaying a vast amount of shirt-front; M. de la Bourbonais, a distinct foreign type, amidst these familiar English ones, the face furrowed with deep lines of study, of care too, unmistakably, the forehead moulded to noble thought, the eyes deep-set under strong projecting black brows, their latent fire flashing out through the habitually gentle expression when he grew animated. He was never a talkative man in society, and to-night he was more silent than usual; but no one noticed this, not even Sir Simon. He was too much absorbed in his own preoccupation. Raymond sat opposite him as his alter ego, doing the honors of one side of the hospitable round table.

The conversation turned at first on generalities and current events; the presence of Mr. Plover, instead of feeding it with a fresh stream, seemed to check the flow and prevent its becoming intimate and personal. Sir Simon felt this, and took it in his own hands and kept it going, so that, if not as lively as usual, it did not flag. Raymond looked on and listened in amazement. Was yesterday’s letter a dream, and would this supreme crisis vanish as lesser ones had so often done? Was it possible that a man could be so gay—so, to all appearance, contented and unconcerned, on the very brink of ruin, disgrace, beggary, banishment—all, in a word, that to a man of the baronet’s character and position constitute existence? He was not in high spirits. Raymond would not so much have wondered at that. High spirits are sometimes artificial; people get them up by stimulants as a cloak for intense depression. No, it was real cheerfulness and gayety. Was there any secret hope bearing him up to account for the strange anomaly? Raymond could speculate on this in the midst of his own burning anxiety; but for the first time in his life bitterness mingled with his sympathy for the baronet. Was it not all his own doing, this disgrace that had overtaken him? He had been an unprincipled spendthrift all his life, and now the punishment had come, and was swallowing up others in its ruin. If he had not been the reckless, extravagant man that he was, he might at this moment be a harbor[316] of refuge to Raymond, and save his child from a premature death. But he was powerless to help any one. This is what his slavish human respect had brought himself and others to. A few hundred pounds might save, or at any rate prolong for perhaps many years, the life of the child he professed to love as his own, and he had not them to give; he had squandered his splendid patrimony in the most contemptible vanity, in selfish indulgence and unprofitable show. And there he sat, a piece of tinsel glittering like true gold, affable, jovial, as if care were a hundred miles away from him. M. de la Bourbonais felt as if he were in a dream, as if everything were unreal—everything except the vulture that was gnawing silently at his own heart.

The conversation grew livelier as the wine went round. Mr. Plover was attending carefully to his dinner, and was content to let others do the most of the talking. A discussion arose as to a case of something very like perjury that a magistrate of the next county had been involved in. Some were warmly defending, while others as warmly condemned, him. Mr. Plover suspended the diligence of his knife and fork to join with the latter; he was almost aggressive in his manner of contradicting the other side. The story was this: A magistrate had to judge a case of libel where the accused was a friend of his own, who had saved him from being made a bankrupt some years before by lending him a large sum of money without interest or security. The evidence broke down, and the man was acquitted. It transpired, however, a few days later, that the magistrate had in his possession at the time of the trial proof positive of his friend’s guilt. In answer to this charge he replied that the evidence in question had come to his knowledge under the seal of confidence; that he was therefore bound in honor not only not to divulge it, but to ignore its existence in forming his judgment on the case. The statement was denied, and it was affirmed that the only seal which bound him was one of gratitude, and that he was otherwise perfectly free to make use of his information to condemn the accused.

The dispute as to the right and the wrong of the question was growing hot, when Sir Ponsonby Anwyll, who noticed how silent Raymond was, called out to him across the table:

“I should say that gratitude in such a case might stand in the place of a verbal promise and compel the judge to be silent,” replied Raymond.

“The temptation to silence was very strong, no doubt, but would it justify him in pronouncing an acquittal against his conscience?” asked Mr. Langrove.

“It was not against his conscience,” replied the count; “on the contrary, it was in accordance with it, since it was on the side of mercy.”

“Quite a French view of the subject!” said Mr. Plover superciliously, showing his shining teeth through his coal-black moustache. “If I were a criminal, commend me to a French jury; but if innocent, give me an English one!”

“Mercy has perhaps too much the upper hand with our tender-hearted neighbors,” observed Sir Simon; “but justice is none the worse for being tempered with it.”

“That is neither here nor there,”[317] said Mr. Plover. “Justice is justice, and law is law; and it strikes me this Mr. X—— has tampered with both, and it’s a very strange thing if he is not tabooed as a perjurer who has dodged the letter of the law and escaped the hulks, but whom no gentleman ought from this out to associate with.”

“Come, come, that is rather strong language,” said Mr. Langrove. “We must not outlaw on mere inferential evidence a man who has borne all his life a most honorable name; and if worse comes to worst, we must remember it would go hard with the best of us to put a social brand on a friend that we were deeply indebted to, if we could by any possibility find a loophole of escape for him. A man may remain strictly honest in the main, and yet not be heroic enough not to save a friend on a quibble.”

“Why, to be sure; there are honest men and honest men,” assented Plover. “I’ve known some whose moral capacity expanded to camels when expediency demanded the feat and it could be done discreetly. It’s astounding what some of these honest men can swallow.”

Sir Simon felt what this speech implied of impertinence to Mr. Langrove, and, indeed, to everybody present. “Roxham,” he said irrelevantly, “why is your glass empty? Bourbonais, are you passing those delectable little patés de foie gras?”

Raymond helped himself mechanically, as the servant presented again the rejected dish.

“It would be a nice thing to define exactly the theory of truth and its precise limits,” observed Mr. Langrove in his serious, sententious way, addressing himself to no one in particular.

“One should begin by defining the nature of truth, I suppose,” said Mr. Plover. “Let us have a definition from our host!”

“Oh! if you are going in for metaphysics, I hand you over to Bourbonais!” said Sir Simon good-humoredly. “Take the pair of them in hand, Raymond, and run them through the body for our edification.”

“I should very much like to have the count’s opinion on this particular point of metaphysics or morals, whichever it may be,” said Mr. Plover. “Do you believe it possible for a man to effect such a compromise with his conscience, and yet be, as our reverend friend describes him, a blameless and upright man?”

“I do,” answered M. de la Bourbonais with quiet emphasis. “I doubt if any simple incident can with safety be taken as the key of a man’s character. One fault, for instance, may stand out in his life and color it with dishonor, and yet be a far less trustworthy index to his real nature than, a very slight fault committed deliberately and involving no consequences. We are more deliberate in little misdeeds than in great ones. When a man commits a crime, he is not always a free agent as regards the command of his moral forces; there are generally a horde of external influences at work overpowering his choice, which is in reality his individual self. When he succumbs to this pressure from without, we cannot therefore logically consider him as the sole and deliberate architect of his sin; hard necessity, fear of disgrace, love of life, nay, some generous feeling, such as gratitude or pity, may hurry a man into a criminal action as completely at variance with the whole of his previous[318] and subsequent life as would be the act of a Christian flinging himself out of the window in a fit of temporary insanity.”

“Subtly put,” sneered Mr. Plover. “If we were to follow up that theory, we might find it necessary on investigation to raise statues to our forgers and murderers, instead of sending them to the hulks and the gallows.”

“I have sometimes considered whether it may not on given occasions be justifiable to do evil; I mean technically evil, as we class things,” said Lord Roxham.

“Well, for instance—I’ll put it mildly—to convey a false idea of facts, as your friend X—— seems to have done in this libel business. I suppose there are cases where it would be morally justifiable?”

“To tell a lie, you mean? That is a startling proposition,” said the vicar, smiling.

“It has the merit of originality, at least,” observed Mr. Plover, helping himself to a tumblerful of claret.

“I’m afraid it can’t boast even that,” said Lord Roxham; “it is only an old sophism rather bluntly put.”

“I should like to hear the Count de la Bourbonais’ opinion on it,” said Mr. Plover, rolling the decanter across to his self-elected antagonist.

Raymond had feigned unconsciousness of the stranger’s insolent tone thus far, though he had detected it from the first, and was only too deeply possessed by other thoughts to resent it or to care a straw for what this stranger or any human being thought of him or said to him. But the persistency of the attack forced him to notice it at last, if not to repel it; he was not sufficiently interested in the thing for that. But he was roused from the kind of stinging lethargy in which he had hitherto sat there, nibbling at one thing or another, oftener playing with his knife and fork, and touching nothing. He laid them down now, and pushed aside his glass, which had been emptied to-night oftener than was his wont.

“You mean to ask,” he said, “if, according to our low French code of morals, we consider it justifiable to commit a crime for the sake of some good to ourselves or others?”

“I don’t go quite that length,” replied Mr. Plover; “but I assume from what you have already said that you look on it as permissible to—tell a lie, for example, under given circumstances.”

“My dear Bourbonais! you are joking, or talking for the mere sake of argument,” cried Sir Simon, forcing a laugh; but he looked vexed and astonished.

“I am not joking, nor am I arguing for argument’s sake,” protested Raymond with rising warmth. “I say, and I am prepared to prove it, that under given circumstances we are justified in withholding the truth—in telling a lie, if you like that way of putting it better.”

Several spoke together, excited and surprised, and every head was bent towards M. de la Bourbonais.[319] Raymond moved his spectacles, and, fixing his dark gray eyes on Mr. Plover as the one who had directly challenged him, he said:

“Let us take an illustration. Suppose you entrust me with that costly diamond ring upon your finger, I having promised on my oath to carry it to a certain person and to keep its possession a secret. We will suppose that your life and your honor depend on its being delivered at its destination by me and at a given time. On my way thither I meet an assassin, who puts his pistol to my breast and says, ‘Deliver up your purse and a diamond which I understand you have on your person, or I shoot you and take them; but if you give me your word that you have not got it, I will believe you and let you go.’ Am I not justified, in order to save your honor and life and my own in answering, ‘No, I have not got the diamond’?”

“Certainly not!” cried Plover emphatically, bringing his jewelled hand down on the table with a crash.

“‘Certainly not!’ Just so. But suppose I draw my pistol and shoot the robber dead on the spot? God and the law absolve me; I have a right to kill any man who threatens my life or my property, or that of my neighbor.”

“And yet homicide is a greater sin than a lie!” cried Raymond. He was flushed and excited; his eye sparkled and his hand trembled as he pushed the glasses farther away, and leaned on the table, surveying the company with a glance that had something of triumph and something of defiance in it.

“Well done, Bourbonais!” cried Sir Simon. “You’ve not left Plover an inch of ground to stand on!”

“Closely reasoned,” said Mr. Langrove, with a dubious movement of the head; “but.…”

“Sophistry! a very specious bit of sophistry!” said Mr. Plover in a loud voice, drowning everybody else’s. “Comte and Rousseau and the rest of them in a nutshell.”

“Crack it, then, and let’s have the kernel!” said Lord Roxham. He was growing out of patience with the dictatorial tone of this vulgar man.

“Just so!” chimed in Mr. Charlton, airing a snowy hand and signet gem, and falling back in his chair with the air of a man wearied with hard thinking.

“It’s too preposterous to answer,” was Plover’s evasive taunt; “it’s mere casuistry.”

“A very compact bit of casuistry, at any rate,” said Sir Simon, with friendly pride in Raymond’s manifest superiority over his assembled guests; “it strikes me it would take more than our combined wits to answer it.”

“Egad! I’d eat my head before I’d answer it!” confessed Ponsonby Anwyll, who shared the baronet’s personal complacency in the count’s superior brain. But Raymond had lapsed into his previous silent mood, and sat absently toying with a plate of bonbons before him, and apparently deaf to the clashing of tongues that he had provoked. There was something very touching in his look, in the air of gentle dejection that pervaded him, and which contrasted strikingly with the transient warmth he had displayed while speaking. Sir Simon noticed it, and it smote him to the heart. For[320] the first time this evening he bethought him how his own cheerfulness must strike Raymond, and how he must be puzzled to account for it. He promised himself the pleasure of explaining it to his satisfaction before they parted to-night; but meanwhile it gave him a pang to think of the iron that was in his friend’s soul, though it was part of his pleasant expectation that he would be able to draw it out and pour some healing balm on the wound to-morrow. He would show him why he had borne so patiently with the vulgar pedagogue who had permitted himself to fail, at least by insinuation, in respect to M. de la Bourbonais. The pedagogue meanwhile seemed bent on making himself disagreeable to the inoffensive foreigner.

“It is a pity X—— was not able to secure Count de la Bourbonais as counsel,” he began again. “In the hands of so skilful a casuist his backsliding might have come out quite in a heroic light. It would have been traced to his poverty, which engendered his gratitude, and so on until we had a verdict that would have been virtually a glorification of impecuniosity. It is a pity we have missed the treat.”

“Poverty is no doubt responsible for many backslidings,” said Raymond, bridling imperceptibly. He felt the sting of the remark as addressed to him by the rich man, or he fancied he did. “The world would no doubt be better as well as happier if riches were more equally divided; but there are worse things in the world than poverty, for all that.”

“There is the excess of riches, which is infinitely worse—a more unmitigated source of evil, taking it all in all,” said Mr. Langrove.

“Well said for a professional, my dear sir,” laughed Mr. Plover; “but you won’t find many outsiders to agree with you, I suspect.”

“If by outsiders you mean Turks, Jews, and Hottentots, I daresay you are right,” said the vicar good-temperedly.

“I mean every sensible man who is not bound by his cloth to talk cant—no offence; I use the word technically—you won’t find one such out of a thousand to deny that riches are the best gift of heaven, the one that can buy every other worth having—love and devotion into the bargain.”

“What rank heresy you are propounding, my dear sir!” exclaimed Sir Simon, taking a pinch from his enamelled snuff-box, and passing it on. “You will not find one sane man in a thousand to agree with you!”

“I agree with you, monsieur,” said Raymond with a certain asperity; “money can purchase most things worth having, but I deny that it can always pay for them.”

“Ha! there we have the sophist again. It can buy, and yet it can’t pay. Pray explain!”

“What do you mean, Raymond?” said Sir Simon, darting a curious, puzzled look at his friend.

“It is very simple. I mean that money may sometimes enable us to confer an obligation which no money can repay. We may, for instance, do a service or avert a sorrow by means of a sum of money, and thus purchase love and gratitude—things which Mr. Plover has included in those worth having, and which money cannot pay for, though it may be the means of buying them.” The look that accompanied the answer said more to Sir Simon than the words conveyed to[321] any one else. He averted his eyes quickly, and was all at once horrified to discover several empty glasses round the table. They were at dessert now.

“Charlton, have you tried that Madeira? Help yourself again, and pass it on here, will you? I shall have to play Ganymede, and go round pouring out the nectar to you like so many gods, if you don’t bestir yourselves.”

And then there was a clinking of glasses, as the amber and ruby liquid was poured from many a curious flagon into the glistening crystal cups.

“Talking of gods, that’s a god’s eye that you see there on Plover’s finger,” observed Mr. Charlton, whose azure gem was quite eclipsed by the flashing jewel that had suggested M. de la Bourbonais’ illustration. “It was set in the forehead of an Indian idol. Just let Sir Simon look at it; he’s a judge of precious stones,” said the young man, who felt that his feeble personality gained something from the proximity of so big a personage, and was anxious to show him off. The latter complacently drew the ring from his finger and tossed it over to his host. It was a large white diamond of the purest water, without the shadow of a flaw.

“It is a beauty!” exclaimed Sir Simon with the enthusiasm of a connoisseur; “only it’s too good to be worn by a man. It ought to have gone to a beautiful woman when it left the god. I suppose it will soon, eh, Plover?”

Mr. Plover laughed. He was not a marrying man, he said, but he would make no rash vows. Then he went on to tell about other precious stones in his possession. He had some amazingly sensational stories to relate concerning them and how he became possessed of them. We generally interest others when we get on a subject that thoroughly interests ourselves and that we thoroughly understand. Mr. Plover understood a great deal about these legendary gems, and the celebrated idols in which they had figured; he had, moreover, imbibed a certain tinge of Oriental superstition concerning the talismanic properties of precious gems, and invested them, perhaps half unconsciously, with that kind of prestige that is not very far off from worship. This flavor of superstition pierced unawares through his discourse on the qualities and adventures of various rubies and sapphires that had played stirring parts in the destinies of particular gods, and were universally believed to influence for good or evil the lives of mortals who became possessed of them.

The company began to find him less disagreeable as he went on. They did not quite believe in him; but when a story-teller amuses us, we are not apt to quarrel with him for using a traveller’s privilege and drawing the long bow.

By the time this vein was exhausted the party had quite forgiven the obnoxious guest, and admitted him within the sympathetic ring of good-fellowship and conviviality. M. de la Bourbonais had become unusually talkative, and contributed his full share to the ebb and flow of lively repartee. He was generally as abstemious as an anchorite; but to-night he broke through his ascetic habits, and filled and refilled his glass many times. It was deep drinking for him, though for any one else it would have been reckoned moderate. Before the dessert was long on the table the effect of the wine was visible[322] in his excited manner and the shrill tone of his voice, that rose high and sharp above the others in a way that was quite foreign to his gentleness. Sir Simon saw this, and at once divined the cause. It gave him a new pang. Poor Raymond! Driven to this to keep his misery from bursting out and overwhelming him!

“Shall we finish our cigars here or in the library?” asked the baronet when his own tired limbs suggested that a change of posture might be generally agreeable.

As by tacit consent, the chairs were all pushed back and everybody rose. The clock in the hall was striking ten.

“Do you know I think I must be going?” said Mr. Langrove. “Time slips quickly by in pleasant company; I had no idea it was so late!”

“Nonsense! you are not going to leave us yet!” protested Sir Simon. “Don’t mind the clocks here; they’re on wheels.”

“Are they?” said the vicar, and innocently pulled out his watch to compare it with the loud chime that was still trembling in the air. “Humph! I see your wheels are five minutes slower than mine!” he said, with a nod and a laugh at his prevaricating host.

“Come, now, Langrove, never mind the time. ‘Hours were made for slaves,’ you know. Come in and have another cigar,” urged Sir Simon.

“Then I may as well go with you,” said M. de la Bourbonais; “it’s late already for me to be out.”

Sir Simon was beginning to protest, when his attention was called away by Lord Roxham.

“What ring? Plover’s? No; I passed it to you to look at, and it didn’t come round to me again. Can it not be found?”

“Oh! it’s sure to turn up in a minute!” said Mr. Plover. “It has slipped under the edge of a plate, very likely!” And he went to the table and began to look for it.

“Come, let us be going, as we are going,” said M. de la Bourbonais to the vicar, and he went towards the door.

“Wait a bit,” replied Mr. Langrove—“wait a moment, Bourbonais; we must see the end of this.”

“What have we to see in it? It is no concern of ours,” was the slightly impatient rejoinder. Raymond was in that state of unnatural excitement when the least trifle that crosses us chafes and irritates. He had nothing for it, however, but to comply with the vicar’s fancy and wait.

“Most extraordinary!” Sir Simon exclaimed, as crystal dishes and porcelain plates were lifted and moved, and silver filigree baskets overturned and their delicate fruits sent rolling in every direction. “It must have dropped; stand aside, everybody, while I look under the table.” Every one drew off. Sir Simon flung up the ends of the snowy cloth, and, taking a chandelier with several lights, set it on the floor and began carefully to examine the carpet; but the ring was nowhere to be seen.

“If it is here, it is certain to be seen,” he said, still bent down. “Look out, all of you, as you stand; you may see it flash better in the distance.”

But no flash was anywhere visible. The wax-lights discovered nothing brighter than the subdued colors of the rich Persian carpet. Sir Simon went round to the other[323] side of the table, and searched with the same care and the same result.

“You are not an absent man, are you?” he said, lifting the chandelier from the ground, and addressing the owner of the missing ring. “You are not capable of slipping it into your pocket unawares?”

“I never did such a thing in my life; but that is no reason why I may not have done it now. Old wine sometimes plays the deuce with one,” said Mr. Plover, and he began to rummage his pockets and turn their contents on to the table-cloth. Its whiteness threw every article into vivid relief; but there was no ring.

“This is very singular, very extraordinary indeed!” said Sir Simon in a sharp tone of annoyance. “Is any one hoaxing? Charlton, you’re not playing a trick on us, are you?”

“What should I play such a stupid trick as that for?” demanded the young man. “I’m not such an idiot; but here goes! Let us have my pockets on the table too!”

And following his friend’s example, he turned them inside out, coat, waistcoat, and trousers pockets in succession; but no ring appeared.

“It is time we all followed suit,” said Sir Simon, and he cleared a larger space by sweeping away plates and glasses. “I am given to absence of mind myself, and, as you say, I may have taken a glass more than was good for me.”

As he spoke he turned out one pocket after another, with no other result than to show the solidity and unblemished freshness of the linings; there was not a slit or the sign of one anywhere where a diamond ring, or a diamond without a ring, could have slipped through.

“Well, gentlemen, I invite you all to follow my example!” said the host, stepping back from the table, and motioning for any one that liked to advance. His voice had a ring of command in it that would have compelled obedience if that had been necessary; but it did not seem to be so. One after another the guests came up and repeated the operation, while the owner of the ring watched them with a face that grew darker with every disappointment. Mr. Langrove and M. de la Bourbonais were standing somewhat apart from the rest near the door, and were now the only two that remained. The vicar came first. He submitted his pockets to the same rigorous scrutiny, and with the same result. A strange gleam passed over Mr. Plover’s features, as he turned his sallow face in the direction of M. de la Bourbonais. Suspicion and hope had now narrowed to this last trial. Raymond did not move. “Come on, Bourbonais; I have done!” said Mr. Langrove, consigning his spectacles and his handkerchief to his last pocket.

“Come, my dear friend, come!” Sir Simon called out, in a voice that was meant only to be kind and encouraging, but in which those who knew its tones detected a nervous note.

“I will not!” said the count in a sharp, high key. “I will not submit to such an indignity; it has been got up for the purpose of insulting me. I refuse to submit to it!”

“I am not mad! I am poor!” retorted the count, facing round and darting eyes of defiance at Sir[324] Simon. “This person, who calls himself a gentleman, has insulted me from the moment I sat down to table with him, and you allowed him to do it. He taunted me with my poverty; he would make out now that because I am poor I am a thief! I have borne with him so far because I was at your table; but there is a limit to what I will bear. I will not submit to the outrage he wants to put upon me.”

“You shall hand out my ring before you stir from here, my fine sir!” cried Mr. Plover, taking a stride after him, and stretching out an arm as if to clutch him; but Sir Simon quick as thought intercepted him by laying a hand on the outstretched arm, while Ponsonby Anwyll stepped forward and placed his tall, broad figure like a bulwark between Raymond and his assailant.

“Let me go!” said the latter, shaking himself to get free from the baronet’s clasp; but the long, firm fingers closed on him like grim death.

“You shall not touch M. de la Bourbonais in my presence,” he said; “you have insulted him, as he says, already. If I had seen that he detected what was offensive in your tone and manner, I would not have suffered it to pass. Stand back, and leave me to deal with him!”

“Confound the beggar! Let him give me my ring! I don’t want to touch him; but as I live he doesn’t stir from this room till I’ve seen his breeches pocket turned wrong-side out!”

The man had been drinking heavily, and, though he was still to all intents and purposes sober, this excitement, added to that caused by the wine, heated his blood to boiling-point. He looked as if he would have flown at Raymond; but cowed by Sir Simon’s cool self-command and determined will, he fell back a step, fastening his eyes on Raymond with a savage glare.

Raymond meantime continued obstinate and impracticable. Mr. Langrove took his hand in both his, and in the gentlest way entreated him to desist from his suicidal folly; assuring him that he was the last man present whom any one in his senses would dream of suspecting of a theft, of the faintest approach to anything dishonorable, but that it was sheer madness to refuse to clear himself in the eyes of this stranger. It was a mere form, and meant no more for him than for the rest of them. But Raymond turned a deaf ear to his pleading.

“Let me go! I will not do it! He has been insulting me from the beginning. I will not submit to this,” he repeated, and shook himself free from Mr. Langrove’s friendly grasp.

Sir Simon came close up to him. He was pale and agitated in spite of his affected coolness, and his hand shook as he laid it on Raymond’s shoulder.

But Raymond thrust away his hand, and said with bitter scorn: “Ha! I am a beggar, and so I must be a thief! No, I will not clear myself! Let this rich man go and proclaim me a thief!” And breaking away from them all, he dashed out of the room.

“Hold! Stop him, or by —— I’ll make hot work of it for you!” shouted Mr. Plover, making for the door; but Ponsonby Anwyll set his back to it, and defied him to pass. If the other had been brave enough to try, it would have been a hopeless[325] attempt; his attenuated body was no match for the stalwart limbs of the young squire. He involuntarily recoiled as if Ponsonby’s arms, stoutly crossed on his breast, had dealt him a blow. Lord Roxham and Mr. Charlton pressed round him, expostulating and trying to calm him. This was no easy task, and they knew it. They were terribly shaken themselves, and they felt that it was absurd to expect this stranger, fuming for his diamond, to believe that M. de la Bourbonais had not taken it.

“No one but a madman would have done such a thing, when it’s as certain as death to be found out,” said Sir Ponsonby, whose faith in Raymond was sustained by another faith. “Besides, we all know he’s no more capable of it than we are ourselves!”

“Very fine talk, but where is the ring? Who has taken it, if not this Frenchman? I tell you what, he will be making out that it was his right and his duty to steal from a rich man to help a poor one. Perhaps he’s hard up just now, and he blesses Providence for the opportunity.”

“Remember, sir, that you are speaking of a gentleman who is my friend, and whom I know to be incapable of an unworthy action,” said Sir Simon in a stern and haughty tone.

“I compliment you on your friends; it sha’n’t be my fault if you don’t see this one at the hulks before long. But curse me! now I think of it, I’m at your mercy, all of you. I have to depend on you as witnesses, and it seems the fashion in these parts for gentlemen to perjure themselves to screen a friend; you will most likely refuse to swear to facts—if you don’t swear against them, eh?”

“You must be drunk; you don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Mr. Charlton, forgetting to drawl, and speaking quickly like a sensible man. “It is as premature as it is absurd to imagine the ring is stolen; it must be in the room, and it must be found.”

“In the room or out of it, it must and it shall be found!” echoed Mr. Plover, “or if not.…”

“If not, it shall be paid for,” added Mr. Charlton; “it shall be replaced.”

“Not its duplicate as a god’s eye invested with magical virtue,” said Mr. Charlton ironically; “but its value in the market can be paid, I suppose. What price do you put on it?”

“As a mere stone it is worth five hundred pounds to any jeweller in London.”

Sir Simon said nothing. A mist came before his eyes. He saw Raymond in the grip of this cruel man, and he was powerless to release him. If the dread was an act of disloyalty to Raymond, Sir Simon was scarcely to blame. He would have signed away five years of his life that moment to see M. de la Bourbonais cleared of the suspicion that he had so insanely fastened on himself; but how could he help doubting? He knew as no one else knew what the power of the temptation was which had—had it?—goaded him to the mad act. Its madness was the strongest argument against its possibility. To pocket a ring worth five hundred pounds—worth five pounds—in the very teeth of the person[326] it belonged to, and with the clear certainty of being immediately detected—no one in his right mind would have done such a thing. But was Raymond in his right mind when he did it? Had he been in his right mind since he entered the house to-night? There is such a thing as delirium of the heart from sorrow or despair. Then he had been drinking a great deal more than usual, and wine beguiles men to acts of frenzy unawares. If Sir Simon could even say to this man, “I will pay you the five hundred pounds”; but he had not as many pence to call his own. There had been a momentary silence after the exclamation of surprise that followed the announcement of the value of the diamond. Would Mr. Charlton not ratify his offer to pay for it? And if he did not, what could save Raymond?

“We’ll see whether I am or not! I had the diamond valued with several others at Vienna, where it was set,” said Mr. Plover.

“Consider me your debtor for the amount,” said Sir Ponsonby Anwyll, stepping forward; “if the ring is not found to-night, I will sign you a check for five hundred pounds.”

“Let us begin and look for it in good earnest,” said Lord Roxham. “We will divide; two will go at each side of the table and hunt for it thoroughly. It must have rolled somewhere into a crevice or a corner.”

“I don’t see how a ring was likely to roll on this,” said Mr. Plover, scratching the thick pile of the carpet with the tip of his patent-leather boot.

“Some of us may have kicked it to a distance in pushing back our chairs,” suggested Mr. Langrove; “let us set the lights on the floor, and divide as Lord Roxham proposes.”

Every one seized a chandelier or a lamp and set it on the floor, and began to prosecute the search. They had hardly been two minutes thus engaged when a loud ring was heard, and after a momentary delay the door opened and M. de la Bourbonais walked in.

“Good heavens, Bourbonais! is it you?” cried Sir Simon, rising from his knees and hastening to meet him.

“I made a mistake in refusing to submit to the examination you asked of me,” said the count, addressing himself to all collectively. “I was wrong to listen only to personal indignation in the matter; I saw only a poor man insulted by a rich one. I have come back to repair my mistake. See now for yourselves, and, if you like, examine every corner of my clothes.”

He advanced to the table, intending to suit the action to the words, when a burst of derisive laughter was heard at the other end of the room. It was from Mr. Plover. The others were looking on silent and confounded.

“Do you take us all for so many born fools?” cried Mr. Plover, and he laughed again a short, contemptuous laugh that went through Raymond’s veins.

He stood there, his right hand plunged into his pocket in the act of drawing out its contents, but arrested by the sound of that mocking laugh, and by the chill silence that followed. He cast a quick, questioning[327] glance at the surrounding faces; pity, surprise, regret, were variously depicted there, but neither confidence nor congratulation were visible anywhere. A gleam of light shot suddenly through his mind. He drew out his hand and passed it slowly over his forehead.

But the door was closed. Raymond was gone. Sir Simon followed into the hall, but he did not overtake him; the great door closed with a bang, and the friend he loved best on earth was beyond his hearing, rushing wildly on in the darkness and under the rain, that was falling in torrents.

The apparition had come and gone so quickly that the spectators might have doubted whether they had not dreamt it or seen a ghost. No one spoke, until Mr. Plover broke out with a hoarse laugh and an oath:

“If the fellow has not half convinced me of his innocence! He’s too great a fool to be a thief!”

“Until he has been proved a thief, you will be good enough not to apply the term to Monsieur de la Bourbonais under my roof,” said Sir Simon. “Now, gentlemen, we will resume our search.”

They did, and prosecuted it with the utmost care and patience for more than an hour; but the only effect was to fasten suspicion more closely on the absent.

Mr. Plover was so triumphant one would have fancied the justification of his vindictive suspicion was a compensation for the loss of his gem.

“Have you a pen and ink here, or shall I go into the library? I want to write the check,” said Ponsonby.

“You will find everything you want in the library,” said Sir Simon, and Ponsonby went in. Some one rang, and the carriages and horses were ordered. In a few minutes Ponsonby returned with the check, which he handed to Mr. Plover.

“If you require any one to attest my solvency, I dare say Charlton, whom you can trust, will have no objection to do it,” he remarked.

“Oh! it’s not necessary; I’m quite satisfied with Sir Ponsonby Anwyll’s signature,” Mr. Plover replied. And as he pocketed the check he went to the window and raised the curtain to see if Mr. Charlton’s brougham had come round. The rest of the company were saying good-by, cordial but sad. Sir Simon and the young squire of Rydal stood apart, conversing in an earnest, subdued voice.

“Have you a trap waiting, or shall I drop you at the vicarage?” inquired Lord Roxham of Mr. Langrove.

“Thank you! I shall be very glad,” said the vicar. “The night promised to be so fine I said I would walk home.”

“You will have a wet ride of it, Anwyll; is not that your horse I see?” cried Mr. Charlton from the window, where he had followed his ill-omened friend. “Had you not better leave him here for the night, and let me give you a lift home?”

“Oh! thank you, no; I don’t mind a drenching, and it would take you too far out of your way.”

Mr. Plover and Mr. Charlton were leaving the room when Sir Simon’s voice arrested them.

“One moment, Charlton! Mr.[328] Plover, pray wait a second. I need not assure any one present how deeply distressed I am by what has occurred to-night—distressed on behalf of every one concerned. I know you all share this feeling with me, and I trust you will not refuse me the only alleviation in your power.”

He stopped for a moment, while his hearers turned eager, responsive faces towards him.

“I ask you as a proof of friendship, of personal regard and kindness to myself, to be silent concerning what has happened under my roof to-night; to let it remain buried here amongst ourselves. Will you grant me this, probably the last favor I shall ever ask of you?”

His voice trembled a little; and his friends were touched, though they did not see where the last words pointed.

“Plover, I hope I may include your promise with that of my older friends?” continued the baronet, his voice still betraying emotion. “I have no right, it is true, to claim such an act of self-denial at your hands; I know,” he added with a faint laugh that was not ironical, only sad—“I know that it is a comfort to us all to talk of our misfortunes and complain of them to sympathizing acquaintances; but I appeal to you as a gentleman to forego that satisfaction, in order to save me from a bitter mortification.”

Sir Simon did not profess to be a very deep reader of human nature, but the most accomplished Macchiavellist could not have divined and touched the right chords in his listener’s spirit with a surer hand than he had just done. Mr. Plover laid his shrivelled fingers in the baronet’s extended hand, and said with awkward bluntness:

“As a proof of personal regard for you, I promise to hold my tongue in private life; but you can’t expect me not to take steps for the recovery of the stone.”

“It is pretty certain to get into the diamond market before long, and, unless the police are put on the watch, it will slip out of the country most likely, and for ever beyond my reach, and I would give double the money to get it back again. But I pledge myself not to mention the affair except to the officers.”

He bowed another good-night to the company, and was gone. The rest quickly followed, and soon the noise of wheels crushing the wet gravel died away, and Sir Simon Harness was left alone to meditate on the events of the evening and many other unpleasant things.

RECOLLECTIONS OF WORDSWORTH.[131]
BY AUBREY DE VERE, ESQ.

PART I.

It was about eight years before his death that I had the happiness of making acquaintance with Wordsworth. During the next four years I saw a good deal of him, chiefly among his own mountains, and, besides many delightful walks with him, I had the great honor of passing some days under his roof. The strongest of my impressions respecting him was that made by the manly simplicity and lofty rectitude which characterized him. In one of his later sonnets he writes of himself thus: “As a true man who long had served the lyre”; it was because he was a true man that he was a true poet; and it was impossible to know him without being reminded of this. In any case he must have been recognized as a man of original and energetic genius; but it was his strong and truthful moral nature, his intellectual sincerity, the abiding conscientiousness of his imagination, so to speak, which enabled that genius to do its great work, and bequeath to the England of the future the most solid mass of deep-hearted and authentic poetry which has been the gift to her of any poet since the Elizabethan age. There was in his nature a veracity which, had it not been combined with an idealizing imagination not less remarkable, would to many have appeared prosaic; yet, had he not possessed that characteristic, the products of his imagination would have lacked reality. They might still have enunciated a deep and sound philosophy; but they would have been divested of that human interest which belongs to them in a yet higher degree. All the little incidents of the neighborhood were to him important.

The veracity and the ideality which are so signally combined in Wordsworth’s poetic descriptions of nature made themselves, at least, as much felt whenever nature was the theme of his discourse. In his intense reverence for nature he regarded all poetical delineations of her with an exacting severity; and if the descriptions were not true, and true in a twofold sense, the more skilfully executed they were the more was his indignation roused by what he deemed a pretence and a deceit. An untrue description of nature was to him a profaneness, a heavenly message sophisticated and falsely delivered. He expatiated much to me one day, as we walked among the hills above Grasmere, on the mode in which nature had been described by one of the most justly popular of England’s modern poets—one for whom he preserved a high and affectionate respect. “He took pains,” Wordsworth said; “he went out with his pencil and note-book, and jotted down whatever[330] struck him most—a river rippling over the sands, a ruined tower on a rock above it, a promontory, and a mountain ash waving its red berries. He went home, and wove the whole together into a poetical description.” After a pause Wordsworth resumed with a flashing eye and impassioned voice: “But nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charms! He should have left his pencil and note-book at home; fixed his eye, as he walked, with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him, and taken all into a heart that could understand and enjoy. Then, after several days had passed by, he should have interrogated his memory as to the scene. He would have discovered that while much of what he had admired was preserved to him, much was also most wisely obliterated. That which remained—the picture surviving in his mind—would have presented the ideal and essential truth of the scene, and done so, in a large part, by discarding much which, though in itself striking, was not characteristic. In every scene many of the most brilliant details are but accidental. A true eye for nature does not note them, or at least does not dwell on them.” On the same occasion he remarked: “Scott misquoted in one of his novels my lines on Yarrow. He makes me write,

“Never could I have written ‘swans’ in the plural. The scene when I saw it, with its still and dim lake, under the dusky hills, was one of utter loneliness; there was one swan, and one only, stemming the water, and the pathetic loneliness of the region gave importance to the one companion of that swan—its own white image in the water. It was for that reason that I recorded the swan and the shadow. Had there been many swans and many shadows, they would have implied nothing as regards the character of the scene, and I should have said nothing about them.” He proceeded to remark that many who could descant with eloquence on nature cared little for her, and that many more who truly loved her had yet no eye to discern her—which he regarded as a sort of “spiritual discernment.” He continued: “Indeed, I have hardly ever known any one but myself who had a true eye for nature—one that thoroughly understood her meanings and her teachings—except” (here he interrupted himself) “one person. There was a young clergyman called Frederick Faber,[132] who resided at Ambleside. He had not only as good an eye for nature as I have, but even a better one, and sometimes pointed out to me on the mountains effects which, with all my great experience, I had never detected.”

Truth, he used to say—that is, truth in its largest sense, as a thing at once real and ideal, a truth including exact and accurate detail, and yet everywhere subordinating mere detail to the spirit of the whole,—this, he affirmed, was the soul and essence not only of descriptive poetry, but of all poetry. He had often, he told me, intended to write an essay on poetry, setting forth this principle, and illustrating it by references to the chief representatives of poetry in its various departments. It was this twofold[331] truth which made Shakspere the greatest of all poets. “It was well for Shakspere,” he remarked, “that he gave himself to the drama. It was that which forced him to be sufficiently human. His poems would otherwise, from the extraordinarily metaphysical character of his genius, have been too recondite to be understood. His youthful poems, in spite of their unfortunate and unworthy subjects, and his sonnets also, reveal this tendency. Nothing can surpass the greatness of Shakspere where he is at his greatest; but it is wrong to speak of him as if even he were perfect. He had serious defects, and not those only proceeding from carelessness. For instance, in his delineations of character he does not assign as large a place to religious sentiment as enters into the constitution of human nature under normal circumstances. If his dramas had more religion in them, they would be truer representations of man, as well as more elevated and of a more searching interest.” Wordsworth used to warn young poets against writing poetry remote from human interest. Dante he admitted to be an exception; but he considered that Shelley, and almost all others who had endeavored to outsoar the humanities, had suffered deplorably from the attempt. I once heard him say: “I have often been asked for advice by young poets. All the advice I can give may be expressed in two counsels. First, let nature be your habitual and pleasurable study—human nature and material nature; secondly, study carefully those first-class poets whose fame is universal, not local, and learn from them; learn from them especially how to observe and how to interpret nature.”

Those who knew Wordsworth only from his poetry might have supposed that he dwelt ever in a region too serene to admit of human agitations. This was not the fact. There was in his being a region of tumult as well a higher region of calm, though it was almost wholly in the latter that his poetry lived. It turned aside from mere personal excitements; and for that reason, doubtless, it developed more deeply those special ardors which belong at once to the higher imagination and to the moral being. The passion which was suppressed elsewhere burned in his “Sonnets to Liberty,” and added a deeper sadness to the “Yew-trees of Borrowdale.” But his heart, as well as his imagination, was ardent. When it spoke most powerfully in his poetry, it spoke with a stern brevity unusual in that poetry, as in the poem, “There is a change, and I am poor,” and the still more remarkable one, “A slumber did my spirit seal”—a poem impassioned beyond the comprehension of those who fancy that Wordsworth lacks passion, merely because in him passion is neither declamatory nor, latently, sensual. He was a man of strong affections—strong enough on one sorrowful occasion to withdraw him for a time from poetry.[133] Referring once to two young children of his who had died about forty years previously, he described the details of their illnesses with an exactness and an impetuosity of troubled excitement such as might have been expected if the bereavement had taken place but a few weeks before. The lapse of time appeared to have left the sorrow submerged indeed, but still[332] in all its first freshness. Yet I afterwards heard that at the time of the illness, at least in the case of one of the two children, it was impossible to rouse his attention to the danger. He chanced to be then under the immediate spell of one of those fits of poetic inspiration which descended on him like a cloud. Till the cloud had drifted he could see nothing beyond. Under the level of the calm there was, however, the precinct of the storm. It expressed itself rarely but vehemently, partaking sometimes of the character both of indignation and sorrow. All at once the trouble would pass away and his countenance bask in its habitual calm, like a cloudless summer sky. His indignation flamed out vehemently when he heard of a base action. “I could kick such a man across England with my naked foot,” I heard him exclaim on such an occasion. The more impassioned part of his nature connected itself especially with his political feelings. He regarded his own intellect as one which united some of the faculties which belong to the statesman with those which belong to the poet; and public affairs interested him not less deeply than poetry. It was as patriot, not poet, that he ventured to claim fellowship with Dante.[134] He did not accept the term “reformer,” because it implied an organic change in our institutions, and this he deemed both needless and dangerous; but he used to say that, while he was a decided conservative, he remembered that to preserve our institutions we must be ever improving them. He was, indeed, from first to last, pre-eminently a patriot—an impassioned as well as a thoughtful one. Yet his political sympathies were not with his own country only, but with the progress of humanity. Till disenchanted by the excesses and follies of the first French Revolution, his hopes and sympathies associated themselves ardently with the new order of things created by it; and I have heard him say that he did not know how any generous-minded young man, entering on life at the time of that great uprising, could have escaped the illusion. To the end his sympathies were ever with the cottage hearth far more than with the palace. If he became a strong supporter of what has been called “the hierarchy of society,” it was chiefly because he believed the principle of “equality” to be fatal to the well-being and the true dignity of the poor. Moreover, in siding politically with the crown and the coronets, he considered himself to be siding with the weaker party in our democratic days.

The absence of love-poetry in Wordsworth’s works has often been remarked upon, and indeed brought as a charge against them. He once told me that if he had avoided that form of composition, it was by no means because the theme did not interest him, but because, treated as it commonly has been, it tends rather to disturb and lower the reader’s moral and imaginative being than to elevate it. He feared to handle it amiss. He seemed to think that the subject had been so long vulgarized that few poets had a right to assume that they could treat it worthily, especially as the theme, when treated unworthily, was such an easy and cheap way of winning applause. It has been observed also that the religion of Wordsworth’s[333] poetry, at least of his earlier poetry, is not as distinctly “revealed religion” as might have been expected from this poet’s well-known adherence to what he has called emphatically “The lord, and mighty paramount of truths.” He once remarked to me himself on this circumstance, and explained it by stating that when in youth his imagination was shaping for itself the channel in which it was to flow, his religious convictions were less definite and less strong than they had become on more mature thought; and that, when his poetic mind and manner had once been formed, he feared that he might, in attempting to modify them, have become constrained. He added that on such matters he ever wrote with great diffidence, remembering that if there were many subjects too low for song, there were some too high. Wordsworth’s general confidence in his own powers, which was strong, though far from exaggerated, rendered more striking and more touching his humility in all that concerned religion. It used to remind me of what I once heard Mr. Rogers say, viz.: “There is a special character of greatness about humility; for it implies that a man can, in an unusual degree, estimate the greatness of what is above us.” Fortunately, his diffidence did not keep Wordsworth silent on sacred themes. His later poems include an unequivocal as well as beautiful confession of Christian faith; and one of them, “The Primrose of the Rock,” is as distinctly Wordsworthian in its inspiration as it is Christian in its doctrine. Wordsworth was a “High-Churchman,” and also, in his prose mind, strongly anti-Roman Catholic, partly on political grounds; but that it was otherwise as regards his mind poetic is obvious from many passages in his Christian poetry, especially those which refer to the monastic system and the Schoolmen, and his sonnet on the Blessed Virgin, whom he addresses as

He used to say that the idea of one who was both Virgin and Mother had sunk so deep into the heart of humanity that there it must ever remain.

Wordsworth’s estimate of his contemporaries was not generally high. I remember his once saying to me: “I have known many that might be called very clever men, and a good many of real and vigorous abilities, but few of genius; and only one whom I should call ‘wonderful.’ That one was Coleridge. At any hour of the day or night he would talk by the hour, if there chanced to be any sympathetic listener, and talk better than the best page of his writings; for a pen half paralyzed his genius. A child would sit quietly at his feet and wonder, till the torrent had passed by. The only man like Coleridge whom I have known is Sir William Hamilton, Astronomer Royal of Dublin.” I remember, however, that when I recited by his fireside Alfred Tennyson’s two political poems, “You ask me why, though ill at ease,” and “Of old sat Freedom on the heights,” the old bard listened with a deepening attention, and, when I had ended, said after a pause, “I must acknowledge that those two poems are very solid and noble in thought. Their diction also seems singularly stately.” He was a great admirer of Philip van Artevelde. In the case of a certain poet since dead, and little popular, he said to me: “I consider his sonnets to be certainly[334] the best of modern times”; adding, “Of course I am not including my own in any comparison with those of others.” He was not sanguine as to the future of English poetry. He thought that there was much to be supplied in other departments of our literature, and especially he desired a really great history of England; but he was disposed to regard the roll of English poetry as made up, and as leaving place for little more except what was likely to be eccentric or imitational.

In his younger days Wordsworth had had to fight a great battle in poetry; for both his subjects and his mode of treating them were antagonistic to the maxims then current. It was fortunate for posterity, no doubt, that his long “militant estate” was animated by some mingling of personal ambition with his love of poetry. Speaking in an early sonnet of

He died at eighty, and general fame did not come to him till about fifteen years before his death. This might perhaps have been fifteen years too soon, if he had set any inordinate value on it. But it was not so. Shelley tells us that “Fame is love disguised”; and it was intellectual sympathy that Wordsworth had always valued far more than reputation. “Give me thy love; I claim no other fee,” had been his demand on his reader. When fame had laid her tardy garland at his feet, he found on it no fresher green than his “Rydalian laurels” had always worn. Once he said to me: “It is indeed a deep satisfaction to hope and believe that my poetry will be, while it lasts, a help to the cause of virtue and truth, especially among the young. As for myself, it seems now of little moment how long I may be remembered. When a man pushes off in his little boat into the great seas of Infinity and Eternity, it surely signifies little how long he is kept in sight by watchers from the shore.”

Such are my chief recollections of the great poet, whom I knew but in his old age, but whose heart retained its youth till his daughter Dora’s death. He seemed to me one who from boyhood had been faithful to a high vocation; one who had esteemed it his office to minister, in an age of conventional civilization, at nature’s altar, and who had in his later life explained and vindicated such lifelong ministration, even while he seemed to apologize for it, in the memorable confession,

It was to nature as first created, not to nature as corrupted by “disnatured” passions, that his song had attributed such high and healing powers. In singing her praise he had chosen a theme loftier than most of his readers knew—loftier, as he perhaps eventually discovered, than he had at first supposed it to be. Utterly without Shakspere’s dramatic faculty, he was richer and wider in the humanities than any poet since Shakspere. Wholly unlike Milton in character and in opinions, he abounds in passages to be paralleled only by Milton in solemn and spiritual sublimity, and not even by Milton in pathos. It was plain to those who knew Wordsworth that he had kept his[335] great gift pure, and used it honestly and thoroughly for that purpose for which it had been bestowed. He had ever written with a conscientious reverence for that gift; but he had also written spontaneously. He had composed with care—not the exaggerated solicitude which is prompted by vanity, and which frets itself to unite incompatible excellences, but the diligence which shrinks from no toil while eradicating blemishes that confuse a poem’s meaning and frustrate its purpose. He regarded poetry as an art; but he also regarded art, not as the compeer of nature, much less her superior, but as her servant and interpreter. He wrote poetry likewise, no doubt, in a large measure, because self-utterance was an essential law of his nature. If he had a companion, he discoursed like one whose thoughts must needs run on in audible current; if he walked alone among his mountains, he murmured old songs. He was like a pine-grove, vocal as well as visible. But to poetry he had dedicated himself as to the utterance of the highest truths brought within the range of his life’s experience; and if his poetry has been accused of egotism, the charge has come from those who did not perceive that it was with a human, not a mere personal, interest that he habitually watched the processes of his own mind. He drew from the fountain that was nearest at hand what he hoped might be a refreshment to those far off. He once said, speaking of a departed man of genius, who had lived an unhappy life and deplorably abused his powers, to the lasting calamity of his country: “A great poet must be a great man; and a great man must be a good man; and a good man ought to be a happy man.” To know Wordsworth was to feel sure that if he had been a great poet, it was not merely because he had been endowed with a great imagination, but because he had been a good man, a great man, and a man whose poetry had, in an especial sense, been the expression of a healthily happy moral being.

P.S.—Wordsworth was by no means without humor. When the Queen, on one occasion, gave a masked ball, some one said that a certain youthful poet, who has since reached a deservedly high place both in the literary and political world, but who was then known chiefly as an accomplished and amusing young man of society, was to attend it dressed in the character of the father of English poetry—grave old Chaucer. “What!” said Wordsworth, “M—— go as Chaucer! Then it only remains for me to go as M——!”

PART II.

The above-written sonnet is the record of a delightful day spent by my father in 1833 with Wordsworth at Rydal, to which he went from the still more beautiful shores of Ulswater, where he had been sojourning at Halsteads. He had been one of Wordsworth’s warmest[336] admirers when their number was small, and in 1842 he dedicated a volume of poems to him.[136] He taught me when a boy of eighteen years old to admire the great bard. I had been very enthusiastically praising Lord Byron’s poetry. My father calmly replied: “Wordsworth is the great poet of modern times.” Much surprised, I asked: “And what may his special merits be?” The answer was, “They are very various; as, for instance, depth, largeness, elevation, and, what is rare in modern poetry, an entire purity. In his noble ‘Laodamia’ they are chiefly majesty and pathos.” A few weeks afterwards I chanced to take from the library shelves a volume of Wordsworth, and it opened on “Laodamia.” Some strong, calm hand seemed to have been laid on my head, and bound me to the spot till I had come to the end. As I read, a new world, hitherto unimagined, opened itself out, stretching far away into serene infinitudes. The region was one to me unknown, but the harmony of the picture attested its reality. Above and around were indeed

I felt that no tenants less stately could walk in so lordly a precinct. I had been translated into another planet of song—one with larger movements and a longer year. A wider conception of poetry had become mine, and the Byronian enthusiasm fell from me like a bond that is broken by being outgrown. The incident illustrates poetry in one of its many characters—that of the “deliverer.” The ready sympathies and inexperienced imagination of youth make it surrender itself easily despite its better aspirations, or in consequence of them, to a false greatness; and the true greatness, once revealed, sets it free. As early as 1824 Walter Savage Landor, in his “Imaginary Conversation” between Southey and Porson, had pronounced Wordsworth’s “Laodamia” to be “a composition such as Sophocles might have exulted to own, and a part of which might have been heard with shouts of rapture in the regions he describes”—the Elysian Fields.

Wordsworth frequently spoke of death, as if it were the taking of a new degree in the University of Life. “I should like,” he remarked to a young lady, “to visit Italy again before I move to another planet.” He sometimes made a mistake in assuming that others were equally philosophical. We were once breakfasting at the house of Mr. Rogers, when Wordsworth, after gazing attentively round the room with a benignant and complacent expression, turned to our host, and, wishing to compliment him, said: “Mr. Rogers, I never see this house, so perfect in its taste, so exquisite in all its arrangements, and decorated with such well-chosen pictures, without fancying it the very house imaged to himself by the Roman poet when, in illustration of man’s mortality, he says: ‘Linquenda est domus.’” “What is that you’re saying?” replied Mr. Rogers, whose years between eighty and ninety, had not improved his hearing. “I was remarking that your house,” replied Wordsworth, “always reminds me of the ode (more properly called an elegy, though doubtless the lyrical measure not unnaturally causes it to be[337] included among Horace’s odes) in which the Roman poet writes: ‘Linquenda est domus’; that is, since, ladies being present, a translation may be deemed desirable, The house is, or has to be, left; and again,’et placens uxor’—and the pleasing wife; though, as we must all regret, that part of the quotation is not applicable on the present occasion.” The Town Bard, on whom “no angle smiled” more than the end of St. James’ Place, did not enter into the views of the Bard of the Mountains. His answer was what children call “making a great face,” and the ejaculation, “Don’t talk Latin in the society of ladies.” When I was going away, he remarked, “What a stimulus the mountain air has on the appetite! I made a sign to Edmund to hand him the cutlets a second time. I was afraid he would stick his fork into that beautiful woman who sat next him.” Wordsworth never resented a jest at his own expense. Once when we had knocked three times in vain at the door of a London house, I exclaimed, quoting his sonnet written on Westminster Bridge,

He laughed heartily, then smiled gravely, and lastly recounted the occasion and described the early morning on which that sonnet was written. He did not recite more than a part of it, to the accompaniment of distant cab and carriage; and I thought that the door was opened too soon.

Wordsworth, despite his dislike to great cities, was attracted occasionally in his later years

where his society was courted by persons of the most different character. But he complained bitterly of the great city. It was next to impossible, he remarked, to tell the truth in it. “Yesterday I was at S—— House; the Duchess of S——, showing me the pictures, observed: ‘This is the portrait of my brother’ (naming him), ‘and it is considered very like.’ To this I assented, partly perhaps in absence of mind, but partly, I think, with an impression that her grace’s brother was probably a person whose face every one knew or was expected to know; so that, as I had never met him, my answer was in fact a lie! It is too bad that, when more than seventy years old, I should be drawn from the mountains to London in order to tell a lie!” He made his complaint wherever he went, laying the blame, however, not so much on himself or on the duchess as on the corrupt city; and some of those who learned how the most truthful man in England had thus quickly been subverted by metropolitan snares came to the conclusion that within a few years more no virtue would be left extant in the land. He was likewise maltreated in lesser ways. “This morning I was compelled by my engagements to eat three breakfasts—one with an aged and excellent gentleman, who may justly be esteemed an accomplished man of letters, although I cannot honestly concede to him the title of a poet; one at a fashionable party; and one with an old friend whom no pressure would induce me to neglect, although for this, my first breakfast to-day, I was obliged to name the early hour of seven o’clock, as he lives in a remote part of London.”

But it was only among his own mountains that Wordsworth could be understood. He walked among them not so much to admire them[338] as to converse with them. They exchanged thoughts with him, in sunshine or flying shadow, giving him their own and accepting his. Day and night, at all hours, and in all weathers, he would face them. If it rained, he might fling his plaid over him, but would take no admonition. He must have his way. On such occasions, dutiful as he was in higher matters, he remained incurably wayward. In vain one reminded him that a letter needed an answer or that the storm would soon be over. It was very necessary for him to do what he liked; and one of his dearest friends said to me, with a smile of the most affectionate humor: “He wrote his ‘Ode to Duty,’ and then he had done with that matter.” This very innocent form of lawlessness, corresponding with the classic expression, “Indulge genio,” seemed to belong to his genius, not less than the sympathetic reverence with which he looked up to the higher and universal laws. Sometimes there was a battle between his reverence for nature and his reverence for other things. The friend already alluded to was once remarking on his varying expressions of countenance: “That rough old face is capable of high and real beauty; I have seen in it an expression quite of heavenly peace and contemplative delight, as the May breeze came over him from the woods while he was slowly walking out of church on a Sunday morning, and when he had half emerged from the shadow.” A flippant person present inquired: “Did you ever chance, Miss F——, to observe that heavenly expression on his countenance as he was walking into church on a fine May morning?” A laugh was the reply. The ways of nature harmonized with his feelings in age as well as in youth. He could understand no estrangement. Gathering a wreath of white thorn on one occasion, he murmured, as he slipped it into the ribbon which bound the golden tresses of his youthful companion,

SIR THOMAS MORE.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

III.

“Ah! well, and so you are going to carry the French birds back!” exclaimed the old keeper Jack, with a loud, coarse laugh, as he leaned against one of the century-old trees in Windsor forest. “Well, well, so be it, my friends; but give us a little drop to drink,” he added in a jocular but self-important tone. As he said these words, he familiarly slapped the shoulder of one of the falconers, who was engaged in fastening the chains again to the feet of the tiercelets, whilst his comrades cut off the heads of the game taken, and threw them as a reward to the cruel birds, who devoured them with avidity.

“After a while,” replied the falconer a little impatiently. “Wait till our work is done, father Jack; you are always in a hurry—to drink. We will take our glass together now directly. See that troop of birds! They must first be chained and put with the others.”

“Well, well!” replied Jack, “provided we lose nothing by waiting. These are beautiful birds, if they do come from France.”

“No, no, you shall lose nothing by waiting,” cried the second falconer. “Come here; I will let you taste a liquid that these birds have brought over under their wings, and we will see then if you have ever drunk anything equal to it since you drew on your boots in the service of his majesty.”

And he poured out of a canteen that hung from his shoulder-belt a very acid gin, filling, until it foamed over, a large pewter cup, which he handed to father Jack.

“Oh! superb, superb!” cried the old keeper, returning the cup and smacking his lips. “During the five-and-forty years past that I have had the honor of keeping Windsor, I have drunk nothing better. Let’s go! That strengthens a man’s courage and warms up his old blood! I believe the deer will give us a hard drive to-day; I have seen the tracks of fourteen or fifteen at least.” And saying this, he remounted his old wind-broken mare.

“Wait, father Jack, wait for us! We will all go together,” exclaimed the gens de l’equipage; for Jack contributed much to their amusement. When they had mounted their horses, they followed the keeper, getting off a hundred jokes on the old mare, to which he was much attached.

They very soon passed by two young lords who had halted near the verge of the forest, and were engaged in conversation.

One of them held in leash four beautiful greyhounds, especial favorites of the king because of their great sagacity and swiftness in the chase. Their keeper, however, was obliged to use the lash, in order to stop their clamorous baying.

“Yes, I have seen her down yonder. She crossed the road with all of her ladies,” replied the latter, who belonged to Wolsey’s household and wore his livery. “She was dressed in a black velvet cap and green riding-habit and she is really charming!”

“Well, my poor friend,” replied the other, “but do you know I have serious fears that your cardinal will soon fall into disfavor? But a moment ago, as they passed by here, I heard the Duke of Norfolk remark to a lady that the red cloak was decidedly out of style, and altogether it was at this time so completely used up that he did not think it could ever again be mended. The lady smiled maliciously, and said he was right—she believed the green mantle would eventually end by tearing the red to pieces! And pointing to the young Anne Boleyn, who was not far off, she made a sign that left no doubt on my mind it was that lady she meant to designate as the destroyer.”

“Truly,” replied the young domestic,[137] “what you tell me is anything but encouraging. And so our dear duke must have his finger in the pie! I shall be very sorry for all this if it happens, because my own clothes, are made of scarlet, you see; and when one has succeeded, in the course of time, in getting a suit well made up, he doesn’t like the trouble of having to commence again and make it over.”

As he said this a cloud of dust arose, and a troop of horsemen passed at full gallop and with a terrible hue and cry.

“My dogs! my dogs!” cried the king in the midst of the crowd. “Let loose my dogs! The deer makes for the ponds. Let them hasten to tell the ladies, that they may be in at the death.”

He disappeared like a flash of lightning, of which we obtain but a glimpse ere it is gone. The shrill notes of the hunter’s horn resounded from afar, awaking countless echoes through the forest.

“Let us go,” exclaimed the two young men simultaneously. “We will then get rid of these accursed hounds.”

“To the ponds! To the ponds!” they cried. “The ladies, to the ponds! The ladies, to the ponds!” And they started on, laughing and shouting.

“What is that you are shouting down there?” cried a huntsman from a distance, whose horse had just made him roll in the dust.

The retinue surrounding the Duke of Suffolk put whip to their horses and followed in a sweeping gallop. From every side of the hills surrounding these ponds there appeared, at the same moment, troops of eager hunters, panting and covered with dust. The different roads traversing the forest in every direction converged and met on the banks of the ponds that slept in the basin thus formed.

The ladies had already assembled, and nothing could have been more entertaining than the rapid and eager movements of the remainder of the hunters as they came galloping up. The king arrived before any of the others. He excelled in exercises of this kind, and took great delight in ending the chase in a brilliant manner by shooting the deer himself. On this occasion he had decided that, contrary to the usual[341] custom, it should be taken alive; consequently, they hastened to spread in every direction the nets and fillets.

In this case the skill of the hunters consisted in driving the game into the snare.

Very soon the deer made his appearance, followed by a multitude of hounds, who pursued him so furiously, and crowded so closely one against the other, that, to use a familiar expression of the hunters, they could have been covered with a table-cloth.

At sight of the nets the beautiful animal paused for an instant. He shook his horns menacingly, and stamped the ground with his feet; then suddenly, feeling already the scorching breath of the infuriated pack of hounds about to seize him, he made a desperate effort, and, leaping at a single bound the entire height of the fillets, threw himself into the lake. Instantly a loud and deafening shout arose, while the furious hounds, arrested in their course by the nets, uttered the most frightful howlings on seeing their prey escape.

“My cross-bow!” cried the king. “Quick! my cross-bow!” and he drew it so skilfully that at the first shot he pierced the flank of the poor animal, who immediately ceased to swim.

Satisfied with his brilliant success, the king, after having heard the plaudits of the ladies and received the congratulations of the hunters, proceeded to the pavilion, constructed of evergreens and foliage, as elegant as it was spacious, which he had had erected in the midst of the forest, in order to dine under cover.

The Duchess of Suffolk did the honors of the festival, taking the place of Queen Catherine, who, under the pretext of bad health, declined appearing at these hunting parties, the noisy sports having become insupportable to her.

Meanwhile the courtiers were greatly excited by observing a roll of paper the extremity of which projected from the right pocket of the king’s hunting-jacket; on one of the leaves, a corner of which was turned down, two words were visible—the name of “Wolsey” and that of “traitor.” Each one sought to approach the king or pass behind him in order to assure himself of the astonishing fact, of which they had the temerity to whisper mysteriously together.

But in spite of all their efforts, they were unable to discover anything more; the day and the festival ended with numerous conjectures—the fears and hopes excited in the minds of that court where for so long the learned favorite had ruled with as much authority as the king himself.

At daybreak on the morning succeeding the festival the gates were thrown open, and a carriage, bearing the royal arms and colors, drove from the great courtyard of Windsor Palace.

While the postilion trotted leisurely along, looking around from time to time as he wonderingly reflected why the horse on his right grew constantly lean in spite of the generous addition he had made to his rations, the two occupants of the carriage engaged in the following conversation:

“It is cold this morning,” said one of them, wrapping his cloak more closely about him.

“Yes; and how this fog and the heavy dew covering the earth remind one of the bivouac!”

“It does indeed,” responded[342] Norfolk to his companion; “but such souvenirs are always agreeable, and carry us back to the happiest days of life—years spent amid the tumult and vicissitudes of the camp. Eighteen! that impulsive, impetuous age, when presumptuous courage rushes headlong into danger, comprehending nothing of death; when reckless intrepidity permits not a moment’s reflection or hesitation, transported by the ardent desire of acquiring glory; the intoxicating happiness of a first success—such are the thrilling emotions, the brilliant illusions of youth, which we shall experience no more!” And the old warrior sorrowfully bowed his head.

“Yes, to be displaced and disappear in their turn,” answered the duke, brushing back the white locks the wind had blown over his forehead, on which appeared a deep scar.

“Well, my lord,” exclaimed the Duke of Suffolk, “do not spoil, by your philosophic reflections, all the pleasure we ought to enjoy in the thought that, thanks to the influence and good management of your charming niece, we are now going to inform Monseigneur Wolsey that the time has at last arrived for him to abdicate his portion of the crown.”

“Yes, perhaps so,” replied the duke. “And yet I don’t know. Yesterday, even, I detested this man, and desired most ardently his ruin; to-day—no, no; an enemy vanquished and prostrate at my feet inspires only compassion. Now I almost regret the injury my niece has done him and the blow she has struck.”

“Come, come, my lord, do you not know that an excess of generosity becomes a fault? We have nothing to regret,” continued Suffolk, with an exulting laugh. “I only hope he may not be acquitted (and thus be able to settle the scores with us afterwards); that Parliament will show him no mercy. Death alone can effectually remove him. The little memorandum you have there contains enough to hang all the chancellors in the world.”

“It is very certain,” replied the Duke of Norfolk, abstractedly turning the leaves of the book he held in his hand (the same that had excited such eager curiosity among the courtiers)—“it is certain this book contains grave accusations. Nevertheless, I do not think it has entirely accomplished the end proposed by the author.”

“In truth, no,” answered Suffolk; “for Wiltshire counted very certainly on replacing Wolsey. He will be astounded when he learns of the choice of the king.”

“Although Wiltshire is a relative of mine,” replied the duke, “I am compelled to acknowledge that it would have been impossible for the king to have made a better selection or avoided a worse one. Wiltshire is both ignorant and ambitious, while Thomas More has no superior in learning and merit. I knew him when quite a child, living with the distinguished Cardinal Morton, who was particularly attached to him. I remember very often at table Morton speaking of him to us, and always saying: ‘This young boy will make an extraordinary man. You will see it. I shall not be living, but you will then recall the prediction of an old man.’”

“Extraordinary!” replied Suffolk in his habitual tone of raillery; “most extraordinary! We[343] are promised, then, a chancellor of a peculiar species! I suppose he will not be the least astonished at receiving so high and singular a favor. But, the devil! he will need to be a wonderful man. If he sustains himself on the throne ministerial, he will find a superior degree of wisdom necessary. Between the king, the queen, the council, Wiltshire, the Parliament, the clergy, and the people, I would not risk my little finger, brother-in-law of his majesty although I have the honor to be.”

And he began laughing as he looked at Norfolk, although, out of deference to him, he had not included in the list of difficulties the most formidable of all, and the one that carried all others in its train—his niece, Mlle. Anne.

“In the sense you use the word,” the duke answered coldly, “I believe, on the contrary, he is by no means an astute man. The intrigues of court will be altogether foreign to his character; but otherwise, in science and learning, he has no equal. He is in possession of all that a man is capable of acquiring in that direction, and no man has made a more profound study of the common law and the statutes of the kingdom. Morton placed him at Oxford, then at the Chancellors’ College at Lincoln, and he achieved the most brilliant success.”

“Since that time,” pursued the Duke of Norfolk, “his reputation has continued to increase. When he lectured in S. Lawrence’s Church, the celebrated Dr. Grocyn and all of our London savants crowded eagerly to hear him.”

“Well! well! I knew nothing of these most agreeable particulars,” said Suffolk; “I only knew that it was he who induced Parliament to refuse the subsidy demanded for the Queen of Scots. If he continues to repeat such exploits as that, I venture to predict he will not be chancellor very long.”

“Oh! as to that,” replied the duke, “he is a man who will never compromise his conscience. Yes, yes, I recall distinctly the enraged expression of the present king’s father when Mr. Tyler came to inform him that the House of Commons had rejected his demand, and a beardless youth had been the cause of it. I have not forgotten, either, that Henry VII., of happy memory, well knew how to avenge himself by having an enormous fine imposed on Sir Thomas’ father.”

“Well,” replied Suffolk, “but it was not always expedient for the House of Commons to raise money in that way.”

The conversation was continued in this manner, as the hours glided by, until at length the glittering spires of the London churches appeared in the distance, and very soon the carriage had entered the narrow, gloomy streets of that great city.

Just at this time the soul of Wolsey was replenished with an inexpressible quietude and contentment. “At last,” he said to himself, “my enemies have all been confounded. I can no longer entertain a doubt respecting my power, after the most gracious manner in which the king has treated me at Grafton. I trust the influence of Anne Boleyn has diminished in the same proportion that mine has increased. Now she wants Sir Thomas Cheney recalled; but I shall not consent to that. Campeggio goes loaded with honorable presents. The influence of[344] the mistress will soon cease, and that ambitious fool Wiltshire will lose the fruit of his intrigues.…” As the Cardinal of York consoled himself with these agreeable reflections, the arrival of the Venetian ambassador was announced.

“Ah! so he presents himself at last,” Wolsey exclaimed. “He has been a long time demanding an audience!” And he ordered him to be introduced.

Wolsey received him in the most gracious manner. After the usual compliments were exchanged, he proposed showing him the honors of the palace. He had spent his life in embellishing and adorning it with wonderful treasures of industry and art, of which he was the enlightened and generous protector, bestowing on them from his own purse the most liberal encouragement.

Numerous galleries, in which an exquisite taste had evidently directed even the most trivial ornamentation, were filled with paintings, statues, and precious antique vases. Superb Flanders tapestries gleamed on all sides, covered the panels, were disposed around the windows, and fell in heavy drapery before the openings of the doors to conceal the entrance. These precious cloths, then of inestimable value, were only found in the palaces of kings. They usually represented some historical or poetical subject; and sometimes landscapes and the rarest flowers were wrought and tinted with reflections of gold. Finally, Wolsey took occasion to point out, among all these treasures, the presents he had received at different times from the various princes of Europe who had sought to secure his influence.

Charmed with the order, taste, and beauty that reigned throughout the palace, the Italian admired everything, surprised to find in this foreign clime a condition of luxury that recalled the memory, always pleasing, yet sometimes sad, of his own country.

“Alas!” he exclaimed at length, “we also were rich and happy, and reposed in peace and security in our palaces, before this war in which we have been so unfortunate as to rely on the King of France for assistance. He has abandoned us; and now, compelled to pay an enormous tribute, the republic finds itself humiliated in the dust beneath the sceptre of the haughty emperor!”

“Such is the right of the conqueror,” replied Wolsey. “You are fortunate, inasmuch as he is forced to use that right with moderation.”

“It seems a heavy burden to us, this moderation!” replied the ambassador. “He not only exacts immense sums of money, but compels us to surrender territory we have conquered with our blood. Florence is placed under the dominion of the Medici, and all of our Italian princes are reduced to a condition of entire dependence.”

“Which, of course, they will shake off at the first opportunity,” interrupted Wolsey. “Charles V. is too shrewd not to foresee that. Be assured he will endeavor to secure your good-will, because your support is indispensable to enable him to resist the formidable power of the Sultan Soliman, and the invasions of the barbarians subject to his authority.”

“In that we have placed our last hope. If our services can be made available, then from vanquished enemies we may become united allies. Already the emperor foresees it; for he overwhelms Andrew[345] Doria and the republic of Genoa with favors. He seems to have forgotten the injuries he suffered from Sforza; he received him most affably at court, and promised him the Princess of Denmark, his niece, in marriage.”

“I am informed,” said Wolsey, “that he is deeply afflicted by the death of the Prince of Orange.”

“Very much,” replied the ambassador. “The prince was a valiant captain. He leaves no children; his titles and landed property will descend to the children of his sister Rénée, the Countess of Nassau.”

“And they are all German princes who have thrown themselves headlong into the Lutheran heresy. They will endeavor to cast off the yoke of the emperor, and become altogether independent.”

“They have no other intention,” replied the ambassador; “and by separating from the Church of Rome they hope more surely to effect their purpose. However, the decree laid before the diet against the religious innovations has passed by a large majority.”

“Yes,” replied Wolsey; “but you see the Elector of Saxony, the Marquis of Brandenburg, the Landgrave of Hesse, the Dukes of Luneburg, and the Prince d’Anhalt are all leagued against the church, with the deputies of fourteen imperial cities, and are designated by no other name than that of Protestant.”

“I am aware of that,” replied the ambassador. “It will greatly increase the difficulties in carrying out the emperor’s secret project,” he continued after a moment’s silence. “Perhaps, however, he may succeed in making the crown hereditary in his family.”

“That is what we shall have to prevent!” cried Wolsey vehemently, who, at the words of the ambassador, felt all his old hatred toward Charles V. revive. “We will never suffer it, neither will France. No, no; I am very certain France will never permit it.”

“Ah!” replied the ambassador, shaking his head with a doubtful air, either because he was not convinced, but more probably because he was well pleased to arouse against the conqueror of Venice the animosity of England (still, as he considered, entirely governed by the will of the minister who stood before him).

“I assure you of it most positively,” answered Wolsey; “and I wish you to bear it in mind.” And he regarded him with an expression of perfect confidence and authority.

“I hope it may be so,” said the ambassador in an abstracted manner. “We certainly desire nothing more.”

“Ah! if he had only you to oppose him,” answered Wolsey, resuming his usual haughtiness, “I should doubt of success. See where you stand,” he continued, with the secret satisfaction of national pride. “Invaded on all sides, Italy can oppose but a feeble barrier to the power of two such bold and daring pirates. Is it not a shame, then, to see these obscure and cruel robbers, sons of a Lesbian potter—two barbarians, in fact—reigning sovereigns of the kingdom of Algiers, which they have seized, and from whence they fearlessly go forth to destroy the Christian fleets on every sea? When would you be able to conquer these ocean pirates—you, who have but a gibbet for your couch and a halter for your vestment? Justice would be kept a long time waiting!”

The Italian reddened and bit his[346] lip. He vainly sought words in which to reply, and was relieved of his embarrassment when the door opened and admitted the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk.

They entered without the usual ceremonies or salutations, and Wolsey, surprised at seeing Suffolk, whom he had not met since the altercation at Blackfriars, regarded them with astonishment. He arose, however, and advanced toward them. Suffolk, with a disdainful gesture, referred him to the Duke of Norfolk.

Astonished at the coldness of the one, the brusque impoliteness of the other, and embarrassed by the presence of the ambassador, the cardinal stood motionless, undecided what to think or say.

“We want you to deliver up the seal of state,” replied Norfolk, without changing countenance.

“The king has ordered it,” continued the duke with the same imperturbable manner.

“The king! Can it be possible?” said Wolsey, dismayed, and in a voice almost inaudible. “The seal of state! And what have I done? What? Can this be true? No, my lord, no,” he suddenly exclaimed with an expression of indescribable terror; “it cannot be true! You have mistaken the king; I do not deserve any such treatment. I pray you let me see him; let me speak to him for a moment—one single moment. Alas! alas!”

And he glanced at the ambassador, who, astounded himself at first, and feeling himself out of place in the presence of this mighty downfall, had involuntarily withdrawn towards the door.

“It is no longer a question to be submitted to the king,” cried Suffolk in a threatening and defiant manner; “it is only necessary now to obey him, and he orders you instantly to deliver up the seal.”

“The order is imperative,” added Norfolk in a cold and serious manner. “I regret being charged with a commission which to you, my lord, must be so painful.”

He said no more. But Suffolk, base and jealous in his nature, was not ashamed to add to the humiliation of the unfortunate cardinal.

“Come, my good friend,” he said in an ironical voice, “why do you beg so imploringly? One would suppose we had demanded the apple of your eye. You have been putting the seal so long now on our purses and tongues, you ought not to be surprised nor annoyed that we feel like using it awhile ourselves.”

This cowardly insult exasperated Wolsey, but his courage was roused with his indignation.

“My Lord Suffolk,” he answered with dignity, “I am sorry for you and for the prompt manner in which you seem to forget in their misfortune those who in days of prosperity were always found ready to come to your assistance. I hope you may never experience how painful it is to endure a similar cruel ingratitude.”

He immediately withdrew, and returned with the richly-adorned casket containing the great seal of state.

Holding it in his trembling hand, he avoided Suffolk, and, advancing rapidly toward the Duke of Norfolk, handed it to him.

“My lord,” he said, “here are[347] the seals of the kingdom of England. Let the king’s will be done. Since I received them from his hand, fifteen years ago, I am conscious of having done nothing to merit his displeasure. I trust he will one day deign to render me full justice, for I have never proved myself unworthy of his favor.”

As he uttered the last words, he was unable to restrain the tears which involuntarily arose to his eyes.

Although the cardinal was by no means a favorite with the Duke of Norfolk, he was moved with compassion, and sadly reflected that he had still more painful intelligence to communicate.

He glanced at his companion, but, fearing the bitter and poignant irony in which Suffolk never failed to indulge, he hastened to prevent it in order to spare Wolsey.

“My lord cardinal,” he said, “you ought to reflect that the king is too just and impartial to withdraw the favor he has so long bestowed on you without having weighed well the reasons and necessities requiring such a course. Nevertheless, his goodness has not abandoned you; he permits you to select such counsel as you may desire to defend you against the accusations presented against you to Parliament.”

“To Parliament!” murmured Wolsey, terror-stricken; for the duke’s last words suddenly disclosed the depth of the abyss into which he had fallen. “To Parliament!” he repeated. The shock he had experienced was so violent that his pride of character, the sense of personal dignity, the presence of his enemies, were all forgotten in a moment, and he abandoned himself to despair. Unable longer to sustain himself, he sank on his knees. “I am lost!” he cried, weeping and extending his hands toward his persecutors. “Have pity on me, my Lord Norfolk! I give up all to the king! Let him do with me what he will! Since he says I am culpable, although I have never had the intention, yet I will acknowledge that I am. But, alas! of what do they accuse me?”

“And betraying your country,” continued Suffolk, “by carrying on a secret correspondence with the King of France. You well remember that it was you who had me recalled at the moment when, having become master of Artois and Picardy, I had the Parisians trembling within their walls? Will you dare deny that you were the cause of it, and that it was the prière d’argent of Mme. Louise [138] induced you to give the order for me to retire? The king has been already long enough your dupe, and our duty was to enlighten him. As to the rest, my lord cardinal, you understand the proceedings; your advocate ought to be here, and you should immediately confer with him with regard to the other charges herein contained.”

As he said this, he threw on the cardinal’s table the bill of presentment, which contained no less than forty-four chief accusations.

They then took possession of all the papers they could find, carrying away the seal of state, and left Wolsey in a condition deserving pity.

As they retired, they proposed sending in the advocate, who was waiting in an adjoining apartment conversing with Cromwell.

“Ha! ha! you are here, then, Sir[348] Cromwell,” said the Duke of Suffolk, laughing. “Go in, go in there at once,” he cried, pointing to the door of Wolsey’s cabinet. “The cardinal needs you; I fear he will be hard to console.”

Cromwell watched with great anxiety the course of events, and, not knowing to which side to turn, determined at least to secure for himself the appearance and merit of fidelity to his benefactor. Without reflecting on the consequences, he hastily replied that he would not leave Wolsey, would never abandon him, but follow him to the end.

“You will follow him to the end, eh?” replied Suffolk. “When you know his intended destination, I doubt very much if you will then ask to follow him.”

As he said this, he made a gesture giving Cromwell to understand that his master, besides losing place and power, was also in danger of losing his head.

“High treason, my dear sir, high treason!” cried Suffolk. “Do you hear me?”

“High treason?” repeated Cromwell slowly. “Ah! my lord duke, how could he be guilty?”

He hastened to rejoin Wolsey, whom he found bathed in tears and endeavoring to decipher the act of presentment.

“Ah! Cromwell,” exclaimed the unhappy cardinal on seeing him, “my dear friend, you have not then forsaken me! But, alas! I am lost. Read here for yourself—read it aloud to me; for my sight is failing.”

Cromwell seized the paper and commenced reading the accusation. On hearing that it was based principally on the violation of the statutes of præmunire,[139] Wolsey was unable to control his indignation.

“How,” he cried, “can the king be induced to sanction such unparalleled injustice? It is true that in receiving from the pope the title of legate, and exercising throughout the kingdom the authority conferred by that title, I have been brought in opposition to the precautionary statutes of King Richard; but still I have not violated them, since the king himself has sanctioned that power and recognized it by appearing in his own person before the court. Is he not more to blame, then, who desired and ordered it, than I, who have simply been made a party to it? I can prove this,” he cried—“yes, I can prove it; for I have still the letters-patent, signed by his own hand, and which he furnished me to that effect. Cromwell, look in my secretary; you will find them there.”

“There is not a single paper here,” he said. “Where could you have placed them?”

“Indeed!” exclaimed the cardinal. “Then they have all been carried away! All!” he repeated. “I have no longer any means of defence; I am lost! They are all arrayed against me; they have resolved upon my death. O Henry! O my king! is it thus you forget in one moment the services I have rendered you? Cromwell,” he continued in a low voice and gloomy, abstracted manner—“Cromwell, I am lost!”

The same evening another messenger came to inform the unhappy cardinal the king wished to occupy, during the session of Parliament he was about to convene, his palace of York (the object of his care[349] and pride), and that in leaving it he could retire to, and have at his disposal, a house about eight leagues from London, entirely abandoned, and belonging to the bishopric of Winchester.

The night, already far advanced, found Sir Thomas More still seated in his cabinet, conversing with the Bishop of Rochester, who had arrived at Chelsea very late that morning.

A light was burning on a long table encumbered with books and papers; several high-backed chairs, covered with black morocco, cast their shadows on the walls; a capacious rug of white sheep-skin was spread before the hearth, where the remains of a fire still burned in the grate.

“And why, my dear friend,” asked the Bishop of Rochester, “will you consent to take upon your shoulders so terrible a responsibility? Once become chancellor, have you fully considered that you will be surrounded by enemies, who will watch your every movement and pursue you even to your death? Have you reflected well that you acknowledge no other laws than those of your own conscience, and feel no remorse unless for not having spoken your views with sufficient candor? Is it thus you hope to resist—thus you hope to escape the snares that will continually surround you?”

“I fear nothing,” replied More; “for I believe in God! And you yourself—would you not blame such weakness? In refusing the king I refuse the queen. Would not Catherine then declare that the trusted servant, even he who had been called her friend, had sacrificed her interests to his love of ease? He had declared his life should be devoted to her cause, and now had abandoned and deprived her of the only hope of relief Providence seemed to have left her! No, Fisher, friendship has rights too sacred for me not to respect them.”

“Then,” cried the bishop, “if you respect the rights of friendship, listen to my appeal! I ask you to decline a dignity that will prove destructive to you. In the name of all that you hold most dear, in the name of all that is good and beautiful in nature, in the entire universe, I conjure you to refuse this fatal honor! It is more than probable the very seal they wish now to place in your hands will be very soon affixed to your death-warrant! Believe me, my friend, all will unite against you. A deep conviction has taken possession of my soul, and I see, I feel, the wrath of this prince, as violent as he is cruel, ready to fall upon your devoted head. You will be crushed in this struggle, too unequal to admit for an instant the hope of escape.”

“Ah! well,” replied More laughingly, “instead, then, of simply inscribing on my tombstone ‘Here lies Thomas More,’ there will appear in pompous style the inscription, ‘Here lies the Lord High Chancellor of England.’ Assuredly, I think that would sound much better, and I shall take care to bequeath my first quarter’s salary to defray the expense of so elegant an inscription.”

“More!” cried the Bishop of Rochester with impatience, “I cannot suffer you to jest on a subject of such grave importance. Do you, then, desire to die? Would you ruin yourself? Trust to my experience. I know the heart of[350] Henry thoroughly; your attempt to save the queen will be vain, and you will inevitably be involved in her ruin. I conjure you, then, accept not this office. I will myself carry your refusal to the king.”

“Irrevocably?” repeated Rochester, whom the thought reduced almost to despair. “More, I see it. You have become ambitious; the vainglory of the world, the fatal infatuation of its honors, have taken possession even of the soul of Thomas More! Your heart no longer responds to mine; your ear remains deaf to all my solicitations! Ah! well, since the desire of being honored among men, and to have them grovel at your feet, has made even you despise my counsel and advice, then listen, listen well, and God grant that I may be able to destroy in your heart the poison that pride has poured into it! You are willing to sacrifice to your vanity all the happiness, all the quiet and peace, of your future; know, then, what recompense will be meted out to you. Yesterday Wolsey was in a manner driven from his palace, and descended the Thames in a common boat, Cromwell alone accompanying him; for all have deserted him except his enemies, who, in order to enjoy his calamities, crowded the river in boats and followed after him. They hoped to see him arrested and carried to the Tower, the report having been circulated that he would be taken there. Wolsey—he whom you have so often seen make his appearance in Parliament, surrounded by an almost royal pomp and splendor—is now a fugitive, alone, abandoned, without defence, of the clamorous insults and bitter scorn of a populace always eager to feast their eyes on the ruins of fallen greatness. The air around him resounded with their maledictions. ‘Here is the man who fattened on the blood of the poor,’ they cried. ‘The taxes will be reduced now,’ exclaimed others, ‘since he will have no farther use for palaces and gardens’; and all, in their ignorance, abused him as the cause of the wrongs and oppressions which it was probably not in his power to have averted. At length, overwhelmed with insults and outrages, he was landed at Pultney, and, in order to escape the mob, was hurriedly conducted to his house at Asher, where he has been banished. Such is the reward you will receive in the service of an avaricious prince and a blind infatuated multitude!”

“My dear Fisher,” responded More, deeply moved, “our hearts and thoughts are always in unison; you have only represented to me a second time the picture I had already painted myself.”

“What!” replied More, resolutely, “and does it require so much hesitation to sacrifice one’s self? I would not wish to live dishonored; and I should consider myself guilty if I forgot my duty toward my sovereign and the honor of England!”

“So you are resolved! Ah! well, let your sacrifice be accomplished,” said the saintly bishop; “but then may God, whose goodness is infinite, hear my vows and grant my prayer: may the same dangers unite us; side by side with you may my last sigh be breathed out with yours; and if the life of the aged man is[351] not extinguished before that of the man in his prime, then may the stroke of death cut us down at the same moment!”

“My dear friend,” cried More, “the many years that have passed over your head and blanched your locks have not yet ripened your judgment, since you can believe it possible that the king’s anger, although it may one day fall on me, could ever be permitted to overtake you, the counsellor of his youth, whom he has so often called his father! No, I can conceive of no such fearful possibility; the wise, the virtuous Bishop of Rochester can never be involved in the misfortune that would crush Thomas More.”

“Ah!” replied Fisher, “but I shall understand how to call down on my head the vengeance with which he may hesitate to strike me. Believe me, More, a man scarcely reaches the prime of life before he feels himself, as it were, daily beginning to fail. Just as in the autumn days the sun’s light rapidly diminishes, so the passing years despoil his body of physical strength and beauty; but it has no effect upon his soul. The heart—no, the heart never grows old! It loves, it suffers, as in the early morning of life; and when at last it has reached the age when wisdom and experience have destroyed the illusions of the passions, friendship, strengthened by so many blessed memories, reigns there alone and entire, like a magnificent flower that has been sheltered and preserved from the destroying worm.

“Having almost arrived at the end of his career, he often takes a survey of the road he has passed over. He loves to recall his joys and his sorrows, and to weep again for the friends he has lost. I know that presumptuous youth imagines that the prudence he refuses to obey is the only good that remains after the labors of life have been terminated by time.

“Your feelings are not in unison with those of an old man. It is because you do not understand them. He lives in memory, and you in hope. You pursue a phantom, a chimera, the nothingness of which he has already experienced; you accuse him, he complains of you, and often you do not deign to regard the last bitter tear that is drawn from him at the sight of the tomb into which he must soon descend.”

“Oh!” exclaimed More, “you whom I venerate as a father and love as a friend—can you doubt for one moment the truth of a heart entirely devoted to you? Confirmed by your example, guided and sustained by your counsels, what have I to fear? Banish from your mind these sad presentiments. Why should this dread of the future, that perhaps after all is only chimerical, destroy the extreme happiness I enjoy in seeing you?”

For a long time they continued to converse, until the light of early morning at length succeeded the uncertain glimmer of the candle, now flickering in its socket.

“My friend, I must leave you,” said Rochester. “The day already dawns. God grant the sun may not this morning arise on the beginning of your misfortunes!”

“Oh! no,” replied More, “this is my fête to-day. S. Thomas will pray for and protect us.”

The good bishop then descended to the courtyard and mounted his mule; but More, unwilling to give him up, walked on by his side as far as the road followed the course of the river. When they reached[352] the cross-road where the bishop turned off, More shook his hand and bade him farewell.

A great wooden cross stood near the roadside, on which was suspended a wreath of withered leaves; and More, seating himself on one of the stone steps upon which the cross was elevated, followed the good bishop with his eyes until he had disappeared in the distance.

He then rested his head sadly on his hands, and recalled to mind all this venerable friend had said to him.

“He is right!” he mentally exclaimed. “How clear-sighted his friendship renders him! Into what a sea of agitation, malignity, and hatred I shall be plunged! And all for what? In order that I may be lord chancellor of the kingdom through which this road passes. Behold, then, beside the highway,” he added, looking around him, “my lord the great high chancellor, shivering in the cold morning air just as any other man would do who had gone out at this hour without putting on his cloak!… Yes, I can understand how social distinctions might cause us to scorn other men, if they exempted us from the inconveniences of life. We might then perhaps believe that we had different natures. But let us change our garments, and we fall at once, and are immediately confounded with the common herd.”

While making these sad reflections upon the follies of human nature, More arose and returned to the house, where his wife and children and his aged father—simple and peaceable old man, happy in the favor of the king and the virtues of his son—were all wrapped in profound slumber.

In a spacious apartment, of which the dark and worm-eaten ceiling, ragged tapestry, and dilapidated windows presented the appearance of a desolate and abandoned edifice, a fragment of broken furniture still remained, upon which was placed a small piece of bread. Numberless crumbs strewed the dusty floor and were eagerly devoured by a little mouse, but recently the only inhabitant of the place. To-day, however, he had the company of a man whose extraordinary mind had conceived vast projects and executed great and useful enterprises—the Archbishop of York, Cardinal Wolsey. Seated upon the edge of a wooden stool which he had placed in the embrasure of a window, he held his hands crossed one upon the other, and bitterly reflected upon his unhappy destiny. Regrets, of which he felt all the impotency, pressed upon his agitated soul. It seemed to him that he still heard the cries and menaces of the furious populace that exulted in his distress, and to which perhaps, alas! he would again be subjected. At one time filled with courage and resolution, at another humble and cast down, the anxieties of his mind seemed wholly without measure. His eyes, wearied with straying listlessly over the plain which extended before him, beheld only a single laborer ploughing the field. “Man is small,” said he, “in presence of immensity; the point which he forms in space is imperceptible. Entire generations have passed away, have gathered the fruits of the earth, and now sleep in their native dust. My name has been unknown to them. Millions of creatures suffer, where I exist free from pain. Coming up from the lowest ranks of society, I have endeavored to elevate myself above them. And[353] what has my existence signified to them? Has not each one considered himself the common centre around which all the others must revolve?”

Here Wolsey, impelled by extreme hunger, approached the little worm-eaten table, and took up the morsel of dry bread left from his repast the evening before.

Just as he was raising it to his mouth a man entered, dressed in the most scrupulous manner, and enveloped in an ample cloak of the finest material.

“What! Arundel,” he exclaimed at last, “what could have brought you to this place?”

“Yourself,” replied Arundel, in a frank, abrupt manner. “You have lost everything, and have never informed me by a word! Do you think, then, I have forgotten all you have done for me?”

“The favors I have conferred on you were so slight,” replied Wolsey, “that it would have been natural you should have no longer remembered them, especially since many who owe their wealth, and perhaps their lives, to me have so completely forgotten it.”

“I have never learned how to flatter nor to wear velvet gloves,” replied Arundel; “but I am still more ignorant of the art of forgetting past favors. No, it has never been my custom to act thus; and you have offended me more than you imagine by proving you believed me capable of such baseness.”

As he said this, Arundel took from his bosom an immense purse of red satin, filled with gold, and laid it on the dilapidated table beside a package of clothing which he had thoughtfully added to his gift.

“There are no acknowledgments to be made,” he remarked; “it is essential first of all that you be made comfortable. You can return this when it suits your convenience. Now let us say no more about it.”

“Alas!” cried Wolsey, “are you not aware, then, that I may never be able to return it? They will divide my ecclesiastical benefices among them. The Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Wiltshire have already been put in possession of the revenue from my bishopric of Winchester. This is the only food I have had since I came here,” he added, showing him the bread he still held in his hand.

“Indeed! It is not very delicate,” replied Arundel; “but it is your own fault. When one has friends, he should not neglect them, and that is just what you have done.”

“Misfortune often renders us unjust,” answered the cardinal, deeply moved by the generous frankness and brusque proceedings of Arundel, whom he had always, until now, regarded as being haughty and ungrateful, because he had never observed him among his crowd of fawning courtiers. “I must confess that I could not endure the thought of being repulsed by those for whom I have done everything. I do not believe that among the immense number of those who daily wearied me with protestations of their ostentatious regard there is to-day one who has condescended to think of me in my misfortunes. You only have thought to succor me in my distress—you, who, without my being aware of it, have doubtless been all the while the most sincere among them all.”

“I cannot believe,” replied Arundel, without appearing to notice the acknowledgments with which Wolsey continued to overwhelm him, “that they would all thus[354] have abandoned you had they known the extreme severity with which you have been treated; it would be too foul a blot upon the name of humanity. Notwithstanding they laugh at our misfortunes, I think it appears worse to us than it really is. No, be assured you will find some faithful friends who will defend you. For instance, Sir Thomas More, your successor, whose fortune you have made, cannot fail to use his influence in your favor.”

“More owes me nothing,” replied the cardinal. “I have not made his fortune; when I proposed him to the king as Treasurer of the Exchequer, he had for a long time been acquainted with his rare merits. Knowing that the appointment would prove both useful and agreeable to the king, I recommended him to make it; but really it was more for the king’s benefit than More’s. Besides, I am aware that More is one of the most zealous partisans of Catherine. Thus, you see, there exists no reason why he should feel inclined to assist me. I am only surprised that a man of his exalted integrity should accept a position where he will necessarily be compelled to act in opposition to his convictions.”

“It is with the eager desire of ultimately being able to convert all the world and to correct all consciences,” replied Arundel with a smile of derision; for he never lost an occasion of ridiculing the importance which many attach to political intrigues, and, as they say, to the public good, in whose management they pretend to take a hand, in order to win admiration at any cost for their talents. “And verily, he will find it difficult to sustain his position, unless he becomes the very humble servant of my Lady Anne, regent of the kingdom; for nothing is done but what she ordains, and her uncle, whom she has appointed chief of the council, executes the orders which the king claims the honor of communicating to him. Oh!” continued Arundel in the same ironical tone, and without perceiving the painful effect his words produced on the unhappy cardinal, “truly it is a very great advantage, and above all highly honorable for England, to see her king put in tutelage to the caprices of a woman as weak and vain as she is arrogant. If he was absolutely determined to go into leading-strings, why did he not beseech the good Queen Catherine to take charge of him? She, at least, would have been careful to hold the reins equally on both sides, so that the swaddling could have been made to walk straight.”

“Hold, my dear lord,” continued Arundel; “it cannot be denied that you have made a great mistake in encouraging the king in his divorce project—yes, a great mistake, which they now begin to discover. But I do wrong, perhaps, to reproach you, since you are the first to be punished for your manner of seeing things. But listen to me; as for myself, if, in order to avoid dying of starvation, or being compelled to subsist on just such bread as you have there, I had been obliged to accept the place of lord chancellor, on the day when I found myself relieved of so burdensome and exacting an office I should have cried aloud: ‘Thank heaven that I am again seated by my own fireside, where in peace and quiet I can get up at my leisure and contemplate passing events.’ For myself, these are my principles: to have nothing to do is the first essential to happiness;[355] nothing to lose, the second; nothing to disturb or annoy, the third; and upon these rest all the others. Such is my system—the best of all systems, the only.…”

Arundel would have still continued explaining the numerous theories he had originated for securing happiness for an indefinite length of time, perhaps, but he suddenly perceived that Wolsey no longer heard him, but, with his head sunk on his breast, seemed absorbed in thought.

“Well, my lord,” said Arundel, “you are not listening to me, it seems? Really, it is not worth while to explain to you the true method of being happy.”

“Ah! my dear Arundel,” replied Wolsey, aroused by the exclamation of his visitor, “how could you expect me to think of profiting by your lessons, or to make an application of your theories of happiness, when at this very moment, perhaps, I have been condemned to death by Parliament?”

“There is no proof of that,” replied Arundel. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil—gloomy apprehensions profit us nothing; they do not delay the progress of events; on the contrary, they send them on us in advance, and only serve to aggravate the consequences. Moreover, I must not forget to suggest that if it would be more agreeable for you to be with your friends, there are many who will be happy to receive you, and offer you a mansion as commodious, although less sumptuously furnished, than your palace of York or that of Hampton Court, the latter of which I have never liked since you added the gallery.”

“What is that gallery to me now? I surrender it up to you,” said the cardinal.

The endless arguments of Arundel began to weary him exceedingly. In spite of the extreme gratitude he felt for his sincere and generous offers, Wolsey could not divest himself of the conviction that Arundel belonged to that class who, while in other respects full of good impulses and laudable intentions, are so entirely wanting in tact and delicacy, and contend so urgently for their own opinions, that the consolations they would force you to adopt, far from alleviating your sufferings, only augment them and render their sympathy irksome and oppressive. This feeling was experienced by Wolsey, uncertain as he was what fate was reserved for him, trembling even for his life, while Arundel endeavored to paint for him a minute picture of the happiness and tranquillity enjoyed by a man living in peace and quiet, with nothing to disturb him in the enjoyment of his possessions.

“Alas!” he exclaimed at length impatiently, “why has not kind Providence blessed me with a nature like yours? I should be less unhappy, nor every instant see yawning before me the terrible depths of the precipice on which I now stand. I could catch, at least, at the branches of absurdity, until the moment when I should be dashed to pieces! But no, I cannot; I am too well acquainted with men and things to expect the slightest assistance. They are always ready to strike those who are falling, but never attempt to raise them up. Yesterday, only yesterday, the commissioners of Parliament demanded of me the letters-patent I had received from the king in order to exercise my authority as legate, although every one knew that, as he had given them to me, it was[356] his right alone to take them away again. Ah! well, they have persisted in their demand, and have refused to believe me on oath! No, I will indulge in no more illusions; my enemies have sworn my death, and they will obtain it! And the king, the king my master, after fifteen years of the most faithful service, he delivers me up, helpless and defenceless, to all the cruelties their hatred may inspire; and yet you, Arundel, think that I should still indulge in hope?”

“But all this will be arranged, I tell you,” replied Arundel with an imperturbable coolness. “You should not trouble yourself in advance, because, if the worst should happen, it will change nothing; and if it does not, your present suffering will have been needless.”

He came from London, where he had been, he said, to defend Wolsey before the Parliament.

On seeing him enter the cardinal was seized with an uncontrollable alarm, thinking his fate had been decided.

“Ah!” replied Cromwell, “you should not thus give way to your apprehensions, although.…” He paused on seeing the cardinal grow deadly pale. “You need have no uneasiness, because the king has sent Norris to bid me assure you he would take you under his protection.”

“I have been condemned, then!” cried the unhappy Wolsey. “Speak, Cromwell, speak; conceal nothing from me. I am not a child,” he added with firmness.

“You have been condemned by the Star Chamber, but the king says he will have the bill rejected in the House of Commons,” replied Cromwell.

“He will not do it!” cried Wolsey, the tears coursing rapidly down his cheeks. “He will sacrifice me, Cromwell, I know it; he has no longer any use for me, and my past services have left no impression on his mind. But how far has their rage carried them? To what have they condemned me?”

“You have been placed beyond the protection of the king, and all your property confiscated.”

“The king’s protection is already recovered,” gently interrupted Arundel, who had listened until this time in silence. “As for the confiscation, that will be more difficult, inasmuch as they are generally more ready to take than to give. However, my dear cardinal, you should despair of nothing; then let us try and console you. They cannot confiscate me, who have never had anything to do with the gentlemen of the council. I have a good house, an excellent cook; you will come home with me, and, my word for it, you shall want for nothing.”

“Arundel,” interrupted the cardinal, “I am deeply grateful for your kind offer; but believe me, they will not leave me the choice of profiting by it.”

“Why not? why not?” exclaimed Arundel. “The devil! Why, these gentlemen of the council are not wild beasts! A little avaricious, a little ambitious, a little envious, and slightly selfish, but they are at least as accommodating as the devil!”

“I assure you, before receiving the king’s message,” said Cromwell, “I was in despair, for they spoke of having you arrested and immediately urging the accusation of high[357] treason; but since the king has declared you under his protection, I do not believe that all is entirely lost. Norris has repeated to me twenty times: ‘Say positively to the cardinal that the king advises him not to be troubled, and to remember that he can give him, any moment he pleases, far more than they can take away.’”

“I hope I may be mistaken, dear Cromwell,” replied the cardinal with a sombre air; “but I fear a momentary compassion only has excited the king to say what you tell me, and it will not be long before that wicked night-bird [140] will again have possession of his ear. She will not fail to use her influence in defaming me and blackening anew all my actions, until the king will cease to oppose the wicked designs they have conceived against me.”

Saying this, he buried his face in his hands and sank into a state of despondency impossible to describe.

Cromwell made no reply, and Arundel silently took his leave, inwardly congratulating himself, as he returned home, upon the tranquil and happy life he knew so well how to lead, and censuring those who would not imitate his example; without once reflecting that few were in a position so agreeable or independent as his, and consequently were not able to enjoy themselves equally nor after his own deliberate fashion.

SINE LABE CONCEPTA

VILLAGE LIFE IN NEW HAMPSHIRE.

“I think I shall start for New Hampshire to-morrow,” I said. “Do you know anything about L——, in Cheshire County?”

Jones, who had been meditatively examining the coloring of a richly-tinted meerschaum, sat up erect at this question, with a sudden access of vigor.

“L——?” he said. “By George! there’s where Agnes Cortland lives now in the summer.”

It was the middle week of July. Aspirations for one whiff of the breeze among the hills had become irresistible. We were sitting together, Jones and I, in my room up-town after luncheon. Jones was a young New York artist in his first season after his return from Italy the previous autumn. He, too, was about to start on a sketching tour through Vermont, in which State his people lived. He was late leaving town, but money was not easy with him—a handsome young fellow of that golden age between twenty-three and twenty-four, when one is apt to think he needs only a very short-handled lever to move the world. He was of medium height, but squarely and powerfully built; with a face good-natured, but very resolute, in expression. A stranger would not be likely to take a liberty with him. I had a strong notion that Jones would make a better soldier than artist, if there were any question of blows being struck for the country, which happily there is not. But hitherto I had shrewdly kept that opinion to myself. Considerably older than he was, and engaged in another occupation, circumstances had thrown us a good deal together. Intimacy had brought confidence, and confidence, at his age, meant—nothing more nor less than it always does under such circumstances—the unbosoming of his love affairs. How few there are who have not found themselves in the same position, either as actors or sympathetic chorus, or in time as both! What countless dramas of passion are continually being put upon the private stage before this limited audience!

Now, it is not the purpose of this paper to pursue the history of Jones’ captivity at the hands of the tender goddess through all the infinitesimal and transcendental chapters a first romance runs into. More placid emotions and observations, befitting the serenity of approaching middle age, are in store for the reader. And in fact the history of Jones’ passion is still incomplete. But so much of it may be given as fell within the purview of our New Hampshire observations.

Jones was poor—prosaic fact, which robs life of so many compensations as we grow old. But at twenty-three we spurn the mastery of the glittering dross—that is, if Congress gives us any to spurn! Let us say rather of the flimsy paper. At that age of our flowing life we coin money at our own mint; or, more truly, draw limitless drafts on the Bank of the Future. Happy the man who[359] meets them when they fall due! Jones, at least, had no doubts as to his future solvency. But his plans were vague—very!

Agnes Cortland was the daughter of a railroad director—or two or three directors rolled into one—and had the world, or at least the New York world, to choose from. Poor Jones! his story might almost be predicted from the start. Yet this inheritor of the (latent) genius of any half-dozen masters, ancient or modern, you choose to name, believed, perhaps with some reason, that this daughter of Dives liked him; and as for himself, he vowed with hyperbole that he adored her. They had frequently met—their families then being neighbors in the country—before he went to Italy, where he had spent two years studying and wandering about. No avowal of affection had been made between them, but he had gone away with the consciousness many little signs and tokens give that he was not disliked. Since his return a year ago some meetings had taken place—at rarer intervals—in society. At an evening party some months before she had given him, he said, a slight but unmistakable opportunity of declaring himself, if he had wished to do so.

“But I did not take it,” said Jones, who, spite of his being in love, was as manly a young fellow as one could meet. “She knows I am poor; and I don’t want to be thought a fortune-hunter.”

“My dear fellow,” I said, “you fly at high game. But I should not let the auri sacra fames interfere, one way or the other, with my tender emotions. If I did so at all, Plutus would have his due weight in the scale, believe me!”

“What would you do?” said Jones. This was in one of those “tobacco parliaments” in early spring—if so they might be called, where one, only, smoked, and the other looked on with sympathy; for I had abandoned the “weed” some years before—hardly of such profundity, nor yet so silent, as those Mr. Carlyle speaks of. Jones had recurred to his usual topic of hopes and perplexities.

“Do?” I answered, looking at him retrospectively, as it were, as if contemplating my own departed youth, as he sat there in his favorite attitude after dinner, gracefully balancing one leg over the arm of my chintz-covered easy-chair, while I was stretched out on the sofa. “Ah! that is an easy question to propound, but not so easy to answer. At your age I should not think you would need much prompting. But if you ask me, I would say, leave it alone! Love is a luxury for the rich or the evenly-mated poor. But you are not likely to take that advice. A good deal would depend on the reinforcements she might bring to the struggle. A woman is not always a passive instrument in those affairs, but sometimes has a will of her own. I have never seen your fair one, and know nothing about her. But if she be a girl of some strength of character, and her love do not prove a mere school-girl’s fancy, she might possibly gain her father’s consent. But it is not a promising adventure, at the best; and I would not recommend you to embark your hopes in it. Keep clear of serious entanglements until you see your way before you. Above all, avoid anything like a clandestine engagement. It will not add to your happiness or hers. I don’t suppose you will think this[360] a very encouraging opinion. But there may be circumstances in your favor I know nothing of. Marry her, if you can, and can get the father’s consent; and go into “railroading” with him in his office. You will make more money at that than you are ever likely to do sticking little dabs of color on a piece of canvas.”

I saw Jones wince at this mercenary view of his art. But he bore it like a man, and continued silent. The suggestion of such a change of vocation did not appear to surprise him, though it was plain no active intention of throwing up his art had yet entered his mind. The fact is, Jones is one of those young men—not inconsiderable in numbers in the profession—who “have a studio,” but are not likely ever to send many master-pieces out of it. Developing some precocious talent for drawing when they are boys, and seizing with boyish eagerness upon the suggestion of being “an artist,” they are offered by fond but undiscerning parents upon the altar of art. But they never advance beyond a mechanical dexterity in putting conventional scenes upon canvas. They haven’t a spark of that genius that is often observed where other pursuits have prevented a devotion to the profession. Eventually they abandon altogether the study or practice of their art, or sink into drudges for the picture or chromo dealers, or grind out a living as drawing-masters, or—Heaven knows how. I will not say that Jones was altogether deficient in talent, but the talent that makes an agreeable accomplishment for the rich amateur is a different thing from that which will pay the piper or win eminence in the art. Jones painted his pictures for the autumn and spring exhibitions, and had one or two on view in one of the up-town windows. But at Du Vernet’s big sale I know that a clever little bit of coloring on which he had spent some time was knocked down to a chromo-dealer for sixteen dollars! How was he going to live on such prices? And as for marrying Agnes Cortland—it was simply preposterous to think of it. Nor is this redundancy of young native artists on whom neither genius nor fashion smiles confined to New York alone. In Boston, which is the only other city boasting of a native school of art, the same low prices prevail. It is disheartening; but a more disheartening thing still is that those prices often represented the actual value of the picture.

Jones was imperfectly educated, though his continental travel had made him a fair linguist. He certainly drew very little inspiration from the antique, for he knew next to nothing about it; nor had he much of that sympathy with the undercurrent of life, and its relations with nature, which gives significance to common things. He had a fondness for pleasure which, of course, did not contribute to his success. Yet he was one of those young fellows whom it is impossible to meet without liking. He was frank, honorable, and spirited, and had a robust shrewdness about him in dealing with men and things that made him a pleasant companion. That he would eventually choose a more active kind of life—and probably succeed in it—I was half-convinced, and my advice about “railroading,” though spoken partly in jest, was inwardly meant in good faith.

On this particular July evening on which our paper opens Jones followed up the announcement of[361] my proposed trip to L—— by expressing a wish that he were going there too, so that he might come to a definite understanding with Agnes Cortland; and the wish was soon followed by the determination to act on it.

“Then I will come back that way, and join you for a few days about the first of September. The Cortlands don’t leave there till October. We can come back to New York together.”

It would have been ungracious on my part to have objected to this proposal, though I had a good many doubts about its wisdom. So it happened that my little excursion to L——, which I had innocently designed to be a season of simple lotus-eating such as Mr. Tennyson ascribes to his Olympian deities, “reclined upon the hills together, careless of mankind,” was complicated by a subordinate interest in a comedy from real life which had that quiet village for a stage.

The next day I started, taking Boston en route. That staid, quiet, cleanly city seems always to be, compared with New York, like a good school-boy by the side of a big, blustering brother fonder of a street row than his books. Then to Fitchburg, where I stopped over night, as some stage travelling was to be done from our “jumping-off” place, and riding over the country roads in the morning was more promising than on a dark and cloudy night. In the morning the Fitchburg Railroad again, and one of its branches to L——. The unwonted coolness of the morning breeze, as the train entered the New Hampshire hills, already began to refresh mind and body alike. The pines and hemlocks extending back into deep, dim recesses carpeted with moss and ferns; the cattle moving slowly over the pastures in the distance; the pastures themselves stretching up the sides of the highest hills, still of the freshest green, without a hint of the yellow undertone that I watched gradually overspread them as the summer ripened into autumn; a lake in the foreground, silent, unvisited, its clear waters unpolluted by the dregs of commerce or the drainage of a vast metropolis; even the caw! caw! of the ravens flying off from the tops of the pine stumps, send a novel and delicious feeling of freedom through the breast of the city traveller who has put care and work behind him for a season. Nor is this feeling altogether evanescent. Even now, as winter approaches and the north winds from the same hills come sweeping down over the great city, sending us chattering and freezing to our cosey firesides, the glory of the July foliage moves our memory like a far-off dream of youth. Yet, after all, it may be doubted whether the charm of country scenes is not due in great part to their novelty and the feeling that we are not bound to them longer than we please. Of all that has been written in praise of country life, how much is the work of the city resident; how little, comparatively speaking, springs from the country itself! There drudgery too often takes the place of sentiment. It is the Epicurean poet, Horace, satiated with the noise of the Forum and the gossip of the baths, who sings sweetest of rural contentment, of the “lowing herds,” the “mellow fruits of autumn,” and the “brooks murmuring over stony beds.” But when he gives play to[362] his satiric vein, none pictures more truthfully than the Venusian the grumbling of the husbandman, who “turns the heavy clay with the hard plough.” Embowered in some shady arbor on the windings of the Digentia through his Sabine farm, or doing a little amateur farming, to the amusement, as he confesses, of his blunt country neighbors, who laughed at the dandy poet with a hoe in his hand, it was easy for Horace to chant the smooth and sunny side of country life. But the eight laborers on his estate, chained literally to the soil, as many a New England farmer morally is by the burden of debt or family, no doubt saw things differently. And the bailiff of his woodlands we know to have despised those “desert and inhospitable wilds,” and to have longed for the streets and shows of Rome. It is amazing upon what inattentive ears the music of our wild birds falls in a secluded farm-house. Often it seems absolutely unheard; while the clatter of the long street of the country town that the farmer visits once a month is for ever in his mind.

The carrier of the United States mail, who is at the same time the Jehu of the passenger stage, slings our impedimenta up behind with an energy to be envied by a veteran “baggage-smasher” at some of our big depots, straps it down, and jumps upon the box. We mount more slowly beside him, disdaining to be shut up in the close interior, and intent upon looking at the country we pass through this lovely morning. The two stout grays breast the hill leading to L—— Centre, eight miles distant.

The surface of the country is hilly and broken; as we approach L——, mountainous. Mounting the crest of the first steep hill, a beautiful natural panorama spreads out before us: long, narrow, intersecting lines of timber, like giant hedges, dividing the hill farms from each other. A rolling country spreads toward the east, bounded on the horizon by a low range of mountains wooded to the summit, and with a white steeple flashing out here and there among the trees at their base. The effects of light and shade, caused by the clouds on a brilliant day, on one of those white steeples, standing out solitarily against the side of a mountain eight or ten miles distant, are peculiar. Sometimes it becomes invisible, as the circle of the shadow is projected upon that area of the mountain which includes it. Then, as the dark veil moves slowly, with a sliding motion, up the side and over the crest of the mountain, the white spire flashes out from the obscure background of the forest with a sudden brilliancy. On this side patches of blue water among the trees in the hollows revealed the presence of numerous ponds, as the small lakes, and some of the large ones, are universally called in New England.

To the northwest what seemed to be a level plain from the height over which we rode, but which was in reality broken and undulating ground, stretched beneath us for ten or twelve miles to the base of Mt. Monadnock. The mountain, grand, massive, and still veiled by a thin mist, rose boldly from the low country at its foot to a height of nearly four thousand feet.

A ride of an hour and a half brought us to the top of the hill on the side of which stands L——. A dozen scattered houses flank the[363] broad village green, and a Congregational meeting-house, with white belfry tower and green blinds, stands half-way down the incline.

The post-office and country store combined is at the cross-roads as you drive down the hill, and some ancient elms on the green seem to nod at the stranger with a friendly air as he enters the village. “Here,” said I to myself, “is rural quiet and simplicity. Farewell for many slumberous weeks the busy haunts of men.” L—— is quite out of the beaten track of summer travel, and had been recommended me by a friend who had spent some seasons there, on the ground of economy, charming scenery, good fishing, and repose. Nor did I find any reason to regret having listened to him. A country tavern offers entertainment to man and beast, and is resorted to by the drummers and sample men who invade L——, as elsewhere, with their goods. But I was not forced to be dependent on it, as a letter from my friend opened to me the hospitable doors of the comfortable farm-house where he had boarded two years before.

Here let it be said at the outset that whatever the other drawbacks of village life in New Hampshire, there is among the farming class a natural courtesy, and, among the women, even an inherited refinement of manner, especially in their treatment of strangers, which speaks well for the native stock. Prejudices there are among both men and women—deep-rooted, as we shall see—and narrow-minded opinions in plenty; but even these are concealed where to manifest them might give offence. The family in which I was domiciled consisted of Mr. Allen and his wife, their married daughter—who, together with her husband, resided with them—an unmarried daughter, and a pretty little girl, the grandchild. Mr. Allen kept a country store—for L—— boasted of two—and traded also in cattle with Canada, making a journey sometimes as far as Montreal in the spring to buy stock, which he fattened on his pastures through the summer and autumn, and sold in the early part of the winter. These various ventures, which were on the whole successful—as the command of a little ready money enabled him to take his time and buy and sell to advantage—had made him more “forehanded” than most of his neighbors. He was one of the selectmen of L——. His dwelling-house, a large, white, well-kept two-story edifice, with a garden-plot facing the village street, a piazza on the sunny side, and two beautiful maples dividing the carriage yard from the road, was one of the handsomest in L——. Mrs. Allen was one of those energetic housewives whose sound sense and domestic capacity had evidently contributed not a little to her husband’s present prosperity.

They were a sturdy couple, intelligent, honest, and knowing what was due to themselves and others; now going down the hill together with mutual dependence and confidence in each other. I consider them a good example of the best type of the New Hampshire farming class.

The married daughter did not compare favorably with the mother. One could not say of her in any sense:

for, as to the question of female beauty, I will not say, as far as my observations extend, that the New Hampshire, or indeed the New England[364] women generally, outside the radius of Boston and some of the large towns, are very generously endowed by nature with that gracious but dangerous gift. The lines of the face are too strongly marked; they are sallow, the form angular; or, where the figure is fuller, it is apt to be as redundant as the old Flemish painters make the women at a village fair.

But this absence of feminine beauty is not universal. I have seen a young mother with her babe in her lap—a visitor sitting in Mrs. Allen’s parlor—who made a picture of beautiful maternity as dignified and simple as Murillo ever painted. As for that more lasting moral beauty which, where it is feminine, puts on its most delightful and engaging charm, Mrs. Harley, the married daughter, was too much engaged with her own little cares and gossip—poor woman!—to think much of so intangible a possession. Brought up, probably, in habits of more leisure and pleasure-seeking than her mother, who still took all the household work upon herself, she was a victim of ennui and of that blight of too many American homes—only one child to care for. Her health was delicate and uncertain, and she bade fair to sink eventually into that class of invalid wives which forms such an unhappily large percentage of American women. How often have I heard her complain of the dreadful dulness of the day! “But,” I asked, “what will you do in the winter, if you find the summer so unbearable?” Her answer was that they generally enjoyed themselves enough in the summer-time to be able to get through the winter. I don’t know whether this was a covert thrust at my lack of entertaining power; but I laughed at the stroke of satire at my expense, innocent or intended. That long dreary, snow-shrouded New Hampshire winter—it demanded indeed a stout heart to face it in one of those isolated villages. Mrs. Harley had given up her music when she married; the piano stood idle in the best room. She read nothing—unless looking at the fashion-plates in a ladies’ magazine be considered reading. A Sunday-school picnic, a day’s shopping in the nearest country town, were white days in her calendar. Is such a picture of life cheerless? Yet too many women are forced to endure it elsewhere. Happy they if the abounding resources of the faith and its literature come to their aid! Mrs. Harley was a kind woman withal, if her attention were drawn for a moment from herself; and an affectionate and anxious wife. This and her love for her child—fretful and over-indulgent as the latter sentiment was apt to be—were her redeeming qualities. Placed in a large city, with means equal in proportion to those within her reach in L——, she would have made a more agreeable woman, and would have been tenfold happier herself. The influence of semi-solitary life—where a religious vocation does not exalt and sanctify it—is more unfavorable in its effects upon women than upon men. The latter commonly have work to do which keeps their faculties from rusting. Woman’s nature is essentially social.

Mr. Harley assisted his father-in-law in the store—a tall, handsome young man with a city air, who, at that season, sat in the store the whole afternoon with perhaps one customer. Such a life for youth, with its superabundant energies ready to pour like a torrent[365] into any channel, is stagnation. The highest of man’s natural powers rust and decay. But natural forces have their sway in the great majority of such cases, and force an outlet for themselves. The youth of these villages leave their homes for the great cities, or take Horace Greeley’s advice and “go West.” Life is hard, and it is monotonous, which adds a new slavery to hardship. The exodus is constant. L—— has less population and fewer inhabited houses now than it had forty years ago. The same is true of other villages—a striking fact in a comparatively new country. One rambles along some by-road overgrown with grass, and presently comes upon a deserted and ruined house and barn, the rafters only standing, or perhaps nothing more than a heap of bricks in the cellar. He asks about the people, and is told that they have “gone away.” The answer is vague and uncertain as their fate. I spoke to an old man of eighty-seven, seated in the shade on the long bench before the country store, where he could hear the news in the morning. He remembered with distinctness the events of the war of 1812. He spoke with regret of the flourishing times of his youth in L—— and its dulness to-day. This roving disposition of the American youth is the result of immense elbow-room, and has been providential in building up new States and subduing the virgin wilderness. The manufacturing cities of New Hampshire also gain yearly at the expense of the small villages. The township—or town, as it is most commonly called—embraces three or four of such villages, and is subject to the same reciprocal movement. Comparatively few new farms have been broken in during the last twenty or thirty years; and too rarely it happens on the old farms that fresh ground is taken in from the pasture for cultivation. The son tills what his father or grandfather cleared.

The first few days in L—— I spent rambling about the pastures—some of them literally red with the raspberry, which, though it has not the delicacy or fragrance of the wild strawberry, is not to be disdained by the city palate—or climbing to the tops of the highest neighboring hills. What a sense of elastic joy and freedom to me, who had not spent a summer in the country for three years, to lie stretched at full length on the top of a new-mown hill, and let the eye wander over the valley beneath, with its intervening woods and ponds, till it rested upon the distant mountains, the cloud-shadows chasing each other over their sides and summits! If this were not in truth an Arcadia to those who lived and died there, and were buried in the white-stoned churchyard among the elms—if to them life brought its cares, its jealousies, and sorrows—to the stranger who sought nothing more than to enjoy its natural beauties it renewed all the associations of rural happiness and simplicity. Not that one might hope to see a Corydon and Phillis issue from the New Hampshire woods—for there is a sternness among those northern scenes, even in the brightest bloom of summer, foreign to the poetry of the South—but that in its dark pine groves and on its windy hills fancy might picture an eclogue or a romance not less sweet and tender because more real.

L—— is on the height of land between the valleys of the Connecticut and Merrimac, between twenty[366] and thirty miles distant from each. It is from one thousand to one thousand three hundred feet above the sea level. It is said of the rain that falls on the roof of the village church that part of it eventually runs into the Connecticut, part into the Merrimac, so evenly does its roof-tree divide the water-shed of those rivers. But as the same story is told of other churches in the central belt of Cheshire County, it may be regarded rather in the light of a rhetorical illustration than as a fact of physical geography. The scenery is not of the grand or sublime order to be seen further north among the White Mountains, except where Mt. Monadnock raises its dark and solemn front above the surrounding landscape; but it is beautiful and picturesque. Its greatest charm is its variety. In the morning, when the sun was well towards the zenith—for the fresh air of those hills made the day at all hours delightful—I would stroll out over the pastures to a hill a quarter of a mile distant from the farm-house. There would I seat myself, protected from the sun’s ardent rays, under a young maple bush, the elastic branches of which, with the sloping ground thick with ferns, made a natural easy-chair. The valley is below me, the farms stretch along the nearer hills, and in the further distance the blue-veiled mountains define the skyline. I bend down a branch of the maple, and before me is the upper half of Mt. Monadnock, a thin gray mist still enveloping it. The base of the mountain is hidden by an intervening hill. Leaving this pasture, and walking a few hundred rods further on, I enter a field where the hay has just been cut, and which is now as smooth as a croquet lawn, but not so level; for it is the crest of one of the highest hills. Here a new scene awaits me. To the north and west the hill has the shape almost of a perfect dome. Stretched on the top, I cannot see the declivities of the sides, but only the tops of the trees at some distance. One has the sensation of being on the roof of a high building with a deep drop between him and the surrounding country. The view is superb. The whole mass of Mt. Monadnock, from its base to the highest elevation, rises from the valley ten miles distant. At its foot is the village of West Jaffrey, a fashionable watering place. The white spire of the church is conspicuous among the trees. Further south is Gap Mountain and Attleborough Mountain; and sweeping round to the east, the view stretches along the New Ipswich Mountains to Watatick Hill. The circuit extends about twenty or thirty miles, making a picture of great natural beauty. The English hay, as the timothy and red clover are generally called, was still standing in many of the fields, but here and there the whirr of the mowing-machine could be heard, and the eye, following the direction of the sound, could discern the mower in his shirt-sleeves driving his pair of horses in the distant field. The meadow-grass of the lowlands was still in most places untouched. On the sides of the hills the scattered fields of wheat, barley, and oats, still green, made darker patches of verdure on the yellowish ground-color.

But the view I most preferred was from a hill a little to the south of the village near some deserted buildings. Here the scene was wilder and more extensive. To the west Mt. Monadnock could be[367] seen through a gorge between two hills; to the east was a wild and broken country; while to the south the woods seemed to extend as far as the eye could reach, and over the furthest range of hills the great dome of Mt. Wachusett in Massachusetts, nearly thirty miles distant, was plainly seen, gray and massive, with the naked eye. It was only when one turned to Mt. Monadnock, ten miles distant, and observed how plainly he could distinguish the different colors of the mountain—the dark woods, the brown, bare surfaces, and the slate-colored rocks—that, looking at Mt. Wachusett, and noting its uniform pale gray outline, he was able to estimate the real distance of the latter, so comparatively close at hand did it appear.

Seated at ease on the smooth turf on the summit of this “heaven-kissing” hill, and looking at this wide and beautiful prospect, one might repeat to himself Mr. Longfellow’s lines:

But descriptions of natural scenery, if long continued, are wearisome. Even a Ruskin is read best in snatches. The mind otherwise becomes clogged with images. Let us return, therefore, to animated life.

As Sunday approached, I made inquiries about the nearest Catholic church. I found it was at W——, eight or nine miles distant. I had no means of getting there the first Sunday. I retired to my room and read some chapters of that sublime and affecting work, the Imitation of Christ, the gift of a good and beloved mother.

A Catholic is still almost a being from another moral world in some of the isolated New Hampshire villages. Nowhere are the traditions of Puritanism more zealously or rigidly maintained. These good folk seem hardly yet to have emerged from a fog of wild amazement that “popish” priests and their followers should be tolerated by the selectmen. Not that any overt or offensive change of manner follows the announcement that one is a Catholic—as I have elsewhere said, there is a natural or inherited vein of good manners among the people that forbids it—but a momentary silence reveals to the speaker that he has stated something strange and unlooked for. There is an unmistakable tone of intolerance manifest, however, in any allusion to the poorer class of Irish and French that congregate in the larger towns, and are sometimes found in the villages in a wooden-ware factory, or cutting wood or hemlock-bark, or doing an odd job of haymaking. They are looked upon with dislike and distrust, mixed with a feeling of contempt. Curious it is that the native-born New Englander, with his mind saturated with hereditary theories of personal liberty, equality, and fraternity, should yet evince a more unconquerable aversion to the foreign element, which has contributed so largely to the greatness of the country, than is shown in European countries to men of a different race, unless war has temporarily embittered national feeling. Yet the explanation is not hard to find. This descendant of the Puritan, chained to the rocky and ungrateful soil his forefathers won from the Indians and the wilderness, sees with sullen[368] indignation and jealousy the same rights and privileges which he enjoys under our free institutions extended so largely to those of a different nationality and religion. In revenge he draws himself more jealously into his shell. Nor is this feeling confined to the rich and refined; it penetrates the mass of the native-born New England population.

To speak of lighter things. Society in L—— is eminently aristocratic. Better, perhaps, it would be to say that the lines of society are very strongly marked, and that the aristocratic element is essentially conservative.

Mrs. Cortland, the wife of the New York capitalist, who resides there three months in the summer, a stout, refined, tight-gloved, graciously condescending lady, gives a metropolitan tone to L—— society. Mr. Cortland, an easy-going, easy-tempered man in private life, but reported to be hard as flint in business matters, seldom finds time to leave New York, and his visits to L—— are uncertain. His country house, a large, handsome mansion with well-kept grounds, croquet-lawn, coach-house, and stables, is on the highest ground in the village; and Mrs. Cortland occupies without dispute the highest ground socially. It is an imperial elevation, after the manner of the saying attributed to Cæsar. A call on Mrs. Cortland is the event of a week, and a return call from her is a matter not to be lightly treated. How have I seen this good Mrs. Allen, my landlady, prepare her best room for the grand occasion, and Mrs. Harley speculate about it with well-assumed indifference a whole afternoon. One or two other magnates from Boston, scattered through L—— and adjacent townships, save Mrs. Cortland from complete exhaustion by contact with the village people during the summer.

Then there is the local aristocracy, consisting of the wife of the Congregational pastor ex-officio, and Mrs. Parsons, the wife of “Squire” Parsons, who owns a small bucket-factory near L——. These two ladies maintain a strict alliance, offensive and defensive, with Mrs. Cortland during the summer. Then come the middle classes, comprising Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Harley, the young doctor’s wife—a stranger and somewhat snubbed by the autochthonous élite—and the well-to-do farmers’ wives. Finally, we have the profanum vulgus, the tail of L—— society, or, to speak more correctly, those whom society does not recognize—some farmers’ wives whose husbands were too much in debt to allow them to keep up appearances; one or two hapless women who sold milk in a wagon to the neighboring towns, and drove the wagon themselves; and the village washerwoman, who went around doing “chores.” I think I have exhausted the classification of the social strata of L——. I observed that the men eschewed as much as possible the aristocratic distinctions made by their wives, and were apt to resent by silence or the assumption of an unwonted bluntness the empty airs and loud voice with which some vulgar rich man from a neighboring large town would sometimes stride through the village.

Wanderers and waifs, destined apparently to be at some time drawn into the great caldron of city life—perhaps to their own destruction—were not wanting in L——. I have said that the women were not remarkable for beauty. But there[369] was one exception. A girl belonging to one of the most destitute families in the village, by one of those whims of nature which are not uncommon, was gifted with a face and figure to attract even an unobservant eye, and which seemed out of place in that quiet and homely neighborhood. The mother, a poor, struggling woman with a growing-up family of all ages, managed to live somehow by the days’ work and occasional assistance given her by the well-to-do families. The father was living, but spent most of his time in the county jail for drunkenness. The daughter of whom I speak was about nineteen or twenty years of age; tall, of fair complexion, with a naturally elegant carriage and a proud and almost defiant air, as if she resented the caprice of fortune which had placed her in that lowly station. She had the art of dressing well with limited means, which some women possess to the envy of others. On Sundays and at picnics she outshone the more expensively-dressed daughters of the farmers. She had been, and perhaps still is, the maid at the village inn. It may be imagined that gossip was not idle about this poor girl, thus singularly placed and dangerously gifted. Dreadful quarrels had taken place between the father and mother about the girl’s staying at the hotel; the drunken father, with a true sense of what was becoming, insisting that she should leave, the mother as strenuously maintaining that she should remain. The beauty of the girl herself was not of that domestic type I have elsewhere noticed in the mother and her babe I saw in Mrs. Allen’s parlor, but of that showy, restless, naturally haughty stamp which presaged storm, perhaps disaster. It is this class misfortune follows and the great cities sweep into their net. Poverty often makes vice of that which, under happier fortunes, might have been attractive virtue. Absit omen. May this rustic beauty find a happier, if more homely, destiny as the wife of some honest farmer in L——!

The summer passed, week after week. I fished, I walked, I rode, I read, I loitered. The barley ripened on the hill behind the farm-house, and a golden tint began to spread over the distant fields. The apples grew large and ruddy on one side where the sun struck the laden branch in the orchard. The tassels of the corn showed purple. August blazed. The doves flew thirstily to the large blue pump, and perched on the edges of the horse-trough after the farmer watered his horse at mid-day. The bees hummed three at a time in the big yellow cups of the squash-vines. Have you ever observed of that homely vegetable how ingeniously and dexterously it fastens its daring and aggressive vines to the ground as it shoots out over the close-cut grass? Stoop down among the after-math, or rowen, as it is called in New Hampshire, and you will see that at the inosculation of each successive joint of the vine, where it throws out its tendrils and blossoms, it also thrusts forth slender, white, curling ligaments that twist, each of them, tightly around a tiny tuft of the short grass. Thus it moors itself, as if by so many delicate living cables, to the bosom of the life-giving earth.

I might, if space allowed, tell of my fishing ventures, and how one glorious morning we rode out of L—— in a big yellow wagon with three horses—a party of seven of us, ladies and gentlemen, from[370] the village—to make the ascent of Mt. Monadnock. This is the lion of all the country round. Parties are made up every week to climb its rugged summit. Over the hills and rolling ground we gaily rattled. Through the sandy country roads, where the branches of the trees met overhead and made dim aisles of verdure, we smoothly sped. And then what panting, laughing, climbing, shrill screaming, as we toiled up the winding path from the half-way house to the top of the mountain! What a magnificent, boundless view repaid us! The day was clear. To the north, Mt. Kearsarge and rolling ranges of mountains; to the southeast, a diversified surface of country spreading onwards far as the eye could reach towards the unseen ocean; to the south, Mt. Wachusett; below us woods, valleys, and lakes. A feeling of awe creeps over one in these mountain solitudes.

As to the fishing, I will confess that to me, who had thrown a fly over more than one Canadian river, and had killed my twenty-pound salmon on the Nipisiquit, loafing with a pole in a boat over a lily-covered pond for a half-pound pickerel was not tremendously exciting sport. But what mattered it? The mornings were soft and wooing; the woods were full of mysterious shadows; the water was limpid as if Diana and her nymphs bathed there in the spectral moonlight. Life passed smoothly and agreeably. I sought no more.

The blackberries began to ripen, first one by one and then in sable clusters, in the pastures. The days were growing shorter. The twilight sank more quickly into night. September approached, and I began to look for the appearance of my friend Jones. I had seen Miss Cortland two or three times coming from or going to the meeting-house on Sunday mornings, when all the beauty and fashion of L—— for miles around rode up in buggies, carryalls, or open wagons; but I had never met her to be introduced to her—a little imperial beauty, with a fresh and rosy color, and a mouth shaped like Cupid’s bow, that needed only to smile to conquer.

On a bright September morning, when the surrounding atmosphere was clear as a bell, but a thin haze still clung about Mt. Monadnock and the far-off mountains, Jones rode over on the stage-coach from the railroad station and joined me at L——. He asked eagerly about Miss Cortland.

Well, I thought her pretty enough to excuse a little wildness of imagination on his part. He would be a lucky fellow if he got her and some of her father’s money or a position in his business!

“My dear Jones,” I replied, “I don’t want to appear cold-blooded, or to dash your enthusiasm for your art in the least; but, to speak candidly, I should not be surprised if you did some day under sufficient temptation—the prospect of marrying Miss Cortland, for example.”

Jones declared his intention of calling on Miss Cortland that very day. He had a sketch-book full of studies, spirited, but many of them mere hints. He came back before dinner, full of life, and proposing[371] a score of schemes for to-morrow. He made a sort of small whirlwind in my quiet life. Mrs. Cortland had received him civilly, but he thought a little coolly. But he had seen Agnes, and had spoken a few words to her that might mean much or little as they were taken, and he was happy—rather boisterously happy, perhaps, as a young fellow will be at such times—full of jokes, and refusing to see a cloud on his horizon.

Jones fell easily into our farm-house ways, though he was apt to steal off in the mornings to play croquet on the Cortlands’ lawn with Miss Cortland and Miss Parsons, and any other friend they could get to join them.

One afternoon, when the sun was getting low and a southerly wind blowing, we started to try for some fish at a pond about half an hour’s walk from the house. As we turned off the highway into a by-road covered with grass that led to the pond, I saw Miss Cortland standing on the rising ground some distance before us. She was looking from us towards the sinking sun, now veiled in quick-drifting clouds. Her dog, a large, powerful animal, a cross between a Newfoundland and Mount St. Bernard, was crouched at her feet. Some vague thoughts about Una and her lion flitted through my mind. But I was more struck by the way the light touched her figure, standing out motionless against the gray sky. It reminded me very much of the general effect of a painting by a foreign artist—Kammerer, I think it was—that I saw at the exhibition of the Boston Art Club last year. It was the picture of a girl standing on a pier on the French coast, looking out to sea. Her golden hair was slightly stirred by the breeze, her lips a little parted, and there was a far-away look in her eyes, as if she may have expected a lover to be coming over the sea in one of the yachts that lined the horizon. The dress of the girl and the stone-work of the pier were both white. It was a good example of the striking effects produced by the free use of a great deal of almost staring white, which is a favorite device of the latest school of French art.

As we advanced, the dog growled and rose, but, recognizing Jones, wagged his tail inoffensively as we drew nearer. Miss Cortland turned towards us.

Jones advanced, hat in hand. “What happy fortune,” he said, addressing her, “has led me to meet the goddess of these woods?” Then, altering his tone, he added in a bantering way: “I see you have been poaching on our preserves, Miss Cortland. But I do wonder at your taste, fishing for eels!” pointing to a small basket on her arm from which hung some of the long stems of the pond-lily. This he said to vex her, knowing her horror of those creatures. “Eels?” she exclaimed indignantly, with a tone and gesture of aversion at the thought. “They are pond-lilies.”

“Oh! that is very well to say,” replied Jones, “when you have the lid of the basket down to hide them; but I insist upon their being eels unless you show them to me.”

By this time I was out of hearing. I left them together, and kept on down the road to the pond.

That night Jones came into my[372] room with a quieter manner than usual. He was evidently very happy, but his happiness had a sobering effect upon him. He told me that he had made a plain avowal of his feelings to Agnes Cortland as they walked home together, and that he had won from her the confession that she loved him and had not been indifferent to him before he left for Europe. I wished him joy of his good-fortune, though I could foresee plainly enough that his difficulties had only begun. For a little time these two innocent young souls—for Jones I knew to be singularly unsullied by the world for a man of his age—would enjoy their paradise undisturbed together. Then would come maternal explanations, and the father’s authority would be invoked. A solemn promise would be exacted from her to see him no more. Miss Cortland was much attached to her parents, who would be sincerely anxious for her welfare. She would not make much resistance. Some day there would come a storm of tears, and poor Jones’s letters and the ring he gave her would be returned to him by a faithful messenger, and a little note, blotted with tears, asking him to forgive her and praying for his happiness. This must be the end. A year or two of separation and a summer and winter in Europe with her parents would leave nothing more than a little sad memory of her brief New Hampshire romance; and in five years she would be married to some foreigner of distinction or successful man of business, and would be a happy wife and mother. As for poor Jones, he would probably be heard of at rare intervals for a year or two as a trader on the Pacific coast or prospecting a claim in Nevada. But men like him, vigorous, powerful, well equipped in body and temper for the struggle with the world, are not kept down long by such disappointments. The storm is fierce, and leaves its scars after it; but the man rises above it, and is more closely knit thereafter. Jones will make his mark in the world of business, if not of art.

No unwelcome prophecies of mine, however, disturbed his happiness for those few days. I let events take their course. Why should I interrupt his dream by Cassandra-like anticipations of woe, which would have been resented as a reflection upon the constancy of his idol? I know that they met frequently for the following three or four days. Then came the packing up for departure. My long holiday was over.

On a foggy morning in September we steamed up the Sound on a Fall River boat. Through Hell Gate the stately boat sped on her way, past Blackwell’s Island, and across the bows of the Brooklyn ferry-boats, crowded with passengers for the city in the early morning. Around the Battery we swept, into the North River, and slowly swung alongside of Pier 28. Then the hackmen yelled at us; our coach stuck at the corner of the street; a jam followed; the drivers swore; the policemen shouted and threatened; the small boys grinned and dodged between the horses; and a ward politician, with a ruby nose, looked on complacently from the steps of a corner “sample” room. In one word, we were in New York, and our village life in Hampshire was a thing of the past.

THE PALATINE PRELATES OF ROME.

Whatever is connected with our Holy Father must have an interest for Catholics; and at the present time especially it would seem desirable to know something about the origin and functions of those faithful prelates of whom this article treats, and with some of whom American visitors to Rome may be likely to have relations. They are called palatine prelates because lodged in the same palace as the sovereign, and in these days of trouble are the nearest to his most sacred Majesty in his solitude and sufferings. They are four in number, and belong to the pope’s intimate court and confidence, their names being registered in the Roman Notizie immediately after those of the palatine cardinals among the members of the pontifical family.

MAGGIORDOMO.

The majordomo, called in good Latin, the official language of the church, Magister Domus Papæ, is the first of these prelates and one of the highest dignitaries of the Holy See. The chief of the royal palace has had in all countries immense influence and power; and in France and Scotland, at least, the Maires du palais and stewards succeeded in mounting the throne. This officer, who, like the other three, is always a clergyman, is the high steward of his Holiness and master of his household, remaining day and night conveniently near to the Pope’s person, of which he has the special care, and for the safety of which he is responsible to the Sacred College. Until the present reign he was supreme under the sovereign, in the civil, military, and ecclesiastical affairs of the court, having his own tribunal of civil and criminal jurisdiction.[141] Some years ago, however, a part of the prerogatives of this office was transferred to the Cardinal Secretary of State; but even now the majordomo is at the head of the administration of the palace in which the Pope may reside for the time being, and on a vacancy of the see is ex-officio, by a decree of Clement XII. in 1732, governor of the conclave.[142] In this latter capacity, by a natural order of things which cannot be long delayed (yet God grant it may!), he will have to act a part during one of the most critical periods in the history of Christian Rome. He has the privilege [143] for life of using the pope’s arms with his own, and consequently retains this heraldic distinction even after he has been promoted to the cardinalate to which his office surely leads, sooner or later, according to a court custom that began in[374] the middle of the XVIIth century.[144] The origin of this office is involved in some doubt, owing to its antiquity. It must have been that, in the palace given to Pope Melchiades by the Emperor Constantine, some person conspicuous for piety and prudence was appointed to keep the members of a large and constantly-increasing court in mutual harmony and subjection to authority, while relieving the pontiff of the immediate superintendence of his household, and leaving him free to give his precious time to public and more important matters. At all events, at a very early period after this there is mentioned among the officers attached to the Patriarchium Lateranense—as the old Ædes Lateranæ were then called—a Vice-dominus, who was chosen from the Roman clergy, and was often, as the more modern prelates have been, invested with the episcopal dignity. He was answerable for the good order and harmonious administration of the palace; and the extent of that portion of it in which he dwelt and had his offices, as well as held his court of jurisdiction over the papal domestics,[145] must have been large, since it was called the vicedominium; and although his successor fifteen hundred years later has not the same ample powers that he enjoyed, he is still a personage so considerable that the part of the Vatican in which he resides is known officially as the Maggiordomato. The earliest name (not title) of such an officer which has come down to us is that of a certain priest Ampliatus, who is mentioned in the year 544 as having accompanied Pope Vigilius to Constantinople for the affair of the Three Chapters, and being detached from the pontiff’s suite at Sicily on their way back, with orders to hurry on to Rome, where the concerns of the Lateran seem to have suffered by his absence. Anatolius, a deacon, held the office under S. Gregory the Great, who was very particular to have only virtuous and learned men about him; and in 742 Benedict, a bishop, held it under S. Zachary, who sent him on a mission to Luitprand, King of the Lombards. This officer is mentioned for the last time in history as Vice-dominus in the year 1044, when an archdeacon Benedict served under Benedict IX. After this period, those who held the analogous position were styled chamberlains of the Holy Roman Church until 1305, when, the court being at Avignon, a large share of their duties and privileges was given to a nobleman of high standing, who was called Maestro del sacro Ospizio.[146]

Under Alexander V., in 1409, the Holy Father having returned to Rome, mention is made for the first time, in a paper drawn up for the guidance of the court, of a prefect of the apostolic palace—Magister domus pontificiæ—who was the same as the later majordomo, the name only having been changed by Urban VIII. in 1626. The series of these high prelates, to the number of 99—belonging generally to the very first nobility of Italy,[375] and showing such illustrious names as Colonna, Gonzaga, Farnese, Frangipani, Visconti, Acquaviva, Cybo, Cenci, Caraffa, Pico della Mirandola, Piccolomini, Borghese, Borromeo, etc.—begins with Alexander Mirabelli, a Neapolitan, who was named to the office by Pius II. in the month of August, 1458.

MAESTRO DI CAMERA.

This officer, whose official title in Latin is Prefectus cubiculi Sanctitatis suæ, is the second palatine prelate. He is the grand chamberlain of his Holiness, carries out the entire court ceremonial, and has the supervision of all audiences, as well as admittances of whatever kind to the presence of the Pope. How important and confidential is this post which he holds at the door of the papal chambers may best be judged from the single fact that no one can approach the sovereign without his knowledge in all and his consent [147] in most cases. He has sometimes the episcopal character—in truth, was usually in times past an archbishop in partibus; but it is now more customary for him to be simply in priest’s orders. If, however, he be not already a prelate of high rank, he is always, immediately after his nomination to the office, made an apostolic prothonotary, with precedence over all his brethren in that ancient and honorable college. Like his immediate superior, he has the privilege of quartering the Pope’s arms with his own. He is the keeper of the Fisherman’s ring, and at the Pope’s death delivers it up to the cardinal chamberlain of the Holy Roman College, who gives him a notarial receipt for it. This celebrated ring is the official one of the popes, and gets its name from having the figure of S. Peter in a bark and casting his net into the sea engraved upon it. Above this figure is cut the name of the reigning pontiff. It is the first among the rings, but the second in the class of seals, since it only serves as the privy seal or signet used on apostolic briefs and matters of subordinate consequence,[148] whereas the Great Seal is used to impress the heads of SS. Peter and Paul in lead (sometimes, but rarely, in gold) on papal bulls. At first this ring was a private and not an official one of the pope; for in a letter from Perugia of March 7, 1265, addressed by Clement IV. to his nephew Peter Le Gros, he says that he writes to him and to his other relatives, not sub bulla, sed sub piscatoris sigillo, quo Romani Pontifices in suis secretis utuntur; from which we gather that the ring was in use some time before, but by whom introduced is unknown, as is also the precise period when it became official, although this happened during one or other of the XVth century pontificates. Perhaps the first time that the now familiar expression, “Given under the Fisherman’s ring,” is met with in the manner of a formal statement or curial formula, such as it has been ever since retained, is in a document of Nicholas V. dated from Rome—Datum Romæ—on the 15th of April, 1448.

The institution of this office is extremely ancient, but, like most others of the court, it has had different[376] names and increased or diminished attributions at various periods. The modern Romans take a legitimate pride in being able to deduce many of their great court offices from the corresponding ones of the Cæsars, to whom their sovereign has succeeded. Thus this officer is sometimes called in classical Latin Magister admissionum, such an one being mentioned by the historian Ammianus Marcellinus (xv. 5); and his office Officium admissionis, which is found in Suetonius’ Life of Vespasian (xiv.) Among the members of the household of S. Gregory the Great in the year 601 there was a certain (S.) Paterius, Secundicerius of the Holy See (corresponding to the modern sub-dean of the apostolic prothonotaries, the dean being Primicerius). He had to make known to the pope the names of those who solicited the favor of an interview; and it is probable that he also gave (as is now given) along with the name some account of the quality and business of the visitor, for fear that the pontiff should be unnecessarily intruded upon or brought in contact with unworthy and perhaps dangerous characters. Investigators into the origin of the offices of the Holy See have fixed upon this person as the remote predecessor of the present Maestro di Camera; but all the charges of the palace having been remodelled and placed nearly on their present footing about four hundred and fifty years ago, and many of the court records having been lost or stolen during the disturbed era between the pontificates of Clement V. (1305) and Martin V. (1417)—which includes the periods of Avignon and the schism—the authentic roll of the holders of these high offices of state rarely begins earlier than the XVth century. Thus the first grand chamberlain of the modern series is Bindaccio Ricasoli of Florence, who was Magister aulæ palatii to John XXIII. in 1410. The present one is Monsignor Ricci-Paracciani, a Roman, who, however, has become majordomo by Monsignor Pacca’s promotion. The Maestro di Camera, being constantly in company with exalted personages who seek an audience of the Holy Father and wait their turn in, or at all events pass through, the Anticamera nobile, which opens immediately into the Pope’s reception-room, must be distinguished for good breeding and courtliness, and serve as a model to his subordinates in that august apartment, lest it be said of him:

Hence we are prepared to find the noblest families of Italy represented in the office, and notice such patrician names as Odescalchi, Altieri, Fieschi, Ruffo, Doria, Massimo, Pignatelli, Caracciolo, Barberini, Riario-Sforza, etc.

UDITORE.

The auditor of his Holiness—Auditor Papæ—is the agent-general, most intimate privy councillor, and canonist of the Pope. He is third in rank of the palatine prelates, and lived in the Quirinal, where his offices and the archives were situated, until the present iniquitous occupation, since which they have been removed to the Torlonia palace, near the Vatican. This office was instituted by Paul II. (1464-1471), and the first to hold it was the renowned J. B. Millini, a Roman, who was at the same time Bishop of Urbino (which was administered by some one else in his name); he later became a[377] cardinal under Sixtus IV., in 1476. His successor at the present time is Monsignor Sagretti. Up to this century the power and general influence of the auditor were extraordinary, since he had a court of justice and ample jurisdiction, even exercising in the name of the Pope the supremacy of appeal in many matters. For this reason the great epigraphist Morcelli, who wrote before these judicial functions were abolished, called him Judex sacrarum cognitionum. Formerly he gave audience to all comers about matters of equity and appeal on Tuesdays, in his apartment at the Quirinal, standing in his prelatic robes behind a low-backed throne supposed by a sort of fiction to be then occupied by the Pope;[149] hence he was called in choice Latin Cognoscens vice sacrâ—i.e., in lieu of his Holiness. The common Italian appellation Uditore Santissimo is only a corrupt rendering of the Latin Auditor Sanctissimi. This post has always been occupied by one of the ablest jurists in Italy; and even now the auditor must be both very learned and most incorruptible, from the part that he takes officially in filling vacant sees and making other important nominations.

MAESTRO DEL SACRO PALAZZO.

The Master of the Holy Apostolic Palace—Magister Sacri Palatii Apostolici—is one of the most distinguished members for piety and doctrine of the Dominican Order. He is the Pope’s official theologian, and usually a consultor of several Roman congregations, more nearly concerned with matters of faith and morals, as the Inquisition, Indulgences and Relics, Index, etc. He ranks fourth among the palatine prelates, and resided until the late invasion in the Quirinal Palace with his “companion” and two lay brothers of his order. He is considered an honorary auditor of the Rota, and as such has a place with the prelates of this class in the papal chapels and reunions. He retains the habit of his order, but wears on his hat a black prelatical band. He is ex-officio president of the Theological Faculty in the Roman University, and the person to whom was entrusted the censorship of the press. The origin of this office dates from the year 1218, when S. Dominic, who established the Order of Friars Preachers, suggested to Honorius III. that it would be proper if some one were charged to give religious instruction to the many servants of cardinals, prelates, and others, who used to spend their time idly in useless talk and slanderous gossip with their brethren of the papal palace while their masters were expecting an audience or engaged with his Holiness.[150] The Pope was pleased, and at once appointed Dominic to the good work, who began by explaining the Epistles of S. Paul.[151] The fruit of these pious conferences was so apparent that the pope determined to perpetuate them under the direction of a Dominican. Besides the more familiar instructions, which were given at first extempore, it was arranged later that while the pope[378] and court were listening to the preacher appointed to sermonize in the palace during Advent and Lent, the papal domestics and other servants should also have the benefit of formal discourses, but in another part of the building. It was always the father master—i.e., doctor—who held forth to them until the XVIth century, when the duties of his office becoming more onerous, especially by reason of the many attempts to misuse the recently-discovered art of printing to corrupt faith and morals in Rome itself, the obligation devolved upon his companion—Pro-Magister or Socius—who also holds three days of catechism in preparation for each of the four general communions that are given yearly in the palace. This deputy is appointed by the master, and is a person of consequence, succeeding sometimes to the higher office. The present master is Vincenzo Maria Gatti. When the learned Alexander V. became pope (1409), the Master of the Palace was required to stand by at his meals, especially on Sundays and festival days, and be ready to propose difficult points of debate, or to enter into an argument on any matter and with any person present as the Holy Father should command.[152] There have been seventy-nine occupants of this office since its institution (not to count several anti-masters created by anti-popes), of whom seventeen have been made cardinals, and among them the celebrated church historian Orsi. The great writer on Christian antiquities, Mamachi, held this office with distinction. It is one, of course, in which “brains” rather than “blood” find a place; and since there is no royal road to learning—for as an old monkish couplet says:

—we are not surprised that the series of Masters of the Apostolic Palace exhibits no such names as those that predominate among the chamberlains and majordomos—“Not many noble” (1 Cor. i. 26).

In the mother-church of the Dominican Order at Rome, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, which is also the title of the first American cardinal,[153] there is a special vault beneath the chapel of S. Dominic for the entombment of the masters; but the brutal invaders who now hold possession of Rome having forbidden all intra-mural burials—evidently through malice, because, from the dry nature of the soil and the perfection of Roman masonry, there could not be the slightest danger from a moderate number of interments within the city—they will have to sleep after death in some less appropriate spot: “How long shall sinners, O Lord, how long shall sinners glory?… Thy people, O Lord, they have brought low: and they have afflicted thy inheritance” (Ps. xciii.)

POWER, ACTION, AND MOVEMENT.

The word “motion” is now commonly used for movement, but it properly means the action by which a thing is set into movement. This action, or motion, of course proceeds from an agent, and consists in the production of an act, or momentum, which must be terminated or received in a patient. The active power of the agent is its substantial act as virtually containing in itself all the acts which the agent is ready to produce, according to its nature. This active power may therefore be called the virtuality, or terminability, of the act by which the agent is. The momentum produced by such a power stands to the power in the same ontological relation as the now of time to the virtuality of God’s eternity, and as the ubication of a point in space to the virtuality of God’s immensity; for in all these cases there is question of nothing else than of an extrinsic terminability and an extrinsic term. We may, therefore, in treating of motive powers and momentums, follow the same order of questions which we have followed in our articles on space and duration.

But the subject which we are about to investigate has a special feature of its own; because in the exertion of active power, and consequently in the momentums produced, there is something—intensity—which is not to be met with either in the when or in the where. For the when and the where are mere terms of intervals or distances, and do not partake in their continuity; from which it follows that they are not quantities, but merely terms of quantities, whereas the momentum of motion is the formal principle of the real changes produced by the agent in the patient. And these changes admit of different degrees, and thus by their greater or less magnitude reveal the greater or less intensity of the exertion. The reason of this difference is very plain; for the when and the where are not efficiently produced by God’s eternity and immensity, for these divine attributes do not connote action. Their origin is not to be traced to action, but to resultation, as we have explained in our preceding articles. The entity of every creature, on the contrary, proceeds from God as efficient cause—that is, it does not merely result from the existence of other things, but it is actively produced; and, since an act produced must have some degree of perfection, creatures are more or less perfect as to their entity, and therefore have in their own act a greater or less power of acting, according to the degree of their entitative perfection. This explains why it is that there is intensity in all action and in all act produced, whereas there is no intensity in the when and the where.

But, apart from this special feature, the questions regarding active powers, actions, and the acts produced are entirely similar to those which we have answered in treating of space and of duration. Nay, more, the same questions may be[380] viewed under three distinct aspects—viz., first, with reference to the divine power and its causality of contingent things; secondly, with reference to second causes, their actions, and the momentums produced by them; and, thirdly, with reference to these momentums themselves and the local movements resulting from them. This third view of the subject is the only one immediately connected with the notions of space and of time, and we might limit ourselves to its consideration. Nevertheless, to shed more light on the whole treatise, we propose to say something of the other two also; for, by tracing the actions and the phenomena of the material world to their original sources, we shall discover that all different grades of reality are linked with their immediate principles in such a manner as to exhibit a perpetual analogy of the lower with the higher, till we reach the highest—God.

To ascertain the truth of this proposition, let us recall to mind the main conclusions established by us with respect to space. They were as follows:

1st. There is void space—that is, a capacity which does not imply the presence of anything created.

4th. Absolute space is the virtuality, or extrinsic terminability, of God’s immensity.

5th. Absolute space is not modified by the presence of matter in it—that is, by its extrinsic termination.

6th. Ubications are extrinsic terms of absolute space, and their relations have in space itself an extrinsic foundation.

A similar series of conclusions was established in regard to duration. They were:

1st. There is a standing duration—that is, an actuality which does not imply succession.

4th. Standing duration is the virtuality, or extrinsic terminability, of God’s eternity.

5th. Standing duration is not modified by the existence in it of created things—that is, by its extrinsic termination.

6th. The whens of creatures are extrinsic terms of standing duration, and their relations have in standing duration their extrinsic foundation.

Before we give the analogous conclusions concerning active powers and their causality, we have to premise that all power ready to act is said to be in actu primo, or in the “first act,” with respect to its termination and term, or act, which it is ready to produce. Its action is its termination, and it consists in the causation of a second act. This second act, inasmuch as it exists in its proper term, potency, or subject, is called actio in facto esse—that is, an action wholly complete, though the action proper is always in fieri; for it consists in the very production of such a second act, as we have just stated. The result of this production is the existence of a new reality, substantial or accidental, according to the nature of the act produced. This well-known terminology we shall use here for the parallel development of the three classes of questions which we have to answer.

Origin of Power.—First, then, with regard to the primary origin[381] of active and moving powers, we lay down the following conclusions:

1st. There is some absolute power—that is, a first act which has no need of producing any second act.

4th. Absolute power is the virtuality, or extrinsic terminability, of the act by which God is.

5th. Absolute power is not modified by the production of effects—that is, by its extrinsic termination.

6th. The beings thus produced are extrinsic terms of God’s power; and although, owing to their intrinsic perfection, which may be greater or less, they can be related to one another by an intrinsic foundation, yet their “entitative distances” have only an extrinsic foundation—to wit, God’s omnipotence.

Some of these propositions are so obvious that they might have been omitted but for the object we have in view of pointing out the parallelism of absolute power with space and duration.

The first of these conclusions is proved thus: All first act which naturally needs to produce some second act has an intrinsic and natural ordination to something distinct from itself; for all effect is really distinct from its efficient principle. But it cannot be admitted without absurdity that every first act has such an intrinsic and natural ordination; for, if everything were thus ordained to something else, all things would tend to some subordinate end, while there would be no supreme end at all; for nothing that is ordained to something else can rank as the supreme end. On the other hand, no subordinate ends can be admitted without a supreme end. And therefore there must be some first act which has no intrinsic necessity of producing any second act. Such a first act is altogether absolute.

The second conclusion is evident. For what we call here “a first act” is not an imperfect and incomplete act, since it needs no termination; nor is it a result of mental abstraction and analysis, but a perfect principle of real operations; for the epithet “first,” by which we characterize it, does not imply that it lacks anything in its entity, but, on the contrary, it means that it already contains eminently the whole reality of the effects which it is competent to produce. Hence it is clear that, if such effects are objective realities, the first act on which their production depends is an objective reality, and a much better one too.

The third conclusion needs no proof, it being evident that whatever is created must tend to the end of its creation, which is the manifestation of the perfections of its creator. This manifestation implies action—viz., a transition of the first act to its second act. Accordingly, a first act which has no necessary ordination to second acts cannot be created.

The fourth conclusion follows from the third, since an uncreated act can be nothing else than the act by which God is. This act, inasmuch as it eminently contains the reality of all possible things, is extrinsically terminable, and as thus terminable it exhibits itself as a “first” act. But, since God has no need of creatures, such a first act has no need of extrinsic terminations, and, as first, it constitutes omnipotence, or God’s absolute power. This power in its infinite simplicity has an infinite range, as it extends to all conceivable reality.

The fifth conclusion will be easily understood by reflecting that the extrinsic termination of active power consists in giving existence to contingent things by efficient action. Now, to act efficiently does not bring about any intrinsic change in the agent; for all intrinsic change follows from passion, which is the opposite of action. Nor does God, when giving existence and active powers to any number of creatures, weaken his own power. For the power imparted to creatures is not a portion of the divine power, but a product of creation, and nothing, in fact, but the created act itself. For, as all contingent things are created for the manifestation of God’s perfections, all creatures must be active; and as everything acts as it is in act, the act being the principle of the acting, it follows that all act produced by creation is an active power of greater or less perfection according to the part it is destined to fill in the plans of its Maker. This shows that the act by which a creature is, bears a resemblance to the act by which God is, inasmuch as it virtually contains in itself all those acts which it is fit to produce according to its nature. But, since all contingent act is extrinsic to God, divine omnipotence is not entitatively and intrinsically more actuated by creation than by non-creation; though, if God creates any being, from the term produced he will acquire the real denomination of Creator. Thus the existence of a contingent being is the existence of a real term, which extrinsically terminates the virtuality of God’s act, in which it is eminently contained. Its relation to its Creator is one of total dependence; whilst God’s relation to it is that of first causality. The foundation of this relation is the action which proceeds from God and terminates in the creature.

The first part of the sixth conclusion, that beings produced by creation are extrinsic terms of God’s power, has just been explained. But we say, moreover, that the entitative distances between such beings have an extrinsic foundation in God’s omnipotence. By “entitative distance” we mean the difference in degree between distinct beings—v.g., between a man and a tree—as we have explained in another place.[154] And we say that, as the distance between two material points in space has its extrinsic foundation in the virtuality of God’s immensity, so also the entitative distance of two beings has its extrinsic foundation in the virtuality of God’s infinite act—that is, in divine omnipotence. In fact, the different degrees of entity conceivable between the tree and the man are all virtually contained in God’s omnipotence, just as all the distinct ubications possible between two points are virtually in God’s immensity. Hence the foundation of such entitative distances is extrinsic to the beings compared in the same manner as the foundation of local distances.

But the terms produced by creative action, inasmuch as they possess a greater or less perfection in their individual constitution, can be compared with one another according to the relative degree of their intrinsic reality; and thus, besides the extrinsic relation just mentioned, they have a mutual relativity arising from an intrinsic foundation. The relative degree of reality of a contingent being becomes known to us through the relative intensity of its active power;[383] which implies that the beings compared have powers of the same species. If they are not of the same species, the comparison will give no result.

Remarks.—Before leaving this part of our subject, we have to notice that, as the ubication, so also the act produced by creation, can be considered both absolutely and respectively. A created act, considered absolutely, is an act intrinsically completed by its essential potency, and constitutes the being as it is in actu secundo. The same act, considered respectively, or as ordained to something else, is a power ready to act, and thus it is in actu primo with regard to all the acts which it is able to produce.

The essential act of a contingent being, be it considered absolutely or respectively, bears no proportion to the perfection of its Creator, no more indeed than a point in space to immensity, or a now of time to eternity. Hence all contingent act or power, whatever be its perfection or intensity, as compared with God, is like nothing. It is only when a created act or power is compared with another of the same kind that we can establish a proportion between them as to degrees of perfection and of intensity. These degrees are measured by comparing the relative intensities of the effects produced by distinct causes of the same kind, acting under the same conditions.

The quantity of efficient power may be conceived as a virtual sum of degrees of power. In this particular the quantity of power differs entirely from the quantity of distance; because this latter cannot be conceived as a virtual sum of ubications. The reason of this difference is that ubications, as being simple points, have no quantity, and therefore cannot by addition make up a continuous quantity; whereas the degrees of power always possess intensity, and are quantities; hence their sum is a quantity of the same kind.

It may be useful to remark that all continuous quantity has a necessary connection with the quantity of power, and that all extension owes its being to the efficacy of some motive principle. In fact, all intervals, whether of space or of time, are reckoned among continuous quantities only on account of the quantity of continuous movement which can be made, or is actually made, in them, as we have explained in a preceding article; but the quantity of movement is itself to be traced to the intensity of the momentum produced by the agent, and the momentum to the intensity of the motive power. As soon as movement is communicated to a point, its ubication begins to shift and to extend a continuous line in space; and its now, too, for the same reason begins to flow and to extend continuous time.

When the quantity of power is expressed by a number, its value is determined, as we have stated, by the intensity of its efficiency in a given time and fixed conditions. The unit of intensity by which the amount of the effect produced is measured is arbitrary; for there is no natural unit for the degrees of intensity, it being evident that such degrees can be divided and subdivided without end, just like the continuum. Hence the numbers by which we express degrees of intensity are only virtually discrete, just as those by which we express continuous quantities. The ordinary unit assumed for the measure of intensity is that degree of intensity[384] which causes a unit of weight to measure a unit of distance in a unit of time. As all these units are arbitrary, it is evident that such is also the unit of intensity.

Let us remark, also, that the power of natural causes has in its action a twofold continuity—that is, with regard both to space and to duration. As long as a natural cause exists, it acts without interruption, owing to its intrinsic determination, provided there be, as there is always in fact, some subject capable of being acted upon by it. This constitutes the continuity of action with regard to duration. On the other hand, the motive power of such natural causes is exerted, according to the Newtonian law, throughout an indefinite sphere, as we have shown in another place;[155] and this constitutes the continuity of action through space. Moreover, if the point acted upon approaches the agent or recedes from it, the continuous change of distance will be accompanied by a continuous change of action; and thus the intensity of the act produced by the agent will increase or decrease in a continuous manner through infinitesimal degrees corresponding to the infinitesimal changes of local relations occurring in infinitesimal instants of time. This relation of changes is the base of dynamics. But enough on this point.

Origin of movement.—We may now pass to the conclusions concerning movement as dependent on its proximate cause. The power by which the natural causes produce momentums of movement is called “motive power.” This power is to be found both in material and in spiritual beings; but as in spiritual substances the exercise of the motive power is subject to their will, and consists in the application of a nobler power to the production of a lower effect, we do not and cannot consider the power of spiritual beings as merely “motive,” for it is, above all, intellective and volitive. Material things, on the contrary, because they possess no other power than that of moving, are characterized by it, and are naturally determined to exercise it according to a law which they cannot elude. It is of these beings in particular that the following conclusions are to be understood.

1st. There is in all material creatures a motive power—that is, a first act of moving—which, considered in its absolute state, has no need of extrinsic termination, that is, of producing a momentum of movement.

3d. The same power is nothing accidentally superadded to the being of which it is the power.

4th. This power is the virtuality, or extrinsic terminability, of the act by which the agent is.

5th. This power is not modified by the production of momentums in extrinsic terms.

6th. The momentums thus produced are second acts of the motive power, extrinsic to it; and though, owing to their intensity, which may be greater or less, they can be related to one another through an intrinsic foundation, yet their entitative distances have only an extrinsic foundation—to wit, the agent’s power.

Some of these propositions are quite evident; but our present object is not only to explain what may require a special discussion, but also, and principally, to dissect[385] our subject in such a manner as to make it manifest that a perpetual analogy exists between the conditions and the principles of all kinds of continuum, and that in all of them the transition from the absolute to the relative, from the cause to the effect, and from the formal reason to its formal result, is made through a like process and through similar degrees. For this reason we think that even those conclusions which seem too obvious to deserve mention become interesting and serve a good purpose; for in the parallel treatment of analogous subjects, those things which are clearer throw light on those which are more abstruse, and about which we often feel a certain hesitation.

The first of our present conclusions needs only a short explanation. When we say that in every creature there is a motive power which, considered in its absolute state, has no need of producing a momentum, we mean that in every creature there is an act which is a principle of activity, but that the exercise of this activity is not required for the substantial perfection and essential constitution of the creature itself, though it may be required for some other reason, as we shall see presently. In fact, every substance has its own complete being independently of accidents; and since the exertion of motive power is an accident, every substance is entitatively independent of it. We conceive that if God had created nothing but an element of matter, such an element would indeed (on its own part) be ready to act and to produce a momentum of movement; but, as there would be no subject capable of receiving a momentum, the motive power would remain in actu primo—that is, without actual exertion. And yet it is evident that the non-existence of other elements can have no bearing on the intrinsic constitution and substantial perfection of the element in the question. Therefore the power of an element of matter is a first act, which, as far as the entity of the element itself is concerned, has no need of producing any second act.

Nevertheless, since all creatures must in some manner glorify God as long as they exist, because such is the true and highest end of their existence, hence to every created power some proportionate term or subject corresponds, in which its exertion is received without interruption. In the same manner as the understanding never lacks an intelligible object, and the sense never lacks a sensible term, about which to exercise itself by immanent operation, the motive power of inferior beings never fails to meet a proportionate—that is, movable—term and to impress upon it a momentum of a certain intensity. Hence, when we regard, not the substance of natural things as such, but the natural necessity they are under of tending constantly to the ultimate end of their creation, we see that their first act of moving must always entail some second act, or momentum, in all the terms which it can reach according to its natural determination.

The second conclusion is self-evident; for, if the principle of real movement were not an objective reality, a real effect would proceed from an unreal cause—which is absurd. Nor does it matter that the power is only a “first” act. For, as we have explained above, it is first as compared with the acts which it can produce, but it is intrinsically complete in the entity[386] of the agent, as it is terminated to its substantial term.

The third conclusion is nothing but a corollary of the well-known axiom that in all things the principle of operation is the substantial act: Forma est id quo agens agit, and Principium essendi est principium operandi. We have proved in another place [156] that no natural accident possesses active power or is actually concerned in any of the effects produced by the agent. This truth should be well understood by the modern scientists who very commonly mistake the conditions of the action for the active principle. Of course no creature can act independently of accidental conditions; but these conditions have no bearing on the active power itself—they only determine (formally and not efficiently) the mode of its application according to a constant law. Thus the distance of two material points has no active influence on their motive power or on their mutual action, but only constitutes the two points in a certain relation to one another; and when such a relation is altered, the action is changed, not because the power is modified, but because its determination to act—that is, its very nature—demands that it should in its application follow the Newtonian law of the inverse ratio of the squared distances.

The philosophers of the old school admitted, but never proved, that, although the substantial form is the main principle of activity in natural things, nevertheless this principle was in need of some accidental entity, that it might be proximately disposed to produce its act. This opinion, too, originated in the confusion of active power with the conditions on which the mode of its exertion depends. What they called “active qualities” is now acknowledged to be, not a new kind of active power superadded to the substantial forms, but merely a result of the concurrence of many simple powers acting under determinate conditions. The accidental change of the conditions entails the change of the result and action, but the active powers evidently remain the same. The ancients said also that the substantial forms were the active principles of substantial generations, whereas the “active qualities” were the active principles of mere alterations. As we have shown that the whole theory of substantial generations, as understood by the peripatetic school, is based on assumption and equivocation, and leads to impossibilities,[157] we may be dispensed from giving a new refutation of the opinion last mentioned.

Our fourth conclusion directly follows from the general principle that the act by which a thing has its first being is its principle of action: Quo aliquid primo est, eo agit. The substantial act, considered as to its absolute entity, does not connote action, but simply constitutes the being of which it is the act. In order to conceive it as an active power, we must refer to the effects which it virtually contains—that is, we must consider its virtuality. In this manner what is a second act with regard to the substance of the agent, will be conceived as a first act with reference to the effects it can produce, according to a received axiom: Actus secundus essendi est actus primus operandi.

The fifth conclusion, notwithstanding the contrary opinion of many philosophers, is quite certain. For all intrinsic modification is the result of passive reception or passion. Now, to produce a momentum of movement is action, not passion. Therefore, when such a momentum is produced, no other subject is intrinsically modified by it except the one which passively receives it. It is therefore the being which is acted on, not that which acts, that acquires an intrinsic modification. The power of the agent is not entitatively and intrinsically more actuated by action than by non-action. Its action is an extrinsic termination, and gives it nothing but the real denomination of agent, by which it is really related to the term acted on. The patient, by its reception of the momentum, becomes similarly related to the agent, as is evident. And the relation consists in this: that the patient acquires formally an act which the agent virtually contains. This relation is of accidental causality on the one side and of accidental dependence on the other. The foundation of the relation is the accidental action as coming from the one and terminating in the other.

As everything that is in movement must have received the motion from a distinct agent, according to the principle Omne quod movetur, ab alio movetur, it follows that whatever is in movement is accidentally dependent on an extrinsic mover; and, since all material elements are both movers and moved, they all have a mutual accidental causality and dependence.

Our sixth conclusion is sufficiently clear from what has been said concerning the sixth conclusion of the preceding series. The momentum of movement is evidently the second act of the motive power—that is, the extrinsic term of its exertion. The entitative distance between two momentums produced by the same mover is an extrinsic relation; for its foundation is the virtuality of the act by which the agent is, as has been explained above. But the same momentums, as possessing greater or less intensity, can also be compared with one another according to their intrinsic entity or degree; and thus they will be found to have a mutual relation arising from an intrinsic foundation.

Remarks.—As the ubication, so also the momentum produced by accidental action, can be considered both absolutely and respectively. The momentum, considered absolutely, is an act received in a subject—an absolute momentum, an extrinsic term of the virtuality of the motive principle; and, as such a momentum is only one out of the innumerable acts which can proceed from the agent, it has an entity infinitely less than that of the agent. It is evident, in fact, that between a substantial and an accidental act there must be an infinite entitative disproportion, both because no substance can be substantially changed by its accidents, and because the substantial act can never be exhausted, and not even weakened, by the production of accidental acts, as we have established in another place.[158] The momentum is considered respectively when it is compared with another momentum, in which case we can find the relation of the one to the other as to intensity. This intensity is measured by the quantity of the movement to which[388] they give rise when not counteracted.

The unit of intensity is arbitrary in the momentums, as in their principles, for the same reason—that is, because in neither case a natural unit of intensity can be found. The number expressing the relative intensity of a momentum is only virtually discrete, because the momentum is only virtually compounded, since it is not a number of distinct acts, but one act equivalent to many.

Movement and its affections.—The production of a momentum entails movement. The general definition of movement, according to Aristotle and S. Thomas, is Actus existentis in potentia ut in potentia, or, as we would say, an actual passage from one potential state to another. Now, all created being is potential in two manners: first, on account of its passive receptivity; secondly, on account of its affectibility, which is a consequence of its passivity, as we have explained in the “Principles of Real Being.”[159] Hence the momentum of movement, inasmuch as it is received in the patient, actuates its passive potency; and inasmuch as its reception entails a certain mode of being, it affects its resultant potentiality. But besides this double potentiality, which is intrinsic to the subject, there is another potentiality which refers to an extrinsic term, and for this reason movement is considered both as it is a modification of its subject, ratione subjecti, and as it points at an extrinsic term, ratione termini.

With regard to its subject, movement is usually divided into immanent and transient. It is called immanent when it results from immanent acts, as when the soul directs its attention to such or such an object of thought; and it is called transient when it brings about a change in a subject distinct from the agent, as when a man moves a stone, or when the sun moves the earth. But this is inaccurate language; for what is transient in these cases is the action, not the movement.

With regard to its term, movement is divided into two kinds—that is, movement to a place, motus ad ubi, and movement towards a certain degree of perfection or intensity of power, motus virtutis.[160] The first is called local movement, of which we will speak presently. The second is subdivided into intension, remission, and alteration. Intension and remission are the acquisition or loss of some degree of perfection or of intensity with regard to power and qualities; alteration is the passage from one kind of quality or property to another. Thus, in water, heat is subject to intension and remission; but when the cohesive force of the molecules is superseded by the expansive force of vapor, there is alteration.

It is important to notice that there is no motus virtutis in primitive elements of matter. The exertion of their power varies indeed according to the Newtonian law, but the power itself is always exactly the same, as its principle is the substantial act, which cannot be modified by accidental action. It is only in material compounds that the motus virtutis can be admitted,[389] for the reason that the active powers and qualities in them are a result of composition; hence a change in the mode of the composition brings about a change in the resultant. So also in spiritual substances there is no motus virtutis, because their active faculties are always substantially the same. True it is that the intellect has also its passivity with regard to intelligible species, and that it acts by so much the more easily and perfectly in proportion as it is better furnished with intelligible species distinctly expressed and arranged according to their logical and objective connection. But this cannot mean that the active power of the intellect can be increased, but only that it can be placed in more suitable conditions for its operations. And the like is to be said of all acquired habits; for they give a greater facility of acting, not by intensifying the intrinsic power, but by placing the active faculty in such conditions as are more favorable for its operation.

But let us revert to local movement. This movement may be defined as the act of gliding through successive ubications. Such a gliding alters the relations of one body to another, as is evident, but it involves no new intrinsic modification of the subject. As long as the subject continues to move under the same momentum, its intrinsic mode of being remains uniformly the same, while its extrinsic relations to other bodies are in continual change. Hence the local movement of any point of matter merely consists in the act of extending from ubication to ubication, or, as we may say, in the evolution of the intensity of the momentum into continuous extension. The reason of this evolution is that the momentum impressed on a subject has not only a definite intensity, but also a definite direction in space; whence it follows that the subject which receives the momentum receives a determination to describe a line in a definite direction, which it must follow, owing to its inertia, with an impetus equal to the intensity of the momentum itself. And in this manner a material point, by the successive flowing of its ubication, describes a line in space, or evolves the intensity of its momentum into extension.

Hence, of local movement we can predicate both intensity and extension. The intensity is the formal principle, which, by actuating the inertia or mobility of the subject, evolves itself into extension. The extension is the actual evolution of the momentum, and constitutes the essence of local movement, which is always in fieri. And this is what is especially pointed out in Aristotle’s words: Motus est actus existentis in potentia, ut in potentia. The actus refers to the intensity, which is not in fieri, but has a definite actuality; whilst the in potentia ut in potentia clearly refers to the evolution of extension, which is continually in fieri under the influx of said act. Accordingly, local movement is both intensive and extensive. But this last epithet is to be looked upon as equivalent to “extending,” not to “extended”; for it is the line drawn, or the track of the movement already made, that is properly “extended,” whereas the movement itself is the act of extending it.

The formal intensity of local movement is called velocity. We say the formal intensity, because movement has also a material intensity. The formal intensity regards the rate of movement of each[390] element of matter taken by itself, and it is greater or less according as it evolves a greater or a less extension in equal times. The material intensity regards the quantity of matter which is moving with a given velocity, and is measured by the product of the velocity into the mass of the moving body. This product is called the momentum of the body, or its quantity of movement.

Local movement is subject to three affections—viz., intension, remission, and inflexion. In fact, since local movement consists in extending with a certain velocity in a certain direction, it is susceptible of being modified either by a change of velocity, which will intensify or weaken it, or by a change of direction—that is, by inflexion. So long, however, as no agent disturbs the actual movement already imparted to a body, the movement must necessarily continue in the same direction and with the same velocity; for matter, owing to its inertia, cannot modify its own state. This amounts to saying that the tendency uniformly to preserve its rate and its direction is not an accidental affection, but the very nature, of local movement.

This being premised, we are going to establish a series of conclusions, concerning movement and its affections, parallel to that which we have developed in the preceding pages respecting power and its exertions. The reader will see that the chain of our analogies must here end; for, since movement is not action, it affects nothing new, and produces no extrinsic terms, but only entails changes of local relations. On the other hand, the affections of local movement are not of a transient, but of an immanent, character, and thus they give rise to no new entity, but are themselves identified with the movement of which they are the modes. Our conclusions are the following:

1st. There is in all local movement something permanent—that is, a general determination of a lasting character, which has no need of being individuated in one manner more than in another.

3d. This same determination is nothing accidentally superadded to local movement.

4th. This determination is the virtuality of the momentum of movement, or the act of evolving extension in a definite direction.

5th. This determination is not intrinsically modified by any accidental modification of local movement.

6th. The affections of local movement are intrinsic and intransitive modes, which identify themselves with the movement which they modify.

The first of these conclusions is briefly proved thus: whatever is a subject of real modifications has something permanent. Local movement is a subject of real modifications. Therefore, local movement involves something permanent.

The third conclusion, too, is evident. For whatever is accidentally superadded to a thing can be accidentally taken away, and therefore cannot belong to the thing permanently and invariably. Hence the constant and fixed determination in question cannot be an accident of local movement.

The fourth conclusion is a corollary of the third. For nothing is necessarily permanent in local movement, except that which constitutes its essence. Now, its essence[391] lies in this: that it must evolve extension at the rate and in the direction determined by the momentum of which it is the exponent. Therefore the permanent determination of which we are speaking is nothing else than the virtuality of the momentum itself as developing into extension. And since the momentum by which the moving body is animated has a determinate intensity and direction, which virtually contains a determinate velocity and direction of movement, it follows that the permanent determination in question consists in the actual tendency of movement to evolve uniformly and in a straight line—uniformly, because velocity is the form of movement, and the velocity determined by the intensity of the actual momentum is actually one; in a straight line, because the actual momentum being one, it gives but one direction to the movement, which therefore will be straight in its tendency. Whence we conclude that it is of the essence of local movement to have an actual tendency to evolve uniformly in a straight line.

Some will object that local movement may lack both uniformity and straightness. This is quite true, but it does not destroy our conclusion. For, as movement is always in fieri, and exists only by infinitesimal instants in which it is impossible to admit more than one velocity and one direction, it remains always true that within every instant of its existence the movement is straight and uniform, and that in every such instant it tends to continue in the same direction and at the same rate—that is, with the velocity and direction it actually possesses. This velocity and direction may, of course, be modified in the following instant; but in the following instant, too, the movement will tend to evolve uniformly and in a straight line suitably to its new velocity and direction. Whence it is manifest that, although in the continuation of the movement there may be a series of different velocities and directions, yet the tendency of the movement is, at every instant of its existence, to extend uniformly in a straight line. This truth is the foundation of dynamics.

Our fifth conclusion is sufficiently evident from what we have just said. For, whatever be the intensity and direction of the movement, its determination to extend uniformly in a straight line is not interfered with.

Our last conclusion has no need of explanation. For, since the affections of local movement are the result of new momentums impressed on the subject it is plain that they are intrinsic modes characterizing a movement individually different from the movement that preceded. The tendency to evolve uniformly in a straight line remains unimpaired, as we have shown; but the movement itself becomes entitatively—viz., quantitatively—different.

Remarks.—Local movement is divided into uniform and varied. Uniform movement we call that which has a constant velocity. For, as velocity is the form of movement, to say that a movement is uniform is to say that it has but one velocity in the whole of its extension. We usually call “uniform” all movement whose apparent velocity is constant; but, to say the truth, no rigorously uniform movement exists in nature for any appreciable length of time. In fact, every element of matter lies within the sphere of action of[392] all other elements, and is continually acted on, and continually receives new momentums; the evident consequence of which is that its real movement must undergo a continuous change of velocity. Hence rigorously uniform movement is limited to infinitesimal time.

Varied movement is that whose rate is continually changing. It is divided into accelerated and retarded; and, when the acceleration or the retardation arises from a constant action which in equal times imparts equal momentums, the movement is said to be uniformly accelerated or retarded.

Epilogue.—The explanation we have given of space, duration, and movement suffices, if we are not mistaken, to show what is the true nature of the only continuous quantities which can be found in the real order of things. The reader will have seen that the source of all continuity is motive power and its exertion. It is such an exertion that engenders local movement, and causes it to be continuous in its entity, in its local extension, and in its duration. In fact, why is the local movement continuous in its entity? Because the motive action strengthens or weakens it by continuous infinitesimal degrees in each successive infinitesimal instant, thus causing it to pass through all the degrees of intensity designable between its initial and its final velocity. And again: why is the local movement continuous in its local extension? Because it is the property of an action which proceeds from a point in space and is terminated to another point in space, to give a local direction to the subject in which the momentum is received; whence it follows that the subject under the influence of such a momentum must draw a continuous line in space. Finally, why is the local movement continuous in its duration? Because, owing to the continuous change of its ubication, the subject of the movement extends its absolute when from before to after, in a continuous succession, which is nothing but the duration of the movement.

Hence absolute space and absolute duration, which are altogether independent of motive actions, are not formally continuous, but only supply the extrinsic reason of the possibility of formal continuums. It is matter in movement that by the flowing of its ubi from here to there actually marks out a continuous line in space, and by the flowing of its quando from before to after marks out a continuous line in duration. Thus it is not absolute space, but the line drawn in space, that is formally extended from here to there; and it is not absolute duration, but the line successively drawn in duration, that is formally extended from before to after.

With regard to the difficulties which philosophers have raised at different times against local movement we have very little to say. An ancient philosopher, when called to answer some arguments against the possibility of movement, thought it sufficient to reply: Solvitur ambulando—“I walk; therefore movement is possible.” This answer was excellent; but, while showing the inanity of the objections, it took no notice of the fallacies by which they were supported. We might follow the same course; for the arguments advanced against movement are by no means formidable. Yet we will mention and solve three of them before dismissing the subject.

First. If a body moves, it moves where it is, not where it is not. But it cannot move where it is; for to move implies not to remain where it is, and therefore bodies cannot move. The answer is, that bodies neither move where they are nor where they are not, but from the place where they are to the place where they are not.

Second. A material element cannot describe a line in space between two points without gliding through all the intermediate ubications. But the intermediate ubications are infinite, as infinite points can be designated in any line; and the infinite cannot be passed over. The answer is that an infinite multitude cannot be measured by one of its units; and for this reason the infinite multitude of ubications which may be designated between the terms of a line cannot be measured by a unit of the same kind. Nevertheless, a line can be measured by movement—that is, not by the ubication itself, but by the flowing of an ubication; because the flowing of the ubication is continuous, and involves continuous quantity; and therefore it is to be considered as containing in itself its own measure, which is a measure of length, and which may serve to measure the whole line of movement. If the length of a line were an infinite sum of ubications—that is, of mathematical points—the objection would have some weight; but the length of the line is evidently not a sum of points. The line is a continuous quantity evolved by the flowing of a point. It can therefore be measured by the flowing of a point. For as the line described can be divided and subdivided without end, so also the time employed in describing it can be divided and subdivided without end. Hence the length of a line described in a finite length of time can be conceived as an infinite virtual multitude of infinitesimal lengths, just in the same manner as the time employed in describing it can be conceived as an infinite multitude of infinitesimal instants. Now, the infinite can measure the infinite; and therefore it is manifest that an infinite multitude of infinitesimal lengths can be measured by the flowing of a point through an infinite multitude of infinitesimal instants.[161]

Third. The communication of movement, as we know by experience, requires time; and yet time arises from movement, and cannot begin before the movement is communicated. How, then, will movement be communicated? The answer is that time and movement begin together, and evolve simultaneously in the very act of the communication of movement. It is not true, then, that all communication of movement requires time. Our experience regards only the communication of finite movement, which, of course, cannot be made except the action of the agent continue for a finite time. But movement is always communicated by infinitesimal degrees in infinitesimal instants; and thus the beginning of the motive action coincides with the beginning of the movement, and this coincides with the beginning of its duration.

And here we end. The considerations which we have developed in our articles on space, duration, and movement have, we think, a sufficient importance to be regarded with interest by those who have a philosophical turn of mind. The subjects which we have endeavored so far to investigate are scarcely ever examined as deeply as they deserve by the modern writers of philosophical treatises; but there is no doubt that a clearer knowledge of those subjects must enable us to extricate ourselves from many difficulties to be met in other parts of metaphysics. It is principally in order to solve the sophisms of the idealists and of the transcendental pantheists that we need an exact, intellectual notion of space and of time. We see how Kant, the father of German idealism and pantheism, was led into numerous errors by his misconception of these two points, and how his followers, owing to a like hallucination, succeeded in obscuring the light of their noble intellects, and were prompted to deny and revile the most certain and fundamental principles of human reasoning. In fact, a mistaken notion of space lies at the bottom of nearly all their philosophical blunders. If we desire to refute their false theories by direct and categorical arguments, we must know how far we can trust the popular language on space, and how we can correct its inaccuracies so as to give precision to our own phraseology, lest by conceding or denying more than truth demands we furnish them with the means of retorting against our argumentation. This is the main reason that induced us to treat of space, duration, and movement in a special series of articles, as we entertained the hope that we might thus help in cutting the ground from under the feet of the pantheist by uprooting the very germ of his manifold errors.

NOT YET.

SONGS OF THE PEOPLE.

Without going back to abstruse speculations on the origin of music in England (there is a mania in our century for discovering the “origin” of everything, and theorizing on it, long before a sufficient number of facts has been collected even to make a pedestal for the most modest and limited theory), we gather from the mention of it in old English poems, and books on ballads and songs, glees and catches, that it existed in a very creditable form at least eight hundred years ago. Indeed, there was national and popular music before this, and the Welsh songs, the oldest of all, point far back to a legendary past as the source of their being. The first foreign song that mingled with the rude music of the early Britons was doubtless that of the Christian missionaries in the first century of our era, and after that there can have been little music among the converted Britons but what was more or less tinged with a foreign and Christian element. We know, too, that at various times foreign monks either came or were invited to the different kingdoms in England to teach the natives the ecclesiastical chant. Gardiner, in his Music of Nature, says that “as the invaders came from all parts of the Continent, our language and music became a motley collection of sounds and words unlike that of any other people; and though we have gained a language of great force and extent, yet we have lost our primitive music, as not a single song remains that has the character of being national.” He also says that before music was cultivated as an art, England, in common with other countries, had its national songs, but that these, with the people who sang them, were driven by the conquerors into Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. This assertion is rather a sweeping one, and the recognized formula about the ancient inhabitants of Britain being all crowded into certain particular districts is one that will bear modifying and correcting. The British Anthropological Society has, during the last ten years, made interesting researches in the field of race-characteristics in different parts of England, and an accumulation of facts has gone far to prove the permanence of some Gaelic, Cymric, and Celtic types in other parts, exclusive of Wales and Cornwall. Dr. Beddoe and Mr. Mackintosh have published the result of their observations, and the latter concludes that “a considerable portion of the west Midland and southwestern counties are scarcely distinguishable from three of the types found in Wales—namely, the British, Gaelic, and Cymrian. In Shropshire, and ramifying to the east and southeast, the Cymrian type may be found in great numbers, though not predominating.… In many parts of the southwest the prevailing type among the working classes is decidedly Gaelic.… North Devon and Dorset may be regarded as its headquarters[396] in South Britain.” Then, again, the district along the borders of Wales, especially between Taunton and Oswestry, and as far east as Bath, shows a population more naturally intellectual than that of any other part of England, and that without any superiority of primary education to account for it. The people are what might be called Anglicized Welsh, and there is among them a greater taste for solid knowledge than in the heart of England. Lancashire is to a great extent Scandinavian, and also somewhat Cymrian, as we have seen, and there the people are known as a shrewd, hardy race, thoughtful and fond of study, and great adepts in music.

At a large school in Tiverton, Devonshire, nine-tenths of the boys presented the most exaggerated Gaelic physiognomy; while at another, near Chichester, the girls were all of the most unmistakable Saxon type. We need not go further in this classification, and only introduced it to show that massing together all British types in Wales and Cornwall is a fallacy, such as all hasty generalizations are. It is not so certain, therefore, that there exists no indigenous element in the old songs that have survived, though in many an altered form, in some of the rural districts of England. Then, again, how is the word “national” used—in the sense of indigenous, or of popular, or of exclusively belonging to one given country? English music was, before the Commonwealth, at least as indigenous as the English language, as that gradually grew up and welded itself together. As to popularity, there was a style of song—some specimens of which we shall give—which was known and used by the poorest and humblest, and a style, too, far removed from the plebeian, though it may have been rather sentimental. Then glees and catches are, though of no very great antiquity, essentially English, and are scarcely known in any other country. If “national” stands for “political,” as many people at this day seem to take for granted, then, indeed, England has not much to boast of. That music is born rather of oppression and defeat, and loves to commemorate a people’s undying devotion to their own race, laws, customs, and rulers. Irish and Welsh and Jacobite songs exhibit that style best, though only the first of the three have any present significance, the two other kinds having long ago become more valuable for their intrinsic or historical merit than for their political meaning. Certain modern English songs, such as “Ye Mariners of England,” “Rule Britannia,” “The Death of Nelson,” might be called national songs in the political sense; but “God Save the King,” though patriotic and loyal, is thoroughly German in style and composition, and therefore hardly deserves the title national.

The Welsh have kept their musical taste pure. Mr. Mackintosh, in his paper on the Comparative Anthropology of England and Wales, says of the quiet and thoughtful villagers of Glan Ogwen, near the great Penrhyn slate quarries, that “their appreciation of the compositions of Handel and other great musicians is remarkable; and they perform the most difficult oratorios with a precision of time and intonation unknown in any part of England, except the West Riding of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Worcester,[397] Gloucester, and Hereford.” The three latter are towns where the musical festivals are so frequent that the taste of the people cannot help being educated up to a good standard. Hereford, too, is very near the Welsh border. “The musical ear of the Welsh is extremely accurate. I was once present in a village church belonging to the late Dean of Bangor, when the choir sang an anthem composed by their leader, and repeated an unaccompanied hymn-tune five or six times without the slightest lowering of pitch. The works of Handel, Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart are republished with Welsh words at Ruthin and several other towns, and their circulation is almost incredible. At book and music shops of a rank where in England negro melodies would form the staple compositions, Handel is the great favorite; and such tunes as ‘Pop goes the Weasel’ would not be tolerated. The native airs are in general very elegant and melodious. Some of them, composed long before Handel, are in the Handelian style; others are remarkably similar to some of Corelli’s compositions. The less classical Welsh airs, in 3-8 time, such as ‘Jenny Jones’ are well known. Those in 2-4 time are often characterized by a sudden stop in the middle or at the close of a measure, and a repetition of pathetic slides or slurs.”

Much of this eulogium might be equally applied to the people of Lancashire, especially the men, who know the great oratorios by heart, and sing the choruses faultlessly among themselves, not only at large gatherings, but in casual reunions, whenever three or four happen to meet. Their part-singing, too, in glees, both ancient and modern, is admirable, and they have scarcely any taste for the low songs which are only too popular in many parts of England.

The songs of chivalry were another graft on the stock of English music, and the honor paid to the bards and minstrels was a mingling of the love of a national institution at least as old as the Druids—some say much older—and of the enthusiasm produced by the metrical relation of heroic feats of arms. The Crusades gave a great impulse to the troubadours’ songs, while the ancient British custom of commemorating the national history by the oral tradition and the music of the harpers, seemed to merge into and strengthen the new order of minstrels. Long before the bagpipe became the peculiar—almost national—instrument of Scotland, the harp held that position, as it has not yet ceased to do, in Ireland and Wales. The oldest harp now in Great Britain is an Irish one, which was already old in 1064. It is now in the museum of Trinity College, Dublin. These ancient instruments were very different from the modern ones on which our grandmothers used to display their skill before the pianoforte became, to its detriment, the fashionable instrument for young ladies; and even now the Irish and Welsh harps are made exactly on the old models, and have no pedals. But the use of the harp was not confined to the Welsh, and in the reign of King John, in the XIIth century, on the occasion of an attack made on the old town of Chester by the Welsh during the great yearly fair, it is recorded in the town annals that the commandant assembled all the minstrels who had come to the place upon that occasion, and[398] marched them in the night, with their instruments playing, against the enemy, who, upon hearing so vast a sound, were filled with such terror and surprise that they instantly fled. In memory of this famous exploit, no doubt suggested by the Biblical narrative of Gideon’s successful stratagem, a meeting of minstrels is annually kept up to this day, with one of the Dutton family at their head, to whom certain privileges are granted. In the reign of Henry I. the minstrels were formed into corporate bodies, and enjoyed certain immunities in various parts of the kingdom. Gardiner [162] says that “the most accomplished became the companions and favorites of kings, and attended the court in all its expeditions.” Perhaps we may refer the still extant office of poet-laureate to this custom of retaining a court minstrel near the person of the sovereign. In the time of Elizabeth the profession of a harper had become a degraded one, only embraced by idle, low, and dissolute characters; and so it has remained ever since, through the various stages of ballad-monger, street-singer and fiddler, in which the memory of the once noble office has been merged or lost. In Scotland the piper, a personage of importance, has taken the place of the harper since the time of Mary, Queen of Scots, who introduced the pipes from France; but in Wales the minstrel, with his harp, upheld his respectability much longer, and even now most of the old families, jealous and proud of their national customs, retain their bard as an officer of the household. The writer has seen and heard one of these ancient minstrels, in the service of a family living near Llanarth, the mistress (a widow) making it her special business to promote the keeping up of all old national customs. She was an excellent farmer, too, and had a pet breed of small black Welsh sheep, whose wool she prepared for the loom herself, and with which she clothed her family and household. In the neighboring town she had got up an annual competition of harpers and choirs for the performance of Welsh music exclusively. The concert was always the occasion of a regular country festivity, ending with a ball, and medals and other prizes were given by her own hand to the best instrumental and vocal artists.

In Percy’s Reliques a description is given of the dress and appearance of a mediæval bard, as personated at a pageant given at Kenilworth in honor of Queen Elizabeth. The glory of the brotherhood was already so much a thing of the past that it was thought worth while to introduce this figure into a mock procession. This very circumstance is enough to mark the decline of the art in those days, but already a new sort of popular song had sprung up to replace the romances of chivalry. “A person,” says Percy, “very meet for the purpose, … his cap off; his head seemly rounded tonsure-wise, fair-kembed [combed], that with a sponge daintily dipt in a little capon’s grease was finely smoothed, to make it shine like a mallard’s wing. His beard smugly shaven; and yet his shirt, after the new trink, with ruffs fair starched, sleeked and glittering like a pair of new shoes; marshalled in good order with a setting stick and strut, that every ruff stood up like a wafer.[163] A long gown of[399] Kendal-green gathered at the neck with a narrow gorget, fastened afore with a white clasp and a keeper close up to the chin, but easily, for heat, to undo when he list. Seemly begirt in a red caddis girdle; from that a pair of capped Sheffield knives hanging at two sides. Out of his bosom was drawn forth a lappet of his napkin [handkerchief] edged with a blue lace, and marked with a true-love, a heart, and D for Damain; for he was but a bachelor yet. His gown had long sleeves down to mid-leg, lined with white cotton. His doublet-sleeves of black worsted; upon them a pair of poynets [wristlets, from poignet] of tawny chamlet, laced along the wrist with blue threaden points; a wealt towards the hand of fustian-a-napes. A pair of red neather stocks, a pair of pumps [shoes] on his feet, with a cross cut at the toes for corns; not new, indeed, yet cleanly blackt with soot, and shining as a shoeing-horn. About his neck a red riband suitable to his girdle. His harp in good grace dependent before him. His wrest [tuning-key] tyed to a green lace, and hanging by. Under the gorget of his gown, a fair chain of silver as a squire minstrel of Middlesex, that travelled the country this summer season, unto fairs and worshipful men’s houses. From his chain hung a scutcheon, with metal and color, resplendent upon his breast, of the ancient arms of Islington.” The peculiarities marking his shoes no doubt referred to the long pedestrian tours of the early minstrels.

Chaucer, in the XIVth century, makes frequent mention of music, both vocal and instrumental. Of his twenty-nine Canterbury Pilgrims, six could either play or sing, and two, the Squire and the Mendicant Friar, could do both. Of the Prioress he quaintly says:

Dr. Burney thinks that part-singing was already known and practised in Chaucer’s time, and draws this inference from the notice the poet takes in his “Dream” of the singing of birds:

and it is certain that this kind of music was a great favorite with the English people at a very early period, and was indebted to them for many improvements. The same writer says that the English, in their secular music and in part-singing, rather preceded than followed the European nations, and that, though he could find no music in parts, except church music, in foreign countries before the middle of the XVIth century, yet in England he found Masses in four, five, and six parts, as well as secular songs in the vulgar tongue in two or three parts, in the XVth and early part of the XVIth centuries. Ritson, it is true, in his Ancient Songs from the Time of King Henry III. to the Revolution, disputes this, but Hawkins is of the same opinion as Burney. Mr. Stafford Smith, at the end of the last century, made a collection of old English songs written in score for three or four voices; but though the oldest music to such songs is scarcely intelligible, the number collected proves how popular that sort of music was in early times. (Perhaps the illegibility of the music is due to the old notation, in use before[400] the perfected stave of four lines became general—the pneumatic notation, supposed by Coussemaker, Schubiger, Ambros, and other writers on music to have been developed out of the system of accents of speech represented by signs, such as are still used in French.)

Landini, an Italian writer of the XVth century, in his Commentary on Dante, speaks of “many most excellent musicians” as coming from England to Italy to hear and study under Antonio degli organi (a name denoting his profession); while another writer, the choir-master of the royal chapel of Ferdinand, King of Naples, mentions the excellence of the English vocal music in parts, and even (incorrectly) calls John of Dunstable (a musician of the middle of the XVth century) the “inventor of counterpoint.”

One of the oldest compositions of this kind is a manuscript score in the British Museum, a canon in unison for four voices, with the addition of two more voices for the pes, as it is called, which is a kind of ground, and is the basis of the harmony. The words, partially modernized, are as follows (they are much older than the music, which is only four hundred years old):

Dr. Burney says of this song that the modulation is monotonous, but that the chief merit lies in “the airy, pastoral correspondence of the melody with the words”—a merit which many modern compositions of the “popular” type are very far from possessing. Under the Tudors music made rapid strides. Dr. Robert Fairfax was well known as a composer in those days, and a collection of old English songs with their music (often in parts), made by him, has been preserved to this day. Besides himself, such writers as Cornyshe, Syr Thomas Phelyppes, Davy, Brown, Banister, Tudor, Turges, Sheryngham, and William of Newark are represented. Of these, Cornyshe was the best, and Purcell, two hundred years later, imitated much of his rondeau style, most of these composers being entirely secular. Henry VIII. himself wrote music for two Masses, and had them sung in his chapel; and to be able to take a part in madrigals, and sing at sight in any piece of concerted music, was reckoned a part of a gentleman’s education in those days. The invention of printing gave a great impulse to song-writing and composing, though for some time after the words were printed the music was probably still copied by hand over the words; for the printing of notes was of course a further and subsequent development of the new art. A musician and poet of the name of Gray became a favorite of Henry VIII. and of the Protector Somerset “for making certain merry ballades, whereof one chiefly was ‘The hunt is up—the hunt is up.’”[164]

“A popular species of harmony,” says Ritson, “arose in this reign; it was called ‘King Henry’s Mirth,’ or ‘Freemen’s Songs,’ that monarch being a great admirer of vocal music. ‘Freemen’s Songs’ is a corruption of ‘Three-men’s Songs,’ from their being generally for three[401] voices.” Very few songs were written for one voice.

Ballads were very popular, and formed one of the great attractions at fairs. An old pamphlet, published in the reign of Elizabeth, mentions with astonishment that “Out-roaring Dick and Wat Winbars” got twenty shillings a day by singing at Braintree Fair, in Essex. It does seem a good deal, considering that the sum was equal to five pounds of the present money, which again is equivalent to about thirty dollars currency. These wandering singers, the lowly successors of the proud minstrels, were in their way quite as successful; but, what is more wonderful, their songs were for the most part neither coarse nor vulgar. Good poets wrote for music in those days; now, as a general rule, it is only rhymers who avowedly write that their words may be set to music. As quack-doctors, fortune-tellers, pedlers, etc., mounted benches and barrel-heads to harangue the people, and thus gained the now ill-sounding name of mountebanks, so too did these singers call over their songs and sing those chosen by their audience; and they are frequently called by the writers of those times cantabanchi, an Italian compound of cantare (to sing) and banchi (benches). Among the headings given of these popular songs are the following: “The Three Ravens: a dirge”; “By a bank as I lay”; “So woe is me, begone”; “Three merry men we be”; “But now he is dead and gone”; “Now, Robin, lend me thy Bow”; “Bonny Lass upon a green”; “He is dead and gone, Lady,” etc. There is a quaint grace and sadness about the titles which speaks well for the manners of those who listened and applauded. Popular taste has certainly degenerated in many parts of England; for such titles now would only provoke a sneer among an average London or Midland county audience of the lower classes. Gardiner says: “The most ancient of our English songs are of a grave cast, and commonly written in the key of G minor.”

Among the composers of the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. was Birde, who wrote a still popular canon on the Latin words “Non nobis, Domine,” and set to music the celebrated song ascribed to Sir Edward Dyer, a friend of Sir Philip Sidney, “My Mind to me a Kingdom is.”

Birde’s scholar, Morley, produced a great number of canzonets, or short songs for three or more voices; and Ford, who was an original genius, published some pieces for four voices, with an accompaniment for lutes and viols, besides other pieces, especially catches of an humorous character. George Kirbye was another canzonet composer, and Thomas Weelkes has been immortalized by the good-fortune which threw him in Shakspere’s way, so that the latter often wrote words for his music. Yet doubtless the fame of the one, as that of the other, was chiefly posthumous; and poet and musician, on a par in those days, may have starved in company, unknowing that a MS. of theirs would fetch its weight in gold a hundred years after they were in their graves.

“The musical reputation of England,” says a writer in an old review of 1834, “must mainly rest on the songs in parts of the period between 1560 and 1625.” And Gardiner says: “If we can set up any claim to originality, it is in our glees and anthems.” The gleemen, who were at first a class[402] of the minstrels, are supposed to have been the first who performed vocal music in parts, according to set rules and by notes, though the custom must have existed long before it was thus technically sanctioned. The earliest pieces of the kind upon record are by the madrigal writers, and were, perhaps, founded upon the taste of the Italian school; but there soon grew up a distinction sufficient to mark English glee-music as a separate species of the art. It is said that glee-singing did not become generally popular till about the year 1770, when glees formed a prominent part of the private concerts of the nobility; but their being adopted into fashionable circles only at that date is scarcely a proof of their late origin. The canzonets for three or four voices must have been closely allied to glees, and a family likeness existed between these and the madrigals for four or five voices, the ballets, or fa-las, for five, and the songs for six and seven parts, which are so prodigally mentioned in a list of works by Morley within the short space of only four years—1593 to 1597. The number of these songs proves their wonderful popularity, and we incline to think, with the writer we have quoted, that the English, in the catches and glees, the works of the composers of the days of Elizabeth and James I., and those of Purcell, Tallis, Croft, Bull, Blow, Boyce, etc., at a later period, possess a music essentially national and original—not imitative, as is the modern English school, and not more indebted to foreign sources than any other progressive and liberal art is to the lessons given it by its practisers in other civilized communities. For if national is to mean isolated and petrified, by all means let us forswear nationalism.

Shakspere’s songs are scattered throughout his works, and were evidently written for music. Both old and new composers have set them to music, and of the latter none so happily as Bishop Weelkes and John Dowland, his contemporaries and friends; the latter, the composer of Shakspere’s favorite song (not his own), “Awake, sweet Love,” often wrote music for his words. In his plays Shakspere has introduced many fragments of old songs and ballads; but Ritson says of him: “This admirable writer composed the most beautiful and excellent songs, which no one, so far as we know, can be said to have done before him, nor has any one excelled him since.” This statement is qualified by an exception in favor of Marlowe, a predecessor of Shakspere, and the author of the “Passionate Shepherd to his Love”; and besides, it means that he was the first great poet among the song-writers, who, in comparison with him, might be called mere ballad-mongers. Shakspere’s love for the old, simple, touching music of his native land, shown on many occasions throughout his works, is most exquisitely expressed in the following passage from Twelfth Night:

Though Shakspere’s plays were[403] marked with the coarseness of speech common in his time, and therefore not, as some have thought, chargeable to him in particular, his songs, on the contrary, are of singular daintiness. They are too well known to be quoted here, but they breathe the very spirit of music, being evidently intended to be sung and popularly known. The chorus, or rather refrain, of one, beginning, “Blow, blow, thou winter wind,” runs thus:

The “Serenade to Sylvia” is lovely, chaste and delicate in speech as it is playful in form; and the fairy song “Over hill, over dale,” is like the song of a chorus of animated flowers. The description of the cowslips is very poetic:

Bishop Hall, in 1597, published a satirical poem in which he complains that madrigals and ballads were “sung to the wheel, and sung unto the pail”—that is, by maids spinning and milking, or fetching water; and Lord Surrey, in one of his poems, says (not satirically, however):

Now, we gather what was the style of these songs of peasant girls and laborers from the writings of good old Izaak Walton, who mentions, as a common occurrence, that he often met, in the fields bordering the river Lee, a handsome milkmaid who sang like a nightingale, her voice being good and the ditties fitted for it. “She sang the smooth song which was made by Kit Marlowe, now at least fifty years ago, and the milkmaid’s mother sang the answer to it which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger days.… They were old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good; I think much better than that now in fashion in this critical age.”[166] He wrote in the reign of Charles I., and already deplored the influx of more pretentious songs; but those he mentions with such commendation were the famous “Passionate Shepherd to his Love” and the song beginning “If all the world and love were young,” two exquisite lyrics of an elegance much above what is now termed the taste of the vulgar.

Izaak Walton was as fond of music as of angling, and quotes many of the popular songs of his day. He was a quiet man, and only describes the pastimes of humble life. He used to rest from his labors in an “honest ale-house” and a “cleanly room,” where he and his fellow-fishermen, and sometimes the milkmaid, whiled away the evenings by singing ballads and duets. Any casual dropper-in was expected to take his part; and among the music mentioned as common in these gatherings are numbers of “ketches,” or, as we should say, catches. The music of one of his favorite duets, “Man’s life is but vain, for ’tis subject to pain,” is given in the old editions of his book. It is simple and pretty; the composer was Mr. H. Lawes. Other songs, favorites of his, were “Come, shepherds, deck your heads”; “As at noon Dulcina rested”; “Phillida flouts me”; and that touching elegy, “Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,” by[404] George Herbert. This is as full of meaning as it is short:

and some verses of Dr. Donne (both these writers being contemporaries of James I.), are also mentioned by Walton as popular among the lower classes in his day. Here is another instance of the power of song over the peasantry in the early part of the XVIIth century. In the spring of 1613, on the occasion of Queen Anne of Denmark’s return from Bath, where she had gone for her health, she was met on Salisbury Plain by the Rev. George Fereby, vicar of some obscure country parish, who entreated that her majesty would be pleased to listen to a concert performed by his people. “When the queen signified her assent, there rose out of the ravine a handsome company, dressed as Druids and as British shepherds and shepherdesses, who sang a greeting, beginning with these words, to a melody which greatly pleased the musical taste of her majesty:

We should suppose, from the commencing words, that this poem had originally been a Nativity hymn pertaining to the ancient church; and it is possible that the melody might be traced to the same source.… The music, the voices, and the romantic dresses, so well corresponding with the mysterious spot where this pastoral concert was stationed, greatly captivated the imagination of the queen.”[168] Anne of Denmark admired and patronized the genius of Ben Jonson, the writer of several musical masques often performed at court by the queen and her noble attendants. The really classical time of English poetry and music was before the Commonwealth, and popular music certainly received a blow during the Puritan rule. Songs and ballads were forbidden as profane; and in 1656 Cromwell enacted that “if any of the persons commonly called fiddlers or minstrels shall at any time be taken playing, fiddling, and making music in any inn, ale-house, or tavern, or shall be taken proffering themselves, or designing or entreating any to hear them play or make music in any of the places aforesaid,” they should be “adjudged and declared to be rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars.” Fines and imprisonments were often the penalties attached to a disregard of these ordinances; but this opposition only turned the course of popular song into political channels, and it became a point of honor among the Royalists to listen to, applaud, and protect the veriest scamp who called himself a minstrel. Songs were written with no poetical merit, but full of political allusions, bitter[405] taunts and sneers; and it was the delight of the Cavaliers to sing these doggerel rhymes and make the wandering fiddlers sing them. Many a brawl owed its origin to this. Even certain tunes, without any words, were considered as identified with political principle, and led to dangerous ebullitions of feeling, or kept alive party prejudices in those who heard them. Popular music has always been a powerful engine for good or bad, in a political sense. Half the loyalty of the Jacobites of Scotland in the XVIIIth century was due to inflammatory songs; Körner’s lyrics fired German patriotism against Napoleon; and there has never been a party of any kind that did not speedily adopt some representative melody to fan the ardor of its adherents.

But if music and poetry were proscribed by the over-rigorous Puritans, a worse excess was fostered by the immoral reign of Charles II. The Restoration polluted the stream which the Commonwealth had attempted to dam up. Just as, in a spirit of bravado and contradiction, the Cavaliers had ostentatiously made cursing and swearing a badge of their party, to spite the sanctimoniousness of the Roundheads, so they affected to oppose to the latter’s psalm-singing roaring and immodest songs. Ritson says that Charles II. tried his hand at song-writing, and quotes a piece by him, beginning:

“Though by no means remarkable for poetical merit,” says the critic, “it has certainly enough for the composition of a king.” Molière was not more severe on the attempts of Louis XIV. But though the general spirit of the age was licentious, many good songs were still written. Sedley, Rochester, Dorset, Sheffield, and others wrote unexceptionable ones, and the great Dryden flourished in this reign. One of his odes, “On S. Cecilia’s Day,” is thoroughly musical in its rhythm, the refrains at the end of each stanza having the ring of some of the old German Minnesongs of the XIIth and XIIIth centuries. But his verses were scarcely simple or flowing enough to become popular in the widest sense, which honor rather belonged to the less celebrated poets of his day. Lord Dorset, for instance, was the author of a sea-song said to have been written the night before an engagement with the Dutch in 1665, and which, from its admirable ease, flow, and tenderness, became at once popular with all classes. The circumstances under which it was supposed to be written had, no doubt, something to do with its popularity; but Dr. Johnson says: “Seldom any splendid story is wholly true. I have heard from the late Earl of Orrery, who was likely to have good hereditary intelligence, that Lord Dorset had been a week employed upon it, and only retouched or finished it on the memorable evening. But even this, whatever it may subtract from his facility, leaves him his courage.” The anonymous writer to whom we have referred [169] tells us that “the shorter pieces of most of the poets of the time of Charles II. had a rhythm and cadence particularly well suited to music. They were, in short, what the Italians call cantabile, or fit to be sung.… In the succeeding reigns, with the growth[406] of our literature, there was a considerable increase in song-writing; most of our poets of eminence, and some who had no eminence except what they obtained in that way, devoting themselves occasionally to the composition of lyrical pieces. Prior, Rowe, Steele, Philips, Parnell, Gay, and others contributed a stock which might advantageously be referred to by the composers of our own times.” Prior was a friend and protégé of Lord Dorset, who sent him to Cambridge and paid for his education there. Parnell was an Irishman. His “Hymn to Contentment” is a sort of counterpart to the old song “My Mind to me a Kingdom is”:

Gay, the elegant, the humorous, and the pathetic, shows to most advantage in this group. He it was who wrote the famous ballad “Black-eyed Susan,” and many others which, though less known at present, are equally admirable. One of them was afterwards set to music by Handel, and later on by Jackson of Exeter. But music did not keep pace with poetry; and though Purcell, Carey, and one or two other composers flourished in the latter part of the XVIIth and beginning of the XVIIIth centuries, they kept mostly to sacred music, and the new songs of the day were generally set to old tunes. Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, a collection of seventy-two songs, could not boast of a single air composed for the purpose. The music was all old, but the stage, says Dr. Burney, ruined the simplicity of the old airs, as it invariably does all music adapted to dramatic purposes. Indeed, we, in our own day, sometimes have the opportunity of verifying this fact, when old airs or ballads are introduced into operas to which they are unfitted. The “Last Rose of Summer” put into the opera of Martha is an instance in point; but, worse than that, the writer once heard “Home, Sweet Home” sung during the music-lesson scene in the Barbier de Seville. Adelina Patti was the prima donna, and any one who has seen and heard her can imagine the contrast between the simple, pathetic air and words, and the kittenish, coquettish, Dresden-china style of the singer! Add to this the costume of a Spanish señorita and the stage finery of Rosina’s boudoir, not to mention the absurd anachronism involved in a girl of the XVIIth century singing Paine’s touching song. Of course the audience applauded vigorously; for an English audience at the opera goes into action in the spirit of Nelson’s words, “England expects every man to do his duty,” and the incongruousness of the scene never troubles its mind.

Carey tried to stem the downfall of really good popular music by writing both the words and music of the well-known ballad of “Sally in our Alley,” which attained a popularity (using the word in its proper sense) that it has never lost and never will lose. The song was soon known from one end of the country to the other, and, like the old songs, was “whistled o’er the furrowed land” and “sung to the wheel, and sung unto the pail.” Addison was no less fond of it than the common people; but the song was an exception in its time, and the poetry of the day never again made its way among the great body of the people, as it had done under the Tudors and the early Stuarts. Music and poetry both grew[407] artificial under the Hanoverian dynasty, and the mannerisms and affectations of rhymers and would-be musical critics were sharply satirized by Pope and Swift. In the reign of Queen Anne the Italian opera was introduced into London, and the silly rage for foreign music, because it was foreign, soon worked its way among all classes. Handel brought about the first salutary return to natural and simple musical expression, and, setting many national and pastoral pieces to music, diffused the taste for good music through the intermediate orders of the people, especially the country gentry, but the masses still clung to interminable ballads, with monotonous tunes and no individuality either of sense or of form. Although England could boast of some good native composers and poets in the XVIIIth century—for instance, among the former, Boyce, Arne, Linley, Jackson, Shield, Arnold, etc.—still no good music penetrated into the lower strata of society; for these musicians mostly confined themselves to pieces of greater pretension than anything which was likely to become popular. Wales and the North of England still kept up a better standard, but the general taste of the nation was decidedly vitiated. Dibdin’s sea-songs broke the spell and reached the heart of the people; but this was rather a momentary flash than a permanent resurrection of good taste and discernment. The custom of writing the majority of songs for one voice, we think, had had much to do with destroying the genuine love of music among the people. It seemed to shift the burden of entertainment upon one member of a social gathering, instead of assuming that music was the welcome occupation and pastime of the greater number; and besides this, it no doubt fostered an undue rage for melody, or, as it is vulgarly called, tune. We have often had occasion to notice how bald and meagre—trivial, indeed—a mere thread of melody can sound when sung by one voice, which, if sung in parts, acquires a majestic and full tone. The fashion of solo-singing, which obtains so much in our day, has another disadvantage: it encourages affectation and self-complacency in the singer. The solo-singer is very apt to arrogate to him or herself the merit and effect of the piece; to think more of the individual performance than of the music performed; and to spoil a good piece by interpolating runs and shakes to show off his or her powers of vocal gymnastics. All this was impossible in the old part-songs, where attention and precision were indispensable.

There are hopeful indications at present that England is not utterly sunk into musical indifference, but, strange to say, wherever the good leaven does work, it does so from below upwards. The lower classes in the North of England have mainly given the impulse; the higher are still, on the whole, superficial in their tastes and trivial and mediocre in their performances. Even as far back as 1834, the writer in the Penny Magazine already quoted gives an interesting account of a surprise he met with at a small village in Sussex. (This, be it remembered, is an almost exclusively Saxon district of the country.) Being tired of the solitude of the little inn and the dulness of a country newspaper, he walked down the street of the village, and, in so doing, was brought to a pause before a small cottage, nowise distinguished from the other humble[408] homesteads of the place, from which proceeded sounds of sweet music. The performance within consisted, not of voices, but of instruments; and the piece was one of great pathos and beauty, and not devoid of musical difficulty. When it was finished, and the performers had rested a few seconds, they executed a German quartet of some pretensions in very good style. This was followed by variations on a popular air by Stephen Storace, which they played in excellent time and with considerable elegance and expression. Several other pieces, chosen with equal good taste, succeeded this, and the stranger enjoyed a musical treat where he little expected one. On making inquiries at the inn, he found that the performers were all young men of the village, humble mechanics and agricultural laborers, who, for some considerable time, had been in the habit of meeting at each other’s houses in the evening, and playing and practising together. The taste had originated with a young man of the place who had acquired a little knowledge of music at Brighton. He had taught some of his comrades, and by degrees they had so increased in number and improved in the art that now, to use the words of the informant, “there were eight or ten that could play by book and in public.”

At that time, and in that part of the country, this was an unusual and remarkable proof of refinement and good taste; but at present, though still the exception, it is no longer quite so rare to find uneducated people able to a certain degree to appreciate good music. Much has been written to vindicate English musical taste within the last thirty or forty years; but still the fact can scarcely be overlooked that, notwithstanding all efforts to the contrary, the standard of taste among the masses is lower than it was in Tudor days.

Every one is familiar with the choral unions, the glee-clubs, the carol-singing, Leslie’s choir, and Hullah’s methods, which all go far to raise the taste of the people and enlist the vocal powers of many who otherwise would have been tempted to leave singing to the “mounseers” and other “furriners,” as the only thing those benighted individuals could be good for. There is, as there has been for many generations, the Chapel Royal, a sort of informal school of music; there is the Academy of Music; there are “Crystal Palace” and “Monday Popular Concerts”; musical festivals every year in the various cathedrals, oratorios in Exeter Hall; and there soon will be a “National School of Music,” which is to be a climax in musical education, the pride of the representative bodies of wealthy and noble England (for princes and corporations have vied with each other in founding scholarships); but with all this, the palmy days of the Tudors are dead and gone beyond the power of man to galvanize them into new activity. True, every young woman plays the pianoforte; you see that instrument in the grocer’s best parlor and the farmer’s keeping-room; but the sort of music played upon it is trivial and foreign, an exotic in the life of the performer, a boarding-school accomplishment, not a labor of love. You can hear “Beautiful Star,” and “Home, Sweet Home,” and Mozart’s “Agnus Dei” sung one after the other, with the same expression, the same “strumminess,” the same stolidity, or the same affected languor, and you will perceive[409] that, though the singer may know them, she neither feels nor understands them. Moore’s melodies, too, you hear ad nauseam, murdered and slurred over anyhow; but both the delicacy of the poetry and the pathos of the music are a dead-letter to the performer. But though a few songs by good writers are popular in the middle classes—for instance, Tennyson’s “Brook” and “Come into the garden, Maud,” the immortal and almost unspoilable “Home, Sweet Home”—yet there is also a dark side to the picture in the prevalence of comic songs, low, slangy ballads, sham negro melodies (utterly unlike the real old pathetic plantation-song), and other degrading entertainments classed under the title of “popular music.” The higher classes give little countenance or aid to the upward movement in music, and still look upon the art as an adjunct of fashion. With such disadvantages, it is a wonder that England has struggled back into the ranks of music-lovers at all, even though, as yet, she can take but a subordinate place among them.

PIOUS PICTURES.

A great deterioration having been observable for some time past in the multitudinous little pictures published in Paris, ostensibly with a religious object, some of the more thoughtful writers in Catholic periodicals have on several recent occasions earnestly protested against the form these representations are taking. Their remonstrances are, however, as yet unsuccessful. The “article” continues to be produced on an increasing scale, and is daily transmitted in immense quantities, not only to the farthest extremities of the territory, but far beyond, especially to England and America, to ruin taste, sentimentalize piety, and “give occasion to the enemy to” deride if not to “blaspheme.”

The bishops of France have already turned their attention to this unhealthy state of things in what may be called pictorial literature for the pious, and efforts are being made in the higher regions of ecclesiastical authority to arrest its deterioration. In the synod lately held at Lyons severe censure was passed on the objectionable treatment of sacred things so much in vogue in certain quarters; and, still more recently, Father Matignon, in his conference on “The Artist,” condemned these “grotesque interpretations of religious truths, which render them ridiculous in the eyes of unbelievers, and corrupt the taste of the faithful.” The eloquent preacher at the same time recommended the Catholic journalists to denounce a species of commerce as ignorant as it is mercenary, and counselled the members of the priesthood to “declare unrelenting war against this school of pettiness, which is daily gaining ground in France, and which gives a trivial and vulgar aspect to things the most sacred.”

This appeal has not been without effect. There appears in the[410] Monde, from the pen of M. Léon Gautier, the author of several pious and learned works, a Letter “Against Certain Pictures,” addressed “to the president of the Conference of T——,” in which the absurdity of these silly compositions is attacked with much spirit and good sense. The Semaine Religieuse de Paris reproduces this letter, with an entreaty to its readers to enroll themselves in the crusade therein preached by the eminent writer—a crusade the opportuneness of which must be only too evident to every thoughtful and religious mind. M. Léon Gautier writes as follows:

You have requested me, dear friend, to purchase for you a “gross” of little pictures for distribution among your poor and their children.…

As to the selection of these pictures I must own myself greatly perplexed, and must beg to submit to you very humbly my difficulties, and not only my difficulties, but also my distress, and, to say the truth, my indignation. I have before my eyes at this moment four or five hundred pictures which have been sold to me as “pious,” but which I consider as in reality among the most detestable and irreverent of any kind of merchandise. A great political journal the other day gave to one of its leaders the title of L’Ecœurement.[170] I cannot give a title to my letter, but, were it possible to do so, I should choose this one in preference to any other. I am in the unfortunate state of a man who has swallowed several kilograms of adulterated honey. I am suffering from an indigestion of sugar; and what sugar! Whilst in the act of buying these little horrors, I beheld numberless purchasers succeed each other with feverish eagerness in the shops, which I will not specify. Yes, I had the pain of meeting there with Christian Brothers and with Sisters of Charity, who made me sigh by their simple avidity and ingenuous delight at the sight of these frightful little black or rose-colored prints. They bought them by hundreds, by thousands, by ten thousands; for schools, for orphanages, for missions. Ah! my dear friend, how many souls are going to be well treacled in our hapless world! It is the triumph of confectionery. “Why are you choosing such machines as these?” I asked of the good Brother Theodore, whom, to my great astonishment, I found among the purchasers; “they are disagreeable.” “Agreed.” “They are stupid.” “I know it.” “They are dear.” “My purse is only too well aware of the fact.” “Then why do you buy them?” “Because I find that these only are acceptable.” And thereupon the worthy man told me that he had the other day distributed among his children pictures taken from the fine head of our Saviour attributed to Morales—a chef-d’œuvre. The children, however, perceiving that there was no gilding upon them, had thrown them aside, gaping. Decidedly, the evil is greater than I had supposed, and it is time to consider what is to be done.

In spite of all this, I have bought your provision of pictures; but do not be uneasy—I am keeping them myself, and will proceed to describe them to you. I do not wish that the taste of your beloved poor should be vitiated by the sight of these mawkish designs; but I will[411] take upon myself to analyze them for your benefit, and then see if you are not very soon as indignant as myself.

In the first place we have the “symbolical” pictures, and these are the most numerous of all. I do not want to say too much against them. You know in what high estimation I hold true symbolism, and we have many a time exchanged our thoughts on this admirable form of the activity of the human mind. A symbol is a comparison between things belonging to the physical and things belonging to the immaterial world. Now, these two worlds are in perfect harmony with each other. To each phenomenon of the moral order there corresponds exactly a phenomenon of the visible order. If we compare these two facts with each other, we have a symbol. There is a life, a breath, a whiteness, which are material. Figurative language is nothing else than a vast and wonderful symbolism, and you remember the marvellous things written on this subject by the lamented M. Landriot. In the supernatural order it is the same, and all Christian generations have made use of symbolism to express the most sacred objects of their adoration. There has been the symbolism of the Catacombs; there has been also that of the Middle Ages. The two, although not resembling, nevertheless complete, each other, and eloquently attest the fact that the Christian race has never been without the use of symbols.

Thus it is not symbolism which I condemn, but this particular symbolism of which I am about to speak, and which is so odiously silly. I write to you with the proofs before me. I am not inventing, but, mirror-wise, merely reflecting. I am not an author, but a photographer.

Firstly, here we have a ladder, which represents “the way of the soul towards God.” This is very well, although moderately ideal; but then who is mounting this ladder? You would never guess. It is a dove! Yes; the poor bird is painfully climbing up the rounds as if she were a hen getting back to roost, and apparently forgetting that she owns a pair of wings. But we shall find this dove elsewhere; for our pictures are full of the species, and are in fact a very plentifully-stocked dove-cote. I perceive down there another animal; it is a roe with her fawn, and with amazement I read this legend: “The fecundity of the breast of the roe is the image of the abundance and sweetness of grace.” Why was the roe selected, and why roe’s milk? Strange! But here again we have a singular collection. On a heart crowned with roses is placed a candlestick (a candlestick on a heart!), and this candelabrum, price twenty-nine sous, is surmounted by a lighted candle, around which angels are pressing. This, we are told underneath, is “good example.” Does it mean that we are to set one for the blessed angels to follow? Next, what do I see here? A guitar; and this at the foot of the cross. Let us see what can be the reason of this mysterious assemblage; the text furnishes it: Je me délasserai à l’abri de la Croix—“I will refresh myself in the shelter of the cross”—from whence it follows that one can play the guitar upon Golgotha. Touching emblem! And what do you say of this other, in which our Saviour Jesus, the Word, and, as Bossuet says, the Reason and Interior[412] Discourse of the Eternal Father, is represented as occupied in killing I know not what little insects on the leaves of a rose-bush? “The divine Gardener destroys the caterpillars which make havoc in his garden,” says the legend. I imagine nothing, but merely transcribe, and for my part would gladly turn insecticide to this collection of imagerie.

This hand issuing out of a cloud I recognize as the hand of my Lord God, the Creator and Father of all, who is at the same time their comforter, their stay, and their life. I admit this symbol, which is ancient and truly Christian; but this divine hand, which the Middle Ages would most carefully have guarded against charging with any kind of burden; this hand, which represents Eternal Justice and Eternal Goodness—can you imagine what it is here made to hold? [Not even the fiery bolt which the heathen of old times represented in the grasp of their Jupiter Tonans, but] a horrible and stupid little watering-pot, from the spout of which trickles a driblet of water upon the cup of a lily. Further on I see the said watering-pot is replaced by a sort of jug, which the Eternal is emptying upon souls in the shape of doves; and this, the legend kindly informs me, is “the heavenly dew.” Heavenly dew trickling out of a jug! And there are individuals who can imagine and depict a thing like this when the beneficent Creator daily causes to descend from his beautiful sky those milliards of little pearly drops which sparkle in the morning sunshine on the fair mantle of our earth! Water, it must be owned, is scarcely a successful subject under any form with our picture-factors. Here is a poor and miserably-painted thread lifting itself up above a basin, while I am informed underneath that “the jet of water is the image of the soul lifting itself towards God by meditation.”

I also need to be enlightened as to how “a river turned aside from its course is an image of the good use and of the abuse of grace.” It is obscure, but still it does not vulgarize and debase a beautiful and Scriptural image, like the next I will mention, in which, over the motto, “Care of the lamp: image of the cultivation of grace in our hearts,” we have a servant-maid taking her great oily scissors and cutting the wick, of which she scatters the blackened fragments no matter where.

The quantity of ribbon and string used up by these symbol-manufacturers is something incalculable. Here lines of string unite all the hearts of the faithful (doves again!) to the heart of Our Blessed Lady; there Mary herself, the Immaculate One and our own incomparable Mother, from the height of heaven holds in leash, by an interminable length of string, a certain little dove, around the neck of which there hangs a scapular. This, we are told, means that “Mary is the directress of the obedient soul.” Elsewhere the string is replaced by pretty rose-colored or pale-blue ribbons, which have doubtless a delicious effect to those who can appreciate it. Here is a young girl walking along cheerfully enough, notwithstanding that her heart is tied by one of these elegant ribbons to that of the Blessed Mother of God, apparently without causing her the slightest inconvenience. Her situation, however, is, I think, less painful than that of this other young person, who is occupied[413] in carving her own heart into a shape resembling that of Mary. Another young female has hoisted this much-tormented organ (her own) on an easel, and is painting it after the same pattern. But let us hasten out of this atelier to breathe the open air among these trees. Alas! we there find, under the form and features of an effeminate child of eight years old, “the divine Gardener putting a prop to a sapling tree,” or “grafting on the wild stock the germ of good fruits.” This is all pretty well; but what can be said of this ciborium which has been energetically stuck into a lily, with the legend, “I seek a pure heart”? These gentlemen, indeed, treat you to the Most Holy Eucharist with a free-and-easyness that is by no means fitting or reverent. It is forbidden to the hands of laics to touch the Sacred Vessels, and it is only just that the same prohibition should apply to picture-makers. They are entreated not to handle thus lightly and irreverently that which is the object of our faith, our hope, and our love.

Hitherto I have refrained from touching upon that very delicate subject which it is nevertheless necessary that I should approach—namely, the representation of the Sacred Heart. And here I feel myself at ease, having beforehand submitted to all the decisions of the church, and having for long past made it my great aim to be penetrated with her spirit. Like yourself, I have a real devotion to the Sacred Heart, nor do I wish to conceal it. When any devotion takes so wide a development in the Holy Church, it is because it is willed by God, who watches unceasingly over her destinies and the forms of worship which she renders to him. All Catholics are agreed upon this point. It is true that certain among them regard the Sacred Heart as the symbol of Divine Love, and that others consider it under the aspect of a very adorable part of the Body of the God-Man, and, if I may so express it, as a kind of centralized Eucharist. Well, I hold that to be accurate one ought to admit and harmonize the two systems, and therefore I do so. You are aware that it is my belief that physiology does not yet sufficiently understand the mechanism of our material heart, and I await discoveries on that subject which shall establish the fact of its necessity to our life. The other day, at Baillère’s, I remained a long time carefully examining a fine engraving representing the circulation of the blood through the veins and arteries, and I especially contemplated the heart the source and receptacle of this double movement, and said to myself, “The worship of the Sacred Heart will be one day justified by physiology.” But why do I say this, when it is so already? Behold me, then, on my knees before the Sacred Heart of my God, in which I behold at the same time an admirable symbol and a yet more admirable reality. But is this a reason for representing the Sacred Heart in a manner alike ridiculous and odious? I will not here enter upon the question as to whether it is allowable to represent the Sacred Heart of Jesus otherwise than in his Sacred Breast, and I only seek to know in order to accept unhesitatingly whatever with regard to this may be the thought of the church. But that which to my mind is utterly revolting is the sight of the profanations of which these fortieth-rate picture-manufacturers are guilty. What right have they, and how do they dare,[414] to represent hundreds of consecrated Hosts issuing from the Sacred Heart, and a dove pecking at them as they are dropping down? What right have they to make the Heart of our Lord God a pigeon-house, a roosting-place for these everlasting doves, or into a vase out of which they are drinking? What right have they to insert a little heart (ours) into the Divine Heart of Jesus? What right have they to represent to us [a Pelion, Ossa, and Olympus on a small scale] three hearts, the one piled upon the other, and cascades of blood pouring from the topmost, which is that of Our Lord; upon the second, which is that of his Blessed Mother; and thence upon the third, which is our own? What right have they to make the Sacred Heart shed showers of roses, or to give its form to their “mystic garden”? Lastly, what right have they to lodge it in the middle of a full-blown flower, and make the latter address to it the scented question, “What would you desire me to do in order that I may be agreeable to you?” Ye well-meaning picture-makers! beware of asking me the same question; for both you and I very well know what would be the answer.

The truth is that these clumsy persons manage to spoil everything they touch, and they have dishonored the symbolism of the dove, as they have compromised the representations of the Sacred Heart. The dove is undoubtedly one of the most ancient and evangelical of all the Christian symbols; but a certain discretion is nevertheless necessary in the employment of this emblem of the Holy Spirit of God. This discretion never failed our forefathers, who scarcely ever depicted the dove, except only in the scene of Our Lord’s baptism and in representations of the Blessed Trinity. In the latter the Eternal Father, vested in pontifical or imperial robes, holds between his arms the cross, whereon hangs his Son, while the Holy Dove passes from the Father to the Son as the eternal love which unites them. This is well, simple, and even fine. But there is a vast difference between this and the present abuse and vulgarization of the dove as an emblem, where it is made use of to represent the faithful soul. No, truly, one is weary of all this. Do you see this flight of young pigeons hovering about with hearts in their beaks? The beaks are very small and the hearts very large, but you are intended to understand by this that “fervent souls rise rapidly to great perfection.” These other doves, lower down, give themselves less trouble and fatigue; they are quietly pecking into a heart, and I read this legend: “The heart of Love is inexhaustible; let us go to it in all our wants.” The pigeon that I see a little farther off is not without his difficulties; he is carrying a stout stick in his delicate beak, and—would you believe it?—the explanation of this remarkable symbol is, “Thy rod and thy staff have comforted me.” Here again are carrier-pigeons, bringing us in their beaks nicely-folded letters in charming envelopes. One of these birds [who possibly may belong to the variety knows as tumbler pigeons] has evidently fallen into the water; for he is shown to us standing to recover himself on what appears to be a heap of mud in the middle of the ocean, with the motto, “Saved! he is saved!” Next I come upon a party of doves again—always doves!—whose occupation is certainly no sinecure. Oars[415] have been fitted to their feeble claws, and these hapless creatures are rowing. Here is another unfortunate pigeon. She is in prison with a thick chain fastened to her left foot, and we are told that she is “reposing on the damp straw of the dungeon.” Further on appears another of this luckless species, on its back with its claws in the air. It is dead. So much the better. It is not I who will encourage it to be so unwise as to return to life. True, in default of doves, other symbols will not be found lacking. Here are some of the tender kind—little souvenirs to be exchanged between friend and friend, wherein one finds I know not what indescribable conglomerations of religious sentiment and natural friendship. Flowers, on all sides flowers: forget-me-nots, pansies, lilies, and underneath all the treasures of literature: “It is a friend who offers you these”; “Near or far away, yours ever”; “These will pass; friendship will remain.” “C’est la fleur de Marie Que je vous ai choisie.” (N.B.—This last is in verse.)

I know not, my dear friend, whether you feel with me on this point. While persuading myself that all these playfulnesses are very innocent, I yet find in them a certain something which strikes me as interloping, and I do not like mixtures.

We have also the politico-religious pictures. Heaven forbid that I should speak evil of the fleurs-de-lys which embalmed with their perfume all the dear Middle Ages to which I have devoted so much of my life; but we have in these pictures of which I am speaking mixtures which are, to my mind, detestable, and I cannot endure this pretty little boat, of which the sails are covered with fleurs-de-lys, its mast is the Pontifical Cross, and its pilot the Sacred Heart. Is another allusion to legitimacy intended in this cross surrounded with flowers and bearing the legend, “My Beloved delights himself among the lilies”? I cannot tell; but if we let each political party have free access to our religious picture-stores, we shall see strange things, and then Gare aux abeilles!—“Beware of the bees.”

One characteristic common to all these wretched picturelings is their insipidity and petty childishness. They are a literature of nurses and nursery-maids. The designers must surely belong to the female portion of humanity; for one is conscious everywhere of the invisible hand of woman. One is unwilling to conceive it possible that any one with a beard on the chin could bring himself to invent similar meagrenesses. These persons are afraid of man, and have wisely adopted the plan of never painting him, and of making everybody under the age of ten years. Never have they had any clear or serious idea of the Word, the God made man—of him, the mighty and terrible One, who pronounced anathema on the Pharisees and the sellers in the Temple. They can but represent a little Jesus in wax, or sugar, or treacle; and alarmed at the loftiness of Divinity, and being incapable of hewing his human form in marble, they have kneaded it in gingerbread.

And yet our greatest present want is manliness. Truly, truly, in France we have well-nigh no more men! Let us, then, have no more of these childishnesses, but let us behold in the divine splendor and perfect manhood of the Word made flesh the eternal type of regenerated humanity.

SUMMER STORMS.

THE KING OF METALS
FROM THE FRENCH.

There once lived a widow named Mary Jane, who had a beautiful daughter called Flora. The widow was a sensible, humble woman; the daughter, on the contrary, was very haughty. Many young persons desired her in marriage, but she found none to please her; the greater the number of her suitors, the more disdainful she became. One night the mother awoke, and, being unable to compose herself again to sleep, she began to say her rosary for Flora, whose pride gave her a great deal of disquietude. Flora was asleep near her, and she smiled in her sleep.

“I dreamed that a great lord conducted me to church in a copper coach, and gave me a ring composed of precious stones that shone like stars; and when I entered the church, the people in the church looked only at the Mother of God and at me.”

Flora began to sing. That same day a young peasant of good reputation asked her to marry him. This offer her mother approved, but Flora said to him:

“Even were you to seek me in a coach of copper, and wed me with[418] a ring brilliant as the stars, I would not accept you.”

The following night Mary Jane, being wakeful, began to pray, and, looking at Flora, saw her smile.

“I dreamed that a great lord came for me in a coach of silver, gave me a coronet of gold, and when I entered the church those present were more occupied in looking at me than at the Mother of God.”

“O poor child!” exclaimed the widow, “what an impious dream. Pray, pray earnestly that you may be preserved from temptation.”

That day a young gentleman came to ask her in marriage. Her mother regarded this proposal as a great honor, but Flora said to this new aspirant:

“Were you to seek me in a coach of silver and offer me a coronet of gold, I would not wed you.”

“Unfortunate girl!” cried Mary Jane, “renounce your pride. Pride leads to destruction.”

The third night the watchful mother saw an extraordinary expression on her child’s countenance, and she prayed fervently for her.

“I dreamed,” she said, “that a great lord came to seek me in a coach of gold, gave me a robe of gold, and when I entered the church all there assembled looked only at me.”

That day in the court-yard of the house there stood three equipages, one of copper, the other of silver, and the third of gold. The first was drawn by two horses, the second by four, the third by eight. From the first two descended pages clothed in red, with green caps; from the third descended a nobleman whose garments were of gold. He asked to marry Flora. She immediately accepted him, and ran to her chamber to decorate herself with the golden robe which he presented to her.

The good Mary Jane was sorrowful and anxious, but Flora’s countenance was radiant with delight. She left her home without asking the maternal benediction, and entered the church with a haughty air. Her mother remained on the threshold praying and weeping.

After the ceremony, Flora entered the golden equipage with her husband, and they departed, followed by the two other equipages.

They drove a long, a very long distance. At last they arrived at a rock where there was a large entrance like the gate of a city. They entered through this door, which soon closed with a terrible noise, and they were in midnight darkness. Flora was trembling with fear, but her husband said:

“Reassure yourself; you will soon see the light.” In truth, from every side appeared little creatures in red clothes and green caps—the dwarfs who dwell in the cavities of the mountains. They carried flaming torches, and advanced to meet their master, the King of Metals.

They ranged themselves around, and escorted him through long valleys and subterranean forests. But—a very singular thing—all the trees of these forests were of lead.

At last the cortége reached a[419] magnificent prairie or meadow; in the midst of this meadow was a château of gold studded with diamonds. “This,” said the King of Metals, “is your domain.” Flora was much fatigued and very hungry. The dwarfs prepared dinner, and her husband led her to a table of gold. But all the meats and all the food presented to her were of this metal. Flora, not being able to partake of this food, was reduced to ask humbly for a piece of bread. The waiters brought her bread of copper, of silver, and of gold. She could not bite either of them. “I cannot give you,” her husband said, “the bread that you wish; here we have no other kind of bread.”

“Your tears cannot change your fate. This is the destiny you have yourself chosen.”

The miserable Flora was compelled to remain in this subterranean abode, suffering with hunger, through her passion for wealth. Only once a year, at Easter, she is allowed to ascend for three days to the upper earth, and then she goes from village to village, begging from door to door a morsel of bread.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

I. Renewed Working of the Holy Spirit in the World.—We are, in a religious, social, and political point of view, in times of transition which we are not able to understand, for the same reason that no one can follow the movements of the battle-field who is in the midst of the engagement.

To judge from appearances, especially those which are nearest at hand, we are on the brink of an abyss. The Catholic religion, openly persecuted in Germany, prostrated now for several years in Italy and Spain by the suppression of the religious congregations, attacked in all countries, abandoned by all sovereigns, appears, humanly speaking, to be on the brink of destruction. There are not wanting prophets who predict the collapse of Christianity and the end of the world. There are, however, manly souls who do not allow themselves to be discouraged, and who see grounds for hope in the very events which fill ordinary hearts with terror and consternation.

Of this number is an American religious, Father Hecker, who has just issued a pamphlet in English, wherein, without concealing the difficulties of the present, he avows his expectation of the approaching triumph of religion.

His motives are drawn from the deep faith he professes in the action of the Holy Spirit in the church, outside of which he does not see any real Christianity. It is the Holy Spirit whom we must first invoke; it is the Holy Spirit of whom we have need, and who will cure all our ills by sending us his gifts.

“The age,” he says, “is superficial; it needs the gift of wisdom, which enables the soul to contemplate truth in its ultimate causes. The age is materialistic; it needs the gift of intelligence, by the light of which the intellect penetrates into the essence of things. The age is captured by a false and one-sided science; it needs the gift of science, by the light of which is seen each order of truth in its[420] true relations to other orders and in a divine unity. The age is in disorder, and is ignorant of the ways to true progress; it needs the gift of counsel, which teaches how to choose the proper means to attain an object. The age is impious; it needs the gift of piety, which leads the soul to look up to God as the heavenly Father, and to adore him with feelings of filial affection and love. The age is sensual and effeminate; it needs the gift of force, which imparts to the will the strength to endure the greatest burdens, and to prosecute the greatest enterprises with ease and heroism. The age has lost and almost forgotten God; it needs the gift of fear to bring the soul again to God, and make it feel conscious of its great responsibility and of its destiny.”

The men to whom these gifts have been accorded are those of whose services our age has need. A single man with these gifts could do more than ten thousand who possessed them not. It is to such men, if they correspond with the graces which have been heaped upon them, that our age will owe its universal restoration and its universal progress. This being admitted, since, on the other hand, it is of faith that the Holy Spirit does not allow the church to err, ought we not now to expect that he will direct her on to a new path?

Since the XVIth century, the errors of Protestantism, and the attacks upon the Catholic religion of which it gave the signal, have compelled the church to change, to a certain extent, the normal orbit of her movement. Now that she has completed in this direction her line of defence,[171] it is to be expected that she will resume her primitive career, and enter on a new phase, by devoting herself to more vigorous action. It is impossible to dispute the fresh strength which the definition lately promulgated by the Council of the Vatican has bestowed upon the church. It is the axis on which now revolves the church’s career—the renewal of religion in souls, and the entire restoration of society.

Do we not see an extraordinary divine working in those numerous pilgrimages to authorized sanctuaries, in those multiplied novenas, and those new associations of prayer? And do they not give evidence of the increasing influence of the Holy Spirit on souls?

What matter persecutions? It is they which purify what remains of the too human in the church. It is by the cross we come to the light—Per crucem ad lucem.

A little farther on the author explains in what the twofold action of the Holy Spirit consists.

He acts at one and the same time in an intimate manner upon hearts, and in a manner quite external on the church herself.

An indefinite field of action conceded to the sentiments of the heart, without a sufficient knowledge of the end and object of the church, would open the way for illusions, for heresies of every kind, and would invite an individual mysticism which would be merely one of the forms of Protestantism.

On the other hand, the exclusive point of view of the external authority of the church, without a corresponding comprehension of the nature of the operations of the Holy Spirit within the heart of every one of the faithful, would make the practice of religion a pure formalism, and would render obedience servile, and the action of the church sterile.

Moreover, the action of the Holy Spirit made visible in the authority of the church, and of the Holy Spirit dwelling invisibly in the heart, form an inseparable synthesis; and he who has not a clear conception of this double action of the Holy Spirit runs the risk of losing himself in one or other of the extremes which would involve the destruction and end of the church.

In the external authority of the church the Holy Spirit acts as the infallible interpreter and the criterion of the divine revelation. He acts in the heart as giving divine life and sanctification.

The Holy Spirit, who, by means of the teachings of the church, communicates divine truth, is the same Spirit which teaches the heart to receive rightly the divine truth which he deigns to teach. The measure of our love for the Holy Spirit is the measure of our obedience to the authority of the church; and the measure of our obedience to the authority of the church is the measure of our love for the Holy Spirit. Whence the[421] saying of S. Augustine: Quantum quisque amat ecclesiam Dei, tantum habet Spiritum Sanctum.

It is remarkable that no pope has done so much for the despised rights of human reason as Pope Pius IX.; that no council has done better service to science than that of the Vatican, none has better regulated its relations to the faith; that none has better defined in their fundamental principles the relations of the natural and the supernatural; and the work of the pontiff and of the council is not yet finished.

Every apology for Christianity must henceforth make great account of the intrinsic proofs of religion, without which people of the world would be more and more drawn to see the church only on her human side.

The Holy Spirit, by means of the sacraments, consummates the union of the soul of the believer with God. It is this end which true religion should pursue. The placing in relief the internal life, and the constitution of the church, and the intelligible side of the mysteries of the church—in short, the intrinsic reasons of the truths of the divine revelation combined with the external motive of credibility—will complete the demonstration of Christianity. Such an exposition of Christianity, founded on the union of these two categories of proofs, will have the effect of producing a more enlightened and intense conviction of religion in the souls of the faithful, and of stimulating them to more energetic action; and it will have, as its last result, the opening of the door to their wandering brethren, and gathering them back into the bosom of the church. With the vigorous co-operation of the faithful, the ever-augmenting action of the Holy Spirit will raise the human personality to such an intensity of strength and greatness that there will result from it a new era for the church and for society—an admirable era, which it would be difficult to describe in human expressions, without having recourse to the prophetic language of the inspired Scriptures.

II. The Mission of Races.—In pursuing his study upon the action of the Holy Spirit in the world, the author says that a wider and more explicit exposition of the dogmatic and moral verities of the church, with a view to the characteristic gifts of every race, is the means to employ in order to realize the hopes he has conceived.

God is the author of the different races of men. For known reasons of his providence, he has impressed on them certain characteristic traits, and has assigned to them from the beginning the places which they should occupy in his church.

In a matter in which delicate susceptibilities have to be carefully handled, it is important not to exaggerate the special gifts of every race, and, on the other hand, not to depreciate them or exaggerate their vices.

It would, however, be a serious error, in speaking of the providential mission of the races, to suppose that they were destined to mark with their imprint religion, Christianity, or the church. It is, on the contrary, God who makes the gifts and qualities with which he has endowed them co-operate in the expression and development of the truths which he created for them.

Nevertheless, no one can deny the mission of the Latin and Celtic races throughout the greater part of the history of Christianity. The first fact which manifested their mission and established the influence they were to exercise was the establishment of the chair of S. Peter at Rome, the centre of the Latin race. To Rome appertained the idea of the administrative and governmental organization of the whole world. Rome was regarded as the geographical centre of the world.

The Greeks having abandoned the church for schism, and the Saxons having revolted against her by heresy in the XVIth century, the predominance which the Latin race, united later on to the Celtic race, assumed in her bosom, became more and more marked.

This absence of the Greeks and of a considerable part of the Saxons—nations whose prejudices and tendencies are in many respects similar—left the ground more free for the church to complete her action, whether by her ordinary or normal development, or by the way of councils, as that of Trent and that of the Vatican.

That which characterizes the Latin and Celtic races, according to our author, is their hierarchical, traditional, and emotional tendencies.

He means, doubtless, by this latter expression, that those races are very susceptible to sensible impressions—to those which come from without.

As to the hierarchical sentiment of the[422] Celtic and Latin races, it appears to us that for upwards of a century it has been much weakened, if it be not completely extinct.

One might have feared, perhaps, a kind of hardihood arising from a certain national partiality in regard to which the author would find it difficult to defend himself against his half-brethren of Germany, if he had not added:

It would be impossible to enter into the idea of the Bismarckian policy in a manner more ingenious, more exact, and more striking.

It is by presenting to Germany this monstrous counterfeit of the church that they have succeeded in provoking its hatred of her, and the new empire proposes to be itself the resolution of a problem which can be only formulated thus: “Either adapt Latin Christianity, the Romish Church, to the Germanic[423] type of character and to the exigences of the empire, or we will employ all the forces and all the means at our disposal to stamp out Catholicity within our dominions, and to exterminate its existence as far as our authority and influence extend.”

This war against the Catholic religion is formidable, and ought not to leave us without alarm and without terror.

Truth is powerful, it is said, and it will prevail. But truth has no power of itself, in so far as it is an abstraction. It has none, except on the condition of coming forth and showing itself living in minds and hearts.

No thought can be entertained for a moment of modifying Catholic dogmas, of altering the constitution of the church, or of entering, to ever so small an extent, on the path of concessions. What is needed is to present religious truth to minds in such a manner as that they shall be able to see that it is divine. It is to prove to them that our religion alone is in harmony with the profoundest instincts of their hearts, and can alone realize their secret aspirations, which Protestantism has no power to satisfy. For that, the Holy Spirit must be invoked in order that he may develop the interior life of the church, and that this development may be rendered visible to the persecutors themselves, who hitherto see nothing in her but what is terrestrial and human. Already a certain ideal conception of Christianity exists amongst non-Catholics of England and of the United States, and puts them in the way of a more complete conversion. As to the Saxons, who, in these days, precipitate themselves upon an opposite course, we should try to enlighten their blindness. Already we have seen the persecutors, whether Roman or German, become themselves Christian in their turn. We shall see the Germans of our days exhibiting the same spectacle. It is a great race, that German race. Now, “the church is a divine queen, and her aim has always been to win to her bosom the imperial races. She has never failed to do it, too.”

Already we can perceive a very marked return movement amongst the demi-Saxons, or Anglo-Saxons. It is a great sign of the times.

At different epochs there have been movements of this kind in England. But none exhibited features so serious as that of which we are witnesses in these days. Conversions to the church multiply without number, above all amongst the most intelligent and influential classes of the nation; and that in spite of the violent cry of alarm raised by Lord John Russell, and in spite of the attacks of the ex-minister Gladstone, who has the reputation of being the most eloquent man in England.

The gravitation towards the Catholic Church exhibits itself in a manner still more general and more clear in the bosom of the United States.

The Catholics in that country amounted to scarcely a few hundreds at the commencement of this century. They form now a sixth of the population of the United States. They number about 7,000,000. And the Catholic is the only religion which makes any real progress.

It is, then, true “that the Catholic religion flourishes and prospers wherever human nature has its due liberty. Let them but give to the church rights only equal to those of other confessions, and freedom of action, and we should see her regain Europe, and, with Europe, the world.”

Now, might we not conclude that these two demi-Saxon nations, England and the United States, are predestined by Providence to lead the Saxons themselves in a vast movement of return towards the Catholic Church?

Before concluding, the author returns to the Latin and Celtic nations, and directs towards them a sorrowful glance.

As for France, he regrets that a violent reaction against the abuses of the ancient régime, of which he gives a somewhat exaggerated picture, has brought about an irreligious revolution and a political situation which oscillates ceaselessly between anarchy and despotism, and despotism and anarchy. He deplores still more that the progressive movement has been diverted from its course in Spain and in Italy by the evil principles imported from France.

“At this moment,” says the author, “Christianity is in danger, on the one hand, of being exterminated by the persecution of the Saxon races; on the other, of being betrayed by the apostasy of the Celto-Latins. This is the great tribulation of the church at the present time. Between these two perils she labors painfully.”

According to human probabilities, the[424] divine bark should be on the point of perishing. But perish it cannot. God cannot abandon the earth to the spirit of evil. “Jesus Christ came to establish the kingdom of God on the earth, as a means of conducting men to the kingdom of God in heaven.”

The zealous religious who is the author of this important manifesto traversed the seas in order to submit it to the Holy Father. [A mistake. Father Hecker went to Europe for other reasons, and took advantage of the opportunity to submit his pamphlet to the examination of the Roman censors and other eminent theologians.] If we are well informed, the Roman Curia found in it neither error nor rashness.[172] It is a complete plan of action proposed to the apostolate of the church for the future. The old era would close, a new one would open.

On this ground all ancient differences should disappear. Bitter and useless recriminations would be laid aside. All would be moving towards the same future, in accord not only as to the end, but as to the means.

The Culturkampf advances daily. Its war-cry in precipitating itself upon the church, bent upon her destruction, is: “The doctrine of infallibility has made spiritual slaves of Catholics, who are thus a hindrance to civilization.” In presence of so furious an attack, every voice which suggests means of safety deserves our best attention.

Of this kind is a pamphlet published lately in London, and which has been already translated into French, German, and Italian, and of which the journals of different countries, of the most opposite views, have given very favorable opinions.

The lamented M. Ravelet would, had he been spared, have introduced it to the readers of the Monde; for he had met its author at Rome, and knew how to appreciate the breadth of his views. Father Hecker, its author, the founder of the Paulists of New York, is celebrated in his country for a style of polemics admirably adapted to the genius of his fellow-countrymen. Does he understand Europe, to which he has made prolonged visits, equally well? On that point our readers will soon be able to judge.

How is it that the Catholic religion, which reckons more adherents than any other Christian religion, does not succeed in making itself respected? Evidently because many Catholics are not on a level with the faith which they profess. “We want heroes,” said J. de Maistre at the beginning of our century. At this moment is not the demand the same? There is no lack of religious practices; a number of exterior acts of exterior piety are performed; but the interior life of souls is not exalted; they seem to be afflicted with a kind of spiritual dyspepsia. The crises which threaten terrify them, instead of inflaming beforehand their courage and their confidence in God. It is in the sources of religion itself we shall find energy; it is to them we must betake ourselves to reinvigorate our strength, in the direct action of God upon our consciences, and in the operation of the Holy Spirit upon our souls. From this source issues the true religious[425] life, and our external practices are availing only so far as they are inspired by this internal principle, itself inspired by the Spirit of God. Herein are the primal verities of Christianity. At every epoch of decadence the voices of saints remind the world of them; the spirit of the church inclines us to them; but, distracted by external agitations, we forget to correspond with its suggestions. We do not possess enough of God! Here is our weakness. A little more of divinity within us! Lo, the remedy!

Father Hecker has well written upon the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and upon the men our age wants. Intelligences illuminated from on high, wills divinely strengthened—is not that what is wanted to maintain the struggle? Is he not right when he asserts that one soul adorned with these gifts would do more to promote the kingdom of God than a thousand deprived of them?

This urgent call to a more intensely spiritual life will touch Christian hearts. But the pamphlet foresees an objection. Does not this development of our faculties and of our initiative under the divine influence expose us to some of the dangers of Protestantism? Do we not run the risk of the appearance of strong individualities who, filled with their own ideas, will think themselves more enlightened than the church, and so be seduced into disobeying her authority?

This eternal question of the relation of liberty to authority! Catholics say to Protestants: “Liberty without the control of the divine authority of the church leads insensibly to the destruction of Christianity.” Protestants reply: “Authority amongst you has stifled liberty. You have preserved the letter of the dogmas; but spiritual life perishes under your formalism.” We are not estimating the weight of these reproaches; we merely state the danger. The solution of the religious problem consists in avoiding either extreme.

No Catholic is at liberty to doubt that the Holy Spirit acts directly in the soul of every Christian, and at the same time acts in another way, indirect, but no less precious, by means of the authority of the church. Cardinal Manning has written two treatises on this subject, one on the external, the other on the internal, working of the Holy Spirit. It is these two workings which Father Hecker endeavors to connect in a lofty synthesis, and this is the main object of his work.

The first step of the synthesis is the statement that it is one and the same spirit which works, whether by external authority or by the interior impulse of the soul, and that these two workings, issuing from a common principle, must agree in their exercise and blend in their final result. The liberty of the soul should not dispute the authority of the church, because that authority is divine; the church, on the other hand, cannot oppress the liberty of the soul, because that liberty is also divine. The second step is to prove that the interior action of the Holy Spirit in the soul alone accomplishes our inward sanctification and our union with God. The authority of the church, and, generally, the external observances of religion, having only for their aim to second this interior action, authority and external practices occupy only a secondary and subordinate place in the Catholic system, contrary to the notion of Protestants, who accuse us of sacrificing Jesus Christ to the church, and of limiting Christianity to her external action. The completion of the synthesis is in the following: The individual has not received for his interior life the promise of infallibility; it is to Peter and his successors—that is to say, to the church—that Jesus Christ has conceded this privilege. The Christian thus cannot be sure of possessing the Holy Spirit, excepting in so far as he is in union with the infallible church, and that union is the certain sign that the union of the two workings of the Holy Spirit is realized in him.

We have no doubt that this theory is one of the most remarkable theological and philosophical conceptions of our age. Father Hecker is no innovator, but he seizes scattered ideas and gathers them into a sheaf of luminous rays; and this operation, which seems so simple, is the result of thirty years’ laborious meditation. One must read the pamphlet itself to appreciate its worth. The more we are versed in the problems which agitate contemporary religious thought, the better we shall understand the importance of what it inculcates.

We shall briefly dispose of the application the author makes of his synthesis. One most ingenious one is that Protestantism, by denying the authority of the[426] church, obliges her to put forth all her strength in its defence.

If Luther had attacked liberty, the church would have taken another attitude, and would have defended with no less energy the free and direct action of the Holy Spirit in souls. It is this necessary defence of divine authority which gave birth to the Jesuit order, and which explains the special spirit which animates that society. If, however, the defence of assailed authority has been, for three centuries, the principal preoccupation of the church, she has not on that account neglected the interior life of souls. It is sufficient to name the spirituality, so deep and so intense, of S. Philip Neri, S. Francis of Sales, S. John of the Cross, and S. Teresa. Moreover, does not the support of authority contribute to the free life of souls by maintaining the infallible criterion for testing, in cases of doubt, the true inspirations of the Holy Spirit?

The church, in these days, resembles a nation which marches to its frontiers to repel the invasion of the foreigner and protect its national life; its victory secured, it recalls its forces to the centre, to continue with security and ardor the development of that same life.

According to Father Hecker, the church was in the last extremity of peril. He sees in the proclamation of the infallibility of the Pope the completion of the development of authority provoked by the Reformation, and believes that nothing now remains but its application.

If, since the XVIth century, external action has predominated in the church, without, however, ever becoming exclusive, so now the internal working will predominate, always leaving to the external its legitimate share. Only, this new phase will be, in a way, more normal than the preceding, because, in religion as in man, the internal infinitely surpasses the external, without, however, annihilating it, as does Protestantism. This internal is the essence of Christianity; it is the kingdom of heaven within us, and whose frontiers it is our duty to extend. It is the treasure, the hidden pearl, the grain of mustard-seed, of the Gospel. It is to this interior of the soul that our Lord addressed the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. The external church—the priesthood, the worship, the sacraments—are only means divinely instituted to help the weakness of man to rise to the worship in spirit and in truth announced by our Saviour to the Samaritan woman. And the time has come for a fuller expansion of this internal life, for the more general development of the spirit of S. Francis of Sales and of the other saints of whom we spoke above.

As to those outside the church, they will never believe in this evolution, because they suppose that the doctrine of infallibility has condemned us to a kind of petrifaction. But if they study the actual situation, events will undeceive them from this present moment.

The persecutions which deprive the church of her temporalities, of her exterior worship, of her religious edifices, which go the length even of depriving the faithful of their priests and bishops, which suppress as far as they can the external part of Catholicity, do they not reveal the power of its interior?

In the parts of Switzerland and Germany where the populations are robbed of their clergy and worship, do we not see faith developing in sacrifice, and piety becoming more serious and fervent in the privation of all external aid? This example is an additional proof of the opportuneness of Father Hecker’s pamphlet. If God wills that the persecution should increase, we must be prepared to do without the external means which he himself has instituted, and which he accords to us in ordinary times. For we must not forget that no human power can separate us from God, and that so long as this union exists religion remains entire as to its substance.

The merit of the Christian is in the intention which inspires his acts. Religion exists only in the idea which clothes its rites; the sacraments, the channels of grace, are only effective in us as they are preceded by the dispositions of our soul. For a religion not to degenerate, it must perpetually renew the internal life, in order to resist the encroachments of routine.

Here the author asks what is the polemic best suited to help the people of these times to escape from their unbelief, which often proceeds from regarding the church as having fallen into formalism and into a debasing authoritativism. He believes they might be undeceived by disclosing to them the inner life of religion and the internal proofs of her divinity—an idea he shares with the most[427] illustrious writers of our age. Lacordaire wrote to Mme. Swetchine that he had reversed the point of view of the controversy in scrutinizing matters from within, which manifested truth under a new aspect.

Father Hecker quotes in this sense the striking words of Schlegel: “We shall soon see, I think, an exposition of Christianity appear which will bring about union among all Christians, and convert the unbelieving themselves.” Ranke said with no less decision: “This reconciliation of faith and science will be more important, as regards its spiritual results, than was the discovery, three centuries ago, of a new hemisphere, than that of the true system of the universe, or than that of any other discovery of science, be it what it may.”

The pamphlet ends with a philosophy of race. And here the author, whilst acknowledging his fear of wounding susceptibilities, expresses the hope that none of his views will be exaggerated. He inquires what natural elements the several races have offered to the church in the successive phases of her history; and, starting from the principle that God has endowed the races with different aptitudes, he examines in what way those aptitudes may co-operate in the terrestrial execution of the designs of Providence. The Latin-Celtic races, who almost alone remained faithful to the church in the XVIth century, have for authority and external observances tastes which coincide with the more special development of the church since that epoch.

On the contrary, the Anglo-Saxon races have subjective and metaphysical instincts which, in a natural point of view, should attract them to the church in the new phase on which she is entering. Father Hecker has been accused with some asperity of predicting that the direction of the church and of the world will pass into the hands of the Saxon races, whose conversion, sooner or later, he anticipates. But he does not in any sense condemn the Latin races to inferiority. He merely gives it as his opinion that the Latin races can only issue from the present crisis by the development of that interior life of independent reason and deliberate volition which constitutes the force of the Saxon races. God has not given the church to the Latin races. He has not created for nothing the Saxon, Sclavonic, and other races which cover the surface of the globe. They have their predestined place in the assembly of all the children of God, and are called to serve the church according to their providential aptitudes.

Father Hecker and Dr. Newman are not the only ones who think that the absence of the Saxon races has been, for some centuries, very prejudicial to the church. J. de Maistre, whose bias cannot be suspected, expressed himself even more explicitly to that effect. The Latin genius, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, has been and will continue to be of the utmost value to the church. Under the divine influence, the Saxon genius will, in its way, effect equally precious conquests.

2. The definition of infallibility has lent such strength to the church that henceforth personality may become as powerful as possible without the risk, as in the XVIth century, of injuring unity.

3. This definition having completed the external system of Catholicity, the initiative of the church proceeds logically to concentrate itself on the aggrandizement of the interior life, which is the essence of religion.

4. This is proved by the persecutions, which augment and strengthen the religious life of Catholics.

5. The result of these persecutions will be to unveil to Protestants and unbelievers the interior view of Catholicity, and to prepare the way for religious unity.

6. This unity will be effected when Protestants and unbelievers see that Catholicity, far from being opposed to the aspirations of their nature, understands them and satisfies them better than Protestantism and free-thinking.

7. This expansion of Catholicity advances slowly, because it meets few souls great enough to admit of the full development of its working, and of showing what it is capable of producing in them.

8. The way to multiply these souls is to place ourselves more and more under the influence of the Holy Spirit.

Whatever opinion may be formed of certain details, on the whole, this work manifests a high grade of philosophical thought and theological insight. But to appreciate it fully it must be read and studied.

Exceptions have been taken to it, on the ground that one meets nothing in it but theories, without any practical conclusion. Yet what can be more practical than the exhortation which confronts us on every page, to seek in all our religious acts, in sacraments, worship, and discipline, the divine intention involved therein? What more practical than to urge us to develop all the forces of our nature under the divine influence, and to tell us that the more conscientious, reasonable, and manly we are, the more completely men we are, so much the more favorable ground will the church find within us for her working?

Far from urging any abrupt change, Father Hecker recommends that everything should be done with prudence, consideration being had for the manners of every country. He is persuaded that, by placing more confidence in the divine work in souls, they will become insensibly stronger, and will increase thus indefinitely the force and energy of the whole body of the church. Such a future will present us with the spectacle of the conversion of peoples who at present are bitterly hostile to her—a future which we shall purchase at the cost of many sacrifices. But our trials will be full of consolations if we feel that they are preparing a more general and abundant effusion of divine illumination upon the earth. Per crucem ad lucem.

This volume is a compendium of one of those books of memoirs or personal recollections bequeathed to us by the survivors of the English Renaissance of the beginning of the century—My Friends and Acquaintances, by P. G. Patmore. This the editor has supplemented, in the case of Hazlitt, by some letters and reminiscences culled from the Memoirs published by his grandson, W. Carew Hazlitt. These works, it might be fairly supposed, would be of themselves light enough for the most jaded and flippant appetite. However, the aid of the “editor” is called in—heaven forgive the man who first applied that title, honored by a Scaliger and a Bentley, to the modern compiler of scandal!—the most entertaining and doubtfully moral tidbits are picked out; and the result is the class of books before us, which is doing for the national intellect what pastry has done for its stomach. The mutual courtesies—honorable enough when rightly understood—existing between publishers and the periodical press make honest criticism seem ungracious; and thus the public judgment is left uninstructed by silence, or its frivolous tastes are confirmed by careless approval.

The motives impelling the awful scissors of the “editor” not only deprive the original works which fall under them of the modicum of value they may possess, but affirmatively they do worse. They give an absolutely false impression of the persons represented. Thus, in the case before us the character and genius of Lamb are as ridiculously overrated as his true merits are obscured; and the same may be said with even more justice of the portrait given of Hazlitt. Singularly enough, though the editor derives all he knows, or at least all he presents to the reader, from Mr. Patmore and Mr. Carew Hazlitt, he speaks in the most contemptuous terms of both. One he pronounces “not a man of note,” and the other he terms, with a delightful unconsciousness of self-irony, “a bumptious bookmaker, profusely addicted to scissors and paste”; and both he bids, at parting, to “make room for their betters.” If such be the character of Mr. Patmore and Mr. Hazlitt, what opinion, we may ask, is the reader called upon to entertain of the “editor” who is an accident of their existence? Nor is it in relation only to the authors after whom he gleans that the “editor” shows bad taste and self-sufficiency. The immortal author of the Dunciad, speaking of a kindred race of authors, tells us,

“The ricketty little papist, Pope,” is the witticism the editor levels at the brightest and most graceful poet of his age—a master and maker of our English tongue, and a scourge of just such dunces as himself.

Of the writers whose habits and personal characteristics are treated of in this volume we have little or no room to speak, nor does the work before us afford any sufficient basis to go upon. Lamb[429] occupies a niche in the popular pantheon, as an essayist, higher than posterity will adjudge him. His essays are pleasing and witty, and the style is marvellously pure; but they want solidity; they are idealistic, humorous, subjective; they fail to present that faithful transcript of manners, or to teach in sober tones those lessons of morality, which make the older essayists enduring. Lamb’s other works are already forgotten. He was an amiable man in the midst of unhappy surroundings, and his unassuming manners have enshrined his name with affection in the works of his contemporaries.

Hazlitt’s was not a character to be admired, nor in many ways even to be respected. He was devoured with vanity and grosser passions. His work was task-work, and therefore not high. ’Tis true Horace tells us,

—poverty has often been the sting which urged genius to its grandest efforts. But Hazlitt, though undoubtedly a man of genius, was not gifted with that genius of the first order, which abstracts itself wholly from the miserable circumstances about it. The great body of his work is criticism, brilliant, entertaining, even instructive at the moment in which it was produced, but substantially only the fashion of a day.

Of the poet Campbell and Lady Blessington it would be an impertinence to say anything on the slight foundation this volume gives us.

The editor of the “Bric-à-Brac” Series has placed on the cover of each volume this motto:

The author of this work informs us in the preface that his object has been to condense into one volume the colonial, general, and constitutional history of the United States. This volume professes to be a digest of the writings and speeches of the fathers of the Constitution of the United States, the statutes of the several States, the statutes of the United States, of the writings and speeches of eminent American and foreign jurists, the journals and annals of Congress, the Congressional Globe, the general history of the United States, the decisions of the Supreme Courts of the several States, the opinions of the attorneys-general of the United States, and the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States; of extracts from De Tocqueville, the Madison Papers, the Federalist, Elliott’s Debates, the writings of Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and Vattel, and of extracts from Jefferson and other eminent authors on parliamentary law. The platforms of political parties are also given. This list is copied verbatim from the author. It will be seen, therefore, that Mr. Cudmore has set himself no contemptible task to accomplish, and, as he has executed it in a thin octavo of 254 pages, it may reasonably be conjectured that he possesses a talent for condensation that Montesquieu might have envied. Mr. Vallandigham finds a powerful advocate in this author, and his philippics against Mr. Stanton are proportionately severe. Mr. Cudmore has a fondness for notes of exclamation; and such is the ardor of constitutionalism with which he pursues this latter-day “tyrant of the blackest dye” (we quote Mr. Cudmore) that it often takes three notes of admiration to express his just abhorrence of his measures. The bulk of the work is taken up by a civil and military history of the late conflict, and the disputes that preceded it. If we might venture a hint to Mr. Cudmore, we would say that his tone is a little too warm for this miserably phlegmatic age, which affects a fondness for impartiality in great constitutional writers. The fact is, the questions which the author discusses with the greatest spirit are dead issues. They still preserve a faint vitality for the philosopher and speculative statesman, but they have sunk out of sight for the practical politician and man of to-day. The vis major has decided them. We might as usefully begin to agitate for a re-enactment of the Agrarian Laws. Mr. Cudmore’s Chapters IV. and V., containing a digest of State and Federal law, show much meritorious industry. The history of land-grants, the homestead law, and[430] the laws pertaining to aliens and naturalization, will be found useful.

This is a very simple and attractive little book, designed to make the beginning of arithmetic, which certainly is rather a dry study in itself, interesting and capable of fixing the attention of the very young children for whose use the work is intended. We do not remember having seen any prettier or more practical little text-book for beginners, and cannot recommend it too highly. It is also very nicely illustrated.

As a first attempt in this country to prepare a series of geographies adapted to Catholic schools this is deserving of great praise. The type is clear, the maps and illustrations, and the mechanical execution generally, are excellent. It is based, to some extent, on a geographical course originally known as Monteith’s, and adapted by the insertion of additional matter interesting to Catholics. What we should have preferred, and hope eventually to see, is a series of geographies and histories entirely original, and written from the Catholic point of view, and pervaded by the Catholic tone which we find in this.

It gives us great pleasure to express, with slight qualifications, our entire approval of this work, so far as its moral purport is concerned. Its plot and incidents are all within the range of ordinary life and experience, and therefore not calculated to foster in the youthful reader extravagant anticipations in regard to his own future. There are many good hits at the weaknesses and inconsistencies of human nature, and faithful pictures of the vices and miseries to which an unscrupulous ambition leads. Selfishness and injustice prosper for a time, but eventually reap their reward; while integrity and true manliness, even in the rude and uncultivated, are recognized and appreciated.

“Almanac,” when applied to this publication, seems to us a misnomer. The popular notion of an almanac is a thin, badly-printed pamphlet, containing incomprehensible astrological tables, delusive prophecies as to the weather, tradesmen’s advertisements, and a padding of stale jokes or impracticable recipes gathered from country newspapers; whereas the Illustrated Catholic Family Almanac is an annual of 144 pages, containing each year enough solid, well-digested information to furnish forth an ordinary volume of three hundred pages, to say nothing of the many fine engravings—and this, too, at a price which should extend its circulation to equal that of the once-famous Moore’s Almanac (published in England about the beginning of the XVIIIth century), which is said at one time to have sold annually more than four hundred thousand copies.

The several volumes of the Family Almanac form a valuable manual for Catholics, containing, as they do, articles of great interest to the literary student, the antiquarian, and the archæologist. Much of the information could be gathered only from exceedingly well-furnished libraries; some of it appears here for the first time in print.

In the Almanac for 1876, among other good things, we find an extended and very interesting biographical sketch of His Eminence Cardinal McCloskey; also, biographical sketches of Cardinals Wiseman and Altieri, of Bishops Bruté and Baraga, of Rev. Father Nerinckx and the Cura Hidalgo—the Washington of the Mexican revolution—and of Eugene O’Curry, the eminent Irish scholar—all of these being illustrated with portraits. The approaching centenary has not been forgotten, for in “Centennial Memorials” is shown the part—a glorious one, which received the public endorsement[431] of the “Father of his Country,” as will be seen by perusal of the article—taken by Catholics of Irish origin in the Revolutionary struggle. In the same article are numerous statistics showing the temporal growth of our country during the century just closing; the article closes with an account of the wonderful growth of the Catholic Church during the same period—the whole being valuable for future reference. “About the Bible” and “The Bible in the Middle Ages” contain information of interest to every Christian, and which is to be got elsewhere only by much reading; the latter article also contains an ample refutation of the old slander that the Catholic Church of the middle ages kept the Scriptures from the laity. Besides the foregoing, there is much curious and entertaining prose and verse, and several pictures of churches and other edifices (among them one of old S. Augustine’s Church, Philadelphia, destroyed in the riots of 1844, and toward the building of which, in 1796, Washington contributed $150; Stephen Girard, $40; George Meade, father of Gen. Meade, $50; and Commodore Barry, $150), a complete and authentic list of the Roman pontiffs translated from the Italian, the American hierarchy, and the usual astronomical and church calendars, postal guide, etc.

This volume will doubtless be welcome to those already familiar with the Memoirs previously published. The work is largely made up of letters which are of no particular interest, except so far as they throw light on the character of the writers. Endowed by nature with extraordinary beauty, and possessing that knowledge of public events and skill in their interpretation which seems a special gift of Frenchwomen, Mme. Récamier became the centre of an admiring group of statesmen and littérateurs who sought the benefit of her intuitive wisdom.

A very strong testimony to Mme. Récamier’s many virtues is found in the warm friendship which existed between herself and other ladies holding a similar position in French society; in the loving devotion of the child of her adoption, who subsequently became her biographer; and—in the fear and jealousy of the First Napoleon, who paid her the compliment of a temporary exile. The personal attention she gave to her adopted daughter’s education is worthy of imitation.

Father Moriarty’s work has one merit on which editors place a high value—brevity. A book of travels is not properly a history or topography of the countries visited, and a bird’s-eye view of the most salient features is all that we can reasonably ask at the traveller’s hand. The interlarded extracts with which some authors swell their volumes are often wearisome reading. In the above work the reverend traveller narrates all the important incidents of his journey, with descriptions of the various shrines on his route, in so picturesque a manner, and in so few words, that the reader will have no difficulty in laying up in his memory many pleasant subjects for reflection.

An entertaining volume for youthful readers, and one which conveys many useful lessons. The same charming freshness which won for Little Women its wide reputation will render this volume a favorite, notwithstanding its defects—one of which is a spirit of self-assertion in the heroine which is only too true to nature in the average American girl. However reluctant we may be to acknowledge the fact, we cannot fail to see that our so-called progress has had a tendency to weaken veneration for age and respect for authority. Miss Alcott shows her sympathy with this fault by sometimes placing age in a ludicrous light before her juvenile readers. The young people of this generation do not need any encouragement in the belief that age does not always bring wisdom, and we the more regret this mistake in a book otherwise commendable. Destroy[432] the confidence and veneration with which childhood looks up to those placed over it, and you rob parents of that which constitutes a great charm in their offspring, and go far to break down the chief bulwark of society—the family.

This is a new volume added to the already large devotional literature of the church. As its title imports, it was prepared especially with a view to the wants of the daughters of St. Vincent, though adapted to those of other religious, and of persons in the world. As it bears the imprimatur of the Archbishop of Baltimore, and has the approval of the Bishop of Louisville, and, in addition, has had the benefit of Mr. Murphy’s careful proofreading—a matter the importance of which can scarcely be over-estimated in devotional works—we deem further comment unnecessary. We would, however, suggest whether the use of a somewhat thinner paper would not make a better proportioned volume.

The publishers have added to the value of this edition by incorporating in it a number of papers not contained in previous editions, and which had received the author’s last corrections. Few writers of the present century in the English language have done more to popularize Catholic themes and relieve Protestants from the misconceptions which they had previously entertained regarding the history and doctrines of the church, than the late Archbishop of Baltimore. Those who have not previously possessed themselves of his admirable works have a new motive in the improvements now made.

The present edition of Perry’s Instructions differs from the original one in the addition of questions, thus making it a text-book for advanced classes, whereas its use was heretofore limited in a great measure to teachers. The editor (Rev. E. M. Hennessey) has also incorporated an explanation of the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and Papal Infallibility.

BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS RECEIVED.

THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXII., No. 130.—JANUARY, 1876.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by Rev. I. T. Hecker, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

THE PRESIDENT’S SPEECH AT DES MOINES.

The utterances of any person occupying so lofty a station as that of President of the United States demand attention and respect, by reason of the source from whence they emanate. The deliberate judgments of such a man as President Grant have in themselves a special claim to the consideration of his fellow-citizens. He has had opportunities to study the length and breadth of the land. His private convictions have matured amidst the most varied experience of all classes and sections of our people—first in a profession affording ample leisure and abundant means of observation from an independent stand-point, and afterwards in commercial life, which placed him in the midst of daily events, no longer as a theorist, but as one actively concerned in their course and development. His position in military affairs has been that of one of the most celebrated commanders of the age, and his political career has been that of an independent statesman, always wielding supreme influence, and quite beyond the need of vulgar trickery, in order to maintain its power. Having almost completed an illustrious public life, he is now able to express the results of his observations, and no one can lightly question the validity of his conclusions. The country is prepared to receive anything he may have to say to it, with solicitous, intelligent, and earnest consideration.

Those who may differ from him in political convictions, or who may retain a partiality for some of his less successful competitors for the highest prize of military glory, and even those who go so far as to question his greatness—all must admit that he is a true American, formed and moulded by the events in which he has moved, and truly representing the country and the times.

We are disposed, therefore, to attach the fullest importance to his words, whether spoken officially or from the convictions of his heart, and to ponder them respectfully and thoughtfully.

On the 29th of September last[434] His Excellency attended, at Des Moines, the capital city of Iowa, a convention of the “Army of the Tennessee,” one of those military organizations composed of veterans of the late war. The nature of these and kindred associations is not political. Their aim is to keep up a brotherly spirit among those who formerly stood shoulder to shoulder on the battle-field. Nevertheless, the gallant men, who thus risked life and limb for the integrity of the national government, are supposed to retain their patriotism, and to look with pride and zeal upon the continuance and healthy growth of those institutions, which are vitally connected with the nation’s greatness.

In the midst of such an assembly, composed of men of all creeds, our chief magistrate felt called upon to utter a prophetic warning, which has excited much comment at home, and has been extensively published abroad. We print his speech, delivered at the evening session of the “Army of the Tennessee,” as currently reported in the daily press. President Grant, being called for, came forward and said:

Taking all things into consideration, the speech is fully equal to any written production of the President. It is direct. It is plain. It is manly and vigorous, and far superior to any other oration which we have heard of from the same distinguished quarter. Beyond all things it expresses, better than many imagine, the common sentiments of the American people.

We have not been surprised at the general applause with which it has been greeted; and we think that all our readers will agree in the judgments which we are about to express with regard to it.

An impression has been spread abroad that the views of President Grant are hostile to the Catholic Church, and that the speech was fulminated by his zeal against it. It has been averred that he was talked into making a public manifestation of his feelings by the mayor of the city of Des Moines, who called his attention to the political campaign in Ohio, where Catholics were vainly struggling for equal rights in the matter of the public schools. His Excellency is said to have been strongly moved, and hastened home from his ride, in order to prepare his speech for the evening. We have no means of definitely ascertaining the motives of the President’s speech. If he meant to hurl a thunderbolt at us, we honor him for using language, in the main, so just and courteous. But if his friends have sought to make use of him to stir up feeling against us, they must be sadly disappointed at his words; for, if they now repeat them too freely, for the purpose of injuring us, they will find themselves “hoist by” their “own petard.”

Trying as hard as we can to lash ourselves into fury; trying to fancy ourselves insulted, by representing to ourselves that the head of this nation has gone out of his way and abased his dignity, in order to cast an aspersion at a large and respectable class of the community, we are forced to give it up, and to lay down our pen; for we find nothing in the oration with which we are in the least disposed to take issue. On the contrary, we are prepared to join our tribute to the burst of applause which echoes through the land. We are convinced that, if it meets with the attention which it merits, the country at large, and Catholics in particular, will treasure the “Des Moines speech” among the “Sayings of the Fathers.” Like Washington’s Farewell, and Webster’s mighty peroration, and Lincoln’s noble and pathetic Inaugural, it will pass from the vulgar atmosphere of party strife into the pure and serene empyrean of immortality.

We have given the speech at length. We now propose to explain our decision with regard to it, and to examine at greater length those portions of it which seem to us most true, most wise, and most remarkable.

“Encourage free schools,” the President says, “AND RESOLVE THAT NOT ONE DOLLAR APPROPRIATED FOR THEIR SUPPORT SHALL BE APPROPRIATED FOR THE SUPPORT OF ANY SECTARIAN SCHOOLS.”

Do we hear aright? Does the President of the United States maintain the proposition which has[436] brought us so much contempt and derision?

What is a free school? A free school is one in which every scholar can obtain an education without violating the honest convictions of conscience, or—to use the words of the President—a free school is one where education can be obtained “unmixed with sectarian, pagan, or atheistical dogmas.”

Are our so-called common schools free? Let us glance at the general history of the controversy concerning them. As soon as the public schools had ceased to be purely charitable institutions, a new policy was inaugurated by our people. The government assumed that it was bound to ensure an intelligent use of the franchise, by encouraging the mental activity of its citizens. To this all Catholics agreed, and still agree. But our Protestant fellow-citizens, rightly desiring that some religious instruction should be given their children, wrongly insisted upon having the Bible read in the schools. The government might have permitted such a custom to continue, when no protest was made against it. But it soon became evident that the schools were essentially Protestant institutions, and served as an instrument to prevent the growth of “Popery.” This was no secret. It was openly preached.

About this time Catholics began to see what everybody else was rejoicing over, and were, naturally, alarmed. They had assisted to found and build up the republic, or they had immigrated under the assurance of equal rights. To find it proclaimed a Protestant country was news to them. They insisted that the Government was bound to deny this imputation, and they registered an universal protest against the design of the falsely so-called “common” schools.

We have demanded either that we be relieved from taxation for these sectarian schools, or that such arrangement be devised as shall render them equally desirable for Catholics and non-Catholics.

We were not called upon to explain why we so earnestly desired this. It was nobody’s business but our own. The public schools are not held to be eleemosynary institutions. They are ostensibly for the benefit of all. And even if they were places for the confinement of criminals, or almshouses, both criminals and paupers have consciences, however dull or uninformed. What, then, is the objection to our having a right to direct the policy on which public institutions are to be conducted? None. But if we were to have taken such a position as this, we should, at once, have been indicted, for an insidious and damnable conspiracy.

Therefore we have openly stated the grounds of our convictions, relying on the inherent force of truth to secure our rights. We regard morality as inseparable from religion. In this we merely echo the sentiments of the greatest American statesmen, and notably, of the Father of our republic. We say that, if we are to pay for the education of our children, we should like to have the worth of our money. What fairer demand can a Yankee make? We ask nothing to which every citizen has not a right. We have never met a fair reply to our demands, or a fair discussion of their merits. First we were greeted with silent scorn. The practical operation of the laws was found to force our children into Protestant schools. We proclaimed[437] claimed them to be Protestant schools. It was unblushingly denied. We put the question to the test, by endeavoring to stop the Protestant Bible from being read in them. There was not enough power in our voice, nor enough fairness in our opponents, to enforce even an appearance of consistency. The schools were pronounced “un-sectarian,” a Protestant service was daily carried out, and we were bidden to hold our tongues, and to be thankful. And, now, that we are not willing, either to hold our peace, or to be grateful to those who deny us our equal rights, a loud outcry is raised, and every manner of evil is predicted, unless we are forcibly restrained. The party of malevolence seeks to create an issue where none exists, and to force us into a strife, in which it can avail itself of superior numbers to strike us a cruel and unjust blow. Now, neither this design nor the clamor with which it is urged, can be defended by any true or just plea. And we venture to predict that there is too much intelligence and love of fair play in the American people, to allow it to succeed in its sinister purpose.

What is our position once more? Here we stand, on the same basis with all other American citizens. Is it not so? Where, then, is any legal disability proved against us? We ask for nothing which we are not willing to concede to all our fellow-citizens—viz., the natural right to have their children brought up according to their parents’ conscientious convictions. We want, and we will have, our children brought up Catholics. It can be done in various ways. The state can pay the salaries of our teachers, and the cost of our buildings, and other expenses, securing proper guarantees that the money will be honestly laid out, and the children receive their due amount of secular instruction. Again, the state may pay a pro rata, and allow teachers to compete for scholars. This is done in Protestant England and Prussia, as well as in Catholic France and Austria, and is, obviously, most in harmony with democratic principles. Other ways may be devised which will secure justice to all parties. There is no practical difficulty, except in the smallest country school districts. These are always settled by the citizens themselves. Or, we can educate our children, without the state. The state may let us alone, and may do away entirely with public education, except for those who are utterly without means—in other words, change the common schools into charitable institutions, and let parents provide. But this, we are persuaded, is full of practical difficulties.

But the plan actually adopted has been to tax all alike for the common good, and yet maintain a system, which perfectly suits Protestants, but to which Catholics cannot honestly or conscientiously agree. Our so-called common schools are not free. Millions of the people rise up and proclaim it. Let those who like them send their children to them. Let those support them who like them by their “private contributions.” Then all honor to President Grant when he says “that not one dollar should be appropriated to the support of any sectarian schools.”

Now, what is it that Catholics complain of, except that the state has supported, and does support, “institutions of learning” mixed “with sectarian, pagan, and atheistical dogmas”?

There is no doubt about this fact. Protestants insist upon having the Bible read in the public schools, lest they become irreligious. Catholics maintain that the version used is garbled, and that, even if it were not, no one has a right to teach it, except those who have compiled it, and are to-day the only responsible witnesses to its true meaning. The Jews maintain that the New Testament part of it is not true. Infidels deny it altogether. What right has any school board, or any other purely human institution to decide this controversy; and what right has any man under the Constitution to enforce his religious views or his denial of religion upon others? It is an outrage. It is an inconsistency, which cannot be stated in any terms without transparently manifesting its absurdity. Under the Constitution, and according to the spirit of our government, all men are equal. Under the present system of common schools, and, according to the spirit of those who uphold them, men are not equal, and there is no such thing as regard for conscience; but every majority has a right to enforce upon any minority, no matter how large, its peculiar ideas of instruction, involving, as this always does, the question of religion itself. We have repeated our protest, until we are almost sick and tired of hearing the outrage mentioned; we have never seen our position manfully approached within beat of drum; and, yet, we have constantly been forced to ask ourselves, “Will the American people never see this? Can it be that our enemies are, as some of them hold themselves to be, totally depraved?”

Some time ago, after considerable agitation, the Chicago School Board prohibited the reading of the Sacred Scriptures in the public schools of that city.

Undoubtedly the protest of Catholics had something to do with this. But the action of the board was certainly based upon the idea, that the reading of the Protestant Bible made the schools Protestant, “sectarian” institutions, and therefore unjust towards all other religious bodies. Let it be thoroughly understood, that we fully appreciate the desire of our Protestant fellow-citizens, to hallow secular instruction. But the reading of the Scriptures as a public ceremony is as distinctive to them, as the celebration of Mass would be to Catholics. No one can evade the argument which forces this conclusion. “Such schemes are glass; the very sun shines through them.” And yet it is not a little remarkable, how slowly the light breaks in upon the seat of the delusion.

It is a satisfaction, however, to note the few acknowledgments, tardy and incomplete as they are, of the principle which we have always maintained. Prof. Swing, alluding to the action of the Chicago School Board to which we have referred, gives voice to the following observations of common sense:

The government, then, according to the professor, has no rights in the spiritual domain—a proposition which we have been condemned to universal derision for maintaining, and yet one that is self-evident to any person who will pause for a moment to consider our institutions.

An ardent advocate of what are called liberal principles, commenting upon the position of Prof. Swing, very properly styles it the only one defensible. The purpose of the Liberal League is, unquestionably, to procure the complete secularization of our public schools, which would, of course, be as unjust towards Catholic tax-payers as any other system. This class is no less hostile to justice and true liberty than any other set of meddlers. Nevertheless, it is not a little amusing to see the unmistakable fear with which it regards the issue of the present anti-Catholic policy. It waves, as its flag of hostility to the Catholics, the threadbare pretext, that we are secretly opposed to all education. It is not necessary for us to repeat the indignant denial and protest, with which we have ever met this gratuitous calumny. We quote from the Boston Index of Oct. 28:

When the avowed heathen, who reap the fullest harvest, fear for the destruction of our present unjust system of education, on the ground that it is too iniquitous to last, is it not time, for people who call themselves Christians, to give a moment’s heed to the petition, which we have for years addressed to them, as most advantageous to all of us, and as doing injustice to none?

It appears, however, that this idea has infiltrated into other minds. Zion’s Herald, a Methodist journal, quoted by the liberal paper to which we have referred, says:

In the face of this growing acknowledgment of the “sectarian” character of our public schools, and[440] knowing that they must give religious instruction or else be “pagan and atheistical,” we are pleased to hear the demand that “neither the State nor nation, nor both combined,” shall support such schools.

The fact is, that a people cannot wholly escape from its national traditions, without forgetting its language, or undergoing some violent revolution. If our fellow-citizens will study the meaning of the terms which they habitually use, they will not lose their traditions of freedom and equal rights, nor will they throw themselves into a violent, perilous departure from them. But we hasten to comment upon another sentence, which is frequently quoted from the President’s oration:

“Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school supported by private contributions.”

Precisely so. If it must come to this; if no arrangement can be made, by which religion and morality can be taught in the public schools, then, leave the matter to the family altar and the church, and allow it to be done by private contributions.

In other words, either furnish the people with that which you pretend to tax them for—viz., a fair and equitable system of public schools—or allow them to provide for themselves. But, whatever you do, keep your hands off the sacredness of the “family altar.” Do not set foot into the hallowed precincts of the domestic sanctuary. The family, though subordinate, is not to be violated by the state. Parents have rights, which no government can usurp. You have no more right to force the education of their children out of their hands, than to define the number of offspring by law. You have no more right to establish a system, to which you will endeavor to secure their conformity by violent measures, than you have to establish public wet-nurseries, or, require that voters shall be brought up on government pap and be fed out of a government spoon.

What a bitter rebuke these words of the President contain for that party, small and contemptible in itself, but powerful by reason of the times, which has ever sought to widen the gulf between us and our true-hearted countrymen! It is not enough that we should be estranged by the traditions of three hundred years. It is not enough to whisper into the popular ear every stale and loathed calumny. It is not enough to bring our holiest rites and beliefs into the obscene literature now circulating amongst the depraved youth of our country. It is not enough to drown with a thousand noisy, insolent tongues, every attempt we make at explanation. It is not enough for this malignant, persecuting power to drop its poison into every crevice of our social and religious system, from the parlor to the sewer, from the temple to the lupanar; but the nation must be organized against us. Our religion must, in some way or other, be dragged into politics. For shame! we cry, with the President. In a country of such varied religious beliefs as ours, there is but one way to order and peace—“Keep the church and the state for ever separate.”

1st. No “sectarianism” in our common schools; and, therefore,[441] “not one dollar” to our present system of schools, because they are sectarian.

3d. “Not one dollar” to “atheistical” schools, in which God is denied in the name of “science falsely so-called.”

We now turn to consider the prophecy in which the President warns the American people of its future dangers:

Formerly it meant seeking for power or knowledge, by dealing with the impure spirits.

Does the President mean to warn us against the delusions and uncleanness of modern spiritism? If so, we are agreed.

But we do not really suppose that the President means any such thing. What does he mean?

We find in the dictionary four other meanings of the word which he has used. Superstition means “an excessive reverence or fear of that which is unknown or mysterious.” But, we observe no such phenomenon among our people; if anything, rather the reverse. Or it means “The worship of false gods.” We see no signs of this except in the “Joss Houses” of San Francisco. Nor do we behold any great belief “in the agency of superior powers in certain extraordinary or singular events, or in omens, or prognostics.” Nor, further, do we behold any “excessive nicety or scrupulous exactness,” as an alarming feature of our present moral condition. There remains but one meaning (and this, we are persuaded, is the sense which the President intended to convey): “Especially, an ignorant or irrational worship of the supreme Deity.”

An ignorant worship of God is one which knows not what to believe concerning him, or one which is unable to state what it does believe; or, further, one which can give no conclusive reason for believing anything. But, outside the Catholic Church, there is no religious body which can tell precisely what it ought to believe, or precisely what it does believe, or precisely why it ought to believe anything. Again, an irrational belief in God is one which recognizes his existence, and, at the same time, denies his attributes. For instance, it is an irrational belief in God, which denies his wisdom; which asserts, that he has not chosen means adequate to accomplish his ends; which represents him, when he has made a revelation to man, as leaving his divine truth in scattered and mysterious writings in an obscure language, requiring men to find them, collect them, and believe their true meaning in order to be saved; or which fancies that reading daily a few pages from these writings, to little children, will be sufficient to prepare them for the duties of life. It is an irrational belief in God which represents him as immoral, as creating man simply to damn him, or, which denies his justice, by wickedly imagining that he will not punish oppression and calumny and those who sow discord in the midst of a free and happy people.

Here again we agree with the President in denouncing such impiety, and in predicting that, if the liberties and institutions of this republic are soon to be jeopardized, it will be by irreverence towards God and the contempt of charity and justice towards men, ever practised by this “ignorant and irrational worship of the supreme Deity.”

Another item of danger which the President foresees in the near future is “ignorance.” Here, again we find him sounding the note of warning, to which we have always given voice. His Excellency says: “In a republic like ours, … where no power is exercised except by the will of the people, it is important that the sovereign, the people, should foster intelligence—that intelligence which is to preserve us as a free nation.” The liberties of this republic will not be maintained, we say, by an ignorant, debauched, and corrupted generation. Our common people must be educated. They must possess “that intelligence which is to preserve us as a free nation.” They must know something more than simply how to read and write and “cipher.” Nor will it be sufficient, to add to this a knowledge of music. They must have a sound and thorough moral training. Their conscientious convictions must be grounded on truth daily taught and daily enforced. They must be daily taught to control their passions; they must be taught honesty, and be required to give back that which is unjustly gotten. They must be taught the true purpose of life.

But this training, as the President affirms, belongs not to the state, but to the “family altar and the church.” Either assist all families and all churches, or else encourage them to help themselves. These are our sentiments. But when sectarian bigotry has gotten hold of a system of the falsely so-called “common schools,” and with obstinate purpose, and clamorous intensity and ever-swelling declamation, manifests its resolve to maintain this system, even though it conflicts with the conscientious rights of millions of the people of our country; when, further, it is determined to force a large minority to accept this state of things, or to go without instruction, we, as American citizens, denounce the system as tyrannous; in the full sense of the word, as a reckless and immoral oppression. We assert that those who uphold it, do not desire intelligence, but prefer ignorance; that their aim is not to promote knowledge, but to destroy the religious convictions of our children, and to keep us from growing in the land. We affirm that such self-delusion originates in ignorance, is perpetuated by ignorance, tends to still deeper degradation of ignorance; and we predict that it will bring forth the fruits of ignorance, not only in morality, but in the lower sciences.

We, for our part, will never relax our efforts to show up the dishonesty of this party; we will never withdraw our protest, until justice has been done; and knowing to what lengths men can go when they start without principle, we fully share in the alarm of our chief magistrate, as to the danger of “ignorance.” Have we not, therefore, reason to hope that, in the midst of the struggle, which his sagacious mind perceives to be at hand, we shall find him on the side of patriotism and intelligence, with all true Americans, against that “superstition” and “ignorance,” whose aim is to destroy the “security of unfettered[443] religious sentiments and equal rights” of his fellow-citizens?

There is another item of the future contest, which, according to our President, is

A man has been elected to the highest office in the gift of a free people, the limits of which have been fixed by a custom handed down by the fathers of the nation, and which, to the minds of true patriots, has the force of law. When such a trust does not satisfy the honored recipient, and he, yielding to personal motives, strains every nerve, and seeks by every means at his command, to break down all barriers to continuation of power, thereby abusing the dignity of his post and the confidence of the people—that is ambition.

We do not fully share the apprehension with which the President foresees this threat to the “near future” of our national welfare. But if it be true, we fully agree with him when he says: “Now, the centennial year of our national existence, I believe, is a good time to begin the work of strengthening the foundations of the structure commenced by our patriotic forefathers one hundred years ago at Lexington.”

“Language,” according to a great diplomatist, “was given to man, in order that he might conceal his ideas.” But this maxim has never been accepted by honorable men. In examining, thus briefly, the “Des Moines speech,” we have followed that other canon of criticism, which requires that words shall be interpreted in their literal sense, as far as possible. Submitted to this just criticism, the language appears to us immortal, and worthy of the high place which is even now being prepared for it. Some may marvel, and may wonder how the President came to be filled with so high a degree of the prophetic spirit. Like Balaam, the son of Beor, he was expected to curse us; unlike Balaam, he was not stayed, but rather urged on by the faithful servant with whom he previously conversed. But there is no mystery about it. He has grown up with the instincts of a true American, and he has spoken accordingly. Not only are the words on which we have commented true, but they are in accordance with sound Catholic principles. We are ready to take him at his word, and his words in their true meaning. To those who will join us we say, without disguise or reserve: “Gentlemen, you will never regret having trusted us, and dealt fairly with us, according to the laws and Constitution of this country.” We believe with the President, that, if the only honest meaning of his language be as honestly carried out, “the battles which created the Army of the Tennessee” (which, by the way, a Catholic general once commanded and in whose ranks hundreds of Catholic hearts bled)—we believe, we say, that these battles “will not have been fought in vain.” The children of the soldiers of the Union will at least be the peers of those whom their fathers overcame. The nations’ heroes will not look down, to see their heirs defrauded of equal rights in “the Union and the free institutions for which they died.” The President will yield to his comrades in arms, at least as much as he is so ready to accord to his late opponents. And as for our countrymen throughout the Union, we are prepared to wait, trusting that when fully enlightened, they will agree to our obtaining, independently of all political agitations or party organizations, our just and equal rights as American citizens.

SONNETS IN MEMORY OF THE LATE SIR AUBREY DE VERE, BART.

A MESSAGE.

Is there anything more tantalizing than to be caught with a toothache and swelled face just at Christmas time, when one’s hands are full of work that must be finished, of plans that have been begun in time and carried on prosperously to within a few days of their fulfilment? This is just what befell Mr. Stephen Walpole on the 20th of December in the year of grace 1870. You remember what a terrific winter that was? How the bleak north wind blew over ice and snow, and added tenfold horrors to the poor soldiers fighting in that terrible Franco-German war—how all our hearts shuddered in pity for them, as we sat stitching and knitting in their service by the glow of our Christmas fires! This 20th of December was, perhaps, the bitterest day of the whole season. The snow was deep on the ground, the ice hung in long spikes from rails and roofs, and the east wind blew cruelly over all. Stephen Walpole ought to have been out breasting it, but, instead of this, he sat at home moaning, in a voice that sounded like a fog-bell at sea, through poultices, wadding, and miles of flannel that swelled his head out of all human proportions.

“To think of a man being knocked down by a thing no bigger than a pin’s point!” he grumbled. “A prick of that miserable atom one calls a nerve turns the seat of one’s intellect into a monster calf’s head, and makes one a spectacle to gods and men. I could whip myself for being such a milksop as to knock under to it. I’d rather have every tooth in my head pulled out than play the woman like this.… Och! Whew!”

“Serves you right, sir, for your impertinence!” protested Nelly Walpole, bridling up and applying a fresh hot poultice to her brother’s cheek, which she bade him hold; but Stephen, in his manly inability to bear the toothache with composure, dropped the soft mess under a sudden sting that jerked it out of his hand.

“What an unmanageable baby it is!” cried Nelly, catching the poultice in time to save her pretty violet cashmere dress. “I told you to hold your cheek while I fastened the bandage; make haste now before it cools.”

“O my unfortunate brother! Ill-fated man! Is this how I find you, bound and poulticed in the hands of the Philistines?”

This was from Marmaduke, Nelly’s younger brother, who entered while the operation was going on, and stood surveying the victim in serene compassion.

“Yes,” cried Stephen, “and all the pity a poor devil gets is being bullied for not holding his jaw.”

“Oh! come, you’re not so bad, since there’s vice enough in you for a pun!” said Marmaduke. “How did you catch the thing?”

“Then it caught you in some of those villanous cut-throat places[446] where you go pottering after beggars and blackguards and the Lord knows what!” said Marmaduke with airy contempt, drawing his slim, beringed fingers gracefully through a mass of remarkably fine curls that clustered over his high, white forehead, and gave a boyish look to his handsome young face, and added to its attractions. He was extremely prepossessing, this perfumed, patent-leather-booted young gentleman of two-and-twenty. You could not look at him without liking him. His eye was as clear as a child’s, his smile as frank, his laughter as joyous and catching. Yet, as it sometimes happens with the graces of childhood, these things were a deceptive promise. The frankness and the joy were genuine; but there was a cold gleam of contempt, a cold ring of selfishness, in the bright eyes and the merry voice that were very disappointing when you found them out. But people were slow to find them out. Even those who lived with Marmaduke, and thus had ample opportunities of judging, remained under the spell of his attractive manners and personal charms until some accident revealed their worthlessness. A false coin will go on passing current through many hands, until one day some one drops it to the ground, and the glittering sham is betrayed. He had not a bad heart; he was kind even, when he could be brought to forget himself for a moment and think of others. But it required a shock to do this; and shocks are, happily, rare in every-day life. So Marmaduke slept on undisturbed in his egotism, hardening unconsciously in self-absorbed enjoyment. He had never taken trouble about anything, made a genuine effort of any sort except for his amusement. He had just the kind of brains to enable him to get through college with a decent amount of success easily—tact, ready repartee, a quick, retentive memory that gave the maximum of result for the minimum of work. He would pass for clever and well informed where an awkward, ugly youth, who had ten times his intellect and studied ten times harder, would pass for knowing nothing. Stephen was eight years older than he, and had not yet discovered his brother’s real value. Perhaps this arose partly from Stephen’s not being of a particularly observant or analytical turn of mind. He took people pretty much at their own valuation, as the world is rather apt to do. Marmaduke set a very high price on his handsome face and limited attainments, and his brother had never dreamed of disputing it. He would sometimes naïvely express his surprise that people were so fond of Duke when he did so little to please them; and wonder how popular he was, considering that he never gave himself the smallest trouble to oblige or humor people.

“I suppose it’s his handsome face that mankind, and womankind in particular, find so taking,” Stephen would remark to Nelly. “He certainly has a wonderful knack for getting on with people without caring twopence whether they like him or not. I wish I knew his secret. Perhaps it’s his high spirits.”

Nelly would sometimes suggest that Marmaduke’s fine temper might count for something in the mystery. And Stephen never contradicted her. His temper was not his best point. He had a heart of gold; he had energy, patience, and endurance to any extent—except in case of toothache; he was unselfish[447] and generous; but he was sensitive and exacting. Like most persons who dispense liberally, he was impatient of the selfishness and ingratitude of men who take all they can get and return nothing. Marmaduke had no such accounts to square with human beings, so he never felt aggrieved, never quarrelled with them. Stephen was working hard at his profession—he was an engineer—and so far he had achieved but moderate success. Marmaduke had been called to the bar, but it was a mere formality so far; he spent his time dawdling about town, retailing gossip and reading poetry, waiting for briefs that never came—that never do come to handsome young gentlemen who take it so easy. His elder brother laid no blame on him for this want of success. He was busy all day himself, and took for granted that Marmaduke was busy on his side. The law was up-hill work, besides; the cleverest and most industrious men grew gray in its service before they made a name for themselves; and Duke was after all but a boy—he had time enough before him. So Stephen argued in his brotherly indulgence, in ignorance of the real state of things.

Nelly was, as yet, the only person who had found out Marmaduke, who knew him thoroughly. She knew him egotistical to the core, averse to work, to effort of every sort, idle, self-indulgent, extravagant; and the knowledge of all this afforded much anxious thought to her little head of nineteen years. They lived alone, these three. Nelly was a mother to the two young men, watching and caring for them with that instinctive child-motherhood that is so touching in young girls sometimes. She was a spirited, elfin little creature, very pretty, blessed with the sweetest of tempers, the shrewdest of common sense, and an energy of character that nothing daunted and few things resisted. Marmaduke described this trait of Nelly’s in brother-like fashion as “a will of her own.” He knew his was no match for it, and, with a tact which made one of his best weapons of defence, he contrived to avoid clashing with it. This was not all policy. He loved his pretty sister, and admired her more than anything in the world except himself. And yet he knew that this admiration was not mutual; that Nelly knew him thoroughly, saw through him as if he were glass; but he was not afraid of her. His elder brother was duped by him; but he would have staked his life on it that Nelly would never undeceive him; that she would let Stephen go on believing in him so long as the deceiver himself did not tear off the mask. Yet it was a source of bitter anxiety to the wise little mother-maiden to watch Marmy drifting on in this life of indolence and vacuity. Where was it to end? Where do such lives always end? Nothing but some terrible shock could awake him from it. And where was the shock to come from? Nelly never preached—she was far too sensible for that—but when the opportunity presented itself she would say a few brief words to the culprit in an earnest way that never irritated him, if they worked no better result. He would admit with exasperating good-humor that he was a good-for-nothing dog; that he was unworthy of such a perfection of a sister and such an irreproachable elder brother; but that, as nature had so blessed him, he meant to take advantage of the[448] privilege of leaving the care of his perfection to them.

“If I were alone on my own hook, Nell, I would work like a galley-slave,” he protested once to her gentle upbraiding. “But as it is, why need I bother myself? You will save my soul, and pray me high and dry into heaven; and Stephen—Stephen the admirable, the unimpeachable, the pink of respectability—will keep me out of mischief in this.”

“I don’t believe in vicarious salvation for this world or the next, and neither do you, Marmy. You are much too intelligent to believe in any such absurdity,” replied Nelly, handing him a glove she had been sewing a button into.

Marmaduke did not contradict her, but, whistling an air from the Trovatore, arranged his hat becomingly, a little to one side, and, with a farewell look in the glass over the mantel-piece, sauntered out for his morning constitutional in the park. Nelly went to the window, and watched the lithe young figure, with its elastic step, until it disappeared. She was conscious of a stronger solicitude about Marmaduke this morning than she had ever felt before. It was like a presentiment. Yet there was nothing that she knew of to justify it. He had not taken to more irregular hours, nor more extravagant habits, nor done anything to cause her fresh anxiety; still, her heart beat as under some new and sudden fear. Perhaps it was the ring of false logic in his argument that sounded a louder note of alarm and warned her of worse danger than she had suspected. One might fear everything for a man starting in life with the deliberate purpose of shifting his responsibility on to another, setting his conscience to sleep because he had two brave, wakeful ones watching at his side.

“If something would but come and wake him up to see the monstrous folly, the sinfulness, of it!” sighed Nelly. “But nothing short of a miracle could do that, I believe. He might, indeed, fall ill and be brought to death’s door; he might break his leg and be a cripple for life, and that might serve the purpose; but oh! dear, I’m not brave enough to wish for so severe a remedy.”

Two months had passed since this little incident between the brother and sister, and nothing had occurred to vindicate Nelly’s gloomy forebodings. Marmaduke rose late, read the newspaper, then Tennyson, Lamartine, or the last novel, made an elaborate toilet, and sauntered down to the courts to keep a lookout for the coming briefs. But it was near Christmas now, and this serious and even tenor of life had been of late broken in upon by the getting up of private theatricals in company with some bachelor friends. What between learning his own part, and hearing his fellow-actors and actresses theirs, and overseeing stage arrangements, Marmaduke had a hard time of it. His hands were full; he was less at home than usual, seldom or never of an evening. He had come in very late some nights, and looked worn and out of spirits, Nelly thought, when he came down to his late breakfast.

“I wish those theatricals were over, Marmy. They will kill you if they last much longer,” she said, with a tender, anxious look on her pretty little face. This was the day he came home and found Stephen in the hands of the Philistines.

“’Tis hard work enough,” assented[449] the young man, stretching out his long limbs wearily; “but the 26th will soon be here. It will be too bad if you are laid up and can’t come and applaud me, Steevy,” he added, considering his elder brother’s huge head, that looked as if it would take a month to regain its natural shape.

“Humph! That’s the least of my troubles!” boomed Stephen through his poultice.

“Civil! Eh, Nell? I can tell you it’s as bad as any toothache, the labor I’ve had with the business—those lazy dogs, Travers and Milford, throwing all the weight of it on me, under pretext of never having done that sort of thing before.”

“That’s always the fate of the willing horse,” said Stephen, without the faintest idea of being sarcastic. “That’s just what I complain of with those idle fellows X—— and W——; they throw the burden of all the business on me, because, forsooth, I understand things better! I do understand that people can’t get work done unless they bestir themselves and attend to it.”

“I wouldn’t be such an ass as to let myself be put on in that way,” said Marmaduke resentfully. “I would not be fooled into doing the work of three people instead of one.”

“Oh! that’s different; it is only en passant,” explained Marmaduke; “and then, you see, it.…”

“Amuses you,” Nelly had it on the tip of her tongue to say; but she checked herself, and finished the sentence for him with, “It is not the same thing; people cannot make terms for a division of labor, except it be in the case of real business.”

“Of course not,” assented Stephen. Marmaduke looked at his boots, and inwardly voted Nelly “no end of a trump.”

Did she guess this mental vote, and did she take advantage of it to ask him a favor?

“Perhaps Marmy would go and see that poor man for you, Stephen?” she said in the most natural way possible, without looking up from her work.

“I wish he would; I should be ever so much obliged to him. Would you mind it, Duke?”

“Taking a message for me to a poor fellow that I wanted badly to go and see to-day.”

“His name is John Baines, and he hangs out in Red Pepper Lane, ten minutes from here, at the back of the square.”

“The locality is not Berkeley Square or Piccadilly, but it would not kill you to walk through it once,” rejoined Stephen.

“Do go, there’s a dear boy!” coaxed Nelly, fixing her bright eyes on Marmaduke’s face, with a smile that would have fascinated a gorilla.

Marmaduke said nothing, but his nose uttered such an unmistakable pshaw! that Nelly, in spite of herself, burst out laughing.

“What the deuce can make him cultivate such company?” he exclaimed, appealing to Nelly, and[450] joining good-humoredly in her merriment.

“Every man to his taste; I confess I have none for evangelizing rag-and-bone men, or indeed men of any station, kind, or degree,” observed Marmaduke emphatically.

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t. I don’t mind devoting myself for once to oblige you. What’s your message for John Baines? Not a leg of mutton or a bottle of port? I won’t bargain for carrying that sort of article.”

“I don’t want you to carry anything that will encumber you,” replied the elder brother. “Tell him I cannot get to see him to-day, and why, and that I am very sorry for it. Meantime, you can say I have done his commission. See if he wants anything, and, if so I will send it at once.”

“Oh! that’s all! I mean it’s not a case of typhus or small-pox. I should not care to imperil my valuable life by running in the way of that sort of thing,” observed Marmaduke.

“Have no fear. The complaint is not catching,” replied his brother. “Whatever good he may do you, he’ll do you no harm.”

“Dear Marmy! it’s very good of you!” whispered Nelly, as she tripped down-stairs after the reluctant messenger, and helped him on with his fur coat in the hall.

“It’s not a bit good; it’s an infernal bore, and I’m only doing it to please you, Nell,” protested Marmaduke. “What a fool’s errand it is! I sha’n’t know from Adam what to say to the man when I get there. What am I to say to him?”

“Oh! anything,” suggested Nelly. “Say you have come to see him because Stephen is ill, and ask him how he is. You’re never at a loss for something to say, you know that right well; and whatever you say is sure to be right.”

“When I know who I’m talking to; but I don’t know this interesting party, or what topics of conversation he particularly affects. He won’t expect me to preach him a sermon, eh?” And Marmaduke faced round with a look of such comical terror at the thought that Nelly again burst out laughing.

“Heaven forbid! That’s the last thing you need dream of,” she cried. “He is much more likely to preach to you.”

“Oh! indeed; but I didn’t bargain for that. I would very much rather be excused,” protested Marmaduke, anything but reassured.

“You foolish boy! I mean that he will preach to you as the poor always do—by example; by their patience, and their gratitude for the least thing one does for them.”

“I’m not going to do anything for John Baines that I can see; only bothering him with a visit which he would very likely rather I spared him.”

“You will give him Stephen’s message,” suggested Nelly, “and then let him talk. There is nothing poor people enjoy so much as a good listener. They are quite happy when they can pour out their grievances into a willing ear. The sympathy of the rich is often a greater comfort to the poor than their alms.”

“Humph! That’s lucky, anyhow,” grunted Marmaduke. “Well,[451] I’ll let the old gentleman have his head; I’ll listen till he pulls up of his own accord.” He had his hand on the door-latch, when Stephen’s muffled tones were heard calling from the room above. Nelly bounded up the stairs, and was back in an instant.

“He says you are to give Baines half a sovereign from him; he had nearly forgotten it.”

Marmaduke hesitated for a moment, and then said abruptly: “It doesn’t matter where it is; there’s nothing in it.”

“What have you done with your money? You had plenty a few days ago!” exclaimed Nelly in childlike surprise.

“I have lost it; I haven’t a brass farthing in the world!” He said this in a reckless, dogged sort of way, as if he did not care who knew it; and yet he spoke in an undertone. For one moment Nelly looked at him in blank astonishment.

“Lost it?” she repeated, and then, the truth flashing on her suddenly, she cried in a frightened whisper: “O Marmaduke! you have not been gambling? Oh! tell me it’s not true.” She caught hold of his arm, and, clinging to it, looked into his face, scared and white.

“Nonsense, Nell! I thought you were a girl of sense,” he exclaimed pettishly, disengaging himself and pushing back the bolt. “Let me be off; tell Stephen I had not change, so his friend must wait till he can go and tip him himself.”

“No, no; he may be hungry, poor man. Stay, I think I have ten shillings here,” said Nelly; and she pulled out her porte-monnaie, and picked four half-crowns from the promiscuous heap of smaller coins. “Take these; I will tell Stephen you will give the ten shillings.”

Her hand trembled as she dropped the money into Marmaduke’s pocket. He was about to resist; but there was something peremptory, a touch of that will of her own, in her manner that deterred him.

“I’m sorry I said anything about it; I should not if I thought you would have minded it so much,” he observed.

“Tush! Don’t talk nonsense! A man isn’t a gambler because once in a way he loses a twenty-pound note.”

Nelly did not sit down on one of the hall chairs and cry. She felt mightily inclined to do so; but she struggled against the weakness and overcame it. Walking quietly up the stairs, she hummed a few bars of a favorite air as she passed the door of Stephen’s sitting-room, and went on to her own room on the story above. But even here, safe and alone, the tears were bravely held back. She would not cry; she would not be seen with red eyes that would betray her brother; she would do her very utmost to rescue him, to screen him even now. While she is wrestling and pleading in the silence of her own room, let us follow the gambler to Red Pepper Lane.

Marmaduke had described the place accurately when he called it an abominable slum. Red Pepper Lane was one of those dismal, frightful dens of darkness and dirt that cower at the back of so many of our wealthy squares and streets—poison-pits for breeding typhus and every social plague that desolates great cities. The houses were so high and the lane so narrow that you could at a stretch have shaken hands across from window to window. There was a rope slung half-way down the alley, with a lantern hanging from it which looked more like a decoration or a sign than a possible luminary; for the glass was too thickly crusted with dirt to admit of the strongest light piercing it. In the middle of the lane was a gutter, in which a few ragged, begrimed, and hungry-looking little mortals were playing in the dirty snow. The east wind whistled through the dreary tenements with a sharp, pitiless cry; the sky was bright outside, but here in Red Pepper Lane its brightness did not penetrate. Nothing but the wind could enter, and that came with all its might, through the crannies in the walls, through the rickety doors, through the window-frames glazed with brown paper or battered old hats—any rag that could be spared to stuff the empty panes. Not a head was seen anywhere protruding from windows or doors; the fierce blast kept every one within who had a roof to cover them. If it were not for the sooty little objects disporting themselves in the gutter, the lane might have been the precincts of the jail, so deserted and silent was it. Marmaduke might have wandered up and down for an hour without meeting any one whom he could ask to direct him to where John Baines lived, but luckily he recognized the house at once by Stephen’s signal of an old broom nailed over the door. He searched for a knocker or a bell; but seeing neither, he sounded a loud rat-ta-ta-tat with the gold knob of his walking-stick, and presently a voice called out from somewhere to “lift the latch!” He did so, and, again left to his own devices, he followed Stephen’s injunctions and went straight up to the second story, where he knocked, and in obedience to a sharp “Come in!” entered.

The gloom of the lane had prepared him gradually for the deeper gloom of the room, and he at once distinguished a person, whom he rightly surmised to be the rag-and-bone man, sitting at the farther end, near the fire-place, wrapped up in a brown blanket, with his feet resting on the hearth-stone, as if he were toasting them. If he was, it was in imagination; for there was no fire—only the ghost of one as visible in a mass of gray ashes, and they did not look as if even a glow of the late warmth remained in them. He had his back to the door, and, when it opened, he turned his head in that direction, but not sufficiently to see who came in. Marmaduke, as he stood on the threshold, took in the surroundings at a glance. There was a bed on the floor in one corner, with no bed-clothes to speak of, the blanket being just now in requisition as a cloak; a miserable-looking table and two chairs—an unoccupied one and the one Baines sat in; a bag and a basket were flung under the window, and some dingy old utensils—a saucepan, kettle, etc.—lay about. There was nothing particularly dreadful in the scene; it was, compared with many such, rather a cheerful one on the whole; but Marmaduke, who had no experience[453] of the dwellings of the poor, thought it the most appalling picture of misery and desolation that could be conceived. He was roused from the stupor of horror into which the sudden spectacle had thrown him by hearing the figure in the blanket ask rather sharply a second time “Who’s there?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Marmaduke, advancing within a step of the chair. “My name is Walpole; I have come to see if there is anything I can do for you—anything that you … that …” he stammered, not knowing how to put it.

“Oh! Mr. Walpole, I am obliged to you for calling, sir. I want nothing; but I am glad to see you. It is very kind of you. Pray take a chair. You must excuse me for not getting up; my leg is still very painful.”

“I am only the brother of the Mr. Walpole whom you know,” said Marmaduke, surprised beyond measure at the good address of the man. “My brother is laid up with a violent face-ache. He was greatly put out at not being able to keep his appointment with you this afternoon, and sent me to see how you were getting on, and to tell you he had done something that you commissioned him to do.”

“Your brother is extremely kind,” said the man. “I am sorry to hear he is ill. This weather is trying to everybody.”

“You seem to be a severe sufferer from it,” remarked Marmaduke. He had opened his fur coat, and sat back in the rickety chair, in mortal fear all the while that it would go to smash under him. This was the most extraordinary specimen of the rag-and-bone tribe—he could not say that he had ever known, for he had never known one in his life, but—that he could have imagined. He spoke like an educated man, and, even in his blanket, he had the bearing of a gentleman. If it were not for his swollen nose and the glare of his red eye-balls, which were decidedly not refined, there was nothing in his appearance to indicate that he belonged to the very dregs of human society. It was impossible to say how old he was, but you saw at a glance that he was more broken than aged.

“Yes, I am suffering rather severely just now,” he replied in a quiet, conversational way; “I always do when the cold sets in. But, added to my chronic complaint of sciatica, I slipped on the ice some time ago, and sprained my left foot badly. Your brother made my acquaintance at the hospital where I was taken to have it set right.”

“Yes; I can’t get about easily yet, but it will be all right by and by.” And then, dismissing the selfish subject, he said: “I am distressed, sir, that you should have had the trouble of coming to such a place as this; pray don’t let me detain you longer.”

“I’m in no hurry,” replied Marmaduke, whose interest and curiosity were more and more excited. “Is there nothing I can do for you? It’s dismal work sitting here all day with a sprained ankle, and having nothing to do; would you care to have some books?” It did not occur to him to ask if he knew how to read; he would as soon have inquired if he knew how to speak.

“I don’t look like a man to lend books to, do I?” he said. “There’s not much in common between books and a rag-and-bone man.”

“Quite as much, I should say, as there is between some men and[454] rags and bones,” retorted Marmaduke, meeting the man’s eyes with a responsive question in his own.

Baines turned away with a short laugh. Perhaps it was mere accident or the force of habit that made him look up at the space over the mantel-piece; but there was something in the deliberate glance that made Marmaduke follow it, and, doing so, he saw a faded but originally good engraving of Shakspere hung in a frame against the wall. Repressing the low whistle which rose involuntarily to his lips, he said, looking at the portrait:

“Acted them! You were originally on the stage, then? I saw at once that you were not what you seem to me,” said Marmaduke, with that frankness that seemed so full of sympathy and was so misleading, though never less so, perhaps, than at this moment. “Would it be disagreeable to you to tell me through what chapters of ill-luck or other vicissitudes you came to be in the position where I now see you?”

The man was silent for a few minutes; whether he was too deeply offended to reply at once, or whether he was glancing over the past which the question evoked, it was impossible to say. Marmaduke fancied he was offended, and, vexed with himself for having questioned him, he stood up, and laying Nelly’s four half-crowns on the chimney-piece, “I beg your pardon if I seemed impertinent; I assure you I did not mean it,” he said. “I felt interested in you, and curious to know something more of you; but I had no right to put questions. Good-morning.” He made a step towards the door, but Baines, rousing himself, arrested him by a sign.

“I am not offended,” he said. “I saw quite well what made you ask it. You would have every right to catechise me if I had come to you for help; as it is, your kindness and your brother’s makes a claim which I am in no mind to dispute. If you don’t mind shivering in this cold place for half an hour, pray sit down, and I will tell you my story. I have not a cigar to offer you,” he added with a laugh, “but perhaps you don’t affect that vice?”

“I do indeed very considerably,” said Marmaduke, and, pulling out a handsome cigar-case, he handed it to Baines, and invited him to help himself; the rag-man hesitated just for a moment, and then, yielding to the instinct of his good-breeding, took one.

“It’s not an amusing story,” he began, when they had sent up a few warm puffs from their fragrant weeds, “but it may not be uninteresting to you. You are very young; would it be rude to ask how young?”

“Humph! I was just that age when I took the fatal turn in the road that led to the honorable career in which I am now embarked. My father was an officer in the line. He had no fortune to speak of; a couple of thousand pounds left him by an aunt was all the capital he possessed. When he was still young, he married, and got three thousand pounds with his wife. I was their only child. My father died when I was ten years old, and left me to the sole care of my mother, who made an idol of me and spoiled me to my heart’s content. I was not a bad boy, I had no evil[455] propensities, and I was not deficient in brains. I picked up things with little or no effort, and got on better at school than many who had twice the brains and four times the industry. I was passionately fond of poetry, learned pages of Byron and Shelley by heart, and declaimed with a good deal of power. There could not have been a greater curse than such a gift to a boy of my temperament and circumstances. When I left school, I went to Oxford. My poor mother strained every nerve to give me a university education, with a view to my becoming a barrister; but instead of repaying her sacrifices by working hard, I spent the greater part of my time acting. I became infatuated about Shakspere, and took to private theatricals with a frenzy of enthusiasm. As ill-luck would have it, I fell in with a set of fellows who were drama-mad like myself. I had one great chum named Hallam, who was stark mad about it, and encouraged me in the folly to the utmost. I soon became a leading star in this line. I was sought for and asked out by everybody in the place, until my head got completely turned, and I fancied I had only to walk on to the stage to take Macready’s place and achieve fame and fortune. The first thing that roused me from the absurd delusion was seeing Charles Kean in Macbeth. I felt utterly annihilated under the superiority of his acting; it showed me in an instant the difference there is between ordinary taste and talent and the divine afflatus of genius. And yet an old friend who happened to meet me in the theatre that night assured me that the younger Kean was not a patch upon his father, and that Macready outshone the elder Kean. I went back to Oxford a crestfallen man, and for a time took refuge from my disappointment in real work. I studied hard, and, when the term came for going up for my degree, I was confident of success. It was a vain confidence, of course. I had only given myself to study for a period of two months or so, and it would have been little short of a miracle if I had passed. My mother was terribly disappointed; the sight of her tears cut me up more than the failure on my own account, and I determined to succeed or die in the effort, if she consented to let me make one more. She did consent, and I succeeded. That was the happiest day of my life, I think.” He drew a long breath, and repeated in an undertone, as if he forgot Marmaduke’s presence, and were speaking aloud to himself: “Yes, the happiest day of my life!”

“Lost time! Yes, that was it—lost time!” said Baines, musing; then he continued in his former tone: “My poor mother was very happy. She declared I had repaid her amply for all her sacrifices. She saw me already at the top of my profession, a Q.C., a judge, the chief of all the judges, seated in robes on the woolsack. I came home, and was in due time called to the bar. I was then just twenty-four. We lived in a pretty house on the road to Putney; but my mother thought it now desirable to move into London, that I might have an office in some central neighborhood, where my clients would flow in and out conveniently. I remember that I strongly opposed the plan, not from dislike, but from some feeling like a presentiment, a dread, that London[456] would be a dangerous place for me, and that I was taking the road to ruin by leaving the shelter of our secluded home, with its garden and trees, away from a thousand temptations that beset a young man in the great city. But my mother’s heart was set on it. She was convinced my character had thoroughly changed, that I had broken off for ever from old habits and old propensities, and that I was strong enough to encounter any amount of temptation without risk. Poor mother! It was no fault of hers if she was blinded by love. The fault was all mine. I fed her with false hopes, and then I betrayed them. She gave in so far to my wishes as to consent only to let the house, instead of selling it, as she first intended; so that our removal to London took the appearance more of an essay than a permanent arrangement. I was thankful for this, and set about the change in high spirits. We were soon comfortably settled in a very small house in Wimpole Street. I found it rather like a bird-cage after our airy, roomy abode in the suburbs; but it was very snug, and my mother, who had wonderful taste, soon made it bright and pretty. She was the brightest and prettiest thing in it herself; people used to take her for my elder sister when she took me to parties of an evening. I was very proud of her, and with better reason than she was of me.”

He paused again, looking up at the Shakspere print, as if he saw his mother’s likeness there. The sunken, red eyes moistened as he gazed on it.

“It is a great blessing to have a good mother,” said Marmaduke. “I lost mine when I was little more than a child.”

“So much the better for both of you,” retorted Baines bitterly; “she did not live for you to break her heart, and then eat out your own with remorse. But I am talking wildly. You would no doubt have been a blessing to her; you would have worked like a man, and she would have been proud of you to the end. It was not so with me. I was never fond of work. I was not fond of it then; indeed, what I did was not worthy of being called work at all. I moped over a law-book for an hour or so in the morning, and then read Shakspere or some other favorite poet, by way of refreshing myself after the unpalatable task, and getting it out of my head as quickly as possible. I went down regularly to the courts; but as I had no legal connection, and nothing in myself to make up for the want of patronage, or inspire confidence in my steadiness and abilities, the attorneys brought me no business; and as I was too lazy, and perhaps too proud, to stoop to court them, I began to feel thoroughly disgusted with the profession, and to wish I had never entered it. I ceased to go through the farce of my law-reading of a morning, and devoted myself entirely to my dilettante tastes, reading poetry, and occasionally amusing myself with writing it. My old longing for the stage came back, and only wanted an opportunity to break out actively. This opportunity was not far off. My mother suspected nothing of the way I was idling my time; she knew the bar was up-hill work, and was satisfied to see me kept waiting a few years before I became famous; but it was matter of surprise to her that I never got a brief of any description. She set it down to jealousy on the part of my rivals at the[457] courts, and would now and then wax wroth against them, wondering what expedient could be devised for showing up the corrupt state of the profession, and forcing my enemies to recognize my superiority as it deserved. Don’t laugh at her and think her a fool; she was wise on every subject but this, and I fear I must have counted for something in leading her to such ridiculous conclusions. I held very much to preserving her good opinion, but, instead of striving to justify it by working on to the fulfilment of her motherly ambition, I took to cheating her, first tacitly, then deliberately and cruelly. Things were going on in this way, when one day, one ill-fated day, I went out as usual in the afternoon, ostensibly to the courts, but really to kill time where I could—at my club, in the Row, or lounging in Pall Mall. I was passing the Army and Navy Club, when I heard a voice call out:

“‘Halloo, Hamlet!’ (This was the name I went by at Oxford, on account of my success in the part.) ‘How glad I am to see you, old boy! You’re the very man I’ve been on the look-out for.’

“‘Hallam!’ I cried, returning his friendly grasp, and declaring how delighted I was to see him.

“‘I’ve been beating about for you ever since I came to town, ten days ago,’ he said. ‘I wrote to your old address, but the letter was sent back to me. Where have you migrated to; and what are you doing?’

“I told him the brief history of my existence since we had parted at Oxford, he to enter the army, I to begin my course of dinners-eating at the Temple. He was now on leave; he had just come from the north, where his regiment was quartered, and he was in high spirits at the prospect of his month’s holiday. I asked him what it was he had been wanting me so particularly for.

“‘I wanted to see you, first of all, for your own sake, old boy,’ he answered heartily; ‘and in the next place I want you badly to help us to get up some private theatricals at the Duchess of B——’s after Easter. I suppose you are a perfect actor—a Garrick and Charles Mathews combined—by this time. You have had plenty of practice, I’ll be bound.’

“I assured him that I had not played since the last time he and I had brought down the house together. He was immensely surprised, and loudly deplored my mistake in burying such a talent in the earth. He called me a conceited idiot to have let myself be crushed by Kean, and vowed a year’s training from a professional would bring me out a better actor than ever Kean was. Amateur acting was all very well, but the finest untaught genius ever born could no more compete successfully with a man who had gone through the regular professional drill than a civilian could with a trained soldier in executing a military manœuvre.

“‘I told you before, and I tell you again,’ he continued, as arm in arm we paced a shady alley of the park—‘I tell you that if you went on the stage you would cut out the best actor we have; though that is not saying much, for a more miserable, ignorant lot of drivelling idiots no stage ever saw caricaturing the drama than our English theatres can boast at this moment.’

“My heart rose high, and my vanity swelled out like a peacock’s tail, pluming itself in this luxurious air of flattery. I knew Hallam[458] meant what he said; but I knew that he was a light-headed young fellow, not at all competent to judge dramatic power, and still less to counsel me. Yet such is the intoxicating effect of vanity that I swallowed his praise as if it had been the purest wisdom. I opened my whole heart to him, told him how insufferably bored I was at the bar, that I had no aptitude for it, that I was wasting my time waiting for briefs that never came—I did not explain what pains I took to prevent their coming—until, kindling with my own exaggerated statement as I went on, I ended by cursing the day I took to the bar, and declaring that if it were not for my mother I would abandon the whole thing and try my luck on the stage to-morrow.

“‘And why should you let your mother stand in your way?’ said Hallam. ‘If she is too unreasonable to see the justice of the case, why, then … well, I can’t for the life of me see why your happiness and fortune should be sacrificed to it.’

“He was not a bad fellow—far from it. He did not mean to play the devil’s advocate. I am certain he thought he was giving me excellent advice, using his superior knowledge of the world for my benefit. But he was a fool—an ignorant, silly, well-meaning fool. Such men, as friends, are often worse than knaves. If he had proposed anything obviously wicked, dishonest, or unprincipled, I should have scouted it indignantly, and walked off in contempt. But he argued with a show of reason, in a tone of considerate regard for my mother’s wishes and feelings that deceived and disarmed me. He represented to me the folly of sticking to a life that I hated and that I had next to no chance of ever succeeding in; he had a score of examples at his fingers’ ends of young fellows teeming with talent, patient as asses, and hard working as negroes, who had gone for the bar and given it up in despair. My mother, like all fond mothers, naturally expected me to prove an exception to the general rule, and to turn out a lord chancellor of the romantic sort, rising by sheer force of merit, without patronage, without money, without any of the essential helps, by the power of my unaided genius. ‘This is simply bosh, my dear fellow—innocent maternal bosh,’ persisted Hallam, ‘but as dangerous as any poison. Cut the bar, as your better genius prompts you to do, and take to your true calling—the drama.’

“‘For aught I know, I may have lost any talent I had,’ I replied; ‘it is two years, remember, since I acted at all.’

“‘That is very easily ascertained,’ said my friend. ‘You will take a part in these theatricals we are going to get up, and we will soon see whether your talent has evaporated or not. My own impression is that it will come out stronger than ever; you have studied, and you have seen something, if not very much, of life since your last attempts.’

“‘My mother has a horror of the theatre,’ I said, unwilling to yield without a show of resistance; ‘it would break her heart to see me take to the stage.’

“‘You are sure not to fail,’ he urged. ‘But look here: do nothing rashly. Don’t say anything about this business until you have tried your hand at it in private. We[459] have not settled yet what the play is to be; they left it to me to select, and I will choose one that will bring out your powers best—not tragedy; that never was your line, in my opinion. At any rate, you must for the present confine yourself to light parts, such as.…’

“‘Why, if I’m not tragic, I’m nothing!’ I exclaimed. ‘Every one who ever saw me in Hamlet declared they had never seen the part so well rendered! And you said many a time that my Macbeth was.…’

“‘First-rate—for an amateur; and I will say it again, if you like,’ protested Hallam; ‘but since then, I have seen real acting.…’

“‘Then mine was not real? I can’t for the life of me see, then …’ I broke in.

“‘Don’t get so infernally huffy,’ said Hallam, shaking my arm with good-humored impatience. ‘If you want to know what real, trained, professional acting is, you must go abroad, and see how the actors of the Théâtre Français, for instance, study and train and drill. If you will start with the English notion that a man can take to the stage as he does to the saddle, give up the plan at once; you will never rise above an amateur. But to come back to our present purpose; we will select a part to suit you, and if the rehearsals promise a genuine success—as I have not a doubt they will—we will invite your mother to come and see you, and she will be so proud of your triumph that the cause will be won.’

“‘My dear Hallam, it was some good fairy sent you in my way assuredly this morning!’ I cried, grasping his arm in delight.

“I was highly elated, and took to the scheme with enthusiasm. We spent the afternoon discussing it. It was settled that the play should be The Taming of the Shrew; the part of Benedict would suit me to perfection, Hallam declared, and I was so subdued by the amount of worldly wisdom and general knowledge of life which he had displayed in his arguments about my change of profession that I yielded without difficulty, and consented to forego tragedy for the present.

“For the next week I was in a whirl of excitement. He took me to the Army and Navy Club, and introduced me to a number of swells, all military men, who were very agreeable and treated me with a soldier-like cordiality that charmed me. I fancied life must be a delightful thing in such pleasant, good-natured, well-bred company; that I was now in my proper sphere; and that I had been hitherto out of place amidst rusty lawyers and hard-working clerks, etc. In fact, I was a fool, and my head got turned. I spent all my time in the day lounging about with Hallam and his aristocratic captains and colonels, and the evenings I devoted to the business of rehearsal, which was carried on at Lady Arabella Daucer’s, the married daughter of the duchess at whose house the theatricals were to be performed. I had been very graciously received by her grace, and consequently all the lords and ladies who composed her court followed suit. I was made as much of as if I had been ‘one of them,’ and my acting soon established me as the leading star of the select company. I suppose Hallam was right in saying that more mature reading and so on had improved my dramatic talent; for certainly it came out with a brilliancy that surprised myself. The[460] artistic, high-bred atmosphere that surrounded me seemed to infuse fresh vigor into me. I borrowed or revealed a power that even my vanity had never suspected. Hallam was enchanted, and as proud of my success as if it had been his own.

“‘I can fancy how your mother will enjoy this!’ he exclaimed one evening, as I walked home with him to his chambers in Piccadilly. ‘She will be beside herself with pride in you, old fellow. Fancy what it will be the night of your first public representation! I expect a seat in her box, mind!’

“It was just two days before the grand night, and we were having our last rehearsal—the final one—in the theatre at B—— House, which was lighted up and filled with a select few, in order to judge of the general effect for the following night. I was in great spirits, and acted better than I had done yet. The audience applauded warmly, the ladies clapping their white-kid hands and shaking their handkerchiefs, that filled the air with the perfumes of Arabia, while the gentlemen, more audible in their demonstrations, cheered loudly.

“When it was over, we sat down to supper, about a hundred, of us. I sat next the duchess, and my beautiful Katharina on the other side of me. She was a lovely girl of twenty, a cousin of the duchess. I had been struck by her beauty at the first, but the more I saw of her the less she pleased me; she was a vain, coquettish young lady, and only tolerated me because I was useful as a good set-off to her acting, which, to be just, was excellent. I never saw anything so good off the stage, and very seldom saw it equalled even there. Flushed with her recent triumph, which had borrowed additional lustre from mine she was more gracious and conversational than I had yet known her. I was flattered, though I knew perfectly how much the caprice was worth, and I exerted myself to the utmost to be agreeable. We were altogether a very merry party; the champagne flowed freely, and with it the spirits of the guests rose to sparkling point. As we rose from the table, some one called out for a dance before we broke up. The musicians had gone to have refreshments after the rehearsal, but they were still in the house. The duchess, a good-natured, easy-going person, who always agreed with everybody all round, at once ordered them in; people began to engage partners, and all was laughing confusion round the supper-table. I turned to my pretty neighbor, and asked if she was engaged; she replied, laughing, that being neither a sibyl nor a clairvoyant, she could not have known beforehand that there was to be dancing. ‘Then may I have the honor of claiming you for the first dance, whatever it may be?’ I said; and she replied that I might. I offered her my arm, and we took our way back into the theatre, which was still brilliantly illuminated. We were to dance on the stage. As we were pushing on with the crowd, I felt a strong hand laid on my arm, and, before I had time to prevent it, Lady Caroline’s hand was withdrawn, and the intruder stood between us. He was a square-built, distinguished-looking man, not very young, but handsome and with the beau stamped all over him.

“‘Excuse my want of ceremony,’ he said in an easy, supercilious tone to me. ‘I claim the first dance with Lady Caroline.’

“‘On what grounds?’ I demanded[461] stiffly. We were still moving on, carried with the crowd, so it was impossible to make him stand aside or to regain my post next Lady Caroline.

“Lady Caroline uttered a laughing ‘O Lord George!’ but did not draw away the hand which he had so unceremoniously transferred from my arm to his.

“‘Lady Caroline made no engagement before she came here to-night,’ I said, ‘and she promised this dance to me. I refer you to herself whether this be true or not.’

“‘Gentlemen are not in the habit of catechising ladies as to their behavior—not, at least, in our set; and while you happen to be in it you had better conform to its customs,’ observed Lord George, without looking towards me.

“I felt my blood boil so that it was an effort not to strike him. Two ladies near me who had heard the passage between us cried, ‘Shame! No gentleman would have said that!’ This gave me courage to maintain my self-command. We were now in the theatre; the orchestra was playing a brilliant prelude to a waltz, and Lord George, as if he had forgotten all about me, prepared to start. I laid my hand peremptorily on his arm.

“‘In my set,’ I said, and my voice shook with agitation, ‘gentlemen don’t tolerate gratuitous impertinence; you either make me an apology, or I shall exact reparation of another kind.’

“‘Oh! indeed. I shall be happy to hear from you at your convenience,’ sneered Lord George, with a low bow. He turned away, and said in a voice loud enough to be heard by me or any one else near, ‘The puppy imagines, I suppose, that I would meet him in a duel. The next thing will be we shall have our footmen sending us challenges. Capital joke, by Jove! Come, we are losing time, Lady Caroline! The waltz is half over.’

“They were starting this time, when a voice behind me called out imperiously: ‘A moment, Lord George Halberdyne! The gentleman whom you have insulted is a friend of mine and a guest of the Duchess of B——; two conditions that qualify him, I think, to be an adversary of yours.’

“‘Oh! he’s a friend of yours, is he?’ repeated Lord George, facing around. ‘That’s a natural phenomenon that I shall not stop to investigate just now; but it certainly puts this gentleman in a new light. Good-evening, sir. I shall have the pleasure, probably, of seeing you to-morrow.’

“‘You shall, my lord,’ I replied; and allowing Hallam to link my arm in his and draw me away, I turned my back on the brilliant scene, and hurried out of the house, feverish, humiliated, desperate.

“‘The idiot! The snob! You shall give him a lesson that he’ll not forget in a hurry,’ said Hallam, who seemed nearly as indignant and excited as myself. ‘Are you a good shot? Have you ever stood fire?’

“I answered both questions in the negative. He was evidently put out; but presently he said in a confident tone:

“‘Well, it does not so much matter; you are the offended party, and consequently you have the choice of weapons. It shall be swords instead of pistols. I suppose you’re a pretty good swordsman?’

“‘My dear Hallam,’ I said, ‘you forget that these things are not in my line at all. I never handled[462] a sword since we flourished them in the fencing hall at Oxford. In fact, if the choice be mine, as you say it is, I think I would do better to choose pistols. I have a chance with them; and if Lord George be a swordsman, I have none with the other.’

“‘It’s not quite such an affair of chance as you appear to imagine,’ he said. ‘Halberdyne is one of the best shots in the service; he never misses his mark; and he is a first-rate swordsman. ’Pon my honor I don’t know what to advise you.’

“‘I must stand advised by myself then, and here goes for pistols,’ I said, trying to put a bold face on it, though I confess I felt anything but cheerful at the prospect. ‘You will stand by me, Hallam, will you not?’

“‘Of course I will! I’ve committed myself to as much already,’ he answered cordially; but I saw he was uncomfortable. ‘I shall take your card to the scoundrel to-morrow morning. I wonder who he’ll have for second—that bully Roper, very likely,’ he went on, talking more to himself than to me.

“‘Is the meeting to take place to-morrow morning?’ I inquired; and a sudden rush of anguish came on me as I put the question. I thought of my mother, of all that might be in store for her so soon.

“‘We must try and put it off for a day,’ said Hallam. ‘It is deucedly awkward, you see, if it comes off to-morrow, because of the play. You may get hit, and it would be a terrible business if you were hors de concours for the evening.’ There was something so grimly comical in the earnestness with which he said this that, though I was in no merry mood, I burst out laughing.

“‘A terrible business indeed!’ I said. ‘How exceedingly unpleasant for Lady Caroline particularly to be left in the lurch on such an occasion! However, if I go to the wall, and Lord George comes off safe, he might get up the part in a hurry and replace me, eh?’ I had hit the mark without knowing it. It was jealousy that had provoked Lord George to the gratuitous attack. I suppose there was something sardonic in my voice that struck Hallam with the inappropriateness of his previous remarks. He suddenly stopped, and grasping my arm warmly—

“‘I’m used to this sort of thing, my dear fellow,’ he said; ‘but don’t fancy from that that my feelings are turned to stone, or that I forget all that is, that may be, unpleasant in the matter. But there is no use talking of these things; they unman a fellow, and he wants all his nerves in working order at a moment like this. Take my advice and go home now, and cool yourself by a quiet night for to-morrow’s work, if it is to be to-morrow. You may have some letters to write or other things to attend to, and they had better be done at once.’

“I replied that I had no letters to write and no business instructions to leave. The idea of facing my home, passing my mother’s door, and then going to bed as if the world had not turned right round; as if all life, the present and the future, were not revolutionized—this was what I did not, at this moment at least, feel equal to, and I said so.

“‘I would rather go for an hour to the club,’ I said, ‘if you don’t mind, and we will have a game of billiards. I don’t feel inclined to go home, and I should not sleep if I went to bed.’

“‘Just as you like,’ he said; ‘but the night is so fine we may as well take a few more turns in the open air. It does one good after those heated rooms.’

“It did me no good. I felt the most miserable man in this miserable world. I would have given any happiness the world could have offered me to undo this night’s work, to be as I was an hour ago, free, guiltless of projected murder or suicide. I repeated to myself that it was not my fault; that I had been gratuitously provoked beyond endurance; that as a gentleman I could not have done otherwise; but these sophistries neither calmed nor strengthened me. Truer voices rose up and answered them in clear and imperious tones that drowned the foolish comforters. Why had I ever entered the society where my position exposed me to such results? What business had I there? What good could it do myself or any one else to have been tolerated, even courted, as I fancied I was, by these fine people, who had nothing of any sort in common with me? I had forsaken my legitimate place, the profession that my mother had made such heavy sacrifices to open to me. I had deliberately frittered away my life, destroyed my prospects of honorable success; and this is what it had brought me to! I was going either to shoot a man who had done me no graver injury than offend my pride and punish my folly, or to be shot down by him—and then? I saw myself brought home to my mother dangerously wounded, dead perhaps. I heard her cry of agony, I saw her mortal despair. I could have cried out loud for pity of her. I could have cursed myself for my folly—for the mad, sinful folly that had rewarded her by such an awakening.

“There is an electric current that runs from mind to mind, communicating almost like an articulate voice the thoughts that are passing within us at certain moments. I had not spoken for several minutes, as we paced up and down Pall Mall, puffing our cigars in the starlight; but this current I speak of had passed from my brain to Hallam’s, and informed him of what my thoughts were busy on.

“‘Don’t let yourself down, old boy,’ he said good-naturedly. ‘No harm may come of it after all; I’ve known a score of duels where both sides came off with no more than a pin-scratch, sometimes with no scratch at all. Not that I suspect you of being faint-hearted—I remember what a dare-devil you were at Oxford—but the bravest of us may be a coward for others.’

“I felt something rise in my throat as if it would choke me. I could not get a word out.

“‘Who knows?’ continued Hallam in his cheeriest tone; ‘you may be bringing down the house to-morrow night, and your mother may be the proudest woman in London, seeing you the king of the company, cheered and complimented by “fair women and brave men!” I feel as sure of it, do you know, as if I saw it in a glass.’

“He spoke in kindness, but the levity of his tone, the utter hollowness of his consolations, were intolerable. They mocked my misery; every word pierced me like a knife. What evil genius had led me across this man’s path? Only a few weeks ago I said it was the work of an angel, a good fairy, or some absurdity of the sort. It was more likely a demon that had done it. If I had never met him, I said to myself,[464] I would never have known this hour; I should have been an innocent and a happy man. But this would not do either. I was neither innocent nor happy when I met him. I was false to my duty, wasting my life, and sick to death of both; only longing for the opportunity which Hallam had brought me. If I had not met him, I should have met or sought out some other tempter, and bitten greedily at the bait when it was offered. Still, I felt embittered toward Hallam. I accused him, as if he had been the sole author of my misfortune; as if I had been a baby or an idiot without free-will or responsibility.

“‘Come into the club,’ I said, dropping his arm and throwing away the end of my cigar.

“He did not notice the impatient movement, but readily crossed over, and we entered the club. The lofty, spacious rooms were blazing with light and filled with groups of men. Some were lounging on luxurious couches, reading the evening papers, some were chatting, some were playing cards. An air of easy grandeur, prosperity, and surface happiness pervaded the place. I felt horribly out of keeping with it all. I had no business amongst these wealthy, fashionable men; I was like a skeleton stalking into the feast. I believe it was nothing but sheer human respect, the fear of making myself ridiculous, that prevented me from turning on my heel and rushing straight out of the house. I mechanically took up the Globe, which a member tossed on to a table near me, and sat down as if I were going to read it.

“‘Leave that alone, and come into the billiard-room,’ said Hallam. And he whipped the paper out of my hands with brotherly unceremoniousness.

“I rose and followed him like a dog. I would have gone anywhere, done anything, he or anybody else suggested. Physically, I was indifferent to what I did; my brain on fire, I felt as if I were walking in a dream.

“We were passing into the billiard-room when a gentleman who was seated at a card-table cried out to Hallam to come and join them. It was Col. Leveson, a brother officer and great friend of his. Hallam replied that he was going on to have a pull at the balls; but he strolled over to see how the game was going. I mechanically followed him. Some of the players knew me, and greeted me with a friendly nod. They were absorbed in the game; it was lansquenet. I knew very little about cards; but lansquenet was the one game that interested me. I had lost a few sovereigns a night or two before at it, and, as the luck seemed set in against the banker, it flashed over me I could not do better than to take a hand and win them back now. I did not, however, volunteer to join the game. In my present state of smarting pride I would not run the risk of being made to feel I was an intruder. Unluckily, Hallam’s friend, reading temptation on my countenance perhaps, said, holding up his cards to me: “I’m in splendid vein, but I must be off. I’ll sell you my hand for half a sovereign, if you like.”

“‘Done!’ I said; and paying the half-sovereign, I sat down. I had scarcely taken his place when there was a noise in the adjoining room announcing fresh arrivals. I recognized one loud, domineering voice above the others, and presently Lord George Halberdyne came in.

“‘On the contrary, never was in better vein in my life,’ replied the colonel. ‘I sold my hand for a song, because I have an appointment that I can’t forego.’

“‘Mr. Botfield,’ said Col. Leveson. (My real name is Botfield; I only took the name of Baines when I fell into disgrace and misery.)

“Lord George muttered an exclamation of some sort—whether of surprise or vexation I could not tell—and advanced to the table.

“‘Do you mind my joining you?’ he said, appealing to nobody in particular. There was a general assent, and he sat down. Hallam would not take a hand. He hated cards; his passion was for billiards, and he played nothing else. He came and stood behind me to watch the game. I felt him lay his hand on my shoulder, as if to encourage me and remind me that he was there to stand by me and take my part against my late bully, if needs be. It did not seem as if he was likely to be called upon to do so. My late bully was as gracious as man could be—at least he intended to be so; but I took his familiar facetiousness for covert impertinence, and it made my blood boil quite as fiercely as his recent open insult had done. I was not man of the world enough to understand that Lord George was only doing his duty to society; that he was in fact behaving beautifully, with infinite tact, like an accomplished gentleman. I could not understand that the social canons of his ‘set’ made it incumbent on a man to joke and laugh and demean himself in this lively, careless fashion towards the man whom he was going to shoot in a few hours. I grew inwardly exasperated, and it was nothing but pride and an unprecedented effort of will that enabled me to keep my temper and remain outwardly cool. For a time, for about twenty minutes, the luck continued in the same vein; my half-sovereign had been paid back to me more than fifty times. Col. Leveson was right when he said he had sold his hand for a song. Hallam was all this time standing behind my chair, smoking his cigar, and throwing in a word between the puffs. The clock struck two.

“‘Come off now, Botfield,’ he said, tapping me on the shoulder—‘come off while your star is shining; it is sure to go down if you stay too long.’

“‘Very likely, most sage and prudent mentor,’ retorted Lord George; ‘but that cuts both ways. Your friend has been pocketing our money up to this; it’s only fair he should give us a chance of winning it back and pocketing a little of his. That is a law universally recognized, I believe.’ As he said this, he turned to me good-humoredly enough; but I saw where the emphasis pointed, and, stung to the quick, I replied that I had not the least intention of going counter to the law; I would remain as long as the game lasted.

“‘Halloo! That’s committing yourself somewhat rashly,’ interposed Hallam. ‘You don’t know what nefarious gamblers these fellows are; they’re capable of keeping it up till morning!’

“‘If they do, I shall keep it up with them,’ I replied recklessly. I was desperate, and my luck was good.

“Hallam said no more, but sauntered to the other side of the table, where I felt his eyes fixed on me warningly, entreatingly.

“I looked up at last, and met[466] them fastened on me in a mute, impatient appeal. I answered it by a peremptory nod. He saw I would not brook farther interference, so he took himself off to the billiard-room, and did not reappear for an hour.

“I cannot recall clearly what passed during the interval. The luck had turned suddenly against me; but, nothing daunted, I went on playing desperately, losing as fast as I had been winning, only in much heavier sums; for the stakes had risen enormously on the change of luck. There was a large pool, immense it seemed to me—some two hundred pounds. I lost again and again. At last terror sobered me. I began to realize the madness of my conduct, and wanted to withdraw; but they cried out against it, reminded me that I had pledged myself to remain and see the game out. Lord George was loudest in protesting that I must remain. ‘One can’t have luck always,’ he said, ‘A man must put up with it when the tide turns. It is of good omen for you, Mr. Botfield,’ he added pointedly; ‘you will be in splendid luck to-morrow.’

“I shuddered. I can remember the horrible, sick sensation that ran through me as he said this, lightly, pleasantly, as if he alluded to a rowing-match I had in view. I saw my mother’s pale face beckoning me to come away—to stop before I ruined her utterly. I almost made a movement to rise, but something glued me to the chair. The game went on. I again held the bank, and again lost. I had no money about me except the forty pounds or so I had won at the outset; but several leaves out of my pocketbook were strewn about the table bearing I. O. U.’s for nine times that sum. I suppose by this time I had quite lost my senses. I know that I went on betting like a maniac, with the feverish, triumphant impulse of a man in delirium. I was losing tremendously. I remember nothing except the sound of my own voice and Lord George’s calling banco! again and again, and how the cry ran through me like a blade every time, and how I hastily tore out fresh leaves and wrote down the sums I lost, and tossed them to the winner, and went on. All this time we had been drinking deeply of brandy and water. I was naturally abstemious, but to-night I drank recklessly. The wonder was—and I was going to say the pity—that it had not stupefied me long ago, and so made me physically incapable of continuing my insane career. But excitement acted, I suppose, as an antidote, and prevented the alcohol from taking effect as it otherwise must have done. At last Hallam came back. I have a vague recollection of hearing him exchange some remarks in an undertone with one of the players, who had given up and was now watching the game with a number of others who had dropped in from adjoining rooms. I then heard him say, ‘Good God! he is ruined twice over!’ I heard nothing more. I had fallen back insensible in my chair. Everybody started up; the cards were dropped, and all was confusion and terror. It appears that at the first moment they thought I was dead. A young guardsman present declared I was, and that it was disease of the heart; a young kinsman of his had dropped down on parade only a month ago just in the same way. There was a cry for a doctor, and two or three ran out to fetch one. Before he arrived, however, I had[467] given signs of returning consciousness. Up to this moment Lord George had been anxiously looking on, silent and pale, they said. He had borne me with Hallam to a couch in the next room, where the air was free from cigar-fumes, and had opened the window to admit the fresh night-breeze. He had done, in fact, what any humane person would have done under the circumstances; but he had done it in a manner that betokened more than ordinary interest. He drew an audible breath of relief the moment he saw my eyelids quiver and heard me breathe like a man awaking to life. Hallam signed to him to leave the room; he did not wish his face to be the first I saw on opening my eyes. Lord George no doubt understood; for he at once withdrew into the card-room. He drew the door after him, but he did not quite close it, so that I heard dreamily, yet distinctly, all that was said. Lord George’s second for the morrow’s meeting, the Hon. Capt. Roper, inquired eagerly how I was going on. ‘Oh! he’ll be all right presently,’ was the reply, spoken in Lord George’s off-hand way. ‘There was nothing to make such a fuss about; the poor devil was scared to see how much money he had lost, and fainted like a girl—that’s all.’

“‘Hallam says he is quite cleared out by to-night’s ill-luck,’ observed some one.

“‘Served him right,’ said Lord George; ‘it will teach puppies of his kind not to come amongst us and make fools of themselves.’

“‘I mean to give him a chance of shooting me; unless,’ he continued—and I saw in imagination, as vividly as if my bodily eyes had seen it, the cold sneer that accompanied the remark—‘unless he shows the white feather and declines fighting, which is just as likely.’

“While this little dialogue had been going on in subdued tones close by the door which opened at the head of the sofa where I lay, Hallam was conversing in animated whispers with two gentlemen in the window. He was not more than a minute absent, when he returned to my side, and, seeing my eyes wide open, exclaimed heartily: ‘Thank God! he’s all right again!’

“I grasped his hand and sat up. They gave me some sal-volatile and water to drink, and I was, as he said, all right again. But it was not the stimulant that restored me, that gave me such sudden energy, and nerved me to act at once, to face my fate and defy it. I took his arm, and led him, or let him lead me, to some quieter place near, and then I asked him how much he thought I had lost.

“‘Don’t think of that yet, my dear fellow,’ he said; ‘you are too done up to discuss it. We will see what can be done to-morrow.’

“‘Five thousand pounds!’ I said. ‘Do you hear that? Five thousand pounds! That means that I am a beggar, which an’t of much consequence; and that I’ve made a beggar of my mother. She will have to sell the bed from under her to pay it, to save my honor. A curse upon me for bringing this blight upon her!’

“‘Tut! tut! man, don’t take on like a woman about it!’ said Hallam. ‘These things can be arranged; no need to make matters out worse than they are. I’ll speak to Lord George, and see what terms we can make with him.’

“He made me light a cigar, and[468] left me alone, while he went back to parley with the man who held my fortune, my life, my all in his hands. I never heard exactly all that passed between them. I only know that in answer to Lord George’s question, put in a tone of insulting haughtiness, ‘Has the fellow pledged himself for more than he’s worth? Can’t he pay?’ Hallam replied: ‘He can, but it will ruin him’; upon which the other retorted with a laugh, ‘What the devil is that to me?’ and turned his back on my second, who had nothing left but to take Capt. Roper aside and arrange for the morrow’s meeting. He came back, and told me all was settled; that Halberdyne was behaving like a brute, and would be tabooed in the clubs and every decent drawing-room before twenty-four hours. This thought seemed to afford him great satisfaction. It gave me none. Anguish had drowned resentment. I could think of nothing except that I was a ruined man, that I had beggared my mother, and that I was going to fight a duel in a few hours. Richmond Park—6 A.M.—pistols at thirty paces! This was how the appointment was notified by our seconds to both of us. Suddenly a light burst on me—a ray of hope, of consolation: I might be killed in this duel, and, if so, surely my honor would be saved and my debt cancelled. Lord George would not pursue my mother for the money. She should know nothing of this night’s work until after the meeting. If I escaped with a wound, I would tell her; if I died, who would have the cruelty to do so? I told Hallam of this sudden thought as he walked home with me. He approved of it, and cheered me up by almost assuring me that I should be shot. Halberdyne was a dead-shot; it was most likely that I should not leave the field alive.

“The night passed—the few hours of it that must elapse before the time named for the meeting. 0 God! how did I live through them? And yet this was nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to what was yet in store for me.…

“The duel took place. Lord George wounded me in the hip. He escaped unhurt; I fired in the air. I was carried home on a door, insensible. Hallam had gone before to prepare my mother. For some weeks it was feared I would not live. Then amputation was talked of. I escaped finally with being a cripple for life. Before I was out of danger, Hallam’s leave expired, and he went to rejoin his regiment. He had been very assiduous in calling to inquire for me, had seen my mother, and, judging by her passionate grief that I was in a fair way not to recover, he had forborne mentioning anything about the five thousand pounds. She promised to write and let him know when any change took place. Meantime, she had found out my secret. I had talked incessantly of it in my delirium, and with an accuracy of iteration that left no doubt on her mind but that there was a foundation of truth in the feverish ravings. The doctor was of the same mind, and urged her to give me an opportunity of relieving my mind of the burden, whatever it was, as soon as this was possible.

“The first day that I was strong enough to bear conversation she accordingly broached the subject. I inferred at once that Hallam had told her everything, and repeated the miserable story, only to confirm what I supposed he had already said.

“My mother was sitting by my[469] bedside. She busied herself with teaseling out linen into lint for my wound, and so, purposely no doubt, kept her face continually bent or averted from mine.

“Seeing how quietly she took it, I began to think I had overrated the misfortune; that we had larger resources in some way than I had imagined. ‘Then it is possible for us to pay this horrible debt and save my honor, and yet not be utterly beggared, mother?’ I said eagerly. She looked at me with a smile that must surely have been the reflex of some angel near her whom I could not see. ‘Yes, my boy; he shall be paid, and we shall not be beggars,’ she said gently, and pressed my hand in both her own. ‘You should have told me about it at once; it has been preying on your mind and retarding your cure all this time. I will see Mr. Kerwin to-day, and have it arranged at once. Promise me now, like a good boy, to forget it and think no more of it until you are quite well. Will you promise?’

“I did not answer, but signed with my lips for her to kiss me. She rose and twined her arms around me, and let me sob out my sorrow and my love upon her breast.

“It was about three days after this that she handed me a letter to read; it was from Lord George to Mr. Kerwin, and ran thus:

“‘Mother! mother!’ I cried out, and opened my arms to her in a passion of tears. But she laid her finger smilingly on my lips, and made me be silent. In a month hence, when I was well, we should talk it all over, but not now.

Marmaduke started to his feet with a cry of horror, and Botfield, unable to control the anguish that his own narrative evoked, dropped his head into his hands, and shook the room with his sobs.

“O dear God! that I should have lived to tell it!—to talk over the mother that I murdered! Brave, tender, generous mother! I killed you, I broke your heart, and then—then I brought shame upon your memory! O God! O God! why have I outlived it?” He rocked to and fro, almost shouting in his paroxysm of despair. Marmaduke had never beheld such grief; he had never in his life been so deeply moved with pity. He did not know what to say, what to do. His heart prompted him to do the right thing: he fell on his knees, and, putting his arms around the wretched, woe-worn man, he burst into tears and sobbed with him.

Botfield suffered his embrace for a moment, and then, pressing his horny palm on the young man’s blond head, he muttered: “God bless you! God bless you for your pity!”

As soon as they were both calmed, Marmaduke asked him if he would not prefer finishing the story to-morrow. But he signed to him to sit down; that he would go on with it to the end.

“I was lying a cripple on my bed[470] when she was carried to her grave. I was seized with a violent brain fever, which turned to typhus, and they took me to the hospital. The servants were dismissed; they had received notice from my mother. She had foreseen everything, taken every necessary step as calmly as if the catastrophe I had brought upon her had been a mere change of residence for her own convenience. All we had was gone. That brave answer of hers to my question about our resources was a subterfuge of her love. If ever a sin was sinless, assuredly that half-uttered falsehood was. She had directed the lawyer to raise the money immediately, at every sacrifice. She meant to work for her bread, and trusted to me to make the task light and short to her. I would have done it had she been spared to me. So help me God, I would! But now that she was gone, I had nothing to work for. I left the hospital a cripple and a beggar. I did not even yet know to what an extent. I went straight to our old house, expecting to find it as I had left it—that is, before all consciousness had left me. I found it dismantled, empty; painters busy on scaffolding outside. I went to Mr. Kerwin, and there learned the whole truth. Nothing remained to me but suicide. Nothing kept me from it, I believe, but the prayers of my mother.”

“You were a Christian, then?” interrupted Marmaduke in a tone of unfeigned surprise.

“I ought to have been. My father was, and my mother was; I was brought up as one, until I went to the university and lost what little belief I had. For a moment it seemed to come back to me when I found myself alone in the world. I remember walking deliberately down to the river’s side when I left the lawyer’s office, fully determined to drown myself. But before I reached the water, I heard my mother’s voice calling so distinctly to me to stop that I felt myself arrested as by some visible presence. I heard the voice saying, ‘Do you wish never to see me again even in the next world?’ Of course it was the work of imagination, of my over-wrought feelings; but the effect was the same. I stopped, and retraced my steps to Mr. Kerwin’s.”

“It was your guardian angel, perhaps your mother’s, that saved you,” said Marmaduke.

“Oh! I forgot,” said Botfield. “Your brother is a Catholic; I suppose you are too?”

Marmaduke nodded assent; he felt that his Catholicity was not much to boast of. Like the poor outcast before him, he had lost his faith practically, though he adhered to it in name.

“Yes, it was an angel of some sort that rescued me,” said Botfield; “it was no doubt my own fault if the rescue was not complete. I went back to Mr. Kerwin, and asked him to give me, or get me, something to do. My chance on the stage was at an end, even if I could have turned to that: I was dead lame. He got me a situation as clerk in an office; but the weariness of the life and the pressure of remorse were more than I could bear. I took to drink. They forgave me once, twice; the third time I was dismissed. But of what use is it to go over that disgusting, pitiable story? Step by step I went down, lower and lower, sinking each time into fouler depths, drinking more loathsome draughts, wallowing in mire whose very existence such as you don’t dream of. I will spare you all those details.[471] Enough that I came at last to what you see me. One day when hunger was gnawing me, and even the satanic consolation of the public-house was shut against me for want of a sixpence to pay for a glass of its diabolical elixir, I fell in with a man of the trade; he offered me work and bread. Hunger is not a dainty counsellor. I closed with the offer, and so sank into the last slough that humanity can take refuge in.…

“Now, Mr. Walpole, you have heard my history; it was a pain, and yet, somehow, a relief, to me to tell it. It has not been a very pleasant one for you to listen to; still, I don’t regret having inflicted it on you. You are very young; you are prosperous and happy, and, most likely, perfectly free from any of the temptations that have been the bane of my life; still, it never hurts a young man starting in life to hear an older man’s experience. If ever temptation should come near you, dash it from you with all your might; scorn and defy it from the first; hold no parley with it; to treat with perdition is to be lost.”

“You have done me a greater service than you know of,” said Marmaduke, rising and preparing to take leave of his singular entertainer. “Perhaps one day I may tell you.…” He took a turn in the narrow room, and then, coming back to Botfield, resumed in an agitated manner: “Why should I not own it at once? You have trusted me with all; I will tell you the truth.”

“I stand on the very brink of the abyss against which you warn me. Like you, I am a barrister; like you, I hate my profession, and spend my time reading poetry and playing at private theatricals. They are my passion. A few nights ago I tried my luck at cards, and won. This tempted me; I played last night and lost—precisely the sum of twenty pounds.”

“I am in debt—not much—a mere trifle, if it lead to no worse! You see now what a service you may have done me; who knows? Perhaps my mother’s guardian angel prompted you to tell me your story as a warning, to save me before it was too late! I know that I came here to-day at the bidding of an angel; and reluctant enough I was to take the message!”

“I never thought to be of use to any one while I lived,” said Botfield with emotion. “I bless God, anyhow, if my wretched example proves a warning to you. Who sent you to me? I understood it was your brother?”

“So it was; but it was to please my sister that I consented to come. She is one of those angels that people talk about, but don’t often see. You will let her come and see you, Mr. Botfield, will you not?”

He held out his delicate lavender kid hand, and pressed Botfield’s grimy fingers cordially.

When Marmaduke got home, he inquired at once where his sister was, and, hearing she was in her room, he crept up quietly to the door and knocked. He entered so quietly that Nelly had scarcely time to jump off her knees. Marmaduke saw at once that he had taken her by surprise; he saw also that her eyes were red.

“What is the matter?” she asked, with a frightened look. “Has anything happened? You have[472] been away so long! What kept you, Marmaduke? Where have you been?”

“To Stephen’s poor man? Why, you have been out nearly two hours! It did not take all that time to give your message?” said incredulous Nelly, and her heart beat with recent apprehension.

“No; but Stephen’s poor man had a message for me. Sit down here, and I will tell you what it was. But how cold you are, darling! You are positively perished! Where have you been?”

She blushed, hesitated, and then said simply, “I was praying for you, Marmaduke.”

He folded her in his arms, and whispered, “I was right to say it was an angel sent me.”

Then, taking a warm shawl that he saw hanging up, he wrapped her in it, and sat down beside her, and told the story as it had been told to him. When it was over, Nelly’s head was on his breast, and the brother’s tears of penitence were mingling with the sister’s tears of joy.

“Let us go down now and tell Stephen,” said Marmaduke, when he had finished.

“Dear Marmy! I am so happy I could sing for joy,” she said, smiling through her tears. “Let us kneel down here and say one little prayer together; will you?”

“How did you thaw the man and break up the ice he seemed to be buried under?” was Stephen’s amazed inquiry when other more precious and interesting questions were exhausted.

On Christmas morning Marmaduke announced his intention of dining out. It was a sacrifice to all three, but no one opposed him. Nelly made up a store of provisions, including a hot plum-pudding, which was put with other steaming hot dishes into the ample basket that the gay young man carried off in a cab with him to Red Pepper Lane. There he found a clean hearth, a blazing fire, and a table spread with a snowy cloth, and all necessaries complete. Some fairy had surely been at work in that gloomy place. The host was clean and brushed, looking like an eccentric gentleman in his new clothes amidst those incongruous surroundings. He and Marmaduke unpacked the basket with many an exclamation at its inexhaustible depths. That was the happiest, if not the very merriest, Christmas dinner that ever Marmaduke partook of.

When it was over, and they were puffing a quiet cigar over the fire, steps were heard on the rickety stairs, and then a knock at the door, and a silvery voice saying: “May we come in?” It was Stephen and Nelly.

“I don’t see why you should have all the pleasure to yourself,” said Nelly, with her bright laugh; “you would never have been here at all if I had not teased you into taking the message!”

If this were a romance instead of a true episode, the story should end by the some-time rag-and-bone[473] man becoming a Catholic, rising to wealth and distinction, and marrying Nelly. But the events of real life don’t adjust themselves so conveniently to the requirements of the story-teller. Stephen Walpole got Mr. Botfield a situation in the post-office, where, by good conduct and intelligent diligence, he rose gradually to a position of trust, which was highly paid. He never married. Who knows? Perhaps he had his little romance, and never dared to tell it.

THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH CONGRESS.

The second annual Congress of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States was held at Philadelphia during the early part of November. Church congresses are new things in this country, and the Episcopalians are not yet quite at home in them. Their first experiment, made at New York in 1874, was not wholly successful. Some of their leading bishops and presbyters treated it rather cavalierly, apparently in the fear that it was going to weaken the bonds of ecclesiastical discipline, and open vexatious questions which the church for years had been expending all its learning and ingenuity in trying not to answer. But church congresses seemed to be very proper and respectable things for every denomination which laid claim to antiquity: they are common in the mother-church of England; they are efficient and interesting organizations in what our Anglican friends are pleased to call the Roman branch of the church of Christ; Dr. Döllinger has them regularly in the Old-Catholic “branch”; and so the originators of the movement in the American “branch” have persevered in their attempt to establish them here. The meeting in Philadelphia appears to have been all that its promoters could have reasonably expected. The denominational papers of various shades of opinion concur in believing that the permanency of the Congress as an annual institution is now nearly secured; and we find one of these journals rejoicing that the meeting passed off with “entire cordiality,” and that nothing in the proceedings “elicited prejudice or excited hostile action.” This indeed was something to boast of. Perhaps it would have been still more gratifying had not the same paper explained that this unexpected peaceableness of the Congress arose “from the fact that no resolutions were adopted, no legislation proposed, no elections held. When any of these are distinctly in view, those who participate range themselves into parties, and it is almost impossible not to resort to measures to ensure victory which generate unkind feelings and provoke exaggerated statements.” All which gives us a queer idea of the manner in which the Holy Ghost is supposed to operate in the councils of the Protestant Episcopal Church. But no matter. Let us be glad, for the sake of propriety, that this was[474] merely a meeting for talk, and not for action. The strict rules applicable to conventions, synods, and other business meetings were not in force. The topics of discussion were not so much points of doctrine as minor questions of discipline and methods of applying the machinery of the church to the every-day work of religion. And with the knowledge that no vote was to be taken upon any subject whatever, the Congress unanimously agreed to let every man say what he pleased. The great variety of irreconcilable things which it accordingly pleased the gentlemen to say seems to have attracted remark, and denominational papers point to it with pride as a proof of the large toleration allowed within the bosom of the church. If they like it, far be it from us to interfere with their enjoyment.

The Episcopal Church is one of the largest and richest of the Protestant sects. Its clergy are popularly supposed to boast of more general culture and enjoy fuller opportunities for study than those of the other religious bodies, and its people are found in large numbers among the educated and well-to-do classes. A congress of this church, gathered from all parts of the country, representing all shades of opinion, and possessing almost unbounded facilities for talk and deliberation, ought therefore to have elicited a great deal that was worth remembering. The programme of the sessions was stated in an alluring manner by Bishop Clarke, of Rhode Island, who made the introductory address. “We come,” said he, “to consider how the doctrine and organization of the church can be brought most effectually to sanctity”; and then he went on to speak briefly of the particular things, in our daily experience, which the church ought to purify and bless—our business affairs, our amusements, our care of the poor, our family relations, the marriage tie—practical points all of them, and points, too, in which the church and the state are more or less in contact.

Well, having laid out this plan of work, how did the Congress address itself to it? The first session gave a rather curious illustration of the practical spirit of the assemblage; for the reverend gentlemen, by way of “bringing the doctrine and organization of the church most effectually to sanctity,” rushed straightway with hot haste into the subject of “ultramontanism and civil authority,” and pounded upon the doors of the Vatican the whole afternoon. The Rev. Francis Wharton, D.D., of Cambridge, Mass., was careful in the outset to distinguish between ultramontanism and the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. The mass of us, he believes, have always been loyal to the territory of whose population we form a part, but our loyalty has no connection with our religion. If we followed the teachings of our church, Dr. Wharton thinks we should be a dangerous set of people. “Ultramontanism teaches that the Pope, a foreign prince, deriving his support from a foreign civilization, is entitled to set aside governments which he considers disloyal, and to annul such institutions as he does not approve.” We confess that we do not know what Dr. Wharton means by the Pope deriving his support from a foreign civilization. If he means his physical support, then the doctor is both wrong and right; for that is derived from the faithful of the[475] whole world. If he means that his authority is derived from a foreign civilization, then the doctor is apparently irreverent; for the papal authority is derived from the institution of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and surely a respectable Cambridge divine would not call that a foreign civilization.

As for the distinction which is drawn between American and ultramontane Catholics, let us repudiate it with all possible warmth before we go any further. Ultramontanism is an objectionable word, because it was invented to localize a school of religious doctrine which is the only catholic school—the school acknowledged all over the world; but if it be understood as defining that spirit of faith and piety which yields all love and obedience to the Vicar of Christ, accepts all the Vatican decrees gladly and without reserve, is not afraid of paying too much respect to the Holy See, or showing too much humility before God, or believing one little particle more than we are commanded to believe under pain of anathema, then the Catholics of America are ultramontane Catholics to a man. Probably there are no Catholics in any country of the world less disposed to compromise in matters of religious duty, and more thoroughly imbued with filial reverence and love for the Head of God’s church on earth, than the Catholics of the United States. The spirit of the church in Rome is the spirit of the church in America; and when Dr. Wharton asserts that “the political tenets of ultramontanism are repudiated by the leading Catholic statesmen of our land,” he makes an utterly erroneous statement, against which American Catholics will be the first to protest. It is very true that with the fictitious ultramontanism conceived of his fears and prejudices neither Americans nor any other sensible people have the slightest sympathy. But show us what Rome teaches, and there you have precisely what the church in the United States accepts. If it is true, therefore that the Pope claims authority “to set aside governments which he considers disloyal, and to annul such institutions as he does not approve,” it must be true that America upholds his pretensions. Dr. Wharton may live in the fear that His Holiness will some day send the Noble Guard to set aside the government of Gen. Grant whenever it becomes “disloyal”; while he may well feel an absolute certainty that our common-school system, our constitutional prohibition of the establishment of a state church, our laws against sectarian appropriations, and various other wicked and heretical provisions found on our statute-books, will sooner or later be “annulled” by a decree from the Vatican. He need not flatter himself that any superior enlightenment among the Catholics of America will save the Protestant community from the miserable fate in store for it. We are not a bit wiser or better than the Pope.

The possible interference of the Vatican with our Congresses and ballot-boxes Dr. Wharton evidently regards as a very remote danger. There are points, however, he thinks, where the Vatican clashes every day with the civil power, and where it ought to be resisted with all the energy at our command. And just at this part of the reverend doctor’s address we should like very much to have seen the face of Bishop Clarke. In his introductory remarks Bishop Clarke told the[476] Congress that one of the most important subjects for churchmen to consider was the influence or authority of the church over the family relations. “The Gospel obtained hold of the family before it touched the state. How does the condition of the marriage bond stand to-day? In some of our States it is as easy to solve it as it is to join it. Is this the religion of which we have made such boast?” But here, before the echoes of the bishop’s words have fairly died away, is the Rev. Dr. Wharton on his feet denouncing as a crime the very interference which Bishop Clarke inculcated as a duty. It is one of the usurpations of ultramontanism, says the Cambridge doctor, to annul civil marriages which the state holds binding, and to treat as invalid divorces which the state holds good. This is one of the most serious conflicts between the state and the Vatican, and it is one, if we understand aright the somewhat imperfect report of his remarks, in which Protestant Episcopalians must prepare themselves to take an earnest part, remembering that, while their church is free, it is “a free church within a free sovereign state, and that this state, in its own secular sovereignty, is supreme.” Here, then, we have a distinct declaration that the family relation is not a proper subject of religious regulation. If the state sees fit to make it as easy to loose the marriage bond as to tie it, the church has no right to object; it is a secular matter, and the free sovereign state is supreme in its own secular sovereignty. If the state sanctions an adulterous connection, the Protestant Episcopal Church must revise its Bible and bless the unholy tie; it is a secular matter, and the free sovereign state is supreme in its own secular sovereignty. The sanctity of the family relation is under the protection of the church, says Bishop Clarke. No such thing, replies Dr. Wharton—that is an insolent ultramontane pretension; the Protestant Episcopal Church knows its place, and does not presume to interfere with the legislature. “The Gospel obtained hold of the family before it touched the state,” says the bishop. “Oh! well, we have changed all that,” rejoins the doctor; the glory of the Protestant Episcopal gospel nowadays is that it lets the family alone. In point of fact, Episcopalianism is not quite so bad as this hasty advocate would have us believe; for it does censure, in a mild way, the laxity of some of the divorce laws, and does not always lend itself to the celebration of bigamous marriages. But Dr. Wharton is correct in his main position—that his church leaves to the state the control of the family relation; and if she shrinks from the logical consequences of her desertion of duty, that is only because a remnant of Catholic feeling remains to her in the midst of her heresies and contradictions. The time must come, however, when these illogical fragments of truth will be thrown away, and the Protestant Episcopal Church will take its place beside the other Protestant bodies in renouncing all right to be heard on one of the most important points of contact between the law of God and the concerns of every-day life. It is impossible to allow the civil power to bind and loose the family tie at pleasure, without admitting that the subject is entirely outside the domain of ecclesiastical supervision. The attempt of the Episcopal Church to[477] compromise on adultery is an absurdity, and in the steady course of Protestant development it will surely be abolished.

Is there any particular in which the Protestant Episcopal Church fairly takes hold of the family? We have seen that she abandons to politicians the sacred tie between the parents; what has she to do with the next domestic concern—the education of the child? Dr. Wharton holds it to be one of her distinguishing claims to public favor that she abandons this duty also to the secular power. The right to control education, according to him, is, like the right to sanction the marriage tie, one of the insolent pretensions of the Vatican usurper. The state, he thinks, is bound not only to educate all its subjects, but to decide what points a secular education shall cover, while the church may only add to this irreligious training such pious instruction as the child may have time and strength to receive after the more serious lessons are over. “The church,” he says, “concedes to the state the right and duty to require a secular education from all, while for itself it undertakes, as a free church in a free state, the right and duty to give a religious education to all within its reach.” Expressed in somewhat plainer English, this means that thirty hours a week ought to be given to the dictionary and multiplication table, and one hour to the catechism and the ten commandments. Send your children to schools all the week where they will hear nothing whatever of religion, where that most vital of all concerns will be a forbidden subject, where the idea will be practically, if not in so many words, impressed upon their tender minds that it is of no consequence whether they are Christians, or Jews, or infidels, so long as they master the various branches of worldly knowledge which promote success in the secular affairs of life; and then get them into Sunday-school if you can, for a wild and ineffectual attempt to counteract the evil tendencies of the previous six days’ teachings. This is trying to give a Christian education without the corner-stone of Christian doctrine; building a house upon the sand, and then running around it once a week with a hatful of pebbles and a trowel of mud to put a foundation under the finished structure. Dr. Wharton seems to embody in his own person a surprising variety of the inconsistencies for which the Protestant Episcopal Church has such a peculiar celebrity. For here, after he has claimed credit for his church as the champion of a secular education, he tells the Congress that secularism is one of the great dangers of the age, against which the church must fight with all her strength. “The battle with secularism has to be fought out.” It must be fought “by the church, and eminently by our own church. Our duty therefore is to fit ourselves for the encounter, and we must do this with the cause of religion, undertaking in its breadth and embracing all branches of religious, spiritual, and ethical culture.” Well, but, dear sir, you have just said that during the most important period of man’s intellectual development, when the mind is receiving impressions which are likely to last through life, the church ought to stand aside and let the state teach secularism without hindrance. Are you going to cultivate secularism in the young until it becomes firmly rooted, and then fight against it with sermons[478] and essays which your secularized young men will not listen to? How do you expect to impart religious, spiritual, and ethical culture when you have formally renounced your inestimable privilege and your sacred duty as a guide and teacher of children? You propose to wait until your boys have come to man’s estate before you attempt to exercise any influence upon them; and then, when they have grown up with the idea that religious influence ought to be avoided as one avoids pestilence, you wonder and complain that they are indifferent to the church and will not hear you. “The battle with secularism has to be fought out.” Your way of fighting is to abandon the outposts, leave front and rear and flanks unprotected, and throw away your arms.

It was one of the peculiarities of the Congress that whatever error was promulgated in the essays and debates, somewhere in the course of the sessions an antidote was sure to be furnished—this being an illustration, we suppose, of the extreme toleration of opinion to which Bishop Clarke referred as “somewhat singular” in a church “so fixed in its doctrines.” Hence we need not be surprised to find in the second day’s proceedings a refutation of the educational theories propounded during the first. Dr. Wharton made use of the principle of secular schooling as a weapon of offence against the Vatican. But when the delegates had relieved their minds and vindicated their Protestant orthodoxy by giving the poor Pope about as much as he could stagger away with, they turned their attention to their own condition, and one of their first subjects of inquiry was what secular education had done for them. The topic of consideration on the second morning was “The Best Methods of Procuring and Preparing Candidates for the Ministry.” Dr. Schenck of Brooklyn began by stating that the supply of candidates for holy orders was not only inadequate to the needs of the church, but it was falling off—a smaller number offering themselves to-day than six or seven years ago. This, said he, should excite the gravest concern of the church; and nobody seemed disposed to contradict him. Dr. Edward B. Boggs indeed presented some uncomfortable statistics which tell the whole story. In 1871, the number of resident presbyters of the Episcopal Church in the United States was 2,566; in 1874, it was only 2,530. Here, then while the population increases the clergy are diminishing. A great many reasons were suggested for the phenomenon. One thought the question of salary was at the bottom of the evil. Another blamed mothers for not giving their boys a taste for the ministry while they were young. A third believed the trouble was too little prayer and too much quarrelling over candles and ecclesiastical millinery. And more than one hinted in the broadest terms that the ministry was discredited by having too many fools in it.[174] The truth, however, which had been vaguely suggested by some of the earlier speakers, was plumply told by Dr. Edward Sullivan of Chicago. “The church,” said he, “must learn to supply the ranks of the ministry[479] from her own material”—that is to say, by giving the children of the church a Christian education. He lamented the exclusion of the Bible from some of the common schools as a national calamity—not, if we understand him, because he has any overweening faith in the efficacy of Bible-reading per se, but because he knows that when positive religious teaching is banished from the school, the children can hardly fail to grow up without any religious feeling whatever. “Until we establish parochial church schools,” he continued, “we can never solve this problem.” And he might have added that if the teaching of secularism is to be continued for a generation or two longer, the problem will solve itself: there will be no need of preachers when there cease to be congregations.

If such an alarming phenomenon as an actual falling off in the numbers of the clergy were noticed in our own holy church, it would perhaps occur to good Catholics to inquire whether the bishops were doing all that they ought to do for the souls of their people. But the Episcopal Congress at Philadelphia seems to have been vexed with the idea that the bishops were doing entirely too much. Looking at the assemblage from the outside, we cannot pretend to see the under-currents of opinion, or to comprehend the denominational politics; but it was plain both from the tone of the addresses in the session set apart for considering the “Nature and Extent of Episcopal Authority” and from the manner in which some of the remarks of the speakers were received, that a jealousy of episcopal authority prevailed with considerable bitterness. Dr. Vinton of Boston drew a parallel between the government of the church and the government of the state; both were ruled by executives appointed by law and controlled by law, and in each case the chief officer acted by the assumed authority of those he governed. The bishops therefore, we infer, have just as much power as the people choose to give them, and we see no reason why the congregations should not enlarge and restrict that power at pleasure—make a new constitution, if they wish, every year, and treat their prelates as the savage treats his idol, which he sets upon an altar for worship in the morning, and if things go not well with him, kicks into the kennel at night. Indeed, since the foundation of the Anglican Church the episcopate has always been treated with scant ceremony. Dr. Vinton tells us that it is a reflex of the political organization, and as that has varied a great deal in England and America, and is not unlikely in the course of time to vary a great deal more, we must not be surprised to find the system undergoing many strange modifications and holding out the promise of further change indefinitely. In the primitive church, the episcopacy was a despotism. In the Anglican Church, it is “merely an ecclesiastical aristocracy.” In the Protestant Episcopal Church of America, where the exigencies of politics have to be considered, it is—well, that is just what the Congress tried in vain to determine. For one thing, Dr. Vinton and other speakers after him laid great stress upon the fact that its authority was carefully circumscribed by statute, and that the church was a corporation—though whence it derived its charter nobody was good enough to tell us. In truth, we did not find the day’s proceedings edifying. Dr. Vinton declared that an organic evil of the church constitution,[480] “boding more of mischief and sorrow to the body of Christ than any or all of the evils besides that our age makes possible,” was the liability of bishops to grow arrogant of power, to make their authority troublesome, to put on idle pomp, and set themselves “in conspicuous difference from the taste, the traditions, the educated and intelligent convictions which the providence of God has caused to rule in this land.” Dr. Fulton of Indianapolis inveighed with warmth against any bishop who ventured to intrude into another man’s diocese, and remarked that “some bishops were never at home unless they were abroad.” A bishop, continued the doctor, is subject to civil law. He should be tried for violation of the ninth commandment if he wilfully slander a clergyman either in or out of his own diocese. Bishops must not affect infallibility in doctrinal utterances. They must remember that in more than one respect they and their presbyters are equals. A bishop who would be respected must respect the rights of other bishops—not being an episcopal busybody in other men’s sees. Dr. Goodwin of Philadelphia thought that what our Lord meant to have was “a moderate episcopate.” Dr. Washburn of New York believed that even the powers granted to the apostles were not exclusive, and that ever since the apostolic age these powers had been gradually more and more distributed, until now, we should think, they must be so finely divided that no fragment of them is anywhere visible in the Episcopal Church.

Dr. J. V. Lewis convulsed the house with laughter by a speech in which he declared that the bishops had been so “tied hand and foot by conventions and canons that it was wonderful they had time to do anything but find out what they must not do”; and he called upon the church to “cut those bands and let the bishops loose.” We quote from the report of his remarks in the Church Journal: “What will they do? He would tell them what they would do. He had at home in his yard six chickens about half-grown. He had placed among them a turkey big enough to eat any of them up. But they all flew at him. One little fellow pecked him and spurred him savagely. The turkey looked on in perfect astonishment, apparently; but at length he spread out his wings and literally sat down upon him. From that day to this, whenever that turkey stirs, these chickens cannot be kept from following him. And this is just what will happen in the church, if we will only let our bishops loose.” All this was the cause of much innocent hilarity among the brethren; but we fear that it was to Dr. Lewis that the Churchman referred the next week in the following solemn strain: “It is a sad circumstance that the ministry has in it, here and there, a professional joker and cheap story-teller and anecdote-monger, one of the most tedious and least estimable types of foolishness that try Christian endurance and vex religious families. It is to be hoped no such melancholy-moving buffoon will ever propose himself as clown to the Church Congress; and, short of that, will it be wise to confer the award of the heartiest and loudest applause on a sort of comic pleasantry and ‘jesting not convenient’ which, at best, is outdone in its own line in whole columns of daily newspapers? We may smile, because it[481] cannot be helped, but we can surely reserve our plaudits—if they must be given at all—for that species of superiority which manifests a chaste refinement and suits tastes that are intellectual rather than jovial.”

Clearly there was a great deal more in these essays on the limitations of episcopal authority than met the profane eye. Who are the trespassers upon other men’s sheepfolds, and the busybodies, and the slanderers, and the pompous bishops, and the infallible bishops, and the bishops who think themselves better than their presbyters, it is not for us to inquire. Neither perhaps would it be decorous to ask how the ten or twelve bishops in the Congress—none of whom opened their mouths during the debate—enjoyed the session. But there is excellent reason to believe that the presbyters had a very pleasant day, singing the opening hymn in the morning, “Come, gracious Spirit, heavenly dove,” with peculiar unction, and joyously dismissing their right reverend fathers in the afternoon with the verses, “Go forth, ye heralds, in my name.”

If the bishops are in disrepute and the inferior clergy are falling away, it can hardly be necessary to tell us that the church has no real hold upon the people; that follows as a matter of course. Accordingly, the most interesting of the debates were on the best methods of giving vitality to the work of the church—on ministrations to the laboring classes, on free churches and free preaching, on the abuses of the new system, and on the need of something equivalent to the preaching Orders and Congregations of our own church. Of all the papers read at the Congress the only one which was received with what we may fairly call enthusiasm was an essay by Mr. Francis Wells, editor of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, on the “Parochial System and Free Preaching,” at the close of which one of the reverend delegates jumped upon a bench and led the assembly in three cheers. We have seen no report which gives a fair abstract of Mr. Wells’ paper, or even explains what practical suggestions he had to offer, so that it is impossible to understand what it was that moved the feelings of the Congress. But if he drew a faithful picture of the average Episcopal Church of our day he may well have startled his audience. “The chief trouble,” he said, “lies in the spirit of exclusiveness which eyes the fashion of the dress and warns off strangers with a cold stare.” He was quite right in holding that the renting of pews and the expenditure of large sums of money for the adornment of the house of God are not necessarily obstacles to the influence of the church over the masses. Our own experience proves that. What poor and ragged sinner was ever repelled from a Catholic Church by imposing architecture, or gorgeous windows, or the blazing magnificence of lighted altars, or the strains of costly music? The rich have their pews—at least in this country, where it is only by pew-rents that we can meet the necessary expenses of the parish—but the most wretched beggar feels that he is welcome at all times in the splendid temple, and he may kneel there, feasting the senses, if he pleases, as well as refreshing the soul, without fear that his more comfortable neighbor will stare at his humble garments. Whatever the character of our churches, it is always the poor who fill them. It never occurs to a Catholic that the[482] people who pay pew-rents acquire any proprietorship in the house of God, or have any better right there than those who pay nothing. The sermons are never made for the rich, and the Holy Sacrifice is offered for all indiscriminately. But in the Episcopal Church how different it is!

Imagine the feelings of a mechanic who approaches one of the luxurious Fifth-Avenue temples in his patched and stained working trowsers and threadbare coat. Carriages are setting down the haut ton at the door, every lady dressed in the extreme of fashion, every gentleman carefully arrayed by an expensive tailor. A high-priced sexton, with rather more dignity than an average bishop, receives the distinguished arrivals just inside the lobby, and scrutinizes strangers with the air of an expert who has learned by long experience in the highest circles just what kind of company every casual visitor has probably been in the habit of keeping. The interior of the church somehow suggests a Madison-Avenue parlor, furnished in the latest style of imitation antique. The upholstery is a marvel of comfort. The pleasantly subdued light suits the eyes and softens the complexions of Christians who have been up late dancing. A decorous quiet pervades the waiting congregation, broken only by the rustle of five-dollar silks sweeping up the aisles. Such a handsome display of millinery can be seen nowhere else for so little money. What is a working-man to do in such a brilliant gathering as this? He looks timidly at the back seats, and he finds there perhaps two or three old women, parish pensioners, Sunday-school boys, or young men who keep near the door in order to slip out quietly when they are tired of the services, but nobody of his class. The prosperous people all around him listen to the choir, and the reader, and the preacher, with an indescribable air of proprietorship in all of them. The sermon is an elaborate essay addressed to cultivated intellects, not to his common understanding. He goes away with the uncomfortable consciousness that he has been intruding, and feels like a shabby and unkempt person who has strolled by mistake into the stockholders’ row at the Italian Opera, and been turned out by a high-toned box-keeper. “It is indeed hard to imagine,” said The Nation the other day, “anything more likely to make religion seem repelling to a poor man than the sight of one of the gorgeous edifices in which rich Christians nowadays try to make their way to heaven. Working out one’s salvation clothed in the height of the fashion, as a member of a wealthy club, in a building in which the amplest provision is made for the gratification of all the finer senses, must seem to a thoughtful city mechanic, for instance, something in the nature of a burlesque. Not that the building is too good for the lofty purpose to which it is devoted, for nobody ever gets an impression of anything but solemn appropriateness from a great Catholic cathedral, but that it is the property of a close corporation, who, as it might be said, ‘make up a party’ to go to the Throne of Grace, and share the expenses equally, and fix the rate so high that only successful businessmen can join.”

But we heed not enlarge upon the prevalence of this evil. The speakers at the Congress recognized it frankly, and they are undoubtedly aware, though they may not have[483] deemed it prudent to confess, that the case is growing more and more serious all the time. As wealth concentrates in the large cities and habits of luxury increase, the Protestant Episcopal Church is continually becoming colder and colder towards the poor. No remedy that has been proposed holds out the faintest promise of stopping this alarming decline. No remedy proposed even meets the approbation of any considerable number of the Episcopal clergy. One speaker proposes a greater number of free congregations, and is met by the obvious objection that the result would be a still more lamentable separation between rich and poor, with a different class of churches for each set. Another recommends the bishops to send missionary preachers into every parish where there seems to be need of their labor, but does not tell us where the missionaries are to be found, and forgets that almost every parish in the United States would have to be supplied in this way before the evil could be cured. A third advises the rich and poor to meet together, and fraternize and help each other; and a fourth calls for more zeal all around. All these proposals are merely various ways of stating the disease; they do not indicate remedies. Perhaps it may occur to some people that if the Catholic Church and the Episcopal Church correspond so closely in their outward operations, both striving to celebrate divine worship with all possible splendor, both building costly churches and supporting them by pew-rents, both employing highly paid choirs, both keeping up a system of parishes, and if all the while the one gathers people of every rank and condition into her fold, offering health and consolation to all alike, while the other is constantly losing the affections of the multitude and becoming a lifeless creature of forms and fashions, the explanation of the difference after all may be that the Holy Ghost lives and works in the one, while the other is only the device of man.

YULE RAPS.
A CHRISTMAS STORY.

We once saw a picture of a wide, undulating snow-landscape, overspread with a pale rosy tint from the west, and we thought it a fancy picture of an Arctic winter. It hung in a pretty room in a Silesian country-house. The weather was lovely, warm but temperate; it was mid-June, and the woods were full of wild strawberries, and the meadows of forget-me-nots. Yet that landscape was simply Silesia in the winter; the same place, six months later, becomes a wilderness of snow. What shall we say of Mecklenburg, then, so much farther to the north of Silesia? But even there winter brings merriment; and as in these snow-bound countries there is less work to be got through in the winter, their people associate the ideas of pleasure and holiday with the cold rather than the warm weather. In Mecklenburg spring, summer, and autumn mean work—ploughing, sowing, haying, harvesting; winter means fun and frolic, peasants’ dances, farmers’ parties, weddings, christenings, harvest-homes, Christmas, New Year’s, and Epiphany presents, gatherings of friends, fireside talk, innocent games, and general merriment.

In a little village in this province the house of Emanuel Köhler was famous for its jollity. Here were old customs well kept up, yet always with decorum and a regard to higher matters. Emanuel was virtually master of the estate of Stelhagen, the absentee owner of which was a gay young officer who never wrote to his agent, except for a new supply of money. Clever and enlightened an agriculturist as old Köhler was, it was sometimes difficult for him to send the required sums, and yet have enough to farm the estate to his satisfaction. In the language of the country, he was called the inspector, and his house, also according to the local custom, was a kind of informal agricultural school. At the time of our story he had four young men under him—who were in all respects like the apprentices of the good old time—and two of his own relatives, his son and his nephew. His only daughter was busy helping her mother, and learning to be as efficient a housekeeper as the young men to be first-rate farmers; and this nucleus of young society, added to the good Köhler’s hearty joviality and the known good-cheer always provided by Frau Köhler, naturally made the large, cosey, rambling house a pleasant rendezvous for the neighborhood. The Köhler household was a host in itself, yet it always loved to be reinforced on festive occasions by the good people of the village and farms within ten miles round. So also the children, whether poor or pretty well off, were all welcome at old Emanuel’s, and knew the way to the Frau Inspectorin’s pantry as well as they knew the path to the church or the school. All the servant-girls in the neighborhood wanted to get a place in this house, but there was scarcely ever a vacancy, unless one of the[485] dairy-maids or the house-girls married. Frau Köhler and her daughter did all the kitchen work themselves, and the latter, a thoughtful girl, though she was only fifteen, studied books and maps between-whiles. But her studies never interfered with the more necessary knowledge that a girl should have when, as Rika,[175] she has to depend upon herself for everything. In the country, in the Mecklenburg of even a very few years ago, everything was home-made, and a supply of things from the large town twenty or thirty miles off was the event of a life-time. Such things came as wedding-gifts; and though fancy things came every Christmas, even they were carefully and sacredly kept as tokens of that miraculous, strange, bewildering world outside, in which people wore their silk dresses every day, and bought everything they wanted at large shops a few steps from their own houses. Frau Köhler often wondered what other women did who had no farm-house to manage, no spinning, or knitting, or cooking, or dairy-work to do; and when her daughter Rika suggested that they probably read and studied, she shrugged her shoulders and said: “Take care, child; women ought to attend to women’s work. Studying is a man’s business.”

The honest soul was a type of many an old-fashioned German house-mother, of whose wisdom it were well that some of our contemporaries could avail themselves; and when Rika gently reminded her of the story of Martha and Mary, she would energetically reply:

“Very well; but take my word for it, child, there was a woman more blessed than that Mary, and one who was nearer yet to her Lord; and we do not hear of her neglecting her house. I love to think of that house at Nazareth as just a model of household cleanliness and comfort. You know, otherwise, it could not have been a fitting place for Him; for though he chose poverty, he must needs have surrounded himself with spotless purity.”

And Rika, as humble and docile as she was thoughtful, saw in this reverent and practical surmise a proof that it is not learning that comes nearest to the heart of truth, but that clearer and directer knowledge which God gives to “babes and sucklings.”

This particular Christmas there was much preparation for the family festival. The kitchen was in a ferment for a week, and mighty bakings took place; gingerbread and cake were made, and various confectionery-work was done; for Frau Köhler expected a friend of her own early home to come and stay with her this last week of the year. This was the good old priest who had baptized her daughter; for neither mother nor daughter were natives of Mecklenburg, though the latter had grown up there, and had never, since she was six months old, gone beyond the limits of the large estate which her father administered. Frau Köhler was a Bavarian by birth, and had grieved very much when her Mecklenburg husband had taken her to this northern land, where his position and wages were so good as to make it his duty to abide and bring up his family. But the worthy old creature had done a wonderful deal of good since she had been there, and kept up her faith as steadfastly as ever she had at home. Frederika had been her treasure and her comfort; and between the mother’s intense, mediæval firmness[486] of belief, and the child’s naturally deep and thoughtful nature, the little farm-maiden had grown up a rare combination of qualities, and a model for the young Catholic womanhood of our stormy times. The old priest whom Frau Köhler had looked up to before her marriage as her best friend, and whom Rika had been taught to revere from her babyhood, had been very sick, and was obliged to leave his parish for a long holiday and rest. His former parishioner was anxious that he should see Christmas kept in the old-fashioned northern style, more characteristic than the Frenchified southern manners would now allow, even in her remote native village. Civilization carries with it the pick-axe and the rule; and when young girls begin to prefer Manchester prints and French bonnets to homespun and straw hats, most of the old customs slip away from their homes.

In the sturdy Mecklenburg of twenty years ago, even after the temporary stir of 1848, things were pretty much as they had been for centuries, and it was Emanuel’s pride that his household should be, if needful, the last stronghold of the good old usages. He heartily acquiesced in his wife’s invitation to the southern guest, and resolved to have the best Christmas that had been known in the country since he had undertaken the care of the Stelhagen estate. In truth, he lived like a patriarch among his work-people; his laborers and their families were models of prosperity and content, and the children of all the neighborhood wished he were their grandfather. Indeed, he was godfather to half the village babies born during his stay there.

The sleighs of the country were the people’s pride. Some were plain and strong, because their owners were not rich enough to adorn them, but others were quite a curiosity to the visitor from the south. They partook of the same quaintness as the old yellow family coaches that took the farmers to harvest-homes and weddings before the early snows came on. Lumbering, heavy-wheeled vehicles these were, swinging on high like a cradle tied to a couple of saplings in a storm; capacious as the house-mother’s apron-pockets on a baking day; seventy years old at least, barring the numerous patchings and mendings, new lining or new wheel, occasionally vouchsafed to the venerable representative of the family dignity. The sleighs were much gayer and a little less antiquated, because oftener used, and therefore oftener worn out; besides, there were fashions in sleighs even in this remote place—fashions indigenous to the population, each individual of which was capable of some invention when sleighs were in question. On Christmas Eve, long before it grew dark, many of these pretty or curious conveyances clattered up to the farm-house door. Some were laden with children two rows deep, all wrapped in knitted jackets, blankets, boas, etc., and here and there covered with a fur cap or furred hood; for knitting in this neighborhood supplied all with warm winter wraps, even better than woven or machine-made stuffs do nowadays. There were no single sleighs, no tiny, toy-like things made to display the rich toilet of the occupant and the skill of the fast driver by her side; here all were honest family vehicles, full of rosy faces like Christmas apples; hearty men and women who at three-score were almost as young as[487] their grandchildren on their bridal day; and young men and maidens who were not afraid to dance and move briskly in their plain, loose, home-spun and home-made clothes, nor to fall in love with German downrightness and honest, practical intentions. Most of these sleighs were red, picked out with black, or black liberally sprinkled with red; some were yellow and black, some yellow and blue, and in most the robe and cushions were of corresponding colors. Some of these robes had eagles embroidered in coarse patterns and thick wool, while others were of a pattern something like those used for bed-quilts; and some bore unmistakable witness to the thrift of the house-mother, and were skilfully pieced together out of carpet, curtain, blanket, and dress remnants, the whole bordered with some inexpensive fur. One or two sleighs bore a sort of figure-head—the head of a deer, or a fox, or a hawk—carved and let into the curling part of the front; while one party, who were gazed upon with mingled admiration and disapproval, went so far as to trail after them, for three or four feet behind the sleigh, and sweeping up the snow in their wake, a thick scarlet cloth of gorgeous appearance, but no very valuable texture. This was the doing of a young fellow who had lately been reading one or two romances of chivalry, and been much pleased with the “velvet housings of the horses, sweeping the ground as the knight rode to the king’s tournament.” His indulgent old mother and admiring sisters had but faintly remonstrated, and this was the consequence. The horses were not less bedecked than the vehicles. Silver bells hung from their harness and belted their bodies in various places; shining plates of metal and knobs driven into the leather made them as gay as circus-horses; while horse-cloths of variegated pattern were rolled up under the feet of their masters, ready for use whenever they stopped on the road.

Emanuel himself had gone to the nearest town at which a stage-coach stopped, to welcome his wife’s friend and special guest, and entertained him with a flow of agricultural information and warm eulogy of the country through which they were speeding on their way home. He arrived at Stelhagen before the rush of country visitors, and was triumphantly taken through every part of the well-kept farm, while his meal was being prepared by Rika and the maids. But more than all, Frau Köhler, in her delight, actually made him “free” of the sacred, secret chamber where stood the Christbaum, already laden but unlighted, among its attendant tables and dishes. The old man was as innocently charmed as a seven-year-old child; it reminded him so of his own Christmas-tree in days when the simple customs of Germany were still unimpaired, and when it was the fashion to give only really useful things, with due regard to the condition and needs of the recipients.

“But at the feasts to which my people ask me now,” said he, “I see children regaled with a multitude of unwholesome, colored bonbons in boxes that cost quite as much as the contents, and servants given cheap silks or paste jewelry, and the friends or the master and mistress themselves loaded with pretty but useless knick-knacks, gilded toys that cost a great deal and make more show than their use warrants.[488] Times are sadly changed, Thekla, even since you were married.”

“Well, Herr Pfarrer, I have had little chance, and less wish, to see the change; and up here I think we still live as Noah’s sons after they came out of the ark,” said good Frau Köhler, with a broad smile at her own wit. As the day wore on, she and Rika left the Pfarrer (curé) to Emanuel’s care, and again busied themselves about the serious coming festivity. She flew around, as active as a fat sparrow, with a dusting-cloth under her arm, whisking off with nervous hand every speck of dust on the mantel-piece or among the few books which lay conspicuously on the table in the best room; giving her orders to the nimble maids, welcoming the families of guests, and specially petting the children. Emanuel took the men under his protection, and gave them tobacco and pipes, and talked farming to them, while his own young home-squad whispered in corners of the coming tree and supper.

At last Rika came out from the room where the mystery was going on, and, opening the door wide, let a flood of light into the dark apartment beyond. There was a regular blaze. The large tree stood on a low table, and reached nearly up to the ceiling. There were only lights, colored ribbons, and gilded walnuts hung upon it, but it quite satisfied the expectation of the good folk around it. Round the room were tables and stands of all kinds, crowded together, and barely holding all the dishes apportioned to each member of the party. The guests had secretly brought or sent their mutual presents; one family generally taking charge of its neighbor’s gifts, and vice-versa, that none might suspect the nature of their own. The tree, too, was a joint contribution of the several families; all had sent in tapers and nuts, and this it was that made it so full of bright things and necessitated its being so tall.

On the middle table, under the tree itself, were dishes for the Köhler household, each one having a liberal allowance of apples, nuts, and gingerbread. Besides these, there were parcels, securely tied, laid by the dishes, and labelled with the names of their unconscious owners. Köhler was seized upon by his wife and daughter before anyone else was allowed to go forward—for in this old-fashioned neighborhood the head of the house is still considered in the light of an Abraham—and a compact parcel was put into his hands by Rika, while Thekla kissed him with hearty loudness. Next came the guest, whom Rika led to the prettiest china dish, and presented with a small, tempting-looking packet. Leaving him to open it at his leisure, she joined her young friends, and a good-natured scramble now began, each looking for his own name in some familiar handwriting, finding it, and opening the treasure with the eagerness of a child. It would be impossible to describe every present that thus came to view; but though many were pretty and elaborate, none were for mere show. Presently Frau Köhler was seen to take possession of her husband, and, pulling off his coat, made him try on the dressing-gown he had just drawn from his parcel. She turned him round like a doll, and clapped her hands in admiration at the perfect fit; then danced around to the other end of the room, and called out to the maids:

“Lina! Bettchen! it is your[489] turn now; you have not been forgotten. Those are your dishes where the silver dollars are sticking in the apples.” The maids opened their parcels, and each found a bright, soft, warm dress, crimson and black. Then came George, the man who did most of the immediate work round the house, and found a bright red vest with steel buttons in his parcel. Frau Köhler was busy looking at other people’s things, when her husband slipped a neat, long packet on her dish, and, as she turned and saw the addition, she uttered an exclamation of joy. Rika helped her to unfold the stiff, rustling thing, when it turned out to be a black silk dress. Not every housewife in those days had one, and her last was nearly worn out. Then the old priest came forward to show the company his Christmas box; and what do you think it was? There was no doubt as to where it came from. It was a set of missal-markers, and in such taste as was scarcely to be expected in that time and neighborhood. Rika had designed it, and her mother had worked it; but many an anxious debate had there been over it, as the Frau Inspectorin had been at first quite vexed at what she called its plainness. It was composed of five thick gros-grain ribbons, two inches wide and fifteen long. There was a red, a green, a white, a purple, and a black ribbon; and on each was embroidered a motto—on the red and green, in gold; on the white, in red; and on the black and purple, in silver. The letters were German, though the mottoes were in Latin, and each of the five referred to one of these events: our Lord’s birth, death, Resurrection, and Ascension, and the Coming of the Holy Ghost. At the end of each ribbon, instead of fringe or tassels, hung a cross of pure silver, into the ring of which the ribbon was loosely gathered. Every one crowded round this novel Christmas gift, and examined it with an admiration equally gratifying to the giver and the receiver. But Emanuel’s jolly voice soon broke the spell by saying:

“These fine presents are very delightful to receive, no doubt, and the women-folk would not have been happy without some such thing; but we are all mortal, and I have not forgotten that my guest has feet and hands, and needs warmth and comfort as much as we of grosser clay.”

And with this he thrust a large parcel into the Pfarrer’s arms. Every one laughed and helped him to open it; every one was curious to see its contents. They were, indeed, of a most substantial and useful kind: a foot-muff of scarlet cloth, lined and bordered with fur, and a pair of huge sealskin gloves.

Scarcely had the parcel been opened when a hum of measured sound was heard outside, and presently a Christmas carol was distinctly audible. Everyone knew the words, and many joined in the song before the singers became visible. Then the door opened, and a troop of children came in, dressed in warm white furs and woollen wrappings, and carrying tapers and fir-branches in their hands. They sang a second carol, quaint and rustic in its words, but skilfully set to anything but archaic music, and then, in honor of their southern guest, they began the song of the evening, a few stanzas from the “Great Hymn” to the Blessed Virgin, by the Minnesinger, Gottfried of Strasburg, the translation of which, according to Kroeger, runs thus:

“You are not so utterly unknowing of all gentle and learned pursuits as you would have had me believe,” said the Pfarrer to Frau Köhler. “It is not every child in Bavaria that could sing so well this Old-World poem, so graceful in its rhyming and so devout in its allusions. Our old XIIth-century poetry, the most national—i.e., peculiar to our country—is too much superseded by noisy modern rhymes or sentimental ballads copied from foreign models. Have you any unknown scholar among your farmers and agents, who, you told me, made up a hearty but not a learned society here?”

“Well,” said Frau Köhler, “there is the school-master, Heldmann, who is always poring over old useless books, but never can have a good dinner unless his friends send it to him, poor man! He is a bachelor, and cannot afford to have a housekeeper. And then there is one of our young gentlemen, who Köhler says is always in the clouds, and who spends all his spare time with Heldmann, while the other boys spend theirs with their pretty, rosy neighbors. By the way, Heldmann is coming to-night; but he said he could not come till late, as he had some important business which would detain him for an hour or two.”

“You forget our Rika, mother,” said Emanuel, not heeding the last part of his wife’s sentence; “she is as wise as any of them, though she says so little. She knows all the old legends and poetry, and more besides, I warrant.”

“Rika designed that missal-marker,” said the Frau Inspectorin proudly (she had found out, since it had been so admired, that her daughter’s instinct had guided her aright in the design).

But Rika, hearing her name mentioned, had slipped away among the white-wrapped children, and was laying their tapers and fir-branches away, preparatory to giving them cakes and fruit. This was quite a ceremony, and when they were ready Frau Köhler, handing the large dish of nuts to the Pfarrer, begged him to distribute them, while she took charge of the gingerbread and Rika of the apples.

It was funny to see the solemn[491] expectancy with which the children brought out dishes, mugs, pitchers, etc., in which to receive these Christmas gifts. Some of the girls held out their aprons, as more convenient and capacious receptacles than anything else they could lay hands on. One boy brought a large birthday cup, and another a wooden milk-bowl; another a small churn, while a fourth had carried off his father’s peck-measure, and a fifth calmly handed up a corn-sack, which he evidently expected to get filled to the brim. As Frau Köhler came to one of the children, she said:

“Fritz, I saw you in the orchard last autumn stealing our apples. Now, naughty boys must not expect to get apples at Christmas if they take them at other times; so, Rika, don’t give him any. He shall have one piece of gingerbread, though.” A piteous disclaimer met this sentence; but the Pfarrer thrust a double quantity of nuts into the culprit’s basket, and passed on. Then once again Frau Köhler stopped and said; “Johann, didn’t I see you fighting with another boy in the churchyard two weeks ago, and told you that Santa Claus would forget you when he came to fill the stockings on Christmas night? I shall not give you any gingerbread.”

“Franz knows we made it up again,” whined the boy, and Franz, with a roguish look, peeped out from his place in the row and said: “Yes, we did, Frau Inspectorin”; so both got their gingerbread. At last, this distribution being over, the children, laden with their gifts, went home to their own various firesides, not without many thanks to the “stranger within the gates” and his parting reminder, as he showed them the stars:

“Look up at God’s own Christmas-tree, lighted up with thousands of tapers, children, and at the smooth, white snow spread over the fields. That is the white table-cloth which he has spread for the beautiful gifts which spring, and summer, and autumn are going to bring you, all in his own good time.”[176]

Then came another batch of visitors—the old, sick, and infirm people of the village; the spinning-women, the broom-tyers, the wooden bowl and spoon carvers, and the makers of wooden shoes; and some who could no longer work, but had been faithful and industrious in their time. They had something of the old costume on: the men wore blue yarn stockings and stout gray knee-breeches (they had left their top-boots outside; for the snow was deep and soft, and they needed them all the winter and through most of the spring); and the women had large nodding caps and black silk handkerchiefs folded across their bosoms. Each of these old people got a large loaf of plain cake and some good stout flannel; and these things, according to the local etiquette, the inspector himself delivered to them as the representative of his young master. This distribution was an old custom on the Stelhagen estate, and, though the present owner was careless enough in many things, he wished this usage to be always kept up. Even if he had not, it is not likely that as long as Köhler was inspector the old people would not have been able to rely on the customary Christmas gift. After this some bustle occurred, and two or three people went and stationed themselves outside the door.[492] Presently the expectant company within were startled by a loud rap, and the door flew open, a parcel was flung in, and a voice cried out:

This was a pair of slippers for the inspector. No one knew where they came from; no one had sent them. Yule raps are supposed to be magical, impersonal causes of tangible effects; so every one looked innocent and astonished, as became good Mecklenburgers under Christmas circumstances.

“Yule rap!” again, and the door opened a second time; a smoking-cap, embroidered with his initials, was evolved out of a cumbrous packet by one of the young apprentices, and scarcely had he put it on than another thundering knock sounded on the door.

“Yule rap!” was shouted again, and in flew a heavy package. It was a book, with illustrations of travel scenes in the East, and was directed to Rika.

This time it was only a little square envelope, with a ticket referring Frau Köhler to another ticket up in the bureau drawer in her bedroom; but when one of the boys found it, that referred again to another ticket in the cellar; and when another boy brought this to light, it mysteriously referred her to her husband’s pocket. Here, at last, the hidden thing was revealed—an embroidered collar, and a pair of larger cuffs to match. Köhler had no idea what sprite had put it there, so he said.

“Yule rap!” and this time it was for the guest—a black velvet skull-cap, warm and clinging. Then came various things, all heralded by the same warning cry of “Yule rap!” and a knock at the door, generally in George’s strong voice. The two maids got the packages ready, and peeped in at the keyhole to see when it was time to vary the sensation by throwing in another present. Again, a breakfast-bell came rolling in, ringing as it bounded on, with just a few bands of soft stuff and silver paper muffling its sound. Once a large meerschaum pipe was laid gently at the threshold of the door, and one of the apprentices fetched it as carefully. Then a violin was pushed through the half-open door, and the eager face of the one for whom it was intended peeped anxiously over his neighbor’s shoulder, wondering if any one else were the happy destined one, and as much surprised as delighted when he found it was himself. That violin has since been heard in many a large and populous town, and, though its owner did not become as world-known as Paganini or Sivori, he did not love his art less faithfully and exclusively. We cannot enumerate all the gifts which Yule brought round this year; but before the evening was over, a different voice cried out the magic words, “Yule rap!” and the door being slightly opened and quickly closed again, a tiny, white, silky dog stood trembling on the carpet. Rika jumped up and ran to take it in her arms; then pulling open the door, “Herr Heldmann! Herr Heldmann!” she cried. “I know it is you!”

The schoolmaster came forward, his rough face glowing with the cold through which he had just come.

“I promised you a dog, Rika,” he said rather awkwardly, “but they would not let me have it till this very day, and I had no time to go for it but this evening. I kept it under my coat all the time; so it is quite warm. It is only two months old.”

Rika was in ecstasies. She declared this was worth all her Christmas presents, and then rewarded Herr Heldmann by telling him how well the children had done their part, and how delightfully surprised the Pfarrer had been. The two men were soon in a deep conversation on subjects dear and familiar to both, and the company gradually dissolved again into little knots and groups. Many took their leave, as their homes were distant and they did not wish to be too late; but for all an informal supper was laid in the vast kitchen, and by degrees most of the good things on the table were sensibly diminished. The host’s wife and daughter, and the Herr Pfarrer, with half a dozen others and a few children, did not leave the Christmas-tree, whose tapers were constantly attended to and replaced when necessary. Other “Christmas candles” were also lighted—tall columns of yellow wax, made on purpose for this occasion. As the household and its inmates were left to themselves, the children began asking for their accustomed treat—the stories that all children have been fond of since the world began. No land is so rich in the romance of childhood as Germany, both north and south. There everything is personified, and as an English writer lately said, wonderful histories are connected with the fir-trees in the forests, the beloved and venerated Christbaum. “Though it be yet summer, the child sees in fancy the beautiful Weihnachtsbaum, adorned with sparkling things as the Gospel, is adorned with promises and hopes; rich in gifts as the three kings were rich; pointing to heaven as the angel pointed; bright as those very heavens were bright with silver-winged messengers; crowned with gold as the Word was crowned; odorous like the frankincense: sparkling like the star; spreading forth its arms, full of peace and good-will on every side, holding out gifts and promises for all.”

Weihnacht, the blessed, the hallowed, the consecrated night, is the child-paradise of Germany. That land of beautiful family festivals has given Christmas a double significance, and merged into its memories all the graceful, shadowy legends of the dead mythology of the Fatherland. The German child is reared in the midst of fairy-tales, which are only truths translated into child-language. Besides the old standard ones, every neighborhood has its own local tales, every family its own new-born additions or inventions. Every young mother, herself but a step removed from childhood, with all her tender imaginations still stirring, and her child-days lifted into greater beauty because they are but just left behind, makes new stories for her little ones, and finds in every flower a new fairy, in every brook a new voice.

And yet the old tales still charm the little ones, and the yearly coming of King Winter brings the old, worn stories round again. So Emanuel Köhler told the fairy-tale which the children had listened to every Christmas with ever-new delight, about the journey of King Winter from his kingdom at the North Pole, and how he put on his crown with tall spikes of icicles, and wrapped himself in his wide snow-mantle, which to him is as precious and as warm as ermine.

“And now,” said the host, “there is some one here who can tell you a far more beautiful story than mine. Some One, greater than the Winter-King, comes too every year—a snow-Child, the white Christ whom our[494] ancestors, the old Norse and Teutonic warriors, learned to see and adore, where they had only seen and worshipped the God of War and the God of Thunder before. Ask him to tell you a story.”

And the old, white-haired Pfarrer stroked the head of the child nearest to him, as the little one looked shyly up into his face, mutely endorsing Emanuel’s appeal. He told them that they must already know the story of the first Christmas night, and so he would only tell them how the news that the angels told the shepherds on the hills came long centuries after to others as pure-minded as the shepherds, and by means almost as wonderful. He repeated to them from memory the words of an English prose-poet, which he said he had loved ever since he came across them, and which made the picture he best loved to talk on at Christmas-time: “That little infant frame, white as a snow-drop on the lap of winter, light almost as a snow-flake on the chill night air, smooth as the cushioned drift of snow which the wind has lightly strewn outside the walls of Bethlehem, is at this moment holding within itself, as if it were of adamantine rock, the fires of the beatific light.… The little white lily is blooming below the greater one; an offshoot of its stem, and a faithful copy, leaf for leaf, petal for petal, white for white, powdered with the same golden dust, meeting the morning with the same fragrance, which is like no other than their own!”[177]

There was a more marvellous tale than any they had heard about talking-flowers. The Christkind was a flower, and his blessed Mother was a flower—holy lilies in the garden of God, blossoming rods like Aaron’s, fruitful roots, stately cedars, and fruit-giving palm-trees. It was a very happy thing to know and feel all this, as we do; but many millions of men know nothing of it, and centuries ago even our forefathers in these forests knew nothing of it. “But,” he continued, “there was a distant island, where men of our race lived, which did not receive the faith till long after Germany and France and Britain were Christian, and even had cathedrals and cloisters and schools in abundance. It was two hundred years after Charlemagne, who was a Frankish, and therefore a German, sovereign, founded the Palatine schools and conferred with the learned English monk, Alcuin. This distant, pagan island was Iceland. The Norsemen there were a wild, fierce, warlike people, free from any foreign government, and just the kind of heroes that their old mythology represented them as becoming in their future, disembodied life. They had their scalds, or saga-men, their bards, who were both poets and historians, who kept up their spirit by singing wild songs about their ancestors and the battles they had won. They were all pagans, and thought the forgiveness of injuries very mean. Well, one day, the eve of Yule-tide, when it was terribly cold and cheerless, an old scald sat in his rough hut, with a flickering light before him, chanting one of his wild, heathen songs, and his daughter, a beautiful girl, sat at the plank table near him, busy with some woman’s work. During an interval of his song she raised her eyes and said to him:

“‘Father, there must be something beyond all that—something greater and nobler.’

“‘Why, child,’ said the old man, with a kind of impatient wonder, ‘why should you think so? Many things different there may be, just as there are different kinds of men, and different kinds of beasts, and different kinds of plants; some for mastery and some for thraldom; some for the chase, and some for the kitchen or the plough; some for incantations and sacrifices, and some for common food. But anything nobler than our history there could not be; and as for our religion, if there were anything different, or even better, it would not suit our people, and so would be no concern of ours.’

“‘Why ask the question, child? What was good enough for the wise and brave Northmen who fled here that they might be free to fight and worship according to their fancy, is good enough for their descendants.’

“‘But you know yourself, father,’ persisted the maiden, ‘that those whom our poetical traditions call gods were men, heroes and patriots who taught our forefathers various arts, and guided them safely across deserts and through forests in their long, long migration—but still only men. Our chieftains of to-day might as well become gods to our great-grandchildren, if the old leaders have become so to us. Wise as they were, they could not command the frozen seas to open a way for their ships, nor make the sun rise earlier in the long winter, nor compel the cutting ice-wind to cease. If they could not do such things, they must have been very far from gods.’

“‘It is true,’ said the old man, ‘that those great chieftains were, in the dim ages we can scarcely count back to, men like us; but the gods who taught them those very arts took them up to live with them as long as their own heaven might last, and made them equal to themselves. You know even Paradise itself is to come to an end some day.’

“‘So our legends say, father; but that, too, makes it seem as if these gods were only another order of mortal beings, stronger but not better than we are, and hiding from us the true, changeless heaven far above them. For surely that which changes cannot be divine. And then our legends say that evil is to triumph when heaven and earth come to an end. True, they say there will be a renewal of all things after that, and that, no doubt, means that good will be uppermost; very likely all the things spoken of in our Eddas are only signs of other things which we could not understand.’

“The daughter continued these questionings and speculations, the scald answering them as best he could.

“He had listened with evident admiration and approval to her impassioned speech, but he was willing to test her faith in her own womanhood to the utmost. She now seemed wrapt in her own thoughts, but after a short pause said:

“‘It would not be another’s inspiration in which I should believe; it would be a message from Him who has put this belief already into my heart. Some One greater than all has spoken to my inmost heart, and I am ready to believe; but the messenger that is to put it into words and tell me what to do has not come.’

“There was a silence, and the wind and the sea roared without. The old man shaded the flickering[496] light with his hand, and gazed at his daughter, who was sitting with her hands clasped in her lap. He thought that she herself must have received some divine illumination; for the Norsemen believed in the prophetic gifts of some of their women. His own mind, more cultivated than that of the warrior’s, saw through the symbolic character of many of the very myths he sang, and tended vaguely to belief in a higher and hidden circle of things infinite, true, and eternal. But then the northern mind was naturally simple, not prone to metaphysical distinctions, not analytical and subtle, dividing as with the sword that pierceth between soul and spirit; and the old man saw no use in raising theological problems for which he could offer no rational solution, save through the dreams of a young girl. Presently the old man rose, shaking off his meditations, and said:

“‘It is time for me to go to the Yule-night festival, and I shall have a stormy trudge of it to the castle. I must leave you alone here till to-morrow night. But, my child, I know that there is safety for the scald’s daughter wherever she may be; the very sea would not hurt her, and the wildest men would kneel before her; so farewell, and a father’s blessing be upon you.’

“His daughter rose and fetched his cloak and staff, wrapped the former around him, and fastened it over the rude musical instrument that answered the purpose of lyre and harp; but I am not very learned in such things, and cannot tell you exactly what it was. The young girl stood long on the threshold of the hut, shading the light, and looking out after her father into the darkness. The wind was sharp and icy, and blew from the frozen sea. As she held the light, she thought she heard a cry come from the direction of the sea. She lingered before closing the door, although the wind was very chill; for the cry seemed repeated, and she thought it was a human voice calling. A moment’s reflection told her it could not be so; for the whole sea was frozen for miles outward, and no boat or wreck could come so near land. She sat down again to her work, and mused on the conversation she had held with her father. He had studied their national books all his life, and she was not yet twenty. He must know best. Was she likely to be right? She had little experience of the way in which the old system worked; only her own dreams and fancies showed her any other possibility; and yet—she could not shake off the thought: she thirsted for another revelation. The far-off, unknown Godhead must have some means of communicating with men; why should he not speak to her, who so passionately and blindly longed for a message, a command, from him?

“The cry from the sea sounded again. Surely, this time there could be no mistake; the voice was human, and it had come nearer since she had left the door. She took up the light again, and went outside, shouting as loud as she could in return. She was answered, and a strange awe came upon her as she heard this cry. Was it that of a man or a spirit? The latter supposition seemed to her unsophisticated mind quite as likely as the former, but it did not frighten her, as it would most of her countrywomen. She went in again, wrapped a thick fur cloak around her, and, taking another on her arm,[497] sallied out once more with another stronger light. It was barely possible to keep the resinous torch alight, and she looked anxiously out towards the sea, to try and catch some glimpse of a human figure. The cries came again at intervals; but she knew that in the clear air a seemingly near sound might yet be far distant. She had to walk briskly up and down the shore, in the beaten path between walls of snow, to keep herself warm, and occasionally she lifted the flaring torch and waved it as a signal. She could do no more, but she longed to see her unknown visitor, and to go out to meet him on the frozen waters. Was it some wrecked sailor, who had clambered from ice-floe to ice-floe, in the desperate hope of reaching land before he died of cold and hunger, or some unearthly messenger from an invisible world? If he were a mere man, from what coast could he have drifted. No Icelander would be out at this time and place; it was Yule-tide, and there were no wandering boats out among the ice-cliffs and floes. At last she thought she could discern a shadowy form, blacker than the surrounding darkness, but surely no human form; it was like a moving cross, one upright shape, and one laid across near the top, and both dark and compact. But the cry was repeated, though in a more assured and joyful tone, and the maiden waited with bated breath, wondering what this marvel could mean. A field of unbroken ice stretched between her and the advancing figure, which now hastened its steps, and came on like a swift-sailing bird, cleaving the darkness. She thought she could distinguish a human face above the junction of the two arms of the cross, and she held up the light, still uncertain what kind of visitant this approaching form might be. At last it flashed upon her that it was a man bearing a child. But why so rigid? Why did he not hug him close to his bosom to keep him warm, to keep him alive? Was the child dead? And a shuddering awe came upon her, as she thought of its dead white face upturned to heaven, and of the faithful man who had not forsaken it, or left it to the seals and wolves on the ice, or buried it in the chill waters beneath the ice-floes. What a cold it must have struck to the heart of the man carrying it; how his hands must be well-nigh frozen in supporting this strange burden!

“She hardly knew whether she was still imagining what might be, or witnessing real movements, when the figure came straight up to her, and, stooping, laid the child at her feet. She lowered the torch, and, as the glare fell on the little face, she saw that it was no breathing one; the man had sunk down beside it, hardly able to stir, now the supreme effort was over and his end was accomplished. She dropped the cloak she held over the little body, and caught up a handful of snow, wherewith she energetically rubbed the face and hands of the stranger, then half dragged, half supported him to the door of the hut. He had only spoken once, just as he dropped at her feet, but she did not understand him: he spoke in a foreign tongue. Once more she went out and brought in the stiffened, frozen body of the child, which she laid on a fur robe just outside the hut; for it was warm within the small, confined dwelling. It was an hour before the stranger’s eye told her that her simple, quick remedies had succeeded. He was not very tall, but[498] immensely strong and powerful, and there was a fire in his dark gray eye that gave the clew to his strange, weird pilgrimage over the ice-floes. His hair was dark brown, with a reddish tinge, but already mixed with a few gray streaks; it had been shorn close to his head some time since, as appeared from its irregular growth at present. Beneath his cloak he wore a long black robe, with a leathern girdle round the waist. The child was very beautiful, even in death; his eyes were closed, but his black, curling hair hung round his neck, and the lips had a sweet though somewhat proud outline. The scald’s daughter set some simple food before her silent guest, and made him a sign to eat. He was evidently very hungry, but before he began he moved his lips and made the sign of the cross on his forehead, lips, and breast. She asked him in her own language what that ceremony meant, not hoping to make him understand her speech, but trusting to her inquiring looks for some explanatory sign that she might interpret as best she could to herself. To her surprise, he answered in a few, slow, labored words, not in Icelandic to be sure, but in some dialect akin to it; for she could make out the meaning. It was, in fact, the Norse dialect that was spoken in the Orkney Islands, but she did not know that. As he spoke, her guest pointed upwards, and she knew that he referred to God. A great longing came into her heart, and she asked again if his God were the same the Icelanders worshipped. He shook his head, and she eagerly questioned farther, but grew so voluble that he could not follow her, and the conversation ceased. Then the stranger rose and went out to the little corpse, which he addressed in impassioned terms in his own language, making over it the same sign that had drawn the maiden’s attention before. He then described to her—mostly in pantomime, and with a few Norse words to help him on, and a few slowly-pronounced questions on her part—how the boy and he had been in a boat that was wrecked many days’ journey from their own country, and how he had carried him and fed him for three or four days, and then seen him die in his arms. The boy was the only son of a great chief, and he was taking him to his uncle in the North of Scotland. His own country was south of Scotland, a large island like Iceland, but green and beautiful, and there was no ice there.

“The girl made him understand that she was alone for a day or two, but when her father came back he would help him. He evidently understood her better than she did him.

“The next morning, when she again set food before him, she imitated his sign of the cross, and said she wished to believe in the true God; and if his God were the true one, she would believe in him. She looked so earnest and anxious that he again began to try to explain; but the few words he could command, though they sufficed to hint at his worldly adventures, and made clear to her that he had been wrecked, were scarcely adequate to tell her of the new religion she longed to understand.

“But at noon that day another guest and traveller passed by the scald’s dwelling. He was hurrying to the same castle where the girl’s father had gone in his capacity of minstrel, but a violent snow-storm[499] had come on that morning, and he had lost his way. He stopped a moment to refresh himself, and noticed the stranger. He was himself known as a great traveller, and the figure in the coarse black robe seemed not unfamiliar to him. He addressed the stranger in the latter’s language, guessing him at once to be an Irish monk. He said he had seen such men in the Scottish islands, where he had been storm-driven with his ship two years ago, and he had picked up a little of their speech. When the maiden discovered that in this stray guest she had found an interpreter, she pressed him, implored him, almost commanded him, to stay.

“‘I must ask him the questions my father could not solve yesterday,’ she said; ‘and my father’s friend will not refuse to speak in my name, for I believe that the unknown God has answered my prayer in sending this holy man over the sea to my very feet.’ And she told him how the stranger had come to her, out of the darkness, in the shape of a cross—the same sign he made to propitiate his God.

“‘Ask him to tell us what he believes,’ she said impetuously; and the interpreter, compelled by some instinct that he could not resist, began his office willingly.

“‘Tell him,’ she said, ‘that yesterday, before he came, I was all day thinking that the high, true, unknown God had a message for me, and a truer faith to teach me, because he had put into my heart a longing for something higher than what our books and songs have taught us. And tell him that I believe God sent him in answer to my doubts and prayers.’

“‘The traveller faithfully translated all this. The monk’s face glowed as he replied, in his own language, which he used with the grace and skill of a poet:

“‘Tell the maiden that she is right; the true God did send me, and now I know why such things happened to me; why I was wrecked with my lord’s only son, a precious freight, a sacred deposit, which the Lord of lords has now taken upon himself to account for to the earthly father, bereaved of his one hope. But God sent me here because to this pure-hearted virgin I was to explain the faith he had already put into her heart. It is not I who bring her the true faith, but God himself who has spoken to her and inclined her to believe; me he has sent to put this message into practical form. Tell her that this is the birthday of the Lord, and that a thousand years ago, almost at the same hour when I set my dead burden at her feet, a living Child, God’s own Child, lay at the feet of a pure Virgin in a little village far away in the land of the rising sun. And as this maiden’s torch which I saw over the wild, frozen sea, and followed, was an emblem of the faith that dwelt already in her heart, so, too, a marvellous star led three wise men, the scalds of the East, to where this Child lay, and the star was the emblem of their firm faith, which led them to cross rivers and deserts to reach the Child. And tell her that the way in which this wonderful birth was celebrated was by a song which held all the essence of truth in it: “Glory to God on high, and on earth peace to men of good-will.”’

“All this the interpreter told the maiden, and both marvelled at it. The stranger told them more and more of that wonderful tale, so familiar to us, but which once sounded to our warlike forefathers like[500] the foolishness of babes and sucklings, or at most like some Eastern myth good enough for philosophers to wrangle over, but unfit for sturdy men of the forest. To the Icelandic maiden it seemed but the fulfilment of her own dreams; and as she listened to the story of the Child, grown to be a wise but obedient Boy, and then a wandering, suffering Man, her soul seemed to drink in the hidden grandeur of the relation, to pierce beyond the human stumbling-blocks which confronted the wise and learned of other lands, and go at once to the heart of the great mystery of love, personified in the Man-God. All the rest seemed to her to be the fitting garment of the central mystery, the crown of leaves growing from the fruitful trunk of this one doctrine. All day long the three sat together, the two Icelanders hanging on the words of the stranger; and so the scald found them on his return. He, too, wanted to know the news which the monk had brought; for he said he had always believed that behind their national songs and hymns lay something greater, but perhaps not expedient for Norsemen to know. He shook his head sadly when he learned the monk’s precepts of love, peace, mercy, and forgiveness, and said he feared his countrymen would not understand that, but for his part it was not uncongenial to him. As the weather was such that no vessel could put to sea before the ice broke up, he constrained the monk to stay the rest of the winter with him, and in the spring promised to go over with him to the nearest Scottish coast, and carry the body of his little charge to the uncle to whom he had been on his way when he was wrecked.

“Before the New Year began, the monk baptized the first Icelandic convert, the daughter of the scald, and gave her the name of the Mother of the Babe of Bethlehem, Mary. Many others heard of the new religion before he left, but that does not belong to my story. The new convert and her father accompanied him to Scotland, and were present at the burial of the Irish chieftain’s son at the castle of his Scottish uncle. The latter’s son married the Norse maiden, but she never ceased to lament that it had not been given to her to convert many of her own countrymen, or at least shed her blood for her new faith. All her life long she helped to send missionaries to Iceland; and when her son grew up to manhood, the palm she coveted was awarded to him, for he went to his mother’s native country, founded a monastery there, labored among the people, converted many, and taught reading and the arts of peace as well as the faith to his pupils; became abbot of the monastery, and was finally martyred on the steps of the altar by a horde of savage heathen Norsemen.

“This is the best Christmas story I know, children,” concluded the Herr Pfarrer; “and you, Rika, I can wish you no better model than the fair maiden of Iceland.”

It was nearly midnight when the old priest finished his tale, and Frau Köhler, rising, and thanking him cordially for this unwonted addition to ordinary Christmas stories, led him to a door which had been locked till now. It opened into a room decked as a chapel, with an altar at the end, which was now decorated with evergreens. A few chairs and benches were ranged before it, and on a table at the side was everything in readiness for saying Mass.

“It is long since I have heard a midnight Mass,” said the good hostess, growing suddenly grave and reverential in her manner, “and my Rika never has; and you know, Herr Pfarrer, I told you I had a greater surprise in store for you yet, after all the local customs in which you were so much interested.”

So the beautiful Midnight Mass was said in the Mecklenburg inspector’s farm-house, and a more impressive one Frau Köhler had never heard in any southern cathedral; for though there was no music and no pomp, there brooded over the little congregation a spirit of reverence and peace, which comes in full perfection only through a deep silence. The hostess and her daughter received Communion together, and the attentive household could not help thinking of the beautiful Icelandic convert when she came back from the altar, her hands folded over her breast, and her long, fair hair plaited in two plain, thick tresses.

Herr Heldmann had stayed too, and from that day he never ceased his study of theological problems and his correspondence with the Herr Pfarrer, till he became a Catholic, and was married to Rika in this same little chapel-room a year later by the same kind old priest. One of the young apprentices of Emanuel Köhler had been his secret rival; but notwithstanding that Heldmann was ungainly, shy, and twice her age, Rika decidedly thought that she had the best of the bargain.

CHRISTMAS CHIMES.

ANGLICANS, OLD CATHOLICS, AND THE CONFERENCE AT BONN.

Under the title of Anglicanism, Old Catholicism, and the Union of the Christian Episcopal Churches, an essay has recently been published by the Rev. Father Tondini,[178] Barnabite, whose intimate acquaintance with the respective languages of England, Germany, and Russia, as well as the religious history and literature of those countries, peculiarly qualifies him for dealing with the questions just now exciting so much attention in Western Europe. We shall, therefore, not only make his treatise, which merits more than ordinary notice, the basis of the present article, but shall reproduce such portions of it as are particularly suggestive at the present time, and conclude with some account of the Conference at Bonn and the considerations it suggests.

In the Introduction to his treatise the reverend author gives the reasons which called it forth, the last being the promise made on the tomb of a friend [179] to leave nothing untried which might promote the return of the Greco-Russian Church to Catholic unity; an unexpected opportunity being given for fulfilling this promise by the reference made more than once by Mr. Gladstone, in his recent publications, to the organization of the Eastern as contrasted with that of the Catholic Church. Moreover, the sympathy displayed by Mr. Gladstone for the Old Catholics and their Conference at Bonn serves to complete the argument.

There are two passages in Mr. Gladstone’s Vaticanism with which Father Tondini has more especially dealt. One is the following:

“Of these early provisions for a balance of church power, and for securing the laity against sacerdotal domination, the rigid conservatism of the Eastern Church presents us, even down to the present day, with an authentic and living record.”[180]

These valuable “provisions” are set forth at length in the second edition of a former work by Father Tondini, The Pope of Rome and the Popes of the Oriental Church.[181] In a special preface he there says: “There is much to be learned from them, especially if we take into consideration their recent date, and the ecclesiastical canons of which the Eastern Church has not been indeed a rigid conservator.”

In the quotations there given at length from the original documents, we find abundant evidence of the manner in which the ancient canons have been set aside, wherever convenient to the czar, for his own regulations.

“The ancient principles of popular election and control, for which room was found in the Apostolic Church under its inspired teachers, and which still subsist in the Christian East.”[182]

This, as we shall see, is disposed of in the third chapter of the present essay, into which has been collected trustworthy information as to the non-popular mode of election of bishops resorted to in the Oriental Orthodox Church.[183]

Towards the close of the Introduction the writer remarks that if the statements made by Mr. Gladstone respecting the Catholic Church were true, she could not be the true church of our Lord, and, if not, he asks, where then is the true church to be found? The Oriental Church could not solve the question, because she is in contradiction to the doctrine contained in her own liturgy,[184] and also for other reasons, to which for some years past he has been directing public attention.[185] There remain to be considered the Anglican Establishment—this being the church to which belongs the writer who accuses the Catholic Church of having changed in faith, and deprived her children of their moral and mental freedom—and the newest sect of all, namely, the so-called Old Catholics, owing to the same writer’s admiration of those who figure in its ranks.

Reason, so loudly appealed to by Mr. Gladstone, has been strictly adhered to by Father Tondini in his careful examination of the credentials of the two latter bodies, and we will give, in as concise a form as may be consistent with clearness, the result of his inquiry. He especially addresses those who admit the existence of a visible Church of Christ, and still more particularly those who, rather than reconcile themselves to the Catholic Church, say that neither the Roman Catholic Church, nor the Anglican Establishment, nor the Old-Catholic Society, but the Oriental Orthodox Church, is the true visible church of Christ.

The claims of the Anglican[504] Church are first examined, her vitality being an argument that we are in presence of an institution adhered to, at least by a large portion of her members, with conviction and devotedness, as a valuable medium between unbelief and superstition, worldliness and sanctity; and of a state church as solidly framed as human genius could devise.

“Bodies,” says Mr. Gladstone, “are usually held to be bound by the evidence of their own selected and typical witnesses.”[186] Now, the selected and typical witnesses of the Church of England are the sovereign, who is “Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church in her Dominions,” and the episcopate. If the whole clergy is consulted, the evidence becomes as undeniable as it can possibly be.

This perfect evidence is found in the Thirty-nine Articles, which are thus headed: “Articles agreed upon by the archbishops and bishops of both provinces, and the whole clergy, assembled in convocation holden at London in the year 1562, for the avoiding of diversities of opinions,” etc., etc.

The Ratification is to the same effect, with the addition of the assent and consent of the queen (Elizabeth), after their final rehearsal in the General Convocation of bishops and clergy in 1571. They are, moreover, reprinted in the Book of Common Prayer, with the Declaration of King James I. affixed, and which runs as follows:

“Being by God’s ordinance, according to our just title, Defender of the Faith and supreme governor of the church in these our dominions, … we will that all curious search be laid aside, and these disputes shut up in God’s promises as they be generally set forth in the Holy Scriptures, and the general meaning of the Articles of the Church of England according to them; and that no man hereafter shall either print or preach to draw the article aside any way, but shall submit to it in the plain and full meaning thereof, and … shall take it in the literal and grammatical sense.”

“Following this last admonition, and bearing in mind that the Church of England considers herself to be a branch of the universal church of Christ, we open the Book of Common Prayer, and turn to those among the Articles which treat of the universal church, that we may see how, without renouncing our Italian nationality—which to us is very dear—we could belong to the universal church of Christ. We see an article headed ‘Of the Authority of General Councils,’ and, on reading it, find to our astonishment the definition, not indeed of the infallibility of the Pope, but of the fallibility, without any exception, of the universal church of Christ! It is: Article XXI.—‘General Councils may not be called together without the commandment and will of princes. And when they be gathered together (forasmuch as they be an assembly of men, whereof all be not governed with the spirit and word of God), they may err, and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining unto God. Wherefore things ordained by them as necessary to salvation have neither strength nor authority, unless it may be declared that they be taken out of Holy Scripture.’”

“Thus” (we give Father Tondini’s words) “the Church of England has defined, in two plenary national councils, that the universal[505] church of Christ, even when assembled in a general council, may err, and ordain, as necessary to salvation, things which have neither strength nor authority; and a king, ‘Defender of the Faith,’ has declared that this is the true doctrine of the Church of England, agreeable to God’s word, and required all his loving subjects to submit to this article ‘in the plain and full meaning thereof,’ and to take it ‘in the literal and grammatical sense’!

“We can hardly trust our own eyes. Again: What does the word ‘declare’ mean in the concluding words of the article? This word may convey two senses—that of proving and of making a declaration.

“In the first case, who is to offer the proofs that ‘the thing ordained as necessary to salvation’ is taken out of Holy Scripture? This the Church of England has forgotten to tell us!… Moreover, an authority whose decrees, in order to have a binding power, must be proved to be taken out of Holy Scripture, is by that very fact subordinate to those who are called to examine the proofs.[187] The chief authorities of the church assembled in a general council are thus rendered as inferior to the faithful as the claimant is inferior to the judge who is about to pronounce sentence upon his claims. The teaching and governing body of the church is consequently no more than an assembly commissioned to frame, ‘as necessary to salvation,’ laws to be submitted to the approbation of the faithful!

Again, if the word “declare” must be taken in the sense of a declaration, Father Tondini asks: “But by whom is such a declaration to be made? Assuredly not by the council itself—‘judice in causâ propriâ.’ An authority liable to err, ‘even in things pertaining unto God,’ and to ordain ‘as necessary to salvation’ things which have ‘neither strength nor authority,’ is liable also to mistake the sense of Holy Scripture. To seek such a declaration from this fallible authority would be like begging the question.

“The declaration must, then, be made by some authority external to the general council. But the ‘archbishops, bishops, and the whole clergy of England’ have omitted to inform the faithful where such an authority is to be found. Moreover, since a general council—that is, the ‘selected and typical witnesses’ of the whole Church of Christ—may err (according to Article XXI.), it necessarily follows that portions of the whole church of Christ may err also. In fact, this natural consequence is explicitly stated in Article XIX. The zeal displayed by the Church of England in asserting the fallibility, both of the whole church of Christ and of portions of that church, may be said to rival that of the most fervent advocates of the infallibility of the Pope.”

This XIXth Article modestly asserts that, “as the Churches of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch have[506] erred, so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of ceremonies, but also in matters of faith.”

Whereupon “a legitimate doubt arises whether the Church of England, too, might not have erred in issuing the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. This doubt is very material. These Articles ordain several things as ‘necessary to salvation.’ Are they, or are they not, ‘taken out of Holy Scripture’? Have they, or have they not, ‘strength and authority’?”

Shortly after their promulgation, we have it upon the authority of King James I. himself that this doubt gave rise to “disputations, altercations, and questions such as may nourish faction both in the church and commonwealth,” and his majesty adds that “therefore, upon mature deliberation,” etc., he “thought fit” to make the declaration following:

“That the Articles of the Church of England … do contain the true doctrine of the Church of England, agreeable to God’s Word, which WE do therefore ratify and confirm.”

“May we” (with Father Tondini) “be allowed respectfully to ask whether King James I. was infallible?”

And if so, why should Catholics be charged with having forfeited their mental and moral freedom, etc., etc., because they admit the infallibility of the Pope, which results, by the law of development, from several passages of Holy Scripture; whereas, on the contrary, no “brain power” will ever be able to discover a single word in Holy Scripture which can, by the most vigorous process of development, bud forth into the infallibility of a King of England?

On the other hand, if King James were not infallible, by what right could he then prohibit and will in matters of faith for his subjects?

His only right was this: that the Church of England had been made a powerful instrumentum regni in the hands of her sovereigns,[188] just as the Church of Russia is in the hands of her czars.

In Article XVIII. it is declared that “the body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten in the [Lord’s] Supper only after an heavenly and spiritual manner”; and again, at the end of the “Order of the Ministration of the Holy Communion,” that “the natural body and blood of our Saviour Christ are in heaven, and not here.” How can these declarations be made to agree with the following, which is taught in the Little Catechism?—“The body and blood of Christ are verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful in the Lord’s Supper.”

Again, in Article XI. we find: “That we are justified by faith only is a most wholesome doctrine, and very full of comfort”; whereas in the order for the visitation of the sick we read as follows:

“Here shall the sick person be moved to make a special confession of his sins, if he feel his conscience troubled with any weighty matter. After which confession the priest shall absolve him (if he humbly and heartily desire it) after this sort,” etc., etc.

“But,” asks Father Tondini, “by what strange metamorphosis can the above-quoted doctrine of justification by faith only, declared to be ‘most wholesome and very full of comfort’ while we are in good health, cease to possess the power of comforting the conscience of a sick person? And how can confession, which through life is to be considered by Anglicans as ‘grown of the corrupt following of the apostles’ (see Article XXV.), become suddenly so transfigured by the approach of death as to obtain the power of relieving a conscience ‘troubled with any weighty matter’?”

Although it may not be matter of much surprise that a church which has so carefully defined her own fallibility should have one doctrine for her children in their days of health and vigor, and another for the time of their sickness and death, still it does surprise us that a man of education like Mr. Gladstone should be so unconscious of his own extraordinary inconsistency in appealing—as he does throughout his attacks against Catholics and the Catholic Church—to “mental and moral freedom,” “logic,” “consistency of mind,” “manliness of thought,” etc., etc.

Already arise from all sides echoes of the question singularly enough asked by Mr. Gladstone himself: “Is the Church of England worth preserving?”[189]

“The Church of England,” said Laud, “is Protestant.” And Mr. Gladstone, true to “the church of his birth and his country,” protests, like her, against the church which made his country a Christian nation. The Ritualists, the latest sect within her, still boast that they “help to keep people from the Church of Rome,” and reject the imputation of sympathy with her as an insupportable calumny.[190] “They will give communion in Westminster Abbey to an Unitarian, flatter Jansenists and Monophysites, remain in communion with bishops whom they themselves proclaim to be heretics; but one thing they will not do—tolerate the creed of the church to which they owe every fragment and crumb of truth that remains to them.” “Take the great Anglian divines,” writes Mr. Marshall: “Bull scorned and preached against the Catholic Church; Barrow wrote a book against it; Sandys called the Vicar of Christ ‘that triple-crowned thief and murderer’; Hooker sent for a dissenter on his death-bed;[508] Morton, Bramhall, Andrews, and the rest avowed the opinion that the Protestant sects of the Continent were as true churches as their own. Episcopal ordination, as the late Mr. J. Keble confessed, was not made a condition for holding Anglican preferment until the latter half of the XVIIth century; and it was then adopted as a weapon against the growing power of the dissenters. Then Anglicans who had always argued as Protestants against the church began to argue as Catholics against dissent.”

At the present time, however, the English episcopate seems veering round again to the Protestant quarter, against the pseudo-Catholic innovations of a portion of the clergy. The Church Herald, which, up to the time when it ceased to exist, a few weeks ago, had been protesting for many months previously, with good reason, against the implacable opposition offered by the Anglican bishops to the so-called “Catholic revival,” gravely told its readers, while asserting once more that “no one trusts the bishops,” and that “of influence they have and can have next to none,” nevertheless that “their claims as Catholic bishops were never so firmly established.” (!) Certainly Anglican logic is peculiar. Their bishops were never more vehemently opposed to the Catholic faith; but no matter, “never were they more truly Catholic.” (!)

“I have very reluctantly,” says Dr. Lee (as reported in the John Bull), “come to a conclusion which makes me melancholy—that the passing of the Public Worship Bill has to all intents and purposes sealed the fate of the Church of England.” Its end, he thinks, is very near, because no church can last unless it be a true portion of the one family of God—not a mere human sect, taking its variable opinion from the civil government, and its practice from a parliamentary officer without the faintest shadow of spiritual authority. “The point that gravely perplexes me,” he writes, “with regard to the new law, is that our bishops, one and all, have, with their eyes open and deliberately, renounced their spiritual jurisdiction, which, for both provinces and every diocese, is placed in the hands of Lord Penzance, ex-judge of the Divorce Court.” For which reason certain Ritualist papers lament it as “strange and sad” that Dr. Lee should say of the bishops and their bill exactly the same after their victory as they themselves had said before it. These papers, after the example of some learned Anglican professors, etc., are ready enough beforehand to threaten, in the event of such and such a decision, to “reconsider their position.” The decision is made; they then discover that, after all, it is not so very serious, and compose themselves, for the third, or fourth, or fifth time, just where they were before.

It is stated that the first case under the Public Worship Regulations Act is now being brought before Lord Penzance. It is a suit against the Rev. J. C. Ridsdale, incumbent of S. Peter’s, Folkestone. According to the new law, three inhabitants made a representation to the Archbishop of Canterbury as to the manner in which the services were conducted at S. Peter’s. A copy of the representation was forwarded to Mr. Ridsdale, and, no agreement to abide by the decision of the archbishop having been made, the proceedings will be determined by the judge, from whom there is an ultimate appeal to her[509] Majesty in council. There are, it is said, three cases pending under the new law; and fresh proceedings are about to be commenced against the clergy of S. Alban’s, Holborn. The bill bids fair to be as one-sided in its application as it avowedly was in its intention. “The Puritan triumph in the XVIIth century,” said the Bishop of London, “would not be more disastrous than a pseudo-Catholic triumph now,” and the rest of the episcopal bench are evidently of the same mind.

Nor can it be matter of much surprise that such repression should be exercised against men, many of them truly earnest and self-denying, who are the means of reviving a certain amount of Catholic doctrine as well as practice (however illegal) in their communion, when Dr. Lee is able to write as follows to an episcopal correspondent: “The Catholic faith, Archbishop Tait, in the presence of his suffragans, frankly declared that neither he nor they believed, and his grace—to give him all credit—has done his worst to get rid of it.”

Here again can we wonder at the result, even to her highest dignitaries, of the uncertain teaching of a church which, from its very beginning, was intended to be a compromise?

And, again, how can a church which is essentially a compromise be expected to sympathize with that unchanging church which is “the pillar and ground of the truth”?

II.

To return to Father Tondini’s essay. We come now to consider the newest among the sects, the so-called Old Catholics, who, after the manner of many other schismatics, appropriate the name of “Catholic” with an affix of their own, which is a proof that theirs is a base metal, unworthy of the “image and superscription of the King” or his appointed vicegerent.

Mr. Gladstone’s judgment of these people is thus expressed: “When the cup of endurance,” he says, “which had so long been filling, began, with the Council of the Vatican in 1870, to overflow, the most famous and learned living theologian of the Roman communion, Dr. von Döllinger, long the foremost champion of his church, refused compliance, and submitted, with his temper undisturbed and his freedom unimpaired, to the extreme and most painful penalty of excommunication. With him many of the most learned and respected theologians of the Roman communion in Germany underwent the same sentence. The very few who elsewhere (I do not speak of Switzerland) suffered in like manner deserve an admiration rising in proportion to their fewness.

“It seems as though Germany, from which Luther blew the mighty trumpet that even now echoes through the land, still retained her primacy in the domain of conscience, still supplied the centuria prærogativa of the great comitia of the world.”[191]

After giving this quotation, Father Tondini, in the exercise of his “mental freedom,” proceeds to examine whether Old Catholics really deserve this highly laudatory and enthusiastic passage, and in what their merit consists.

Their merit consists “in having rebelled against the church to which they previously belonged, on the ground that, in their conviction, she had changed her faith.

“Not one single bishop, not one[510] out of the teaching body of the church, has expressed the same conviction. Old Catholics are, then, a mere handful … protesting against the Pope and the whole episcopate, preferring their own private judgment to that of the whole teaching body of the Catholic Church, and fully decided to do everything in their power to bring about the triumph of their private personal judgment. Their first act was to raise a schism in the church. They had openly and freely separated themselves from her long before the sentence of excommunication was notified to them. They then became the occasion of a severe persecution against their former fellow-Catholics; and now, whilst the persecution is raging, and Old Catholics, supported by governments and the press, have suffered neither in person nor property, nor in their individual liberty, we are called upon to bestow upon those who suffered ‘in like manner’ an admiration rising in proportion to their fewness!”[192]

But why is this? and what is the Expostulation itself but a cry of alarm to prevent British Catholics from rebelling against the queen? Why, then, is the rebellion of some private individuals to be extolled in terms like these? Or if, indeed, strong private religious convictions (taking it for granted that the Old Catholics have such) make it praiseworthy to rebel against the church, why should not strong private political convictions make it equally praiseworthy to rebel against the state? The field of similar applications is fearfully wide, and many a parental admonition to an indolent or disobedient child might be met by the young rebel in Mr. Gladstone’s words, that “with temper undisturbed, with freedom unimpaired,” he had no intention to do as he was bid.

The first official document of the Old Catholics is the “Declaration” of Dr. von Döllinger and his adherents, dated Munich, June, 1871,[193] and which bears the signatures of Dr. von Döllinger, sixteen professors or doctors, seven magistrates, three private gentlemen, two manufacturers, one “Maître royal des cérémonies,” and one “Intendant royal de musique au théâtre de cour”—thirty-one signatures in all, to which was added later that of the unhappy Loyson.

The second document is a French manifesto or appeal, “Aux fidèles de l’Ancienne Eglise Catholique,” signed “E. Michaud, Docteur en Théologie,” dated 1872, and widely circulated in France, with a request that every reader will help to make it known and gain as many additional adherents as possible.

The style of both documents is peculiar. They alike belong to those literary productions which betray an almost feverish excitement of mind. A small number of persons, till lately belonging to the Catholic Church, declare themselves “determined” to do their utmost towards bringing about “the reform of ecclesiastical affairs, so long desired and henceforth so inevitable, in the organization as well as in the life of the church.” In fact, the[511] authors of both these documents show a faith in their own infallibility, both doctrinal and practical, at least as strong as their conviction of the fallibility of the Pope. They are peculiarly unfortunate in their choice of the fathers they quote, as well as in their appeal to the authority of S. Paul. Their style is certainly wholly unlike that of this great apostle, who, with so much earnestness and humility, begs the prayers of the faithful, while the necessity of prayer for such an undertaking as that which the Old Catholics call the “regeneration of the church” is not even once alluded to in their manifestoes.

There is another consideration which presents itself. Every practical man is careful to ascertain the competency, in any particular subject, of those who give him their advice upon it. A sick man would not consult a lawyer for his cure, nor an aggrieved man seek legal advice of his baker or shoemaker. The distinguished magistrates who signed the German Declaration must be supposed to have done so, not in consequence of a clear and detailed knowledge of the grounds of the assertions it contained, but in consequence of their confidence in Dr. von Döllinger, which led them to adopt his views. In the same way must be explained the adhesions given by the respectable manufacturers, “Maître royal des cérémonies,” and “Intendant royal de musique au théâtre de cour”; for though these pursuits need not be in themselves an obstacle to a man being well acquainted with religious matters, still they are an undeniable argument against his having made it the chief object of his studies.

“Now,” continues Father Tondini, “the charges brought in the present case against the Catholic Church are so heavy, and the mere probability of their being founded on truth of such vital importance to the whole Christian world, … that to require something more than the ordinary amount of theological science which is in general to be found in men involved in worldly affairs of the most distracting kind, is only acting in accordance with the most ordinary laws of prudence. All this will become evident if we only suppose that the ‘Declaration’ had appeared without the signatures of Dr. von Döllinger and the above-mentioned professors.” In looking over the latter we find that none of them can lay any claim to the same scientific authority and repute as that which he enjoys; and the same remark applies to all who have subsequently joined the Old Catholics.

With regard to Dr. von Döllinger himself, he has till now, if we are rightly informed, abstained from joining his fellow-subscribers to the German “Declaration” in their submission to Mgr. Reinkens, the Old-Catholic Bishop of Germany. “Thus the chief promoter of the opposition to the Vatican Council stands apart, and we should be grateful to any one who might tell us to what church he belongs and whom he recognizes as his legitimate bishop. We cannot suppose that he whom Mr. Gladstone calls ‘the most famous and learned theologian of the Roman communion’ has the pretension of forming a church in his own person.”

Father Tondini next notices the remarkable phenomenon presented by Old Catholicism during the first three years of its existence as body without a head, and calls the reader’s attention to the following passage in the French manifesto:

“If it be the will of God,” thus it runs, “that some Roman bishops have the courage to return publicly to the profession of the ancient faith, we will place them with joy at our head. And if none break publicly with heresy, our church, though essentially episcopal, will not for that reason be condemned to die; for as soon as it shall be possible to regularize its situation in this respect, we shall choose priests who will receive either in the West or in the East an episcopal consecration of unquestionable validity.”

“These,” he remarks, “are plain words. It evidently results from them that there was a time when the church, ‘unstained by any Roman innovation,’ was still looking for a bishop—in other words, for a head, which she did not possess as yet. How, in spite of this deficiency, the Old-Catholic Church could be termed essentially episcopal we are at a loss to understand. That which is essential to a thing is that without which it cannot possibly exist for a single moment; but here we are asked to believe in a miracle which at once destroys all our physical and metaphysical notions of things. A new-born warrior fighting without a head, and a being existing without one of its essential constituents—such are the wonders which accompanied the genesis of the so-called regenerated church of the Old Catholics.”

The German Declaration in like manner states the then headless condition of the Old-Catholic body. Its subscribers, and among them Prof. Reinkens, say they look forward to a time when “all Catholicity shall be placed under the direction of a primate and an episcopacy, which by means of science,” etc., etc., “and not by the decrees of the Vatican, … shall approach the crowning object assigned to Christian development—we mean that of the union of the other Christian confessions now separated from us,” etc.

Such was their language in June, 1871, when they were already nearly a year old. Their first bishop, Joseph Hubert Reinkens, was consecrated in August, 1873. These dates are very important. No power on earth will ever be able to annul them as historical facts, which prove that a body calling itself the true church of Christ has existed some time without a single bishop, although bishops are essential to the church of Christ, as Scripture, tradition, history, all antiquity agree. S. Cyprian says:

“The church is the people in union with the bishop—a flock adhering to its shepherd. The bishop is in the church and the church in the bishop. He who is not with the bishop is not in the church.”[194] And again: “He cannot be accounted a bishop who, in despite of the evangelic and apostolic tradition, has, of himself, become one (a se ipso ortus est, nemini succedens), and succeeds to none.”

Now, “to what bishop” (asks Father Tondini) “did Dr. Reinkens succeed? His first pastoral letter, dated August 11, 1873, is addressed ‘to the priests and faithful of Germany who persevere in the ancient Catholic faith.’ Who ever heard of the bishop and diocese[513] of Germany before this letter?” Again: “That same Dr. Reinkens who in June, 1871, signed the ‘Declaration’ in which the Christian confessions outside the Roman Church were called ‘Christian confessions now separated from us,’ in August, 1873, saluted with the title of ‘Old Catholics,’ the Jansenists of Holland, and Mgr. Heykamp, the bishop by whom he was consecrated, with that of ‘bishop of the Old Catholics’!”[195]

III.

We now come to the consideration of Old Catholicism as an instrument of union between the Christian Episcopal churches. In accordance with their “Declaration,” the Old Catholics insist upon its being one of their main objects to reunite the Christian churches separated from Rome during the VIIIth and IXth centuries, and complacently boast of the marks of sympathy bestowed upon them by these churches.

From one of their manifestoes Father Tondini quotes the following important statements:

“The bishops of the Oriental Orthodox Church”—thus runs the manifesto—“and those of the Episcopal Church of England and the United States of America (!) encourage Old Catholicism with their most profound sympathy. Representatives of the Orthodox Church of Russia assist every year at its congress.… The interest displayed for it by governments is not inferior to that of the churches.… The governments of Russia and of England are disposed to recognize its rights when it shall be opportune to do so.”[196]

Upon which he points out the exceeding inexpediency, for their own sakes, of these governments or their bishops having any participation in the doings of Old Catholics; and this for the following reasons, which are worthy of careful consideration by the two governments in question, and which we give in his own words:

“In order, it would seem, to escape the stringent conclusion of S. Cyprian’s words, ‘He who does not succeed to other bishops, but is self-originated, cannot be reckoned among bishops,’ Mgr. Reinkens, in his above-quoted pastoral letter, … authoritatively declared not only that the ‘apostolic see of Rome was vacant,’ but that not one of the actually existing Roman Catholic bishops was legitimate.

“In support of this assumption the Old-Catholic bishop invokes some fathers of the church—not, indeed, what they said or did while living, but what they would say or do if they were to return to life: ‘If the great bishops of the ancient church were to return to life in the midst of us,’ says Mgr. Reinkens, ‘a Cyprian, (!) a Hilary, an Ambrose, … they would acknowledge none of the existing bishops of the Roman Catholic Church as validly elected.’[197]

“So much for the fact. As it can only be ascertained when those great bishops are restored to life, all we can do is to defer this verification until the great day of judgment.

“Now comes the general principle on which the assumed fact is founded. Let us listen again to Mgr. Reinkens: ‘They [the resuscitated[514] bishops of the ancient church] would not acknowledge any of the existing bishops of the Roman Catholic Church as validly elected, because none of them were appointed in conformity with the immutable rule of the fathers of the church. Never! no, never! would they have received into their company, in the quality of a Catholic bishop, one who had not been chosen by the people and the clergy. This mode of election was considered by them as of divine precept, and consequently as immutable.’”

“How many bishops are there in existence at the present day,” asks Father Tondini, “either in the Anglican Church or in the Christian East, who have been chosen by the people and the clergy?”

In answer to this question we have, respecting the non-popular mode of election in the Oriental Orthodox Church, the following trustworthy information: In the Orthodox Church of the Turkish Empire the election of a patriarch is made by the members of its synod, which is composed of metropolitans, of one of their own number, and this election “is then made known to the people assembled in the atrium of the synodicon, who give, by acclamation and the cry of ἄξιος (worthy), their assent to the election.… This, however, is in fact an empty formality; the more so as the election itself is the result of previous secret understandings between the more influential members of the synod and the leading men among the people.”[198]

“The three patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem are elected by their respective synods, composed of metropolitans.

“The metropolitans and bishops of each patriarchate are elected by the respective patriarchs, together with their synods.”

Did the Patriarch of Constantinople, in agreeing, on the invitation of Dr. von Döllinger, to send representatives of the Greek Orthodox Church to the Old Catholic Church Congress at Bonn, forget that, according to Mgr. Reinkens, all bishops who have not been elected by the clergy and the people are illegitimate bishops, that their sees are all vacant, that this mode of election is of divine precept, and consequently immutable?

“We know not,” says Father Tondini, “which of the two is more to be wondered at: the boldness of the Old Catholics in inviting the patriarch to be represented at the congress, or the logical inconsistency of the patriarch in accepting the invitation.”

No one who may have read “The Future of the Russian Church,” which recently appeared in the pages of The Catholic World,[199] will need to be told how little voice either the inferior clergy or people of Russia have in the election of their bishops. The Most Holy Governing Synod proposes to his majesty two persons (on an eparchy becoming vacant), and that one of the two selected by the czar is chosen and consecrated.[200] (See Consett, Spiritual Regulation of Peter the Great.)

In the formula of the oath taken by the Russian bishops before being consecrated, they engage themselves to yield true obedience to the Holy[515] Synod, “the legitimate authority instituted by the pious Emperor Peter the Great of immortal memory, and confirmed by command of his (or her) present imperial majesty,” and to obey all the rules and statutes made by the authority of the synod agreeably to the will of his (or her) imperial majesty, adding the following words: “Furthermore, I do testify that I have not received this province in consideration of gold or silver given by me, … but I have received it by the free will of our most serene and most puissant sovereign (by name), and by the election of the Holy Legislative Synod.[201] Moreover, at the beginning of the ceremony the bishop-consecrator thus addresses the newly-elected bishop: “Reverend Father N., the Most Serene and Most Puissant Czar N. N. hath commanded, by his own singular and proper edict, and the Holy Legislative Synod of all the Russias gives its benediction thereto, that you, holy sir, be bishop of the city of N.”; to which the future bishop is made to answer: “Since the Most Serene, etc., Czar has commanded, and the … synod … has judged me worthy to undertake this province, I give thanks therefor, and do undertake it and in nowise gainsay.”[202]

After similarly disposing (with regard to the remaining Oriental churches) of Mr. Gladstone’s extraordinary assertion that “the ancient principles of popular election and control exist in the Christian East”—an assertion of which also he makes use as a weapon against the Catholic Church [203]—Father Tondini passes on to the election of bishops in the Anglican Church. With regard to this, the following abstract from Stephen is amply sufficient to show how far “the principles of popular election” prevail in the nomination of the bishops of the Establishment:

“By statute 25 Henry VIII. c. 20 the law was altered and the right of nomination secured to the crown, it being enacted that, at every future avoidance of a bishopric, the king may send the dean and chapter his usual license to proceed to election, or congé d’elire, which is always to be accompanied with a letter missive from the king, containing the name of the person whom he would have them elect; and if the dean and chapter delay their election above twelve days, the nomination shall devolve to the king, who may by letters-patent appoint such person as he pleases. This election or nomination, if it be of a bishop, must be signified by the king’s letters-patent to the archbishop of the province; if it be of an archbishop, to the other archbishop and two bishops, or to four bishops, requiring them to confirm, invest, and consecrate the person so elected; which they are bound to perform immediately, without any application to the See of Rome. After which the bishop-elect[516] shall sue to the king for his temporalities, shall take oath to the king and to none other, and shall take restitution of his secular possessions out of the king’s hand only. And if such dean and chapter do not elect in this manner by this act appointed, or if such archbishop or bishop do refuse to confirm, invest, and consecrate such bishop-elect, they shall incur all the penalties of a præmunire—that is, the loss of all civil rights, the forfeiture of lands, goods, and chattels, and imprisonment during the royal pleasure. It is to be observed, however, that the mode here described of appointing bishops applies only to such sees as are of old foundation. The five new bishoprics created by Henry VIII. … have always been donatives, and conferred by letters-patent from the crown; and the case is the same as to the bishopric of Ripon, now recently created” (Stephen’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. iii. p. 61).

In concluding his essay, Father Tondini repeats Mgr. Reinkens’ words: “If the great bishops of the ancient church were to return to life in the midst of us, … never! no, never! would they have received into their company, in the quality of a Christian bishop, one who had not been chosen by the people and the clergy; this mode of election was considered by them as of divine precept, and consequently as immutable”; and then asks: “How can the support given by the state churches and governments of England and Russia to Old Catholicism be explained? Is it for the purpose of declaring that all the episcopal sees, both of England and Russia, are vacant and awaiting the choice of the people?”

The reader, being now acquainted with much of the contents as well as with the general tenor of Father Tondini’s essay, may find some interest (possibly amusement also) in comparing the following remarks of the London Tablet (Sept. 18) with the confirmation of their accurate appreciation of the “British Philistine’s” pride in his own obtuseness so ingenuously furnished (Sept. 25) by a writer in the Church Review:

“We are a little afraid that the Anglican sympathizers with the Old Catholics will not be sharp enough to understand the keen logic of Father Tondini’s concise reasoning. The British Philistine rather glories in being impervious to logic or wit, and chuckles over his own obtuseness as a proof of the strength of the religion which he patronizes. It is provoking to a zealous controversialist to have to do battle with such a heavy antagonist, but we trust the good father will not cease to labor at the conversion of our illogical but worthy fellow-countrymen. We thank him for a well-timed and well-written pamphlet.”

(The Universe calls it “another fatal blow for the theology of our ex-prime minister; closely reasoned and perfectly terrible in its manner of grasping its luckless opponent.”—Universe, September 25, 1875.)

“The Rev. Cæsar Tondini, who is fond of linking Russian Orthodoxy and Anglican Catholicism in one sweeping condemnation, is by no means one of the Pope’s greatest controversialists. But this pamphlet is hardly worthy of even his reputation. Every point in it might be answered by a tu quoque. Fact might be set against fact, defect against defect, innovation against innovation, inconsistency against inconsistency, and error against error. But picking holes in our neighbor’s coat will never mend the rents in our own. So we forbear, content for the present to congratulate ourselves on the fact that, while Romanists are still utterly blind to their own nakedness, we have at least plucked a fig-leaf by the efforts already made to bring about reunion.” [Who could help thinking, “We would not give a fig for such a leaf as this”?]

IV.

We will conclude the present notice by some account of the recent Conference at Bonn, in which the Old Catholics have given abundant proof that they are no freer from variation than are any other of the Protestant sects.

Desirous of strengthening their position by alliance with other forms of schism, Dr. von Döllinger invited to a congress representatives of the schismatic Greek and Russian Church, the English and American Episcopalians, and the Old[517] Catholics. The assembly was called the “International Conference of the Union of the Christian Churches,” and proposed as its object an agreement on the fundamental points of doctrine professed by Christendom before its divisions, with a view “to restore by a reform as broad as possible the ancient Catholic Church of the West.”[204]

In this International Conference, which began on the 12th of August and ended on the 16th, the principal Orientals, who numbered about twenty in all, were two bishops from Roumania; an archimandrite from Belgrade; two archimandrites, Anastasiades and Bryennios, from Constantinople, sent by the patriarch as being well versed in all the questions which have divided and which still divide the Greek and Latin Churches; there were also present the Archbishop of Syra and Tino, Mgr. Licourgos, well known in England, and six professors, among whom were Profs. Osinnin and Janischef, the latter being the gentleman who at the last Conference was so severe on Anglican orders. The Protestant Episcopalians were the most numerous, being about a hundred in number; but they had only one bishop among them—namely, the Bishop of Gibraltar. Those of Winchester and Lincoln, who had also given their adherence to the movement, found themselves at the last moment unable to attend. The most notable person in the Anglican group was Dr. Liddon, Canon of S. Paul’s. Dean Howson, of Chester, was also one of its members; his “views” on nearly every point of church teaching being diametrically opposed to those of Canon Liddon. The same group contained an Unitarian minister from Chesterfield (Mr. Smith), and a “Primitive Methodist” (Mr. Booth, a chemist and druggist of the same town), who on a late occasion was voted for and returned at the head of the poll as an advocate of secular education. The Americans sent only three delegates, and the “Reformed Church” one—the Rev. Th. de Félice. The Old Catholics, all of whom were Germans, numbered eighteen or twenty, with Dr. von Döllinger and Bishop Reinkens at their head, supported by Herr Langen, “Altkatholik”; Herr Lange, Protestant, and Herr Lang, the least orthodox of all. Close to this little group figured seven or eight more German Protestants. In all, the Conference was composed of about one hundred and fifty persons, of whom the Times observes that, “slender as the gathering was, it was forced to display an almost ludicrous caution in drawing up such articles of faith as would command the assent of the whole assembly”—articles “so vague that they might be made to mean anything or nothing”; and, further, that the few English divines who went to Bonn to play at a council no more represent the Church of England than Dr. von Döllinger represents the Church of Rome, but spoke in the name of nothing but themselves. It suggests to them, with scornful irony, that “charity begins at home,” and that in the present distracted state of the Church of England, “when nothing keeps the various and conflicting ‘schools’ of clergy in the same communion but the secular forces of the Establishment, there is surely there a magnificent field for the exercise of even a genius of conciliation.”

A Bavarian Protestant clergyman informed the assembly that,[518] as there was no chance of their coming to an agreement by means of discussion about dogma, they had far better throw over dogma altogether, and trust to brotherly love to bring about union. Dr. von Döllinger, however, said that if they all shared this opinion, they had better have stayed at home. One reverend gentleman proposed to settle the difference by examining where the fathers all harmonize, and abiding by the result (a task which, as a looker-on observed, would give all the theological acuteness and learning in the world abundant work for about half a dozen centuries); whereupon Bishop Reinkens nervously tried to draw the debaters into the cloud-land of love and unity of purpose, etc., etc. But here Canon Liddon hastened to the rescue with a carefully-prepared scheme for effecting the reconciliation of the East and West, which was apparently received by the Orientals with a tranquil indifference, and was chiefly remarkable for its adroit semblance of effecting much, while it in fact does nothing. Yielding here and there a phrase of no special meaning, it declared in the next clause that it would retain its own form of the Creed until the dispute should be settled by “a truly œcumenical council.” This announcement was the signal for an outburst of disapproval, questions, and objections. “What did Canon Liddon mean by an œcumenical council?” “An assent of the whole episcopate.” This was too much for Lord Plunkett, who exclaimed that he would never have come to the Conference if he had known that it meant to confine the Christian Church within the bounds of episcopacy. What, he should like to know, was to hinder Presbyterian ministers from being admitted equally with bishops to take part in an œcumenical council?

On this the canon obligingly agreed to substitute “the whole church” for the obnoxious term; but while the assembly hesitated, some paragon of caution suggested the phrase “sufficient authority.” However, this masterpiece of conciliation—for nobody could say what it meant—was rejected for “the whole church,” this latter being equally ambiguous to those who were adopting it. On this they agreed. As the Times’ correspondent observes, “Everybody will agree with everybody else when all deliberately use words for the purpose of concealing what they mean. When men differ from each other essentially, it is childish folly to try to unite them by an unmeaning phrase.”

The great question was that of the procession of the Holy Spirit. On this M. Osinnin was the chief speaker on behalf of the Greeks, and he seems to have challenged every interpretation of the Westerns, maintaining even that procedit was not an exact rendering of ἐκπορεύεται. However, a committee was appointed, composed of the Germans, two Orientals, an Englishman, and an American; and Dr. von Döllinger announced to the Conference on its last sitting that an agreement had been arrived at on all essential points. The Greeks were to retain their version of the Nicene Creed, and the Westerns theirs; the latter were to admit that the Filioque had been improperly introduced, and that both were to agree that, whichever version they used, their meaning was that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. With regard to the last point, however, the Orientals said that although they had personally no objection to[519] the expression, yet they must decline to give any official assent to the article until it had been submitted to their synods or other competent authorities at home.

Judging from every account we have seen (all of them Protestant) of the Bonn Conference, it is evident that its members, in order to give an appearance of mutual agreement, subscribed to propositions which may be taken in various senses. The six articles agreed to by the committee were couched in the following terms:

“We believe with S. John Damascene, 1, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father as the beginning, the cause, and the fountain of Deity. 2. That the Holy Spirit does not proceed from the Son ἐκ τοῦ υίοῦ, and that for this reason there is in the Godhead only one beginning, one cause, through which all that is in the Godhead is produced. 3. That the Holy Spirit is the image of the Son, who is the image of the Father, proceeding from the Father and resting in the Son, as the outbeaming power of the latter. 4. The Holy Spirit is the personal bringing forth of the Father, but belonging to the Son, yet not of the Son, since he is the Spirit of the Godhead which speaks forth the Word. 5. The Holy Spirit forms the connecting link between the Father and the Son, and is united to the Father through the Son. 6. The Holy Spirit proceeds [or, as amended by Mr. Meyrick, ‘issues’] from the Father through the Son.”

It is the supposed denial of that unity of the αρχή, or originating principle in the Most Holy Trinity, which has always been the ground of the Greek objections to the Latin form of the Creed.[205] “The double Procession[206] of the Holy Ghost has always been believed in the church, only to a certain number of minds it remained for a time obscure, and thus there are to be found in the writings of the fathers passages in which mention is made rather of the procession from the Father than of the double procession from the Father and the Son, but yet none which, although not formally indicating, exclude or contradict it.

“In recurring to the expressions employed by the fathers, the members of the Bonn Conference have made choice of some of those which are vague and least explicit, instead of others which convey to the mind a clear idea. We are fully aware that, from a historical point of view, the question of the Filioque presents some difficulties. At Nicæa, in 325, the question of procession was not even mentioned, from the fact of its not having up to that time been raised. At Constantinople, in 381, in order to cut short discussions which were tending to result in a denial of the Trinity, the addition had been made to the Creed that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father, without mention of the Son. At the Third Council of Toledo, in 589, the faith of the church in the double procession was clearly indicated by the addition of the Filioque—an addition, which was adopted by several particular councils, and which became general in France. The popes, however, foreseeing that the Orientals—always inclined to be ill-disposed towards the West—would make this addition an excuse for breaking off into schism, appeared at first but little in favor of a modification which, although expressing with greater accuracy the faith of[520] the church, would furnish fresh fuel to theological disputes. It was a question of prudence. But when the truth was once placed in peril, they hesitated no longer. All the West chanted the Filioque; and the Greeks themselves, on repeated occasions, and notably at the Council of Florence in 1438, confessed the double procession to be an article of the Catholic faith.”

The Old Catholics of Bonn have thus made, as it seems to us, a retrogression on this question. Will this help to secure “the union of the Christian churches” which was the object of the Conference? In outward appearance possibly it may, because all the separated communities willingly join hand in hand against the true church of Christ; but in reality, no, for the Greeks will continue to reject the procession through the Son, as the Anglicans will continue to accept it; and we have no need to say that the Catholic Church will never cease to confess the double procession, and to sing: Qui ex Patre Filioque procedit.

With regard to other subjects discussed by the meeting at Bonn, we will briefly mention that Canon Liddon spoke against the invocation of saints, and Dr. von Döllinger talked of “making a clear sweep” of the doctrine of purgatory and indulgences; although, in stating the belief of his co-religionists, he was obliged to reaffirm the doctrine of purgatory in terms nearly equivalent to those of the Creed of Pope Pius IV. On this matter, whatever the Greeks might do, how many of the Anglicans would agree with the Old Catholics? Not only are the people who go to these conferences from England in no sense representatives of the body to which they belong, but even they themselves do not always abide by what they have agreed to.[207] Dean Howson, in a statement he read at the last Conference, put a Low-Church interpretation on the resolution of last year’s Conference about the Eucharist, which interpretation Canon Liddon immediately repudiated. Before Greek or German schismatics can unite with the Church of England, they will have to make up their minds as to which of at least four theological systems is Anglicanism, and then to get that admitted by the other three.

As to the validity of Anglican orders, Dr. von Döllinger appears to have considered it as resting on the certainty of Parker’s consecration, without going into the really more important questions of Barlow’s orders, or the sufficiency of form or intention, all of which are matters of such grave doubt as to be practically worthless to any one insisting upon the necessity of certainty that the communion to which he belongs possesses the apostolic succession.

We cannot conclude this sketch of the Bonn Conference without presenting our readers with a portrait of its chief, Dr. von Döllinger, drawn by a friendly hand—that of a French apostate priest, and one of the members of the Conference—which we reproduce from the pages of the Indépendance Belge.

“M. Döllinger,” he writes, “pronounced three long and eloquent discourses, marked by that seriousness and depth which so especially characterize his manner of speaking; but notwithstanding their merit, they have not resulted in any new conclusion. May not the blame be in some measure due to M. Overbeck, who … introduced into the discussion authorities posterior to the epoch of the separation[521] of East and West, and mingled the question of the seven œcumenical councils with that of the Filioque?… At all events, both obscurity and coldness found their way into the debates.…

“Truly, this excellent M. Döllinger seems fated to go on from one contradiction to another, and to accept one year that which he refused in the preceding. For instance, in 1871, at the congress at Munich, he energetically opposed the organization of Old-Catholic parishes; afterwards he resigned himself to consent to this. In 1871 he desired the Old Catholics to confine themselves, after his example, to protesting against the excommunication they had incurred; but later on he is willing that their priests should take upon themselves the full exercise of their ministry. In 1871 and 1872 he wished to maintain the decisions of the Council of Trent; in 1873 he decided to abandon them, as well as the alleged œcumenicity of this council. In 1872 … he considered the attempts made to establish union between the Old Catholics and the Oriental churches as at any rate imprudent, if not even compromising. In 1874 he adopted the idea of which he had been so much afraid, and has since that time used every endeavor to promote the union of the churches. Last year a proposal [for a committee to examine on what points the earliest fathers harmonized] was rejected by M. Döllinger with a certain disdain, as impracticable and even childish. Now, however, we find him obliged to come back to it, at least in part.”[208] “It is by no means in reproach but in praise that we say this,” continues the writer, adding: “He accepted with the best grace possible, in one of the sittings of the Conference this year, the observations of Prof. Osinnin on the manner of studying texts; and when an erudite and venerable man like M. Döllinger knows how to correct himself with such humility, he does but raise himself in the esteem of sincere men.”

We would here venture to observe that when “so erudite” a man as Dr. von Döllinger, and one who is acknowledged by an entire sect as its most distinguished doctor and its leader, is so little sure of his doctrine that he is continually altering it, he and his followers are surely among the last people who ought to refuse to the Pope the infallibility which he in fact arrogates to himself in setting himself above an œcumenical council, as was that of the Vatican.

If the head is represented by one of the members as being in a chronic state of uncertainty, so are the members themselves represented by another. In the Church Review (Anglican) for Sept. 18, 1875, is an article entitled “Old-Catholic Prospects,” the greater part of which consists of one of the most abusive and malignant attacks against the Catholic Church, and in an especial manner against the Jesuits, that it has ever been our lot to come upon, even in the journal in which it appears. After informing his readers that “Jesuitism has led the Pope into the egregious heresy of proclaiming his own infallibility,” and that “the Spirit of Christ, who would[522] not rest in the Vatican Council, where all was confusion, restraint, and secrecy, (!) has brooded over the humble (?) Conference of trusting hearts” at Bonn, etc., etc., this person, with a sudden sobriety, ventures on a closer inspection of the favored sect for which he had just profanely claimed the guidance of the Eternal Spirit, while denying it to the œcumenical council where the whole episcopate of the Catholic Church was assembled with its head, the Vicar of Christ.

This writer perceives that, “on the other hand, there are dangers in the future. At present,” he says, “the Old-Catholic body is kept in order by two master minds—Dr. Döllinger and Prof. Schulte. There are innumerable elements of discord” (he adds) “manifest enough, but they are as yet subdued by reverence for Dr. Döllinger, and beat down by the sledge-hammer will of the lay professor. If either of these pilots were removed, it is impossible to say into how many fragments Old Catholicism might split. Its bishop has no means of control over minds, as have Schulte and Döllinger. Michaelis is simply abusive and violent, ready to tear down with hands and teeth, but incompetent to build. Repulsive in personal appearance, his work is that of detraction, denunciation, and destruction. To human eyes the movement is no movement at all; it contains in itself no authority to hold its members personally in check; and yet, in spite of every disadvantage, the Old-Catholic society is the expression of true feeling,” etc., etc.

But we have dwelt long enough on this picture; let us in conclusion turn to a very different one. “Rome accepts no compromise; she dictates laws,” says M. Henri Vignaud,[209] contrasting her in no friendly spirit with the sect we have been contemplating, but yet in a spirit of calmness and candor.

And this, which he intends as a reproach, is in reality a commendation. It is the true church only which can accept no compromise when the truth is in question, of which she is the faithful depository; and whatever laws she dictates are to guard the truth, dogmatic or moral, issued in God’s name and with his authority.

M. Vignaud acknowledges this in the following remarkable manner: “That cannot be conciliated which is by nature irreconcilable. There can be no compromise with faith.… Either man forges to himself the truths which must illuminate his path, or he receives them from the Deity, in which case he must submit to accept the dogma of infallibility; for without this the whole theory falls. It is for this reason that the apostolic Roman Catholicity is so strong. Subordinating reason to faith, it does not carry within it the germ of any scepticism. There can be no transacting with it, and whoever goes out of it enters, whether he is aware of the fact or not, into rationalism, of which the logical outcome is the elimination of the divine action in human affairs.”[210]

It would be scarcely possible to show more clearly that there are but two logical positions in the world of intelligences—namely, Catholicity and scepticism, or, as it is called in the present day, positivism. The next step after refusing God all action in human affairs is to refuse him existence.

The Conference at Bonn, however[523] little it may have done in other respects, has already produced one result which was far from the intention of its promoters. It has furnished an additional proof that there is one church only which is capable of resisting the invasion of scepticism and unbelief, and that this church is the Catholic and Roman.

“Either Jesus Christ never organized a church, or the Catholic is the church which he organized.”[211]

MIDNIGHT MASS IN A CONVENT.

I have lately been reading some remarks on the curious association existing between certain tastes and odors and an involuntary exertion of the memory by which the recurrence of those tastes or odors recalls, with a vividness not otherwise to be obtained, a whole series of incidents of past life—incidents which, with their surrounding scenes, would otherwise be quite forgotten and buried out of sight by the successive overlaying of other events of greater interest or importance. Montaigne has some singular illustrations of this peculiar fact of consciousness, and there is a brief reference to the subject made in some recently republished recollections of William Hazlitt. Connected with this is the powerful influence known to be exercised in many well-authenticated cases upon the nervous sensibilities by the exhalation of particular perfumes or the scent of certain kinds of flowers harmless or agreeable to all other persons. There is a reciprocal motion of the mind which has also been noted, by which a particular train of thought recalls a certain taste or smell almost as if one received the impression from the existing action of the senses. An illustration is given in the discussion just noted, where a special association of ideas is stated to have brought back to the writer, with great vividness, the “smell of a baker’s shop in Bassorah.” Individual experiences could doubtless be accumulated to show that this mysterious short-hand mind-writing, so to term it, by means of which the memory records on its tablets, by the aid of a single sign imprinted upon a particular sense, the history of a long series of associated recollections, is not confined to the senses of taste and smell alone, but makes use of all.

The recollection of one of the happiest days of my life—a day of strong excitement and vivid pleasure, but not carried to the pitch of satiety—is inseparably associated with the warm, aromatic smell of a cigar which I lighted and puffed, walking alone down a country road. In this case the train of thought is followed by the impression on the sense. But in another instance within my experience the reciprocal action of thought and sense is reversed; the sight of a particular object in this latter case invariably bringing back to my mind, with amazing distinctness, a scene of altogether dissimilar import, lying far back in the memory. The circumstances are these:

’Tis now some years since I visited the seaport town of Shippington. It is, or was, one of those sleepy provincial cities which still retain an ante-Revolutionary odor about its dock-yard and ordnance wharves. A group of ragged urchins or a ruby-nosed man in greasy and much-frayed velveteen jacket might be seen any sunny morning diligently fishing for hours off the end of one of its deserted piers for a stray bite from a perch or a flounder. The arrival of the spring clipper-ship from Glasgow, bringing a renewal of stock for the iron merchants, or of a brig with fruit from the Mediterranean, used to set the whole wharf population astir. Great changes have taken place of late years. Railroads have been built. Instead of a single line of ocean steamships, whose fortnightly arrival was the event of the day, half a dozen foreign and domestic lines keep the port busy. Fashion, which was once very exclusive and confined to a few old families, has now asserted its sway over wider ranks, and the officers of her majesty’s gallant Onety-Oneth, and the heavy swells of Shippington society whose figures adorn the broad steps of the Shippington Club-House, have now the pleasure of criticising any fine morning a (thin) galaxy of female beauty and fashion sweeping by them, whose modes rival those of Beacon Street or Murray Hill.

But at the time of which I write—when I was a school-boy, a quarter of a century ago—it had not been much stirred by the march of these modern improvements. Her Britannic majesty was then young to the throne, and a great fervor of loyalty prevailed; and when the Royal Welsh Fusileers used to march down to the parade-ground for morning drill, with the martial drum-major and its great bearded Billy-Goat, presented by the queen, dividing the honors of the head of the regiment, it would be hard to exaggerate the enthusiasm that swelled the bosoms of the small boys and African damsels who stepped proudly along with the band. Those were grand days, quorum pars magna fui, when I too marched down the hill from the citadel, with a mind divided between awe and admiration of the drum-major—curling his mustache fiercely and twirling his staff with an air of majesty—and a latent terror of the bearded pet of the regiment, whom report declared to have destroyed three or four boys in Malta. But rare indeed were those holidays, for I was impounded most of the time in a college, where the study of the Latin Delectus gave little opportunity for the pursuit of those more attractive branches of a liberal education. About half a dozen of the boys, of whom I was one, were proficients at serving Mass. It was therefore with great joy at the distinction that we found ourselves named, one frosty Christmas Eve, to accompany Father W—— to the Convent of the Sacred Heart, about a mile distant, where he was to celebrate midnight Mass. Oh! how the snow crisped and rattled under our feet as we marched along, full of importance, after Father W——, each boy with his green bag, containing his surplice and soutane, swung over his arm! What a jolly night it was; and how the stars twinkled! We slapped our hands together, protected by our thick blue mitts, and stamped our feet like soldiers on the march to Moscow. It was after ten o’clock, and the streets were dark and nearly deserted. To us, long used to be sound asleep at that hour in our warm[525] dormitory, each boy in his own little four-poster, with the moonlight streaming in through the windows on its white counterpane—and not daring, if we were awake, so much as to whisper to the boy next to us, under pain of condign punishment in the morning—there was something mysterious and almost ghostly in this midnight adventure. As we passed the guard-house near the general’s residence, the officer of the night, muffled in his cloak, came along on the “grand rounds.” The sentry, in his tall bear-skin hat, stops suddenly short in his walk.

“Who goes there?” he calls out in a loud, fierce voice, bringing down his bayonet to the charge.

We clung closer to Father W——’s skirts. “Rounds,” replies the officer in a voice of command, his sword rattling on the ground, iron-hard with the frost. “What rounds?” “Grand rounds!” “Advance, grand rounds, and give the countersign!” Then the sergeant of the guard, the alarm being given, rushes out into the street with his men, all with bayonets drawn and looking terrible in the moonlight. They form in line, and the officer advances. A whispered conversation takes place; the soldiers present arms and march back into the warm guard-house; and the officer passes silently on to the next guard.

While this scene was going on we stood half terrified and fascinated, hardly knowing whether to take to our heels or not. But the calm voice of Father W——, as he answered “A friend” to the sentry’s challenge, reassured us. Soon we reached the convent gate, and, entering the grounds, which were open for the occasion, found the convent all ablaze with lights. The parents and friends of the young lady pupils were permitted to attend the midnight Christmas Mass. The convent, and convent chapel which communicated with it, stood in the midst of winding walks and lawns very pretty in the summer; but the tall trees, now stripped of their leaves, swung their bare branches in the wind with a melancholy recollection of their faded beauty. Groups, in twos and threes, walked silently up the paths, muffled in cloaks and shawls, and disappeared within the chapel. We were received by the lady-superior, Mme. P——, whose kind voice and refined and gentle manners were sadly maligned by a formidable Roman nose, that struck our youthful minds with awe. What unprincipled whims does Nature sometimes take thus to impress upon the countenance the appearance of a character so alien to our true disposition! Nor is it less true that a beautiful face and a form that Heaven has endowed with all the charms of grace and fascinating beauty may hide a soul rank with vice and malice. The Becky Sharpes of the world are not all as ferret-featured as Thackeray’s heroine, whom, nevertheless, with much truth to art, he represents as attractive and alluring in her prime. But dear Mme. P——’s Roman nose was not, I have reason to believe, without its advantages; the fortuitous severity of its cast helping to maintain a degree of discipline among her young lady boarders, which a tendency to what Mr. Tennyson calls “the least little delicate curve” (vulgo, a pug), or even a purely classical Grecian, might have failed to inspire. Forgive me the treason if I venture even to hint that those young ladies in white and blue who floated in and out of Mme. P——’s parlors[526] on reception-days, like angels cut out from the canvas on the walls, were ever less demure than their prototypes!

We altar-boys were marshalled into a long, narrow hall running parallel with the chapel. There we busied ourselves in putting on our red soutanes and white surplices, and preparing the altar for Mass. But we had a long time to wait, and while we stood there in whispering silence, and the chapel slowly filled, suddenly appeared Mme. P—— with a lay sister, carrying six little china plates full of red and white sugar-plums, and some cakes not bigger than a mouthful, to beguile our tedium. To this day the sight of one of those small plates, filled with that kind of sugar-plums, brings back to my mind with wonderful minuteness all the scenes I have described and those that followed. The long walk through the snow, the guard-house, the convent grounds, the figures of Mme. P—— and her lay sister advancing towards us, rise before me undimmed by time; and even now as I write the flavor of the sugared cassia-buds seems to be in my mouth, though it is over twenty years ago since I cracked them between my teeth with a school-boy’s relish for sweetmeats.

The feeling of distant respect engendered by the sight of Mme. P——’s nose gave way all at once to a profound sympathy and admiration for that estimable lady, as she handed us those dainties. Yet, as they disappeared before our juvenile appetites, sharpened by the frost, we could not help feeling all a boy’s contempt for the girls that could be satisfied with such stuff, instead of a good, solid piece of gingerbread that a fellow could get two or three bites at! We had no doubt that the convent girls had a congé that day, and that this was a part of the feast that had been provided for them.

We marched gravely into the sanctuary before Father W——, and took our places around the altar-steps while he ascended the altar. A deeper hush seemed to fall on the congregation kneeling with heads bowed down before the Saviour born on that blessed morning. The lights on the altar burned with a mystical halo at the midnight hour. The roses around the Crib of the infant Redeemer bloomed brighter than June. We heaped the incense into the burning censer, and the smoke rushed up in a cloud, and the odorous sweetness filled the air. Then along the vaulted roof of the chapel stole the first notes of the organ, now rising, now falling; and the murmuring voice of the priest was heard reading the Missal. Did my heart stand still when a boy—or is it touched by a memory later?—as, birdlike, the pure tones of the soprano rose, filling the church, and thrilling the whole congregation? Marvellous magic of music! Can we wonder to see an Arion borne by dolphins over the waves, and stilling the winds with his lyre? Poor Mme. L——! She had a voice of astonishing brilliancy and power. Her upper notes I have never heard excelled in flute-like clearness and sustained roundness of tone. When I heard her years later, with a more experienced ear, her voice, though a good deal worn, was still one to be singled out wherever it might be heard. She is since dead. She was a French lady of good family. Her voice had the tone of an exile. She sang the Adeste fideles on that Christmas morning with a soul-stirring pathos that impressed me so much as a boy that the same hymn,[527] sung by celebrated singers and more pretentious choirs, has always appeared to me tame.

It would not serve my present purpose to pursue these recollections farther. Enough has been said to show how quickly the mind grasps at some one prominent point affected by sense, to group around it a tableau of associated recollections. That little china tea-plate with its blue and gilt edge, heaped over with sugar-plums, brings back to me scenes that seem to belong to another age, so radical is the change which time makes in the fortunes and even emotions of men.

When the lights were all out in the chapel, except those that burned around the Crib, and the congregation had silently departed, we wended our way back to the college with Father W—— in the chill morning air more slowly than when we started; sleepy, but our courage still unabated by reason of the great things we had shared in, and the still greater things separated from us by only one more, fast-coming dawn. We slept like tops all the morning, being excused from six o’clock Mass on account of our midnight excursion. When we joined the home circle on Christmas morning, you may be assured we had plenty to talk about. Nor was it until after dinner, and all the walnuts had been cracked, and our new pair of skates—our most prized Christmas gift—tried on and admired, that the recollection of our first Christmas Mass began to fade from our minds. Pure hearts and innocent joys of youth! How smooth the stream—nescius auræ fallacis—on which it sails its tiny craft! How rough the sea it drifts into!

S. LOUIS’ BELL.[212]

FROM CAIRO TO JERUSALEM.

Seated in the spacious hall of the new hotel in Cairo, we discussed a tour through the Holy Land. We had quitted our comfortable and home-like dahabéeah, wherein we had lived for nearly four months upon the waters of the historical Nile. A sad farewell had been said to our trusty sailors, and even those of them who had lingered around the hotel for days after our arrival, to kiss our hands as we came out, had now taken their departure. Old Abiad, our funny man, had for once worn a sober look as he bade us God-speed on our homeward voyage. Said—the indefatigable, hard-working, muscular Said, ever ready for the hardest work, and ever foremost in action—had left us with tearful eyes, and had started on his upward voyage to Keneh, to marry the young Moslem maiden to whom he had pledged his troth some few months before.

Yes, the Nile trip was really over, but on the tablets of memory was painted a most bright and beautiful picture, which time alone could efface. Still another separation: one of our party, having been in the Holy Land the previous year, was about to remain in Egypt, while the rest of us visited Syria. Father H——, Mme. D——, and the writer made the travelling party. The plans were soon settled, and a day was appointed upon which we should depart from Cairo to meet the Russian steamer which was advertised to leave Alexandria on Monday, April the 13th, A.D. 1874. One of the greatest difficulties in travelling in the East is to obtain accurate information concerning the arrival and departure of steamers and trains. When inquiring what time the train would leave Cairo for Rhoda, the terminus of the railway along the Nile, I was informed that it would leave somewhere about seven o’clock in the morning, and would reach Rhoda between six and eight in the evening; this was the most accurate information I could possibly obtain. In point of fact, the train left Cairo at nine A.M., and reached Rhoda at half-past ten at night. On Monday morning, April 13, there was a general clearing out of travellers from the hotel. At nine A.M.—and, for a wonder, punctual to the minute—we left the station at Cairo on the train going to Ismailïa. We passed through some of the richest country of the Delta, teeming with life and activity. The Sagéars, or Persian water-wheels, were sending their streams of life-giving water through the numberless little canals on every hand. Here a line of laden camels march along with stately step. There a family—father, mother, and son—accompanied by the omnipresent donkey, called to mind the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. And well they may; for here we are in the land of Goshen, at Rameses, the home of the Israelites, the starting-point of their long, dreary wanderings. Now the railroad marks the line between the cultivated land and the sandy plains of the[530] desert; on one side rich vegetation, nurtured by the fresh-water canal, on the other, sandy hillocks stretching away to the line of the horizon; and in a few moments we see the deep, rich blue of the water of Lake Timsah, contrasting most strikingly with the golden sand of its desert bank. Ismailïa! Ere the train has stopped we are surrounded by a crowd of Arabs thirsting for their spoil. A score of them pounce upon our baggage. After considerable shouting and threatening, we compromise, and a truce is proclaimed. We engaged two of them to carry our baggage to the steamer on the lake. O porters of the United States! how you would blush and hang your heads in shame to see these Arabs handle baggage. In my childish and untravelled simplicity I thought it most wonderful to see you lift those heavy boarding-houses, miscalled trunks, and carry them to the fourth story of a hotel. But hereafter, for porters, commend me to the Arabs. We had four or five heavy valises, one of them weighing nearly one hundred pounds, and numberless small parcels. One of the men hung these valises from his neck, and tying the smaller parcels in among them, as though by way of ornament, started off, followed by his brother porter, with our only trunk, a large and very heavy one, strapped on his back. They walked at a brisk pace to the boat, about one mile distant, and did not seem in the least fatigued when they arrived there. As we started to walk down the long avenue leading to the lake, we were beset as usual by the importunities of three or four donkey-boys, each one recounting the praises of his own animal, and speaking disparagingly of the others, yet all in the best possible humor. Running here and there, dragging after them the patient donkey, they cried out: “Him good donkey, sah; look him. Oder donkey no good; him back break. Him exquisite donkey, sah! Him Yankee Doodle!” Suddenly, in a fit of indignation, I turned upon them and howled at the top of my voice:

“Empshy Ya Kelb” (“Get out, O dog!”), when, with a roar of laughter, one little imp jumped in front of me, and exclaimed: “Oh! Howadji can speak Arabic. Him good Arab donkey. Take him, sah; him speak Arabic.” Notwithstanding this great inducement, I did not take him.

Like Aladdin’s palace, Ismailïa has sprung up almost in a single night. In 1860 the site of the present town was a barren waste of sand; but when the fresh-water canal was completed to this place, and the magic waters of the Nile were let loose upon it, the golden sands of the desert gave place to the rich verdure of vegetation; gardens, filled with the choicest fruits and flowers, sprang up on every hand. Indeed, it seems but necessary to pour the waters of the Nile on the desert to produce a soil which will grow anything to perfection. Here we see the pretty little Swiss châlet of M. de Lesseps, and a short distance beyond the palace of the viceroy, built in a few months, for the purpose of entertaining his illustrious guest at the opening of the Suez Canal.

What singular fellows these Arabs are! Our two porters demand three rupees (a rupee is worth about fifty cents) for their services. I quietly take one rupee from my pocket and offer it to them. Indignantly they reject it; and if I will not give them what they ask, they will accept nothing[531] at all; and with loud words and angry gestures they shout and gesticulate most vehemently, complaining of the insignificant pittance I offer them for the hard work they have just gone through. I repocket the rupee, and proceed very leisurely to arrange our places on the little postal boat, which is to leave in about an hour. Having purchased tickets, and seen that everything was properly arranged, I again return to the attack, as I am now upon the offensive, and offer them the rupee. No, they will not have it; but now they will accept two rupees. Well, it being the rule of Eastern negotiations that as one party comes down the other should go up, like a balance, I increase the rupee by a franc, and after much talking they agree to accept it. But now what a change comes over them! Finding that they have extracted from me all that they possibly can, their whole manner changes, and they become as polite and affable as you please. They thank me, proffer their services to do anything for me that I may wish, kiss their hands in respectful salutation, and are off.

Our steamer is somewhat larger than a man-of-war’s boat, and our little company is soon assembled in the cabin. Besides ourselves, there are, first, a voluble young Russian who came with us from Cairo, and who precipitates himself most desperately into the strongest friendships that the time will allow with every one he meets, telling you all about himself and his family, and then finding out as much as he can about you and yours; next, a stolid Saxon, Prussian vice-consul at Cairo, a very pleasant and intelligent young man; and, lastly, a quiet, retiring young Italian lady, who, unable to speak any language besides her own, cannot join in the general conversation, which is carried on principally in French. At six o’clock we left the landing-place at Ismailïa, and, passing out the northeast corner of Lake Timsah, we entered the narrow cutting of El Guisr. The surface of these heights is the highest point in the Isthmus of Suez, being from sixty to sixty-five feet above the level of the sea. In cutting the canal through this part they were obliged to dig down some ninety feet, in order to give the canal its proper depth below the sea level. Just after we entered this cutting, the strong north wind which was blowing at the time caught madame’s parasol, whirled it out of her hand, blew it overboard, and the last we saw of it it was floating placidly along toward Suez. One sees here how perceptibly the sand is filling up the hard-won trench, and the dredging-machines are kept in constant operation to keep the channel clear. At dusk we passed a large English steamer tied up for the night—as large steamers are never allowed to travel in the canal after dark.

We soon entered Lake Menzaleh, and continued through it some twenty-seven miles to Port Said. Fifteen years ago a belt of sand, from six to nine hundred feet in width, occupied the place where Port Said now stands. Here in April, 1859, M. de Lesseps, surrounded by a handful of Europeans and a score of native workmen, gave the first blow of the spade to that great channel of communication between the East and the West. Soon the ground for the future town was made, houses erected, gardens laid out, and to-day Port Said is a town of nearly ten thousand inhabitants, with streets,[532] squares, gardens, docks, quays, mosques, churches, and a very safe and easily-approached harbor. The name Port Said was given to it in honor of the then viceroy, Said Pasha. The next morning, when I went to the office to purchase tickets, I was informed, by the not over-polite clerk in the Russian Steamship Co.’s office, that notwithstanding it was advertised that the steamer would leave Alexandria on Monday, it would not leave until Tuesday, and consequently would not leave Port Said until Wednesday afternoon—another illustration of the uncertainty of travelling information in the East. In the afternoon I determined to go down to the lake and endeavor to shoot some flamingoes or pelicans, both of which abound here in great numbers. Leaving the town, I started to cross the wide, level plain which separated it, as I supposed, from the lake. Some distance ahead I saw numerous birds disporting themselves amid the glistening and sparkling waters of the lake. After walking for nearly an hour, I reached the spot, but no lake was there, and turning around, I saw it at the point from which I had started. Somewhat confused, I turned towards the sea, and there I saw, high up in the air, a sand-bank with women walking upon it, and a little further on two gigantic figures like light-houses moving toward me in the air. In a moment the truth flashed upon me—it was a mirage; and retracing my steps to the town, I found that the lake was in a different direction from the one I had taken. The next day we went on board the steamer, which arrived from Alexandria about ten in the morning. There is considerable excitement on board, and a number of smart-looking boats with trim crews rapidly approaching us announce the arrival of M. de Lesseps with his wife and her two nieces, en route for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. M. de Lesseps is a man of medium height, rather stout, and with a very good-natured and jovial-looking countenance. He wears a heavy gray mustache, and his hair is silvery white. His appearance is that of a man of great energy and determination, and one to project and carry through the colossal work he has so successfully executed. The ship was very much crowded, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that the accommodations were very limited, as we did not have more than fifty first-class passengers on board, and yet there were not sufficient accommodations for them in the first cabin. Father H—— and I, together with a young Austrian with whom we had become acquainted at Port Said, were obliged to sleep in a second-class cabin. We were told that they would so arrange it that we could eat in the first saloon, and at dinner-time we found a small work-table set for four of us to eat from. However, it was quite large enough for me; for I had not been seated many minutes before I felt an unaccountable desire to go on deck and inhale the fresh air.

Having done so, I retired for the night. Bright and early the next morning I was upon deck, but I found Father H—— there before me. Madame, having a very comfortable room in the first cabin, had not yet risen. The sea was still and calm as a pond, and, turning my face toward the east, I beheld for the first time the mountain ranges of Judæa. Yea, there before me was Judæa, the land promised and given to the seed of Abraham. There, among those hills,[533] Samson had performed his exploits of power. There the royal David and the wise Solomon had lived and reigned. Ay, and there One greater than them all, the Man-God, was born, lived, and laid down his life for the salvation of mankind. And was it really true that I, an inquisitive Yankee of the XIXth century, was soon to tread those sacred spots, hallowed with reminiscences so dear to the heart of every Christian? I could scarce believe it. Was I not in a dream, and would I not soon awake to find it all a beautiful but fleeting vision? No, it was true, and it was made most painfully apparent by the harsh clangor of the Arab boatmen, and their frantic endeavors to take possession of us, as our ship dropped anchor off the town of Jaffa. There is no harbor of any kind here, and when the sea is calm the steamers anchor about one mile from the shore, and passengers and their baggage are landed in small boats. Immediately in front of the town, and but a short distance from it, a series of partially-covered rocks forms a wall, broken only by two channels or gateways, one about ten feet in width, and the other a little wider. Through these the sea dashes with tremendous fury, and as the little boat approaches it is caught upon the summit of some breaker, and dashed through the opening into the quiet haven behind. When it is stormy, the steamers do not stop here at all, but land their passengers a short distance farther up the coast. The bright, genial face of Father Guido (president of the Casa Nuova) soon welcomed us to Palestine. He had come down from Jerusalem to meet M. de Lesseps, and to offer him the hospitality of their convent, which was thankfully accepted. We soon disembarked and entered a small boat, accompanied by our trusty dragoman, Ali Aboo Suleyman, who had travelled with one of our party the previous year, and whom I believe to be one of the best dragomans in the East. Our boat, propelled by the strong arms of a half-score of powerful Arabs, soon brought us alongside of the town. Passing through a narrow gateway, and giving a substantial and material wink to the revenue official, we, with our baggage, were soon deposited at the door of the Latin convent. After greeting the kind and hospitable fathers, and arranging terms with Ali, we started out for a short walk. Traversing the narrow, tortuous streets and filthy alleys, jostled by camels, horses, donkeys, and preceded by Achmud, Ali’s youngest son—a lad of fourteen years, who, with a pompous and authoritative air, pushed aside old men and young, women and children, and would have done the same with the camels had he been able, to make room for the Howadji—we reached the spot where stood in former days the house of Simon the tanner. Here the Apostle Peter resided many days, and here he saw the vision of the clean and unclean beasts, wherein the voice commanded him saying: “Arise, Peter, kill and eat.” A small mosque now occupies the site of the house. The streets were thronged with Russian pilgrims returning from their Easter pilgrimage to the Holy City. Many of them will leave in the afternoon on the steamer which has brought us from Egypt, and in a few short days will be at Odessa, whence the railway will carry them to St. Petersburg. About three in the afternoon, accompanied by an[534] Irish priest who had lived in Malta for several years, we mounted our horses and started for Jerusalem. We had been most hospitably entertained by the kind fathers at the convent; a large room and an excellent breakfast had been provided for us, but no remuneration asked. We, of course, made a donation, which was thankfully received. We rode through the narrow streets, passed out the gate, and in a few moments were among the world-famous orange-groves of Jaffa. The sky was cloudless, the weather like a beautiful May day at home, and the air heavy with the delicious fragrance of the oranges. We rode for nearly a mile through these beautiful groves. Meanwhile, Ali provided himself with numbers of these large oranges, and soon for the first time I tasted an orange that I really enjoyed. Just plucked from the tree, with skin half an inch in thickness, and without seeds, this luscious fruit seems almost to dissolve in the mouth like ice-cream. Ali owns a large grove, from which he gathers about one hundred and fifty thousand oranges per annum. These he sells in large quantities at the rate of two pounds sterling per thousand, yielding him a very nice income, as the expense of taking care of them is very small. Now we are riding along the level plain which separates the Judæan hills from the bright blue waters of the Mediterranean, and a little after six o’clock we drew rein at the Latin convent in Ramleh. It is almost useless for me to speak of the kindness and hospitality of these good Franciscan fathers of the Holy Land, as it is known throughout the world, and abler pens than mine have endeavored, but in vain, to praise them as they deserve. Unselfish, kind, burying self completely in the great work they have undertaken, they have given up their homes, families, and all that was dear to them, to live a monastic life among these sacred spots, to guard these holy places, and, like ministering angels, to assist pilgrims from every clime and of every Christian race and nationality. Clad in the humble garb of their order, they go quietly and unostentatiously through life, sacrificing themselves at every turn for the benefit and comfort of others. They have stood through centuries, a devoted band of chivalrous knights guarding the spots rendered sacred by the presence of their God. May he in his goodness reward them by permitting them to stand as a noble guard of honor around his celestial throne in the heavenly hereafter! After a comfortable night’s rest and a good breakfast, we started at six o’clock, in order to avoid the intense heat of midday. M. de Lesseps and party had preceded us by nearly two hours. As we rode out the convent gate, numbers of lepers, with shrunken limbs and distorted countenances, clamored piteously for alms. We dropped some small coins into their tin boxes, which they carry so that there may be no possibility of contact with the compassionate passer-by who may bestow alms upon them. We rode for some time across a level plain, and near ten o’clock reached Bab-el-Wady (Gate of the Valley), at the foot of the mountain range. Here we found a very comfortable house, which has been erected for the sake of affording accommodation to pilgrims. We lunched here, took a short nap, and started on our way about two in the afternoon.[535] The whole distance from Jaffa to Jerusalem is not over thirty-six miles; but fast riding is not practicable on account of the baggage, which is transported on mules at a very slow pace; consequently, it generally requires two days to make the trip, whereas a moderately fast horse could easily accomplish the journey in seven or eight hours. We now enter Wady Ali. One could scarcely imagine a more suitable place for lurking bandits to conceal themselves in than among the thick undergrowth here. Their musket-barrels might almost touch their unconscious victim’s breast, without being visible, and many a tale has been told and retold around the Howadji’s camp-fire of their exploits of robbery and murder in this place. But now, thanks to the strict though tardy vigilance of the sultan, the pass is free from danger.

What feelings of emotion now fill my breast! The dreams of my childhood are being realized—I am in the Holy Land! Reaching the summit of one of the ridges, a beautiful panorama is spread out before us. At our feet lies the valley of Sharon, dressed in the richest green, and ornamented with the bright, beautiful wild flowers of early spring; beyond lies the plain of Ramleh, and in the distance, like a silver frame, sparkles and glistens the bright waters of the Mediterranean. Anon we see beneath us the beautiful valley of Beit Hanina, and Ali, laying one hand on my shoulder, points to a little village nestled amid the olive-groves in the valley. Yes, that is Ain-Karim, the place of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin—the spot where was born the “greatest of men.” We check our horses but for a moment; we have no eyes for that now. Every gaze is fixed upon that small yellow house upon the top of the opposite hill; for has not Ali told us that from that point we shall see the Eternal City? Riding rapidly down the mountain-side, we do not even stop as we cross the brook—where David gathered the pebbles with which he slew his gigantic adversary—and push rapidly up the opposite mountain. Father H—— and I are in advance, while madame rides behind with the Irish priest. The shades of evening are now falling, and I fear lest night may come on before we reach the city. Scarce a word is spoken; my heart beats with excitement, such as it has never known before, and seems as though it would break through its prison-house, so eager, so anxious, is it to move quickly on. Unable to restrain my impatience, I give my horse a blow with my riding-whip, and he starts on a full run. Father H—— calls me back. We have travelled so long and shared so many pleasures together, let us together share the great pleasure of the first sight of Jerusalem. I rein in my horse, and ride by his side. Now the top of the hill is reached, and it is yet light; but we have mistaken the house—it is another one still farther on. It is now twilight. We speak not a word, but, bent forward, we scan the horizon with piercing eyes, as though we would penetrate the mountains themselves, so eager are we to see the city. I hail a passing boy: “Fin el Kuds?” (“Where is Jerusalem?”), but with a stupid stare he passes on. A few moments more the house is reached, and Sion, royal city of David, lies before us! Waiting until the rest of the party ride up, we dismount, kneel, kiss the ground, and then recite aloud the psalm Lætatus Sum, a Pater Noster, and an Ave Maria, remount, enter the city by the Jaffa[536] gate, ride to our comfortable quarters at the Latin Hospice, and are in Jerusalem.

At the convent we were entertained in the most hospitable manner, and provided with the neatest and tidiest of rooms. Early the next morning Father H—— and I sallied forth to call on Père Ratisbonne. Following the Via Sacra, we stopped before an iron gate a short distance below the arch Ecce Homo, and little Achmud, picking up a large stone, pounded upon it as though he were repaying a grudge which he had cherished against it for centuries. I ventured to remonstrate, suggesting that they might be displeased at so much noise being made. But he answered very coolly—meanwhile continuing the pounding as if his future happiness depended upon making a hole in the door—that he wanted to inform those inside that some visitors wished to call upon them. I said nothing, but doubted seriously whether that would be the impression produced on their minds. Had it been in America, and had I been inside, I should have imagined that it was an election row, or a fire during the reign of the volunteer fire department. But notwithstanding all this, no one appeared, and we moved away disgusted, only to find that we had been at the wrong place, and to be farther informed that Père Ratisbonne was in Paris.

What shall I say of the sacred spots of Jerusalem, which so many abler pens than mine have attempted to describe?—vainly endeavoring to portray the inexpressible emotions that crowd the breast of every Christian as he kneels before them for the first time! Perhaps I can convey to my readers some idea of the feeling which continually pervaded my whole being. It was as if the curtain of the past had been rolled back, placing me face to face with the living actors in that great tragedy of our Redemption eighteen hundred years ago. What contributed in a great measure to this was that we had lived during the winter in an atmosphere of three or four thousand years ago. We had scarcely esteemed it worth while to look at the ruins of the Ptolemys, they seemed so recent after the massive temples of the Rameses and the Ositarsens, and now the beginning of the Christian era appeared but an affair of yesterday. The Adamic and Mosaic dispensations seemed a little old, ’tis true, but the Christian dispensation was yet to us in all the glory of its early morn. I felt, as I crossed the Kedron and read the Holy Gospels seated beneath the olive-trees in the garden of Gethsemane, as if even I had been a personal follower of the Man-God, and in imagination could hear the hosannas of praise as he rode past me on the ass on the way from Bethany. Before this religion had seemed to me more like an intellectual idea. Now I felt that I knew Him as a friend, and my heart beat earnest acquiescence to Father H——’s remark: “Coming from Egypt, Christ appears a modern personage; and the visit to the sacred places of Palestine adds to the intellectual and moral conviction of the truth of Christianity, the feeling and strength of personal friendship with its Author.”

On Sunday Father H—— celebrated Mass at the altar erected on the spot where the Blessed Virgin stood during the Crucifixion. The hole in the rock wherein the sacred cross was planted belongs to the Greeks, and over it they have erected an altar, loaded down, like all their other altars, with tawdry finery.[537] On another occasion I had the happiness to serve Father H——’s Mass on the spot where our Lord was nailed to the cross. But the greatest happiness of all was reserved for the morning we left the Holy City, when madame and I received Holy Communion from the hands of Father H——, who celebrated Mass, which I served, in the Holy Sepulchre itself. Hic Jesus Christus sepultus est. In that little tomb the three of us, who had shared together the pleasures and dangers of a long voyage in Egypt and Nubia—here on the very spot where He was entombed, we alone, in early morn, received his sacred body and blood, giving fresh life and courage to our souls for our future struggles with the world. How much better, instead of incrusting the sepulchre with marble and gems, to have left it as it was, rude and simple as when the Man-God was laid in it! But one sacred spot is left in its primitive state—the grotto of the Agony. A simple altar has been erected in it, and a marble tablet let into the wall with this inscription upon it: “Hic factus est sudor ejus sicut guttæ sanguinis decurrentis in terram.” The walls and roof of the grotto are to-day as they were that terrible night when they witnessed the sweat as drops of blood rolling down his sacred face.

The limits of this article will not permit me to tell how we wandered reverentially along the Via Sacra, or gazed in admiration from Olivet’s summit on Jerusalem the Golden lying at our feet; of our interesting visit to the residence of the Princesse de La Tour d’Auvergne, on the spot where the apostles were taught the Lord’s Prayer, which she has inscribed on the court-yard walls in every written language. I could tell of our visit to the Cœnaculum to the Temple, the tomb of the Blessed Virgin, our walks through the Valley of Jehoshaphat; but these descriptions are so familiar to every Christian that I will content myself with relating more of the personal incidents which befell us than general descriptions of what we saw.

Father H—— and I left Jerusalem on Tuesday morning, and, after riding several hours, camped for the night near the Greek convent of Mars Saba. No woman is allowed to enter this convent, and men only with permission of the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem. We visited the tomb of S. Saba, model of anchorites, and saw in one room the skulls of fourteen thousand of his brethren, most of them massacred by the Bedouins. Rev. Mr. Chambers, of New York, with two young friends, was encamped near us, and we spent a very pleasant evening in their tent. At five o’clock the next morning we were in the saddle, en route for the Dead Sea. We had a Bedouin escort, who was attired in a dilapidated, soiled night-shirt, and was scarcely ever with us, either taking short cuts down the mountain-side—as he was on foot—and getting far in advance of us, or lagging equally as far in the rear. Nevertheless, it was a powerful escort—had we not paid the sheik of the tribe five dollars for it? and did it not represent the force and power of a mighty tribe of Bedouins? In sober earnest, this hatless, shoeless escort was a real protection; for if we had been attacked while he was with us, his tribe, or the sheik of it, would have been forced by the authorities to make good our loss, and, moreover, the attacking tribe would have incurred the enmity of our escort’s tribe—a very serious thing in this part of the world, and among men whose belief is: Whoso[538] sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed. The Bedouins find this way of robbing travellers more profitable than the old-time system of taking their victim’s property vi et armis, for in the latter instance they are liable to be pursued, caught, and punished; while in the former, by exacting a fee from the traveller and furnishing an escort in return, they make considerable money without fear of punishment. While riding along toward the Dead Sea, I frequently dismounted to shoot partridges, and on remounting I took out the cartridges which had not been used, before handing my gun to the escort, who carried it for me. On one occasion, when near the Dead Sea, I had pursued several partridges, but did not get a shot at them, and returning to my horse, held by the escort, I was about to draw out the cartridges when he requested me to let them remain, so that I should not have the trouble of reloading for the next shot. I shook my head with a negative motion, when he replied in an humble tone: “Very well. I am a Bedouin, and of course you cannot trust me.” And then flashed across my mind that terrible curse pronounced upon Ishmael and his descendants: “His hand shall be against every man, and every man’s against him.” Feeling sorry for the poor fellow, I looked him straight in the eye, as though expressing my confidence in him, and handed him the loaded gun. I was alone with him now, as the rest of the party had ridden on a mile or two in advance. But I felt perfectly safe, because he was walking ahead of me, and, had he meditated treachery, I had my revolver in my belt, and could have killed him before he could raise the gun to shoot. However, I presume that he simply wanted to play sportsman himself; for when he returned me the gun, some hours afterwards, both barrels were empty. About ten o’clock we reached the barren shores of the Dead Sea, passing, very close to it, numberless heaps of cinders, indicating a recent Bedouin encampment. We took a long bath in these buoyant waters. I sank as far as my neck, and then walked through the water as though on land. I remained nearly an hour in the water without touching the bottom. It is very difficult to swim, as, when one assumes the swimming position, the legs are thrown half out of the water. These waters, covering the site of Sodom and Gomorrha, are clear as crystal, yet to the taste are bitter as gall. Riding along the plain for a short hour, we entered the luxurious vegetation on the banks of the Jordan, and dismounted near the place where S. John baptized our Lord. Swift-flowing, muddy, turbulent Jordan! shall I ever forget thee or the pleasant swim I had in thy sweet waters? Father H—— and I dozed for about an hour, took a lunch, and then, remounting, rode across the level plain of Jericho, and about five o’clock reached our tent, pitched on the site of ancient Jericho, at the foot of the Mount of Temptation, where Satan would tempt our Lord with the vain, fruitless riches of this world. After dinner we walked a short distance, and sat down on the limb of a tree overhanging the sweet waters of the heaven-healed fountain of Elisha. Surrounded by armed Bedouins, who watched our every motion with eager curiosity, and occasionally in plaintive tones requested backsheesh, we passed a delightful hour recalling the sacred reminiscences connected with the[539] spots around us. Behind us a crumbling ruin marks the site of once proud Jericho—the city to which the warlike Joshua sent the spies from the Moabitish hills beyond the Jordan; the city destroyed by the Israelitish trumpet-blast, and against which the terrible curse was pronounced: “Cursed be the man before the Lord that riseth up, and buildeth this city Jericho: he shall lay the foundation thereof in his first-born, and in his youngest son he shall set up the gates of it”—a curse which was most fearfully fulfilled. Yonder Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind. Far away in the distance the Dead Sea, hemmed in by its mountain banks, lies calm and placid in the dying sunset. At our feet is the broad plain of Jericho, and at our back the mountains of Judæa. How singular it must have seemed to the Israelites when they first saw mountains covered with trees and verdure! In their old Egyptian home they had seen but sand-mountains, the vegetation in no place extending beyond the level ground; and now for the first time after their dreary desert wanderings they saw the vegetation creeping up the mountain-side even to its summit, and thousands of sheep browsing upon it on every hand. Early the next morning we were in the saddle, en route for Jerusalem, and, passing the spot where the good Samaritan ministered to the poor man who had fallen among thieves, we reached Bethany about noon. Procuring some tapers from an old woman, we descended into the tomb from which the voice of his God had called forth the dead Lazarus. A flight of steps leads down some distance into a small chamber, which is to-day in the same condition as when Martha’s brother, arising from the dead, testified to the assembled crowd the power of Jesus of Nazareth. From here we ascended Olivet, and from its summit looked with admiration upon the beautiful panorama spread out beneath us, and lunched under the venerable olive-trees, which perhaps had cast their shade upon the weary form of our Saviour, and had witnessed the glorious miracle of his Ascension. Soon after we reached our convent home.

The Jews in the Holy City are much fairer than their brethren in America. They wear the old-time gabardine, belted at the waist and extending to the ankles; on the head a high black felt hat with broad brim, while two curls hang down the cheek on either side. They are a sorrowful-looking race, fascinating to gaze upon as connected with the great Drama, yet inspiring me at the same time with a feeling of disgust which I could not control. How striking a picture of their degradation and fall from their once proud estate as the chosen ones of God, is shown as they gather on Fridays to their wailing-place; five courses of large bevelled stones being all that remain of Solomon’s grand Temple! Here are Jews of all ages and of both sexes, crying bitterly over fallen Jerusalem. Old men, tottering up, bury their faces in the joints and cavities, and weep aloud as though their hearts were breaking, while in chorus comes the low, plaintive wail of the women. In and among, and around and about them, with shouts of mirth and laughter, play the children of the Arab conquerors. The Jews are permitted to weep here unmolested.

On Sunday afternoon, accompanied by Father Guido, we went to Bethlehem. We passed the[540] night in the Latin convent, and the next morning madame and I received Holy Communion from the hands of Father H——, who celebrated Mass in the Crib of the Nativity, on the spot where the Wise Men stood when adoring the new-born Babe. The very spot where Christ was born is marked by a silver star, with this inscription upon it: “Hic de Virgine Maria Jesus Christus Natus est.” The star belongs to the Latins, but the altar over it to the Greeks, who have several times attempted to carry off the star, but unsuccessfully. They, of course, will not permit the Latins to celebrate Mass upon the altar. The Greeks, being more powerful, are continually harassing and heaping all sorts of indignities upon the Latins, who are obliged to submit to them. Shame upon the Catholic nations of Europe—nations which in bygone times sent forth those noble bands of Crusaders, sacrificing their lives to rescue the holy places from infidel hands! But Easter a year ago they destroyed the valuable hangings in the Holy Crib, presented to the Latins by the French government, and stole two pictures from their altars valued at six thousand dollars apiece. Nay, more than this: they even severely wounded with a sword the Franciscan brother who endeavored to prevent the execution of their nefarious designs. And again the past Easter, but a few days before we were there, witnessed another of these terrible scenes of barbarism and inhumanity. A number of unoffending pilgrims, just returned from their annual Easter visit to the Jordan, were denied entrance by the Greeks to the basilica over the Holy Crib. And when they insisted upon entering the church—which is common property, and in which they had a perfect right to go—and attempted to force their way in, they were arrested by the Turkish governor of Bethlehem—who is in league with the Greeks—under the pretext that they were inciting to riot, and cast into a loathsome dungeon in Jerusalem. But, thanks to the exertions of M. de Lesseps, they were subsequently released.

I rode over to the hill where the shepherds watched their flocks that eventful night when the angels announced to them the “glad tidings of great joy.” In the afternoon we rode across the mountains to Ain-Karim, the birth-place of S. John the Baptist.

The women in this part of the country, but particularly in Bethlehem and its vicinity, carry all their fortunes on their heads. Dressed in the picturesque garb of the Moabitish women, their coins are hung in great numbers from their caps. One young mother, with her babe in her arms, and with her cap almost covered with rows of gold coins, approached me at Ain-Karim, and begged me in a piteous tone for a copper, and appeared delighted when I gave it to her. They would almost sooner starve than part with these coins, in which they take great pride; but I imagine that after they are married their husbands find means of obtaining possession of them, and then they get into general circulation again. We went to see the scene of the Visitation, over which an altar had been erected in the early ages of Christianity, but which had been concealed for centuries, and only accidentally discovered of late by the Latins in renovating their church. Alongside the altar is the impression of a baby in the[541] rock. It is said that when Herod’s soldiers came to the house of S. Elizabeth to execute their master’s murderous commands to massacre the little innocents, the saintly mother pressed her infant against the wall, which opened, received him, and then, closing again, hid him from view; and thus was he saved to grow up a voice crying in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord.” We spent the night in the convent built on the site of the house where was born this “greatest of men.” The next day we returned to Jerusalem, visiting en route the Greek church on the spot where grew the tree from which the sacred cross was made.

Shortly after this we left the Holy City, soon bade farewell to our trusty dragoman, and embarked on the Tibre at Jaffa, bound for Marseilles. Oh! what impressions were made upon me by my short sojourn among those sacred places. How my faith was strengthened, and my love and devotion increased, and how earnestly and often I wished, and still wish, that each and every one I know could see what I have seen and feel as I now feel!

A CHRISTMAS VIGIL.

Exeter Beach was divided into two distinct parts by a line of cliff jutting far out into Exeter Bay. Below the eastern face of the cliff lay the Moore estate, and then came the town; but on the west side was an inlet, backed by dense woods, and bounded on the farther extremity by another wall of rock. This was known as Lonely Cove, and deserved its title. From it one looked straight out to the open sea; no island intervened, nor was anything visible on shore save the two long arms of frowning rock, the circuit of pine coming close to the edge of drift-wood that marked the limit of the tide, and, at the far distance, a solitary house. This had once been occupied by a man who made himself a home apart from every one, and died as lonely as he lived; since then it had been deserted, and was crumbling to decay, and many believed it to be haunted.

Along this beach, about three o’clock one Christmas Eve, Jane Moore was walking. It was a dull afternoon, with a lowering sky, and a chill in the air which foreboded rain rather than snow; but, wrapped in her velvet cloak and furs of costly sable, Jane did not heed the weather.

Her heart was full to overflowing. From the first Christmas that she could remember to the one previous[542] to his death, she had taken that walk with her father every Christmas eve, while he talked with her of the joy of the coming day, sang to her old Christmas carols, and sought to prepare her for a holy as well as a merry feast. He had tried to be father and mother both to his motherless girl, but his heart ached as he watched her self-willed, imperious nature, often only to be curbed by her extreme love for him.

“Be patient, my friend,” the old priest who knew his solicitude used to say. “It is a very noble nature. Through much suffering and failure, it may be, but surely, nevertheless, our Jane will live a grand life yet for the love of God.” And so James Moore strove to believe and hope, till death closed his eyes when his daughter was only thirteen years old.

Heiress of enormous wealth, and of a beauty which had been famous in that county for six generations, loving keenly all that was fair, luxurious, and intellectual, Jane Moore was one of the most brilliant women of her day. Dancing and riding, conversation and music—she threw herself into each pursuit by turn with the same whole-hearted abandon which had ever characterized her. Yet the priest who had baptized her, and who gave her special, prayerful care and direction, laid seemingly little check upon her. Such religious duties as were given her she performed faithfully; she never missed the daily Mass or monthly confession; not a poor cottage in the village in which she was not known and loved, though as yet she only came with smiles and money and cheery words, instead of personal tendance and real self-denial. No ball shortened her prayers, no sport hindered her brief daily meditation. The priest knew that beyond all other desires that soul sought the Lord; beyond all other loves, loved him; and that she strove, though poorly and imperfectly and with daily failure, to subject her will to the higher will of God. To have drawn the curb too tightly then might have been to ruin all; the wise priest waited, and, while he waited, he prayed.

This Christmas Eve on which Jane Moore was speeding along the beach was the last she would ever spend as a merry girl in her old home. As a wife, as a mother, she might come there again, but with Epiphany her girlhood’s days must end. Her heart, once given, had been given wholly, and Henry Everett was worthy of the gift; but the breaking of old ties told sorely upon Jane, who always made her burdens heavier than need be by her constant endeavor to gain her own will and way. Her handsome face looked dark and sallow that afternoon; the thin, quivering nostrils and compressed lips told of a storm in her heart.

“I cannot understand it,” she said aloud. “Why must I go away? Surely it was right to wish to live always in my old home among my father’s people. Why should God let Henry’s father live and live and live to be ninety years old, and he be mean and troublesome? and why should my dear father die young, when I needed him? I cannot bear to go away.”

And then came to her mind words said to her that very day—few words, but strong, out of a wise and loving heart—“God asks something from you this Christmas, in the midst of your joy, which I believe he will ask from you, in joy or sorrow, all your life long until he gets it. He wants the entire surrender[543] of your will. I do not know how he will do it, but I am sure he will never let you alone till he has gained his end. Make it your Christmas prayer that he will teach you that his will is better and sweeter than anything our wills may crave.”

She flew faster along the beach, striving by the very motion to find relief for the swelling of her heart.

“I cannot bear it,” she cried—“to have always to do something I do not want to do! I cannot bear it. Yes, I can, and I will. God help me! But I cannot understand.”

On, on, faster still, sobs choking her, tears blinding her. “I wanted so much to live and die here. God must have known it, and what difference could it make to him?”

“Don’t ye! Don’t ye, Tom! Ye’ve no right. Ye mustn’t, for God’s sake.” The words, in a woman’s shrill voice, as of one weak with fasting or illness, yet strong for the instant with the strength of a great fear or pain, broke in upon Jane’s passion, and, coming to herself, she found that she was close to the Haunted House. Fear was unknown to her; in an instant she stood within the room.

Evidently some tramp, poorer than the poorest, had sought shelter—little better than none, alas!—in the wretched place. A haggard woman was crouching on a pile of sea-weed and drift-wood, holding tightly to something hidden in the ragged clothing huddled about her, striving to keep it—whatever it might be—from the grasp of a desperate, half-starved man who bent over her.

“Gie it to me,” he cried. “I tell ye, Poll, I’ll have it, that I wull, for all ye. And I’ll trample it, and I’ll burn it, that I wull. No more carrying o’ crucifixes for we, and I knows on’t. Gie us bread and butter, say I, and milk for the babby there.”

“Nay, nay, Tom,” the woman pleaded. “It’s Christmas Eve. He’ll send us summat the night, sure. Wait one night, Tom.”

“Christmas! What’s him to we? Wait! Wait till ye starve and freeze to death, lass; but I’ll not do’t. There’s no God nowhere, and no Christmas—it’s all a sham—and there sha’n’t be no crucifixes neither where I bes. Ha! I’s got him now, and I’ll have my own way, lass.”

“Stop, man!” Jane stood close beside him, with flashing eyes and her proud and fearless face. “Give me the crucifix,” she said.

But she met eyes as fearless as her own, which scanned her from head to foot. “And who be you?” he asked.

“Jane Moore,” she answered, with the ring that was always in her voice when she named her father’s honored name.

“And what’s that to me?” the man exclaimed. “Take’s more’n names to save this.” And he shook the crucifix defiantly.

“Your God died on a cross,” Jane answered. “You shall not harm his crucifix.”

“Speak for yourself, miss! Shall not? My wull’s as strong as yours, I’ll warrant. God! There’s no God; else why be ye in velvets and her in rags? That’s why I trample this ’un.”

In another moment the crucifix would have lain beneath his heel; but Jane flung herself on her knees. All pride was gone; tears rained from her eyes; she, who had been used to command and to be obeyed,[544] pleaded like a beggar, with humble yet passionate pleading, at the feet of this beggar and outcast.

“Wait, wait,” she cried. “Oh! hear me. Truly your God was born in a stable and died upon a cross. He loves you, and he was as poor as you.”

“There be no God,” the man reiterated hoarsely. “It’s easy for the likes o’ ye to talk, all warm and full and comfortable.”

Jane wrung her hands. “I cannot explain,” she said, “I cannot understand. But it must be that God knows best. He sent me. Come home with me, and I will give you food and clothes and money.”

“Not I,” cried the man defiantly. “I knows that trick too well, miss. Food and clothes belike, but a jail too. I’ll trust none. Pay me here.”

Jane turned her pocket out. “I have nothing with me,” she said. “Will you not trust me?” But in his hard-set face she read her answer while she spoke.

“Very well,” she continued. “Take a note from me to my steward. He will pay you.”

“Let’s see’t,” was the brief reply. Hastily she wrote a few words in pencil, and he read them aloud.

“Now, miss,” he said, “it’s not safe for me to be about town much ’fore dark, and, what’s more, I won’t trust ye there neither. Here ye’ll bide the night through, if ye means what ye says.”

“O Tom!” the woman exclaimed, breaking silence for the first time since Jane spoke, “’twull be a fearful night for the like o’ she.”

“Let her feel it, then,” he retorted. “Wasn’t her Lord she talks on born in the cold and the gloom to-night, ’cording to you and she, lass? Let her try’t, say I, and see what she’ll believe come morn.”

Like a flash it passed through Jane’s mind that her last midnight Mass among her own people was taken from her; that, knowing her uncertain ways, no one would think of seeking her till it was too late, any more than her steward, well used to her impulses, would dream of questioning a note of hers, no matter who brought it. Yet with the keen pang of disappointment a thrill of sweetness mingled. Was not her Lord indeed born in the cold and the gloom that night? “I am quite willing to wait,” she said quietly.

The man went to the door. “Tide’s nigh full,” he said, “and night’s nigh here. I’ll go my ways. But mark ye, miss, I’ll be waiting t’other side, to see ye don’t follow. Trust me to wait patient, till it’s too dark for ye to come.”

Jane watched him till he had reached the further line of the cliff; then she buried her face in her hands. Space and time seemed as nothing; again, as for years she had been used to do, she strove to place herself in the stable at Bethlehem, and the child-longing rose within her to clasp the Holy Infant in her arms, and warm him at her heart, and clothe him like a prince. And then she remembered what the man had said: “It’s easy for the likes o’ ye to talk, all warm and full and comfortable.”

There are natures still among us that cannot be content unless they lavish the whole box of ointment on the Master’s feet. Jane turned to the heap of sea-weed where the half-frozen woman lay. “Can you rise for a minute?” she asked gently. “I am going to change clothes with you. Yes, I am strong, and can walk about and bear it all; but you will freeze if you lie here.” And putting down the woman’s feeble resistance[545] with a bright, sweet will, Jane had her way.

Half exhausted, her companion sank back upon her poor couch, and soon fell asleep; and when the baby woke, Jane took it from her, lest its pitiful wailing should rouse the mother, to whom had come blessed forgetfulness of her utter inability to feed or soothe it. She wrapped the child in her rags, and walked the room with it for hours that night. It seemed to her that they must freeze to death if she stopped. For a time the wind raged furiously and the rain fell in torrents; no blessed vision came to dispel the darkness of her vigil; no ecstasy to keep the cold from biting her; she felt its sting sharply and painfully the whole night through. The first few hours were the hardest she had ever spent, yet she would not have exchanged them for the sweetest joy this world had ever given her. “My Lord was cold,” she kept saying. “My Lord was cold to-night.”

By and by—it seemed to her that it must be very late—the storm passed over. She went to the door. The clouds were lifting, and far away the sea was glimmering faintly in the last rays of a hidden and setting moon. Below a mass of dark clouds, and just above the softly-lighted sea, shone out a large white star. Across the water, heaving heavily like one who has fallen asleep after violent weeping, and still sobs in slumber, came to her the sound of the clock striking midnight; and then all the chimes rang sweetly, and she knew that the Mass she had longed for had begun.

“I cannot bear it!” she cried; then felt the child stir on her breast, and, gathering it closer to her, she said slowly: “God understands. His way must be best.” And she tried to join in spirit with those in church who greeted the coming of the Lord.

Surely there was some reason for her great disappointment and for her suffering that night. Reason? Was it not enough to be permitted thus to share His first night of deprivation? And presently she began to plan for herself God’s plan—how the man would return, and find her there wet and cold and hungry, and would learn why she had done it, and would never doubt God again. She fancied them all at home with her, employed by her, brought back to a happy, holy life; and she prayed long and earnestly for each.

He did come, as soon as the gray morning twilight broke—came with haste, bade his wife rise, and take her child and follow him. He gave no time for the words Jane wished to speak; but when the woman said that she must return the garments which had kept her warm, and perhaps alive, that night, Jane cried “No, no! It is as if I had kept our Lady warm for once, and carried her Child, not yours.” And she clasped the baby passionately, kissing it again and again.

The man stood doubtful, then tore the rich cloak from his wife’s shoulders, seized the mean one which it had replaced, wrapped her in it, hiding thus the costly attire, that might have caused suspicion, then looked about the room.

He pointed to the woman. “It’s her bit o’ comfort,” he said. “Gie it to her, miss. Plenty ye’s got, I wot. I’ll ne’er harm ’un again.”

There was no more farewell than that; no more promise of better things. In a few minutes they had[546] disappeared among the pines; and cold, suffering, disheartened, Jane made her way homeward. To her truest home first; for bells were ringing for first Mass, and Jane stole into church, and, clad in beggar’s rags beneath her velvet cloak, knelt in real humility to receive her Lord. “I do not understand,” she said to him, sobbing softly. “Nothing that I do succeeds as I like. But, my Jesus, I am sure thy will is best, only I wanted so much to help them for thee. Why was it, my Jesus?”

But the years went by, and though Christmas after Christmas Jane remembered with a pang that great disappointment, her longings and her questions remained unanswered.

And so it was in almost everything. Her life after that strange Christmas Eve was one of constant, heroic, personal service for others, in the love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The brilliant woman was never seen again at ball or hunt, but beside the beds of the sick and suffering she was daily to be found, making the most painful, repulsive cases her special care. And she, who had delighted in daintiest apparel, never wore again after that Christmas morning jewels or costly clothing. “I have tasted once the sweetness of faring like my Lord,” she said impetuously to her husband. “Do not break my heart by making me all warm and full and comfortable again.” And he, whose high soul answered nobly to her own, never tried to hold her back, but followed her eagerly in her earnest following of her Lord.

Yet the self-willed nature cost its owner many sufferings before it learned submission to the divine Master. It pleased God that Jane Everett should live to an advanced and very strong old age, and it also pleased him through all those years to conform her will to his by constant and peculiar trials. The husband whom she loved with an almost idolatrous love was taken from her, without an instant’s warning, by a fearful accident. Her sons, whom she dedicated to God’s holy priesthood, died in their cradles; her daughters grew into the fairest bloom of womanhood, only to become the brides of death. Yet nothing quenched the fire in her eye, and the cry of her heart for years was still its old cry: “O God! I cannot bear it. Yes, I can. God’s will is best. But I cannot understand.”

One Advent the last remaining friend of her youth sent to her, begging her to come with haste to pass with her the last Christmas they could expect to be together on earth; and the brave old woman, though craving to spend the holy season near her darlings’ graves, went forth to face the inclement weather with as stout a heart as in her youth she had sped along Exeter Beach under the threatening sky. In a little village, with no one near who knew her except her servants, Death laid his hand upon her who had desired him for many days.

“This is a serious illness,” the physician said to her. Then, reading rightly the spirit with which he had to deal, he added: “A sickness unto death, madam.”

“Harness the horses, then,” she said, lifting herself, “and let me get to Ewemouth and die there.”

“Send for a priest,” the doctor answered her. “You have no time to lose.”

“It has been always so, father,” Jane said, looking up pitifully into the face of the priest when at last[547] he came. “From the time that I first earnestly gave myself to God, up to this time, he has thwarted me in every way. Sixty years ago this very Christmas Eve he did it. It all comes back to me as hard to bear as then; and all my life has been like that.” And slowly and with pauses Jane told the story of her night at Lonely Cove.

“It has always been so, father. Whenever I have loved any one or tried to help any one, I have failed or they have left me.”

“My daughter,” the priest replied, “God’s work in a life like yours is far more the subjection of the will than the number of holy actions for others. Be sure that what we think failure is often success in God’s eyes and through his power. He asks one last sacrifice from you. Madam, God has brought you here to add the crowning blessing to your life—the opportunity of a last and entire surrender of your will to his most blessed will. Will you offer to him your whole life, that to you seems so incomplete and marred, judged by your own plans and wishes, saying to him without reserve that you believe, certainly, that his way is far better than yours?”

He held the crucifix before her, and suddenly the long years seemed to vanish like a dream, and she felt once more the biting cold in the haunted house at Lonely Cove, and again a child nestled upon her heart, bringing with it the thought of the manger-bed, and the question, Why should so much suffering be? And from that manger her thoughts returned to the hard couch of the cross; and to all that mystery of suffering came the mysterious answer, “Not my will, but thine, be done.”

She took and kissed the offered crucifix. “Yes, father,” she said meekly. “May the most just, most high, and most amiable will of God be done, praised, and eternally exalted in all things. I had rather die here, O my God! since it is thy blessed will, than in any other place on earth.”

But when the last sacraments had been administered, and Jane lay calm and patient now, waiting her release, the priest drew near to her, and looked with a great reverence upon her face.

“My daughter,” he said “it is at times the will of God to show us even here the use of some part at least of what he has let us do for him. Be sure his Sacred Heart remembers all the rest as well. Sixty years ago this Christmas Eve my father was saved from a great sin, my mother and I from death, by a Christian woman’s love for her Lord. The first confession I ever heard was my own father’s last. He told me that from the time he saw that rich young girl in rags endure the biting cold for God, faith lived in his heart, and would not die. I saw him pass away from earth in penitence and hope. For more than thirty years I have labored among God’s poor as your thank-offering. Madam, my mother by the love of God, God sends you this token that he has worked his own work by means of you all your life long. He sends you this token, because you have given him the thing he most desired of you—your will.”

Jane folded her aged hands humbly. “Not unto us, O Lord!” she said, low and faint, and then a voice as of a son and priest at once spoke clearly, seeing her time had come: “Depart, O Christian soul! in peace.”

THE APOSTOLIC MISSION TO CHILI.
A CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF PIUS IX.

Before entertaining ourselves with an account of the voyage and journeys, from Genoa to Buenos Ayres and across the continent to Valparaiso, of the first pope who has ever been to America, we shall enter into a few details to show the occasion of the apostolic mission which he accompanied in an official capacity.

The great reverses of Spain at the beginning of the present century, and the consequent weakening of the bonds that united her American colonies to their mother-country, besides some other causes silently working since the emancipation of the thirteen British provinces from England, finally led to a Declaration of Independence, which was established after several years of war. But the king to whose government these New-World possessions had been subject for nearly three hundred years refused to recognize the accomplished fact or to enter into diplomatic relations with rebels against his authority.[213]

The Congress of Verona, in 1822, took some notice of these revolted countries; but the European powers did not all agree to receive them into the family of nations by a formal recognition, and it is well known that the views expressed in that assembly gave rise on the part of the President of the United States to a declaration of policy which has been called the Monroe Doctrine.[214] The Holy See, having sublimer interests to deal with, could not act as indifferently in this matter as other governments, which looked only to temporal advantage, and wrangled over old systems of public policy regardless of recent events. By the quixotic obstinacy of Spain the South American republics suffered much inconvenience, particularly in point of religion, because Rome could not provide for their spiritual wants without risking an open rupture with his Catholic Majesty—such were royal pretensions of restricting the exercise of papal rights, even in merely nominal dominions.[215]

During the latter part of Pius VII.’s pontificate the government of Chili sent one of its distinguished[549] citizens, the Archdeacon Don José Cienfuegos, envoy to Rome, with instructions to try to establish direct ecclesiastical relations between the Holy See and Santiago, the capital of his country. He arrived there on August 22, 1822, and was well received, but only in his spiritual capacity. The pope would not recognize him as a political agent. On the 7th of September following the Holy Father addressed a brief to the Bishop of Merida de Maracaybo, in which he expressed himself solicitous for the spiritual necessities of his children in those far-distant parts of America, and intimated his ardent desire to relieve them. A little later he formed a special congregation of six cardinals, presided over by Della Genga, who became his successor as Leo XII.; and after mature deliberation on the religious affairs in the ex-viceroyalties of Spain, it was determined to send a mission to Chili, that country being chosen for the honor as having made the first advances. This measure so displeased the Spanish government that the nuncio Monsignor—afterwards Cardinal—Giustiniani was dismissed; and although he was soon after permitted to return, the wound inflicted upon him left its sting behind, for, coming very near to the number of votes requisite to election in the conclave after Pius VIII.’s death, the court of Madrid barred his fortune by the exercise of that odious privilege called the Esclusiva; the ground of his exclusion from the Papacy being supposed at Rome to have been his participation in the appointment of bishops to South America. The right (?) of veto expires with its exercise once in each conclave; and Cardinal Cappellari (Gregory XVI.), who, as we shall see, had the most to do with these episcopal nominations, was elected pope.

The choice of a vicar-apostolic for the Chilian mission fell upon Prof. Ostini (later nuncio to Brazil and a cardinal), who, after having accepted the position, saw fit suddenly to decline it for reasons best known to himself. In his stead Don Giovanni Muzi, then attached to the nunciature at Vienna, was selected, and, having been recalled to Rome, was consecrated Archbishop of Philippi in partibus infidelium,[216] with orders to proceed immediately to Santiago. The mission, of which we shall speak more particularly hereafter, embarked on October 4, 1823, and reached Rome on its return the 7th of July, 1825.

Leo XII. succeeded Pius VII. In 1824 the republic of Colombia sent Don Ignacio Texada to Rome with an application for bishops and apostolic vicars in that immense region; but the Spanish ambassador, Chevalier Vargas, a haughty diplomate, brimful of Españolismo, went to the pope and demanded his dismissal. This was refused. The envoy had come for spiritual interests, not on political grounds; and the Spaniard could not convince Leo that the rebel’s argument—by which he asked no more than that species of indirect recognition granted by the Holy See, under Innocent X. and Alexander VII., to the house of Braganza when it forced Portugal from under Spanish rule—was not a good one and founded on precedent. Nevertheless, Texada returned to Bologna, and finally withdrew altogether from the Papal States. He had some fine qualities, but lacked discretion in speech, which was a fault[550] very injurious to his position. Harpocrates is still the great god of diplomacy the world over. This state of things was embarrassing. Spain had refused to recognize the independence of her many provinces in the New World, although she had ceased practically even to disturb them. The king, who was somewhat of a Marquis de Carabas, claimed all his old rights over them, and, among them, that of episcopal presentation. Cardinal Wiseman, who was an attentive observer of these times, remarks—very properly, we think—that even if such a power could be still called legal, “it would have been quite unreasonable to expect that the free republics would acknowledge the jurisdiction of the country which declared itself at war with them.” This was a clear case in which allegiance should follow protection. After a prudent delay, Leo thought it his duty to represent energetically to the Spanish government the inconvenience he suffered from the existing state of affairs, and the impossibility of his viewing with indifference a condition in which the faithful, long deprived of pastors, were urgently asking for bishops for the vacant sees. Yet His Holiness had taken no decisive step, but called upon his majesty either to reduce his transatlantic subjects to obedience or to leave him free to provide as best he could for the necessities of the church. In the consistory of May 21, 1827, the pope, after protesting that he could not any longer in conscience delay his duty to Spanish America, proceeded to nominate bishops for more than six dioceses in those parts. Madrid was, of course, displeased, although it was twelve years since the government had lost even the shadow of authority there, and at first refused to receive the new nuncio, Tiberi.[217] At this juncture Pedro Gomez de Labrador was sent from Spain expressly to defeat the measure; but although “acknowledged by all parties, and especially by the diplomatic body in Rome, to be one of the most able and accomplished statesmen in Europe, yet he could not carry his point” against the quiet and monk-like Cardinal Cappellari, who was deputed by the pope to meet him. In the allocution pronounced by Labbrador before the Sacred College, assembled in conclave to elect a successor to Leo, he made an allusion to the ever-recurring subject of the revolted Americans; but although done with tact, it grated on the ears of many as too persistently and, under the circumstances, unreasonably put forward.

The discussion between the courts of Rome and Madrid was not renewed during the brief pontificate of Pius VIII.; but in the encyclical letter announcing his election there is a delicate reference to the affair which, although not expressly named, will be perceived by those who are acquainted with the questions of that day. Comte de Maistre says somewhere that if a parish be left without a priest for thirty years, the people will worship—the pigs; and although the absence of a bishop from his diocese for such a length of time might not induce a similar result, yet the faithful would drop, perhaps, into a Presbyterian form of church government and be[551] lost. The veteran statesman Cardinal Consalvi evidently thought so, as we see by the fourth point, which treats of Spanish America, in the conference that he was invited to hold with Leo XII. on the most important interests of the Holy See.[218] When, therefore, Gregory XVI.—who, as Cardinal Cappellari; had not been a stranger to the long dispute—became pope, he ended the matter promptly and for ever. In his first consistory, held in February, 1831, he filled a number of vacant sees and erected new ones where required in South America. On the 31st of August following he published the apostolic constitution “Solicitudo Ecclesiarum,” in which he explained the reasons why the Holy See, in order to be able to govern the universal church, whose interests are paramount to all local disputes, recognizes de facto governments, without intending by this to confer a new right, detract from any legitimate claim, or decide upon de jure questions. The republics of New Granada [219] (1835), Ecuador (1838), and Chili (1840) were subsequently recognized with all the solemnities of international law.

In the last-named country there were two episcopal sees during the Spanish dominion. These were Santiago and Concepcion, both subject to the Metropolitan of Lima; but Gregory rearranged the Chilian episcopate, making the first see an archbishopric, with Concepcion, La Serena, and San Carlos de Ancud (in the island of Chiloe) for suffragan sees.

At the time that the apostolic mission to South America was determined upon, there was living in Rome a young ecclesiastic as yet “to fortune and to fame unknown,” but who was destined to become the first pope who has ever been across the Atlantic, and the foremost man of the XIXth century. This was Don Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti, one of the fourteen canons of the collegiate church of Santa Maria in Via Lata. He was selected by Pius VII. to accompany Mgr. Muzi as adjunct. The secretary of the apostolic delegation was a priest named Giuseppe Sallusti, who wrote a full narrative of the expedition, in which, as Cardinal Wiseman says, “The minutest details are related with the good-humored garrulity of a new traveller, who to habits of business and practical acquaintance with graver matters unites, as is common in the South, a dash of comic humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous, and withal a charming simplicity and freshness of mind, which render the book amusing as well as instructive, in spite of its heavy quotations from that lightest of poets, Metastasio.”[220] It is in 4 vols. 8vo, with a map. Comparatively only a small portion of the work is taken up with the actual voyages and travels of the party, the rest being devoted to the preliminaries or causes of the mission, to a description of Chili, and an account of the many missionary establishments which had once flourished, as well as of those that[552] were still maintained, there. A fifth volume was promised by the author to contain the documents, official acts, and results of the mission; but we believe that it was never published. The vicar-apostolic having received, at the earnest solicitation of a learned ecclesiastic from the Argentine Confederation, Rev. Dr. Pacheco, very ample faculties not only for the country to which he was more immediately accredited, but also for Buenos Ayres, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, and all other parts of the ex-Spanish dominions, and accompanied by the envoy Cienfuegos and Father Raymond Arce, a young Dominican belonging to Santiago, the party left Rome for Bologna, where it rested awhile to get a foretaste of the magnificent scenes in the New World from Father T. de Molina, who had long resided in Chili. The next stage in the journey was to Genoa, the port of embarkation, which was reached only on the 17th of July; but, “by a series of almost ludicrous delays,” the expedition was detained until after the death of Pius VII. and the election of his successor, Leo XII., who confirmed the mission and addressed a brief to the president [221] of the Chilian Republic, recommending its objects and the welfare of its members.

All matters being now satisfactorily arranged, the party got on board the fine French-built brig Eloysa on the 11th of October, 1823. The vessel sailed under Sardinian colors, and was manned by a crew of thirty-four men, and officered by experienced sailors, the captain, Anthony Copello, having several times navigated the South Atlantic. The weather was very rough, as usual, in the Gulf of Lyons; “and gurly grew the sea,” to the dismay and discomfiture of the terrified landsmen, “Mastai,” as Sallusti familiarly calls his companion, suffering horribly from sickness. This was but the beginning of many trials, and even some serious dangers, amidst which we can well imagine that the captain would have been glad beyond measure if any one had hinted at the very special Providence that guarded his ship, by quoting the famous words, “Quid times? Cæsarem vehis et fortunam ejus!” Soon the Eloysa approached the coast of Catalonia, down which she sailed at the rate of ten knots an hour, until struck by a furious southwest hurricane, the libeccio so much dreaded in the Mediterranean, which threatened destruction to all and everything in its course. To a landsman like Sallusti the storms encountered on this voyage would naturally appear worse than they really were, and his frequent account of “waves mountain-high” and “imminent shipwreck” would perhaps sound like “yarns” to an old tar. He delights in describing the Eloysa as

and everywhere shows himself, like a good inland abbate, dreadfully afraid of salt water. Capt. Copello would fain have put into Valencia for shelter; but it was feared that the Spanish authorities might detain his ship, or at least disembark the passengers, and it was determined rather to brave the elements[553] than to trust themselves within gunshot of a Spanish harbor. These bold resolutions, however, did not appease the fury of the wind, and it finally came to deciding between a watery grave and a stony prison; the decision was quickly taken, and Palma, in the island of Majorca, was fetched in safety. The mission party was very inhospitably treated here; and Mgr. Muzi and Canon Mastai were ordered to come on shore at once and give an account of themselves. As soon as they had put foot on land, the two distinguished ecclesiastics were thrust into a cold and filthy Lazaretto, on plea of sanitary regulations, but really out of spite for their character and destination. Their papers were seized, and measures instantly taken to bring them to trial; and there was even talk of sending them to an African fortress where political prisoners were confined. When Sallusti heard of this Balearic treatment, he summoned all his Italian courage, and, going on shore, declared to the cocked-hatted officials that he would share the fate of his companions; but instead of admiring this prodigality of a great soul (Hor. Od. i. 12, 38), those unclassical islanders simply swore round oaths and turned him in with the rest. This was fortunate in one sense; for we would otherwise have missed a good description of the examination of the three Italians before the magistrates, who behaved rudely; the alcade, in his quality of judge, putting on more airs than a Roman proconsul.[222] Further outrages were threatened, but the intervention of the Sardinian consul and of the Bishop of Palma finally convinced those proud men of the exclusively religious mission of their victims. In view of subsequent events in Italy, it seems strange that the future pope should have been saved from further indignities, and perhaps from a dungeon, by an agent of the Piedmontese government; yet so it was. The Italians were permitted to return to the ship, but a demand was made to deliver up the two Chilians as rebellious Spanish subjects. This was promptly refused; but notwithstanding a great deal of blustering and many threats, the case was allowed to drop, and the Eloysa sailed away after several days’ detention. Gibraltar was passed on the 28th of October, and a severe storm having tossed the brig about unmercifully on her entry into the Atlantic, the peak of Teneriffe loomed up on November 4.

After leaving the Canary Islands, the Eloysa was hailed one dark night by a shot across her bows, which came from a Colombian privateer, and quickly brought her to. She was quickly boarded, and a gruff voice demanded her papers and to have the crew and passengers mustered on deck. Sallusti was in mortal dread, and, to judge from his description of the scene, he must have been quaking with fear; but Don Giovanni Mastai behaved with that calmness and dignity which even then began to be remarked in him, in whatever circumstances he found himself. After some delay, the brig was allowed to proceed; nothing being taken off but a bottle of good Malaga wine—which, however, was rather accepted than stolen by the rover of the seas.

After a time the Cape Verd Islands appeared in all their richness;[554] and on the 27th of the month the line was crossed amidst the usual riot of sailors, and with the payment of a generous ransom by the clergy. On December 8 the Eloysa lay becalmed alongside of a slaver crowded with poor Africans on their way to Brazil. Sallusti complains about this time of bad water and short rations, and mentions with particular disgust that the fare generally consisted of potatoes and lean chickens. On the 22d a man fell overboard in a dreadful gale, and was rescued with difficulty. Christmas was celebrated as well as circumstances permitted; and a neat little oratory having been fitted up in the main cabin, midnight Mass was said by the archbishop, the second Mass by Canon Mastai, and the third by Friar Arce. On the 27th of December, S. John’s Day, and the patronal feast of the canon, the welcome cry of “Land ho!” was heard from the look-out at the mast-head about three P.M., and the crew and passengers united upon deck to return fervent thanks to Almighty God. The land sighted was a small desert island, a little north of Cape Santa Maria, off the coast of Uruguay. A fearful storm was encountered the next evening at the mouth of the La Plata. This was one of those southwestern gales, called Pamperos, which frequently blow with inconceivable fury, causing singular fluctuations in the depth of the wide mouth of the river. It raged so that the captain was obliged to cut his cable and abandon the shelter of Flores Island, which he had sought when it began, and to take to the open sea again. With better weather he returned and dropped anchor opposite Montevideo on the evening of January 1, 1824. Sallusti goes into raptures over the beautiful aspect of the city, as seen from the bay; its broad and regular streets, its stately houses built on a gentle elevation, its fine cathedral, the strains of music borne over the water—everything enchanted the travellers, weary of a three months’ voyage.

As soon as the news got abroad of a delegation from the pope, the whole city was in a joyful commotion, and a deputation, consisting of the cathedral chapter, four other secular priests, and two Dominican fathers, came to the ship to pay their respects to Mgr. Muzi, who was also invited on shore and pressed with every offer of assistance by the most honorable representatives of the laity. These kind attentions could not induce the party to land; and as soon as damages were repaired and a pilot received, sail was made for Buenos Ayres, which was sighted at two P.M. of January 5; but just while the passengers were all on deck watching the approaches to the city, they were assailed and driven below by myriads of mosquitoes. Sallusti is very vehement against these sharp little insects, and bewails the lot of those who must live among them; but he carefully avoids a comparison with the fleas of his native Italy. Although the passengers remained on board that night, crowds of people lined the shore, and, after salutes of artillery, greeted them with cries of “Long live the vicar apostolic!” “Cheers for America!” “Success to Chili!”[555] On the following day the captain of the port and his suite came off to the brig, bringing a courteous note from the governor, offering a public reception (for which preparations had already been made) and the hospitalities of the city to the members of the mission. This was declined, for reasons that are not very clear; but although the archbishop gave his bad health as the principal excuse, we suspect that Cienfuegos impressed upon the Italians that, the mission being directed to his country, it were uncourtly to parade it before reaching its destination. By their minds such a view would be accepted as assai diplomatico. When the party did land, they put up at a hotel called “The Three Kings,” kept by a jolly Englishman, who treated them right royally—and made them pay in proportion. During their twelve days’ stay in Buenos Ayres, the archbishop and his suite received every mark of reverence from the people; yet the officials maintained a cold reserve since the refusal to accept their invitation. Even the ecclesiastical authority—such as it was—put on very bad airs; Zavaletta, a simple priest, but administrator of the diocese, having the audacity to withdraw from Mgr. Muzi permission, which had been previously granted to give confirmation. At the time of the arrival of the apostolic mission the provinces of the Rio de la Plata, which had formed part of the Spanish viceroyalty of Buenos Ayres, had been united from 1816 to 1820, but were now in a state of political isolation, somewhat like that of the States of the American Union before the federal Constitution was adopted. Soon after the arrival of the mission, another General Congress was called. Still, the Italians were not impressed—as it was important that they should be to obtain proper consideration at Rome,—with the idea of a strong government holding sway over a vast and wealthy territory. On the 16th of January, at nine o’clock in the forenoon, the party began the journey across the continent. Three great covered wagons, each drawn by four horses and guided by twelve postilions, composed the train; while a courier went ahead to hunt up quarters, and a mounted orderly, with a very long sword and a fierce-looking beard, brought up the rear or pranced about the flanks of the line. The drivers kept around in no particular order, sonorously cracking their whips and uttering loud sounds which probably were not oaths to the unaccustomed ears of Sallusti. Besides the three Italians, there was Cienfuegos with four young Chilians in his company and two servants, so that the whole party was pretty numerous, and the more so when, a little further on, six gallant guachos were added as an escort. Only fifteen miles were made the first day, which brought the party to Moron, where confirmation was given. At a miserable rancho called Lujan the archbishop said his first Mass on the pampas at a rich altar improvised for him by the padre of the place, and surmounted by four massive silver candlesticks. The room was hung round with rich damask hangings. It was like a jewel in a dung-heap. The Arecife stream was crossed in boats by the travellers, but forded by the wagons and horsemen. The superb Parana River was reached at San Pedro; and thence the route lay through a rich and beautiful country to the important town of Rosario, on the high, precipitous banks of the great river. At the outskirts of this place the party was met by the parish priest; and confirmation was administered the next day to an immense number of the faithful, long deprived of this sacrament. From Rosario, which they left on the morning of the 23d, the journey was long, weary, and dangerous, on account of the roving bands of Indians which at that period scoured the plains in all directions to cut off herdsmen and small parties of travellers or traders, making a booty of their baggage, killing the men, and carrying women and children into captivity. At a little station called Orqueta the party caught sight for the first time of a wild Indian, who was lurking about the place in a very suspicious manner, but kept at a respectful distance from the guachos. When Sallusti saw this man apparently spying out the route and strength of the party, the marrow nearly froze in his bones; and he certainly had good cause for alarm. It happened that leaving Buenos Ayres a few days earlier than had been given out was lucky; for a large band of these mounted savages, armed with lances and lassos, had got wind of the arrival of great personages from Europe, carrying (it was reported) an immense amount of treasure to the Pacific coast, and had formed a plan to attack them, which was defeated only by mistaking the day of their departure, whereby their arrival at the lonely and ill-famed post of Desmochados was miscalculated. Three days after the mission party had passed, the Indians, to the number of about three hundred, swooped down upon the place, but, instead of finding the rich foreigners, they surrounded only a miserable set of twenty peons escorting a lot of goods across the plains. These were all massacred except one, who, although badly wounded and left for dead,[556] survived to tell the story and describe the fiendish disappointment of the savages at not capturing the prey they expected. At Frayle Muerto Mgr. Muzi received, through the agency of Cienfuegos, a polite message from the clergy of Cordova;[224] but having sent his return compliments directly instead of through the channel of original communication, the Chilian thought himself slighted, and separated from the mission party, preceding it a good distance, and taking with him, besides his own attendants, the orderly in brilliant uniform, who, the Europeans had the mortification of seeing, was meant to distinguish the native, although a subordinate in clerical rank. Such is human nature, whether at courts or on a dusty plain.

After passing through several small settlements and the more important town of San Luis—being everywhere well received—the fine old city of Mendoza was reached on the 15th of February. It seemed as if the entire population had turned out to honor the distinguished arrivals. Triumphal arches were erected, troops were drawn up under arms, processions of citizens and clergy marshalled; from every house richly-colored tapestry was suspended, while the balconies were filled with ladies, who threw down flowers in the path of the apostolic vicar as he entered the town and proceeded to the house of a noble and wealthy lady, Doña Emmanuela Corbalan, in which everything had been prepared on the grandest scale of provincial magnificence, and where Cienfuegos, in all his glory and recovered temper, was waiting to receive him and Canon (Count) Mastai, who were to be lodged there during their stay; the secretary, Sallusti, being handed over to a less worshipful host. Religious and civic festivals, excursions in the environs to the vineyards, gardens, farms, and silver-mines, with other congenial occupations, detained the party very agreeably during nine days in this neat and pleasant town, the climate of which is noted for its salubrity. On the 24th they left Mendoza, and had a delightful trip on horseback over good roads and through a civilized country for seventy-five miles to the foot of the mighty Andes. They were now on the eastern range of the Cordilleras, at the Paramilla Mountains, which are about ten thousand feet high and partly covered with wood. Between these and the western range they traversed, near thirty-two degrees south latitude, a wide valley, sterile and impregnated with salt, for over forty miles, called the Uspallata. For fifteen miles the road was level, and the remainder winding up and down the hills which skirt both ranges. After crossing this valley, they struck the great range of the Andes, which is between fifty and sixty miles in width, consisting of four or five parallel masses of rock, divided from one another by deep and dangerous ravines and sombre glens. The road which leads over them is called the Cumbre (summit) Pass, and attains an elevation of twelve thousand four hundred and fifty-four feet above the level of the sea. Our travellers crossed on mules by this road, getting to the north of them, amidst piles of perpetual[557] snow, a magnificent view of the grand volcano of Aconcagua, which is nearly twenty-four thousand feet high. The passage of the mountains was grand and impressive, but was not made without danger to the lives of some of the party, particularly on the 29th of February. From La Cumbre there is a gradual descent to the city of Santiago. On the 1st of March the travellers cast their admiring gaze upon the Pacific slope, which, from that day until they entered the capital of Chili, on the 6th of the month—passing through Villa-de-Santa-Rosa and over the magnificent plains of Chacabuco—was a continually shifting panorama of natural beauty, enhanced by villages, convents, and churches perched on the side of verdant hills or nestling in the fruitful valleys. At every halting-place their hearts were filled with a holy joy to witness the demonstrations of faith among the people, and of loyalty to their great spiritual chief on earth, represented by Mgr. Muzi. The party entered Santiago, as was said, on the 6th, and, going to the cathedral, the archbishop intoned pontifically the Te Deum, with the assistance of a future pope and of the historian of the apostolic mission. The members of the legation were lodged in a house near the Cappucinas; and although we know little of the occupations of Canon Mastai in Chili, it is certain that he made himself personally very agreeable. How could it be otherwise?

We have been told by a distinguished Chilian that Canonico Mastai was a frequent guest in Santiago at the house of his uncle, Don Francisco[558] Ruiz Tagle, and used to go out with him quite often to his country-seat. Although the mission was received with an almost universal outburst of enthusiasm, and notwithstanding the majority of the clergy and people was well disposed, it met with considerable opposition from a fierce and fanatical party of Freemasons, which threw every obstacle in the way of close relations with Rome. Cardinal Wiseman says, in the article in the Dublin Review from which we have already quoted, that “there was jealousy and bad faith on the part of the Chilian government, and want of tact and bad management, we fear on the part of the head of the mission.” Unfortunately, the government was in a transition state between the presidency of O’Higgins and the election of his successor, Freire, and administered by a Junta. Where there were so many voices there was much confusion. Cienfuegos, however, seems to have done his duty, and he was rewarded in 1832 by the bishopric of Concepcion, which had been vacant for fourteen years. He died in 1839. With regard to the causes of the failure of the mission, we will not conceal what we have heard from an excellent senator of Chili, although we mention it reservedly—that one, at least, of the reasons was a suspicion that Muzi intended to put Italians in the sees vacant or to be erected in Chili.

From Santiago Mgr. Muzi and his party went to Valparaiso, and embarked for their return voyage on the 30th of October, 1824. The remarks of the celebrated Spaniard Balmes upon the visit of the future pope to the New World find their place here: “There is certainly in nature’s grand scenes an influence which expands and nerves the soul; and when these are united to the contemplation of different races, varied in civilization and manners, the mind acquires a largeness of sentiment most favorable to the development of the understanding and the heart, widening the sphere of thought and ennobling the affections. On this account it is pleasing, above all things, to see the youthful missionary, destined to occupy the chair of S. Peter, traverse the vast ocean; admire the magnificent rivers and superb chains of mountains in America; travel through those forests and plains where a rich and fertile soil, left to itself, displays with ostentatious luxury its inborn treasures by the abundance, variety, and beauty of its productions, animate and inanimate; run risks among savages, sleep in wretched hovels or on the open plain, and pass the night beneath that brilliant canopy which astonishes the traveller in the southern hemisphere. Providence, which destined the young Mastai-Ferretti to reign over a people and to govern the universal church, led him by the hand to visit various nations, and to contemplate the marvels of nature.”[225]

A remote but very providential consequence of the visit of Pius IX. to America, during his early career, was the establishment of the South American College at Rome, called officially in Italian the Pio-Latino Americano,[226] which educates aspirants to the priesthood from Brazil and all parts of the American continent where the Spanish language is spoken. A wealthy, intelligent, and influential Chilian priest, Don[559] Ignacio Eyzaguirre,[227] who had been vice-president of the House of Representatives in 1848, and was an author of repute, was charged by Pius IX. in 1856 to visit the dioceses of South and Central America and Mexico, to obtain the views of the several bishops upon the necessity of founding an ecclesiastical seminary at Rome. The project was universally acceptable, and funds having been provided—the Holy Father giving liberally from his private purse—a beginning was made in 1858, when a part of the Theatine Convent of San Andrea della Valle was given up to the students, who were put under the direction of Jesuit Fathers. This location was only temporary; and the college was soon transferred to the large house of the general of the Dominicans, attached to the convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, and facing the piazza. However, it has been moved again, and in 1869 occupied the right wing of the novitiate at San Andrea on the Quirinal, with fifty-five inmates. As if this worthy establishment had to figure in its shifting fortune the unsettled state of so many of the Spanish American countries, it has again been disturbed; yet to suffer at the hands of Victor Emanuel and his sacrilegious band is the indication of a good cause, and will prepare to meet other, although hardly worse, enemies in the New World.

FREE WILL.

NELLIE’S DREAM ON CHRISTMAS EVE.

They had quarrelled, these two—it matters not about what trifle—till the hot, bitter words seemed to have formed an impassable barrier and a silence fell between them that the lowering brow and compressed lip told would not be easily broken. Both had loving hearts, and treasured each other above all earthly things. They had real sorrows enough to make imaginary ones glance off lightly; for the second Christmas had not yet cast its snows on their mother’s grave. The thought of each was, “Had she been here, this would not have happened”; but pride was strong, and the relenting thoughts were hidden behind a cold exterior.

It was the week before Christmas, and Laura, the eldest, was assisting to trim the village church, and in the Holy Presence the dark thought faded and tender memories seemed to reassert their olden sway; and on returning from her occupation she formed the resolution to stop this folly, and make advances towards assuming the old, happy life.

“Father Black asked after you, Nell,” she said, as she laid aside her wrappings, and turned cheerily to the fire. “He wants you to play during the rehearsal of the new Benediction to-morrow; for Prof. C—— will be away.” But she was met by a stony look and closed lips. “Come, Nell,” she said half impatiently, “don’t be so dignified; why do you love that temper of yours so dearly?”

“You said let there be silence between us, and I am content,” was the rejoinder. “I shall take care not to trouble you in future.”

Pride and love struggled for mastery in the heart of the eldest, and it was a mingling of both that brought the answer, in tones cold enough to freeze the tenderness of the words: “There will come a silence between us one day, Nell, you will be glad to break.” And she passed from the room.

“Let it come,” was the almost insolent reply; but there was a mist in the flashing black eyes that contradicted the words.

They passed the day apart from each other, and at night, although kneeling for prayer in the same little oratory, and occupying the same little white-draped chamber, the chilling silence remained. So passed the next day, and it was now Christmas Eve. The evergreens were all hung in the village church; the altar was radiant with flowers and tapers; the confessionals were thronged; but both sisters kept aloof, and both hearts were aching over the pride and anger that was strangling even religion in their souls. Alas! alas! how the angels must have mourned to see days of such especial grace passing in sin. Christmas gifts had been prepared, but neither would present them. How different other Christmas Eves had been!—the gentle mother overseeing every preparation for the next day, that was always celebrated as a feast of joy. Those busy hands were idle now, and the white snow[561] was coldly drifting over the mound that loving hearts would fain have kept in perpetual summer. A mother’s grave! Except to those who have knelt beside that mound—that seems such a slight barrier between the aching heart and its treasure, and yet is such a hopeless, inexorable one—these words have little meaning.

They retired early, and, as Nell knelt for prayer, the hot tears rolled through her fingers as she thought of other Christmas mornings, when they had been awakened for early Mass by the “Merry Christmas! girls,” that earth would never, never hear again. But the icy bands of pride that had frozen around her heart would not melt, and sleep came again in that stony stillness.

Morning came to Nellie’s perturbed visions, and in the gray dawn “Merry Christmas” broke forth from her lips; but the memory of the past few days checked the words, and they died in whispers. But as she glanced at Laura, she saw that her eyes were open, but that their expression was fixed and rigid. She sprang up with a vague alarm, and laid her hand upon the low, broad forehead. It was icy cold. Shriek after shriek rang from her lips, but they reached not the death-dulled ear.

“I never meant it, Laura—I never meant it! Only come back that I may speak one word!” she moaned. “O my God! give her back to me for one hour, and I will submit to thy will.” But her voice only broke the silence, and the white, smiling lips on the bed seemed a mockery of the passionate anguish wailing above them. She threw herself before the little altar in her room. “Blessed Mother!” she prayed, “I promise, solemnly promise, that never, never again will I give way to the passionate temper that has been my bane, if she may only come back for one hour to grant forgiveness for the awful words I have spoken.” And for the first time since she had realized her sorrow tears fell from her eyes.

“Why, Nellie, Nellie, what ails you?” said a familiar voice. “You are crying in your sleep on this merry Christmas morning; do waken.” And, oh! the heaven that met those unclosing eyes—Laura bending over her, smiling, yet with a look of doubt in her face as if the icy barrier had not yet broken down.

“O my darling, my darling!” sobbed the excited girl, winding her arms around her sister. “Thank God it is only a dream; but never, never again will I give way to my awful temper. I have promised it, Laura, and I will keep my vow.”

And she did. For though she lived long enough for the dark hair to lie like snowy floss under the matron’s cap, never did those lips utter stinging sarcasm or close in sullen anger. And often, when her gentle voice seemed unable to stem some furious tide of passion among her grandchildren, would she tell the story of her dream on Christmas Eve.

ALLEGRI’S MISERERE.

AT the base of a cliff flowed a tiny rivulet; the rock caught the rain-drops in his broad hand, and poured them down in little streams to meet their brothers at his feet, while the brook murmured a constant song of welcome. But a stone broke from the cliff, and, falling across the rivulet, threatened to cut its tender thread of life.

“My little strength is useless,” moaned the streamlet. “Vainly I struggle to move onward; and below the pebbles are waiting for their cool bath, the budding flowers are longing for my moisture, the little fish are panting for their breath. A thousand lives depend on mine. Who will aid me? Who will pity me?”

“Wait until Allegri passes; he will pity you,” said the breeze. “Once the cruel malaria seized me, and bound messages of death upon me. ‘Pity!’ I cried. ‘Free me from this burden, from which I cannot flee.’ ‘Hear the wind moan,’ said some; but no one listened to my prayer till I met a dreamy musician with God’s own tenderness in his deep eyes. ‘Have mercy!’ I sobbed; and the gentle master plucked branches of roses, and cast them to me. I was covered with roses, pierced with roses, filled with roses; their redness entered my veins, and their fragrance filled my breath; roses fell upon my forehead with the sweetness of a benediction. The death I bore fled from me; for nothing evil can exist in the presence of heaven’s fragrance. Cry to the good Allegri, little brooklet; he will pity you.”

So the rivulet waited till the master came, then sighed for mercy. The rock was lifted, and the stream flowed forward with a cry of joy to share its happiness with pebble and flower and fish.

A little bird had become entangled in the meshes of a net. “Trust to the good Allegri,” whispered the breeze; “it is he who gave me liberty.” “Trust to the good Allegri,” rippled the brook; “it is he who gave me liberty.” So the bird waited till the master passed, then begged a share of his universal mercy. The meshes were parted, and the bird flew to the morning sky to tell its joy to the fading stars and rising sun.

“Oh! yes, we all know Allegri,” twinkled the stars. “Many a night we have seen him at the bed of sickness.”

“Many a day I have seen him in the prison,” shouted the sun with the splendor of a Gloria. “Wherever are those that doubt, that mourn, that suffer; wherever are those that cry for help and mercy—there have I found Allegri.”

The people of the earth wondered what made the sun so glorious, not knowing that he borrowed light from the utterance of a good man’s name.

A multitude of Rome’s children had gathered in S. Peter’s. The Pope was kneeling in the sanctuary; princes and merchants were kneeling together under the vast cupola,[563] the poor were kneeling at the threshold; even a leper dared to kneel on the steps without, and was allowed the presence of his Lord. All souls were filled with longing, all hearts were striving for expression.

Then strains of music arose: O soul! cease your longing; O heart! cease your strife; now utterance is found.

Sadder grew the tones, till, like the dashing of waves, came the sigh: “Vainly I struggle to move onward. Have mercy, Father!” The lights flickered and died, a shadow passed over the worshippers, and the Tiber without stopped in its course to listen.

Sadder grew the tones, till the moan was heard: “Vainly I strive to escape these meshes. Have mercy, Father!” The shadow grew deeper, and a little bird without stopped in its flight to listen.

Still was the music sadder with the weight of the sob: “Vainly I flee from this loathsome burden. Have mercy, Father!” Vaster and darker grew the shadow, and the very breeze stopped in its course to listen.

And now the music mingled sigh and moan and sob in one vast despairing cry: “Vainly I struggle against this rock of doubt. Have mercy, Father! Vainly I strive to escape these meshes of sin. Have mercy, Father! Vainly I flee from this evil self. Have mercy, O Father! have mercy.” Darker and deeper and vaster grew the shadow, and all sin in those human hearts stopped in its triumph to listen.

All light was dead, all sound was dead. Was all hope dead? “No!” wept a thousand eyes. “No!” sobbed a thousand voices; for now high above the altar shone forth the promise of light in darkness, of help in tribulation—in sight of Pope and prince, in sight of rich and poor, and even in sight of the leper kneeling without, gleamed the starry figure of the cross.

“How was this Mass of Allegri so completely formed,” cry the three centuries that have passed since then, “that we have been able to add nothing to its perfection?”

The calm voice of nature answers: It is because his own love and mercy were universal; because he had learned that all creation needs the protecting watchfulness of the Maker; because he gave even the weakest creatures voice in his all embracing cry of Miserere.

TO-DAY AND YESTERDAY.

THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1875.

The year 1875 has not been a specially remarkable one as distinct from the years immediately preceding it. Great questions, which affect humanity at large beyond the line of nationality, and which were rife three or four years ago, are undecided still. No wars, or revolutions, or discoveries, or mighty changes have occurred during the year to alter sensibly the current of human affairs. What the world at large quarrelled and wrangled over a year, two years, three, four years ago, it wrangles over still, and may for years yet to come. Much as science and culture have done to break down the barriers that separate men and bring the human family nearer together, nations, nationally considered, stand as far apart as ever they did, and the imaginary line that divides neighboring peoples finds them wide apart as the antipodes.

To begin a rapid and necessarily incomplete review at home, the past year can scarcely be regarded as either a happy or successful one, commercially speaking, in the United States. Preliminary echoes of the Centennial year of the great republic have been heard, but amid them the crash of falling banks that had no legitimate excuse for falling, and of business firms that followed in due order. This, however, is only a repetition of the two preceding years, which it is as painful as it would be useless to dwell upon here. In a word, business at large—instead of recovering, as it was hoped it would, during the past year—if anything, fell behind, and so continues. The election did not tend to enliven it. There are hopes, however, of a real revival during the coming Centennial year, or at least of a beginning on the road of improvement. There is the more reason to hope for this that large branches of our industries, such as cereals, iron, and cotton goods, are beginning to find a good foreign market.

Looked at largely, there are some things on which Americans may congratulate themselves during the year. Chief among these are their very misfortunes. Extravagance in living, foolish and vulgar display in dress and equipage, have disappeared to a satisfactory extent. Of course where wealth abounds and fortunes are rolled up easily, there will be shoddy; but then let it be marked off, and the world will not be the loser. Again, there was a good sign on the part of the people to form opinions of their own regarding the questions up before them and the respective merits and qualifications of the various candidates for election. To be sure, many, too many, persons were elected who were a disgrace to their constituencies; and while such men are set in high and responsible positions it is vain to look for reform in the thousand abuses that afflict the conduct of public affairs. Still, there was a hopeful indication of the right feeling among the people.

Perhaps the most memorable, certainly the most significant, event to Catholics in the history of this country took place during the year. The venerable Archbishop of New York was raised by the Holy Father to the dignity of the cardinalate, and thereby set in the senate of the church of which Christ is the invisible, and the Pope, the successor of Peter, the visible, head. To speak of the fitness of the Holy Father’s choice in selecting Archbishop McCloskey for this high office and proud privilege of being the first American cardinal is not for us. It is sufficient to say that not Catholics alone, but their Protestant fellow-countrymen also, all the land over, received the news and hailed the choice with acclaim. But what moves us most is the significance of the act. In the appointment of an American cardinal in the United States the wish expressed by the Council of Trent has in this instance been realized. That great council ordained, respecting the subjects of the cardinalate, that “the Most Holy Roman Pontiff shall, as far as it can be conveniently done, select (them) out of all the nations of Christendom, as he shall find persons suitable” (Sess. 24, De Ref., c. i.) Were this recommendation completely carried out, it would probably be[566] one of the greatest movements that have taken place in the Catholic Church for the last three centuries.

Suppose, for example, that the great Catholic interests throughout the world were represented in that body by men of intelligence, of known virtue, and large experience; suppose every nationality had there its proportionate expression—a senate thus composed would be the most august assembly that ever was brought together upon earth. It would be the only world’s senate that the world has ever witnessed. This would be giving its proper expression to the note of the universality of the church. The decisions of the Holy Father on the world-interests of the church, assisted by the deliberations of such a body, would have more power to sway the opinions and actions of the world than armies of bayonets. For, whatever may be said to the contrary in favor of needle-guns and rifled cannon, the force of public opinion through such agents as electricity and types moves the world, above all when supported by the intelligence, virtue, and experience of men who have no other interests at heart than those of God and the good of mankind.

Who knows but the time has come to give this universality of the church a fuller expression? Is not divine Providence acting through modern discoveries, rendering it possible for the human race to be not only one family in blood, but even in friendship and unity of purpose? Perhaps the present persecutions of the church in Italy are only relieving her from past geographical and national limitations, to place her more completely in relations with the faithful throughout the world. Who knows but the time is near when the Holy Father will be surrounded by representatives of all nations, tribes, and peoples, from the South as well as from the North, from the East as well as from the West; by Italians, Germans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Englishmen, Belgians, Portuguese, Austrians, Irishmen, Americans, Canadians, South Americans, Australians, as well as by representatives of the faithful from the empire of China? Would this new departure be anything more than the realization of the wish expressed by that great and holy council held at Trent three centuries ago?

In passing from our own to other lands, we cannot do so, at the opening of the second century of our country’s life, without a glance at something larger and wider than the mere local interests of every-day life which touch us most nearly. Beyond doubt there is much to criticise, much, perhaps, to be ashamed of, much to deplore, in the conduct of our government, local and national, and in the social state generally of our people. Still, we see nothing at present existing or threatening that is beyond the remedy of the people itself. It is a fashion among our pessimists to contrast the America of to-day with the America of a hundred years ago. Well, we believe that we can stand the contrast. The country has expanded and developed, and promises so to continue beyond all precedent in the history of this world. When the experiment of a century ago is contrasted with the established fact—the nation—of a free and prosperous people of to-day, we can only bless God. And allowing the widest margin for the evils and shortcomings in our midst, when we glance across the ocean at nations armed to the teeth, looking upon one another as foes, and either rending with internal throes or threatening to be rent, pride in this country deepens, and the heart swells with gratitude that in these days God has raised up a nation where all men may possess their souls in peace.

We have some alarmists among us who look in the near future to the occurrence of scenes in this country similar to those now being transacted in Europe, where men are persecuted for conscience’ sake. We cannot share in these alarms. As we see no evils in our midst which are beyond the remedy of the people, so we see no religious or other questions that may arise which cannot be civilly adjusted. This is not a country where the raw head and bloody bones thrive. The question of religion is decided once for all in the Constitution. Catholics, of course, have a large heritage of misrepresentation to contend against, but that is rapidly diminishing. A Bismarck may strive to introduce into our free country, through a band of fanatics and weak-minded politicians, the persecuting spirit which he has attempted to introduce into England by a Gladstone, which he has succeeded in introducing into Italy by a Minghetti, and into Switzerland by a Carteret; but before they reach the hundredth part[567] of the influence of the disgraceful Know-Nothing party, the good sense and true spirit of our countrymen will, as it did in the case of that party, brand all who have had any prominent connection with the movement with the note of infamy. The fanatical cry of “No Popery” is evidently played out at its fountain-source in old England, while the attempt to revive its echoes will meet with still less success in new England. We see no clouds on the American horizon that should cause Catholics any grave apprehension.

The end of such attempts always is that those who strike the sparks only succeed in burning their fingers. All we have to do is to walk straight along in the path we have been following of common citizenship with those around us, in order to secure for ourselves all the rights which we are ready to concede to others.

The European situation during the past year may be summed up under two headings—the struggle between church and state, and the prospects of war. To enter at any length into the question between church and state in Germany and in other countries in Europe would be going over old ground which has been covered time and again in The Catholic World. Only such features of the contest will be touched upon as may set the present situation clearly before the mind of the reader.

The official Provincial Correspondence, at the opening of the past year, said in a retrospective article on the events of 1874: “The conviction has been forced upon the German government that the German ultramontane party are a revolutionary party, directed by foreigners and relying mainly upon the assistance of foreign powers. The German government, therefore, are under the necessity of deprecating any encouragement of the ultramontane party by foreign powers. It was for this reason that the German government last year thought it incumbent on them to use plain language in addressing the French government upon the sayings and doings of some of the French bishops. France had taken the hint, and had prevented her ultramontanes setting the world on fire merely to vent their spite against Germany.… It was, perhaps, to be expected under these circumstances that, abandoning at last all hope of foreign assistance, the German ultramontanes would make their peace with the government in Prussia, and no longer object to laws they willingly obey in Baden, Bavaria, Würtemberg, and Oldenburg, not to speak of Austria and other states. At all events, it was very desirable that the ultramontanes should yield before the church was thrown into worse confusion by their malicious but impotent resistance.”

Such was the pleasant prospect held out for the Catholics by the official organ at the opening of the year. The programme sketched in it has been faithfully carried out, and Germany has taken another step in the path of freedom, internal peace, and consolidation by planting its foot nearer the throat of the church. It is useless to enter into a refutation of the falsehoods contained in the extract from the official journal. They have been refuted in the German Reichstag and all the world over. It is needless, also, to call attention to the tone of the official journal, and the manner, become a fashion of late with German statesmen and writers at large, of warning foreign powers to keep a civil tongue in their heads respecting German matters, or it may be the worse for them. How far the Catholics have yielded to the kindly invitation held out to them the world has seen. We have before this remarked on the strange anxiety manifested by a government, convinced of the justice of its cause and the means it was pursuing towards its end, to stifle the expression of public opinion, not only at home, but abroad. Moreover, the very fact of its being compelled to deprecate “any encouragement of the ultramontane party by foreign powers” says as plainly as words can say it that those powers see something in the party to encourage.

Here is a sample—one out of hundreds such—of the manner in which the members of the “revolutionary party” have been treated during the year, and of the crimes, sympathy with which on the part of foreign powers is so earnestly deprecated by the German government. That extremely active agent of Prince Bismarck, the Prussian correspondent of the London Times, tells the story of the deposition of the Bishop of Paderborn by the “Ecclesiastical” Court thus: “He has been sentenced to-day (Jan. 6) to innumerable fines, chiefly for appointing clergymen without the consent of the secular[568] authorities. [Is this a crime, reverend and right reverend gentlemen of the Protestant churches?] Never paying any of these forfeits, he has been repeatedly imprisoned and forcibly prevented from exercising his functions. [And now for the perversity of the man, the “malicious but impotent resistance.”] Notwithstanding the measures taken against him, he has continued his opposition to the state. He would not allow his clerical training-schools to be visited by government inspectors; he has declined to reappoint a chaplain he had excommunicated without the consent of the government [What criminals SS. Peter and Paul would be were they living in Germany to-day!]; and he has continually issued pastorals and made speeches to deputations breathing the most hostile sentiments against crown and parliament [sentiments not quoted]. He has received addresses covered with more than one hundred thousand signatures, and on a single day admitted twelve thousand persons to his presence, who had come to condole with him on the martyr’s fate he was undergoing.” Let it be borne in mind that this is not our description, but that of an agent of the Prussian government. Could words establish more clearly the side on which the criminality lies?

Only passing mention can be made of events which have been already anticipated and commented on. The extension of the civil registration of births, deaths, and marriages from Prussia to the whole German Empire passed in January. Perhaps no measure yet has so aroused the indignation, not only of Catholics, but of believing Protestants also. As the correspondent already quoted tersely puts the matter: “In all Germany this law does away with the services of the clergy in celebrating the three great domestic events of life.” That is to say, there is no longer need to baptize Christian children in the name of God; there is no longer need of God in the marriage service; finally, as man comes into the world, so he may go out of it, without the name or the invocation of God, without God’s blessing over his grave or the ceremonies of religion attending the last act. Like a dog he may come, like a dog he may live, like a dog he may go. And yet this is an evangelical power! Verily, but of a strange evangel. The result of it is shown already. Since the Prussian Civil Registration Law was passed, only twenty-five per cent. of all Berlin marriages have been celebrated in churches, while only thirty per cent. of the children born in the capital have been baptized by clergymen.

The passing of the Landsturm Bill converts the whole German Empire into an armed camp. “Henceforth every German sound in wind and limb must be a soldier. From the age of seventeen to forty-two, every man not belonging to the army or the reserve is to be liable to be called out in the case of an actual or even a threatened invasion,” says the London Times. “At the word of command Germany is arming en masse, and the surrounding nations—that is, the best part of the world—cannot but do as she does.” They are doing as she does, and all the European powers to-day sleep beside their arms. In face of this fact, what comfort can men take from the meeting and hobnobbing of the crowned heads of Europe here, there, and everywhere, or of their assurances of peace? Who is strong enough to keep the peace, who too weak to enkindle war? No man and no people. It is this arming and incertitude of one another that alone prevented what locally was so insignificant an affair as the outbreak within the year of the Bosnian insurrection against Turkey from lighting a universal conflagration. The eagles of the great powers gather around the Turkish carcase. England seizes beforehand on the control of the Suez Canal by way of preparing for eventualities, and the Eastern question begins at last to resolve itself into this simple form: not, How shall we uphold the empire? but, How shall we divide the spoils?

The present rulers of Germany profess to look upon their Catholic subjects as the great foes of the German Empire. The mistake is a fatal one; for in binding the church they bind the only power that can stop the dry-rot which is slowly eating into the heart, not alone of Germany, but of all nations to-day. That dry-rot is socialism, the first-born of infidelity. That socialism prevails in Germany the rulers of that empire know, and its utterances are as dreaded as an encyclical of the Pope. Here are the elements of socialism as pictured by the Cologne Gazette at the opening of the year: “In 1874, although the great bubble schemes burst in the summer of 1873, and although[569] last year a plentiful harvest of corn and wine came to our relief, the consequences of the crisis are still felt. Numerous undertakings are depreciated, and even more lamentable than the losses of the promoters are the mischievous results of the sudden excessive rise in wages, which could not possibly last, the luxurious habits, the strikes, and all that these involve on the laboring classes and the whole industrial life of the German nation. Habits of indolence and gluttony have been established which it will be hard to eradicate,” and much more in the same strain.

This is only a straw showing which way the wind blows. Persecution of the church has not yet exhausted itself, though, beyond the actual taking of life, it is hard to see what remains to be done. The final measure has been resorted to of abrogating the articles of the Prussian constitution of 1850, which were specially drawn up to provide freedom of religion and worship in their fullest sense. Of the attitude of the German Catholics, the prelates, the clergy, and the laity, it is needless to speak. The world has witnessed it; and the very fierceness of the persecution simply serves to show forth more gloriously the divinity of the church; for no human institution could live under it. One result of the persecution has been the return of a Catholic majority to the Bavarian Parliament. We hope for the unity of the German Empire, and its true consolidation; but it is not in our hearts to support tyranny, under whatever name, least of all when it attacks all that we hold most sacred. The German policy must be totally altered before it can command the sympathy of freemen. It must be totally altered before it can command the respect and full allegiance of its subjects, so large and important a section of whom are Catholics. The Catholic majority in Bavaria is but one sign of many of opposition to the one-sided policy of which Prince Bismarck is the author and expounder. Who knows but that the threatened dissolution of an empire erected on so false and narrow a basis has not already begun in Bavaria? All the sacrifices made to establish the empire—not the least of which were made by Bavaria—the German chancellor, by his determined and senseless religious persecution, would now seem foolishly to ignore. And these Bavarians, of all the Germans, once aroused, and their religious rights infringed upon, are not the men quietly and meekly to subside under opposition.

We have dwelt more at length upon Germany because it is the centre of the strife that convulses, and threatens to convulse, the world. Other topics must consequently be hastily dismissed.

Of France there is nothing but good to report. After a series of fiery debates in the Assembly, the constitution of a conservative republic was definitively formed and agreed upon towards the end of February. The nomination of councillors of state was given to the President, who resigned the nomination of the senators. Of course France is still open to surprises, and the various parties seem as unable to coalesce as ever. But there is no question that the government of Marshal MacMahon has deserved well of the country, and, could only a true republic be established in France, it would serve as a safe counter-check to the absolutisms that threaten the east of Europe. The commerce and industries of the country have advanced even on the preceding year, though the imports of 1874 amounted to 3,748,011,000 francs, and the exports to 3,877,753,000 francs, these figures being in excess of those of any former years. The returns for the Paris savings-banks in 1874 indicate how the poorer and lower middle classes, who chiefly patronize these establishments, are recovering from the effects of the war and the Commune. The deposits amounted to 14,500,000 francs, while in 1873 they were 13,500,000 francs, and in 1872 12,629,000 francs. There is every reason to believe that the ratio of the past year will show a corresponding increase.

While the tokens of reviving prosperity are thus encouraging, those of a revival of religious feeling and coming back to the old ways and the old faith among the people at large are not less so. A noble and patriotic work is being accomplished in the rapid formation and spread of Catholic Working-men’s Clubs—a direct offset to the socialism fostered by the spirit of irreligion in other places. The part taken by Catholic laymen of standing and ability in this work, so full of happy promise, is in itself a significant feature, and one that may well be recommended to the attention of Catholic laymen all the world over. The pilgrimages to holy shrines and to Rome have continued, spite of[570] the laugh of the infidel and the scorn of the unbeliever. The solemn consecration of the church in Montmartre to the Sacred Heart was one in which the whole world was interested. But the most encouraging measure of all was the obtaining, after a fierce battle between religion and infidelity, of permission to found free universities in France, where students who believe in God might, if they chose, apply themselves to the study of their faith, or at least carry on their studies under the divine protection and under professors who, lacking nothing in intellect, recognize a higher than themselves, whose law they have the courage to recognize and the sense and piety to obey.

Surely, France was never so worthy of the esteem and profound respect of all the world as it is to-day. What a wonderful vitality is displayed by this Latin-Celtic race! What people could so suddenly recover from what seemed so fatal a blow? What other nation would have shown so much wisdom and self-control as these Frenchmen, whom the outside world stamped as “unstable as water”? Is France to be the leader of the Latin-Celtic races, to conform itself, consistently with its past history and traditions, after a century of throes, into a political form of society fitted to its present needs, its future prosperity, and the renewal of religion? God grant that it be so!

England, true to its peace policy, still keeps aloof from the troubled current of European affairs, beyond its recent move Eastward, which has already been noticed. It steadily refused to accept the invitation of Russia to join the International Conference on the Usages of War, which in reality resembled a consultation among surgeons before beginning to operate on an interesting subject. Mr. Disraeli’s premiership has been marked by some irritating mistakes, though the securing control of the Suez Canal was undoubtedly a move in the present critical state of Eastern affairs that compensates for many a blunder—if he can only hold the control. Mr. Gladstone finally retired from the leadership of the liberal party, and was nominally succeeded by the Marquis of Hartington. The ex-leader, abandoning a position which, take him all in all, he undoubtedly adorned, went paddling in theology and got shipwrecked. The Gladstone fulminations on “Vaticanism” are now a thing of the past, and only afforded another melancholy instance of the facility with which even great men can go beyond their depth. The portentous charges against the Pope, the Curia Romana, the rusty arsenals, and the rest of the papal “properties” were received by the English people themselves with honest laughter or with passive scorn, until finally Mr. Gladstone lost his temper, and then the world became tired both of him and his “rusty tools.”

Materialism is taking deep root in the English mind. The leading organ of English opinion, itself highly respectable, but by no means religious, complained more than once during the year of the general apathy with which the public regarded the doings of the various convocations and general assemblies of the Protestant churches in England. And the success with which the onslaught by such a man as Mr. Gladstone against the Catholic Church met with at the hands of Englishmen reveals anew the fact that religious feeling has fallen to so low an ebb in England that even the most eloquent of bigots could not arouse an anti-Popery cry. And this, for England, is the last stage of religious apathy.

Is this again the immediate precursor of a reaction in favor of the true church in that land for which so many prayers have been offered up, and the blood of so many martyrs has been shed?

Ireland has been quiet, calm, and peaceable, and though, in common with England, suffering from the commercial depression which spread from this country to them, it has shown a strong tendency to advance in prosperity. For its peace the Catholic clergy, according to the testimony of the London Times, and, as we believe, the Home-Rule party, are jointly answerable. Men who believe in God and obey the laws of the church will, with honest and able representatives, seek for no heroic measures of reform, while the legislature is fairly open to complaints. The London Times says that the peaceful record of the year reads like a fairy tale. Yet the Peace Preservation Acts were renewed, for which the same journal could find no better reason than that “you cannot break off abruptly from the past,” and goes on to say: “It is possible that, if there never had been a resolution to impose upon a conquered people a church which they rejected, and to endow it with the spoils to which they remained attached; if there never had[571] been a neglect so little creditable to our statesmanship as the conditions under which agricultural land was held in Ireland; if laws had never been passed to deprive Roman Catholics of political privileges and the right to possess property; if the attempt had never been made to rule the inhabitants of the sister-island by a hostile garrison, that state of feeling would never have been created which imposes upon the legislature of to-day the sad necessity of maintaining an exceptional coercive legislation.” The bitterest foe of England could scarcely add one iota to the force of this terrible indictment of English legislation in Ireland.

But we look with all hope to the speedy dispersing of the clouds which so long have hovered over this real “island of saints,” which has done so much in the past and promises so much in the future for the spread of faith among the peoples of the earth. More pleasing topics to touch upon are the celebration of the centennial of Daniel O’Connell, the fiftieth anniversary of the consecration of the venerable Archbishop McHale, and, though last, far from least, the visit to Ireland of Cardinal McCloskey, and his reception by Cardinal Cullen and the Irish people. The scene was indeed a memorable one; the meeting on a soil consecrated with the blood of saints and martyrs—a soil every inch of which could tell a tale of a struggle of centuries for the faith—of two cardinals of the church that guards the representatives, in their own persons, of the newest and one of the oldest heritages of the church, and the one Irish by birth, the other Irish by blood. A meeting no less significant was that in England between the Cardinal of New York and Cardinal Manning, the first convert probably who ever wore the title: a man of indomitable activity, a fearless asserter of the rights of the church, and always foremost in every movement which aims at the amelioration of the condition of the working classes.

Russia continues her strides in the East, nearing Hindostan, and with Hindostan the sea, at every step. Despite occasional reverses, her march against the conflicting tribes and peoples that lie in her path can only be regarded as irresistible. Meanwhile, at home she is eaten up by sects and the socialistic spirit that pervades other nations, and which tyranny may stifle for a time, but cannot destroy. Again the mistake occurs of regarding the Catholic Church as her enemy, and dragooning her Catholic subjects with a creed which their consciences reject. Austria is engaged in the attempt to set her internal affairs in order, and to recover from the defeat at Sadowa. She finds time, notwithstanding, to attack the church, though without the persistent brutality of her German neighbor, whose offer to procure a joint interference among the nations in the election of the next pope was politely but firmly rejected by Austria. In this path Italy also walks. Rejecting the rough hempen cord with which Germany binds and strives to strangle the church, Italy, true to her national character, chooses one of silk, which shall do the work softly and noiselessly, but none the less securely. Sensim sine sensu. Thus the Law of Guarantees of 1871, which was founded on Cavour’s maxim of “a free church in a free state,” provided for the absolute freedom of the Pope in spirituals. This Germany resents, and early in the year made strong remonstrance with Italy, to see, in plain English, if some plan could not be devised by which the Pope might be muzzled and prevented from issuing encyclicals and bulls and so forth, save only such as might please the mind of present German statesmen. Italy refused to alter the law. But now in November we find Minghetti, the president of the Council, stating to his electors at Cologna-Veneta that there are defects in the law of papal guarantees. The church—says that excellent authority, M. Minghetti—is the congregation of all the faithful, including, of course, M. Minghetti himself. But the state, on whom with the jus protegendi devolves also the jus inspiciendi, is bound to see that the right of the laity and the interest of the lower clergy be not sacrificed to the abuse of papal and episcopal authority. Wherefore, M. Minghetti, urged solely by the desire of seeing that no injustice is done, pledges his electors that he will bring in a bill empowering the laity to reclaim the rights to which they are entitled in the government of the church. How far those rights extend, of course, remains to be seen.

The Holy Father is still spared to us in the full enjoyment of his health and powers of mind. Pilgrims flock to him[572] in thousands, and the eyes of the world, friends and foes alike, look with sympathy upon him. Surely now is the real triumph of his reign, and in his weakness shines forth his true strength. No earthly motives, if ever they affected the allegiance of Catholics to him, could affect it now. Yet what does the world witness? As men regard things, a weak and powerless old man, ruling, from the palace that is his prison, the hearts of two hundred millions of people in the name and by the power of Jesus Christ, whose saintly vicar he is. The Pope, lifted above all entanglements by recent events with the political policy of so-called Catholic countries—his voice, as the head of the church, is heard and respected by all nations as perhaps it never was at any other period of time.

Spain opened with a new revolution—the re-entering of Alfonso, the son of the exiled queen, to the kingdom and the throne from which she was driven. This being said, the situation remains in much the same condition that it has done for the past two years; if anything, notwithstanding some defections and reverses, Don Carlos has gained in strength and boldness. The move that brought in Don Alfonso was a good one, but it came too late.

The customary chronic revolutions prevail in South America. The assassination of Garcia Moreno, the able and good President of Ecuador, by members of a secret society, added a unique chapter of horrors and dastardly cowardice to the records of these societies, showing that to accomplish their purpose they are ready to stab a nation. Garcia Mareno died a martyr to his faith. From a far different cause, though by the same means, died Sonzogno, the editor of the Capitale, the trial of whose assassins furnished food for thought as to the force at work in regenerated Italy. An event that might have been of great importance was the death of the youthful Emperor of China, which was followed by that of his wife. He was succeeded by a child five years old, and the government seems to have passed into the hands of the same men who held it before, so that a change for the better towards Christians is scarcely to be hoped for, while Christian residents are still exposed at any moment to a repetition of the Tien-Tsin massacre.

With the year closes the third quarter of the most eventful century, perhaps, which the world has yet known, the first century of the Christian era alone being excepted. It opened on what Lacordaire has well called “a wild and stormy morning,” and he would be a bold prophet who should predict a clear sky at the close. A writer of the day describes nations within the past year as engaged in “a wild war-dance.” The same is true of the century. Nations seem to have learned nothing, but forgotten much. In forgetting the faith that made them whole they have forgotten the secret of the elixir of national life. Hence, bitter as the struggle is, a Catholic cannot but hope much in the near future from the present trials of the church. The blows of Germany have crushed shams to the earth, and caused the truth to shine forth resplendent and beautiful. Whatever may be this faith that the nations have forgotten, that has been a mockery among men of the world, it is manifest, at least, that there is a profound reality in it, and a vitality that no power on earth can hope to destroy. This testimony of strength in weakness, of the purest devotion and loftiest sacrifices that this world can show, if it do nothing else, at least brings men to ponder and look back, and compare and inquire, and arrive at some conclusions. For the world cannot remain an indifferent spectator to a question that is wide as the world. The vagaries of belief, the churches with fronts of brass and feet of clay, the parasites and the flatterers who, professing to worship and believe in God alone, bow down in secret before the prince of this world, now slink away in shame or stand abashed before the unbeliever.

Again, considering the intensity of the activity of the age, induced in a great measure by the facilities of expressing and communicating our thoughts, of reaching the uttermost parts of the earth in a flash of time—all of which enhances the responsibility of our free will—religion, in view of these facts, will have to keep pace with this activity in order to perform the office for which God established it upon earth. That she will do so is as much a matter of certitude as her existence; for that same “Spirit which fills the whole earth” finds in her bosom his dwelling-place. The general tendency to material science, and the material interests of nations, which have so wonderfully increased within the century,[573] tend all to obscure the supernatural. But there is nothing to be feared from the advocates of material science. There is no escaping from God in his creation. And these men, in their way, in common with the more open persecutors, are preparing for the triumph of the church, and in the providence of God are co-workers in the more complete demonstration of his divine truth.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

The life and character of S. John are so beautiful and so closely connected with our Saviour that true believers have always craved to know more about him.

On the other hand, his testimony is so positive and his language so clear that all who blaspheme the divinity of our Lord have sought to thrust him and his gospel out of sight. The distinguished French author has a warm personal devotion to S. John, and has devoted himself with great enthusiasm to the task of collecting all the historical facts which remain to us as connected with the virgin apostle. His style is manifestly infused with his spirit, and hence the work is one rather of devotion than of cold, scientific dissertation.

“It is,” says the author in his preface, “a book of doctrine. I address it to all those who desire to instruct themselves in the truth of God. Truth has no school above that of the Gospel, and nowhere does it appear fairer or more profound than in the gospel of S. John.

“It is a book of piety. I dedicate it to Christians: to priests—the priesthood has no higher personification than S. John; to virgins—John was a virgin; to mothers—he merited to be given as a son to the Mother of God; to youth—he was the youngest of the apostles; to old men—it is the name he gives himself in his epistles. I offer it to suffering souls—he stood beside the cross; to contemplative souls—he was on Mt. Thabor; to all souls who wish to devote themselves to their brethren, and to love them in God—charity can have no purer ideal than the friend of Jesus.”

It goes to fill up a most important gap in our English hagiography, and will be greeted with much satisfaction by those desirous of having a complete series of lives of the saints.

The ad captandum title of this work leads one to look for an Arabian romance; whereas the story has scarcely anything to do with it, and is a very slender story at that. It is difficult to say whether the book is worth reading or not; for while, no doubt, it contains passages of considerable force and beauty, we are quite sure the poet himself does not know half the time what he means. Now, this kind of thing is “played out.” Far be it from us to accuse the divine Tennyson of straining and affectation; but we do say there are peculiarities in his style which it is dangerous to imitate. Taken as a model for classic and scholarly verse, he has no equal in the English language. But the subjectivism of his “enchanted reverie” may be easily “run into the ground.” Hence he has given rise (we suspect he is full sore over it) to what may be called the “Obscurantist” school of poetry. We think this school has had its day. We hope the coming poets will happily combine the faultless diction of Tennyson with the clear, strong thought of such masters as Milton, Byron, and Longfellow.

We presume this book is meant for a Christmas present. It is admirably fitted for that purpose—beautifully printed and tastefully bound. But the contents are still better worth having.

These “Three Pearls” were indeed “of great price”; three virgin-martyrs—S.[574] Cæcilia, S. Agnes, and S. Catharine of Alexandria. No three saints, perhaps, could have been more happily chosen by the gifted author as models for the young Catholic women of the day, and particularly here in America. If it be objected that such heroines are not imitable, the answer is obvious—that the virtues which led them to become heroines are imitable by all. And, again, the “modern paganism” with which we are familiar has many features in common with that amid which they lived.

There is a prose sketch of each saint, followed by a tribute in verse. The “Editor’s Preface” is from the pen of a learned priest in the Diocese of Boston.

The plan of the author in this work, as is implied in its title, has not been to write a complete treatise on moral theology, but to furnish a compendium containing the points necessary for confessors in the ordinary discharge of their duties. Desirable as such a book is, there is of course a difficulty in compiling it, arising from the variety of sound opinions on many questions, which cannot all be given without extending it beyond the limits which give it its special convenience, and which opinions, nevertheless, it is at least expedient that every priest should know. This difficulty is one, therefore, which cannot be overcome, and a manual of this kind can never entirely supply the place of a larger work. But it nevertheless has its use, and, when it is well done, cannot fail to be a welcome addition to any theological library.

And this book is extremely welcome for it is extremely well done. It is very well arranged; every point of importance is, we believe, given; it is clearly written; it is adapted to the times and to this country, and (which is a great merit) it is by no means dry. There is a little danger in it on this last account, and that is that its superior attractiveness may tend to induce neglect of larger works, and too great confidence in statements which space will not allow the author to modify, as we have said above.

One excellent feature of it is the sound and practical advice which it contains, which is almost as important as the statement of theological conclusions or of matters of law. It would be worth far more than its price on this account alone.

In the present editions an article on “Rome and Geneva” has been added to The History of the Reformation, and a “Pastoral Letter on the Infallibility of the Pope” to The Evidences of Catholicity—both having been prepared by the late archbishop with a view to publication in his collective works.

The same general criticism which we passed in our December number on the revised edition of the Miscellanea will apply to these volumes. Archbishop Spalding’s works constitute a very complete armory from which to select weapons to meet the opponents of the church in this country; though the writings of European Catholics may be more to the purpose as answers to the misrepresentations urged against her in their respective localities. And there is no one writer to whom we would with greater confidence refer Protestants who are willing to learn the truth (and we would fain hope there are very many such), as his works relate to so many supposed stumbling-blocks. Whether conscious of it or not, our separated brethren are very blind followers of tradition—accepting unhesitatingly the representations of writers of the last three centuries, while faulting us for adhering to the unbroken traditions of all the Christian centuries. Hence they are accustomed, when unable to reply to our doctrinal arguments drawn from their translation of the Holy Scriptures, to fall back on their own version of the religious revolution of the XVIth century, and other historical[575] events, the comparative condition of Catholic and Protestant countries, etc., etc., all of which are treated of at length in these volumes.

At a time when it is sought to revive the fell spirit of the defunct Know-Nothing party, it is well to refresh our memories by a re-perusal of the writings which were prompted by the previous manifestation.

The first-named work is at once a history of the Reformation and a review of the most prominent books on the same subject, including D’Aubigné’s popular romance. This treatment very much augments the interest with which we pursue historical inquiries.

This able pamphlet will wear a familiar look to our readers, its principal contents having appeared as an article in our December number. The writer has added biographical sketches of the first and second Lords Baltimore, the Lawgivers of 1649, and of Father Andrew White, the historiographer of the expedition which founded Maryland, and who was intimately associated with the early fortunes of the colony.

It was really too bad in Dr. Clarke to deny asylum to the ex-premier on our (reputed) hospitable shores, after the relentless logic to which he was subjected at home, when proving so clearly to his own satisfaction the disloyalty of Catholics—to spoil, in fact, his nice little story that it was the Protestants, and not those hateful Catholics, who made Maryland a refuge for fugitives from English persecution for conscience’ sake. And what makes the matter all the more aggravating is that our author is in league with ever so many Protestants in this design. For shame, gentlemen!

The author of this work had the good fortune while in England some years since to secure a copy of Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses écrites des Missions Etrangéres, in forty-seven volumes, “containing the letters of the Jesuit missionaries from about 1650 to 1750.… He selected those letters which relate to the labors of the Jesuits within the bounds of our own land, and published a translation, with notes, under the title of The Early Jesuit Missions in North America.” In the present work he takes a wider range, and makes selections, from the same source, of letters from parts of the world widely remote from each other—from China and California; from Cape Horn and the far north; from the shores of South America and the Mediterranean; from the monasteries of Mount Lebanon and the Thebaid Desert.

Bishop Kip and his publishers have laid both Protestants and Catholics under great obligations by the publication of this valuable and beautiful volume. We can scarcely commend too highly the evident fairness of the translation and of the accompanying remarks and notes. It could not well be otherwise than that a Protestant should have some qualifications to offer respecting statements of fact and doctrine such as would naturally occur in these letters; but the Catholic reader will be gratified to find much that is laudatory, and scarcely anything to which he would object; the notes being for the most part historical and philological in character. The naïve simplicity of these relations constitutes one of their chief charms and the best answer to any suggestion of guile on the part of the writers.

The principles and operations of the Jesuits have been, and to a great extent are still, believed by our Protestant fellow-citizens to constitute a vulnerable point in Catholicity, so that we rejoice at the facilities offered by such writers as Parkman, Shea, and Kip for a better understanding of the matter. Nothing can give Catholics greater pleasure than that their Protestant friends should have full opportunities for studying our doctrines and history.

This volume is a concise and well-written account of a holy life, showing[576] what abundant graces are often bestowed upon the meek and lowly, and how those who humble themselves are exalted by Almighty God.

S. Benedict, the child of an enslaved negro parent, was born at Sanfratello in Sicily, A.D. 1524. Early instructed in religion by his parents, he offered himself to God, and became eminent for sanctity as a religious. Seeking always the lowest and most humiliating employments, he served for twenty-seven years as a cook in a convent. Already, during his lifetime, regarded as a saint, he was venerated by all classes. “At the door of his humble kitchen,” says his biographer, “were to be seen the nobles of Palermo, who sought to honor the saint and recommend themselves to his prayers, the learned who came for advice, the afflicted who desired consolation, the sick who hoped for the recovery of their health, and the indigent who desired assistance.”

Winning by his wisdom and virtues the confidence of his brethren, he was chosen guardian of the convent, and afterwards vicar, and master of novices—positions which he accepted with extreme reluctance, and in which he proved his great charity and humility.

But the more he sought to abase and hide himself, the greater the graces bestowed upon him. Though blessed with the spirit of prophecy, the power of performing miracles, and the gift of ecstasy, so great was his humility that he again turned to his simple occupation, and retained it till his death, which occurred in 1589.

The title of this work can scarcely fail to awaken an interest in the youthful hero who gave his life for his faith—an interest which is enhanced by the knowledge that this youth, frail as a girl and possessed of a highly-cultivated mind and rare sensibility, was so filled with the spirit of self-sacrifice that he may well be classed with those “courtiers of martyrdom” whose lives are the glory of the church and the wonder of the world.

Paul Seigneret’s is a name that must be dear to all Catholics at all familiar with his saintly life and death. To a heart overflowing with love for all who had claims upon his affection and charity for all mankind, and to those quick and delicate perceptions which retain all that is good and instinctively reject all that is evil, was added a fervent piety and ardent zeal for the glory of God. Animated by these sentiments, he sought the priesthood, and soon turned his thoughts to the cloister—“‘that pure and shining height’ whither he would go to fix his dwelling nearer heaven.” While yet a student in the Seminary of S. Sulpice, he fell a victim to the Commune, and was permitted to win the crown of martyrdom, which had been the object of his most ardent desires.

The volume before us is one which we would especially recommend to our youthful readers, who will find in it much that is edifying and worthy of imitation. In an age in which respect for authority and filial obedience are so much ignored, we cannot place too high a value on the example of Paul Seigneret, whose devotion and submission to his parents were second only to his love of God.

If a work so admirable in most respects may be criticised, we would say that it would be quite as interesting if the author had condensed the valuable materials of which it is composed. We are aware of the difficulties under which many translations from the French are made. Innumerable things in that versatile, flexible language will bear many repetitions and much minutiæ in description, which will not admit of more than the simple statement in our unyielding vernacular. Readers should therefore hesitate in pronouncing a book dull because some of the aroma escapes in the transition from one medium of thought to another.

The reader will rightly infer from the size of this pastoral that it differs in many respects from other documents of the kind. The learned author has taken occasion to enter very fully into the doctrinal and historical aspects of his subject, thereby making the publication a valuable reference to all who would understand the history and nature of this observance.

THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXII., No. 131.—FEBRUARY, 1876.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by Rev. I. T. Hecker, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

A SEQUEL OF THE GLADSTONE CONTROVERSY.[228]

“It is wonderful,” wrote Proudhon, “how in all our political questions we always stumble on theology.” Mr. Gladstone will doubtless concur in this sentiment; for he cannot take a step without stumbling on the Catholic Church. She is everywhere, and everywhere she is to him a cause of alarm. So potent is her influence growing to be, so cunningly laid are the plans by which her policy is directed, so perfect is the organization and discipline of her forces, so insidious are her methods of procedure, as he would have us believe, that it is full time all Christendom should be warned of the approaching danger. She is in his eyes an ever-present menace to the civilization of the world.

He at least bears testimony to her power and vitality. She is not a relic of a past age; she lives, and, what is more, it does not seem that she is willing to die. If we consider the various efforts by which men are seeking to weaken and destroy the church, we shall find in them no mean evidence of her divine strength. And first of all, in an age intellectually most active, she is the subject of universal criticism, and is cited before every tribunal of human knowledge to be tried on an hundred different and often contradictory counts. Her historical relations with the world, extending over eighteen hundred years and co-extensive with Christendom, are minutely examined into by men who, shutting their eyes to the benefits which she has conferred upon the human race, are eager to discover charges against her. She is made responsible for the crimes of those who called themselves Catholics, though she was the first to condemn their evil deeds. The barbarism, the ignorance, and the cruelty of the middle ages are set to her count, when, in fact, she was the chief source of civilization, of enlightenment, and of mercy during that period. When she opposes the tyranny of kings,[578] she is called the enemy of the state; when she seeks to restrain the lawlessness of the people, she is proclaimed the friend of tyrants. Against her dogmas and institutions all the sciences are brought to bear—astronomy, geology, ethnology, and the others. Not in politics alone, but in all the physical sciences, men in our day stumble on the Catholic Church.

We are told that she is the one great spiritual organization which is able to resist, and must as a matter of life and death resist, the progress of science and modern civilization. These men profess to find innumerable points of collision between her dogmas and the conclusions of science, and are surprised when she claims to understand her own teachings better than they, and is not prepared to abandon all belief in God, the soul, and future life because physical research has given men a wider knowledge of the phenomena of matter. Now we hear objections to her moral teaching—that it is too severe, that she imposes burdens upon men’s shoulders too heavy for human nature to bear, that she encourages asceticism, celibacy, and all manner of self-denial opposed to the spirit of the age and of progress; then, on the contrary, that her morality is lax, that she flatters the passions of men, panders to their sensual appetites, and grants, for gain, permission to commit every excess.

At one time we are told that her priests are indolent, immoral, ignorant, without faith; at another, that they are ceaselessly active, astute, learned, and wholly intent upon bringing all men to their own way of thinking. Now we are informed that her children cannot be loyal subjects of any government; and immediately after we hear that they are so subservient, so passively obedient, that they willingly submit to any master. And here we come more immediately upon our subject; for whereas Mr. Gladstone has declared that the loyalty of Catholics is not to be trusted, M. de Laveleye asserts that “despotic government is the congenial government of Catholic populations.”

The pamphlet from which we quote these words, and which we propose now to examine, has been presented to the English-reading public by the special request of Mr. Gladstone, and has been farther honored by him with a prefatory letter. The author, it is true, takes a fling at the Church of England, and plainly intimates that in his opinion it is little better than the Catholic Church; but the ex-premier could not forego the opportunity of striking his enemy, though he should pierce his dearest friend in giving the blow. He takes the precaution, indeed, to disclaim any concurrence in M. de Laveleye’s “rather unfavorable estimate of the Church of England in comparison with the other reformed communions.” The question discussed in the pamphlet before us, as its title implies, is the relative influence of Catholicism and Protestantism on the liberty and prosperity of nations; and the conclusion which is drawn is that the Reformation is favorable to freedom and progress, and that the Catholic Church is a hindrance to both.

This has long been a favorite theme with Protestants—the weapon with which they think themselves best able to do good battle in their cause; and doubtless it is employed, in most favorable circumstances, in an age like ours, in which material progress is so marked a feature that its influence may[579] be traced in everything, and in nothing more than in the thoughts and philosophies of the men of our day. It is worthy of remark that Protestantism, professing to be a purer and more spiritual worship, should have tended to turn men’s thoughts almost exclusively to the worldly and temporal view of religion; so that it has become the fashion to praise Christianity, not because it makes men humble, pure, self-denying, content with little, but rather because its influence is supposed to be of almost an opposite nature. Much stress is laid upon the physical, social, and mental superiority of Christian nations to those that are still pagan, and the inference implied, if not always expressly stated, is that these temporal advantages are due to the influence of Christianity, and prove its truth and divine origin. Without stopping to consider the question whether the material and social superiority of Christian nations is to be attributed to their religious faith, we may ask whether, admitting that this is the case, it may with propriety be adduced in proof of the truth of the religion of Christ?

In the case of individuals no one, certainly, would think of arguing that prosperity proves a right faith, or even consistent practice. To hold that wealth and success are evidences of religious life, whatever it may be, is certainly not Christianity. Does the teaching of Christ permit the rich to lay the unction to their souls that they are God’s favored children? Were they his friends? Did they flock around him? Did they drink in his words gladly? If men who claim to be his disciples have deified worldly success, and made temporal prosperity a sufficient test of the truth of his religion, they cannot plead any word of his in excuse.

He certainly never paid court to the great, or stooped to flatter the rich. Was it not he who said, “Woe be to you rich: ye have received your reward”? and again, “It is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle”? Did he not take Lazarus to his bosom when Dives was in hell?

“Blessed are ye,” he said, “when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad; for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.”

The preaching of Christ was wholly unworldly. He sternly repressed the earthly ambitions of his disciples, and declared that, as the world hated him, it would also hate those who believed in him. They would be outcasts for his name’s sake; if this life were all, they of all men would be most miserable. Indeed, he rarely speaks of human happiness in the customary sense; he passes over what might be said in favor of this life, and brings out in bold relief its vanity and unsatisfactoriness. He draws no pictures of domestic bliss, and says but little of even innocent pleasures or those temporal blessings which are so sweet to all; and as he taught that worldly prosperity is no evidence of God’s favor, he was careful to correct the error of those who looked upon misfortune as a proof of guilt, as in the case of the man born blind and of those upon whom a tower had fallen.

Christ was poor, his apostles were poor, his disciples were poor, nearly all the Christians of the first[580] ages were poor; and yet every day we hear men talk as though they considered poverty and Christianity incompatible. This is manifestly the opinion of M. de Laveleye. His argument may be stated in this way: England and Scotland are rich, Ireland is poor. The Protestant cantons of Switzerland are rich, the Catholic are poor. “In the United States,” says De Tocqueville, “the greater part of the Catholics are poor.” In fact, wherever the two religions exist together, the Protestants are more active, more industrious, and consequently richer than the Catholics.

This is the substance of what is spread over a dozen pages of the pamphlet. The conclusion is not difficult to draw: Protestants are richer than Catholics, and therefore better Christians.

“No man can serve two masters,” said Christ: “you cannot serve God and Mammon.” On the contrary, says M. de Laveleye, the success with which you worship Mammon is the best proof that you serve God truly. Of course it would be foreign to M. de Laveleye’s purpose to stop to inquire whether the poverty of Ireland be due to the Catholic faith of her people or to the rapacity and misgovernment of England; whether that of the Catholic cantons of Switzerland might not be accounted for by the fact that they are mountainous, with an inhospitable climate and a barren soil; and whether even M. de Tocqueville’s assertion that the greater part of the Catholics of the United States are poor might not be satisfactorily explained by stating that the greater part of them are emigrants who have recently landed upon these shores without a superabundance of this world’s goods.

He had also good reasons, while treating this part of his subject, for not looking nearer home. He had in Belgium, under his very eye, one of the most thrifty, industrious, and prosperous peoples of Europe, and at the same time one of the most Catholic. Why did he not compare the wealth of Belgium with that of Sweden or Denmark? Why did he not say a word about Catholic France, whose wealth and thrift cannot be denied. He does, indeed, make mention of two French manufacturing towns, in which, he states, on the authority of M. Audiganne, the capitalists are for the most part Protestants, whilst the operatives are Catholics; though what this has to do with any debatable question between Catholicism and Protestantism is not easily seen.

The assertion (p. 14) that “wherever the two religions co-exist in the same country the Protestants are more active, more industrious, more economical, and consequently richer than the Catholics,” is not borne out by facts. A single example will suffice to show how rash M. de Laveleye has been in making so wide an affirmation. The Catholics of the Rhine Province are universally acknowledged to be among the most thrifty and enterprising populations of Prussia, and are far richer than, for instance, the Protestants of Pomerania.

It would not be difficult, by adopting M. de Laveleye’s mode of reasoning, to turn his whole argument on this point against his own position. Whether or not national wealth, we might say, is evidence of orthodox Christian faith, there can be no doubt but that the Christian religion is favorable to even the temporal interests of the lowest and most degraded classes of society. Its doctrines on the brotherhood of the race and the[581] equality of all before God first inspired worthy notions of the dignity of man. Then the sympathy which it created for the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed naturally set men to work to devise means for the relief of human misery. It is to its influence that we must ascribe the abolition of slavery, the elevation of woman, and the thousand ministries which in Christian lands attend on the wretched and the weak.

We must infer that those nations in which this influence is most powerful—which, in other words, are most truly Christian—will have, in proportion to their population, the smallest class of human beings cursed by the worst plague known to modern civilization, bearing with it, as it does, a threefold degradation, moral, physical, and social. We of course refer to pauperism.

Now, in England, from whose wealth M. de Laveleye would infer the superiority of her religion, we find that this pauper class, compared with the whole population, is as 1 to 23; whereas in Ireland, which is poor—and, according to this theory, for that reason under the ban of a false religion—there is but 1 pauper to 90 inhabitants; in other words, pauperism is four times more common in England than in Ireland. Now, whether we refer this fact to England’s wealth or to England’s religion—and in M. de Laveleye’s opinion they are correlative—our conclusion must be either that the influence of the Christian religion, which necessarily tends to promote the temporal well-being of the most degraded classes of society, is less felt in England than in Ireland, or else that national wealth is hurtful to the interests of these same classes, and consequently opposed to the true Christian spirit; and in either case we have Catholic Ireland more fairly Christian than Protestant England. We would not have our readers think for a moment that we are seriously of the opinion that our argument proves anything at all. We give it merely as a specimen of the way in which the reasoning of this pamphlet may be turned against its own conclusions, though, in fact, we have done the work too respectably.

We cannot forget, if M. de Laveleye does, that, of all sciences, the social—if, indeed, it may be said as yet to exist at all—is the most complex and the most difficult to master. The phenomena which it presents for observation are so various, so manifold, and so vast, our means of observation are so limited, our methods so unsatisfactory, and our prejudices so fatal, that only the thoughtless or the rash will tread without suspicion or doubt upon ground so uncertain and so little explored.

M. de Laveleye himself furnishes us an example of how easily we may go astray, even when the way seems plain.

“Sectarian passions,” he writes (p. 11), “or anti religious prejudice have been too often imported into the study of these questions. It is time that we should apply to it the method of observation and the scientific impartiality of the physiologist and the naturalist. When the facts are once established irrefragable conclusions will follow. It is admitted that the Scotch and Irish are of the same origin. Both have become subject to the English yoke. Until the XVIth century Ireland was much more civilized than Scotland. During the first part of the middle ages the Emerald Isle was a focus of civilization, while Scotland was still a den of barbarians. Since the[582] Scotch have embraced the Reformation, they have outrun even the English.… Ireland, on the other hand, devoted to ultramontanism, is poor, miserable, agitated by the spirit of rebellion, and seems incapable of raising herself by her own strength.” The conclusion which is drawn from all this, joined with such other facts as the late victories of Prussia over Austria and France, is that “Protestantism is more favorable than Catholicism to the development of nations.”

We may as well pause to examine this passage, which, both with regard to the statement of facts and to the interpretation put upon them, fairly represents the style and method of the pamphlet before us.

“It is admitted that the Scotch and Irish are of the same origin.” This is true, as here stated, only in the sense that both are descended of Adam; and hence it would have been as much to the point to affirm that all the nations of the earth are of the same origin. The Scots were, indeed, an Irish tribe; but when they invaded Caledonia, they found it in the possession of the Picts, of whom whether they were of Celtic or Teutonic race is still undecided. The power of the Scots themselves declined in the XIIth century, when Scotland fell under the influence of the Anglo-Norman Conquest, and the Celtic population either withdrew towards the north, or, by intermarriage with the conquerors, formed a new type; so that the people of that country are even yet divided into two great and distinct stocks differing from each other in language, manners, and dress.

“Until the XVIth century,” continues M. de Laveleye, “Ireland was much more civilized than Scotland. During the first part of the middle ages the Emerald Isle was a focus of civilization, while Scotland was still a den of barbarians.” Now, it was precisely in those ages in which Ireland was “a focus of civilization” that the Catholic faith of her people shone brightest. It was then that convents sprang up over the whole island; that the sweet songs of sacred psalmody, which so touched the soul of Columba, were heard in her groves and vales; that the sword was sheathed, and all her people were smitten with the high love of holy life and were eager to drink at the fountains of knowledge. It was then that she sent her apostles to Scotland, to England, to France, to Germany, to Switzerland, and to far-off Sicily; nor did she remit her efforts in behalf of civilization until the invading Danes forced her children to defend at once their country and their faith.

But let us follow M. de Laveleye: “Since the Scotch have embraced the reformed religion, they have outrun even the English.… Ireland, on the other hand, devoted to ultramontanism, is poor, miserable, agitated by the spirit of rebellion, and seems incapable of raising herself by her own strength.”

We cannot think that Mr. Gladstone had read this passage when he requested the author to have his pamphlet translated into English; for we cannot believe that he is prepared to lay the misfortunes of Ireland to the influence of the Catholic faith upon her people, and not to the cruelty and misgovernment of England.

The Irish Catholics are reproached with their poverty, when for two hundred years the English government made it a crime for them to own anything. They are taunted with their misery, when for two centuries they lived under a code[583] which placed them outside the pale of humanity; of which Lord Brougham said that it was so ingeniously contrived that an Irish Catholic could not lift up his hand without breaking it; which Edmund Burke denounced as the most proper machine ever invented by the wit of man to disgrace a realm and degrade a people; and of which Montesquieu wrote that it must have been contrived by devils, ought to have been written in blood and registered in hell!

Ireland is found fault with because she is agitated with the spirit of rebellion, when even to think of the wrongs she has suffered makes the blood to boil. Is it astonishing that she should be poor when England, with set purpose, destroyed her commerce and ruined her manufacturing interests, fostering at the same time a policy fatal to agriculture, the aim of which, it would seem, was to force the Irish to emigrate, that the whole island might be turned into a grazing ground for the supply of the English markets?

“What a contrast,” further remarks M. de Laveleye (p. 12), “even in Ireland, between the exclusively Catholic Connaught and Ulster, where Protestantism prevails!”

Mr. Gladstone certainly cannot be surprised at this contrast, nor will he seek its explanation in the baneful influence of the Catholic Church. He at least knows the history of Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland; he has read of the massacres of Drogheda and Wexford; he knows the fate of the eighty thousand Catholic Irishmen whom Cromwell drove into the ports of Munster, and shipped like cattle to the sugar plantations of the Barbadoes, there to be sold as slaves; nor is he ignorant of what was in store for those Irish Catholics who were still left; of how they were driven out of Ulster, Munster, and Leinster across the Shannon into Connaught—that is, into the bogs and wild wastes of the most desolate part of Ireland—there to die of hunger or cold, or to survive as best they might. Five-sixths of the Catholics had perished; the remainder were driven into barren Connaught; the Protestants settled on the rich lands of Ulster, Munster, and Leinster; and now here comes good M. de Laveleye to find that Connaught is poor because it is Catholic, and Ulster is rich because it is Protestant. But we must not forget Scotland.

“Since the Scotch,” says M. de Laveleye, “have embraced the reformed religion, they have outrun even the English.”

We shall take no pains to discover whether or in what respect, or how far the Scotch surpass the English. The meaning of the words which we have just quoted is evidently this: The progress which the Scotch have made during the last three centuries, in wealth and the other elements of material greatness, must be ascribed to the influence of the Protestant religion.

To avoid even the suspicion of unfairness in discussing this part of the subject, we shall quote the words of an author who devoted much time and research to the study of the character and tendencies of Scotch Presbyterianism, and whose deeply-rooted dislike of the Catholic Church is well known:

The XVIIth century, which was the golden age of French literature, and also of the Catholic Church in France, threw almost total darkness over Scotland, which during that period was most completely under the power of Protestantism. The clergy governed the nation; they were the only men of real influence; and yet there was no philosophy, no science, no poetry, no literature worth reading. “From the Restoration,” says Laing, “down to the Union the only author of any eminence whom Scotland produced was Burnet.”

If the thrift and industry of the Scotch are due to Protestantism, to what shall we ascribe the enterprise and commerce of the Catholic republics of Venice and Genoa during the middle ages?

If England’s wealth to-day comes from the Reformation, how shall we account for that of Spain in the[585] XVIth and XVIIth centuries? And if the decline of Spain has been brought about by the Catholic faith, to what cause shall we assign that of Holland, who in the XVIIth century ruled the seas and did the carrying trade of Europe?

M. de Laveleye’s way of accounting for the prosperity of nations is certainly simple, but we doubt whether it would satisfy any respectable schoolboy. Unfortunately for such as he, there is no rule of three by which social problems may be solved. Race, climate, soil, political organization, and many other causes, working through ever-varying combinations, must all be considered if we would understand the history of material progress. As labor is the most fruitful cause of wealth, there is a necessary relation between national wealth and national habits, which are the outcome of a thousand influences, one of the most powerful of which undoubtedly is religious faith. But who does not know that climate influences labor, not only by enervating or invigorating the laborer, but also by the effect it produces on the regularity of his habits? If the Italian loves the dolce far niente, while the New Englander makes haste to grow rich as though some demon whom gold could bribe pursued him, shall we find the secret of their peculiar characters in their religious faith or in the climate in which they live, or shall we not rather seek it in a combination of causes, physical and moral? We have assuredly no thought of denying the intimate connection which exists between faith and character or between a nation’s religion and its civilization. We are willing even to affirm that not only the general superiority of Christian nations, but their superior wealth also, is in great measure attributable to their religion. And now, bidding adieu to M. de Laveleye for a while, we propose to discuss this subject, to which we have already alluded, somewhat more fully.

Christianity certainly does not measure either the greatness or the happiness of a people by its wealth, nor does it take as its ideal that state of society in which “the millionaire is the one sole god” and commerce is all in all; in which “only the ledger lives, and only not all men lie.”

Whether we consider individuals or associations of men, the Catholic Church does not hold and cannot hold that material interests are the highest. To be noble, to be true, to be humble, to be pure, is, in her view, better than to be rich. Man is more than money, which is good only in so far as it serves to develop his higher nature.

“The whole aim of man is to be happy,” says Bossuet. “Place happiness where it ought to be, and it is the source of all good; but the source of all evil is to place it where it ought not to be.”

“It is evident,” says S. Thomas, “that the happiness of man cannot lie in riches. Wealth is sought after only as a support of human life. It cannot be the end of man; on the contrary, man is its end.… The longing, moreover, for the highest good is infinite. The more it is possessed, the more it is loved and the more all else is despised; for the more it is possessed, the better is it known. With riches this is not the case. No sooner are they ours than they are despised, or used as means to some other end; and this, as it shows their imperfect nature, is proof that in them the highest good is not to be found.”

If wealth is not the highest good of individuals, is it of nations? What is the ideal of society? The study of the laws which govern national life must necessarily begin with this question, which all who have dealt with the subject, from Plato to Comte and Mill, have sought to answer. It is manifest that each one’s attempt to solve this problem will be based upon his views on the previous question: What is the ideal of man? This, in turn, will be answered according to each one’s notions of the ideal of God; and here we have the secret of the phenomenon which so surprised Proudhon—the necessary connection between religion and society, theology and politics.

Is there a God, personal, distinct from nature? Or is nature the only god, and science her prophet? It is right here at this central point that men are dividing; it is here we must place ourselves, if we would view the two great armies that in all Christendom are gathering for a supreme conflict.

There is a form of infidelity in our day—and it is the one into which all unbelief must ultimately resolve itself—which starts with this assumption: “Whether or not there is a God must for ever remain unknown to man.” It reasons in this way: “This whole subject belongs within the region, not only of the unknown, but of the unknowable. It is an insoluble riddle, and the philosophies and theologies which have sought to unravel it, if only idle, might deserve nothing more than contempt; but they have been the bane of human thought, have soured all the sweetness of life, and therefore ought to be visited with the execration of mankind. Since religion is a subject about which nothing can be known, what is so absurd as to spend time upon it? What so absurd as to divert the thoughts of men from subjects in which thinking is fruitful to those in which it must for ever remain barren of all except evil results? What so absurd as to set them working for a future life, of which we can never know whether it exists at all, when we might at least teach them how to make the present one worth having? The paradise of the future, which the prophetic eye of science can already descry, is in the world, not beyond it; and to seek to hasten its approach is the highest and only worthy object in life.” As we take it, this is the creed of modern unbelief, to which as yet few will openly subscribe, but toward which all its hundred conflicting schools of thought are moving. Few men indeed are able to perceive the logical outcome of their opinions, and still fewer have the courage to confess what they more than half suspect.

This superstition is a return to the nature-worship of paganism, but under a different aspect. Of old, nature was worshipped as revealed to sense, and now as revealed to thought; then as beautiful, now as true or useful. The first was artistic, and form was its symbol; the last is scientific, and law is its expression. The religion of humanity is only a phase of this worship; for in it man is considered, not as the child of God, but as the product of nature.

And now what has this to do with the ideal of society or the wealth of nations? At the basis of all social organization lies morality, as it is by conduct that both individuals and nations are saved or lost. The history of the human race shows that religion and morality are intimately related. That[587] there have been good atheists does not affect the truth of this proposition any more than that there have been bad Christians. Men are usually better or worse than their principles; practice and profession rarely accord; and this is remarked because it ought not to exist.

Conduct, to be rational, should be motived, and consequently referable to certain general principles by which it is justified. To be particular, a man who believes in God, the Creator, a Father as just as he is good, has fundamental motives of action which are wanting to the atheist. The one should seek to approve himself to his heavenly Father; the other cannot go farther than conform to the laws of nature. To the one this life, as compared with that which is to be, is of value only as it relates to it; to the other it is all in all. And since the ultimate end of society is the welfare of the associated, the one will regard this end from a transcendental point of view, taking in time and eternity; the other will consider it merely with reference to man’s present state. Their notions of life, of its ends, aims, and proper surroundings, will be radically different.

Suppose for a moment that religious beliefs are mere dreams, fancies of sick brains; is it not at once manifest that human life is a much poorer and sorrier thing than it is commonly thought to be? As the light of heaven fades away, do not all things grow dark, leaving us in the shadow of death, despairing or debauched, sullen or frantic? The poet’s dream, the mother’s fond hope, the heart’s deep yearning, the mind’s flight towards the infinite, all become flat, meaningless, and unprofitable. Men are simply animals chained to this clod, too happy if the heaven-seeking eye permitted them to see it alone. Trouble, danger, and physical pain are the only evils, and virtue is the sharp-sighted prudence which enables us to avoid them. Self-denial is not only useless, it is irrational. Our appetites are good and ought to be indulged. Nothing, of its own nature, is sinful; excess alone is wrong; all indulgence, provided it hurt no one, is good—nay, it is necessary. Whoever denies any one of his appetites the food it craves cripples himself, is maimed and incomplete. “He may be a monk; he may be a saint; but a man he is not.”

When these views are transferred to questions of political economy and social organization, they lead to materialistic and utilitarian theories. Society must be organized on the basis of positivism; the problem of the future is how to give to the greatest number of individuals the best opportunities of indulgence, the greatest amount of comfort, with the least amount of pain. This is the greatest-happiness principle of Bentham and Mill. Culture, of course, intellectual and æsthetic, as affording the purest pleasure, must form a feature of this society; but its distinctive characteristic is wealth, which is both the means and the opportunity of indulgence.

This is the cosmic religion, which is preached as “the new faith, the religion of the future.” This world is all in all—let us make the most of it; or, as the pagans of old put it: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”

In its essence it is sensualism; in its manifestations it will be refined or coarse, according to the dispositions of the persons by whom it is accepted. Now its worship will be accompanied with music and song and dance; at other times it will sink to those orgies in which man becomes only an unnatural animal.

Let us now turn to the Christian religion, and consider its teachings in their bearing upon the subject we are discussing. They are the very opposite of those which we have just read, and proceed from principles which are in direct contradiction to the cosmic philosophy. God is the highest, the Creator of all things, which are of value only as they relate to him and are in harmony with the laws of his being. The earth is but the threshold of heaven or of hell, as the case may be. This life is a preparation for a future one, which is eternal; and all human interests, whether individual or social, to be rightly understood, must be viewed in their relation to this truth. Man is essentially a moral being, and duty, which is often in conflict with pleasure, is his supreme law. He is under the action of antagonistic forces; seeing the better and approving it, he is drawn to love the worse and to do it. Thus self-denial becomes the condition of virtue, and warfare with himself his only assurance of victory.

“But he said to all: If any one wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross every day, and follow me.”

Wealth, which is the world’s great slave and idol, and universal procurator of the senses, though in itself not evil, is yet a hindrance to the highest spiritual life. “If thou wouldst be perfect, go sell what thou hast, and give it to the poor, and thou shall have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.”

As duty is the supreme law of the individual, it follows that we must seek the ideal of society in the moral order, to which all other social interests should be made subservient, or else they will beget only an unbounded and lawless activity. Even education is valuable only in so far as it gives man a deeper sense of his responsibility to God, and enables him more thoroughly to understand and perform his duty.

The social problem as between Christianity and modern paganism may be stated in this way: is it the end of society to grow strong in virtue through self-denial, or to increase indefinitely the means and opportunity of indulgence? On which side is progress, on which decline?

We cannot now go farther into[589] this subject, but before leaving it we wish to quote the words of Fitzjames Stephen, who will hardly be called a Christian, on modern progress.

The general superiority, and even the greater wealth, of Christian nations as compared with others we would attribute, in great part at least, to the influence of their religious faith, to which they owe their sentiments on the dignity and sacredness of human nature in itself, apart from surroundings; on the substantial equality of all men before God, which tends to produce as its counterpart the equality of all before the law, thus leading to the abolition of slavery, the elevation of woman, and the protection of childhood. To it also they owe their ideas on the family, which, in its constitutive Christian elements, lies at the very foundation of our civilization. To Christianity they owe the principles of universal charity and compassion, which have revolutionized the relations of social life; and, finally, to it they are indebted for the rehabilitation of labor, the chief source of wealth, which the pagan nations looked upon as degrading.

“I cannot say,” writes Herodotus, “whether the Greeks get their contempt for labor from the Egyptians; for I find the same prejudice among the Thracians, the Scythians, the Persians, and the Lydians.”

“The Germans,” says Tacitus, “cannot bear to remain quiet, but they love to be idle; they hold it base and unworthy of them to acquire by their sweat what they can purchase with their blood.” In the same way the Gauls looked upon labor with contempt.

We shall have to take up M. de Laveleye’s pamphlet again; for the present we lay it aside with the following remark: If we should grant, to the fullest, all that is here said about the greater wealth and material prosperity of Protestant as compared with Catholic nations what are we thence to conclude? Shall we say that the greed of gain which is so marked a feature in the populations of England and the United States is at once the result and proof of true Christian faith? May it not be barely possible that the value of material progress is exaggerated? Is there not danger lest, when man shall have made matter the willing slave of all his passions, he should find that he has become the creature of this slave? However this may be, might not a Catholic find some consolation in the words of Holy Writ?

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.

CHAPTER XII.
THE BARONET IS RELIEVED.—A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY.

The night was wild and stormy. The wind had risen to a hurricane, and drove the rain in Raymond’s face as he walked home through the park. It was driving the grass in cold ripples over the fields, and tossing the trees about as if it would break them. Columns of black clouds were trooping over the sky, and the moon broke through them as if she were pursued by the wind and flying for her life. Raymond was a long time getting to the cottage. Great gusts swept up from the valley, staggering him, so that he had to stand every now and then and cling to a tree until it passed. Then the rain beat against his face so that he could hardly profit by the fitful gleams of the moon as she dipped in and out of the clouds. He was dripping wet when he got to his own door and let himself in with his latch-key. He took off his coat, hanging it in the hall, and lighted his candle. Franceline had left it close to his hand with a match.

Mechanically he walked up to his room and began to divest himself of his drenched clothing. He hardly noticed that they were soaking and that he was wet through; he was flushed and heated as if he had come straight from a hot room. How the blast roared and shrieked, beating against the cottage till it rocked like a ship at sea, and trying the windows till they cracked and groaned! It whistled through the chinks so that the flimsy red curtain fluttered as if the window had been open. Raymond pushed it aside and opened the shutters, and looked out. The night was inky black, above and below, except when a star flickered in and out like a gas-jet swept by the wind, and showed the river like a bit of steel, as it flashed and quivered under the pelting rain and hurried away into blacker distance. All this angry roar was better than music to Raymond. The fury of the elements seemed to comfort him. Nature was in sympathy with him. It was kind of her to be angry and disturbed when he was so distraught. Nature had more heart than his fellow-men. These were talking over his despair quietly enough now—mocking him, very likely; but the world around was shaken, and tossed, and driven in sympathy with him. A great gust came swelling up from the river, growing louder and heavier as it drew near, till, gathering itself up like a mountainous wave, it burst with a crash against the cottage. M. de la Bourbonias leaped back, and, with a sudden impulse of terror, flew out into the landing, and knocked at Angélique’s door; but the sonorous breathing of the old servant reassured him that all was right there and in the room beyond. It was pitch dark, but the reflection from his own open door showed Franceline’s[591] standing wide open. He listened, but everything was silent there. He stole noiselessly back to his room and closed the door, without disturbing either of the sleepers.

The storm had reached its crisis, and gradually subsided after this, until the wind was spent and died away in long, low wails behind the woods, and the moon drifted above the tattered clouds that were sweeping toward the east, leaving a portion of the sky stainless, with stars flashing out brightly. Raymond put out his candle and went to bed.

Under ordinary circumstances he would probably have paid for the night’s adventure by an attack of bronchitis or rheumatic fever; but the mental fever that had been devouring him warded off every other, and when he came down next morning he was neither ill nor ailing.

Franceline, like her bonne, had slept through the storm, and they were quite astonished to hear what an awful night it had been, and to see the fields strewn with great branches in every direction, gates torn up, and other evidences of the night’s work. But they saw no traces of another tempest that was raging still in a human soul close by them. Nothing betrayed its existence, and they guessed nothing—so securely does this living wall of flesh screen the secrets of the spirit from every outside gaze! Passions rise up in hearts whose pulses we fondly imagine close and familiar to us as our own, and the winds blow and the waves run high and make wild havoc there, turning life into darkness and despair, or, at the whisper of the Master’s voice, illuminating it as suddenly with a flood of sunshine; and we are blind and deaf to these things, and remain as “a stranger to our brother.” And mercifully so. Many a battle is won that would have been lost if it had not been fought alone. We hinder each other by our pity, perhaps, as often as we help.

Sir Simon had very little appetite for his breakfast when he came down next morning, sick at heart after a sleepless night, and found the pleasant meal thoughtfully spread in his favorite room, the library, with the table wheeled close to his arm-chair on the right side of the hearth. It all looked the very picture of comfort and refinement and elegance. But the cup was doubly poisoned to him now; last night’s adventure had added the last drop of bitterness to it. He could not think of Raymond without a poignant pang. He suspected—and he was right—that Raymond was thinking of him, wondering whether it was really all over with him this time, and whether he was bankrupt and his estate in the fangs of the creditors; and whether he was driving away from the Court never to see it again; or whether once more, for the hundred and ninety-ninth time, he had weathered the storm and was still afloat—even though on a raft. Raymond would have scarcely believed it if any one had informed him that he had been the instrument of destroying Sir Simon’s one chance of escape; that he had snatched the last plank from him in his shipwreck. It may have been an imaginary one, and Sir Simon, after the fashion of drowning men, may have been catching at a straw; but now that it was snatched from him, he was more than ever convinced that it had been a solid plank which would have borne him securely to shore. He did not ask himself[592] whether Mr. Plover would have entered into his plans, and whether, supposing he found it his interest to do so, his fortune would have been equal to the demand; he only considered what might have been, and what was not; and thinking of this, his indulgent pity for M. de la Bourbonais shrank in the bitter reflection that he had ruined not only himself but his friend irretrievably. They were pretty much in the same boat now.

Sir Simon’s self-made delusions had cleared away wonderfully within the last forty-eight hours. He drew no comparison to his own advantage between Raymond’s actual position and his own. If M. de la Bourbonais was a thief in the technical sense of the word, he, Sir Simon, was a bankrupt; and a bankrupt, under certain conditions, may mean a swindler. He had been a swindler for years; his life had been a sham these twenty years, and he had not the excuse of circumstances to fall back on; he had been dishonest from extravagance and sheer want of principle. “Take it first and afford it afterwards” had been his theory, and he had lived up to it, and now the day of reckoning had arrived. Many a time he had said, half in jest, that Raymond was the richer man of the two. Raymond used to laugh mildly at the notion, but it was true. An ambitious, extravagant man and a contented poor one are pretty much on a level: the one possesses everything he does not want; the other wants everything he does not possess. The unprincipled spend-thrift and the high-minded, struggling man were then on an equality of fortune, or rather the latter was virtually the wealthier of the two. But now the distinction was washed out. The proud consciousness of unstained honor and innermost self-respect which had hitherto sustained M. de la Bourbonais and sweetened the cup of poverty to him was gone. He was a blighted man, who could never hold up his head again amongst his fellow-men.

“Good God! what delirium possessed him? How could he be so infatuated, so stupid!” broke out Sir Simon, giving vent to what was passing through his mind. “But,” he added presently, “he was not accountable. I believe grief and anxiety drove him mad.” Then he recalled that answer of Raymond’s, that had sounded so untrue at the time: “Yes, I can fancy myself giving way, if the temptation took a certain form, and if I were left to my own strength.” The words sounded now like a prophecy.

Of course we all know that, according to the canons of poetical justice, the brave, suffering man should have been in some unexpected way succored in his extremity; that some angel in visible or invisible form should have been sent to hold him up from slipping into the pit that despair had dug for him; and that, on the other hand, the wicked spendthrift should have been left to eat the bread of righteous retribution, and suffer the just penalty of his evil behavior. But poetical justice and the facts of real life do not always agree.

Sir Simon, after walking up and down the library, chewing the cud of bitter thoughts until he was sick of it, bethought himself that as breakfast was there he might as well try and eat it before it got cold. So he sat down and poured out his coffee, and then, by mere force of habit, and without the faintest glimmer of interest, began to turn over the bundle of letters[593] piled up beside the Times on the table. One after another was tossed away contemptuously. The duns might cry till they were hoarse now; he need not trouble about them; he would be at least that much the gainer by his disgrace. Suddenly his eye lighted on an envelope that was not addressed in the well-known hand of the race of duns, but in Clide de Winton’s, and it bore the London postmark. The thought of Clide generally produced on Sir Simon the effect of a needle run through the left side; but he took up this letter with a strange thrill of expectation. He opened it, and a change came over his face; it was not joy—it was too uncertain, too tremulous yet for that. He must read it again before he trusted to the first impression; he must make sure that he was not dreaming, and the words that danced like a will-o’-the-wisp before his eyes were real, written with real ink, on real paper. At last he dropped the letter, and a heartier prayer than he had uttered since his childhood came from him: “My God, I thank thee! I have not deserved this mercy, but I will try to deserve it.”

He buried his face in his hands, and remained mute and motionless for some minutes. Then, starting up as if suddenly remembering something, he pulled out his watch. It wanted five minutes of ten. The law officer and the Jew creditor were to start by the train that left Charing Cross at a quarter past eleven. Sir Simon rang the bell sharply.

“Saddle a horse, and ride as fast as you can with this to the telegraph,” he said to his valet, who answered the summons; “and the moment you come back, get ready to be off with me to London by the mid-day train.”

The telegram prepared Mr. Simpson to see his client appear at his office at two o’clock that afternoon, and, in obedience to its directions, the Jew was there to meet him. Clide de Winton had seen Simpson the day before, and given him full authority to settle the Dullerton debts so as to set Sir Simon Harness free. He had only arrived in London that very morning, and it was the merest accident that led him to call on the family lawyer, who was also the family’s best friend, on his way from the station to his hotel. Simpson was discretion itself, and one of the attributes of that virtue is to know when to be indiscreet. Clide’s first inquiry was for Sir Simon, with a view—which the astute lawyer did not see through—of leading up to inquiries about other friends at Dullerton; whereupon Mr. Simpson bolted out the whole truth, told him of the baronet’s position, the long arrears of debt that had come against him, and which were to culminate in bankruptcy within twenty-four hours. It was as if the sky had fallen on Clide, or the ground opened under his feet.

“Thank goodness I am come in time!” he exclaimed; and there and then sat down and wrote to Sir Simon, telling him that proceedings were stopped, and that he, Clide, took them in his own hands.

“And this is what you call being a friend!” said the young man, as he and the baronet left Simpson’s office together, the one with a lightened purse, the other with a heart considerably more so. “To think of your letting things go to such lengths, and that if I had been a day later it would have been all over!”

“By forgiving me. I’ve lived long enough to find out a secret or two. One is that it requires a very noble soul to forgive a man a money obligation, and that there is a deal more generosity in accepting than in conferring it. So if you don’t pick a quarrel with me after this, and turn your back on me, we are quits. Is it a bargain?”

He held out his hand, laughing; Sir Simon wrung it till the pressure made Clide wince. This was his only answer, and the only sentimental passage the occasion gave rise to between them.

It was more than a month since Clide had left St. Petersburg, although the season was still at its height there, and Isabel’s engagement was to have lasted until the end of it. This had, however, been brought to an abrupt and tragic close. She had acted for six weeks with unprecedented success; every night was a fresh triumph, and nothing was talked of in the salons and clubs but the wonders of her voice, the intense reality of her acting, and her rare beauty. Ophelia was considered her grandest part. She was playing it one evening to a crowded house, in the presence of the imperial family and the whole court, and seemed wrought up to a pitch of power and pathos that surpassed her finest preceding efforts. She was singing the mad scene with melting tenderness; the house was breathless, hanging enraptured on every note, when suddenly the voice ceased, the prima donna cast a wild look on every side of her, and then, with a shriek too terribly real to be within the compass of art, she flung her arms over her head, and, clasping her hands, fell insensible to the ground. Never did any opera-house witness so dramatic a scene. The spectators rose in a body from the pit to the gallery, shouting to know what had happened, and calling for help. Help was near enough. A man in plain clothes sprang from behind the scenes, and lifted the prostrate Ophelia before any of the actors could interfere. There were several medical men among the audience, and they rushed in a body to offer their services. It was feared for a moment that she was dead; but the doctors soon pronounced it to be only a swoon, though it was impossible to say what might follow on the awakening. The emperor sent one of his chamberlains to hear and see what was going on in the green-room, and inquire if the piece was to be continued; whereupon the luckless manager flew out before the footlights, and falling on his knees under the imperial box, as if he saw the knout suspended over his shoulders, called heaven to witness that he was a loyal subject and an innocent man, and flung himself on the imperial clemency. The prima donna had been seized with illness, and the opera could not be finished that night. The czar waved his clemency to the terrified man, who withdrew, invoking all manner of benedictions on the mercy of the Father of all the Russians, and flew to hear what the doctors were now saying of Ophelia. They were saying that she was acting out her part as it had never yet been acted, with the perfection of nature—she was raving mad.

This was not proclaimed at once. The affair was hushed up for a few days, and kept out of the newspapers, so that Clide only heard it accidentally at the club, where he happened to lounge in a week after the occurrence. He sent Stanton[595] off at once to make inquiries at the house where Isabel lodged. But they could tell nothing of her there; she had been taken away the day after her seizure at the opera, and had left no address. Clide went straight to the lawyer, and asked if there was no way of getting access to her through the police; of learning at least whether she was in an asylum; for his first idea on hearing that she had been taken away was that they had placed her in some such confinement. The lawyer agreed with him that this was most probable, but did not promise much help in verifying the supposition. He seemed honestly willing to do what he could in the matter, but repeated the old warning that little could be done where imperial favor stood in the way. It was highly probable that the czar would still show his benevolence toward the beautiful artist by screening her hiding-place and the fact of her being mad, in hope of her being able to return and complete her engagement after rest and medical treatment.

His position now seemed worse to Clide than it had ever been. The thought of Isabel’s being in a mad-house, a prey to the most awful visitation that humanity is subject to, rudely, perhaps cruelly, treated by coarse, pitiless menials, was so horrible that at first it haunted him till he almost fancied he was going mad himself. The image of the bright young creature who had first stirred the pulses of his foolish heart was for ever before his eyes as she appeared to him that day—how long ago it seemed!—in the midst of the splendors of Niagara, and that he took her for a sprite—some lovely creature of the water and the sunlight. He remembered, with a new sense of its meaning, the strange air she wore, walking on as if half unconscious he had wondered if she were not walking in her sleep. Was it a phase of the cruel malady that was then showing itself? And if so, was she not, perhaps, blameless from the beginning? This blight that had fallen on her in her brilliant maturity might have been germinating then, making strange havoc in her mind, and impelling her character, her destiny, to fearful and fantastic issues. Some weeks passed while Clide was a prey to these harrowing thoughts, when he received a letter from the lawyer, saying he had something to communicate to him of interest.

“It is not good news,” he said, as the Englishman entered his office; “but it is better than complete suspense. The signora is not in St. Petersburg. All our researches were useless from the first, as she was carried off almost immediately to a lunatic asylum in Saxony.”

“Yes; and she has been admirably treated with the utmost skill and care, so much so that it is expected she will be quite restored after a short period of convalescence.”

“Through a client of mine who has been for some time a patient of the establishment. He left it very recently, and came to see me on his return, and in talking over the place and its inmates he described one in a way that excited my suspicions. I wrote to the director, and put a few questions cautiously, and the answer leaves me no doubt but that the patient whom my client saw there a few days before his departure was the lady who interests you.”

“My client saw a person walking in the grounds with her once, and from the description it must be the same who travelled with her from England—her uncle, in fact: a middle-sized man with coal-black hair and very white teeth; ‘decidedly an unpleasant-looking person’ my client called him.”

“Strange!” murmured Clide. “That description does not tally with my recollection of the man who called himself her uncle, except that he had a forbidding countenance and was of medium height. He had a quantity of gray, almost white, hair, and not a sound tooth in his head.”

“Humph! White hair may turn black, and new teeth may be made to replace lost ones,” observed the lawyer. “I would not be put off the scent by changes of that sort, if the main points coincided.”

“Very true. I must start at once, then, for Saxony, and try and see for myself. I shall have difficulty in gaining the confidence of the directors of the place, I dare say. Can you help me by a letter of introduction to any of them?”

“Yes; I am well known to the principal medical man by name, and I will give you a line to him with pleasure.”

Clide travelled without halting till he drove up to the door of the asylum. His letter procured him admittance at once to the private room of the medical man, and, what was of greater importance, it inclined the latter to credit his otherwise almost incredible story. When Clide had told all he deemed necessary, the doctor informed him that the patient whom he believed to be his wife had already left the house and the country altogether; she had spent three full weeks under his care, and was then well enough to be removed, and had, by his advice, been taken home for the benefit of native air. It was just three days since she had left Saxony. The doctor could give no idea as to where she had gone, beyond that she had returned to England; he knew nothing of the whereabouts of her native place there, and her uncle had left no clue to his future residence.

Clide was once more baffled by fate, and found himself again in a dead-lock. In answer to his inquiries concerning the nature of Isabel’s disease, the medical man said that it was hereditary, and therefore beyond the likelihood—not to say possibility—of radical cure. This, it seemed, was the third attack from which she had suffered. The first was in early girlhood, before the patient was eighteen; the second, somewhat later and of much longer duration—it had lasted six years, her uncle said; then came the third crisis, which, owing, perhaps, to the improved general health of the patient, but more probably to the more judicious and enlightened treatment she had met with, had passed off very rapidly. It was, however, far from being a cure. It was at best but a recovery, and the disease might at any moment show itself again in a more obstinate and dangerous form. Perfect quiet, freedom from excitement, whether mental or physical, were indispensable conditions for preserving her against another crisis. It was needless to add after this that the career of an actress was the most fatal one the unfortunate young woman could[597] have adopted. But in that, no doubt, she was more passive than active.

With this new light on his path, Clide hastened his return to England, farther than ever, it seemed, from his journey’s end, and laden with a heavier burden than when he set out. March! march! was still the command that sounded in his ears, driving him on and on like the Wandering Jew, and never letting him get nearer the goal.

He had not the faintest idea of Isabel’s native place. She had told him she was Scotch, and her name said so too, though she was perfectly free from the native accent which marked her uncle’s speech so strongly. But what did that prove either way? Was Cameron her name, or Prendergast his? He had taken a new name in his travels, and so had she. Still, feeble as the thread was, it was the only one he had to guide him; so he started for Scotland as soon as he landed in England, having previously taken the precaution to acquaint the police in London with his present purpose, and what had led him to it. If Isabel were sufficiently recovered to appear again in public, it was probable that the brutal man—who was in reality no more than her task-master—would have made some engagement for her with a manager, and she might at this moment be singing her brain away for his benefit in some provincial theatre. It was clear he shunned the publicity of the London stage. Clide thought of these things as he tramped over the purple heather of the Highlands, following now one mirage, now another; and his heart swelled within him and smote him for his angry and vindictive feelings toward Isabel; and tears, that were no disgrace to his manhood, forced themselves from his eyes. Poor child! She was not to blame, then, for wrecking his life, and coming again like an evil genius to thrust him back into the abyss just as he had climbed to safety, beckoned onwards and upwards by another angel form. She was a victim herself, and had perhaps never meant to deceive or betray him, but had loved him with her mad, untutored heart as well as she knew how.

The winter days dragged on drearily, as he went from place to place in Scotland, and found no trace of the missing one, heard nothing that gave him any hopes of finding her. The police were equally unsuccessful in London. Stanton had gone back there, very much against his inclination; but Clide insisted that he would be of more use in the busy streets, keeping his keen eyes open, than following his master in his wanderings up and down Scotland.

One dark afternoon the valet was walking along Regent Street, when he stopped to look at some prints in a music-shop. The gas was lighted, and streamed in a brilliant blaze over the gaudily-attired tenors and prime donne that were piling the agony on the backs of various operatic songs. Stanton was considering them, and mentally commenting on the manner of ladies and gentlemen who found it good to spend their lives making faces and throwing themselves into contortions that appeared to him equally painful and ridiculous, when he noticed a lady inside the shop engaged in choosing some music. She was dressed in black, and he only caught a glimpse of her side face through her veil; but the glimpse made him start. He watched her take the roll of music from the shopman, secure[598] it in a little leathern case, and then turn to leave the shop. She walked out leisurely, but the moment she opened the door she quickened her pace almost to a run; and before Stanton knew where he was, she had rushed into the middle of the street. He hastened after her, but a string of carriages and cabs intervened and blocked the street for some moments. As soon as it was clear, he saw the slight figure in black stepping into an omnibus. He hailed it, gesticulating and hallooing frantically; but the conductor, with the spirit of contradiction peculiar to conductors, kept his head persistently turned the other way. Stanton tore after him, waving his umbrella and whistling, all to no purpose, until at last he stopped for want of breath. At the same moment the omnibus pulled up to let some travellers alight; he overtook it this time, and got in. The great machine went thundering on its way, and there opposite to him sat the lady in black, his master’s wife, he was ready to swear, if she was in the land of the living. He saw the features very indistinctly, but well enough to be certain of their identity; the height and contour were the same, and so was the mass of jet black hair that escaped in thick plaits from under the small black bonnet. Then there was the conclusive fact of his having seen her in a music-shop. This clinched the matter for Stanton. The omnibus stopped, the lady got out, ran to the corner of the street, and waited for another to come up, and jumped into it; Stanton meanwhile following her like her shadow. She saw it, and he saw that she saw it, and that she was frightened and trying to get away from him. Why should she do so if she were not afraid of being recognized? He was not a gentleman, and could see no reason for an unprotected young woman being frightened at a man looking fixedly at her and pursuing her, unless she had a guilty conscience. He sat as near as he could to her in the omnibus, and when it pulled up to let her down he got down. She hurried up a small, quiet street off Tottenham Court Road, and on reaching a semi-detached small house, flew up the steps and pulled violently at the bell. Stanton was beside her in an instant.

“Excuse me, ma’am, but I know you. I don’t mean to do you any ’arm, only to tell you that I’m Stanton, Mr. Clide’s valet; you are my master’s wife!”

“You are mistaken,” replied the lady, shrinking into the doorway. “I know nothing about you. I never heard of Mr. Clide, and I’m not married!”

Stanton was of course prepared for the denial, and showed no sign of surprise or incredulity; but, in spite of himself, her tone of assurance staggered him a little. He could not say whether the sound of the voice resembled that of Mrs. de Winton. Its echoes had lingered very faintly in his memory, and so many other voices and sounds had swept over it during the intervening years that he could not the least affirm whether the voice he had just heard was hers or not. Before he had found any answer to this question, footsteps were audible pattering on the tarpauling of the narrow entry, and a slip-shod servant-girl opened the door. The lady passed quickly in; Stanton followed her.

“You must leave me!” she said, turning on him. “This is my papa’s[599] house, and if you give any more annoyance he will have you taken into custody.” She spoke in a loud voice, and as she ceased the parlor door was opened, and a gentleman in a velveteen coat and slippers came forward with a newspaper in his hand.

“What’s the matter? What is all this about?” he demanded blandly, coming forward to reconnoitre Stanton, who did not look at all bland, but grim and resolute, like a man who had conquered his footing on the premises, and meant to hold it.

“Sir, I am Stanton, Mr. Clide’s valet; this lady knows me well, if you don’t.”

“Papa! I never saw him in my life! I don’t know who Mr. Clide is!” protested the young lady in a tremor. “This man has annoyed me all the way home. Send him away!”

“I must speak to you, sir,” said Stanton stoutly. “I cannot leave the house without.”

“Pray walk in!” said the gentleman, waving his newspaper towards the open parlor; “and you, my dear, go and take off your bonnet.”

“Now, sir, be good enough to state your business,” he began when the door was closed.

“My business isn’t with you, sir, but with your daughter, if she is your daughter,” said Stanton. “One thing is certain—she’s my master’s wife; there an’t no use in her denying it, and the best thing she can do is to speak out to her ’usband penitent-like, and he’ll forgive her, poor thing, and do the best he can for her, which will be better than what that uncle of hers ’as been doin’ for her, draggin’ her about everywhere and driving the poor creature crazy. That’s what I’ve got to say, sir, and I ’ope you’ll see as it’s sense and reason.”

The occupant of the velveteen slippers listened to this speech with eyes that grew rounder and rounder as it proceeded; then he threw back his head and laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks.

“My good man, there’s some mistake! You’ve mistaken my daughter for somebody else; she never was married in her life, and she has no uncle that ever I heard of. Ha! ha! ha! It’s the best joke I ever heard in my life!”

“Excuse me; it an’t no joke at all!” protested Stanton, nettled, and resolved not to be shaken by the ring of honesty there was in the man’s laugh. “You mayn’t know the person that calls himself her uncle, but I do, sir. Mayhap you are duped by the rascal yourself; but it’ll all come out now. I have it all in the palm of my hand.” And he opened that capacious member and closed it again significantly. “Your daughter must either come away with me quietly, or I’ll call the police and have her taken off whether she will or no!”

“I tell you, man, you are under some preposterous mistake,” said the gentleman, his blandness all gone, and his choler rising. “My name is Honey. I am a clerk in H—— Bank, and my daughter, Eliza Jane Honey, has never left me since she was born. She is an artist, a singer, and gives lessons in singing in some of the first houses in London!”

“Singer! Singing lessons! Ha! Just so! I know it all,” said Stanton, his mouth compressing itself in a saturnine smile. “I know it all, and I tell you I don’t leave this ’ouse without her.”

“Confound your insolence! What do you mean? You’d better be[600] gone this instant, or I’ll call the police and give you into custody!

“No, sir, don’t try it; it won’t answer,” said Stanton, imperturbable. “It ’ud only make more trouble; the poor thing has enough on her already, and I’m not the one to make more for her. If you call in the police I’ve something ’ere,” slapping his waistcoat pocket, “as ’ud settle at once which of us was to be took up.”

Before Mr. Honey could say anything in answer to this, a voice came carrolling down the stairs, singing some air from an opera, rich with trills and fioriture.

“There it is! The very voice! The very tune I’ve ’eard her sing in the drawing-room at Lanwold!” exclaimed Stanton.

“My dear, he is either a madman or—or worse,” said her father. “It’s the most extraordinary thing I ever heard in my life!”

“Speak out, ma’am, and don’t you fear I’ll do you any ’arm; my master wouldn’t ’ave it, not for all the money he’s worth. Nobody knows the sum he’s spent on them detectives already to try and catch you; and it speaks badly for the lot to say they’ve not caught you long ago. But don’t you be afraid of me, ma’am!” urged Stanton, making his voice as mild as he could.

“Why should I be afraid of you? I never laid my eyes on you before, or you on me; you mistake me for somebody else, I tell you. I never heard of Mr. Clide, and I am certain he never heard of me. The idea of your insisting that I’m his wife!” And she laughed again; but there was a nervous twitch about her mouth, and Stanton saw it.

“As like as two peas in a pod!” was his emphatic remark, as he deliberately scanned her face.

There was no denying the resemblance, indeed. The face was fuller, the features more developed, but the interval of years would explain that.

“Look at my hand! You see I have no wedding-ring? Ask me a few questions; you will find out the blunder at once, if you only try,” she said.

Stanton paused for a moment, as if trying to recall something that might serve as a test.

“I ’ave it!” he said, looking up with a look of triumph. “Open your mouth, ma’am, and let me look into it!”

He advanced towards her, expecting instant compliance. But Miss Honey rushed behind her father with a cry of terror and disgust. The movement was perfectly natural under the circumstances, but Stanton saw it in the light of his own suspicions.

“Ha! I guessed as much,” he said, drawing away, and speaking in a quiet tone of regret. “I was sure of it. Well, you give me no choice. I know my dooty to a lady, but I know my dooty to my master too.” He went toward the window, intending to throw it up and call for a policeman.

“Stop!” cried Mr. Honey. “What do you expect to find in my daughter’s mouth?”

“That, sir, is known to her and to me,” was the oracular reply. “If she has nothing in it as can convict her, she needn’t be afraid to let me look into it.”

Mr. Honey turned aside, touched his forehead with his forefinger, and[601] pointed with the thumb toward Stanton. After this rapid and significant little pantomime, he said aloud to his daughter:

“My dear, perhaps it is as well to let the man have his way. He will see that there is nothing to see. Come and gratify his singular curiosity.”

The girl was now too frightened to see the ludicrous side of the performance; she advanced gravely to the table, on which a gas-burner threw a strong, clear light, and opened her mouth. Stanton came and peered into it. “Please to lift the left side as wide open as you can, ma’am; it was the third tooth from the back of her left jaw.”

She did as he desired, but, after looking closely all round, he could see nothing but two fine, pearly rows of teeth, all ivory, without the smallest glimmer of gold or silver to attest the presence of even an unsound one.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am! I beg a thousand pardons, sir! I find I’ve made a great mistake! I’ve behaved shameful rude to you and the young lady; but I hope you’ll forgive me. I was only doing my dooty to my master. I’m sorrier than I can say for my mistake!” Both father and daughter were too thankful to be rid of him to withhold their free and unconditional pardon. They even went the length of regretting that he had had so much trouble and such an unpleasant adventure all to no purpose, and cordially wished him better success next time, as he withdrew, profusely apologizing.

“Papa, he must be an escaped lunatic!” cried the young lady, as the hall-door closed on Stanton.

“I dare say they took me for a maniac, and indeed no wonder!” was Stanton’s reflection, as he heard a peal of laughter through the window.

The adventure left, nevertheless, an uneasy feeling on his mind, and the next day he called on Mr. Peckitt, the dentist, and related it. Mr. Peckitt had not seen the wearer of the silver tooth since the time he had attended her before her departure for Berlin; but he had seen her uncle, and made an entire set of false teeth for him. He took the liberty on first seeing him of inquiring for the young lady; but her uncle answered curtly that she was in no need of dental services at present, and turned off the subject by some irrelevant remark. Mr. Peckitt, of course, took the hint, and never reverted to it. This was all he had to tell Stanton; but he did not confirm the valet’s certainty as to the non-identity of Miss Honey on the grounds of the absence of the silver tooth. It was, he thought, improbable that his patient should have parted with that odd appendage, and that, if so, she should have gone to a strange dentist to have it replaced by an ordinary tooth; but either of these alternatives was possible.

This was all the information that Stanton had for his master when the latter returned from his bootless search in Scotland.

On the following day Sir Simon Harness came to London and heard of the strange adventure. He was inclined to attach more importance to it than Clide apparently did.

“Suppose this so-called Eliza Jane Honey should not have been Isabel,” he said, “but some one like her—the same whom you saw at Dieppe?” Clide shook his head.

“Impossible! I could not be deceived, though Stanton might.[602] This Miss Honey, too, was fuller in the face, and altogether a more robust person, than Isabel, as Stanton remembers her. Now, after the terrible attack that she has suffered lately, it is much more likely that she is worn and thin, poor child!”

“That is true. Still, there remains the coincidence of the splendid voice and of her being an artist. If I were you, I would not rest till I saw her myself.”

“It would only make assurance doubly sure. Stanton has startled me over and over again for nothing. Every pair of black eyes and bright complexion that he sees gives him a turn, as he says, and sets him off on the chase. No; the woman I saw at Dieppe was my wife—I am as sure of that as of my own identity. I did not get near enough to her to say, ‘Are you my wife?’ but I am as certain of it as if I had.” He promised, however, to satisfy Sir Simon, that he would go to Tottenham Court and see Miss Honey.

While Clide’s tongue was engaged on this absorbing topic, he was mentally reverting to another subject which was scarcely less absorbing, and which was closer to his heart. His love for Franceline had not abated one atom of its ardor since absence and a far more impassable gulf had parted him from her; her image reigned supreme in his heart still, and accompanied him in his waking and sleeping thoughts. He felt no compunction for this. His conscience tendered full and unflinching allegiance to the letter of the moral law, but it was in bondage to none of those finer spiritual tenets that ruled and influenced Franceline. He would have cut off his right hand rather than outrage her memory by so much as an unworthy thought; but he gave his heart full freedom to retain and foster its love for her. He had not her clear spiritual insight to discern the sinfulness of this, any more than he had her deep inward strength to enable him to crush the sin out of his heart, even if he had tried, which he did not. It was his misfortune, not his fault, that his love for her was unlawful. Nothing could make it guilty; that was in his own power, and the purity of its object was its best protection. She was an angel, and could only be worshipped with the reverent love that one of her own pure kindred spirits might accept without offence or contamination. Such was Clide’s code, and, if he wanted any internal proof of his own loyalty to sanction it, he had it in the shape of many deep-drawn sighs—prayers, he called them, and perhaps they were—that Franceline might not suffer on his account, but might forget him, and be happy after a time with some worthier husband. He had been quite honest when he sighed these sighs—at least he thought he was; yet when Sir Simon, meaning to console him and make things smooth and comfortable, assured him emphatically that they had been both happily mistaken in the nature of Franceline’s feelings, and then basely and cruelly insinuated that Ponsonby Anwyll was in a fair way to make her a good husband by and by, Clide felt a pang more acute than any he had yet experienced. This is often the case with us. We never know how much insincerity there is in the best of our prayers—the anti-self ones—until we are threatened with the grant of them.

Sir Simon said nothing about the stolen ring. His friendship for Raymond partook of that strong personal feeling which made any dishonor in its object touch him like a personal stain. He could[603] not bear even to admit it to himself that his ideal was destroyed. M. de la Bourbonais had been his ideal of truth, of manly independence, of everything that was noble, simple, and good. There are many intervals in the scale that separates the ordinary honest man from the ideal man of honor. Sir Simon could count several of the former class; but he knew but one of the higher type. He had never known any one whom he would have placed on the same pinnacle of unsullied, impregnable honor with Raymond. Now that he had fallen, it seemed as if the very stronghold of Sir Simon’s own faith had surrendered; he could disbelieve everything, he could doubt everybody. Where was truth to be found, who was to be trusted, since Raymond de la Bourbonais had failed? But meantime he would screen him as long as he could. He would not be the first to speak of his disgrace to any one. He told Clide how Raymond had lost, for him, a considerable sum of money recently, through the dishonesty of a bank, and how he had borne the loss with the most incredible philosophy, because just then it so happened he did not want the money; but since then Franceline’s health had become very delicate, and she was ordered to a warm climate, and these few hundreds would have enabled him to take her there, and her father was now bitterly lamenting the loss.

“But now you can supply them?” he cried. “Or rather let me do it through you! I must not, of course, appear; but it will be something to know I am of use to her—to both of them. You can easily manage it, can you not? M. de la Bourbonais would make no difficulty in accepting the service from you.”

“Humph! As ill-luck will have it, there is a coldness between us at present,” said Sir Simon—“a little tiff that will blow off after a while but meanwhile Bourbonais is as unapproachable as a porcupine. He’s as proud as Lucifer at any time, and I fear there is no one but myself from whom he would accept a service of the kind.”

“Could not Langrove manage it? They seemed on affectionate terms,” said Clide.

“Oh! no, oh! no. That would never do!” said Sir Simon quickly. “I don’t see any one at Dullerton but myself who could attempt it.”

“Well, but some one must, since you say you can’t,” argued Clide with impatience. “When do you return to the Court?”

“I did not mean to return just yet a while. You see, I have a great deal of business to look to—of a pleasant sort, thanks to you, my dear boy, but still imperative and admitting of no delay. I can’t possibly leave town until it has been settled.”

“I should have thought Simpson might have attended to it. I suppose you mean legal matters?” said the young man with some asperity. He could not understand Sir Simon’s being hindered by mere business from sparing a day in a case of such emergency, and for such a friend. It was unlike him to be selfish, and this was downright heartlessness.

“Simpson? To be sure!” exclaimed the baronet jubilantly, starting up and seizing his hat. “I will be off and see him this minute. Simpson is sure to hit on some device; he’s never at a loss for anything.”

THE STORY OF EVANGELINE IN PROSE.

I spare you M. Jourdain’s oft-quoted saying. Too often, I fear, I successfully imitate the “Bourgeois Gentilhomme” in speaking prose without knowing it—aye, at the very moment when I think to woo the Muse most ardently. But great is the courage demanded to announce a purpose to be prosaic—prosy, it may be—with premeditation. Especially true is this when, as in the case before me, the subject itself ranks high as poetry. Mr. Longfellow, in some of his later writings, may seem to aim at, or does, perhaps, unconsciously catch, that tone, made fashionable by the younger Victorian songsters, which sets the poet apart as a being differing from his kind, and makes him, as the English poet-laureate does, “born in a golden clime”

But in his “Tale of Acadie” our American Wordsworth touches with sympathetic finger the chords that vibrate with feeling in common hearts. This is the lyre he sweeps with a magic sweetness not excelled by any modern English poet. Evangeline is a poem of the hearth and domestic love. That is to say, though it is true the heroine and her betrothed never come together in one happy home, the feelings described are such as might without shame beat tenderly in any Christian maiden’s breast; such, too, as any husband might wish his wife to feel. How different is this from the fierce passion—a surrender to the lower nature—which burns and writhes and contorts itself in Mr. Swinburne’s heroines! One is Christian Love, the other the pagan brutishness of Juvenal’s Messalina. It may be said indeed with truth that, in portraying a Catholic maiden and a Catholic community, Mr. Longfellow has, with the intuition of genius, reflected in this poem the purity and fidelity blessed by the church in the love it sanctions. His admirers, therefore, cannot but regret that debasing contact with the new school of the XIXth-century realism which, in such an one of his later poems, for example, as that entitled “Love,” draws him to the worship of the “languors” and “kisses” of the Lucretian Venus. The love of Evangeline is that which is affected by refined women in every society—humble though the poet’s heroine be; the other strips the veil from woman’s weakness.

The charm of the poem is that it transports us to a scene Arcadian, idyllic, yet which impresses us with its truthfulness to nature. This is not Acadia only, but Arcadia. The nymphs, and the shepherds and shepherdesses, and the god Pan with his oaten reed, put off the stage costumes worn by them in the pages of Virgil or on the canvas of Watteau, and, lo! here they are in real life in the village of Grand Pré—Evangeline milking the kine, Gabriel Lajeunesse, and Michael the fiddler, and the level Acadian meadows walled in by their dykes from the turmoil of war that shook the world all around them. The picture is truthful; but truthful rather by the effect of the bold touches that befit the artist[605] and poet than in the multitude of details—some more prosaic, some not so charming—which, massed together, make up the more faithful portrait of the historian. The description of scenery in the poem confuses the natural features of two widely-separated and different sections of the country; the Evangeline of Grand Pré is not in all respects the Acadian girl of Charlevoix or Murdock; the history of men and manners on the shores of the Basin of Mines,[231] as depicted by the poet, is sadly at variance with the angry, tumultuous, suspicious, blood-stained annals of those settlements. Strange as it may seem, the poem is truer of the Acadians of to-day, again living in Nova Scotia, than of their expatriated forefathers. Remoteness of time did not mean, in their case, a golden age of peace and plenty. Far from it! It meant ceaseless war on the borders, the threats and intrigues of a deadly national feud, the ever-present, overhanging doom of exile, military tyranny, and constant English espionage. Now absolute peace reigns within the townships still peopled by their descendants, and the Acadian peasant and village maiden cling in silence and undisturbed to the manners their fathers brought from Normandy nearly three centuries ago.

The first few lines give the coloring to the whole poem. They are the setting within which are grouped the characters.

This is the refrain running through the poem like the aria of the “Last Rose of Summer” through Martha. Yet the picture conveyed to the reader’s mind is that of the Atlantic coast of Acadia, or Nova Scotia, not of the Basin of Mines, where Evangeline dwelt with her people. The natural features of the two sections of country are strikingly diverse. On the east coast of Nova Scotia rises a line of granitic and other cliffs, sterile, vast, jagged, opposing their giant shoulders to the roaring surges of the Atlantic. On the hills behind, the pines and hemlocks rustle and murmur in answer to the waves. This is the “forest primeval” and the “loud-voiced neighboring ocean.” But on the west coast is quite another scene. The Basin of Mines is an inland gulf of an inland sea—the Bay of Fundy. Here the granite rocks and murmuring pines give place to red clay-banks and overflowed marshes. And here is Horton, or Grand Pré. It is separated by the whole breadth of the peninsula of Nova Scotia from the ocean. The “mists from the mighty Atlantic,” which

are in reality the fogs of the Bay of Fundy shut out by the North Mountain. Instead of the long swell of the Atlantic breaking on a rocky coast, we have in the Basin of Mines numerous small rivers running through an alluvial country, with high clay-banks left bare by the receding tide. This last feature of the scene is correctly described by the poet; but it must be borne in mind that it is not united with the natural features of the[606] east coast. The Acadians never, in fact, affected the Atlantic sea-board. They sailed shuddering past its frowning and wintry walls, and, doubling Cape Sable, beat up the Bay of Fundy to where the sheltered Basins of Port Royal and Mines invited an entrance from the west. For over one hundred years after the founding of Port Royal the Atlantic coast of Acadia remained a waste. A fishing-village at Canseau on the north—a sort of stepping-stone to and from the great fortress of Louisburg—and a few scattered houses and clearings near La Tour’s first settlement alone broke the monotonous silence of the wilderness. The Indian hunter tracking the moose over the frozen surface of the snow, and some half-solitary Irish and New England fishermen in Chebucto Bay, divided the rest of the country between them. It was not until 1749 that Cornwallis landed his colonists at Halifax, and made the first solid footing on the Atlantic coast. But for generations previously, in the rich valley of the River of Port Royal, and along the fertile banks of the streams flowing into the Basin of Mines—the Gaspereau, the Canard, and the Pereau—the thrifty Acadians spread their villages, built their churches, and were married and buried by the good Recollect Fathers.

I was a lad scarce emancipated from college when I first visited those scenes. I remember well my emotion when I drew my eyes away from the landscape, and, turning to my companion, Father K——, asked him if there were any remains of the old village of Grand Pré. To my youthful imagination Evangeline was as real as the people about me. Father K—— was the priest stationed at Kentville, about ten miles distant from Grand Pré and the Gaspereau River, which were included in his mission. He was an old family friend, and I was going to spend the summer vacation with him. We were driving from Windsor through Horton and Wolfville to Kentville, passing on our road through all the scenes described in the poem. I have often visited that part of the country since then, but never has it made such an impression on me. The stage-coach then rolled between Windsor and Kentville, and something of the rural simplicity congenial with the poem was still felt to be around one. Last year I rode by rail over the same ground, and later on another line of railroad to Truro, and thence around the Basin of Mines on the north through Cumberland. But my feelings had changed, or the whistle of the locomotive was a sound alien to the memories of those green meadows and intersecting dykes. Evangeline was no longer a being to be loved, but a beautiful figment of the poet’s brain.

I don’t know to this day whether Father K—— was quizzing me, or was loath to shatter my boyish romance, when he told me that there were some old ruins which were said to be the home of Evangeline. It is probable he was having a quiet joke at my expense, as he was noted for his fund of humor, which I learned better to appreciate in later years. Poor Father K——! He was a splendid type of the old Irish missionary priest—an admirable Latinist; well read in English literature, especially the Queen Anne poets; hearty, jovial, and could tell a story that would set the table in a roar. And, withal, no priest worked harder than he did in his wide and laborious mission, or was a more[607] tender-hearted friend of the poor and afflicted. He is since dead.

During the month or six weeks I spent with Father K——, that part of the country became quite familiar to me by means of his numerous drives on parish duties, when I usually accompanied him. Often, as the shades of the summer evening descended, have I watched the mists across the Basin shrouding the bluff front of Cape Blomidon—“Blow-me-down,” as it is more commonly called by the country-folk. At other times we drove up the North Mountain, where the

and, standing there, I have looked down upon the distant glittering waters of the Bay of Fundy.

On one occasion we rode over from Kentville to Wolfville, and then up the Gaspereau, at the mouth of which

swung with the tide on the morning which ushered in the doom of Grand Pré. We rode some distance up the valley to the house of a Catholic farmer, and there put up for the day. It was the day on which the elections took place for the House of Assembly. The contest was fiercely conducted amid great popular excitement. One of those “No-Popery” cries, fomented by an artful politician—which sometimes sweep the colonies as well as the mother country—was raging in the province. Father K—— left Kentville, the county town, on that day to avoid all appearance of interference in the election, and also to get away from the noise and confusion that pervaded the long main street of the village. I can remember the news coming up the Gaspereau in the evening how every one of the four candidates opposed to Father K—— had been returned. But at that time I paid little heed to politics, and during the day I wandered down through the field to the river, and strolled along its willow-fringed banks. Some of those willows were very aged, and might have swung their long, slim wands and narrow-pointed leaves over an Evangeline and a Gabriel a hundred years before. Those willows were not the natural growth of the forest, but were planted there—by whom? No remnant of the people that first tilled the valley was left to say!

Riding home next day, a laughable incident, but doubtless somewhat annoying to Father K——, occurred. Just as we were about to turn a narrow bend of the road, suddenly we were confronted by a long procession in carriages and all sorts of country vehicles, with banners flying, men shouting, and everything to indicate a triumphal parade. It was, in fact, a procession escorting two of the “No-Popery” members elected the day before. The position was truly rueful, but Father K—— had to grin and bear it. There was no escape for us; we had to draw up at the side of the road, and sit quietly in our single wagon until the procession passed us. It was a very orderly and good-humored crowd, but there were a good many broad grins, as they rode by, at having caught the portly and generally popular priest in such a trap. Nothing would persuade them, of course, but that he had been working might and main for the other side during the election. Finally, as the tail of the procession passed us, some one in the rear, more in humor than in malice, sang out: “To h—ll with the Pope.” There[608] was a roar of laughter at this, during which Father K—— gathered up his reins, and, saying something under his breath which I will not vouch for as strictly a blessing, applied the whip to old Dobbin with an energy that that respectable quadruped must have thought demanded explanation.

Changed indeed was such a scene from those daily witnessed when Father Felician,

It has been said in the beginning of this article that Evangeline, the heroine and central figure of the poem, is not altogether true to history as typical of the Acadian girl of that period, as seen in the annals of Port Royal; and doubtless this assertion can be borne out by the records. But, on second thoughts, it does appear, as it were, a profanation to subject such a bright creation of the poet’s mind to the analysis of history. As profitably might we set about converting the diamond into its original carbon. The magical chemistry of genius, as of nature, has in either case fused the dull and common atoms into the sparkling and priceless jewel.

The stoutest champion of her sex will not, upon consideration, contend that so absolutely perfect a creature as Evangeline is likely to be found in any possible phase of society. Is not a spice of coquetry inseparable from all women? Evangeline has none of it. She is, too, too unconscious that her lover

under the trees in the orchard. She is the heroine of an idyl—not, indeed, of unreal Arthurian romance, but of that exalted and passionless love which the virgin heart seeks, but afterwards consoles itself for not finding. That ideal star does not shine upon this world; but its divine rays fall softly upon many an unknown heart in the cloister.

But it is incontestable that the Acadian maidens of Port Royal and Mines shared in some of the agreeable frivolities which still, it is said, sometimes distinguish their sisters in the world. They had an eye for a military uniform and clanking spurs even in those “primeval” days. It is a frequent complaint of the French governors to the home authorities at Paris that their young officers were being continually led into marriage with girls of the country “without birth,” and, worse still, often “without money.” In the old parish register of Annapolis can be seen more than one entry of the union of a gallant ensign or captain to a village belle from the inland settlements whose visit to the Acadian metropolis had subjugated the Gallic son of Mars. Nor was the goddess of fashion altogether without a shrine in close contiguity to the “murmuring pines and the hemlocks.” Some of the naval and military officers sent for their wives from Paris or Quebec, and these fine ladies brought their maids with them. This is not a supposition, but a fact which can be verified by reference to the letters of M. des Goutins and others in the correspondence of the time. Imagine a Parisian soubrette of the XVIIIth century in the village of Grand Pré! It is a shock to those who derive their knowledge of Acadie from Mr. Longfellow’s poem; but those who are familiar with the[609] voluminous records of the day, preserved in the provincial archives, are aware of a good many stranger things than that related in them. Since Evangeline was published the Canadian and Nova Scotian governments have done much to collect and edit their records, and they are now accessible to the student. Rightly understood, there is no reason why the flood of light thus thrown upon the lives of the Acadians should detract anything from our admiration for that simple and kindly race. They were not faultless; but the very fact that they shared in the common interests, and even foibles, of the rest of the world gives that tone of reality to their history which makes us sympathize with them more justly in the cruel fate that overtook them. Yet, in depicting the young Acadian girl of that period as he has done, the poet has but idealized the truth. The march of the history of her people aids him in making the portrait a faithful one. Had he placed the time a little earlier—that is to say, under the French-Acadian régime—and his heroine at Annapolis, his poem could not have borne the criticism of later research. But in selecting the most dramatic incident of Acadian history as the central point of interest, he has necessarily shifted the scene to one of the Neutral French settlements. Here, too, he is aided in maintaining the truthfulness of his portraiture by the fact that the English conquest, in depriving the Acadians of the right of political action, and cutting them off as much as possible from intercourse with Canada and France, had thrown them back upon rural occupations alone, and developed their simple virtues. Mines and Chignecto had been noted for their rustic independence and their manners uncorrupted by contact with the world, even under the old régime. One of the military governors of Port Royal complains of them as “semi-republicans” in a letter to the Minister of Marine and Colonies at Paris. After the conquest of 1710, intercourse with Annapolis and its English Government House and foreign garrison became even more restricted. No oath of allegiance being taken to the new government, the curé was recognized both by the inhabitants and the Annapolis government as their virtual ruler. Under the mild sway of Fathers Felix, Godalie, and Miniac—in turn curés of Mines—the Acadians sought to forget in the cultivation of their fields the stern military surveillance of Annapolis, and, later, Fort Edwards and Fort Lawrence. Father Miniac comes latest in time, and shared the misfortunes of his flock in their expulsion. But in Father Godalie, the accomplished scholar and long-loved friend of the people of Grand Pré, we seem best to recognize the “Father Felician” of Mr. Longfellow’s poem. He was a guide well fitted to form the lovely character of Evangeline; nor do the authentic records of the time bear less ample testimony to the virtue of his people than the glowing imagination of the poet.

It is less in the delineation of individual character than in its description of the undisturbed peace reigning at Grand Pré that the poem departs most from the truth of history. The expulsion of 1755 was not a thunderbolt in a clear sky descending upon a garden of Eden. It was a doom known to be hanging over them for forty[610] years. Its shadow, more or less threatening for two generations, was present in every Acadian household, disabling industry and driving the young men into service or correspondence with their French compatriots. Space would not permit, in so short a paper, to enter into the history of that desperate struggle for supremacy on this continent ending on the heights of Abraham, isolated chapters of which have been narrated with a graphic pen by Mr. Francis Parkman. Acadie was one of its chosen battlegrounds. So far from the Acadians living in rural peace and content, it may be said broadly yet accurately that from the date of their first settlement to their final expulsion from the country, during a period extending over one hundred and fifty years, five years had never passed consecutively without hostilities, open or threatened. The province changed masters, or was wholly or partially conquered, seven times in a little over one hundred years, and the final English conquest, so far from establishing peace, left the Acadians in a worse position than before. They refused to take the oath of allegiance to the English government; the French government was not able to protect them, though it used them to harass the English.

They acquired, therefore, by a sort of tacit understanding, the title and position of the “Neutral French,” the English government simply waiting from year to year until it felt itself strong enough to remove them en masse from the province, and the Acadians yearly expecting succor from Quebec or Louisburg. Each party regarded the other as aliens and enemies. Hence it is that no French-Acadian would ever have used the words “his majesty’s mandate”—applied to George II.—as spoken by Basil the blacksmith in the poem. That single expression conveys a radically false impression of the feelings of the people at the time. The church at Mines, or Grand Pré, from the belfry of which

had been burned down twice by the English and its altar vessels stolen by Col. Church in the old wars. Nor had permanent conquest, as we have said, brought any change for the better. The curés were frequently imprisoned on pretext of exciting attacks on the English garrisons, and sometimes, as in the case of Father Felix and Father Charlemagne, were exiled from the province. In 1714 the intention was first announced of transporting all the Acadians from their homes. It was proposed to remove them to Cape Breton, still held by the French. The pathetic remonstrance of Father Felix Palm, the curé of Grand Pré, in a letter and petition to the governor, averted this great calamity from his people at that time. But the project was again revived by the English Board of Trade, 1720-30. In pursuance of its orders, Gov. Philipps issued a proclamation commanding the people of Mines to come in and take the oath of allegiance by a certain day, or to depart forthwith out of the province, permitting, at the same time—a stretch of generosity which will hardly be appreciated at this day—each family to carry away with it “two sheep,” but all the rest of their property to be confiscated. This storm also blew over. But the result of this continual harassment and threatening was to drive the Acadians into closer correspondence with the French at[611] Louisburg, and to cause their young men to enlist in the French-Canadian forces on the frontier. In view of this aid and comfort given to the enemy, and their persistent refusal to take the oath of allegiance, later English writers have not hesitated to declare the removal of the Acadians from the province a political and military necessity. But the otherwise unanimous voice of humanity has unequivocally denounced their wholesale deportation as one of the most cruel and tyrannical acts in the colonial history of England. We are not to suppose, however, that the Acadians folded their hands while utter ruin was thus threatening them. In 1747 they joined in the attack on Col. Noble’s force at Mines, in which one hundred of the English were killed and wounded, and the rest of his command made prisoners. They were accused, not without some show of reason, of supporting the Indians in their attack on the new settlement at Halifax. It is admitted that three hundred of them, including many of the young men from Grand Pré, were among the prisoners taken at Fort Beau Sejour on the border a few months before their expulsion. It is not our purpose to enter into any defence or condemnation of those hostilities. But it is plain that Mr. Longfellow’s beautiful lines describing the columns of pale blue smoke, like clouds of incense, ascending

“free from fear, that reigns with the tyrant, or envy, the vice of republics,” were not applicable to the condition of affairs at Grand Pré in 1755, nor at any time.

The poem follows with fidelity the outlines of the scenes of the expulsion. Heart-rending indeed is the scene, as described even by those who were agents in its execution. The poet gives almost verbatim the address of Col. John Winslow in the chapel. Nevertheless one important clause is omitted. Barbarous as were the orders of Gov. Lawrence, he was not absolutely devoid of humanity. Some attempt was made to lessen the pangs of separation from their country by the issuing of orders to the military commanders that “whole families should go together on the same transport.” These orders were communicated with the others to the inhabitants by Col. Winslow, and it appears, they were faithfully executed as far as the haste of embarkation would permit. But as the young men marched separately to the ships, and some of them escaped for a time into the woods, there was nothing to prevent such an incident occurring as the separation of Evangeline and Gabriel.

About seven thousand (7,000) Acadians, according to Gov. Lawrence’s letter to Col. Winslow, were transported from their homes. The total number of these unfortunate people in the province at that time has been estimated at eighteen thousand. The destruction was more complete at Grand Pré than elsewhere, that being the oldest settlement, with the exception of Annapolis, and the most prosperous and thickly settled. A few years later another attempt was made to transfer the remainder of the Acadian population to New England; but the transports were not permitted to land them at Boston, as they were completely destitute, and the New England commonwealths petitioned against being made responsible for their support. The Acadian exiles were scattered over[612] Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Georgia. About four hundred and fifty were landed at Philadelphia.

A few months ago I visited the Quaker City. There, where Evangeline ended her long pilgrimage, I took up the thread of that story the early scenes of which had been so familiar to me. How different those around me! Gone were the balsamic odors of the pines and the salt spray of the ocean. One can conceive how the hearts of the poor Acadian exiles must have trembled. I sought out the old “Swedish church at Wicaco,” whence the “sounds of psalms

on the Sabbath morning when Evangeline went on her way to the hospital, and there found her lover dying unknown. The quaint little church—not larger than a country school-house—built of red and black bricks brought from Sweden, is now almost lost in a corner near the river’s edge, in the midst of huge warehouses and intersecting railroad tracks. In the wall near the minister’s desk is a tablet in memory of the first pastor and his wife buried beneath. Fastened to the gallery of the choir—not much higher than one’s head—is the old Swedish Bible first used in the church, and over it two gilded wooden cherubs—also brought from Sweden—that make one smile at their comical features. In the churchyard, under the blue and faded gray tombstones, repose the men and women of the congregation of 1755 and years before. But no vestiges of the Acadian wanderers remain in the Catholic burying-ground.

Many of the Acadians succeeded in wandering back to their country. Others escaped into what is now called New Brunswick, which was then a part of Acadia, and either returned to Nova Scotia in after-years when the whole of Canada was finally ceded to the English, or founded settlements, existing to this day in New Brunswick, and returning their own members to the Provincial Parliaments. The descendants of the Acadians, still speaking the French language and retaining the manners of their forefathers, are more numerous than is generally supposed in Nova Scotia. They number thirty-two thousand out of a total population of three hundred and eighty-seven thousand (387,000), according to the census of 1871. The poet says:

This refers, no doubt, to the settlement at Chezzetcook, which, from its closeness to Halifax, is best known. On Saturday mornings, in the market at Halifax, the Acadian women can be seen standing with their baskets of eggs and woollen mitts and socks for sale. They are at once recognized by their short blue woollen outer petticoats or kirtles, and their little caps, with their black hair drawn tightly up from[613] the forehead under them. The young girls are often very pretty. They have delicate features, an oval face, a clear olive complexion, and eyes dark and shy, like a fawn’s. They soon fade, and get a weather-beaten and hard expression from exposure to the climate on their long journeys on foot and from severe toil.

But in Yarmouth County, and on the other side of the peninsula in the township of Clare, Digby County, there are much larger and more prosperous settlements. Clare is almost exclusively French-Acadian. The people generally send their own member to the provincial House of Assembly. He speaks French more fluently than English. The priest preaches in French. Here at this day is to be found the counterpart of the manners of Grand Pré. Virtue, peace, and happiness reign in more than “a hundred homes” under the old customs. Maidens as pure and sweet as Evangeline can be seen as of old walking down the road to the church on a Sunday morning with their “chaplet of beads and their missal.” But the modern dressmaker and milliner has made more headway than among the poor Chezzetcook people. Grand Pré itself, and most of the old Acadian settlements, are inhabited by a purely British race—descendants of the North of Ireland and New England settlers who received grants of the confiscated lands. By a singular turn of fortune’s wheel the descendants of another expatriated race—the American loyalists—now people a large part of the province once held by the exiled Acadians.

THE PATIENT CHURCH.

SIR THOMAS MORE.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

IV.

William du Bellay having remained in France, M. de Vaux had been sent to replace him in England. The latter, having but recently returned from Rome, where he was attached to the embassy of M. de Grammont, French ambassador to that court, was not yet initiated into the state of affairs as they existed at the court of Henry VIII.

Du Bellay was not satisfied with the change; and the old diplomate, finding his new assistant inclined to be somewhat dull, undertook to enlighten him—leading him on step by step into the intricacies of diplomacy, like a mother, or rather a governess, a little brusque, who is impatient at the slow progress the child makes in learning to walk.

“Come!” he exclaimed, “I see you understand nothing of this; so I shall have to be patient and begin it all over again. It is incredible,” he added, by way of digression, addressing himself to the public (who was absent), “what absurd reports are circulated outside with regard to what we say and do in our secret negotiations! It extends even to all these harebrains of the court; but you who have a foot in diplomacy I cannot excuse. Come, let us see—we say:

“When my brother left, he went to demand on the part of Henry VIII., of the universities of France, and above all that of Paris (preponderating over all the others)—remark well: to demand, I say—that they should give decisions favorable to the divorce. Now, this point appeared at first quite insignificant; but it is just here we have shown our ability (I would say I, but I do not wish to vaunt myself over a young man just starting out in the world like yourself). Then our king has replied to the King of England that he would ask nothing better than to use his influence with the universities to induce them to give satisfaction on this subject; but that (notice this especially) the Emperor Charles V. had made precisely the same demand in an opposite direction, in favor of Queen Catherine, his aunt; that if he refused the emperor, he would be extremely displeased, and that he was compelled to reflect a second time, because the princes, his children, were held as hostages in the hands of the emperor, and in spite of all his efforts he had not yet been able to pay the price of their ransom stipulated at the treaty of Cambrai.

“It then remained to say that we could do nothing for him—on the contrary, must oppose him so long as the children were held prisoners, or while there was even a chance that they would be restored to us on condition that we should throw our influence on the side of Queen Catherine. All of which is as clear as day—is it not? Now[615] you are going to see if I have understood how to take advantage of these considerations with Henry VIII.”

Saying this, with a slightly derisive smile, Du Bellay took from a drawer a casket of green sharkskin, which he handed to De Vaux, who opened it eagerly.

“Oh! how beautiful,” he exclaimed, taking from the case and holding up in the sunlight a magnificent fleur de lis composed entirely of diamonds. “Oh! this is most superb.”

“Yes, it is beautiful!” replied Du Bellay with a satisfied air, “and worth one hundred and fifty thousand crowns. Philip, the emperor’s father, pledged it to the King of England for that sum. We are obliged by the treaty to redeem it; but as we have not the money to pay, it has been made a present to us. And here is what is better still,” he added, displaying a quittance—“a receipt in full for five hundred thousand crowns which the emperor owed Henry VIII.; and he now makes a present of it to Francis I., to enable him to pay immediately the two millions required for the ransom of the princes.”

“That is admirable!” cried De Vaux. “It must be admitted, my lord, that we shall be under great obligations to Mlle. Anne.”

“All disorders cost dear, my child,” replied Du Bellay; “and if this continues, they will ruin England. Think of what will have to be paid yet to the University of Paris!…”

“No, truly, I do not believe it,” replied Du Bellay. “Except Master Gervais, who is always found ready to do anything asked of him, I know not how they will decide; but, between ourselves, I tell you I believe they will be against it. But, observe, we have not promised a favorable decision—we have only left it to be hoped for; which is quite a different thing.”

“That is very adroit,” replied De Vaux, “assuredly; but it seems to me not very honest.”

“How! not honest?” murmured Du Bellay, contracting his little gray eyebrows, and fixing his greenish eyes on the fair face of the youth. “Not honest!” he again exclaimed in a stentorian voice. “Where do you come from, then, young man? Know that among these people honesty is a thing unheard of. Others less candid than myself may tell you the contrary, knowing very well that such is not the truth. They arrange projects with the intention of defeating them; they sign treaties with the studied purpose of violating them; they swear to keep the peace in order to prepare for war; and a state sells her authority and puts her influence in the balance of the world in favor of the highest bidder. Let the price be earth or metal, it is of no consequence; I make no distinction. When Henry devastated our territories and took possession of our provinces, was it just? No! ‘Might makes right’; that is the veritable law of nations—the only one they are willing to acknowledge or adopt. In default of strength, there remains stratagem; and I must use it!”

“Under existing circumstances you are right,” replied De Vaux, replacing in its case the superb fleur de lis, and again waving it in the sunlight. “It is a pity,” he added, “that they may be obliged to return this; it would set off wonderfully[616] well the wedding dress of the future Duchess of Orleans.”

“What! are they speaking already of the marriage of the young Duke of Orleans?” asked Du Bellay in surprise.

“Ah! that is a great secret,” replied De Vaux confidentially. “You know our king has not abandoned the idea of subjugating the Milanese, and, to ensure the pope’s friendship, he offers to marry his second son to his niece, the young Catherine de’ Medici.”

“No!” cried M. du Bellay. “No, it is impossible! How can they forget that but a short time since the Medici family was composed of only the simple merchants of Florence?”

“It has all been arranged, notwithstanding,” replied De Vaux. “In spite of all our precautions, the emperor has been apprised of it. At first he refused to credit it, and would not believe the King of France could really think of allying his noble blood with that of the Medici. In the meantime he has been so much frightened, lest the hope of this alliance would not sufficiently dazzle Clement VIII., that he has made a proposal to break off the marriage of his niece, the Princess of Denmark, with the Duke of Milan, and substitute the young Catherine in her place. We have, as you may well suppose, promptly advised M. de Montmorency of all these things, who returned us, on the spot, full power to sign the articles. M. de Grammont immediately carried them to the pope; and he was greatly delighted, as Austria, it seems, had already got ahead of us, and persuaded him that we had no other intention than to deceive him and gain time. Now everything is harmoniously arranged. They promise for the marriage portion of Catherine Reggio, Pisa, Leghorn, Modena, Ribera, the Duchy of Urbino; and Francis I. cedes to his son his claims to the Duchy of Milan.”

“Sad compensation for a bad marriage!” replied M. du Bellay angrily: “new complications which will only result in bringing about interminable disputes! Princes can never learn to be contented with the territory already belonging to them. Although they may not possess sufficient ability to govern even that well, still they are always trying to extend it. War must waste and ruin a happy and flourishing country, in order to put them in possession of a few feet of desolated earth, all sprinkled with gold and watered with blood.”

“Ah! yes,” interrupted De Vaux earnestly, “we have learned this cruelly and to our cost. And relentless history will record without regret the account of our reverses, and the captivity of a king so valiant and dauntless—a king who has sacrificed everything save his honor.”

“Reflect, my dear, on all this. The honor of a king consists not in sacrificing the happiness of his people. A soldier should be brave—the head of a nation should be wise and prudent,” replied Du Bellay, as he turned over a great file of papers in search of something, “Valor without prudence is worthless. The intrigues of the cabinet are more certain; they are of more value than the best generals. They, at least, are never entirely defeated; the disaster of the evening inspires renewed strength for the morrow. Cold, hunger, and sickness are not able to destroy them.… They can only waste a few words or lose a sum of money. A dozen well-chosen spies spread their toils in[617] every direction; we hold them like bundles of straw in our hands; they glide in the dark, slip through your fingers—an army that cannot be captured, which exists not and yet never dies; which drags to the tribunal of those who pay them, without pity as without discrimination, without violence as without hesitation, the hearts of all mankind.

“Gold, my child, but never blood! With bread we can move the world; with blood we destroy it. Your heart, young man, leaps within you at the sound of the shrill trumpet, when glittering banners wave and the noise of battle inebriates your soul. But look behind you, child, look behind you: the squadron has passed. Hear the shrieks and groans of the dying. Behold those men dragging themselves over the trampled field; their heads gashed and bleeding, their bones dislocated, their limbs torn; streams of blood flow from their wounds; they die in an ocean furnished from their own lacerated veins. Go there to the field of carnage and death; pause beside that man with pallid face and agonized expression; think of the tender care and painful anxiety of the mother who reared him from his cradle. How often she has pressed her lips upon the golden curls of her boy, the hope of her old age, which must now end in despair! Reflect there, upon the field of carnage and death, on the tender caresses of wives, sisters, and friends. Imagine the brother’s grief, the deep anguish of the father. Alas! all these recollections pass in an instant before the half-open eyes of the dying. Farewell! dream of glory, hateful vision now for ever vanished. Life is almost extinct, yet with the latest breath he thinks but of them! ‘They will see me no more! I must die far away, without being able to bid them a last adieu.’ Such are the bitter thoughts murmured by his dying lips as the last sigh is breathed forth. Tell me, young man, have you never reflected when, on the field glittering in the bright summer sunshine, you have seen the heavy, well-drilled battalions advance; when the prince rode in the midst of them, and they saluted him with shouts of enthusiasm and love; when that prince, a weak man like themselves, elated with pride, said to them: ‘March on to death; it is for me that you go!’ For you! And who are you? Their executioner, who throws their ashes to the wind of your ambition, to satisfy the thirst of your covetousness, the insolent pride of your name, which the century will see buried in oblivion! Ah! my son,” continued the old diplomate, deeply affected, with his hands crossed on the packet of papers, that he had entirely forgotten, “if you knew how much I have seen in my life of these horrible calamities, of these monstrous follies, which devastate the world! If you but knew how my heart has groaned within me, concealed beneath my gloomy visage, my exterior as impassible as my garments, you would understand how I hate them, these mighty conquerors, these vile plagues of the earth, and how I count as nothing the sack of gold which lies at the bottom of the precipice over which they push us, the adroit fraud that turns them aside from their course! But shall I weep like an old woman?” he suddenly exclaimed, vexed at being betrayed into the expression of so much emotion.

Hastily brushing the tear from his cheek, he began examining the[618] package of papers, and, instantly recovering his usual composure, became M. du Bellay, the diplomate.

Young De Vaux, greatly surprised at the excess of feeling into which the ambassador had suddenly been betrayed, so much at variance with his previous manner, as well as his rule of conduct and the rather brusque reception he had given him, still remembered it when all thought of the occurrence had passed from the mind of his superior.

“Here, sir, read that,” he exclaimed, throwing the young man a small scrap of paper.

“‘Cardinal Wolsey, overcome by grief and alarm, has fallen dangerously ill. The king has been informed of it; he has ordered three physicians to Asher, and obliged Lady Anne to send him the golden tablets in token of his reconciliation. Furthermore, it is certainly true that the king has said: “I would not lose Wolsey for twenty thousand pounds.” It is unnecessary to impress upon my lord the importance of this event. My lord will, I hope, approve of the celerity with which I have despatched this information.’”

“By my faith, I am delighted! These golden tablets afford me extreme pleasure,” said De Vaux. “This will revive the hopes of poor Cardinal Wolsey.”

“And that is all!… And you, content to know that he is happy, will remain quietly seated in your chair, I suppose,” said M. du Bellay, fixing his green eyes, lighted with a brilliant gleam, on young De Vaux. “Monsieur!” he continued, “it is not in this way a man attends to the business of his country. Since the day the cardinal was exiled, I have deliberated whether I should go to see him or not. My heart prompted me to do so, but it was not my heart I had to consult. I was persuaded the king would not be able to dispense with him, and sooner or later he would be recalled to the head of affairs. In that case I felt inclined to give him a proof of my attachment in his disgrace. But, on the other hand, that intriguing family who are constantly buzzing around the king induced me constantly to hesitate. Now I believe we have almost nothing more to fear; we will arrive there, perhaps, before the physicians, and later we shall know how to proceed.”

“Most willingly!” cried De Vaux. “I shall be happy indeed to see this celebrated man, of whom I have heard so many different opinions.”

“Doubtless,” interrupted Du Bellay impatiently, “pronounced by what is styled ‘public opinion’—a tribunal composed of the ignorant, the deluded, and short-sighted, who always clamor louder than others, and who take great care, in order to avoid compromising their stupidity, to prefix the ominous ‘they say’ to all their statements. As for me, I say they invariably display more hatred toward the virtues they envy than the vices they pretend to despise; and they will judge a man more severely and criticise him more harshly for the good he has tried to do than for what he may have left undone.… Gossiping, prying crowd, pronouncing judgment and knowing nothing, who will cast popularity like a vile mantle over the shoulders of any man who will basely stoop low enough before them to receive it! He who[619] endeavors to please all pleases none,” added M. du Bellay, with a singularly scornful expression. “To live for his king, and above all for his country, despising the blame or hatred of the vulgar, should be the motto of every public man; and God grant I may never cease to remember it!”

“You believe, then, the cardinal will be restored to the head of affairs?” asked De Vaux, running his fingers through his blonde curls, and rising to depart.

“I am not sure of it yet,” replied Du Bellay; “we are going to find out. If the crowd surrounds him, as eager to pay him homage to-day as they were yesterday to overwhelm him with scorn and contempt; if, in a word, the courtiers sigh and groan around his bed, and pretend to feel the deepest concern, it will be a most certain indication of his return to favor. And, to speak frankly, I believe the king already begins to discover that no one can replace the cardinal near his person as private secretary; for that poor Gardiner copies a despatch with more difficulty than his predecessor dictated one.”

M. du Bellay arose and started, followed by De Vaux, to the bank of the Thames, where they entered a large boat already filled with passengers awaiting the moment of departure to ascend the river either to Chelsea, Battersea, or as far as Pultney, where the boat stopped. Bales of merchandise were piled up in the centre, on which were seated a number of substantial citizens conversing together with their hands in their pockets, and wearing the self-sufficient air of men the extent of whose purse and credit were well understood.

They fixed, at first, a scrutinizing glance on the new arrivals, and then resumed their conversation.

“Come, come, let us be off now!” exclaimed a young man, balancing himself on one foot. “Here is half an hour lost, and I declare I must be at Chelsea to dinner.”

“Indeed, it is already an hour. Look here! This cockswain doesn’t resemble our parliament at all; that does everything it is told to do!” he added, as he sauntered into the midst of the crowd.

“Hold your tongue, William,” immediately replied one of them; “you don’t recollect any more, I suppose, the assembly at Bridewell, where the king, knowing we condemned his course in the divorce affair, after having seized all the arms in the city, told us himself there was no head so high but he would make it fall if it attempted to resist him.”

“What shameful tyranny!” replied another, rolling a bundle under his foot. “I cannot think of it without my blood boiling. Are these Englishmen he treats in this manner?”

“And that wicked cardinal,” continued his neighbor in a loud, shrill voice—“he was standing by the king, and looking at us with his threatening eyes. He has been the cause of all the troubles we have had with this affair. But we are rid of him, at last.”

“We are rid of him, did you say?” interrupted a man about fifty or sixty years of age, who appeared to be naturally phlegmatic and thoughtful. “You are very well contented, it seems to me; … but it is because you only think of the present, and give yourself no concern whatever about the future. Ah! well, in a few days we will see if you are as well satisfied.”

“Explain yourself more clearly, Master Wrilliot,” continued young William. “You always know what’s going to happen better than anybody else.”

“Ah! yes, I know it only too well, in fact, my young friend,” he replied, shaking his head ominously; “and we will very soon learn to our sorrow that if the favor of the cardinal costs us dear, his disgrace will cost us still more. Parliament is going to remit all the king’s debts.”

“What! all of his debts? But Parliament has no right to do this!” they all exclaimed.

“No; but it will take the right!” replied Master Wrilliot. “William will lose half of his wife’s marriage portion, which, if I mistake not, his father gave him in royal trust; and I shall lose fifteen thousand crowns for which I was foolish enough to accept the deed of conveyance.”

“Yes,” continued this far-seeing interlocutor, shaking his head contemptuously, “the king has no money to pay us. War has drained his private treasury, but he nevertheless draws from it abundant means to ransom French princes, who make him believe they will marry him to that lady Boleyn; and if you do not believe me, go ask these Frenchmen who are here present,” he added, raising his voice, and casting on MM. du Bellay and de Vaux a glance of cold, disdainful wrath.

M. du Bellay had lost nothing of the conversation; it was held too near him, and was too openly hostile for him to feign not to remark it. Finding himself recognized, and neither being able to reply to a positive interrogation nor to keep silence, he measured in his turn, very coolly, and without permitting the least indication of emotion or anger to appear, the face and form of his adversary.

“Sir;” he exclaimed, regarding him steadily, “who are you, and by what right do you call me to account? If it is your curiosity that impels you, it will not be gratified; if, on the contrary, you dare seek to insult me, you should know I will not suffer it. Answer me!”

“The best you can make of it will be worth nothing,” replied, with a loud burst of laughter, a Genoese merchant who did not recognize the ambassador, as he sat by the men who directed the boat. “Forget your quarrel, gentlemen, and, instead of disputing, come look at this beautiful vessel we are just going to pass. See, she is getting ready to sail. A fine ship-load!—a set of adventurers who go to try their fortunes in the new world discovered by one of my countrymen,” he added with an air of intense satisfaction.

“Poor Columbus!” replied one of the citizens, “he experienced throughout his life that glory does not give happiness, and envy and ingratitude united together to crush his genius. Do you not believe, if he could have foreseen the cruelties Hernando Cortez and Pizarro exercised toward the people whom he discovered, he would have preferred leaving the secret of their existence buried for ever in the bosom of the stormy sea that bore him to Europe, rather than to have announced there the success of his voyage?”

“I believe it,” said Wrilliot, “his[621] soul was so beautiful! He loved humanity.”

“Christopher Columbus!” exclaimed young William, full of youthful enthusiasm and admiration for a man whose home was the ocean. “I cannot hear his name pronounced without emotion! I always imagine I see him in that old convent of Salamanca, before those learned professors and erudite monks assembled to listen to a project which in their opinion was as rash as it was foolish.

“‘How do you suppose,’ said they, ‘that your vessel will ever reach the extremity of the Indies, since you pretend that the earth is round? You would never be able to return; for what amount of wind do you imagine it would require to enable your ship to remount the liquid mountain which it had so easily descended? And do you forget that no creature can live under the scorching atmosphere of the torrid zone?’

“Columbus refuted their arguments; but these doctors still insisted, nor hesitated to openly demand of him how he could be so presumptuous as to believe, if the thing had been as he said, it could have remained undiscovered by so many illustrious men, born before him, and who had attained the highest degree of learning, while for him alone should have been reserved the development of this grand idea.”

“And yet,” said Wrilliot, who had listened in silence, “it was permitted, some years later, that he should go down to the grave wearing the chains with which his persecutors had loaded him, in order to keep him away from the world that he alone had been able to discover!”

“What perseverance! What obstacles he succeeded in overcoming!” replied one of those who had first spoken. “I shall always, while I live, recall with pleasure having been of service to his brother Bartholomew when he came to this country.”

“Yes, and was in my own house,” continued the citizen. “Christopher, finding the senate of Genoa and the King of Portugal refused equally to listen or furnish him with vessels necessary for the enterprise he had so long meditated, sent his brother to King Henry VII. He was unfortunately captured, in coming over, by some pirates, who kept him in slavery. Many years elapsed before he succeeded in escaping and reaching England, where he found himself reduced to such a state of destitution that he was obliged to design charts for a living, and to enable him to present himself in decent apparel at court. The king gave him a favorable reception, but Christopher, in the meantime, receiving no intelligence from his brother, solicited so earnestly the court of Spain that he obtained two small vessels from Isabella of Castile, and very soon after Europe learned of the existence of another hemisphere. Spain planted her standard there, and we thus lost the advantages which were destined for us.”

“I do not regret it,” replied an old man sitting in the midst of the crowd, who had until that time maintained a profound silence. “Is it not better for a nation to be less rich and powerful than stained with so many crimes? It is now but thirty-eight years since Columbus founded the colony of San Domingo. This island then contained a million of inhabitants; to-day there[622] scarcely remain forty thousand. But,” pursued the old man with a bitter smile, “they will not stop there. No; they will not confine their barbarous exploits to that miserable region. They are renewing in Peru the carnage they carried on in Mexico. It is necessary to have a great many places for a man to die—to pass a few moments, and then go and hide himself in the grave! I have already lived seventy-nine years, and yet it seems to me now that my left hand still rests on my cradle. I can scarcely believe that these white locks are scattered upon my head; for my life has sped like the fleeting dream of a single night that has passed. Yes, William,” continued the old man, “you look at me with astonishment, and your eyes, full of youthful fire, are fixed upon mine, in which the light has long been extinguished. Ah! well, you will very soon see it extinguished in your own, but not before you will have witnessed all their cruelties.”

“That is bad,” replied William. “But these Indians are stupid and indolent beyond all parallel;[232] they will neither work nor pay the taxes imposed on them.”

“And from whom do the Spaniards claim the right of reducing these people to a state of servitude,” exclaimed the old man indignantly, “and to treat them like beasts of burden whom they are privileged to exterminate with impunity, and carry off the gold their avarice covets, the dagger in one hand, the scourge in the other? They ensure them, they say, the happiness of knowing the Christian religion! How dare they presume to instruct these people in that Gospel of peace which commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves, to detach our hearts from the things of the world, and, leaving our offering before the altar, go and be reconciled with our enemy?”

“From that point of view your argument would seem just,” replied William; “but the fact is, if the Spaniards did not force these islanders to work them, the mines would remain unproductive, the fields uncultivated, and the colonies would perish.”

“You are mistaken,” replied the old man. “In acting as she does Spain destroys in her own womb the source from whence she would draw an immense revenue. If she had been satisfied to establish an honest and peaceable commerce with these countries, her industry, excited to the highest degree by the rich commodities of exchange, would have conferred an incalculable benefit on an entire people whom her blind cupidity has induced her to crush and destroy.

“Do you suppose these isolated negroes they buy at such enormous prices will ever be able to replace the native inhabitants who live and die in their own country? This strange and ferocious population will remain among the colonies, enemies always ready to revolt; a yoke of iron and blood will alone be sufficient to keep them in subjection. But let these masters tremble if ever the power falls into the hands of their slaves!”

MM. du Bellay and de Vaux listened to this conversation in silence, and the diversion was at first agreeable; but they were soon convinced that they were suddenly becoming again the objects of general attention.

“I tell you,” exclaimed one, “they are going to look for the cardinal and bring him back to court.”

“Well!” replied another, “I would like to see M. du Bellay in the place of the legate Campeggio.”

“He was arrested at Dover, where he had gone to embark. He was dreadfully alarmed, believing they came to assassinate him. His baggage was searched, in order to find Wolsey’s treasures, with which he was entrusted, they said, for safe keeping.”

“And did they find them?” asked the Genoese merchant, eagerly leaning forward at the sound of the word treasure.

“I presume they were in search of the legal documents, but they were too late. They have long ago arrived in Italy. Campeggio was careful enough to send them secretly by his son Rudolph.[233] I often saw this young man in Rome, and heard him say his father had entrusted him with all his correspondence and despatches,[234] as he was not certain what fate Henry had in store for him.”

“You say,” replied young William, elevating his voice in order that M. du Bellay might hear him, “that the king has sent the Earl of Wiltshire to Rome to solicit his divorce. He had better make all these strangers leave who come into our country only to sow discord, and then gather the fruits of their villany.”

This speech, although spoken indirectly, was evidently intended for the two Frenchmen; but the Genoese merchant, always inclined to be suspicious, immediately applied it to himself.

“Master William,” he exclaimed, reddening with anger, “have you forgotten that for twenty years I have been a commercial friend of your father. And if he has made his fortune with our velvets and silks, to whom does he owe it, if not to those who, by their honesty and promptness in fulfilling their engagements, were the first cause of his success? Now, because you are able to live without work, you take on this insulting manner—very insulting indeed. However, I give you to understand that, if it suited me to do it, I could make as great a display of luxury and wealth as yourself, and can count on my dresser as many dishes and flagons of silver as you have; and if it suited me to remain at home, there is no necessity for me to travel any more on business.”

The merchant continued to boast of his fortune, and William began to explain that his remarks were by no means intended for him, when the passengers began to cry out: “Land! land! Here is Chelsea; we land at Chelsea.”

The rowers halted immediately, and the little boats sent from the shore came to take off the passengers who wished to land.

Almost all of them went; none remaining on the boat except the ambassador, the Genoese merchant,[624] and two citizens whose retiring and prudent character could be read in the quiet, thoughtful expression of their faces. They gazed for a long time on the surrounding country; at last one of them hazarded the question:

“Do you know who owns that white house with the terraced garden extending down to the bank of the Thames?”

“That is the residence of Sir Thomas More, the new chancellor,” replied his companion methodically.

“By my faith, no! However, I saw him the other day on the square at Westminster, as I was passing; the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk were conducting him with great ceremony to the Star Chamber (at least that is what they told me). I stopped to look at him. There was an immense crowd filling all the square. In crossing it the Duke of Norfolk stopped, and, turning to the crowd before him, said the king had instructed him to publicly proclaim what great and important services Sir Thomas had rendered him in every position he had confided to his care, and it was on that account he esteemed him so highly, and had appointed him now to the highest position in the kingdom because of his virtues and the rare talents he possessed. Everybody listened and said nothing (because you know the last is always the best).” The citizen said this in a very low tone.

“More replied very well,” he continued. “He said that, while deeply grateful for his majesty’s goodness and favors, he felt no less deeply convinced that the king had rewarded him far beyond his merits; in all he had accomplished he had but done his duty, and he greatly feared now that he might not possess the ability necessary for acquitting himself of the duties of so high and important an office. And—a very singular thing (for they do not usually speak of their predecessors)—he declared that he could not rejoice in the honor conferred on him, as it recalled the name of the wise and honorable prelate whom he had superseded. On hearing that I supposed they would hiss; but not at all. He said everything so well, with so much sincerity, dignity, and firmness, that they applauded him with an indescribable enthusiasm. It seemed those who knew him were never satisfied with praising him. Nobody, they said, rendered justice so scrupulously as he; none were so wise, so disinterested; in fact, they never ended the recital of his perfections.”

“Ah!” said the other, in a voice scarcely audible, while he looked round to discover if any one could hear him, “we will see later if he performs all these wonderful things, and if any one will be able to get near him without paying even his doorkeeper, as was the case with the other.”

“Yes, we will see,” replied his companion. “None of these great lords are worth much—any amount of promises; but of deeds—nothing!”

“Ah! well, it is all the same; as soon as they rise, they grow proud, and despise and scorn the people. You may believe if ever I obtain a patent of nobility, and become still richer than I am now, I will crush them beautifully; there will not be one who will dare contradict me. By my faith! it is a great pity I had not been born a count or a[625] baron; I should have been so well up to all their impertinences and want of feeling.”

“It is not very difficult,” replied his companion; “you are, I think, sufficiently so now for the good of that poor youth who wants to marry your daughter. He will lose his senses, I am afraid, poor fellow.”

“What did you say, neighbor?” replied the citizen, feeling the blood mount to his face. “Do you think I will give my daughter to a wretch who has not a cent in the world—I who have held in my family the right of citizenship from time immemorial? My grandmother also told me we have had two aldermen of our name. All that counts, you see, Master Allicot; and if you wish to remain my friend, I advise you not to meddle yourself with the tattle of my wife and daughter on the subject of that little wretch they are putting it into her head to marry; because, in truth, the mother is as bad as the daughter. Ah! neighbor, these women, these women are the plagues of our lives! Don’t say any more to me about it. They will run me distracted; but they will make nothing by it, I swear it, neighbor. The silly jades! to dare speak to me of such a match! Hush! don’t say any more to me about it, neighbor; for it will drive me mad!”

The neighbor did reply, however, because he had been commissioned to use his influence in softening the husband and father in favor of a young mechanic full of life and health, who had no other fault than that of belonging to a class less elevated than that of the proud citizen who rejected his humble supplications with scorn.

But the dénouement of this embassy, and the termination of this romance of the warehouse, have been for ever lost to history; for M. du Bellay, seeing they were almost in sight of Asher, made them land him, and the two honorable citizens doubtless continued their journey and their conversation.

At Asher M. du Bellay found everything just as he expected. The physicians surrounded Wolsey’s bed, watching his slightest movement. The golden tablets of young Anne Boleyn were thrown open upon the coarse woollen bedspread that covered the sick man. Cromwell walked the floor with folded arms. He approached the bed from time to time, looked at Wolsey, whose closed eyes and labored breathing betokened nothing favorable, then at the golden tablets, then at the physicians around him. He seemed to say, “Is he going to die, and just when he might be so useful to me?”

On seeing M. du Bellay enter, his countenance lighted up; he ran on before him, and endeavored to arouse Wolsey from his stupor.

“It is singular,” said the doctors, “nothing can arouse him.” And they looked gravely at each other.

“He will not die! I tell you he will not die!” replied Cromwell, evincing the most impatient anxiety.

“So I think,” said M. du Bellay. “You can tell him I have been[626] here,” continued the ambassador, turning towards Cromwell, “but did not wish to disturb him.”

M. du Bellay then took his leave, and returned by the land route to London. He encountered, not far from Asher, a party of the cardinal’s old domestics, whom the king had sent to carry him several wagon-loads of furniture and other effects. At the head of this convoy rode Cavendish, one of the cardinal’s most faithful servants.

Seeing M. du Bellay, they collected around him, and hastily inquired about their master.

Du Bellay advised them to quicken their speed, and, taking leave, went on his way, thinking that the cardinal would not be restored to favor, and already arranging in his mind another course in which to direct his diplomatic steps for the future.

He was not mistaken: Wolsey escaped death, but only to find himself surrounded by misery and abandoned to despair.

PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATION.[235]

If our modern men of science would not travel out of their sphere, there would be no war between them and the church. In the name of the Catholic religion we invite them to push onward in the path of scientific discovery with the utmost energy and ardor of which they are capable. But if their discoveries are to have any bearing on the truths of the Christian revelation, we can accept nothing less than demonstration, and they must not credit science, as does Mr. Tyndall, with mere theories of speculative philosophy. With this reservation, we wish their labors all possible success. But if poor fallible reason—whose discoveries, after whole millenniums of toil, are little better than a record of the blunders of one generation corrected by the blunders of another; and, even on the supposition that they are all correct, are, by comparison with what is unknown, as a drop of water compared with the limitless ocean—ventures to deny the existence of the soul because it has no lens powerful enough to bring it within the cognizance of the senses, its conclusion is no longer scientific. The doctor has become a quack, the philosopher a fool. If the torch which the Creator has placed at the service of his creature, to help him to grope his way amidst the objects of sense, and to illuminate his faith, is to be flung in his face because it does not reveal the whole infinitude of the majesty of his beauty, we can only compassionate so childish a misuse of a noble gift. If natural philosophy is to rob the sensible creation of a motive and end, and to proclaim it to be merely the result of an unintelligent atomic attraction and evolution of forces, a more intelligent and a more logical philosophy, in harmony with the unquenchable instinct of immortality[627] within the human soul, casts from it such pitiful trifling with indignation and a holy disdain. If, in short, the science of nature would dethrone nature’s Creator and God, we address to it the word which He to whom all true science leads addressed to the ocean he placed in the deep hollows of the earth: “Hitherto thou shalt come, and thou shalt go no farther: and here thou shalt break thy swelling waves.”

Physical science cannot contradict the divine revelation. No discovery hitherto made has done so; and until one such presents itself we are entitled to assume its impossibility as a philosophical axiom. For this reason we are of those who would give full rein to even the speculations of experimental philosophy, so long as they are confined strictly within the domain of secondary causes or natural law, and do not venture into a sphere of thought beyond the reach of experimental science, where they are immediately confronted with the dogmas of the faith.

We have never thought that the theory of the evolution of species must of necessity transgress that limit. It has been made to do so by philosophuli, if we may invent a name for them—speculative bigots, who are bent on extorting from natural phenomena any plausible support of the infidel prejudices of which they were previously possessed. A more intelligent observation of scientific facts would have saved them from a ridiculous extravagance which makes them resemble those afflicted creatures, whom we so often meet with in asylums for the insane, who suppose themselves to be God.

We must never lose sight of the fact that God can only communicate with his creature in such a way as he can understand. If he were to reveal himself to any of us as he is, we should die, unless he supplied us with a miraculous capacity for supporting the vision. If he had inspired the historian of those primitive ages to describe the astronomical phenomenon which happened in the time of Joshua in the exact language of physical science, what meaning would it have conveyed to people who did not know that the earth revolves around its own axis and around the sun? If it be objected, Why did not the Holy Spirit use language consistent with scientific truth, and leave it to be understood afterwards in the progress of science? we reply, Because it would have thwarted his own designs to have done so. The Bible is a book of instruction in truth out of the reach of human intelligence, not a book of natural science; and it appeals to the obedience of faith rather than to reason. The mental toil of scientific discovery was a part of the punishment inflicted on the original transgression. To anticipate the result of that toil by thousands of years would have been to contradict His own dispensation.

In the same manner the sublime record of the genesis of the illimitable universe which weaves its dance of light in space is told in a few sentences: The fiat of Him with whom one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day, and the successive order of the creation—that is all. Time was not then, for it was the creation of time. Man can conceive no ideas independent of time, and so days are named; but it is evident that the word may stand for indeterminate periods of time. The creation of light was, it cannot be[628] doubted, instantaneous. But that creation was a law—limitation, relation, succession—whose working was an evolution in successive orders or stages, over which presided the Creator, and still presides. “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” Each of these was a distinct creation, perfect in itself, not an evolution of species. The creation was progressive, but not in the sense of the creation of every one of its six cycles evolving out of the preceding one; for in that case either the lower would have disappeared or the evolution would be still in operation. The firmament did not develop out of light, nor the ocean and the dry land out of the firmament; nor were the fishes an evolution from the sea-weed, nor the birds from the trees and shrubs, nor the wild beasts from the reeds of the jungle, nor man from the lower animals. But they were all to be made before his creation who was the sum and end of all; and the atmosphere must be created before the birds, the ocean before the fishes, the dry land before vegetable life.

And not only was there never any evolution of species into other species, but the creation of every separate species was complete, so that there has never been an evolution of any species into a higher state or condition. There has never been any progress in that sense. Every species, including the human being, remains precisely as it issued from the hand of God, when it has not degenerated or disappeared. Indeed, the tendency of all living things around us is to degeneracy and decay. Whatever progress can be predicated of man is of his moral nature only, and of his knowledge, through the divine revelation. But even that is not a race progress, an evolution of species, but an individual one. If this be conceded—and we think it scarcely admits of dispute—we see no danger to the dogmas of the faith in allowing to the natural philosophers any length of ages they may claim for the creation of the home of man before he was called into being for whom it was destined.

Whatever period of time was covered by those cycles of creation, throughout them it may be said that he was being made. If all was for him and to end in him, it was in effect he who all along was being made. Yet the whole was only a preparatory creation. It was only his body in which all resulted. “A body thou hast prepared for me.” It was when “God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” that man was created. It was then he became “a living soul.”

The error of the physicists who reject revelation is threefold. They make the body the man; they thus assign to his body and the inner principle which animates it a simultaneous beginning and joint development, some of them going so far as to make the spirit itself, or soul, or whatever they call the animating principle, the spontaneous product of material forces. And, throwing back the beginning of the evolution process into untold ages, by comparison with which the life of an individual is a scarcely appreciable moment, they suppose the process to be still going on as it begun. All this obviously contradicts the direct statements of revelation. It is, indeed, shocking to mere human reason. The work of the natural creation ended with the sixth day. Up to that time, whether the periods were long or short, the work was going on. But it was complete when the[629] body which had been prepared for him was animated with the spirit of life. After that there was no farther development. It is contrary to reason to suppose it. It is contrary to the whole analogy of nature. Not an instance can be adduced, throughout the entire creation, of one species developing into another—not an instance even of any species developing within itself into a higher order of being. But up to that period, of which it is thus written, Igitur PERFECTI SUNT cœli et terra, et omnis ornatus eorum: COMPLEVITQUE Deus die septimo opus suum quod fecerat; et requievit die septimo ab uni verso opere quod patrarat, we may admit, without risk of heterodoxy, any doctrine of evolution of which the physicists may give us a satisfactory evidence.

The physicists, in support of their irrational theory of evolution, maintain that the earliest developments of human consciousness were of the lowest order, and that man has ever since been gradually progressing towards a higher morality and loftier spheres of thought. In this able and interesting work Father Thébaud demonstrates, by an exhaustive induction from the history and literature of all the nations, that the history of mankind up to the coming of Christ, instead of a progress, was a continual retrogression.

In his introductory chapter he establishes, by proofs which should be conclusive to all minds unprepossessed by an arrogant perversity, that primitive man was in possession of a primitive revelation. In the morning twilight of the ages, as far back as we can see across the Flood, up to the very cherubim-guarded entrance to the seats of innocence from which the erring creature had been driven, he traces everywhere those rites and dogmas, in their elemental form, which, in their complete development and full significance, made known to us by the revelation of the fulness of time, are still of faith and observance amongst the sons of God from end to end of the habitable globe. This revelation did not go beyond monotheism, because the fallen immortal had to be prepared, through long ages of discipline, for the revelation of the triune nature of the Godhead, and of his restoration to the forfeited favor of his Father by the incarnation and atoning sacrifice of the Eternal Son. We do not remember to have met before with the ingenious hypothesis [236] that the configuration of the earth, consisting of an all-embracing ocean, in the midst of which vast continents are islands, evidences the design of the Creator to have been that “men should have intercourse of some kind with one another,” and that on the land.

But our author considers that the social intercommunion to which the configuration of the earth was to administer was not to develop in the form of “an universal republic,” but that “men were to consent to exist in larger or smaller groups, each of them surrounded with well-defined limits determining numerous[630] nationalities,” united in the bond of religious uniformity which he terms patriarchal Catholicity.

The design of the Creator of universal brotherhood amongst his creatures was not to be fulfilled before the lapse of ages, and throughout that dismal period it has the appearance of being perpetually thwarted by their perverseness. The memories of Paradise rapidly faded away amongst them. After what period of time we are not told, the sons of God committed a second infidelity by intermarrying with the daughters of men. The result was a race of giants—giants in capacity and crime as well as in bodily form—whose existence universal tradition attests. In almost open alliance with the powers of darkness, they sank with such fearful rapidity down the abyss of depravation, dragging with them the better portion of the race, that, to avert the triumph of hell and the utter reprobation of his creature, the offended Creator buried the guilty memories of colossal crime beneath an universal deluge, at whose subsidence the first civilization reappeared on the mountains of Asia in all its earliest purity, brought across the forty days’ extinction of life upon the earth by the eight souls who alone had turned a deaf ear to the universal seduction. “This idea of a gradual and deeper degradation of human kind,” says Frederick Schlegel, “in each succeeding age, appears at first sight not to accord very well with the testimony which sacred tradition furnishes on man’s primitive state, for it represents the two races of the primitive world as contemporary; and, indeed, Seth, the progenitor of the better and nobler race of virtuous patriarchs, was much younger than Cain. However, this contradiction is only apparent, if we reflect that it was the wicked and violent race which drew the other into its disorders, and that it was from this contamination a giant corruption sprang, which continually increased, till, with a trifling exception, it pervaded the whole mass of mankind, and till the justice of God required the extirpation of degenerate humanity by one universal flood.”

It does not admit of a moment’s doubt, as our author argues, that with this terrible judgment began the dissolution of that fraternal unity which God had intended should be the happy lot of the human family, and for which the configuration of the earth was adapted. The gigantic unity of crime was smitten to pieces in the helplessness of division. They who had been brothers looked in one another’s faces and found them strange. They opened their lips, and, lo! their speech was to others a jargon of unintelligible sounds. The one could no more understand the other than they could the wolf or the jackal with whom they both began to be mutually classed. The intercommunion of families of men with one another was rudely snapped asunder. There were no means of common action, there was no medium of common thought. The fragments into which the human family were smitten went off in different directions, to post themselves, in attitudes of mutual distrust and defiance, behind mountains or morasses, on the skirts of forests, the borders of torrents, or in the security of measureless deserts, where their practised eyes swept the horizon. Intercommunion was rendered still more impossible by the mutual antagonism, fear, and hatred that prevailed.[631] And the very ocean, instead of being a pathway for the interchange of social life, became a formidable barrier between man and man. The dangers to be encountered on the lands to which the winds might bear them were more to be dreaded than the terrible phantoms which, issuing ever and anon from the home of the storms, raged across the ocean, and lashed into merciless fury its roaring waves. Memory had lost, in the primeval language, the key of its treasure-house. As years went on, amidst the exacting preoccupations of new ways of life, new surroundings, new ways of expressing their thoughts, and their increasing tribal or race isolation, the ideas upon which their primeval civilization had been based grew dimmer and dimmer, until they finally disappeared.

“To establish this in detail,” says the author of Gentilism, “is the purpose of this work.” And this purpose appears to us to have been accomplished in the most convincing manner.

The scientists maintain, and it is necessary to their evolution theory, that man began with barbarism, and moved slowly onwards in the gradual stages of their tedious evolution process towards what they call civilization, which is to lead, we believe, in the future developments of the ever-continuing evolution, to some loftier state and condition, of the nature of which they supply us with not the faintest idea.

This notion of the original barbarism of man is one of those fallacies which get imbedded in the general belief of mankind one knows not how. Strange to say, it has been very generally acquiesced in for no manner of reason; and it is only of late years that thoughtful men, outside of the faith, have come to suspect that it is not quite the truism they had imagined.

There is a reason for this: The attenuation of the claims of another world on the every-day life and on the conduct of men effected by the great revolt of the XVIth century, and the keener relish for the things of this life which consequently ensued, have infected the sentiments of mankind with an exaggerated sense of the importance of material objects and pursuits. Thus the idea of civilization, instead of being that of the highest development of the moral and whole inner being of social man, is limited to the discovery of all the unnumbered ways and means of administering to the embellishment and luxury of his actual life. His very mental progress, as they term it with extraordinary incorrectness, is only regarded in this light.

Father Thébaud next proceeds, with convincing force, to demolish the argument in behalf of the gradual evolution of the entire race from a state of barbarism, which the evolutionists allege to have been inevitably[632] its first stage of intellectual consciousness drawn from the discovery of human skeletons in caves, and in the drift of long past ages, in juxtaposition with instruments of rude construction belonging to the palæolithic age and fossil remains of extinct animals. This argument has always appeared to us so feeble as to seem a mystery how it could be employed by learned men, unless in support of some preconceived opinion which they would maintain at all hazards. The occasional outbreaks of the Mississippi, the terrible devastation effected by the mere overflow of the Garonne in the South of France, give but a faint idea of what changes must have been effected upon the crust of the earth by the subsidence of the huge mass of water, which must have been at least eight or nine times as ponderous as all the oceans which have since lain at peace in its hollows. As the prodigious volumes of water, sucked and drawn hither and thither, as they hurried to their mountain-bed, rushed in furious tides and vast whirlpools of terrific force, they must have torn up the earth’s crust like a rotten rag. Whole valleys must have been scooped out down to the very root of the mountains, and débris of all kinds deposited everywhere in all kinds of confusion, so as to afford no secure data whatever for chronological, or zoölogical, or geological deductions.

Still more conclusive is Father Thébaud’s refutation of the argument in behalf of the evolution theory drawn from the discovery of stone implements of rude construction in what is asserted to be the earliest drift deposit of iron in the later strata, and bronze in the latest. To make this argument of any force it must be proved that these periods evolved regularly and invariably from one another throughout the whole race of mankind. Their periodicity, as Father Thébaud has it, must be indisputably proved. But this is just what it cannot be. On the contrary,

The scientific arguments, however, of Father Thébaud, in disproof of the alleged original barbarism of the human race, satisfactory as they are, as far as they go, are little more than introductory to the more conclusive historical argument which constitutes the body of his valuable and very opportune work. “The best efforts to ascertain the origin of man,” he justly remarks, “or primeval religion, by the facts of geology or zoölogy, can at best only result in more or less probable conjectures.”

In an argument of this nature our author begins, as was to have been expected, from that philosophical,[633] impassive, and ancient people who inhabit the triangular peninsula which stretches out from no vast distance from the original seat of the renewed race of man into the Southeastern Atlantic. There they have dwelt from times beyond which history does not reach. Inheriting a civilization which dates from the subsiding Deluge, whose gradual decadence can be distinctly traced, they are in possession of the earliest writings that exist, unless the books of Moses or the book of Job are older, which, we do not think it is rash to say, is, at least, doubtful. We find ourselves in the presence of the noblest truths of even supernatural religion, mingled, it is true, with the gross pantheistical absurdities which had already begun to deface the primitive revelation and to deteriorate the primitive civilization.

The general process throughout the world was, no doubt, as Father Thébaud describes—

But we must venture to differ from Father Thébaud as to the religion of the Hindoos having ever taken the latter step. The form its pantheism took, in consequence of its tenets of the incarnations of Vishnu—the second god of the triad—and of metempsychosis, was a worship of animals, and especially of the cow—a worship which prevails to this day. But this was not the gross idolatry of the Greeks and Romans, but rather a respect, a cultus, in consequence of the supposed possible presence in the former of departed friends, and of the incarnation of the divinity in the latter. Their idols are huge material representations of the might and repose which are the chief attributes of the Hindoo deity, or of animals with which the above-named ideas were especially associated; but we do not think they ever were worshipped as was, for example Diana by the Ephesians.

Be this as it may, it in no way affects the incontrovertible testimony which Father Thébaud adduces to the high state of civilization of this remarkable people fifteen hundred years, at all events, before Christ. He proves it from their social institutions, which issued from a kind of tribal municipality closely resembling the Celtic clans, but without the principle of superseding the rightful heir to a deceased canfinny by another son in consequence of certain disqualifications, and that of the ever-recurring redistribution of land, which were the bane of Celtic institutions. The caste restrictions, our author shows from the laws of Menu, were not nearly so rigorous in those primitive ages; and from the same source he exhibits undeniable proof of that purity of morals which evidences the highest stage of civilization, and which has sunk gradually down to the vicious barbarism of the present day. We suspect, however, that this latter has been somewhat exaggerated. It is certainly our impression, taken from works written by those who have lived for years in familiar intercourse with the people, that amongst the Hindoo women there still lingers conspicuous[634] evidence of the purity of morals which was universal amongst them in the beginning of their history.

It might have been added, moreover, that the laws of Menu, in addition to their high morality, display a knowledge of finance and political economy, of the science of government, and of the art of developing the resources of a people which indicate a very high state of civilization indeed.

It is impossible for us, within the limits assigned us, to follow Father Thébaud through an argument consisting exclusively of learned detail. Our readers, if they would have any proper appreciation of it, must consult the work itself. We remark merely that, starting from the admitted fact that the Vedas contain the doctrine of plain and pure monotheism, and that in those distant ages “doctrines were promulgated and believed in” “which far transcend all the most solemn teaching of the greatest philosophers who flourished in the following ages, and which yield only to the sublime and exquisitely refined teachings of Incarnate Wisdom,”[240] our author traces the inroads of pantheism from the time when the doctrine, recently revived by men once Christians, of an “universal soul” was openly proclaimed, and “when it was asserted that our own is a ‘spark’ from the ‘blazing fire,’ that God is ‘all beings,’ and ‘all beings are God.’”[241] And he traces elaborately the change through the several mystical works of the philosophical Brahmins subsequent to the Vedas. Buddhism is a comparatively modern development. We doubt its being any form of Hindooism whatever. It appears to us to be rather the earliest development of that spirit of hostility to the life-giving truths of the Christian revelation which began its work almost at their very cradle—that abject principle of materialism which, after having dragged down the vast populations of China and of North and Western India to the lowest depths of mental and moral degradation of which human nature is susceptible, is now sweeping over Christendom, and threatening to “deceive,” if it were possible, “even the very elect.”

Father Thébaud’s next chapter is devoted to a historical review of the primeval religion and its decline in Central Asia and Africa. And here the proof is more overwhelming, if possible, than in the case of India. As to the monotheism of the great Doctor—if we may give him such a title—of the ancient East, and of the Zends, there can be no manner of doubt. Nay, “even the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is clearly contained in the most authentic part of the Zend-Avesta.” There is also that august personage, apart from all superior beings under God, “who stands between God and man; shows the way to heaven, and pronounces judgment upon human actions after death; guards with his drawn sword the whole world against the demons; has his own light from inside, and from outside is decorated with stars.” Our author makes Zoroaster, at the latest, a contemporary of Moses, and justly observes that the Zend-Avesta “represents the thoughts of men very near the origin of our species.” Now, the magnificent eloquence and profound truth of the thoughts we meet, rivalling at times the Book of Job, the beauty of the prayers, and the elaborate splendor of the ritual, testify to a[635] very different state of things in those earliest days from that alleged by the evolutionists. Father Thébaud decides the Zends to be Vedic, and not Persian. And no doubt in the remarkable form and construction of the poems—dramatic, and mostly in the form of dialogue—in the tone of thought and leading religious ideas, they closely resemble the Hindoo Vedas. But it is our impression that we do not find in the writings of Zoroaster that perpetual insistence on the necessity of absorption into the deity which characterizes the Hindoo poems—the Bhagavât-Gita, for example. It would appear that the Persians occupied a special place in the dispensation of God in the ancient world. The Holy Spirit, in the prophecies, speaks of “my servant Cyrus whom I have chosen,” and it is certain that the pure monotheistic worship was preserved longer in Persia than in any nation of antiquity, except the Jewish. Its corruption was into dualism, by which the spirit of evil, as in the Indian Trimourti, was invested with almost co-ordinate power with the spirit of good. But for full information on this important and interesting subject we must refer the reader to Father Thébaud himself.

Our limits do not admit of our giving scarcely the faintest outline of our author’s argument in proof of the monotheism of Pelasgic Greece, and its gradual degradation to a sensual and idolatrous anthropomorphism in Hellenic and Heroic Greece. The substantial genuineness of the Orphic literature he successfully establishes, as well as the similarity of its doctrines to those of the Vedas; from which he draws the obvious inference that the two came from the same source, and that that branch of the Aryan family carried with them to their more distant settlements traditions of the primitive revelation so conspicuous in the Persian and Hindoo mystic epics, but much defaced and distorted in the course of their long and toilsome migrations. If pure monotheism ever prevailed in Pelasgic Greece, its reign was short. Indeed, to Orpheus himself are ascribed pantheistic doctrines. It was the poets who ushered in that special form of idolatry which took possession of Greece, the worship of the human being deified with all his infirmities—the anthropomorphism of the gods, as Father Thébaud calls it. And the chief sinner, on this score, was Homer, the first and greatest of them all. Yet did that densely-populated, unseen world of the Greeks—that sensuous, nay vicious, idolatry—which peopled the ocean and the mountains and the forests with gods, and imagined a divinity for every fountain, and every grove, and every valley, and every rill, with its superior deities, up to the supreme father of Olympus, himself subject to that forlorn solution of the riddle of “evil”—fate—bear witness from Olympus, and from Hades, and from the realms of the sea, to the primitive revelation. It bore witness to a civilization from which that degradation of the ideas of God to the level of humanity, in spite of its artistic grace and poetic feeling, deformed, however, by a filthy lasciviousness, with its short period of literary splendor and of exalted philosophy, ending with the sophistical negations of scepticism, was a fall, and not a progress.

For all this, “the precious fragments of a primitive revelation are found,” as Father Thébaud truly[636] observes, “scattered through the writings of nearly all ancient Greek and Latin philosophers and poets.” His two chapters on this subject—chapter vii. on “Hellenic Philosophy as a Channel of Tradition,” and chapter viii. on “The Greek and Latin Poets as Guardians of Truth”—are perhaps the most interesting part of his most interesting and instructive work. They embrace a subject which has always appeared to us as more worthy of learned labor than any other which could be named. That life would be well spent which should devote itself to collecting all these fragments of traditionary truth from all ante-Christian literatures. Such a work would not turn back the flood of rationalism, whose first risings we owe to Greece—for it is rather moral than intellectual—but it would materially obstruct it, and would rescue from it many souls which might otherwise be lured to their destruction by the feeble echoes of the sophists and Aristophanes, which, beginning with Voltaire, are now multiplying through all the rationalistic press of the world.

Meanwhile, we cordially commend Father Thébaud’s work on Gentilism to the attentive study of all who wish for solid information and sagacious criticism on a subject which appears to us, without wishing in the least to underrate scientific investigation, to be more interesting and more important than all or any of the discoveries of physical science. These, as has been proved of late years, may be turned against the truth, and become thus a means of darkening instead of enlightening the soul. At the best, be they correct or erroneous, great or small, many or few, they cannot add an inch to our stature or a day to our lives. They do not even add to our happiness.

But a false science—one which would assign to each of us an insignificant phenomenal existence, whose individuality will disappear, at the end of its few days of living consciousness, in an universal whole in an eternal state of progress—is as fatal to human happiness as anything can be short of the abyss of reprobation. More consoling, as it is more in accordance with right reason, is the testimony which comes to us trumpet-tongued, in one vast unison, from all the ages, that the history of the race is one of decadence, not of progress. The sentence passed was death. The road to death is decadence. The way is rounded; there is a movement onward and a growth of life until the descent begins which lands us in dissolution. But every moment from the first cry of infancy is a step nearer to death; we are every one of us dying every day; and a movement towards death is not progress. Individual experience joins its voice to that of universal history in testimony of this. The revelation of Christ has put us in possession of the highest and certain truth; it has given us a more exalted moral, and has recast our nature in a higher, nay, in a divine, mould. We are still dying every day; but the certain hope of a joyful resurrection has deprived death of its agonizing sting, and made it, like sleep, a source of happiness instead of despair. But this is nothing like the progress of which the sceptics prate. It is a supernatural stage in the dispensation of God for the renewal of his fallen creature, predetermined before all time. His own part in it—the natural order—is one long history of decadence. There has[637] been the ebb and flow, the rising to fall, of all movement. But decadence has all along triumphed over progress. Amidst what a decadence are we now living from the promising progress of the middle ages! And we are bid to expect so terrific a retrogression before the consummation of all things, that “even the elect shall scarcely be saved.”

It is the witness of all the ages—human progress ebbing and flowing—but, on the whole, the flow does not overtake the ebb. The ocean of life has been ever ebbing into its eternal abysses, and will ebb, leaving behind it a dry and barren waste, until the morning of eternity shall break over the withdrawing night of time, chaos shall be for ever sealed in the confusion and sadness of its darkness, and the final word shall go forth, of which the sublime physical law was only a type and a shadow: “Let there be light!”

MADAME’S EXPERIMENT.
A SAINT AGNES’ EVE STORY.

Madame the Countess of Hohenstein stood at the window of the great hall of her palace, waiting for the coach which was to take her to a château some leagues distant, where she was to grace a grand entertainment, and to be kept for a whole night by her hosts as an especial treasure. For Madame the Countess of Hohenstein, spite of her sixty years and her three grown sons, was a famous beauty still and a brilliant conversationist, and few were her rivals, young or old, throughout the kingdom. But her face was clouded as she waited in her stately hall that January afternoon, and she listened with a pained expression to the sound of a footstep overhead pacing steadily up and down. She touched a bell presently.

“Tell your master,” she said to the servant who answered it, “that I wish to see him again before I leave.” And soon down the winding stairway she watched a young man come with the same steady pace which might have been heard overhead for a half-hour past.

No need to ask the relationship between the two. Black, waving hair, broad brow, set lips, firm chin, the perfect contour of the handsome face—all these were the son’s heritage of remarkable beauty from his queenly mother; but the headstrong pride and excessive love which shone from her eyes as he came in sight met eyes very different from them. Large and black indeed they were, but their intense look, however deep the passion it bespoke, told of an unearthly passion and a fire that is divine.

“Nay, little mother,” he answered—the caressing diminutive sounding strangely as addressed to her in her pomp of attire and stately presence—“you said I need not go; that you did not care for me at the baron’s.”

“Not so, Heinrich. I care for you everywhere, everywhere. I am lost without you, love of my soul. But I know you hate it, and, if you must stay from any place, better that than some others. There are no maidens there I care for, my son.”

She watched the calm forehead contract as she spoke. “There! as ever,” she exclaimed. “Wilt never hear woman mentioned without a frown? You are no monk yet, child, at your twentieth year; nor ever shall be, if I can help it. It is enough for me, surely, to have given two sons to the priesthood, without yielding up my last one, my hope and my pride.”

Heinrich made no answer, for the sound of the carriage-wheels was heard, and he offered his mother his hand, led her down the steps, and placed her in the coach. She drew him towards her, and kissed him passionately. “Farewell, my dearest,” she said. “I count the minutes till we meet again.” And she never ceased to watch him as long as the mansion was visible.

He was a sight of which many a mother might have been proud, as he stood there bare headed, the winter sun lighting his face, the winter wind lifting his dark locks, the fresh bloom of youth enhancing his peculiar beauty. His mother sighed deeply as the coach turned a corner which hid him from her view—a sigh often repeated during the course of her journey.

It was a full hour before she was out of her own domains, though the horses sped swiftly over the frozen ground. All those broad acres, all that noble woodland, all those peasant homes, were hers; and for miles behind her the land stretching north and west belonged with it, for she had married the owner of the next estate, and, widowed, held it for her son. But at her death all these possessions must be divided among distant unknown kinsmen, if Heinrich persisted in the desire, which had been his from early boyhood, to become a monk. His mother’s whole heart was set against it. Her aim in life was to find for him a wife whom he would love, and whom he would bring to their home; she longed to hold before her death her son’s son on her knee.

The coach stopped as the sun was setting; and at the palace door, too eager for a sight of her to wait in courtly etiquette within, host and hostess stood ready to greet this friend of a lifetime.

“No Heinrich?” they cried, laughing. “A truant always. And we have that with us to-day which will make you wish him here. No matter what! You will see in time.”

And in time she saw indeed. Going slowly up the marble stairs a half-hour later, a vision of magnificent beauty, with her ermine mantle wrapped about her, the hood fallen back from her regal head, the eyes with the pained look of disappointment and longing still lingering in them in spite of the loving welcomes lavished upon her, she came, in a turn of the stairs, upon another vision of beauty radiant as her own, and extremely opposite.

Coming slowly down towards her was a young girl, tall and slight, with a skin of dazzling fairness, where the blue veins in temple and neck were plain to see; a delicate tint like blush-roses upon the cheek; great waves of fair hair sending back a glint of gold to the torches just lighted in the hall;[639] eyes very large, and so deeply set that at first their violet blue seemed black—eyes meek and downcast, and tender as a dove’s, but in them, too, a look of pain and yearning. The face at first view was like that of an innocent child, but beneath its youthfulness lay an expression which bespoke a wealth of love and strength and patience, unawakened as yet, but of unusual force. Skilled to read character by years of experience in kings’ palaces, madame the countess read her well—so far as she could read at all.

Evidently the maiden saw nothing that was before her; but madame held her breath in surprise and delight, and stood still, waiting her approach. Not till she came close to her did the girl look up, then she too stopped with a startled “Pardon madame”; and at sight of the timid, lovely eyes, at the sound of the voice—like a flute, like water rippling softly, like a south wind sighing in the seaside pines—madame opened her arms, and caught the stranger to her heart. “My child, my child,” she cried, “how beautiful you are!”

“Madame, madame,” the girl panted in amazement, carried away in her turn at the sudden sight of this lovely lady, who, she thought, could be, in her regal beauty and attire, no less than a princess—“Madame sees herself surely!”

The countess laughed outright at the artless, undesigned compliment. “And as charming as beautiful,” she said. “I must see more of you, my love.”

Then, kissing the cheek, red now as damask roses, she passed on. In the hall above her hostess stood with an arch smile on her lips. “Ah! Gertrude, we planned it well,” she said. “Fritz and I have been watching for that meeting. It was a brilliant tableau.”

“’Tis but a short story, dear. We found her in Halle. Her name is Elizabeth Wessenberg. She is well-born, but her family are strict Lutherans. She—timid, precious little dove!—became a Catholic by some good grace of the good God. But it was a lonely life, and I begged her off from it for a while. Oh! but her parents winced to see her go. They hate the name even of Catholic. That is all—only she sings like a lark, and she hardly knows what to make of her new life and faith, it is so strange to her.”

“That is all! Thanks, Wilhelmina. I will be with you soon. I long to see her once again.”

All that evening the countess kept Elizabeth near her, and every hour her admiration increased. A maiden so beautiful, yet so ignorant of her own charms, so unworldly, so innocent, she had never seen. Alone in her room that night she fell trembling upon her knees—poor, passionate, self-willed mother!—before the statue of the Holy Mother bearing the divine Son in her arms, and she held up her hands and prayed aloud.

“I have found her at last,” she cried—“a child who has won her way into my heart at once with no effort of her own; a pearl among all pearls; one whom my boy must love. Lord Jesus, have I not given thee two sons? Give me now one son to keep for my own, and not for thee. Grant that he may love this precious creature, fit for him as though thou thyself hadst made her for him, even as Eve was made for Adam.” And then she covered her face, and sobbed and[640] pleaded with long, wordless prayers.

The next day saw her on her homeward way, but not alone. She had coaxed in her irresistible fashion till she had obtained for herself from her friend a part of Elizabeth’s visit; and Elizabeth felt as if she were living in a dream, there in the costly coach, wrapped in furs and watched by those beautiful eyes. Constantly the countess talked with her, leading the conversation delicately in such a manner that she found out much in regard to Elizabeth’s home, and penetrated into her hidden sorrows in regard to the coldness and lack of sympathy there. And it needed no words to tell that this was a heart which craved sympathy and love most keenly; which longed for something higher and stronger than itself to lean upon. Every time she looked at the sensitive face, endowed with such exquisite refinement of beauty; every time the childlike yet longing, unsatisfied eyes met hers; every time the musical voice fell upon her ears, fearing ever an echo of that same craving for something more and better than the girl had yet known, madame’s mother-heart throbbed towards her, and it seemed to her that she could hardly wait for the blessing which, she had persuaded herself, was surely coming to her at last.

Now and then she spoke of the country through which they passed: and to Elizabeth it was almost incredible that such wealth could belong to one person only. Now and then she spoke of “my son” in a tone of exultant love, and then Elizabeth trembled a little; for she dreaded to meet this stranger. Very grand and proud she fancied him; one who would hardly notice at all a person so insignificant as herself.

“Here is the village chapel, Elizabeth,” madame said, as the coach stopped suddenly. “Will you scold, my little one, if I go in for a minute to the priest’s house? Or perhaps you would like to visit the Blessed Sacrament while I am gone?”

Yes, that was what Elizabeth would like indeed; and there she knelt and prayed, never dreaming how much was being said about her only next door.

“Father!” madame exclaimed impetuously to the gray-haired priest who rose to greet her, “I must have Mass said for my intention every morning for a week. See, here is a part only of my offering.” And she laid a heavy purse upon the table. “If God grant my prayer, it shall be doubled, tripled.”

“God’s answers cannot be bought, madame,” the priest said sadly, “nor can they be forced.”

“They must be this time, then, father. You must make my intention your own. Will you not? Will you not for this once, father?”

“Father, do not be angry. It is the old hunger wrought up to desperation. I cannot give my boy to be a monk!”

“No! no!” madame hurried on. “It is too much to ask of me. And now I have found a bride for him at last. She waits for me in the chapel, fair and pure as the lilies. I am taking her home in triumph.”

“Not one word. He cannot fail to love her when he sees her. It is for this I ask your prayers.”

The priest pushed away the purse. “I will have none of this,” he said. “It is far better to see my poor suffer than that this unrighteous deed should be done. You call yourself a Catholic, and pride yourself because your house was always Catholic; and yet you dare say that anything is too much for God to ask of you! I am an old man, madame, and have had many souls to deal with, but I never yet saw one whose vocation was more plain than Heinrich’s to the entire service of God’s church. Will you dare run counter to God’s will?”

“Nay, father, it cannot be his will. Our very name would die out—our heritage pass from us!”

“And suppose it does! Who shall promise you that if Heinrich marries there shall ever be child of his to fill his place? And what are place, and name, and heritage, madame? That which death, or war, or a king’s caprice may snatch away in a moment. But your spiritual heritage shall never die. What mother on earth but might envy you if you give your three sons—your all—to God! Many are the children of the desolate, more than of her that hath an husband, saith the Lord. He maketh a barren woman to dwell in a house the joyful mother of children. There is a place and a name within his walls better than sons and daughters. Do you dream what risk you run, what part you play, when you would tempt from his calling one who, if you leave God to work his own pleasure, shall hereafter shine as the stars through all eternity?”

She did not answer back with pride. Instead, her whole face grew soft, and the large tears filled her eyes and ran slowly down her cheeks. “I want to do right,” she said humbly; “but I cannot feel that it is right. Father, see: I will not ask you to make my intention yours. But I promise you one thing: I must ask God to grant me this blessing, but it shall be the last time. If I fail now, let his will be done. And do you, father, ask him to make it plain to me what his will is.”

“God bless you, daughter!” the old priest answered, much moved by her humility. “I will pray that indeed. But still I warn you that I think you are doing wrong in so much as trying such an experiment as this which you have undertaken.”

“No, no,” she cried again. “No, no, father. This once I must try, or my heart will break.”

Again in the carriage, she pressed Elizabeth to her closely, and kissed her, and said words of passionate love, finding relief thus for the pent-up feelings of her heart; but Elizabeth knew not how to reply. It troubled and perplexed her—this lavish affection; for she could not repay it in kind. It only served to waken a suffering which she had known from childhood, a strange, unsatisfied yearning within her, which came at the sight of a lovely landscape, or the sound of exquisite music, or the caresses of some friend. She wanted more; and where and what was that “more,” which seemed to lie beyond everything, and which she could never grasp?

She felt it often during her visit—that visit where attention was constantly bestowed on her, and she lived in the midst of such luxury as she had never known before. Something in Heinrich’s face seemed to her to promise an answer to her questionings—it was so at rest,[642] so settled; and this, more than anything else about him, interested and attracted her. Madame saw the interest, without guessing the cause. She felt also that Heinrich was not wholly insensible to Elizabeth’s presence; and though she asked him no direct questions, she contrived to turn conversation into the channels which could not fail to engage him, and which the young convert also cared for most.

Elizabeth decided that Heinrich knew more than any one else, but even he tired her sometimes. “He knows too much,” she thought, “and he is so cold and indifferent. Yet he would not be himself if he were more like madame; and she is too tender. Oh! what does it all mean? There is nothing that makes one content except church, and one cannot be always there.”

So passed the time till S. Agnes’ Eve. That night, when the young people entered the dining-hall, madame was absent. She sent a message that they must dine without her, as she had a severe headache, and Elizabeth might come to her an hour after dinner.

The meal was a silent one. When it was over, and they went into the library, Heinrich seated himself at the organ. Grand chorals, funeral marches full of mourning and awe and hope, Mass music welcoming the coming of the Lord of Sabaoth, filled the lofty room. When he ceased, Elizabeth was sobbing irrepressibly.

“Forgive me, forgive me!” she said. “I cannot help it. O monsieur! I know not what it means. Love and hate, beauty and deformity, joy and suffering—I cannot understand. Nothing satisfies, and to be a Catholic makes the craving worse. Is it because I am only just beginning, and that I shall understand better by and by?”

He stood at a little distance from her, looking not at her at all, but upward and far away.

“I will tell mademoiselle a story, if she will permit it,” he said. “Many years ago there was a princess, very beautiful, very wise, and very wealthy. Her councillors begged that she would marry, and at last she told them that she would do so, if they would find for her the prince she should describe, he should be so rich that he should esteem all the treasures of the Indies as a little dust; so wise that no man could ever mention in his presence aught that he did not already know; so fair that no child of man should compare with him in beauty; so spotless in his soul that the very heavens should not be pure in his sight. They knew not where to find that prince, but their lady knew.”

He paused, though not as for an answer. He had guessed well his mother’s plans and hopes; he fathomed as truly Elizabeth’s nature; and when he spoke again, it was as no one except the priest of God had ever heard him speak:

“There are some souls whom no one and nothing on earth can possibly satisfy. Beauty, and learning, and friendship, and home, and love, each alike wearies them. God only can content them, and he is enough—God alone. To such souls he gives himself, if they sincerely desire it. It is a love beyond all imaginable earthly love. It satisfies, yet leaves a constant craving which we have no wish should cease. He understands everything: even those things which we cannot explain to ourselves. It is he finding whom the soul loveth him, and will not let him go.”

After saying this, he sat down once more at the organ, and played again till the hour named by madame arrived. Elizabeth found her pale and suffering, but with a glad look in her eyes.

“You have had talk together, then,” she cried. “I heard the music cease for a while. And is he not charming and good, my Heinrich?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said dreamily. “He made me understand a little to-night—better than any one has ever done before.”

“Here,” Elizabeth said innocently, laying her hand on her heart, and with no suspicion of the meaning which the countess attached to the act. “If I could only understand more—more.”

“You will in time, most dear one—in time, in time.” And oh! the exulting ring in madame’s voice. “But see, my precious, what I have to show you.”

A chest was drawn up beside madame’s easy-chair. She opened it, and before Elizabeth’s dazzled eyes lay jewels of wondrous lustre and value—long strings of pearls, changing opals with the fire-spark trembling in them, sapphires blue as the sky, emeralds green as the sea, and glittering diamonds. Madame drew out the costly things, and adorned Elizabeth with one set after another by turn, watching the effect. Last of all, she touched a spring, and took from a secret drawer a set of pearls, large and round, with a soft amber tint in them. These she held caressingly and sighed.

“Look, Elizabeth,” she said. “Forty years ago this very night I wore them, when I was a girl like you. There was a great ball here. Some one—ah! but how grand and beautiful he looked; my poor heart remembers well, and is sore with the memory now—some one begged me to try the charm of S. Agnes’ Eve. Dost know it, dear? Nay? Then you shall try it too. Go supperless to rest; look not to left or right, nor yet behind you, but pray God to show you that which shall satisfy your heart of hearts.”

Madame sighed heavily. “Alas! love, alas! What contents us here? I had it for a time, and then God took it from me. No prouder wife than I, no prouder mother; but husband and sons are gone, all except my Heinrich. Pray God to keep him for me, Elizabeth, Elizabeth.”

Madame looked aghast, then smiled an amused yet troubled smile. “Nay, child, I thought not of that. S. Agnes was one who loved our blessed Lord alone, not man. She died rather than yield to earthly love and joy.”

“O child, child! But I forget, You have only just begun the Catholic life, my sweet. God’s love, then, is enough for some people; but they are monks and nuns, not common Christians like you and me and Heinrich. We could not live in that way, could we, Elizabeth—you and Heinrich and I?”

“And God would never grow tired of us, madame! Nor ever die! Nor ever misunderstand! O madame! I think we could not live with less.” And Elizabeth stood up suddenly, as if too agitated to remain quiet.

“Ah! love, you are only just a[644] convert. In one’s first excitement one fancies many things. You are meant to serve God in the world, my dear, for many years to come—you and my Heinrich. Pray for him to-night.”

But hurrying along the hall to her own room, Elizabeth whispered passionately in her heart: “I do not want to pray for him. Let him pray for himself. His saints pray for him too, and God loves him, and he does not need me. Does madame, then, suppose that he could ever care for me, or I for him? I want more than he can give—more—more! Show me my heart’s desire, O God, my God!”

In her excitement and in the darkness she laid her hand on the wrong door, and, opening it, found herself in an old gallery, at the end of which a light was glimmering. Scarcely heeding what she did, she moved toward it, and found that she was in the choir of the castle chapel. The door fell gently to behind her, but did not close, and Elizabeth was alone. Alone? The aisles were empty, the organ was still, the priest was gone; but before the sacred shrine the steady ray of the lamp told that He who filleth the heaven of heavens was dwelling in his earthly temple, and that unseen angels guarded all the place.

But of angels or men Elizabeth thought not. Silently, slowly she moved onward, her hands pressed upon her heart, whose passionate beating grew still as she came nearer to the Sacred Heart which alone could fully comfort, fully strengthen, fully understand. Slowly she moved, as one who knows that some great joy is coming surely, and who lengthens willingly the bliss of expectation.

And so she reached a narrow flight of steps, and made her way gently down, and knelt. Outside, in the clear night, a great wind rose, and rocked the castle-tower, but Elizabeth knew it not. She was conscious only of the intense stillness of that unseen Presence; of peace flooding her whole soul like a river; of the nearness of One who is strength and love and truth, infinite and eternal.

God, my God! She lifted up her eyes, and there, above the shrine, beheld the great crucifix of Hohenstein, brought from the far-off East by a Crusader knight. She lifted up her eyes, and saw the haggard face full of unceasing prayer, the sunken cheeks, the pierced hands and feet, the bones, easy to number, in the worn and tortured body, the side with its deep wound where a spear had passed.

Yet, looking upward steadily, all her excitement gone, a sacred calm upon her inmost soul, Elizabeth knew that her prayer was answered, her lifelong hunger satisfied. God had given her her heart’s desire.

God, my God! No love but his could satisfy; and his could with an eternal content. To that Heart, pierced for her, broken for her, she could offer no less than her whole heart; and that she must offer, not by constraint, but simply because she loved him beyond all, above all, and knew that in him, and in him only, she was sure of an unfailing, an everlasting love.

Madame, seeking her in the early morning, found her room unoccupied, then noticed the gallery-door ajar, and, trembling, sought her there. Elizabeth had kept S. Agnes’ Eve indeed, but it was before the shrine of S. Agnes’ Spouse and Lord.

“My daughter,” the countess[645] said, using the word for the first time, and with oh! how sad a tone—“what have you done this night, my daughter?”

Elizabeth lifted hand and face toward the shrine. “Madame,” she answered slowly, as one who speaks unconsciously in sleep, “I have found Him whom my soul loveth. I hold him, and I will not let him go.”

God himself had made his way plain indeed before Madame the Countess of Hohenstein in this her last struggle with his will. The very plan which she had chosen to gain her cherished hopes had crushed them. Not priest or son, but the girl whom she herself had named for her final trial, had shown her that God’s purposes were far aside from hers.

“Take all, O Lord!” she cried, while her tears fell like rain. “Take all I have. I dare not struggle longer.”

One son gave up his life a martyr in the blood-stained church in Japan. Another endured a lifelong martyrdom among the lepers of the Levant, winning souls yet more tainted than the bodies home again to God. And one, the youngest, and the fairest, and the dearest, was seen in China and in India, in Peru and in Mexico, going without question wherever he was sent, for the greater glory of God; but he was never seen in his German home again. After they once left her, their mother never beheld their faces. And she who had been taken to her heart as a daughter entered an order in a distant land.

Yet none ever heard madame the last Countess of Hohenstein murmur against her lot. Clearly, tenderly, patiently, more and more did God vouchsafe to make his way plain to her. In chapel, day by day, she watched the decaying banners which told of the fields her fathers won; saw the monuments to men of her race who had fought and died for their king and their land; read the names once proudly vaunted, now almost forgotten. What was fame like this to the honor God had showered on her? Souls east and west brought safe to him; life laid down for the Lord of lords; a seed not to be reckoned; a lineage which could never fail; sons and daughters to stand at last in that multitude which no one can number, who have come out of great tribulation, with fadeless palms of victory in their hands—such was her place and name in the house of God.

The quaint German text upon her tombstone puzzled travellers greatly, and those who could decipher it wondered but the more. It ran thus:

The children of thy barrenness shall still say in thy ears: The place is too strait for me; make me room to dwell in. And thou shalt say in thy heart: Who hath begotten me these? I was barren, and brought not forth, led away, and captive; and who hath brought up these? I was destitute and alone; and these, where were they?

Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I will lift up my hand to the Gentiles, and will set up my standard to the people. And they shall bring thy sons in their arms, and carry thy daughters upon their shoulders. And thou shalt know that I am the Lord; for they shall not be confounded that wait for him.

THE BASQUES.

We are all Basques. Nay, reader, be not startled at having your supposed nationality thus suddenly set aside. An author of far more learning than we can lay claim to—Señor Erro, a Spanish Basque—gravely asserts that all the inhabitants of Europe and Asia, if not of America also, sprang from the Basques. In short, they—that is, we—are the primitive race. And this fearless writer, with a due sense of national superiority, goes boldly on to prove that Adam and Eve spoke the Basque language in the terrestrial Paradise, of which he gives a detailed description according to the Biscayan interpretation of the Biblical account.

We remember how, in search of Adam—great progenitor!—whose said-to-be-fine statue is among the army of saints on the glorious roof of Milan cathedral, we got bewildered on that celestial height, so that we do not to this day feel sure of having discovered the true Adam, and might never have found our way down to earth again had it not been for the kind offices of one of Victor Emanuel’s soldiers. So it is with many a savant in tracing the origin of the human species. Lost in threading the way back to our first parents, they need some rough, uncultured soul to lead them out of the bewildering maze—back to the point whence they started.

But let us hope in this instance filial instinct has not mistaken the genuine Adam—the first speaker, it is possible, of Basque. Señor Erro finds in this language the origin of all civilization and science. It must be confessed we have wofully forgotten our mother-tongue; for it is said to be impossible to learn to speak it unless one goes very young among the Basques. It is a common saying of theirs that the devil once came into their country to learn the language, but gave it up in despair after three hundred years’ application! It may be inferred he had lost the knowledge he had made such successful use of a few thousand years before in the Garden of Eden.

M. Astarloa, likewise a Biscayan, maintains that the extraordinary perfection of this language is a proof it is the only one that could have been conferred on the first man by his Creator, but in another place says it was formed by God himself at the confusion of tongues in the tower of Babel—which assertions rather lack harmony.

Max Müller, the eminent philologist, pretends a serious discussion took place about two hundred years ago in the metropolitan chapter of Pampeluna as to the following knotty points:

First. Was Basque the primitive language of mankind? The learned members confessed that, however strong might be their private convictions, they did not dare give an affirmative reply.

Secondly. Was Basque the only language spoken by Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden?

As to this, the whole chapter declared there could be no doubt whatever that it was “impossible to bring a reasonable objection against such an opinion.”

This is extremely amusing; but, of course, too absurd to be true. Besides, the archives of Pampeluna do not afford the slightest hint of so singular a record.

Southwestern France, however, has many traditions of the Oriental origin of its inhabitants. Tarbes and Lourdes are said to have been founded by Abyssinian princesses. Belleforest, in his Cosmography, says Japhet himself came into Gaul and built the city of Périgueux, which for several ages bore his name. Père Bajole, of Condom, a Jesuit of the XVIIth century, is less precise in his suppositions, but thinks the country was peopled soon after the Deluge, and therefore by those who had correct notions of the true God. Moreover as Noah, of course, would not have allowed his descendants to depart without suitable advice as to the way of salvation, especially to the head of the colony, he concludes that many of the ancient Aquitanians were saved. The Sire Dupleix cites the epistle of S. Martial to show they had retained some proper notions of theology, which accounts for the rapid success of the first Christian apostles of the country.

But to return to the Basques in particular: In the Leyenda Pendadola—an old book of the XIth century—we read that “the first settlement in Spain was made by the patriarch Tubal, whose people spoke the language still used in the provinces of Biscay”—that is, the Basque. William von Humboldt likewise attributed to the Basques an Asiatic origin, and was decidedly of the school of MM. Erro and Astarloa, though he rejected their exaggerations. The Basque language, so rich, harmonious, and expressive, is now generally believed to be one of the Turanian tongues. Prince Lucian Bonaparte shows the analogy between it and the Hungarian, Georgian, etc.

The word Basque is derived from the Latin Vasco; for in Southwestern France it is quite common to pronounce the letter v like b—a habit which made Scaliger wittily say: Felices populi, quibus Vivere est Bibere.

The Basque country consists of several provinces on both sides of the Pyrenees bordering on the Bay of Biscay. Labourd, Soule, and Lower Navarre are now in the department of the Basses-Pyrenees, on the French side. The two provinces of Biscay and Guipuzcoa—a part of Alava and of Upper Navarre—belong to Spain. The whole Basque population cannot be more than 500,000. The people, as we have had a proof of, are proud of their ancient nationality; and though there is a difference of manners, physiognomy, and even of idiom in these sections, they all recognize each other as brethren. They are a noble race, and have accomplished great deeds in their day. Entrenched behind their mountains, they long kept the Romans at bay, drove back the Moors, and crushed the rear-guard of Charlemagne.

The Basques have always been famous navigators. The first suggestion that led to the discovery of America is said to have been given Christopher Columbus by Sanchez de Huelva, a Basque pilot. The Basques of Labourd certainly discovered Cape Breton. They were the first to go on whale-fisheries, which, in 1412, extended as far as Iceland. And Newfoundland seems to have been known to them in the middle of the XVth century. The first name of Cape Breton—isle[648] des Bacaloas or Bacaloac—is a Basque name.

In the middle ages the Basques maintained a certain independence by means of their fueros, or special privileges, which had been handed down from time immemorial and confirmed by several of the kings of France. The wood of Haïtze is still pointed out as the place where the assemblies of the elders, or bilçars, were formerly held in the district of Labourd. Here came together the proprietors of the different communes to regulate their administrative affairs. The most of the assembly leaned on their staves or against the venerable oaks of the forest. But the presiding member sat on a huge stone, the secretary on another, while a third was used for recording the decrees of the assembly, to which the kings of France and Navarre were often forced to yield by virtue of their fueros.

And this country was never over-ruled by oppressive lords who held it in subjection by means of their fortified castles. The device of Bayonne—Nunquam polluta—seems to express the unstained independence that had never been subjected to feudal dominion. It doubtless had great families who distinguished themselves by their bravery and military services, and were noted for their wealth, like the casas de parientes majores—the twenty-four families of great antiquity—in Guypuzcoa, among which was the family of Loyola of Aspeïtia, to which the immortal founder of the Jesuits belonged, as well as that of Balda, his mother’s family; but they never pretended to the feudal authority of the great nobles of France and Spain. It was only in the XVth century that several Basque families, who had become wealthy, ventured to erect some inoffensive towers like those of Uturbi near St. Jean de Luz, occupied by Louis XI. while on the frontier arranging the treaty between the kings of Castile and Arragon.

It is said of the Basques of Spain: As many Basques, as many nobles. Many of their villages have coats of arms on all the houses, which contrast with the decayed lattices and crumbling roofs. The owners point to their emblazonry with the air of a Montmorency. When the Moors invaded the North of Spain, thousands of mountaineers rose to drive them out. As they made war at their own expense, those who returned alive to their cottages received the reward of gentlemen—the right of assuming some heraldic sign and graving it on their walls as a perpetual memorial of their deeds. In the valley of Roncal the inhabitants were all ennobled for having distinguished themselves at the battle of Olaso, in the reign of Fortunio Garcia. In the village of Santa Lucia, not far from Toledo, an old house of the XIIIth century is still to be seen with double lancet windows, which has its record over the door proving the part a former owner had taken at the bridge of Olaso—an azure field traversed by a river, which is spanned by a bridge with three golden arches surmounted by the bleeding head of a Moor.

In a faubourg of Tolosa is a modest house stating that Juan Perez having borne arms for more than fifty years in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Flanders, etc., and taken part in the great naval victory over the Turks at Lepanto under Don Juan of Austria, the emperor created him knight and gave him for his arms the imperial eagle.

But most of these armorial bearings[649] have reference to the chase, to which the people were so addicted. The trophies they brought home, instead of being nailed up over the door, were now graven there in stone—sometimes a wolf, or a hare, or even a favorite hound. Two dogs are on the arms inherited by the Prince of Viana, the donor of the fine bells to the basilica of Notre Dame de Lourdes.

In the commune of Bardos is a château which bears the name of Salla from the founder of the family. It was he who, fighting under Alphonse the Chaste, King of Navarre, had his legs broken by the explosion of a rock, from which time the house of Salla has had for its arms three chevrons brisés, d’or, sur un champ d’azur. The most illustrious member of this family is Jean Baptiste de la Salle, who founded the admirable order of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, with a special mission for instructing the poor.

Mgr. de Belsunce, the celebrated bishop of Marseilles, was also of Basque origin. The Château de Belsunce is still to be seen—an old manor-house with Gothic turrets bespeaking the antiquity of the family. The name is associated with the legends of the country. Tradition relates that a winged monster having terrified the whole region, a knight of this house armed himself with a lance and went forth to attack the monster in his den. The dragon, having received a mortal wound, sprang with a dying effort upon his enemy, seized him, and rolled with him into the Nive. From that time the family of Belsunce bore on its shield a dragon sable on a field gules.

The arms of Fontarabia is a siren on the waves bearing a mirror and a comb—symbol of this enchanting region. This historic place, once the rival of St. Jean de Luz, now wears a touching aspect of desolation and mourning which only adds to its attractions. Its ruins have a hue of antiquity that must delight a painter’s eye. The long street that leads to the principal square carries one back three hundred years, most of the houses being in the Spanish style of the XVIth century. There are coats of arms over every door, and balconies projecting from every story, with complicated trellises or lattices that must almost madden the moon-struck serenader. Nothing could be more picturesque than this truly Spanish place. Many of the houses bear the imposing name of palacios, which testify to the ancient splendor of this ciudad muy noble, muy leal, y muy valerosa. Overlooking the whole place is the château of Jeanne la Folle, massive, heavy, its walls three yards thick, its towers round—a genuine fortress founded in the Xth century, but mostly rebuilt by Charles V. Its chronicles are full of historic interest. Here took place the interview between Louis XI. and Henri IV. of Castille, whose arrogant favorite, Beltram de la Cueva, in his mantle broidered with gold and pearls and diamonds, and his boat with its awning of cloth of gold, must have offered a striking contrast to the extreme simplicity of the King of France.

The fine, imposing church of Fontarabia, in the transition style, is a marked exception to the Basque churches generally, which are of simple primitive architecture, with but few ornaments; and these, at least on the French side of the frontier, mostly confined to the sanctuary,[650] which is rich in color and gilding. Perhaps over the main altar is a painting, but by no means by Murillo or Velasquez. If on the Spanish side, it may be a S. Iago on a white steed, sword in hand, with a red mantle over his pilgrim’s dress, looking like a genuine matamore, breathing destruction against the Moors. The Madonna, too, is always there, perhaps with a wheel of silver swords, as if in her bosom were centred all the sorrows of the human race.

The galleries around the nave in the Basque churches gives them the appearance of a salle de spectacle; but the clergy think the separation of the sexes promotes the respect due in the sanctuary, and the people themselves cling to the practice. The men occupy the galleries. They all have rosaries in their hands. From time to time you can see them kiss their thumbs, placed in the form of a cross, perhaps to set a seal on their vows to God, as people in the middle ages used to seal their letters with their thumbs to give them a sacred inviolability. Licking the thumb was, we know, an ancient form of giving a solemn pledge; and, till a recent period, the legal form of completing a bargain in Scotland was to join the thumbs and lick them. “What say ye, man? There’s my thumb; I’ll ne’er beguile ye,” said Rob Roy to Bailie Nicol Jarvie.

When Mass is over, every man in the galleries respectfully salutes his next neighbor. This is considered obligatory. Were it even his deadliest enemy, he must bow his head before him. Mass heard with devotion brings the Truce of God to the heart.

The women occupy the nave, sitting or kneeling on the black, funereal-looking carpet that covers the stone above the tomb of their beloved dead. For every family has a slab of wood or marble with an inscription in large characters, which covers the family vault below, and their notions of pious respect oblige the living to kneel on the stone that covers the bones of their forefathers. Or this was the case; for of late years burial in churches has been forbidden, and these slabs now only serve to designate the inalienable right of the families to occupy them during the divine service. It is curious and interesting to examine these sepulchral slabs; for they are like the archives of a town inscribed with the names of the principal inhabitants, with their rank and occupation. In some places the women, by turns, bring every morning an offering for their pastor, which they deposit on these stones like an expiatory libation. Several of them are daily garnished with fruit, wine, eggs, beeswax, yarn, and linen thread, and the curé, accompanied by his servant or the sacristan, goes around after Mass to collect this tribute of rural piety in a basket, and give his blessing to the families. These offerings of the first-fruits of the earth are still continued, though the dead are buried elsewhere.

The seat of that mighty potentate, the village mayor, is in the choir, as befits his dignity, which he fully sustains by his majestic deportment in sight of the whole congregation. Sometimes he chants at the lectern, like Charlemagne. The square peristyle of the church is often divided between him and the village school-master for their respective functions, as if to invest them with a kind of sanctity.

In Soule the belfry is formed by extending upwards the western[651] wall of the church in the form of three gables, looking like three obelisks. The bell is hung in the central one. The origin of this custom is thus explained by M. Cénac Montaut:

“In former times, when the Basques had some difficulty about accepting all the truths of the Gospel, the clergy were unable to make them comprehend the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. One of the priests, like S. Patrick with the shamrock, saw he must appeal to the senses in order to reach the mind and heart. Entering his rude pulpit one day, he addressed his flock something after the following manner: ‘Some of you, my dear brethren, recently objected that the God of the Old Testament, in the tables of the law, wished to be worshipped as one God, and that to add now the Son and Holy Spirit to the Deity is to overthrow the law of Sinai and affect the divine Essence itself.… My dear brethren, hitherto we have had but one gable on our belfry, directing towards heaven the innermost prayer of the heart, and bearing the bell by which God seems to speak to us in return. If, now, two other gables were added to this, would not this triple tower, standing on one base, and pointing to the same heaven, still constitute one belfry?’”

This appeal was effective. Those who had been unable to accept the abstract doctrine of the Trinity perfectly comprehended this material unity. The other priests of Soule hastened to make use of so happy an oratorical figure, and all through the valley of the Gave rose the three-gabled, dogmatic belfries, such as we see at the present day.

Near the church is often a modest white house with a small garden containing a few trees and flowers, where the Daughters of the Cross devote themselves to the instruction of children, planting the seeds of piety in their youthful hearts.

The Basque houses, with their triangular, tile-covered roofs, often project like a châlet, and are painted white, green, and even pink. The casements are made in the form of a cross, and stained red. The doorway is arched like a church-portal, and has over it a Virgin, or crucifix, or some pious inscription. There is no bolt on the door; for a Basque roof is too inviolable to need a fastening. At the entrance is a bénitier (for holy water), as if the house were to the owner a kind of sanctuary to be entered with purification and a holy thought. You enter a large hall that divides the house into two parts, and contains all the farming utensils. It is here the husbandman husks his corn and thrashes his wheat. The uncolored walls of the rooms are hung with a few rude pictures, as of the Last Judgment, the Wandering Jew, or Napoleon. There are some large presses, a few wooden chairs, a shelf in the corner with a lace-edged covering for the statue of the Virgin, who wears a crown of immortelles on her head and a rosary around her neck. At one end of the room is a bed large enough for a whole family, and so high as almost to need a ladder to ascend it. The open pink curtains show the holy-water font, the crucifix, and faded palm branch annually renewed. There is no house without some religious symbol. The Basque has great faith in prayer. He stops his plough or wild native dance to say the Angelus. He never forgets to arm himself[652] with the sign of the cross in a moment of danger. He makes it over the loaf of bread before he divides it among the family. The mother makes it on the foreheads of her children at night. At Candlemas a blessed candle burns under every roof in honor of the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. It is the boast of the country that Protestantism never found entrance therein, even during its prevalence in Béarn at the time of Joan of Navarre, though that princess took pains to have the Huguenot version of the New Testament translated into Basque and published at La Rochelle in 1591 for their benefit. The whole Bible is now translated, M. Duvoisin having devoted six years to the work, and Prince Lucian Bonaparte a still longer time in settling the orthography and superintending the edition.

It must not be supposed, however, that the Basques are an austere race. They are very fond of their national dances, and excel in the jeu de paume. Among their other amusements is the pastorale, acted in the open air with a chirula (a kind of flute) and a tambourine for the orchestra. The subject is borrowed from the Bible, the legend of Roland, the wars with the Moors, etc. They are composed by native poets, and have a certain antique simplicity not without its charm. The people flock to these representations, as to their Cantabrian dances, in their gayest attire. The old man wears a béret drawn over his forehead, while his long hair floats behind in token of the nobility of his ancient race. He wears short breeches, long woollen stockings, and leather shoes with handsome silver buckles.

The young Basque, straight, well formed, and proud in his bearing, wears his blue béret jauntily perched on one side of his head. His jacket is short. Silver clasps fasten his collar and wristbands. He wears sandals on his feet, with red bars across the instep. A bright red sash girdles his waist—as of all mountaineers, enabling them to endure fatigue the better, like the surcingle of a horse. “Beware of that young man with the loose girdle,” said Sulla, speaking of Cæsar. For among the Romans the word discinctus was applied to the indolent, cowardly soldier, as alte cinctus (high-girdled) meant a prompt, courageous man.

The girls, slender in form, with regular, expressive features, are veiled in a black mantilla, or else carry it on their arms. A gay kerchief is wound around the back of their heads like a turban, leaving visible the shining bands of their beautiful black hair.

The old women wear white muslin kerchiefs on their heads, with one corner falling on the shoulder. On the breast is suspended a golden heart or Saint-Esprit. Sometimes they are enveloped from head to foot in a great black cloak, which is absolutely requisite when they attend a funeral. This mantle forms part of the trousseau of every bride of any substance, and she wears it on her wedding-day, as if to show herself prepared to pay due honor to all the friends who should depart this life before her. It must be a great comfort for them to see this mourning garment prepared in advance, and the sight of the bride veiled in her long black capuchin must diffuse a rather subdued gayety over the wedding party.

The Basques pay great respect to the dead. When a man dies,[653] his next neighbor on the right carries the crucifix before his bier in the funeral procession, and his nearest neighbor on the left walks at its side. And the whole neighborhood assembles around it in church, with lighted candles in their hands, to hear the Mass for the Dead. They adorn their graveyards with shrubs and flowers. And they never omit the month’s-mind, or anniversary service.

Of course no one goes to the Basque country without visiting the famous Pas de Roland. The whole region is singularly wild and picturesque. We pass through a deep gorge encumbered with rocks, over which the Nive plunges and foams in the maddest possible way. Twin mountains of granite rise to the very heavens, their sides covered with the golden broom, or furrowed with deep gullies that tell of mountain torrents. The overhanging cliffs, and the dizzy, winding road along the edge of the abyss, create a feeling of awe; and by the time we arrive, breathless and fatigued, at the Pas de Roland, we are quite prepared to believe anything marvellous.

This archway was produced by a mere blow from the heel of the great Paladin, who did not consider the mountain worthy the use of his mighty sword. Everything is bathed in the golden light of the wondrous legend, which harmonizes with the spot. We even fancy we can hear the powerful horn of Orlando—the greatest trumpeter on record. We can see Carloman, with his black plumes and red mantle—opera-like—as he is described in the Chant d’Altabisçar! The natives, pur sang, do not call this pass by the name of Roland, but Utheca gaiz—a bad, dangerous passage, as in truth it is. It is the only means of communication with the opposite side of the mountain. After going through it, the mountains recede, the horizon expands, a country full of bucolic delights is revealed to the eye, the exaltation of the soul subsides, and the mind settles down to its normal state of incredulity.

Just below the Pas de Roland, on the French side, are the thermal springs of Cambo, in a lovely little valley watered by the Nive. The air here is pure, the climate mild, the meadows fresh and sprinkled with flowers, the encircling hills are crowned with verdure. Never did Nature put on an aspect of more grace and beauty than in this delicious spot. One of the springs is sulphurous, the other ferruginous. They became popular among the Spanish and Basques during the last century when patronized by Queen Marie Anne de Neuberg, the second wife of Don Carlos II. of Spain. Some of her royal gifts to the church of Cambo are still shown with pride. These springs were visited as early as 1585, among others, by François de Nouailles, Bishop of Dax, who is often referred to in proof of their efficacy; but as that eminent diplomatist died a few weeks after he tried the waters, the less said of his cure the better for their reputation. Napoleon I., however, had faith in their virtues. He visited Cambo, and was only prevented by his downfall from building a military hospital here.

Not two miles from Cambo is the busy town of Hasparren. The way thither is through a delightful country,[654] with some fresh beauty bursting on the eye at every step. On all sides are to be seen the neat white cottages of the laborers in the midst of orchards, meadows, and vineyards; sometimes in the hollows of a valley like a nest among the green leaves; sometimes on the hills commanding the most delicious of landscapes. Hasparren has about six thousand inhabitants, mostly farmers, but who try to increase their income by some trade. Twelve hundred of them are shoemakers; seven or eight hundred are weavers, curriers, or chocolate-makers. The spacious church is hardly able to contain the crowd of worshippers on festivals. A curious history is connected with the belfry.

The government having imposed a tax on salt in 1784, the people around Hasparren, who had hitherto been exempted, resolved to resist so heavy an impost. They rang the bell with violence to call together the inhabitants. Even the women assembled in bands with spits, pitchforks, and sickles, to the sound of a drum, which one of their number beat before them. The mob, amounting to two thousand, entrenched themselves in the public cemetery, where they received with howls of rage the five brigades the governor of Bayonne was obliged to send for the enforcement of the law. Bloodshed was prevented by the venerable curé, who rose from his sick-bed and appeared in their midst. By his mild, persuasive words he calmed the excited crowd, induced the troops to retire and the mob to disperse. The leaders being afterwards arrested, he also effected their pardon—on humiliating conditions, however, to the town. The hardest was, perhaps, the destruction of the belfry, from which they had rung the alarm; and it was not till some time in the present century they were allowed to rebuild it.

It is remarkable that the ancient Basques left no poems, no war-songs to celebrate their valorous deeds, no epic in which some adventurous mariner recites his wanderings; for the language is flexible and easily bends to rhythm. But the people seem better musicians than poets. There are, to be sure, some rude plaints of love, a few smugglers’ or fishermen’s songs, sung to bold airs full of wild harmony that perhaps used to animate their forefathers to fight against the Moors; but these songs have no literary merit. Only two poems in the language have acquired a certain celebrity, because published by prominent men who ascribed to them a great antiquity. One of these is the Chant des Cantabres, published by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1817 in connection with an essay on the Basque language. Ushered into the world by so distinguished a linguist, it was eagerly welcomed by German savants, and regarded as a precious memorial of past ages. M. von Humboldt took it from the MSS. of a Spaniard employed in 1590 to explore the archives of Simancas and Biscay. He pretended to have found it written on an old, worm-eaten parchment, as well it might be if done soon after the invasion of the country by the Romans. We wonder he did not also find the history of the conquest of Cantabria in five books composed by the Emperor Augustus himself, said to have been in existence in the XVIIth century!

The Chant d’Altabisçar is said to have been discovered by M. La Tour d’Auvergne in an old convent at St. Sebastian, in 1821, written[655] on parchment in characters of the XIIIth or XIVth century. It is unfortunate so valuable a MS., like the original poems of Ossian, should have been lost! The contents, however, were preserved and published in 1835, and, though now considered spurious, merit a certain attention because formerly regarded as genuine by such men as Victor Hugo, who, in his Légende des Siècles, speaks of Charlemagne as “plein de douleur” to think

M. Olivier, in his Dictionnaire de la Conversation, enthusiastically exclaims: “What shall I say of the Basque chants, and where did this people, on their inaccessible heights, obtain such boldness of rhythm and intonation? Every Basque air I know is grand and decided in tone, but none more strikingly so than the national chant of the Escualdunacs, as they call themselves in their language. And yet this fine poem has for some of its lines only the cardinal numbers up to twenty, and then repeated in reverse order. Often, while listening to the pure, fresh melody of this air, I have wondered what meaning was concealed beneath these singular lines. From one hypothesis to another I have gone back to the time when the Vascon race, hedged in at the foot of the Pyrenees by the Celtic invaders, sought refuge among the inaccessible mountains. Then, it seemed to me, this Chant was composed as a war-song in which, after recounting, one by one, their years of exile, they numbered with the same regularity, but in a contrary direction, their deeds of vengeance!”

Let us give the literal translation of the lines in which M. Olivier finds such an expression of sublime vengeance:

The first book in the Basque language was printed in the XVIth century, in the same year Rabelais published his Pantagruel, in which he makes Panurge ask in the Basque language for an erremedio against poverty, that he might escape the penalty of Adam which brought sweat to his brow—a question many are still asking in far more intelligible language.

The most ancient specimens of genuine Basque literature show what changes the language has undergone within four or five centuries, which is a proof against the authenticity of these Chants. M. Bladé, a French critic, says his butter-man readily translated every word of the Chant des Cantabres, so admired by the Baron von Humboldt. Fortunately, it is not needed to prove the valor of the Cantabrians when their country was invaded by the Romans, nor that of Altabisçar to show the part they took in Roncesvalles’ fearful fight.

THE ETERNAL YEARS.

CHAPTER I.
OUR IMPRESSIONS.

It is probable that most of us have been, at some time in our intellectual and spiritual life, conscious of a divergence between our mental impressions and our received belief respecting the nature and characteristics of the divine Being. Outside the closed-in boundaries of our faith there has been, as it were, a margin of waste land which we seldom explore, but the undefined, uncultivated products of which flit athwart our imagination with something like an uncomfortable misgiving. We do not go far into it, because we have our certain landmarks to stand by; and while the sun of faith shines bright on these, we can say to ourselves that we have nothing really to do with the sort of fog-land which surrounds our own happy enclosure. Our allotment is one of peace within the true fold of the church.

We know where we are; we know what we have got to do; and we refuse to be seriously troubled by the dubious questions which may possibly never disturb us, unless we deliberately turn to them.

To us, as Catholics, this is a safe resolve. We know the Church cannot err. We believe, and are ready, absolutely and unreservedly ready, to believe, all she puts before us as claiming our belief. And this is no childish superstition. It is no unmanly laying down of our inalienable right to know good from evil; it is no wilful deafness or deliberate closing of our eyes. It is the absolutely necessary and perfectly inevitable result of the one primary foundation of all our belief—namely, that the church is the organ of the Holy Ghost, the infallible utterance of an infallible voice, which voice is none other and no less than the voice of God, speaking through and by the divinely-instituted kingdom which comprises the church of God. With this once firmly fixed in our hearts and intellects, nothing, can disturb us. Even supposing something to be defined by the church for which we were unprepared—as was the case with some on the definition of the Infallibility of the Sovereign Pontiff—still these surprises, if surprises they be, can be no otherwise than sweet and welcome. To us there cannot be a jarring note in that voice which is the voice of the Holy Ghost. The trumpet cannot give a false sound. It is our fault—either intellectually our fault (which is rather a misfortune than a fault) or spiritually (which is from our negligence and lukewarmness)—if the blast of that trumpet painfully startle us from our slumbers. To all who are waking and watching the sound can only be cheering and encouraging. The good soldier is ever[657] ready to hear it and prompt to obey. The slumberer is among those to whom our Lord says: “You know how to discern the face of the sky, and can you not know the signs of the times?”[242]

He evidently expects us to know the signs of the times. The Lord is not in the strong wind, nor is he in the earthquake or the fire. He is in the gentle air.[243] But the wind and the earthquake and the fire are his precursors, and those who have experienced, and heard, and witnessed these warnings should be all attention for the softer sound which is the utterance of the divine Voice in the church.

There should be no surprise save the surprise of a great joy, the admiring astonishment of finding out how good our God is, and what marvellous treasures of things new and old our great mother, the church, lays before us from time to time, as the Spirit of God moves over the ocean of divine love, as it were incubating the creations of the world of grace. We lie down in our certainty as the infant lies down in its mother’s lap, and we rise on the wings of hope and faith as the lark rises in the morning light, without the shadow of a doubt that the lambient air will uphold the little fluttering wings with which it carries its joyous song to the gates of heaven. Underneath us are the “everlasting arms,”[244] and therefore we “dwell in safety and alone”—alone as regards those outside the church, who cannot understand our security, because they have never grasped the idea that, the voice of the church being the voice of the third Person of the ever-blessed Trinity to doubt the church is the same as to say that God is a liar.

If we have dwelt thus at length upon our certitude, and upon the intellectual and spiritual repose it gives us, we have done so for the purpose of making it absolutely impossible for our readers to suppose that when we speak of a divergence between some of our mental impressions and our received belief, we are in any degree insinuating that we have not got all we require in the absolute and definite teaching of the church; or that we have any cause to feel troubled about any question which the church has left as an open question, and respecting which any one of us individually may have been unable to arrive at a conclusion. All we mean is this: that there are certain feelings, impressions, and imaginings which we find it hard to silence and extinguish, difficult to classify in accordance with our substantial belief, and which hang about us like a sail on the mast of a vessel which the unwary crew have left flapping in a dangerous gale.

The points in question may be various as the minds that contemplate them. They may embrace a variety of subjects, and may assume different shapes and aspects, according to the external circumstances under which they present themselves, or to the color of our own thoughts and feelings at the moment they are before us. Their field is so vast and their possible variety so great that it would be vain for us to attempt to give even a glance at them all. Indeed, the doing so is beyond our capacity, and would be beyond the capacity of any one man. For who shall tell what is fermenting in the thoughts of one even of his fellow-beings?[658] He can merely guess blindly at the souls of others from having dwelt in the depths of his own, and knowing, as the one great fact, that all men are brothers.

We are far, therefore, from intending to take up all the possible questions not hedged in and limited and defined by dogmatic teaching, or to try and help others to come to a conclusion on each. We might as well attempt to count the sands of the sea-shore. All we are proposing to ourselves for our own consolation, and, if possible, for that of our readers, is to lay hold of certain facts which will give a clew to other less certain facts, and, in short—if we may be allowed to resort to a chemical term—to indicate certain solvents which will hold in solution the little pebbles that lie in our path, and which might grow into great stumbling-blocks had we not a strong dissolving power always at our command.

It is self-evident that there is one knowledge which contains all other knowledge, and that is the knowledge of God. As all things flow from him, therefore all things are in him; and if we could see or know him, we should know all the rest. That knowledge, that seeing, is the “light of glory.” Its perfection is only compatible with the Beatific Vision, which vision is impossible to mere man in his condition of viator, or pilgrim.[245] It is the conclusion of faith just as broad noon is the termination of darkness. But as faith is the leading up to the Beatific Vision, to the light of glory, and to the knowledge of all things, therefore in its degree is it the best substitute for sight—the dawning of a more perfect day, and the beginning of knowledge. Consequently, “faith is the evidence of things that appear not.” And as it is some of the things “that appear not” which are puzzling and bewildering many of us, let us lay hold of our faith and go whither it shall lead us.

We can in this life only know God mediately and obscurely by reason and faith. But as the direct and clear intuition of God in the Beatific Vision will include the knowledge of all else, so even our present imperfect knowledge of him comprises in a certain sense all other and lesser science, and is necessary to the highest knowledge of created things.

To do this thoroughly we will investigate the occasional divergence between our mental impressions, as we sometimes experience them, and our received belief of the Divine Nature and characteristics.

In a burst of holy exultation S. Paul asks, “Who hath known the mind of the Lord?”[246]—not as though regretting his ignorance, but rather with the feelings of one who, having suddenly come upon an evidently priceless treasure, exclaims, Who can tell what wealth now lies before us?

Yes, indeed! we know him well while we know him but imperfectly. There is more to know than we can guess at, but our hearts are too narrow to hold it. And yet sometimes how full to overflowing has that knowledge seemed! Have we not followed him from the cradle to the grave, in that sweet brotherhood[659] which he has established with each one of us? Have we not lost ourselves in far-reaching thoughts of how, and where he was when his brotherhood with us was not an accomplished fact, but only an ever-enduring divine intention co-equal with his own eternal existence—a phase of that very existence, for ever present to the Divine Idea, though not yet subjected to the conditions of time? We have thought of him as in the bosom of the Father in a way in which, wonderful to relate, he never can be again in the bosom of the Father. A something has passed in respect to the existence of God himself, and actually made a difference in the extrinsic relations of the divine Being.

There was an eternity in which the Son of God—he whom we most seem to know of the three Persons of the ever-blessed Trinity—dwelt in the bosom of the Father unconnected with his sacred humanity. There was an eternity when his name was not Jesus, when he was the Son of God only, and not the Son of man.

We are expressing what everybody knows who is a Christian—a platitude almost, and yet so full of wonder that, unless we have thoroughly gone into it and sifted it, we have not ransacked half the riches of what we can and may know of the “mind of the Lord.”

In truth, we are very apt to be repelled by this contemplation. There is something dreary to us in the eternity when the Brother of our race and the Spouse of our souls was only the everlasting Begotten of the Father, dwelling in that inscrutable eternity to which we, as the creatures of time, seem to have no link. Our thoughts and imaginations are shackled by the conditions of our own being. Yesterday we were not. And so all before yesterday seems like a blank to us. To-morrow we know will be—if not for us in this identical state, yet certainly for us in some other state. But that dim yesterday, which never began and of which no history can be written, no details given, only the great, grand, inarticulated statement made that the Qui Est, the “I am,” filled it—this appalls us. Can nothing be done to mitigate this stupendous though beautiful horror? Is there no corner into which our insignificance can creep, that so we may look out upon those unknown depths without feeling that we are plunging into a fathomless ocean, there to sink in blank darkness and inanition? Surely the God of the past (as from our point of view we reckon the past) should not be so appallingly unknown to us who have our beloved Jesus in the present, and who look forward to the Beatific Vision of the whole blessed Trinity with trembling hope in the future. But before we can in any degree overcome the stupor with which we think of the backward-flowing ages of eternity, we must endeavor more fully to realize the nature of time.

We are all apt to speak of time as a period; whereas it is more properly a state.

The generality of persons, in thinking of time in relation to eternity, represent to themselves a long, long ago, blind past, and then an interminable but partially appreciable future, and time lying as a sort of sliced-out period between the two, which slice is attached to the eternity behind and the eternity in front, and about which we have the comfort and satisfaction of being able to write history and chronicle[660] events, either on a large or a small scale. We treat it as we should do a mountain of gold, which we coin into money, and we conveniently cut it up into ages, years, months, days, and hours. It is our nature so to do, and we cannot do otherwise. It is the condition of our being. But as it will not be always the condition of our being, there are few things we are more constantly exhorted to than the attempt to raise our imagination, or rather our faith, as much as possible out of these conventional and arbitrary trammels, and dispose ourselves for that other state which is our ultimate end, and where there are no years and no days.

In point of fact, time is only an imperfection of our being—an absolutely necessary imperfection, because our being is finite, and our state is a probationary state; and probation implies not only that succession which is necessary in every finite being, but change and movement in respect to things which are permanent in a more perfect state. Our condition in time has not inaptly been compared to that of a man looking through the small aperture of a camera-obscura, which only permits him to behold a section of what is passing. The figures appear and vanish. But the window is thrown wide open in eternity, and he sees the whole at once. He is, therefore, under a disadvantage so long as he is in the camera-obscura, viewing the landscape through a small hole. And this is our position, judging of eternity through the aperture of time. Even now we have a wonderful power of adding to our time, or of shortening it, without any reference to clocks or sun-dials, and which, if we think about it, will help to show us that time is a plastic accident of our being.

When we have been very much absorbed, we have taken no note of time, and the hours have flown like minutes. During that interval we have, as it were, made our own time, and modified our condition with reference to time by our own act. Time, therefore, is plastic. Were we by some extraordinary and exceptional power to accomplish in one day all that actually we now take a year to effect, but at the same time intellectually to retain our present perception of the succession of events, our life would not really have been shorter for the want of those three hundred and sixty-four days which we had been able to do without. Life is shorter now than it was in the days of the patriarchs. But possibly the perception of life is not shortened. Nay, rather, from the rapidity with which events are now permitted to succeed each other, partially owing to the progress of science and to man’s increased dominion over material force, the probability is that our lives are not abstractedly much, if at all, more brief than Adam’s nine hundred and thirty years. All things now are hastening to the end. They have always been hastening. But there is the added impetus of the past; and that increases with every age in the world’s history.

Now, let us imagine life, or a portion of life, without thought—that is, without the act of thinking. Immediately we find that it is next door to no thing, to no time, and no life. We can only measure life with any accuracy by the amount of thought which has filled it—that is, by the quantity of our intellectual and spiritual power which we have been able to bring to the[661] small aperture in the camera-obscura, by which to contemplate the ever-flowing eternity which lies beyond, and cut it up into the sections we call time.

Another example will show us how plastic is the nature of time. Take the life of an animal. We are inclined to give the largest reasonable and possible importance to the brute creation. It is an open question, in which we see great seeds of future development, all tending to increased glory to the Creator and to further elucidation of creative love. Nevertheless, it is obvious that brutes perceive only or chiefly by moments. There is, as compared with ourselves, little or no sequence in their perceptions. There is no cumulative knowledge. They are without deliberate reflection, even where they are not without perception of relations and circumstances, past or future. Consequently, they are more rigorously subjects to time than ourselves. Therefore, when we deprive an animal of life, we deprive him of a remainder of time that is equal to little more than no time, in proportion to the degree in which his power of filling time with perception is less than our own.[247] All we have said tends to prove that the existence of time is a relative existence; it is the form or phase of our own finite being. It is an aspect of eternity—the aspect which is consistent with our present condition. For time is the measure of successive existence in created and finite beings. As finite spirits we cannot escape from this limit of successive existence, any more than a body can escape from the limit of locality and finite movement in grace. Eternal existence is the entire possession of life, which is illimitable, in such a perfect manner that all succession in duration is excluded. This is possible only in God himself, who is alone most pure and perfect act, and therefore is at once all he can be, without change or movement. But the created spirit must ever live by a perpetual movement of increase in its duration, because it is on every side finite. Time, therefore, will continue to exist while creatures continue to exist.

Having arrived at this conclusion we cannot refuse ourselves the satisfaction of pointing out one obvious deduction—namely, that if time has, in itself, only a relative existence, it is impossible it can ever put an end to the existence of anything else. It is inconceivable that the non est can absorb, exterminate, annihilate, or obliterate any one single thing that has ever had one second of real existence, of permitted being, of sentient, or even of insentient, life. God can annihilate, if he so will (and we do not think he will), but time cannot. Time can hide and put away. It can slip between us and the only reality, which is eternity; that is the condition of God, the Qui Est. Wait awhile, and time will have, as it were, spread or overflowed into eternity. It will hide nothing from our view. It will be “rent in two from the top to the bottom,” from the beginning to the end, like the veil of the Temple, which is its symbol. And then will appear all that it has hitherto seemed, but only seemed, to distinguish. We shall find it all in the inner recesses of eternity. What cause, in point of fact, have we for supposing that anything which is shall cease to[662] exist? Why, because we no longer behold certain objects, do we imagine them to be really lost for ever? Is this a reasonable supposition on the part of beings who are conscious that once they themselves were not, and yet believe that they always shall be? Why should the mere diversity in other existences make us apprehend that the missing is also the lost, and that we have any substantial cause for doubting that all which exists will go on existing? Do we anywhere see symptoms of annihilation? It is true we see endless mutations, but those very mutations are a guarantee to us of the continuousness of being. All material things change: but they only change. They do not ever in any case go out and cease to be. If this be true of merely material things, how absolutely true must it be of the immaterial; and how more than probable of that which is partly one and partly the other, of that far lower nature of the brutes, which have a principle of life in them inferior to ours and superior to the plants, and of which, since we do not believe their sensations to be the result of certain fortuitous atoms that have fashioned themselves blindly after an inexorable law, and independently of an intelligent Lawgiver, we may reasonably predicate that they too will have a future and, in its proper inferior order, an advanced existence. Everywhere there is growth—through the phases of time into the portals of eternity.

The idea in the eternal Mind, of all essences, the least as well as the greatest, was, like the Mind that held it, eternal—that is, exempt from all limit of succession. The past, present, and future are the progressive modes of existence and of our own perceptions rather than the properties of the essences themselves. Those essences had a place in the Eternal Idea; they occupy an actual place as an actual existence in the phases of time, and they go on in all probability—may we not say in all certainty?—in the endlessness of the Creator’s intention. Let no one misunderstand this as implying that matter was eternal in any other sense than its essence being an object of the idea of the eternal God, it was always clearly present to the eternal Mind. Its actuality, as we know it, dates from this creation of the crude, chaotic mass. But once formed, and then fashioned, and finally animated, we can have no pretence for supposing that any part of it will ever cease to be. Nor can we have any solid reason for supposing that what has once been endowed with sentient life will ever be condemned to fall back into the all but infinitely lower form of mere organic matter, any more than we have reason to suppose that at some future period organic matter will be reduced to inorganic matter, and that out of this beautiful creation it will please God to resolve chaos back again, either the whole or in any one the smallest part. We have nothing to do with the difficulties of the question. They are difficulties entirely of detail, and not of principle; and they concern us no more than it concerns us to be able to state how many animalcula it took to heave up the vast sierras of the western hemisphere. The details may well puzzle us, and we cannot venture on the merest suggestion. But the principle is full of hope, joy, and security, which in itself is a presumption in its favor. If we would but believe how God values the work of his own hands;[663] if we would but try to realize how intense is creative love, what much larger and deeper views we should have of the future of all creation, and of the glory that is prepared for us! Even the old heathen religions began by taking larger and more accurate measure of these questions (though they necessarily ended in error) than too many of us do with all the light of the Gospel thrown upon them. The animism of the heathens, which makes no distinction between animate and inanimate existence, but lends a soul to each alike, had in it a sort of loving and hopeful reverence for creation which is often wanting to us who alone truly know the Creator. In their blind groping after faith it led them to fetichism, and further on, as a fuller development of the same notion, to pantheism, and then to the ever-renewed and quite endless incarnations of Buddha. But these errors took their rise originally from a respectful and tender love of that beautiful though awful nature which man found lying all around him; external to himself, yet linked to himself, and beneath the folds of which he hoped to find the hidden deity.

If these reflections have at all enabled us to understand the nature of time, and to shake off some of the unreasonable importance we lend to it in our imaginations—making of it a sort of lesser rival to eternity, fashioning it into an actual, existing thing, as if it were an attribute of God himself, instead of being, what it is, a state or phase imposed upon us, and not in any way affecting him—we shall have done much to facilitate the considerations we wish to enlarge upon. Eternity is “perpetually instantaneous.” It is the nunc stans of theology. Time, on the contrary, is the past, present, and future of our human condition—the nunc fluens of theology.

With this truth well rooted in our minds, we will now turn to the investigation of some of those impressions to which we referred at the beginning of this section, and endeavor to throw light upon them from out of the additional knowledge we acquire of the nature and characteristics of the divine Being through the simple process of clearing away some of our false impressions with respect to time. We had in our modes of thought more or less hemmed in the Eternal, with our human sense of time, and subjected even him to the narrowing process of a past, present, and future. Now we are about to think of ourselves only in that position, and to contemplate him in eternity, dealing with us through the medium of time, but distinctly with a reference to eternity, and only apparently imposing on himself the conditions of time in order to bring himself, as it were, on a level with us in his dealings with us.

Strange as it may appear, out of the depths of our stupidity we have fabricated a difficulty to ourselves in his very condescensions, and, looking back from our present to the past, we find ourselves puzzled at certain divers revelations of God made to mankind in gone-by times; just as, in the weakness of our faith, we are sometimes troubled with doubts about our own condition, and that of those about us, in that future which must come, and which may not be far off to any one of us.

The God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob—is he really quite the same as our own God? our God of the womb of Mary, of the manger, of the wayside places in Palestine,[664] and Mount Calvary, and now, of the silken-curtained Tabernacle, and the Blessed Eucharist, and the dear, ineffable moments of silent prayer—is he the same?

Of course we know that, literally and absolutely, he is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Nevertheless, he appears to us under such different aspects that we find ourselves unintentionally contemplating the Old Testament as a revelation of the divine Being with very different emotions from those with which we contemplate him in the New Testament, and this, again, differing widely from our view of him in the church. It may be a mere matter of feeling, perhaps; but it is nevertheless a feeling which materially influences our form of devotion, the vigor of our faith, and the power of our hope and love.

If we could take in all these different impressions and amalgamate them; if we could group them together, or make them like the several rays of light directed into one focus, we should obtain a more complete and a more influential knowledge of God than we can do while we seem rather to be wandering out of one view of him into another, as if we walked from chamber to chamber and closed each door behind us.

Now, the only way we can arrive at this is by bearing in mind that the acts of God in governing the world are not momentary and solitary facts, but continuous acts, or rather one continuous act.

Our difficulty lies in producing a visibly satisfactory harmony in our own minds as regards the acts of God, and thus (though for our own appreciation of them, they are to us broken up into fragments, or, in other terms, into separate facts) arriving at the same mental attitude towards them as though we saw them as one continuous act.

Its very continuity, its perpetual instantaneousness, must essentially affect its character and make the definition no complex matter. It is an act of love, and it is revealed as such in the whole creation, and in the way God has let himself down to us and is drawing us up unto himself. There have been many apparent modifications, but there have been no actual contradictions, in this characteristic; for even the existence of evil works round to greater good, to a degree sufficiently obvious to us for us to know that where it is less obvious it must nevertheless follow the same law. For law is everywhere; because God is law, though law is not God.

Modern unbelief substitutes law for God, and then thinks it has done away with him. To us who believe it makes no difference how far back in the long continuous line of active forces we may find the original and divine Author of all force. It is nothing but the weakness of our imagination which makes it more difficult to count by millions than by units.

What does it matter to our faith through how many developments the condition of creation, as we now see it all around us, may have passed, when we know that the first idea sprang from the great Source of all law, and that with him the present state is as much one continuous act as the past state and the future state? You may trace back the whole material universe, if you will, to the one first molecule of chaotic matter; but so long as I find that first molecule in the hand of my Creator (and I[665] defy you to put it anywhere else), it is enough for my faith.

You do not make him one whit the less my Creator and my God because an initial law or force, with which he then stamped it, has worked it out to what I now see it. You may increase the apparent distance between the world as it is actually and the divine Fount from whence it sprang; you may seem to remove the creative love which called the universe into existence further off, by thus lengthening the chain of what you call developments; but, after all, these developments are for ever bridged over by the ulterior intentions of the Triune Deity when he said,“Let us make man in our image,” and by the fact that space and time are mere accidents as viewed in relation to the Qui Est. They are, so to speak, divinely-constituted conventionalities, through which the Divinity touches upon our human condition, but which in no way affect the Divine Essence as it is in itself. On the contrary, in the broken-up developments and evolutions which you believe you trace, and which you want to make into a blind law which shall supersede a divine Creator, I see only the pulsations of time breaking up the perpetually instantaneous act of God, just as I see the pulsations of light in the one unbroken ray. The act of God passes through the medium of time before it reaches our ken; and the ray of light passes through the medium of air before it strikes our senses; but both are continuous and instantaneous.

If we have in any degree succeeded in establishing this to our satisfaction, it will become easier for us to estimate the acts of God as they come to us through the pulsations of Time; because we shall be able to bear in mind that they must be in a measure interpreted to us by the time through which they reach us. They were modified by the time in which they were revealed, much as the ray is modified by the substance through which it forces its way to us.

Now, we arrive at the causes of the different impressions we receive of the nature and characteristics of the divine Being. They are a consequence of the different epochs in which we contemplate him. They are the pulsations appropriate to that epoch. Other pulsations belong to our portion of time, and to our consequent view of the divine Being; and so on and on, till time shall be swallowed up in Eternity, and the Beatific Vision burst upon us.

MISSIONS IN MAINE FROM 1613 TO 1854.

To the historical student the following paper can have but trifling value, as the writer makes no pretension to originality of matter, and seeks but to bring within the grasp of the general reader, in a condensed form, the gist of many books, a large number of which are rare, and almost inaccessible.

It is hoped, however, that there are many persons who will read with interest a paper thus compiled from undoubted authorities, who have neither the time nor the inclination to consult these authorities for themselves. These persons will learn with wonder of the self-abnegation of the French priests who went forth among the savages with their lives in their hands, with but one thought in their brains, one wish in their hearts, one prayer on their lips—the evangelization of the Indians.

As Shea says: “The word Christianity was, in those days, identical with Catholicity. The religion to be offered to the New World was that of the Church of Rome, which church was free from any distinct national feeling, and in extending her boundaries carried her own language and rites, not those of any particular state.”

The Franciscan, Dominican, and Jesuit bore the heat and burden of the day, and reaped the most bountiful harvest in that part of North America now known as the State of Maine; and the first mission in that neighborhood was planted at Mt. Desert, and called St. Sauveur. A hotel at Bar Harbor is so named, but not one in a hundred of the numerous guests who cross its threshold knows the reason of the French name of their temporary abiding-place.

This reason, and the facts connected therewith, we shall now proceed to give to our readers. In 1610 Marie de Médicis was Regent of France. The king had been assassinated in the streets of Paris in the previous month of May. Sully was dismissed from court. All was confusion and dissension. Twelve years of peace and the judicious rule of the king had paid the national debt and filled the treasury.

The famous Father Cotton, confessor of the late king, was still powerful at court. He laid before the queen the facts that Henri IV. had been deeply interested in the establishment of the Jesuit order in Acadia, and had evinced a tangible proof of that interest in the bestowal of a grant of two thousand livres per annum.

The ambitious queen listened indulgently, with a heart softened, possibly, by recent sorrows, and consented to receive the son of the Baron Poutrincourt, who had just returned from the New World, where he had left his father with Champlain. Father Cotton ushered the handsome stripling into the presence of the stately queen and her attendant ladies. Young Biencourt at first stood silent and abashed, but, as the ladies gathered about[667] him and plied him with questions, soon forgot himself and told wondrous tales of the dusky savages—of their strange customs and of their eagerness for instruction in the true faith. He displayed the baptismal register of the converts of Father Fléche, and implored the sympathy and aid of these glittering dames, and not in vain; for, fired with pious emulation, they tore the flashing jewels from their ears and throats. Among these ladies was one whose history and influence were so remarkable that we must translate for our readers some account of her from the Abbé de Choisy.

Antoinette de Pons, Marquise de Guercheville had been famed throughout France, not only for her grace and beauty, but for qualities more rare at the court where her youth had been passed.

When Antoinette was La Duchesse de Rochefoucauld, the king begged her to accept a position near the queen. “Madame,” he said, as he presented her to Marie de Médicis, “I give you a Lady of Honor who is a lady of honor indeed.”

Twenty years had come and gone. The youthful beauty of the marquise had faded, but she was fair and stately still, and one of the most brilliant ornaments of the brilliant court; and yet she was not altogether worldly. Again a widow and without children, she had become sincerely religious, and threw herself heart and soul into the American missions, and was restrained only by the positive commands of her mistress the queen from herself seeking the New World.

Day and night she thought of these perishing souls. On her knees in her oratory she prayed for the Indians, and contented herself not with this alone. From the queen and from the ladies of the court she obtained money, and jewels that could be converted into money. Charlevoix tells us that the only difficulty was to restrain her ardor within reasonable bounds.

Two French priests, Paul Biard and Enémond Massé, were sent to Dieppe, there to take passage for the colonies. The vessel was engaged by Poutrincourt and his associates, and was partially owned by two Huguenot merchants, who persistently and with indignation refused to permit the embarkation of the priests. No entreaties or representations availed, and finally La Marquise bought out the interest of the two merchants in the vessel and cargo, and transferred it to the priests as a fund for their support.

At last the fathers set sail, on the 26th of January, 1611. Their troubles, however, were by no means over; for Biencourt, a mere lad, clothed in a little brief authority—manly, it is true, beyond his years—hampered them at every turn. They arrived at Port Royal in June, after a hazardous and tempestuous voyage, having seen, as Father Biard writes, icebergs taller and larger than the Church of Notre Dame. The fathers became discouraged by the constant interference of young Biencourt, and determined to return to Europe, unless they could, with Mme. de Guercheville’s aid, found a mission colony in some other spot.

Their zealous protectress obtained from De Monts—who, though a Protestant, had erected six years before the first cross in Maine at the mouth of the Kennebec—a transfer of all his claims to the lands of Acadia, and soon sent out a small[668] vessel with forty colonists, commanded by La Saussaye, a nobleman, and having on board two Jesuit priests, Fathers du Thet and Quentin.

It was on the 1st of March, 1613, that this vessel left Honfleur, laden with supplies, and followed by prayers and benedictions.

On the 16th of May La Saussaye reached Port Royal, and there took on board Fathers Massé and Biard, and then set sail for the Penobscot. A heavy fog arose and encompassed them about; if it lifted for a moment, it was but to show them a white gleam of distant breakers or a dark, overhanging cliff.

“Our prayers were heard,” wrote Biard, “and at night the stars came out, and the morning sun devoured the fogs, and we found ourselves lying in Frenchmans Bay opposite Mt. Desert.”

L’Isle des Monts Déserts had been visited and so named by Champlain in 1604, and Frenchman’s Bay gained its title from a singular incident that had there taken place in the same spring.

De Monts had broken up his winter encampment at St. Croix. Among his company was a young French ecclesiastic, Nicholas d’Aubri, who, to gratify his curiosity in regard to the products of the soil in this new and strange country, insisted on being set ashore for a ramble of a few hours. He lost his way, and the boatmen, after an anxious search, were compelled to leave him. For eighteen days the young student wandered through woods, subsisting on berries and the roots of the plant known as Solomon’s Seal. He, however, kept carefully near the shore, and at the end of this time he distinguished a sail in the distance. Signalling this, he was fortunate enough to be taken off by the same crew that had landed him. On these bleak shores the colonists decided to make their future home, and, with singular infelicity, selected them as the site of the new colony. It is inconceivable how Father Biard, who had already spent some time in the New World, could have failed to suggest to La Saussaye and to their patroness that a colony, to be a success, must be not only in a spot easily accessible to France, but that a small force of armed men was imperative; for, to Biard’s own knowledge, the English had already seized several French vessels in that vicinity.

On these frowning shores La Saussaye landed, and erected a cross, and displayed the escutcheon of Mme. de Guercheville; the fathers offered the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and gave to the little settlement the name of St. Sauveur.

Four tents—the gift of the queen—shone white in the soft spring sunshine. The largest of these was used as a chapel, the decorations of which, with the silver vessels for the celebration of the Mass and the rich vestments, were presented by Henriette d’Entraigues, Marquise de Verneuil.

The colonists labored night and day to raise their little fort and to land their supplies. Their toil was nearly over, the vessel, ready for sea, rode at anchor, when a sudden and violent storm arose.

This storm had been felt twenty-four hours earlier off the Isles of Shoals by a fishing vessel commanded by one Samuel Argall. Thick fogs bewildered him, and a strong wind drove him to the northeast; and when the weather cleared, Argall found himself off the coast of Maine. Canoes came out like[669] flocks of birds from each small bay. The Indians climbed the ship’s side, and greeted the new-comers with such amazing bows and flourishes that Argall, with his native acuteness, felt certain that they could have learned them only from the French, who could not be far away. Argall plied the Indians with cunning questions, and soon learned of the new settlement. He resolved to investigate farther, and set sail for the wild heights of Mt. Desert. With infinite patience he crept along through the many islands, and, rounding the Porcupines, saw a small ship anchored in the bay. At the same moment the French saw the English ship bearing down upon them “swifter than an arrow,” writes Father Biard, “with every sail set, and the English flags streaming from mast-head and stern.”

La Saussaye was within the fort, Lieut. la Motte on board with Father du Thet, an ensign, and a sergeant. Argall bore down amid a bewildering din of drums and trumpets. “Fire!” cried La Motte. Alas! the gunner was on shore. Father du Thet seized and applied the match.

Another scathing discharge of musketry, and the brave priest lay dead. He had his wish; for the day before he left France he prayed with uplifted hands that he might not return, but perish on that holy enterprise. He was buried the following day at the foot of the rough cross he had helped to erect.

La Motte, clear-sighted enough to see the utter uselessness of any farther attempt at defence, surrendered, and Argall took possession of the vessel and of La Saussaye’s papers, from among which he abstracted the royal commission. On La Saussaye’s return from the woods, where he had retreated with the colonists, he was met by Argall, who informed him that the country belonged to his master, King James, and finally asked to see his commission. In vain did the French nobleman search for it. Argall’s courtesy changed to wrath; he accused the officer of piracy, and ordered the settlement to be given up to pillage, but offered to take any of the settlers who had a trade back to Virginia with him, promising them protection. Argall counted, however, without his host; for on reaching Jamestown the governor swore that the French priests should be hung. Useless were Argall’s remonstrances, and finally, seeing no other way to save the lives of the fathers, he produced the commission and acknowledged his stratagem.

The wrath of Sir Thomas Dale was unappeased, but the lives of the priests were, of course, safe. He despatched Argall with two additional ships back to Mt. Desert, with orders to cut down the cross and level the defences.

Father Biard was on board, as well as Father Massé; they, with refined cruelty, being sent to witness the destruction of their hopes.

This work of destruction completed, Argall set sail for Virginia. Again a storm arose, and the vessel on which were the ecclesiastics was driven to the Azores. Here the Jesuits, who had been so grossly ill-treated, had but a few words to say to be avenged. The captain of the vessel was not without uneasiness, and entreated the priests to remain in concealment when the vessel was visited by the authorities. This visit over, the English purchased all they needed, and weighed anchor for England. Arrived there, a new difficulty occurred;[670] for there was no commission to show. The captain was treated as a pirate, thrown into prison, and released only on the testimony of the Jesuit Fathers, who thus returned good for evil.

Father Biard hastened to France, where he became professor of theology at Lyons, and died at Avignon on the 17th of November, 1622. Father Massé returned to Canada, where he labored without ceasing until his death, in 1646.

With the destruction of St. Sauveur, the pious designs of Mme. de Guercheville seem to have perished. At any rate, the most diligent research fails to find her name again in the annals of that time. Probably the troubled state of France made it impossible for her to provide the sinews of war, or of evangelization. Nevertheless, the good seed was planted, and zeal for the mission cause again revived in Europe, particularly in the Society of Jesus. Young men left court and camp to share the privations and life of self-denial of the missionaries. Even the convents partook of the general enthusiasm, and Ursuline Nuns came to show the Indians Christianity in daily life, ministering to the sick and instructing the young.

Many years after the melancholy failure of the mission at Mt. Desert, an apparent accident recalled the Jesuit Fathers to the coast of Maine.

In 1642 there was a mission at Sillery, on the St. Lawrence, where had been gathered together a large number of Indian converts, who lived, with their families about them, in peace and harmony under the watchful care of the kind fathers. Among these converts was a chief who, to rescue some of his tribe who had been taken prisoners, started off through the pathless wilderness, and finally reached the English at Coussinoe, now known as Augusta, on the Kennebec.

There the Indian convert so extolled the Christian faith and its mighty promises that he took back with him several of the tribe. These were baptized at Sillery, and became faithful servants of our Lord Jesus Christ. In consequence of the entreaties of these converts, Father Gabriel Drouillettes was sent to the lonely Kennebec.

Here he built a chapel of fir-trees in a place now known as Norridgewock, a lovely, secluded spot. Some years before Father Biard had been there for a few weeks, so that the Indians were not totally unprepared to receive religious instruction. Father Drouillettes was greatly blessed in his teaching, and converted a large number, inspiring them with a profound love for the Catholic faith, which the English, twenty years before, had failed to do for the Protestant religion. He taught them simple prayers, and translated for their use, into their own dialect, several hymns. The savages even learned to sing, and it was not long before the solemn strains of the Dies Iræ awakened strange echoes in the primeval forests.

Even the English, biassed as they were against the Catholics, watched the good accomplished by the faithful servant of the great Master, and learned to regard his coming as a great blessing, though at this very time the stern Puritans at Plymouth were enacting cruel laws against his order.

When the Indians went to Moosehead Lake to hunt and fish, Father Drouillettes went with them, watching over his flock with unswerving[671] solicitude. But the day of his summons to Quebec came, and a general feeling of despair overwhelmed his converts. He went, and the Assumption Mission was deserted; for by that name, as it was asked for on that day, was this mission always designated.

Year after year the Abnakis—for so were called the aborigines of Maine—sent deputations to Quebec to entreat the return of their beloved priest, but in vain; for the number of missionaries was at that time very limited. Finally, in 1650, Father Drouillettes set out with a party on the last day of August for the tiresome eight days’ march through the wilderness; the party lost their way, their provisions were gone, and it was not until twenty-four days afterwards that they reached Norridgewock.

From a letter written at this time by Father Drouillettes we transcribe the following: “In spite of all that is painful and crucifying to nature in these missions, there are also great joys and consolations. More plenteous than I can describe are those I feel, to see that the seed of the Gospel I scattered here four years ago, in land which for so many centuries has lain fallow, or produced only thorns and brambles, already bears fruit so worthy of the Lord.” Nothing could exceed the veneration and affection of the Indians for their missionary; and when an Englishman vehemently accused the French priest of slandering his nation, the chiefs hurried to Augusta, and warned the authorities to take heed and not attack their father even in words.

The following spring Father Drouillettes was sent to a far-distant station, and years elapsed before he returned to Quebec, where he died in 1681, at the age of eighty-eight.

About this time two brothers, Vincent and Jacques Bigot, men of rank and fortune, left their homes in sunny France to share the toil and privations of life in the New World. They placed themselves and their fortunes in the hands of the superior at Quebec, and were sent to labor in the footprints of Father Drouillettes. During their faithful ministrations at Norridgewock, the chapel built by their predecessor was burned by the English, but was rebuilt in 1687 by English workmen sent from Boston, according to treaty stipulations. And now appears upon the scene the stately form of one of the greatest men of that age; but before we attempt to bring before our readers the character and acts of Sebastian Râle, we must beg them to turn from Norridgewock, the scene of his labors and martyrdom, to the little village of Castine. For in 1688 Father Thury, a priest of the diocese of Quebec, a man of tact and ability, had gathered about him a band of converts at Panawauski, on the Penobscot. This settlement was protected by the Baron Saint-Castine. This Saint-Castine was a French nobleman and a soldier who originally went to Canada in command of a regiment. The regiment was disbanded, and Saint-Castine’s disappointed ambition and a heart sore from domestic trials decided him, rather than return to France, to plunge into the wilderness, and there, far from kindred and nation, create for himself a new home.

After a while the baron married a daughter of one of the sachems of the Penobscot Indians, and became himself a sagamore of the tribe. The descendants of this marriage hold at the present day some portion of the Saint-Castine lands in Normandy.

Twice was the French baron driven from his home by the Dutch; twice was the simple chapel burned by them. In 1687 Sir Edmund Andros was appointed governor of New England, and in the following year, sailing eastward in the frigate Rose, he anchored opposite the little fort and primitive home of Saint-Castine. The baron retreated with the small band of settlers to the woods. Andros, being a Catholic, touched nothing in the chapel, but carried off everything else in the village. In 1703 the war known as Queen Anne’s war broke out. Again Saint-Castine was attacked by the English, and his wife and children carried off as prisoners, but were soon after exchanged. From this time the name of Baron Saint-Castine appears in all the annals of the time, as the courageous defender of his faith and of its priests. Father Râle, at Norridgewock, turned to him for counsel and aid, and never turned in vain. From Castine on to Mt. Desert the shores are full of historical interest; for there were many French settlements thereabouts, the attention of that nation having been drawn to that especial locality by a grant of land which M. Cardillac obtained of Louis XIV. in April, 1691. This grant was evidently made to confirm possession. A certain Mme. de Grégoire proved herself to be a lineal descendant of Cardillac, and in 1787 acquired a partial confirmation of the original grant.

Relics of the French settlers are constantly turned up by the plough in the vicinity of Castine, and in 1840 a quantity of French gold pieces were found; but of infinitely more interest was the discovery there, in 1863, of a copper plate ten inches in length and eight in width. The finder, knowing nothing of the value of this piece of metal, cut off a portion to repair his boat. This fragment was, however, subsequently recovered. The letters on the plate are unquestionably abbreviations of the following inscription: “1648, 8 Junii, S. Frater Leo Parisiensis, in Capuccinorum Missione, posuit hoc fundamentum in honorem nostræ Dominæ Sanctæ Spei”—1648, 8th of June, Holy Friar Leo of Paris, Capuchin missionary, laid this foundation in honor of Our Lady of Holy Hope.

In regard to this Father Leo the most diligent research fails to find any other trace. The plate, however, was without doubt placed in the foundation of a Catholic chapel—probably the one within the walls of the old French fort. Father Sebastian Râle sailed in 1689 for America. After remaining for nearly two years in Quebec, he went thence to Norridgewock. He found the Abnakis nearly all converted, and at once applied himself to learning their dialect. To this work he brought his marvellous patience and energy, and all his wondrous insight into human nature. He began his dictionary, and erected a chapel on the spot known now as Indian Old Point. This chapel he supplied with all the decorations calculated to engage the imagination and fix the wandering attention of the untutored savage. The women contended with holy emulation in the embellishment of the sanctuary. They made mats of the soft and brightly-tinted plumage of the forest birds and of the white-breasted sea-gulls. They brought offerings of huge candles, manufactured from the fragrant wax of the bay-berry, with which the chapel was illuminated. A couple of nuns from Montreal made a brief sojourn[673] at Norridgewock, that they might teach the Indian women to sew and to make a kind of lace with which to adorn the altar. Busied with his dictionary and with his flock, Father Râle thus passed the most peaceful days of his life; but this blessed quiet ended only too soon.

In 1705 a party of English, under the command of a Capt. Hilton, burst from out the forest, attacking the little village from all sides at once, finishing by burning the chapel and every hut.

About the same time the governor-general of New England sent to the lower part of the Kennebec the ablest of the Boston divines to instruct the Indian children. As Baxter’s (the missionary) salary depended on his success, he neglected no means that could attract.

For two months he labored in vain. His caresses and little gifts were thrown away; for he made not one convert.

Father Râle wrote to Baxter that his neophytes were good Christians, but far from able in disputes.

This same letter, which was of some length, challenged the Protestant clergyman to a discussion. Baxter, after a long delay, sent a brief reply, in Latin so bad that the learned priest says it was impossible to understand it.

In 1717 the Indian chiefs held a council. The governor of New England offered them an English and an Indian Bible, and Mr. Baxter as their expounder.

The Abnakis refused them one and all, and elected to adhere to their Catholic faith, saying: “All people love their own priests! Your Bibles we do not care for, and God has already sent us teachers.”

Thus years passed on in monotonous labor. The only relaxation permitted to himself by Father Râle was the work on his dictionary. The converts venerated their priest; their keen eyes and quick instincts saw the sincerity of his life, the reality of his affection for them, and recognized his self-denial and generosity. They went to him with their cares and their sorrows, with their simple griefs and simpler pleasures. He listened with unaffected sympathy and interest. No envious rival, no jealous competitor, no heretical teacher, disturbed the relations between pastor and flock. So, too, was it but natural that they should look to him for advice when they gathered about their council-fires.

The wrongs which the Eastern Indians were constantly enduring at the hands of the English settlers kindled to a living flame the smouldering hatred in their hearts, which they sought every opportunity of wreaking in vengeance on their foe. Thus, like lightning on the edge of the horizon, they hovered on the frontier, making daring forays on the farms of the settlers.

It was not unnatural that the English, bristling with prejudices against the French, and still more against Catholics, should have seen fit to look on Father Râle as the instigator of all these attacks, forgetting—what is undeniably true—that Father Râle’s converts were milder and kinder and more Christian-like than any of their Indian neighbors. The good father was full of concern when he heard that a fierce and warlike tribe, who had steadily resisted all elevating influences, were about settling within a day’s journey of Norridgewock. He feared lest his children should be led away by pernicious examples; so he with difficulty persuaded some of the strangers to enter the chapel, and to be present at[674] some of the imposing ceremonies of the mother church. At the close of the service he addressed them in simple words, and thus concluded:

“Let us not separate, that some may go one way and some another. Let us all go to heaven. It is our country, and the place to which we are invited by the sole Master of life, of whom I am but the interpreter.” The reply of the Indians was evasive; but it was evident that an impression was made, and in the autumn they sent to him to say that if he would come to them they would receive his teachings.

Father Râle gladly went at this bidding, erected a cross and a chapel, and finally baptized nearly the whole tribe.

At this time Father Râle wrote to his nephew a letter, in which he says: “My new church is neat, and its elegantly-ornamented vestments, chasubles, copes, and holy vessels would be esteemed highly appropriate in almost any church in Europe. A choir of young Indians, forty in number, assist at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and chant the divine Offices for the consecration of the Holy Sacrament; and you would be edified by the beautiful order they preserve and the devotion they manifest. After the Mass I teach the young children, and the remainder of the morning is devoted to seeing those who come to consult me on affairs of importance. Thus, you see, I teach some, console others, seek to re-establish peace in families at variance, and to calm troubled consciences.”

Another letter still later, in speaking of the attachment of the converts to their faith, says: “And when they go to the sea-shore in summer to fish, I accompany them; and when they reach the place where they intend to pass the night, they erect stakes at intervals in the form of a chapel, and spread a tent made of ticking. All is complete in fifteen minutes. I always carry with me a beautiful board of cedar, with the necessary supports. This serves for an altar, and I ornament the interior with silken hangings. A huge bear-skin serves as a carpet, and divine service is held within an hour.”

While away on one of the excursions which Father Râle thus describes, the village was attacked by the English; and again, in 1722, by a party of two hundred under Col. Westbrook. New England had passed a law imposing imprisonment for life on Catholic priests, and a reward was offered for the head of Father Râle. The party was seen, as they entered the valley of the Kennebec, by two braves, who hurried on to give the alarm; the priest having barely time to escape to the woods with the altar vessels and vestments, leaving behind him all his papers and his precious Abnaki dictionary, which was enclosed in a strong box of peculiar construction. It had two rude pictures on the lid, one of the scourging of our Blessed Lord, and the other of the Crowning of Thorns. This box is now in the possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society, while the dictionary itself is at Harvard.

Father Râle saved himself by taking refuge in a hollow tree, where he remained for thirty-six hours, suffering from hunger and a broken leg.

With wonderful courage Father Râle built up another chapel, and writes thus, after recounting the efforts of the English to take him prisoner: “In the words of the apostle, I conclude: I do not fear[675] the threats of those who hate me without a cause, and I count not my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course and the ministry which I have received of the Lord Jesus.”

Again, over the council-fires, the Indian chiefs assembled. They decided to send an embassy to Boston, to demand that their chapel, which had been destroyed by the English, should be rebuilt.

The governor, anxious to secure the alliance of the tribe, listened patiently, and told them in reply that it belonged properly to the governor of Canada to rebuild their church; still, that he would do it, provided they would agree to receive the clergy he would choose, and would send back to Quebec the French priest who was then with them. We cannot forbear repeating here the unequalled satire of the Indian’s reply:

“When you came here,” answered the chief, “we were unknown to the French governor, but no one of you spoke of prayer or of the Great Spirit. You thought only of my skins and furs. But one day I met a French black-coat in the forest. He did not look at the skins with which I was loaded, but he said words to me of the Great Spirit, of Paradise and of hell, and of prayer, by which is the only path to heaven.

“If, when you saw me, you had spoken to me of prayer, I should have had the misfortune to pray as you do; for I was not then able to know if your prayers were good. So, I tell you, I will hold fast to the prayers of the French. I will keep them until the earth burn up and perish.”

At last the final and fatal effort on the life of Father Râle was made, in 1724.

All was quiet in the little village. The tall corn lay yellow in the slanting rays of an August sun, when suddenly from the adjacent woods burst forth a band of English with their Mohawk allies. The devoted priest, knowing that they were in hot pursuit of him, sallied forth to meet them, hoping, by the sacrifice of his own life, to save his flock. Hardly had he reached the mission cross in the centre of the village than he fell at its foot, pierced by a dozen bullets. Seven Indians, who had sought to shield him with their bodies, lay dead beside him.

Then followed a scene that beggars description. Women and children were killed indiscriminately; and it ill became those who shot women as they swam across the river to bring a charge of cruelty against the French fathers.

The chapel was robbed and then fired; the bell was not melted, but was probably afterward buried by the Indians, for it was revealed only a few years since by the blowing down of a huge oak-tree, and was presented to Bowdoin College.

The soft, dewy night closed on the scene of devastation, and in the morning, as one by one the survivors crept back to their ruined homes with their hearts full of consternation and sorrow, they found the body of their beloved priest, not only pierced by a hundred balls, but with the skull crushed by hatchets, arms and legs broken, and mouth and eyes filled with dirt. They buried him where the day before had stood the altar of the little chapel, and sent his tattered habits to Quebec.

It was by so precious a death[676] that this apostolical man closed a career of nearly forty years of painful missionary toil. His fasts and vigils had greatly enfeebled his constitution, and, when entreated to take precautions for his safety, he answered: “My measures are taken. God has committed this flock to my charge, and I will share their fate, being too happy if permitted to sacrifice myself for them.”

Well did his superior in Canada, M. de Bellemont, reply, when requested to offer Masses for his soul: “In the words of S. Augustine, I say it would be wronging a martyr to pray for him.”

There can be no question that Sebastian Râle was one of the most remarkable men of his day. A devoted Christian and finished scholar, commanding in manners and elegant in address, of persuasive eloquence and great administrative ability, he courted death and starvation, for the sole end of salvation for the Indian.

From the death of Father Râle until 1730 the mission at Norridgewock was without a priest. In that year, however, the superior at Quebec sent Father James de Sirenne to that station. The account given by this father, of the warmth with which he was received, and of the manner in which the Indians had sought to keep their faith, is very touching. The women with tears and sobs hastened with their unbaptized babes to the priest.

In all these years no Protestant clergyman had visited them, for Eliot was almost the only one who devoted himself to the conversion of the Indians, though even he, as affirmed by Bancroft, had never approached the Indian tribe that dwelt within six miles of Boston Harbor until five years after the cross had been borne, by the religious zeal of the French, from Lake Superior to the valley of the Mississippi.

But Father Sirenne could not be permitted to remain any length of time with the Abnakis. Again were they deserted, having a priest with them only at long intervals.

Then came the peace of 1763, in which France surrendered Canada. This step struck a most terrible blow at the missions; for although the English government guaranteed to the Canadians absolute religious freedom, they yet took quiet steps to rid themselves of the Jesuit Fathers.

A short breathing space, and another war swept over the land, and with this perished the last mission in Maine. In 1775 deputies from the various tribes in Maine and Nova Scotia met the Massachusetts council. The Indians announced their intention of adhering to the Americans, but begged, at the same time, for a French priest. The council expressed their regret at not being able to find one.

“Strange indeed was it,” says Shea, “that the very body which, less than a century before, had made it felony for a Catholic priest to visit the Abnakis, now regretted their inability to send these Christian Indians a missionary of the same faith and nation.”

Years after, when peace was declared, and the few Catholics in Maryland had chosen the Rev. John Carroll—a member of the proscribed Society of Jesus—as bishop, the Abnakis of Maine sent a deputation bearing the crucifix of Father Râle. This they presented to the bishop, with earnest supplications for a priest.

Bishop Carroll promised that one should be sent, and Father Ciquard[677] was speedily despatched to Norridgewock, where he remained for ten years. Then ensued another interval during which the flock was without a shepherd.

At last a missionary priest at Boston, Father (afterward Cardinal) Cheverus, turned his attention to the study of the Abnaki dialect, and then visited the Penobscot tribe.

Desolate, poor, and forsaken as they had been, the Indians still clung to their faith. The old taught the young, and all gathered on Sundays to chant the music of the Mass and Vespers, though their altar had no priest and no sacrifice.

Father Cheverus, after a few months, was succeeded by Father Romagné, who for twenty years consecrated every moment and every thought to the evangelization of the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes. In July, 1827, Bishop Fenwick visited this portion of his diocese, and in 1831 sent them a resident missionary. A beautiful church stood at last in the place of Romagné’s hut, and two years later Bishop Fenwick, once a father in the Society of Jesus, erected a monument to Father Râle on the spot where he was slain a hundred and nine years before. From far and near gathered the crowd, Protestant as well as Catholic, to witness the ceremony. The monument stands in a green, secluded spot, a simple shaft of granite surmounted by a cross, and an inscription in Latin tells the traveller that there died a faithful priest and servant of the Lord. Bishop Fenwick became extremely anxious to induce some French priest to go to that ancient mission, and a year later the Society of Picpus, in Switzerland, sent out Fathers Demilier and Petithomme to restore the Franciscan missions in Maine. They conquered the difficulties of the Abnaki dialect with the aid of a prayer-book which the bishop had caused to be printed, and in this small and insignificant mission Father Demilier toiled until his death, in 1843.

The successor of Bishop Fenwick resolved to restore the Abnaki mission to the Fathers of the Society of Jesus, by whom it had been originally founded. Therefore, since 1848, the Penobscots and Passamaquoddys have been under the care of the Jesuits, who in that year sent out from Switzerland Father John Bapst to Old Town, on the Penobscot—a short distance from Bangor—where he ministered faithfully to the Abnakis until he nearly lost his life in a disgraceful Know-Nothing riot in 1854.

As we find ourselves thus at the conclusion of our narration, incidents crowd upon our memory of the wondrous sacrifices made by the Catholic clergy in the old missions of Maine; but we are admonished that our space is limited.

Little attention, however, has been paid to the fact that to these Catholic priests alone under God is due the evangelization of the many Indian tribes which formerly haunted our grand old forests. Of these tribes, only a few of the Penobscots are left, and these cling still to the cross as the blessed symbol of the faith first brought to them, “as a voice crying in the wilderness,” by Fathers Biard and Du Thet at St. Sauveur in 1613.

PRUSSIA AND THE CHURCH.

The first attempts to introduce the Christian religion into Prussia were unsuccessful. S. Adalbert, in 997, and S. Bruno, in 1009, suffered martyrdom whilst preaching the Gospel there, and the efforts of Poland to force the conquered Prussians to receive the faith only increased the bitterness of their anti-Christian prejudices. Early in the XIIth century Bishop Otto, of Bamberg, made many conversions in Pomerania; and finally, in the beginning of the XIIIth, the Cistercian monk Christian, with the approval and encouragement of Pope Innocent III., set to work to convert the Prussians, and met with such success that in 1215 he was made bishop of the country. The greater part of the people, however, still remained heathens, and the progress of Christianity aroused in them such indignation that they determined to oppose its farther advance with the sword. To protect his flock Bishop Christian called to his aid the knights of the Teutonic Order; in furtherance of his designs, the Emperor Frederic II. turned the whole country over to them, and Pope Gregory IX. took measures to increase their number, so that they might be able to hold possession of this field, now first opened to the Gospel. Pope Innocent IV. also manifested special interest in the welfare of the church in Prussia; he urged priests and monks to devote themselves to this mission, supported and encouraged the bishops in their trials and difficulties, and exhorted the convents throughout Germany to contribute books for the education of the people. But circumstances were not wanting which made the position of the church in Prussia very unsatisfactory. The people had for the most part been brought under the church’s influence by the power of arms, and consequently to a great extent remained strangers to her true spirit. The Teutonic Order, moreover, gave ecclesiastical positions only to German priests, so as to hold out inducements to the people to learn German; though, as a consequence, the priests were unable to communicate with their flocks, except by the aid of interpreters.

The grand master, too, had almost unlimited control over the election of bishops, which was the cause of many evils, especially as the Order gradually grew lax in the observance of the rule, and lost much of its Christian character. Unworthy men were thrust into ecclesiastical offices, the standard of morality among the clergy was lowered, and the people lost respect for the priesthood. It is not surprising, in view of all this, that the religious sectaries of the XIIIth and XIVth centuries should have found favor in Prussia, and made converts among her still half-pagan populations.

In 1466 the Teutonic Order became a dependency of the crown of Poland. There was no hope of its freeing itself from this humiliating subjection without foreign aid; and with a view to obtain this, the knights resolved to choose their[679] grand master from one or other of the most powerful German families. First, in 1498, they elected Frederic, Duke of Saxony; and upon his death, in 1510, Albrecht, Margrave of Brandenburg, was chosen to succeed him.

Albrecht refused the oath of supremacy to Sigismund, King of Poland, who thereupon, in 1519, declared war upon him.

To meet the expenses of the war, Albrecht had the sacred vessels of the church melted down and minted; but he was unable to stand against the arms of Poland, and therefore sought the mediation of the Emperor of Germany, through whose good offices he was able to conclude, in 1521, a four years’ truce. He now went into Germany, where Luther was already preaching the Protestant rebellion, and asked aid from the Imperial Parliament, which was holding its sessions at Nuremberg; and as this was denied him, he turned with favor to the teachers of the new doctrines. The Teutonic Order had become thoroughly corrupt, and Leo X. urged Albrecht to begin a reformation in capite et membris; but the grand master sought the advice of Luther, from whom he received the not unwelcome counsel to throw away the “stupid, unnatural rule of his Order, take a wife, and turn Prussia into a temporal hereditary principality.” Albrecht accordingly asked for preachers of the new doctrines, and in 1526 announced his abandonment of the Order and the Catholic Church by his marriage with the daughter of the King of Denmark. Acting upon the Protestant principle, cujus regio illius religio—the ruler of the land makes its religion—he forced the Prussians to quit the church from which they had received whatever culture and civilization they had.

At his death, in 1568, Lutheranism had gained complete possession of the country.

A few Catholics, however, remained, for whom, early in the XVIIth century, King Sigismund of Poland succeeded in obtaining liberty of conscience, which, however, was denied to those of Brandenburg Frederic William, the second king of Prussia, and the first to form the design of placing her among the great powers of Europe by the aid of a strong military organization, in giving directions in 1718 for the education of his son, afterwards Frederic the Great, insisted that the boy should be inspired with a horror of the Catholic Church, “the groundlessness and absurdity of whose teachings should be placed before his eyes and well impressed upon his mind.”

Frederic William was a rigid Calvinist; and if he tolerated a few Catholics in his dominions, it was only that he might vent his ill-humor or exercise his proselytizing zeal upon them. He indeed granted Father Raymundus Bruns permission to say Mass in the garrisons at Berlin and Potsdam, but only after he had been assured that it would tend to prevent desertions among his Catholic soldiers, and that, as Raymundus was a monk, bound by a vow of poverty, he would ask no pay from his majesty.

In 1746 permission was granted the Catholics to hold public worship in Berlin, and the S. Hedwig’s church was built; in Pomerania, however, this privilege was denied them, except in the Polish districts.

During the XVIIIth century congregations were formed at Stettin and Stralsund. In the principality of Halberstadt the Catholics[680] were allowed to retain possession of a church and several monasteries, in which public worship was permitted; and in what had been the archbishopric of Magdeburg there were left to them one Benedictine monastery and four convents of Cistercian Nuns. These latter, however, were placed under the supervision of Protestant ministers.

Frederic the Great early in life fell under the influence of Voltaire and his disciples, from whom he learned to despise all religion, and especially the rigid Calvinism of his father. He became a religious sceptic, and, satisfied with his contempt for all forms of faith, did not take the trouble to persecute any. He asked of his subjects, whether Protestant or Catholic, nothing but money and recruits; for the rest, he allowed every one in his dominions “to save his soul after his own fashion.” He provided chaplains for his Catholic soldiers, and forbade the Calvinist and Lutheran ministers to interfere with their religious freedom, for reasons similar to those which had induced his father to permit Raymundus Bruns to say Mass in the garrison at Berlin. He had certainly no thought of showing any favor to the church, except so far as it might promote his own ambitious projects. His great need of soldiers made him throw every obstacle in the way of those who wished to enter the priesthood, and his fear of foreign influence caused him to forbid priests to leave the country. His mistrust of priests was so great that he gave instructions to Count Hoym, his Minister of State, to place them under a system of espionage. Catholics were carefully excluded from all influential and lucrative positions. They were taxed more heavily than Protestants, and professors in the universities were required to take an oath to uphold the Reformation.

Notwithstanding, it was in the reign of Frederic the Great that the Catholic Church in Prussia may be said to have entered upon a new life. For more than two hundred years it had had no recognized status there; but through the conquest of Silesia and the division of Poland, a large Catholic population was incorporated into the kingdom of Prussia, and thus a new element, which was formally recognized in the constitution promulgated by Frederic’s immediate successor, was introduced into the Prussian state. Together with the toleration of all who believed in God and were loyal to the king, the law of the land placed the Catholic and Protestant churches on an equal footing. To understand how far this was favorable to the church we must go back and consider the relations of Prussia to Protestantism.

What is known as the Territorial System, by which the faith of the people is delivered into the hands of the temporal ruler, has existed in Prussia from the time Albrecht of Brandenburg went over to the Reformers. Protestantism and absolutism triumphed simultaneously throughout Europe, and this must undoubtedly be in a great measure attributed to the fact that the Protestants, whether willingly or not, yielded up their faith into the keeping of kings and princes, and thus practically abandoned the distinction of the spiritual and temporal powers which lies at the foundation of Christian civilization, and is also the strongest bulwark against the encroachments of governments upon the rights of citizens. Duke Albrecht had hardly become a Protestant[681] when he felt that it was his duty (“coacti sumus” are his words) to take upon himself the episcopal office. This was in 1530; in 1550 he treated the urgent request of the Assembly to have the bishopric of Samland restored as an attack upon his princely prerogative.

His successor diverted to other uses the fund destined for the maintenance of the bishops, and instituted two consistories, to which he entrusted the ecclesiastical affairs of the duchy.

During the XVIIth century Calvinism gained a firm foothold in Prussia. It became the religion of the ruling family, and Frederic William, called the Great Elector, to whose policy his successors have agreed to ascribe their greatness, sought in every way to promote its interests, though he strenuously exercised his jus episcopale, his spiritual supremacy over both the Lutherans and the Calvinists.

His son, Frederic, who first took the title of King of Prussia (1700), continued the policy of his father with regard to ecclesiastical affairs. “To us alone,” he declared to the Landstand, “belongs the jus supremum episcopale, the highest and sovereign right in ecclesiastical matters.”

The Lutherans wished to retain the exorcism as a part of the ceremony of baptism; but Frederic published an edict by which he forbade the appointment of any minister who would refuse to confer the sacrament without making use of this ceremony. In the same way he meddled with the Lutheran practice of auricular confession; and by an order issued in 1703 prohibited the publication of theological writings which had not received his imprimatur.

His successor, Frederic William, the father of Frederic the Great, looked upon himself as the absolute and irresponsible master of the subjects whom God had given him. “I am king and master,” he was wont to say, “and can do what I please.” He was a rigid Calvinist, and made his absolutism felt more especially in religious matters. It seems that preachers then, as since, were sometimes in the habit of preaching long sermons; so King Frederic William put a fine of two thalers upon any one who should preach longer than one hour. He required his preachers to insist in all their sermons upon the duty of obedience and loyalty to the king, and the government officials were charged to report any failure to make special mention of this duty. Both Lutherans and Calvinists were forbidden to touch in their sermons upon any points controverted between the two confessions. No detail of religious worship was insignificant enough to escape his meddlesome tyranny. The length of the service, the altar, the vestments of the minister, the sign of the cross, the giving or singing the blessing, all fell under his “high episcopal supervision.”

This unlovely old king was followed by Frederic the Great, who, though an infidel and a scoffer, held as firmly as his father to his sovereign episcopal prerogatives, and who, if less meddlesome, was not less arbitrary. And now we have got back to the constitution which, after Silesia and a part of Poland had been united to the crown of Prussia, was partially drawn up under Frederic the Great, and completed and promulgated during the reign of his successor; and which, as we have already said, placed the three principal confessions of the Christian[682] faith in the Prussian states—viz., the Lutheran, the Reformed, and the Catholic—on a footing of equality before the law. Now, it must be noticed, this constitution left intact the absolute authority of the king over the Reformed and Lutheran churches, and therefore what might seem to be a great gain for the Catholic Church was really none at all, since it was simply placed under the supreme jurisdiction of the king. There was no express recognition of the organic union of the church in Prussia with the pope, nor of the right of the bishops to govern their dioceses according to the ecclesiastical canons, but rather the tacit assumption that the king was head of the Catholic as of the Protestant churches in Prussia. The constitution was drawn up by Suarez, a bitter enemy of the church, and in many of its details was characterized by an anti-Catholic spirit. It annulled, for instance, the contract made by parents of different faith concerning the religious education of their children, and manifested in many other ways that petty and tyrannical spirit which has led Prussia to interfere habitually with the internal discipline and working of the church.

As the Catholic population of Prussia increased through the annexation of different German states, this constitution, which gave the king supreme control of spiritual matters, was extended to the newly-acquired territories. Thus all through the XVIIIth century the church in Prussia, though not openly persecuted, was fettered. No progress was made, abuses could not be reformed, the appointment of bishops was not free, the training of the priesthood was very imperfect; and it is not surprising that this slavery should have been productive of many and serious evils.

The French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon, which caused social and political upheavals throughout Europe, toppled down thrones, overthrew empires, and broke up and reformed the boundaries of nations, mark a new epoch in the history of Prussia, and indeed of all Germany, whose people had been taught by these disastrous wars that they had common interests which could not be protected without national unity, the want of which had never before been made so painfully manifest.

After the downfall of Napoleon, the ambassadors of the Allied Powers met in Vienna to settle the affairs of all Europe. Nations, provinces, and cities were given away in the most reckless manner, without any thought of the interests or wishes of the people, to the kings and rulers who could command the greatest influence in the congress or whose displeasure was most feared. Germany demanded the restoration of Alsace and Lorraine, but was thwarted in her designs by Great Britain and Russia, who feared the restoration of her ancient power.

Prussia received from the congress, as some compensation for its sufferings and sacrifices during the Napoleonic wars, the duchies of Jülich and Berg, the former possessions of the episcopal sees of Cologne and Treves, and several other territories, which were formed into the Rhine province. On the other hand, it lost a portion of the Sclavonic population which it had held on the east; so that, though it gained nothing in territory, it became more strictly a German state, and was consequently better fitted gradually[683] to take the lead in the irrepressible movement toward the unification of Germany.

In the Congress of Vienna it was stipulated that Catholics and Protestants should have equal rights before the law. The constitutional law of Prussia was extended to the newly-acquired provinces and “all ecclesiastical matters, whether of Roman Catholics or of Protestants, together with the supervision and administration of all charitable funds, the confirming of all persons appointed to spiritual offices, and the supervision over the administration of ecclesiastics as far as it may have any relation to civil affairs, were reserved to the government.”

In 1817, upon the occasion of the reorganization of the government, we perceive to what practical purposes these principles were to be applied. The church was debased to a function of the state, her interests were placed in the hands of the ministry for spiritual affairs, and the education of even clerical students was put under the control of government.

It was in this same year, 1817, that the tercentennial anniversary of the birth of Protestantism was celebrated. For two centuries Protestant faith in Germany had been dying out. Eager and bitter controversies, the religious wars and the plunder of church property during the XVIth and early part of the XVIIth centuries, had given it an unnatural and artificial vigor. It was a mighty and radical revolution, social, political, and religious, and therefore gave birth to fanaticism and intense partisan zeal, and was in turn helped on by them.

There is a natural strength in a new faith, and when it is tried by war and persecution it seems to rise to a divine power. Protestantism burst upon Europe with irresistible force. Fifty years had not passed since Luther had burned the bull of Pope Leo, and the Catholic Church, beaten almost everywhere in the North of Europe, seemed hardly able to hold her own on the shores of the Mediterranean; fifty years later, and Protestantism was saved in Germany itself only by the arms of Catholic France. The peace of Westphalia, in 1648, put an end to the religious wars of Germany, and from that date the decay of the Protestant faith was rapid. Many causes helped on the work of ruin; the inherent weakness of the Protestant system from its purely negative character, the growing and bitter dissensions among Protestants, the hopeless slavery to which the sects had been reduced by the civil power, all tended to undermine faith. In the Palatinate, within a period of sixty years, the rulers had forced the people to change their religion four times. In Prussia, whose king, as we have seen, was supreme head of the church, the ruling house till 1539 was Catholic; then, till 1613, Lutheran; from that date to 1740, Calvinistic; from 1740 to 1786, infidel, the avowed ally of Voltaire and D’Alembert; then, till 1817, Calvinistic; and finally again evangelical.

During the long reign of Frederic the Great unbelief made steady progress. Men no longer attacked this or that article of faith, but Christianity itself. The quickest way, it was openly said by many, to get rid of superstition and priest-craft, would be to abolish preaching altogether, and thus remove the ghost of religion from the eyes of the people. It seems strange that such license of thought and expression[684] should have been tolerated, and even encouraged, in a country where religion itself has never been free; but it is a peculiarity of the Prussian system of government that while it hampers and fetters the church and all religious organizations, it leaves the widest liberty of conscience to the individual. Its policy appears to be to foster indifference and infidelity, in order to use them against what it considers religious fanaticism. Another circumstance which favored infidelity may be found in the political thraldom in which Prussia held her people. As men were forbidden to speak or write on subjects relating to the government or the public welfare, they took refuge in theological and philosophical discussions, which in Protestant lands have never failed to lead to unbelief. This same state of things tended to promote the introduction and increase of secret societies, which, in the latter half of the XVIIIth century, sprang up in great numbers throughout Germany, bearing a hundred different names, but always having anti-Christian tendencies.

To stop the spread of infidelity, Frederic William II., the successor of Frederic the Great, issued, in 1788, an “edict, embracing the constitution of religion in the Prussian states.” The king declared that he could no longer suffer in his dominions that men should openly seek to undermine religion, to make the Bible ridiculous in the eyes of the people, and to raise in public the banner of unbelief, deism, and naturalism. He would in future permit no farther change in the creed, whether of the Lutheran or the Reformed Church. This was the more necessary as he had himself noticed with sorrow, years before he ascended the throne, that the Protestant ministers allowed themselves boundless license with regard to the articles of faith, and indeed altogether rejected several essential parts and fundamental verities of the Protestant Church and the Christian religion. They blushed not to revive the long-since-refuted errors of the Socinians, the deists, and the naturalists, and to scatter them among the people under the false name of enlightenment (Aufklärung), whilst they treated God’s Word with disdain, and strove to throw suspicion upon the mysteries of revelation. Since this was intolerable, he, therefore, as ruler of the land and only law-giver in his states, commanded and ordered that in future no clergyman, preacher, or school-teacher of the Protestant religion should presume, under pain of perpetual loss of office and of even severer punishment, to disseminate the errors already named; for, as it was his duty to preserve intact the law of the land, so was it incumbent upon him to see that religion should be kept free from taint; and he could not, consequently, allow its ministers to substitute their whims and fancies for the truths of Christianity. They must teach what had been agreed upon in the symbols of faith of the denomination to which they belonged; to this they were bound by their office and the contract under which they had received their positions. Nevertheless, out of his great love for freedom of conscience, the king was willing that those who were known to disbelieve in the articles of faith might retain their offices, provided they consented to teach their flocks what they were themselves unable to believe.

In this royal edict we have at once the fullest confession of the[685] general unbelief that was destroying Protestantism in Prussia, and of the hopelessness of any attempt to arrest its progress. What could be more pitiable than the condition of a church powerless to control its ministers, and publicly recognizing their right to be hypocrites? How could men who had no faith teach others to believe? Moreover, what could be more absurd, from a Protestant point of view, than to seek to force the acceptance of symbols of faith when the whole Reformation rested upon the assumed right of the individual to decide for himself what should or should not be believed? Or was it to be supposed that men could invest the conflicting creeds of the sects with a sacredness which they had denied to that of the universal church? It is not surprising, therefore, that the only effect of the edict should have been to increase the energy and activity of the infidels and free-thinkers.

Frederic William III., who ascended the throne in 1797, recognizing the futility of his father’s attempt to keep alive faith in Protestantism, stopped the enforcement of the edict, with the express declaration that its effect had been to lessen religion and increase hypocrisy. Abandoning all hope of controlling the faith of the preachers, he turned his attention to their morals. A decree of the Oberconsistorium of Berlin, in 1798, ordered that the conduct of the ministers should be closely watched and every means employed to stop the daily-increasing immorality of the servants of the church, which was having the most injurious effects upon their congregations. Parents had almost ceased having their children baptized, or had them christened in the “name of Frederic the Great,” or in the “name of the good and the fair,” sometimes with rose-water.

But the calamities which befell Germany during the wars of the French Revolution and the empire seemed to have turned the thoughts of many to religion. The frightful humiliations of the fatherland were looked upon as a visitation from heaven upon the people for their sins and unbelief; and therefore, when the tercentennial anniversary of Protestantism came around (in 1817), they were prepared to enter upon its celebration with earnest enthusiasm. The celebration took the form of an anti-Catholic demonstration. For many years controversy between Protestants and Catholics had ceased; but now a wholly unprovoked but bitter and grossly insulting attack was made upon the church from all the Protestant pulpits of Germany and in numberless writings. The result of this wanton aggression was a reawakening of Catholic faith and life; whilst the attempt to take advantage of the Protestant enthusiasm to bring about a union between the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia ended in causing fresh dissensions and divisions. The sect of the Old Lutherans was formed, which, in spite of persecution, finally succeeded in obtaining toleration, though not till many of its adherents had been driven across the ocean into exile.

As the Congress of Vienna had decided that Catholics and Protestants should be placed upon a footing of equality, and as Prussia had received a large portion of the secularized lands of the church, with the stipulation that she should provide for the maintenance of Catholic worship, the government, in 1816, sent Niebuhr, the historian, to[686] Rome, to treat with the Pope concerning the reorganization of the Catholic religion in the Prussian states. Finally, in 1821, an agreement was signed, which received the sanction of the king, and was published as a fundamental law of the state.

In this Concordat with the Holy See there is at least a tacit recognition of the true nature of the church, of her organic unity—a beginning of respect for her freedom, and a seeming promise of a better future. In point of fact, however, in spite of Niebuhr’s assurance to the Holy Father that he might rely upon the honest intentions of the government, Prussia began almost at once to meddle with the rights of Catholics. A silent and slow persecution was inaugurated, by which it was hoped their patience would be exhausted and their strength wasted. And now we shall examine more closely the artful and heartless policy by which, with but slight variations, for more than two centuries Prussia has sought to undermine the Catholic religion. In 1827 the Protestants of all communions in Prussia amounted to 6,370,380, and the Catholics to 4,023,513. These populations are, to only a very limited extent, intermingled; certain provinces being almost entirely Catholic, and others nearly wholly Protestant. By law the same rights are granted to both Catholics and Protestants; and both, therefore, should receive like treatment at the hands of the government.

This is the theory; what are the facts? We will take the religious policy of Prussia from the reorganization of the church after the Congress of Vienna down to the revolution of 1848, and we will begin with the subject of education. For the six millions of Protestants there were four exclusively Protestant universities, at Berlin, Halle, Königsberg, and Greifswalde; for the four millions of Catholics there were but two half universities, at Bonn and Breslau, in each of which there was a double faculty, the one Protestant, the other Catholic; though the professors in all the faculties, except that of theology, were for the most part Protestants. Thus, out of six universities, to the Catholics was left only a little corner in two, though they were forced to bear nearly one-half of the public burdens by which all six were supported. But this is not the worst. The bishops had no voice in the nomination of the professors, not even those of theology. They were simply asked whether they had any objections to make, on proof. The candidate might be a stranger, he might be wholly unfitted to teach theology, he might be free from open immorality or heresy; and therefore, because the bishops could prove nothing against him, he was appointed to instruct the aspirants to the priesthood.

At Breslau a foreign professor was appointed, who began to teach the most scandalous and heretical doctrines. Complaints were useless. During many years his pupils drank in the poison, and at length, after he had done his work of destruction, he was, as in mockery, removed. Nor is this an isolated instance of the ruin to Catholic faith wrought by this system. The bishops had hardly any influence over the education of their clergy, who, young and ignorant of the world, were thrown almost without restraint into the pagan corruptions of a German university, in order to acquire a knowledge of theology. At Cologne a Catholic college was made over to the Protestants,[687] at Erfurt and Düsseldorf Catholic gymnasia were turned into mixed establishments with all the professors, save one, Protestants.

Elementary education was under the control of provincial boards consisting of a Protestant president and three councillors, one of whom might be a Catholic in Catholic districts. In the Catholic provinces of the Rhine and Westphalia, the place of Catholic councillor was left vacant for several years till the schools were all reorganized. Indeed, the real superintendent of Catholic elementary education was generally a Protestant minister.

There was a government Censur for books of religious instruction, the headquarters of which were in Berlin, but its agents were scattered throughout all the provinces. All who were employed in this department, to which even the pastorals of the bishops had to be submitted before being read to their flocks, were Protestants. The widest liberty was given to Protestants to attack the church; but when the Catholics sought to defend themselves, their writings were suppressed. Professor Freudenfeld was obliged to quit Bonn because he had spoken of Luther without becoming respect.

Permission to start religious journals was denied to Catholics, but granted to Protestants; and in the pulpit the priests were put under strict restraint, while the preachers were given full liberty of speech. Whenever a community of Protestants was found in a Catholic district, a church, a clergyman, and a school were immediately provided for them; indeed, richer provision for the Protestant worship was made in the Catholic provinces than elsewhere; but when a congregation of Catholics grew up amongst Protestants, the government almost invariably rejected their application for permission to have a place of worship. At various times and places churches and schools were taken from the Catholics and turned over to the Protestants; and though Prussia had received an enormous amount of the confiscated property of the church, she did not provide for the support of the priests as for that of the ministers.

At court there was not a single Catholic who held office; the heads of all the departments of government were Protestants; the Post-Office department, down to the local postmasters, was exclusively Protestant; all ambassadors and other representatives of the government, though sent to Catholic courts, were Protestants.

In Prussia the state is divided into provinces, and at the head of each province is a high-president (Ober-Präsident). This official, to whom the religious interests of the Catholics were committed, was always a Protestant. The provinces are divided into districts, and at the head of each district was a Protestant president, and almost all the inferior officers, even in Catholic provinces, were Protestants.

Again, in the courts of justice and in the army all the principal positions were given to Protestants. In the two corps d’armées of Prussia and Silesia, one-half was Catholic; in the army division of Posen, two-thirds; in that of Westphalia and Cleves, three-fifths; and, finally, in that of the Rhine, seven-eighths; yet there was not one Catholic field-officer, not a general or major. In 1832 a royal order was issued to provide for the religious wants of the army, and every care was[688] taken for the spiritual needs of the Protestant soldiers; but not even one Catholic chaplain was appointed. All persons in active service, from superior officers down to private soldiers, were declared to be members of the military parish, and were placed under the authority of the Protestant chaplains. If a Catholic soldier wished to get married or to have his child baptized by a priest, he had first to obtain the permission of his Protestant curate. What was still more intolerable, the law regulating military worship was so contrived as to force the Catholic soldiers to be present at Protestant service.

Let us now turn to the relations of the church in Prussia with the Holy See. All direct communications between the Catholics and the Pope were expressly forbidden. Whenever the bishops wished to consult the Holy Father concerning the administration of their dioceses, their inquiries had to pass through the hands of the Protestant ministry, to be forwarded or not at its discretion, and the answer of the Pope had to pass through the same channel. It was not safe to write; for the government had no respect for the mails, and letters were habitually opened by order of Von Nagler, the postmaster-general, who boasted that he had never had any idiotic scruples about such matters; that Prince Constantine was his model, who had once entertained him with narrating how he had managed to get the choicest selection of intercepted letters in existence; he had had them bound in morocco, and they formed thirty-three volumes of the most interesting reading in his private library. Thus the church was ruled by a system of espionage and bureaucracy which hesitated not to violate all the sanctities of life to accomplish its ends. The bishops were reduced to a state of abject dependence; not being allowed to publish any new regulation or to make any appointment without the permission and approval of the Protestant high-president, from whom they constantly received the most annoying and vexatious despatches.

The election of bishops was reduced to a mere form. When a see became vacant, the royal commissary visited the chapter and announced the person whom the king had selected to fill the office, declaring at the same time that no other would receive his approval.

The minutest details of Catholic worship were placed under the supervision and control of Protestant laymen, who had to decide how much wine and how many hosts might be used during the year in the different churches.

We come now to a matter, vexed and often discussed, in which the trials of the church in Prussia, prior to the recent persecutions, finally culminated; we allude to the subject of marriages between Catholics and Protestants.

When, in 1803, Prussia got possession of the greater part of her Catholic provinces, the following order was at once issued: “His majesty enacts that children born in wedlock shall all be educated in the religion of the father, and that, in opposition to this law, neither party shall bind the other.” Apart from the odious meddling of the state with the rights of individuals and the agreements of parties so closely and sacredly related as man and wife, there was in this enactment a special injustice to Catholics, from the fact that nearly all the mixed marriages in Prussia were contracted by Protestant government officials and Catholic[689] women of the provinces to which these agents had been sent. As these men held lucrative offices, they found no difficulty in making matrimonial alliances; and as the children had to be brought up in the religion of the father, the government was by this means gradually establishing Protestant congregations throughout its Catholic provinces. In 1825 this law was extended to the Rhenish province, and in 1831 a document was brought to light which explained the object of the extension—viz., that it might prove an effectual measure against the proselyting system of Catholics.

The condition of the church was indeed deplorable. With the name of being free, she was, in truth, enslaved; and while the state professed to respect her rights, it was using all the power of the most thoroughly organized and most heartless system of bureaucracy and espionage to weaken and fetter her action, and even to destroy her life. This was the state of affairs when, in the end of 1835, Von Droste Vischering, one of the greatest and noblest men of this century, worthy to be named with Athanasius and with Ambrose, was made archbishop of Cologne.

The Catholic people of Prussia had long since lost all faith in the good intentions of the government, of whose acts and aims they had full knowledge; and it was in order to restore confidence that a man so trusted and loved by them as Von Droste Vischering was promoted to the see of Cologne. The doctrines of Hermes, professor of theology in the University of Bonn, had just been condemned at Rome, but the government ignored the papal brief, and continued to give its support to the Hermesians; the archbishop, nevertheless, condemned their writings, and especially their organ, the Bonner Theologische Zeitschrift, forbade his students to attend their lectures at the university, and finally withdrew his approbation altogether from the Hermesian professors, refusing to ordain students unless they formally renounced the proscribed doctrines.

By a ministerial order issued in 1825, priests were forbidden, under pain of deposition from office, to exact in mixed marriages any promise concerning the education of the offspring. A like penalty was threatened for refusing to marry parties who were unwilling to make such promises, or for withholding absolution from those who were bringing up their children in the Protestant religion. To avert as far as possible any conflict between the church and the government, Pius VIII., in 1830, addressed a brief to the bishops of Cologne, Treves, Münster, and Paderborn, in which he made every allowable concession to the authority of the state in the matter of mixed marriages. The court of Berlin withheld the papal brief, and, taking advantage of the yielding disposition of Archbishop Spiegel of Cologne, entered, without the knowledge of the Holy See, into a secret agreement with him, in which still farther concessions were made, and in violation of Catholic principle. Von Droste Vischering took as his guide the papal brief, and paid no attention to such provisions of the secret agreement as conflicted with the instructions of the Holy Father.

The government took alarm, and offered to let fall the Hermesians, if the archbishop would yield in the affair of mixed marriages; and as this expedient failed, measures of violence were threatened, which were soon carried into effect; for on the evening of the 20th of November,[690] 1837, the archbishop was secretly arrested and carried off to the fortress of Minden, where he was placed in close confinement, all communication with him being cut off. The next morning the government issued a “Publicandum,” in which it entered its accusations against the archbishop, in order to justify its arbitrary act and to appease the anger of the people. Notwithstanding, a cry of indignation and grief was heard in all the Catholic provinces of Prussia, which was re-echoed throughout Germany and extended to all Europe. Lukewarm Catholics grew fervent, and the very Hermesians gathered with their sympathies to uphold the cause of the archbishop.

The Archbishop of Posen and the Bishops of Paderborn and Münster announced their withdrawal from the secret convention, which the Bishop of Treves had already done upon his death-bed; and henceforward the priests throughout the kingdom held firm to the ecclesiastical law on mixed marriages, so that in 1838 Frederic William III. was forced to make a declaration recognizing the rights for which they contended. But the Archbishop of Cologne was still a prisoner in the fortress of Minden. Early, however, in 1839, health began to fail; and as the government feared lest his death in prison might produce unfavorable comment, he received permission to withdraw to Münster. The next year the king died, and his successor, Frederic William IV., showed himself ready to settle the dispute amicably, and in other ways to do justice to the Catholics. A great victory had been gained—the secret convention was destroyed—a certain liberty of communication with the Pope was granted to the bishops. The election of bishops was made comparatively free, the control of the schools of theology was restored to them, the Hermesians either submitted or were removed, and the Catholics of Germany awoke from a deathlike sleep to new and vigorous life.

An evidence of the awakening of faith was given in the fall of 1844, when a million and a half of German Catholics went in pilgrimage, with song and prayer, to Treves.

Nevertheless, many grievances remained unredressed. The Censur was still used against the church; and when the Catholics asked permission to publish journals in which they could defend themselves and their religious interests, they were told that such publications were not needed; but when Ronge, the suspended priest, sought to found his sect of “German Catholics,” he received every encouragement from the government, and the earnest support of the officials and nearly the entire press of Prussia; though, at this very time, every effort was being made to crush the “Old Lutherans.”

The government continued to find pretexts for meddling with the affairs of the bishops, and the newspapers attacked the church in the most insulting manner, going so far as to demand that the religious exercises for priests should be placed under police supervision. We have now reached a memorable epoch in the history of the Catholic Church in Prussia—the revolution of 1848, which convulsed Germany to its centre, spread dismay among all classes, and filled its cities with riot and bloodshed. When order was re-established, the liberties of the church were recognized more fully than they had been for three centuries.

GARCIA MORENO.

The atrocious assassination of Garcia Moreno, the President of the republic of Ecuador, has filled the minds of all good people with the deepest grief and horror. The liberals are the only ones who have mentioned it in their journals with indifference. One of them headed his announcement of it, “A victim of the Sacred Heart”—alluding, with blasphemous irony, to the act of consecration of his people to the Adorable Heart of our Lord which this truly pious ruler had made. But with the exception of these reprobates—who, hating God, cannot love mankind—no one who has any admiration of moral greatness can help deploring the death of this extraordinary man—a death the more deplorable on account of its coming, not from a natural cause, but from a detestable conspiracy concocted by the enemies of all that is good, who abhorred equally the wisdom of his government and the soundness of his faith. The London Times has a despatch from Paris of October 5 with the following communication: “It appears, from authentic information which we have received, that Garcia Moreno, lately President of the republic of Ecuador, has been assassinated by a secret society which extends through all South America, as well as Europe. The assassin was selected by lot, and obtained admission to the palace at Quito. One of his accomplices, an official, who was arrested after the murder, was assured by the president of the court-martial, before his trial, that he would be pardoned if he turned state’s evidence. ‘Be pardoned?’ said he. ‘That would be of no use to me; if you pardon me, my comrades will not. I would rather be shot than stabbed.’” This decision of the society to kill him was known to Moreno, and he informed the Pope of it in a letter, which we will shortly give.

This illustrious man had governed the republic of Ecuador for about fifteen years—first as dictator, and afterwards, for two consecutive terms, as president; and to this office he had just been re-elected for a third term by an unanimous vote. He had taken charge of the state when it was in an exceedingly miserable condition, and by his lofty genius, practical tact, and perseverance, but above all by his piety and confidence in God, had completely renovated and restored not only the morals of the people, but also the whole political administration, and made the country a perfect model of a Christian nation. He was intending to complete the work which he had begun, and was able to rely confidently on the co-operation of his people, whose reverence and love for him were unbounded. But all this was intolerable to the liberals of our day; they could not bear that in a corner of the New World the problem should be solved, which they are trying to make so perplexing, of harmony between the state and the church;[692] of the combination of temporal prosperity and Catholic piety; of obedience to the civil law and perfect submission to ecclesiastical authority. This was an insufferable scandal for modern liberalism,[248] especially because such a good example might do much to frustrate the plans of this perverse sect in other countries.

The Masons, therefore, resolved to murder this man, whom they had found to be too brave and determined to be checked in any other way; for all the attempts they had made to intimidate him or to diminish his popularity had been entirely without effect. Moreno anticipated the blow, but, far from fearing it, was only the more persuaded to persevere in his undertaking, regarding it as the greatest happiness to be able to give his life for so holy a cause. In the last letter which he wrote to the Supreme Pontiff before his assassination are these words: “I implore your apostolic benediction, Most Holy Father, having been re-elected (though I did not deserve it) to the office of president of this Catholic republic for another six years. Although the new term does not begin till the 30th of August, the day on which I take the oath required by the constitution, so that then only shall I need to give your Holiness an official notification of my re-election, nevertheless I wish not to delay in informing you of it, in order that I may obtain from Heaven the strength and light which I more than any other one shall need, to keep me a child of our Redeemer and loyal and obedient to his infallible Vicar. And now that the lodges of neighboring countries, inspired by Germany, vomit out against me all sorts of atrocious insults and horrible calumnies, and even secretly lay plans for my assassination, I require more than ever the divine assistance and protection to live and die in defence of our holy religion and of this beloved republic which God has given me to govern. How fortunate I am, Most Holy Father, to be hated and calumniated for the sake of our divine Saviour; and what unspeakable happiness would it be for me if your benediction should obtain for me the grace to shed my blood for him who, though he was God, yet shed his own on the cross for us!” This heroic desire of the fervent Christian was granted. He was murdered by the enemies of Christ, in hatred of his zeal for the restoration of the Christian state and of his fervent love for the church. He is truly a martyr of Christ. Are not S. Wenceslaus of Bohemia and S. Canute of Denmark numbered among the holy martyrs, for the same cause? Both of them were killed in the precincts of the temple of God; and Moreno was carried back to the church from which he had only just departed, to breathe out his noble soul into the bosom of his Creator.

II.

The object of Masonic civilization is society without God. The results which it has succeeded in achieving, and which it deems of such importance, are the separation of the state from the church, liberty of worship, the withdrawal of public charities from religious objects, the exclusion of the clergy from the work of education, the suppression of religious orders, the supremacy of the civil law, and the setting[693] aside of the law of the Gospel. Only by these means, according to the Masons, can the happiness of the people, the prosperity of the state, and the increase of morality and learning be attained. These are their fundamental maxims. Now, the difficulty was that Moreno had practically shown, and was continuing to show more completely every day, that the peace, prosperity, and greatness of a nation will be in proportion to its devotion to God and its obedience to the church; that subjection to God and his church, far from diminishing, ensures and increases, the true liberty of man; that the influence of the clergy promotes not only the cause of morality, but also that of letters and science; that man’s temporal interests are never better cared for than when they are subordinated to those which are eternal; and that love of country is never so powerful as when it is consecrated by love of the church.

A man of the most distinguished talents, which had been most fully cultivated at the University of Paris, Moreno had in his own country occupied the most conspicuous positions. He had been a professor of the natural sciences, rector of the university, representative, senator, commander-in-chief of the army, dictator, and president of the republic. In this last office, in which he would probably have been retained by the nation through life, he showed what genius sanctified by religion can accomplish. His first care was to establish peace throughout the country, without which there can be no civil progress; and he succeeded in doing so, not by compromises, as is now the fashion—not by making a monstrous and abnormal amalgamation of parties and principles—but by the consistent and firm assertion of the principles of morality and justice, and by the open and unhesitating profession of Catholicity. His success was so marked that Ecuador very soon arrived at such a perfect state of tranquillity and concord as to seem a prodigy among the agitated and turbulent republics in its neighborhood.

With the exception of some local and ineffectual attempts at revolution during his first presidency, which were quelled by placing some of the southern provinces in a state of siege for fifty days, Ecuador was undisturbed by sedition during the whole of his long government. This was partly due to the splendor of his private and public virtues, which dissipated the clouds of envy and hatred, and gained for him the esteem even of his political opponents. He was chaste, magnanimous, just, impartial, and so well known for clearheadedness that the people often stopped him on the streets to decide their disputes on the spot, and accepted his opinion as final. His disinterestedness seems fabulous when we think of the immoderate cupidity prevailing among modern politicians. In his first six years he would not even draw his salary, being content to live on the income of his own moderate fortune. In his second term he accepted it, but spent it almost entirely in works of public utility. And in such works he employed the whole of his time. When any one endeavored to persuade him not to shorten his life by such continual labor, he used to say: “If God wants me to rest, he will send me illness or death.”

Owing to this unwearying assiduity and his ardent love for the good of his people, he was able to[694] undertake and finish an amount of business that would appear incredible, were not the evidence too strong to admit of doubt. In No. 1,875 of the Univers there is a catalogue of the principal enterprises which he carried through in a brief period. They are as follows:

The paying of the customs to the national treasury, instead of to the provincial ones, as formerly.

The establishment of a fiscal court, and the organization of the courts of justice.

The foundation of a great polytechnic school, which was partially entrusted to the Jesuits.

The construction and equipment of an astronomical observatory, which was built and directed by the Jesuits. On account of the equatorial position of Quito, Garcia Moreno, who was well versed in the mathematical sciences, wished to make this observatory equal to any in the world. He bought most of the instruments with his own private funds.

Roads connecting different parts of the country. Garcia Moreno laid out and nearly completed five great national roads. The principal one, that from Guayaquil to Quito, is eighty leagues in length. It is paved, and has one hundred and twenty bridges. It is a solid and stupendous work, constructed in the face of almost insuperable difficulties.

The reformation of the regular clergy; the restoration among them of a common and monastic life.

The reconstruction of the army. The army had been a mere horde, without organization, discipline, or uniform; the men hardly had shoes. Moreno organized them on the French system, clothed, shod, and disciplined them; now they are the model as well as the defence of the people.

The building of a light-house at Guayaquil. Previously there had been none on the whole coast.

Reforms in the collection of the customs. Frauds put an end to, and the revenues trebled.

Colleges in all the cities; schools in even the smallest villages—all conducted by the Christian Brothers.

Schools for girls; Sisters of Charity, Ladies of the Sacred Heart, Sisters of the Good Shepherd, of Providence, and Little Sisters of the Poor.

Public hospitals. During his first presidency Moreno turned out the director of the hospital at Quito, who had refused to receive a poor man and was very negligent of his duties, and made himself director in his stead. He visited the hospital every day, improved its arrangements, and put it in good working order. He performed in it many acts of heroic charity.

The maintenance and increase of lay congregations and orders. He was an active member of the Congregation of the Poor.

The Catholic Protectory, a vast and magnificent school of arts and trades, on the plan of S. Michele at Rome, and conducted by the Christian Brothers.

The embellishment and restoration of the cities. Guayaquil, and especially Quito, seemed as if they had been rebuilt.

And he accomplished all this, not only without increasing the taxes, but even diminishing some of them. This is the reason why he was so much beloved by the people; why they called him father of his country and saviour of the republic. But it was also this which was his unpardonable sin, which had to promptly receive a chastisement which should serve as a warning for his successors, that they might not dare to imitate his manner of government. For such a course as his was sure to ruin the credit of Masonry in the popular mind.

III.

Moreno loved his country, and worked so hard for its good, because he was truly and thoroughly religious. Every one who really loves God loves his neighbor also; and he who loves God intensely loves his neighbor in the same way, because he sees in him the image of God and the price of his blood.

When he was a student in Paris he was admired for his piety. In his own country, amid the continual cares and heavy responsibilities of his office, he always found time to hear Mass every morning and say the rosary every night. In his familiar conversation he spoke frequently of God, of religion, of virtue, and with such fervor that all who heard felt their hearts touched and moved by his words. Before beginning the business of the day, he always made a visit to the church to implore light from the Source of all wisdom; and he had just left it, as we have said, when he met the ambuscade which was prepared for him. This religious spirit produced in him a great zeal for the glory of God, and that devotion to the Vicar of Christ which in him so much resembled the affection of a child for his father. Let it suffice to say that when he had to arrange the concordat with the Holy See, he sent his ambassador to Rome with a blank sheet signed by himself, telling him to ask his Holiness to write on it whatever seemed to him right and conducive to the good of the church and the true welfare of the nation. Such was the confidence which he reposed in the Pope, with whom politicians are accustomed to treat as if he were an ambitious and designing foreign prince, instead of being the father of all the faithful. When the revolution entered Rome in triumph through the breach of Porta Pia, Garcia Moreno was the only ruler in the world who dared to enter a solemn protest against that sacrilegious invasion; and he obtained from his Congress a considerable sum as a monthly subsidy and tribute of affection to his Holiness.

But his piety toward God and his filial love to the church can best be seen from the message to Congress which he finished a few hours before his death, and which was found on his dead body, steeped in his blood. Although it is somewhat long for the limits of an article, we think that we ought to present it to our readers as an imperishable monument of true piety and enlightened policy, and as a lesson for the false politicians of the present day and of days to come.

Here follows an enumeration of all the improvements which had been made. He continues:

That is the way that a really Catholic ruler can speak, even in this XIXth century. It seems, while we read his words, as if we were listening to Ferdinand of Castile or some other one of the saintly kings of the most prosperous days of Christianity. With great justice, then, did the government of Ecuador, when it published this message—which was found, as we have said, on Moreno’s dead body—append to it the following note:

“The message which we have just given is the solemn voice of one who is dead; or, better, it is his last will and testament actually sealed with his own blood; for our noble president had just written it with his own hand when he was assailed by his murderers. Its last words are those of a dying father who, blessing his children, turns for the last time toward them his eyes, darkened by the shadow of death, and asks pardon of them, as if he had been doing anything during all their lives but loading them with benefits. Deeply moved and distressed by grief, we seek in vain for words adequate to express our love[698] and veneration for him. Posterity no doubt will honor the undying memory of the great ruler, the wise politician, the noble patriot, and the saintly defender of the faith who has been so basely assassinated. His country, worthily represented by their present legislators, will shed tears over this tomb which contains such great virtues and such great hopes, and will gratefully record on imperishable tablets the glorious name of this her son, who, regardless of his own blood and life, lived and died only for her.”

This splendid eulogy is an echo of the eternal benediction and a reflection of the brilliant crown which we cannot doubt that God has given to this his latest martyr.

IV.

The reader will see that this message of Garcia Moreno contains a true and genuine scheme of Christian government which he applied in the republic of Ecuador, in direct opposition to the ideas and aspirations of modern liberalism. Every point of it is in most marked contrast to the liberalist programme. At some risk of repetition, we will here make a short comparison between the two, on account of the importance of the conclusions which all prudent men can draw from it.

Moreno begins with God, and puts him at the head of the government of his people; liberalism would have the state atheistic, and is ashamed even to mention the name of God in its public documents. Moreno desires an intimate union between the state and the Catholic Church, declaring that the social order must be founded on the church, and that her divine teaching must be the rule of human institutions and the law of civil laws; liberalism, on the other hand, not only separates the state from the church, but even raises it above her, and makes the civil laws the standard in harmony with which the ecclesiastical laws must be framed. It even would subject the most essential institutions of the church to the caprice of man. Moreno desires full liberty for the bishops, and ascribes to this liberty the reform of the clergy and the good morals of the people; liberalism wants to fetter episcopal action, excites the inferior clergy to rebellion against their prelates, and endeavors to withdraw the people from the influence of either. Moreno not only supports but multiplies religious communities; liberalism suppresses them. Moreno respects ecclesiastical property, and promotes by the resources of the state the foundation of new seminaries, saying that without them it will not be possible worthily to fill the ranks of the sacred ministry; liberalism confiscates the goods of the church, closes the seminaries, and sends the young Levites to the barracks, to be educated in the dissipation and license of military life. Moreno confides to the clergy and to the religious orders the training and instruction of youth; liberalism secularizes education, and insists on the entire exclusion of the religious element. Moreno removes from his Catholic nation the wiles and scandals of false religion; liberalism promulgates freedom of worship, and opens the door to every heresy in faith and to every corruption in morals. Moreno, finally, sees in himself the weakness inherent in man, and gives God credit for all the good which he accomplishes; while liberalism, full of satanic pride, believes itself capable of everything, and places all[699] its confidence in the natural powers of man. The antagonism between the two systems is, in short, universal and absolute.

Now, what is the verdict of experience? It is that the application of Moreno’s system has resulted in peace, prosperity, the moral and material welfare of the people—in a word, social happiness. On the contrary, the application of the liberalist system has produced discord, general misery, enormous taxation, immorality among the people, and public scandals, and has driven society to the verge of destruction and dissolution. The liberty which it has given has been well defined by Moreno; it is the liberty of a corpse, the liberty to rot.

And at this juncture the infamous wickedness and the despicable logic of the liberalist party can no longer be concealed. It has laid it down as certain that the principles of the middle ages, as it calls them—which are the true Catholic principles, the principles affirmed by our Holy Father Pius IX. in his Syllabus—are not applicable to modern times, and can no longer give happiness to nations. But here is a ruler, Garcia Moreno by name, who gives the lie to this grovelling falsehood, and shows, by the irresistible evidence of facts, that the happiness of his people has actually come simply from the application of these principles. What is the answer of the liberalist sect to this manifest confutation of their theory? First, it endeavors to cry down its formidable adversary by invective and calumny; and then, finding that this does not suffice to remove him from public life, it murders him. This is the only means it has to prove its thesis; and, having made use of it, it begins to shriek louder than before that Catholic principles cannot be adapted to the progress of this age. No, we agree that they cannot, if you are going to kill every one who adapts them. What use is it to argue with a sect so malicious and perverse? O patience of God and of men, how basely are you abused!

A REVIVAL IN FROGTOWN.

There was quite an excitement in Frogtown. The Rev. Eliphalet Notext, “The Great Revivalist, who had made more converts than any other man in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the United States and Territories, and the British Provinces of North America,” was to “open a three weeks’ campaign” in the town.

Now, Frogtown prided itself on being the wickedest little town in the West. Its inhabitants claimed for it the enviable distinction of being “the fastest little village of its size in the United States”—a weakness common to most small towns. This pride in vice is a widespread weakness. The lean and slippered pantaloon will wag his fallen chaps and give evident signs of pleasant titillation when some shank-shrunken contemporary tells “what a rascal the dog was in his youth.”

Well, the Frogtowners flattered[700] themselves that Brother Notext would find their burgh a very hard nut to crack. Brother Notext was not a theologian. He was not a scholar. He was not a preacher. In truth, he was almost illiterate. But he understood the “business” of getting up revivals. He knew how to create a sensation. He could, at least, achieve a success of curiosity, as the French say.

He began with the newspapers, of course. He contrived to have them say something about him and his “work” in every issue. He was not particular whether what they said of him was favorable or unfavorable. Indeed, he rather preferred that some of them should abuse him roundly. Abuse sometimes helped him more than praise. It made some people his friends through a spirit of contradiction. It appealed to the pugnacious instincts of some “professors of religion.” It enabled him to hint that the inimical editors were papal myrmidons, Jesuit emissaries, etc., etc.

The Rev. Eliphalet was really an excellent organizer. He had been originally the business manager of a circus. His advertisements, his posters, his hand-bills, in his old occupation, were prepared with all the gorgeous imagery of the East. He did not forget his old tactics in his new profession. Immediately on his arrival in Frogtown he grappled the newspapers. He begged, bullied, or badgered the editors until they noticed him. He set the Christian Juveniles and the kindred societies to work, with whom, of course, there was no difficulty. In a couple of days he succeeded in drawing around him the clergymen of every denomination, except the Episcopalian and Unitarian. Some of these, however, went much against their will. The Episcopalian minister—a gentle, amiable man—was very loath at first; but the pressure brought to bear upon him was too strong. He finally succumbed and joined in what was called a Union Christian Meeting of all the Protestant congregations. This important point achieved, Mr. Notext had three of the “best workers” in each congregation selected. These he sent among the people to raise the sinews of war, without which no campaign, whether sacred or profane, can be conducted to a successful issue. Mr. Notext’s terms were reasonable—only three hundred dollars a week and found. A man must live; and when a man works hard—as Mr. Notext undoubtedly did—he must live well, or he cannot stand the strain on his physical and mental strength. Then, there were blank weeks when he had no revival in hand, and probably a hotel bill to pay. Taking these things into consideration, any reasonable person will allow that three hundred dollars a week and found was not an exorbitant price.

Mr. Notext had a large tent which the profane said had been formerly used in his old business. It was pitched in a vacant lot within the city limits, and could accommodate about fifteen hundred persons. Mr. Notext prevailed on the clergymen who united with him to close their churches on the first Sunday of his revival. On the previous Friday he gathered around him a number of male and female enthusiasts. Accompanied by these people, organized in squads and led by the regular revival practitioners who did what is profanely termed the “side-show” business in all Mr. Notext’s tours, he sang hymns in front of every drinking-saloon in the town. The[701] instrumental accompaniment to the singing was furnished by a melodeon, which was carried about in a one-horse cart.

On Sunday the union meetings began, and, notwithstanding a heavy rain, the tent was full. A large platform had been erected inside, and near the door was a table on which were exposed for sale a great variety of contributions to religious literature, all by one author, who had evidently tried every string of the religious lyre. There were collections of hymns by the Rev. Mr. Notext; tracts by the Rev. Mr. Notext; sermons by the Rev. Mr. Notext; tales for the young by the Rev. Mr. Notext; appeals to the old by the Rev. Mr. Notext; reasons for the middle-aged by the Rev. Mr. Notext, etc., etc. There were photographs, in every style, of the Rev. Mr. Notext, as well as likenesses of remarkable converts who had been remarkable rascals until they “got religion” through the efforts of the Rev. Mr. Notext.

On the platform were seated the shepherds of most of the flocks in Frogtown. Some among them, it is true, did not seem quite at home in that situation, but they had to be there. In the centre of the platform was an organ, which furnished the instrumental music. On each side of the organ seats were arranged for a volunteer choir. Fully half those present were children.

The Rev. Eliphalet Notext was introduced to the audience by the minister of the Methodist church. The revivalist was a stout, fair-haired, fresh-colored, rather pleasant-looking man, inclined to corpulency, evidently not an ascetic, and gifted with no inconsiderable share of physical energy and magnetism.

“I wish all persons who can sing to come on the platform and occupy the seats to the right and left of the organ,” he began.

No movement was made in response to this call. It was repeated with a better result. A dozen young ladies summoned up enough courage to mount the platform.

“This will never do!” cried Mr. Notext. “I want every person present who can sing right here on this stand. We can’t get along without music and plenty of it.”

“Brethren,” he continued, turning toward the clergymen on the platform, “you know the singers in your congregations; go among them and send them up here. Everybody must put his shoulder to the wheel in the great work of bringing souls to Jesus.”

The brethren meekly did as they were bid. They soon succeeded in filling the seats reserved for the singers. These numbered about one hundred.

“That’s more like it,” said Mr. Notext approvingly. “Now, my friends, we will begin by singing a hymn. I want everybody to join in.” (A nod to the organist, who began to play.)

The singing was rather timid at first, but, led by Mr. Notext, the singers rapidly gained confidence, and soon rolled forth in full chorus. Having fairly launched them, their leader, after the first verse, left them to take care of themselves. The singing was really good. The rich volume of harmony drowned the commonplace melody and the vulgar words. Thus Brother Notext was successful in the production of his first effect. It was evident that he depended much on the singing. There is nothing like a grand mass of choral music to excite the sensibilities. After two or three hymns, the revivalist had[702] his audience in a highly emotional condition. “I want all the children together in front!” shouted Mr. Notext. “Adults [the accent on the first syllable] will retire to the back seats. Don’t stop the music! Keep up the singing! Go on! go on!” Then he ran to the organ, whispered something to the organist, and led off with

leaving the singers to sing it out for themselves after the first two or three lines.

It took some time to get all the children to the front. If the music flagged, Mr. Notext shouted to the singers to “keep it up.” From time to time he would rush to the organ, pick up a hymn-book in a frantic manner, and lead off with a new hymn, waving his hands in cadence, but, with a due regard for his lungs, not singing a note more than was absolutely necessary to start the other singers afresh.

The fathers and mothers of the little ones, softened by the music, looked with moistened eyes on their children as the latter took their seats. The American people are very fond of children when they are old enough to walk and talk and be interesting. Mr. Notext was alive to this fact. Even the worst criminal or the most cynical man of the world cannot help being touched while music charms his ears and his eyes look on the beautiful spectacle of childish innocence. Mr. Notext evidently knew the more amiable weaknesses of human nature. He appealed to the senses and the affections, and won over the fathers and mothers through the children.

“Now, my little friends,” said Mr. Notext, “I wish you all to keep perfectly silent while I am talking to you. This first meeting is especially for you.”

“I must have silence, if I am to do anything with these children,” said Mr. Notext rather testily, and in a tone which showed that he would not scruple to apply the birch to his little friends if they did not keep quiet. “The slightest noise distracts their attention. There are some boys to the right there who are still talking! I wish some one would stop them.”

A softly-stepping gentleman with long hair and green goggles went to the designated group, remonstrated with, and finally succeeded in silencing, them. Then Mr. Notext began his sermon to the children. He told the story of the Passion in a manner which, though it inexpressibly shocked Christians of the old-fashioned kind who happened to be present, was exceedingly dramatic—“realistic” in the highest degree, to borrow a word from the modern play-bill. Suddenly he broke off and said rather excitedly:

“There is a boy on the fourth bench who persists in talking. I must have absolute silence, or I cannot hold the attention of these children. The slightest noise distracts them and takes their minds away from the picture I am endeavoring to present to them. It is that red-haired boy! Will somebody please to take him away?” Several pious gentlemen bore down on the poor little red-haired urchin, and all chance of “getting religion” was taken away from him for the nonce by his summary removal. When silence was restored, Mr. Notext resumed the story. When describing how the divine Victim was buffeted and spat upon, he a[703]dministered to himself sounding slaps on the face, now with the left hand, now with the right. He placed an imaginary crown of thorns on his head, pressed the sharp points into his forehead, and, passing the open fingers of both hands over his closed eyes and down his face, traced the streams of blood trickling from the cruel wounds. Tears already rolled down the cheeks of the little ones. When he reached the nailing to the cross, he produced a large spike, exhibited it to the children, and went through the semblance of driving it into his flesh. An outburst of sobs interrupted him. Some of the children screamed in very terror. The desired effect was produced. Many fathers and mothers, touched by the emotion and terror of their children, wept in sympathy with them.

“Now the music!” shouted Mr. Notext, stamping with impatience, as if he wanted a tardy patient to swallow a Sedlitz-powder in the proper moment of effervescence. “Now the music!” And he led off with

He shouted to the “workers” to go among the people and ask them to “come to Jesus.” A crowd of “workers,” some professional, some enthusiastic volunteers, broke loose upon the audience. They seized people by the hands. They embraced them. They inquired: “How do you feel now? Do you not feel that Jesus is calling you?” They begged them to come to Jesus at once. They asked them if they were “Ker-istians.”

One of the workers met two gentlemen who entered together and were evidently present through curiosity. Of the first, who seemed to be a cool, keen, self-poised business man, the worker asked the stereotyped question:

The worker passed on, perfectly satisfied with the off-hand declaration. He repeated the question to the gentleman’s companion, who, possessed of less assurance, hesitated and humbly replied:

The worker immediately grappled the sensitive gentleman, much to his mortification, and it was some time before he succeeded in effecting his escape, regretting, doubtless, that he had not made as prompt and satisfactory a profession of faith as that of his companion.

The “inquiry meeting,” as the exercises toward the close were named, was continued until late in the afternoon. When the children were dismissed, they were instructed to beg their parents to come to Jesus—to entreat them, with tears if necessary, until they consented. A Presbyterian gentleman of the old school, describing his sensations after the meeting was over, said:

“I cannot deny that I was affected. I felt tears coming to my eyes—why, I could not tell. The effect, however, was entirely physical. My reason had nothing to do with it. It condemned the whole thing as merely calculated to get up an unhealthy excitement, which, even if not injurious, would be fleeting in its effect. I noticed some nervous women almost worked up into spasms. As to the children, they were goaded into a state of nervousness and terror which was pitiable to see. I can only compare my own condition to that of a man who had drunk freely. While the effect lasted I was capable of making[704] a fool of myself, being all the while aware that I was doing so. Sunlight and air have dispelled the intoxication, and now nothing remains but nausea.

“I am disgusted with such claptrap, and ashamed of myself for having been affected by it, however temporarily and slightly.”

The progress made on the first Sunday of the revival was duly chronicled in the newspapers of the day following. It was announced that hundreds of children had been awakened to a sense of their sinful condition. A little girl—four years old—had recognized that she was thoroughly steeped in sin. She had had no idea of the condition of her soul until she was roused to it by Mr. Notext’s preaching. She was now perfectly happy. She had experienced religion. She knew she was forgiven. She had gone to Jesus, and Jesus had come to her. She had sought Mr. Notext’s lodgings, leading her father with one hand and her mother with the other.

Charley Biggs—the well-known drunken alderman—was among the converted. He had “got religion,” and was resolved henceforth to touch the time-honored toddy nevermore.

A belated “local” of one of the newspapers, while returning to his lodgings on the previous evening, had his coat-tail pulled, much to his surprise, by a little girl about six years old.

This was enough. The hard heart-of the “local” was touched. He sobbed, he wept, he cried aloud. He fell upon his knees. The little girl fell on hers. They sang:

When the “local” rose, after the conclusion of the singing, he took the little girl’s hand and went whither she led him. He, too, had “got religion”—somewhat as one gets a coup de soleil or a stroke of paralysis.

The opposition dailies mildly called attention to the purely emotional character of the effects produced. They expressed their fears that the moral and physical result of factitious excitement on minds of tender years might be the reverse of healthy. The next day the melodeon was carted about again and the singing continued on the sidewalks and in front of the drinking-saloons. Mr. Notext’s machinery was in full blast. The meeting on the second evening was devoted principally to grown people. The tent was full. The choir was strengthened by additional voices, and the music was good of its kind.

After half a dozen hymns had been sung, Mr. Notext began his sermon—by courtesy so-called. He first spoke of the number of persons he had converted at home and abroad. For he had been “abroad,” as he took care to let his audience know. He had been the guest and the favored companion of the Duchess of Skippington, of the Earl of Whitefriars, of Lord This and Lady That, and the Countess of Thingumy. In Scotland and in Ireland immense crowds followed him and “got religion.” He converted three thousand people in a single town in Ireland. Since the meeting on the previous day, many children, and[705] many adults as well, had visited him at his lodgings. Some who came to the tent “to make fun” went away full of religion. He would now let a dear little friend of his tell his own story in his own way.

A red-haired youngster, about thirteen, was introduced to the audience as the nephew of a prominent and well-known official in a neighboring town. (It was afterwards stated, by the way, that the official in question had not a nephew in the world. No doubt the youngster imposed on Mr. Notext.) If ever there were a thoroughly “bad boy,” this youngster was one, or—as may be very possible—his face belied him atrociously. Mr. Notext placed his arm dramatically—affectionately, rather—around the young rogue’s neck, and led him to the front of the platform. The boy looked at the audience with a leer, half-impudent, half-jocular, and then gave his experiences glibly in a very harsh treble:

“When first I heard that Rev. Mr. Notext was going to get up a revival, I joked about it with other boys, and said he couldn’t convert me; and the night of the first meeting I said to the other boys—who were bad boys, too—for us to go along and make fun. And so we did. And I came to laugh at Mr. Notext and to make fun. And somehow—I don’t know how it was—I got religion, and I was converted; and now I am very happy, and I love Mr. Notext, and I am going with him to Smithersville when he gets through here. And I am very happy since I was converted and became a good boy.” (Sensation among the audience, and music by the choir in response to Mr. Notext’s call.)

Another juvenile convert was brought forward. He repeated substantially the same story as his predecessor, though more diffidently. (More music by the choir.)

Mr. Notext now told the affecting story of “little Jimmy.” Little Jimmy was a native of Hindostan. He lived in some town ending in an. There was in that town a missionary school. Jimmy’s master was a very bad man—cruel, tyrannical. He forbade Jimmy to go to the mission-school. But Jimmy went, nevertheless, whenever he could. The master was a true believer in the national religion of Hindostan. He believed that Jimmy would go to perdition if he left his ancestral faith to embrace the national religion—or rather the governmental religion—of Great Britain. Jimmy would return from his visits to the mission-school in a very happy mood, singing as he went:

Mr. Notext gave an operatic rendering of the scene of Jimmy going home singing the above words. One day the master heard Jimmy, and was roused to a state of fury. He forbade the boy to sing the song. But Jimmy would sing it (Mr. Notext did not say whether Jimmy sang the hymn in English or Hindostanee). Then the brutal master took an enormous cowhide—or the Hindostanee punitive equivalent thereto—and belabored poor Jimmy. But Jimmy continued to sing, though the tears rolled down his cheeks from pain. And the master flogged; and Jimmy sang. And still the master flogged and flogged. And still Jimmy sang and sang and sang. It was like the famous fight in Arkansas, wherein the combatants “fit and fit and fit.” But there must be an end of everything—even of an Arkansas fight. The[706] struggle lasted for hours. Exhausted nature finally gave way, and poor little Jimmy died under the lash, singing with his last breath:

“Now, my friends,” said Mr. Notext, “I want you all to stand up for Jesus and sing poor little Jimmy’s song.” And Mr. Notext led off. The choir followed his example; but the audience remained seated.

“I want to know,” said Mr. Notext rather testily, “how many Christians there are in this assembly. I want every one of them to stand up!”

Several persons now stood up, and gradually the action began to spread, like yawning in a lecture-room. There were still many, however, who had not hearkened to Mr. Notext’s summons to stand up. He called attention to them, and bade some of the brethren go to them and talk them into an erect position. Some of the recalcitrants, evidently to avoid importunity, stood up. The rest also stood up, and hurriedly left the tent, followed by an angry scowl from Mr. Notext. After a little hesitation, he said: “We will now once more sing little Jimmy’s hymn.” And when the hymn was sung, the meeting dispersed.

Next morning the friendly newspapers chronicled the wonderful success of Mr. Notext’s efforts. The number of converts was miraculously large. Two thousand persons had stood up for Jesus. The meetings were continued during the week. The modus operandi was about the same. Mr. Notext repeated himself so often that interest began to languish and his coups de théâtre to grow flat and stale. When he was at a loss for words to continue one of his disjointed discourses, he took refuge in music and hymns.

When his vulgar and often unintentionally blasphemous exhortations failed to hold the attention of his hearers, and Morpheus was making fight against him in sundry corners of the tent, he would suddenly call in his loudest tones on all present to stand up for Jesus. In cases of very marked inattention, he would summon his hearers, and particularly the children, to write down their names for Jesus in a large book kept for that purpose by the great revivalist. This stroke generally roused the audience pretty thoroughly. But when the children had written their names in the book three or four times, they began to grow tired of the practice, thinking that, if these writing lessons were continued, they might as well be at school.

In the beginning of the second week there were unmistakable signs of impending collapse. The revival received a momentary impulse, however, from the opposition of another “Reverend Doctor,” who challenged Mr. Notext to controversy. This aroused the natural desire to witness a “fight” which lives in the human heart. But the desire was not gratified, owing to Mr. Notext’s refusal to accept the challenge. His failure to exhibit a proper polemical pugnacity was a very great detriment to him. Indeed, the end of the second week showed a marked falling off in the number of persons present at the nightly meetings. Then the sinews[707] of war began to fail. The weekly wage of the great revivalist could not be raised, though he thrice sent back “the best workers” in all the congregations to make additional efforts to raise the stipulated sum.

The Rev. Dr. Notext did not tarry very much longer in Frogtown. He had barely turned his back upon the little town before every trace of the “great tidal wave of the revival” (as the journals called it) had disappeared. The youthful converts had gone back to their peg tops, their kites, and their china alleys, and Alderman Charley Biggs was again taking his whiskey-toddies in the time-honored way.

THE PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE.

The President’s message, so far as it deals with the school question and the taxation of church property, is the sequel to the speech which he delivered at Des Moines. The article on that oration which appeared in our last number was, to some extent, an exposition of our views on the school question.

We are sure that those views, when carefully examined, will be found to contain the only solution in harmony with the spirit of free institutions. We are willing to submit to the fairness of our fellow-citizens, and to wait until time and thought have matured their judgment on the following questions:

1. Who has a right to direct the education of children—their parents or the government?

2. Whether, in a republic whose form of government depends more than any other upon the virtue of its citizens, it is better to have moral instruction given in abundance, or to have this species of instruction restricted to the narrowest limits?

3. Whether it is the design of a free government to legislate for all, or whether public institutions—the common schools, for instance—are to be directed only for the benefit of certain classes?

4. Whether moneys raised by taxation for the common good should not be so applied as to satisfy the conscientious demands of all citizens?

5. Whether taxation otherwise directed than for the good of all is not a violation of the maxim, “Taxation without representation is tyranny”?

6. Whether Catholics have or have not shown zeal for education, both primary and scientific?

7. Whether they have or have not shed their blood in defence of the nation, or furnished any of its great leaders in peace and war?

8. Whether any instance can be shown in which they have entered or inhabited any country on equal terms with Protestants and infidels, and have abused their power to hamper or persecute their fellow-citizens?

9. Whether, in paying their taxes and supporting their own schools to the best of their power, peacefully discussing the question of public welfare and their own rights, Catholics are acting as loyal citizens or as factious disturbers of[708] good-will and kindly feeling among neighbors?

10. Finally, whether, in consideration of the foregoing, our views are not entitled to respectful consideration?

We have no doubt whatever that when the thoughtful and just men of our day and race have duly pondered upon these subjects, we shall fully agree with their deliberate reply.

At no time in the history of our country will it be found that Catholics have introduced religion into the arena of political discussion, and any attempt to do so will meet with failure. In this they are in perfect accord with the principles underlying our institutions and the genuine spirit of this country. If, at this moment, the rancor of ancient bigotry and fanaticism or modern hatred of Christianity has attempted to awaken a political conflict on religious grounds, while it refuses to admit a calm consideration of Catholic claims, we appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober.

In the meantime, we shall assume, that there are those who wish to hear more with regard to our principles and convictions. We shall endeavor to remove all obscurity on the questions now under discussion, and to reply to whatever reasonable objections may be made against our principles.

With regard to the taxation of church property, we await the action of the political world. Some politicians, whose “vaulting ambition” is of that kind which “o’erleaps itself,” would introduce this question into political discussion in order to draw off the attention of the American people from the real, present issues in their politics. We ask for no innovations; but if such be made, let there be no discrimination. We stand before the law as do all other religious denominations. “Let us have peace” were the memorable words spoken at a memorable time by a man who to a large extent held the future of this country in his hands. Those words held, and hold still, the germs of the wisest policy. We repeat them now, and add, if we cannot have peace, let us at least have fair play. If the projectors and advocates of this innovation suppose that, in the event of its being carried out, they will thereby worst the Catholic Church, their action in the end will be found to resemble that of the man who cut off his nose to spite his neighbor.

Since these words were written, four letters have appeared in the New York Times under the heading, “Should Church Property be Taxed?” and over the signature of George H. Andrews. The writer is not a Catholic. His clear, concise reasons against the taxation of church property, as recommended by the President in his message, will have the more weight with non-Catholic readers on that account. It is singular, yet natural, to see how his argument strengthens our own position on the question in a number of ways, particularly as regards the suicidal policy of many who, through hatred or fear of the Catholic Church, may be induced to commit themselves to a measure which would prove an irreparable mischief to their own church or churches. Passing by the many able and suggestive points in Mr. Andrews’ letters, we take just such as more immediately bear on the thoughts thrown out by ourselves.

By the census of 1870 the value of all kinds of church property in the United States belonging to the[709] leading denominations was placed as follows:

“From these it appears,” says Mr. Andrews, “that the relative proportion of each denomination to the whole is substantially as follows:

“Methodist, one-fifth of the aggregate; Roman Catholic, one-sixth of the aggregate; Presbyterian, one-seventh of the aggregate; Baptist, one-ninth of the aggregate; Episcopalian, one-tenth of the aggregate; Congregational, one-fourteenth of the aggregate; Reformed, one-twenty-second of the aggregate; Lutheran, one-twenty-third of the aggregate; Unitarian, one-fifty-ninth of the aggregate; Universalist, one-sixtieth of the aggregate.”

And here is the case in a nutshell: “To me it seems obvious,” comments Mr. Andrews, on reviewing his figures, “that the expectation is that those who belong or are allied to other sects will, from dislike to or fear of the Roman Catholic Church, impose a burden upon it, even if in doing so they are obliged to assume an equal burden themselves; or, in other words, that the owners of $294,000,000 of church property will subject it to taxation in order to impose a similar tax upon the owners of $60,000,000 of church property. So that the adherents of every other sect, at variance among themselves about sundry matters of doctrine and practice, essential and non-essential, can be brought to act in concert, and to give effect to a common spirit of hostility to Roman Catholic doctrine, to Roman Catholic exclusiveness, Roman Catholic aggression, and Roman Catholic influence, by placing a tax upon Roman Catholic Church property—in effect, arousing a spirit of persecution, qualified by the condition imposed by the Constitution, that the would-be persecutor must share in the penalty he may succeed in imposing upon the object of his dislike.” Which is precisely what we have characterized as “cutting off one’s nose to spite a neighbor.”

May we presume to ask whether the taxation of church property will reduce the expenses of the general government, render its officials more honest, and purify our legislative halls? These are the duties of the hour. Here are the issues of our politics. But a profound silence regarding them reigns in the official utterance. Are the projectors of the new policy afraid to face them? Does their conscience make cowards of them? Or is it that they are playing the part of the cuttle-fish?

Up to this period the state and all religious denominations have advanced peaceably to prosperity, and there have been no real grounds of complaint on any side. At least we have heard of none publicly. What, then, has brought about this sudden change? Who has called for it? Why should it be sprung upon us at this moment? No danger threatens from this quarter. There is not visible on our political horizon even the “cloud no bigger than a man’s hand.” Catholics, when only a handful, never dreamed of objecting to the exemption from taxation of the property of other religious denominations,[710] or to the aid which their benevolent institutions received. Can it be the rapid development of Catholicity here which has prompted the proposed innovation? Are these exemptions, which have been handed down from the time of our fathers, to be altered because Catholicity has had her share in the common progress? Let truth and error grapple on a fair and open field. Is there fear that truth will be worsted in the struggle?

If the exemption of church property from taxation be so great an evil and danger to the country, those whom Americans generally are content to regard as their great statesmen must have been very short-sighted men after all to pass by, one after another, so glaring an evil. For the growth of church property is not a thing of to-day. In his message the President says that he believes that “in 1850 the church property of the United States which paid no tax, municipal or State, amounted to about eighty-three million dollars. In 1860 the amount had doubled. In 1875 it is about one thousand million dollars.”

Mr. Andrews questions the estimate for 1875 on the ground that it is too high. But let that pass. The following table, given by Mr. Andrews, shows the increase in value, according to the census, of the property of the ten principal churches for the last twenty years:

The gradation, it will be seen, has been pretty steady, and is comparatively no more marked in 1870 than it was in 1860, or than it was, probably, in 1850. In that year, however, the Catholics were led by four religious bodies, and almost equalled by one. Ten years later they stood second, and after another ten years second still. Surrounded as they are by jealous foes, they offer fair game, therefore, to men in search of political prey. All was right so long as the others reaped an advantage over Catholics; but the moment there appears any prospect of Catholics reaping an advantage equally with the rest, the cry is: The country is in danger, and can only be saved by taxing church property. Who so blind as not to see through this flimsy pretext?

Not Mr. Andrews certainly, and no words of ours could be more forcible than his. “Discarding all circumlocution,” he writes, “it is as well to get down at once to the bottom fact, which is that whatever euphemistic phrases may be resorted to, a desire to obstruct the growth and circumscribe the influence of the Roman Catholic Church gives whatever vitality it may possess to the proposition to tax church property.”

	1850	1860	1870
Methodist,	$14,825,670	$33,683,371	$69,854,121
Roman Catholic,	9,256,753	26,744,119	60,985,556
Presbyterian,	14,543,780	24,227,359	53,265,256
Baptist,	11,620,855	19,789,378	41,608,198
Episcopalian,	11,375,610	21,665,698	36,514,549
Congregational,	8,001,995	13,327,511	25,069,698
Reformed,	4,116,280	4,453,820	16,134,470
Lutheran,	2,909,711	5,385,179	14,917,747
Unitarian,	3,280,822	4,338,316	6,282,675
Universalist,	1,718,316	2,856,095	5,692,325
	$81,649,797	$156,470,846	$330,324,595

But supposing this change to be made, is it to be imagined for a moment that the progress of the church will be stopped by it? That is futile. If, though so few in numbers and at a great disadvantage, the church was able to raise herself to her present position; if, when the exemptions were all in favor of other denominations, Catholics were able to make so great a progress, is it to be supposed that by these changes, and by placing other denominations on an equality with Catholics, the advancement of[711] the Catholic Church is to be retarded?

We have been trained in the stern school of poverty. We are accustomed to sacrifice. Our clergy do not receive high salaries. The personal expenses of his Eminence the Cardinal-Archbishop are much less than those of many a clerical family in New York City. Wherever we have arms to work with, the church of God shall not lack all that is necessary to give it dignity, even if we have to pay taxes for it besides. In Ireland the priests and people have shared their crust in the midst of the famine, and in fear of death, until within a few years. In Germany we are now about to part with our property, under the wicked injustice of the state, rather than submit to its interference in the affairs of conscience. Is any person foolish enough to imagine that a few dollars, more or less, of taxation is going to dishearten or frighten us? If you want to make our people more liberal, if you want to see grand Catholic churches and the cross overtopping roof and spire in every city, just put us on our mettle. Persecution is our legacy. Martyrdom is our life. The cross on our brows is no empty symbol. These are our feelings. We have no alarm whatever.

These proposed innovations are only the entrance of a wedge that, driven home, will disturb the foundations of our government; will create religious strife, and blast the hopes of freedom, not only in this country, but all the world over. They count, however, without their host who think that the American people are prepared to enter on such a career; and the politicians who hope to ride into power by awakening the spirit of fanaticism and religious bigotry among us, if their names be held in memory at all, will at no remote period be pointed out with the finger of scorn and contumely as the disturbers of that peace and harmony which ought always to reign in a just people, and which it is the true policy of all government and the duty of all citizens to foster and maintain. We say nothing at the present regarding the unconstitutionality of these proposed innovations, and of the secret banding together of men to carry them out.

A NIGHT AT THE GRANDE CHARTREUSE.

It is near midnight. I am alone in my cell, awaiting the mysterious guide who brought me hither, and who will return to call me for the office of Matins.

I listen to every sound, seeking to understand its language. During the first hour I still heard steps from time to time in the distance; then I half opened my door and looked outside. At the end of the cloister a white figure appeared, carrying a small light in its hand. It approached at a slow pace, stopped near a pillar, and disappeared under the arches.

Sometimes I have seen other shadows pass along, and have heard a few low-spoken words, … bells which answered each other; then, little by little, everything is extinguished and silent.… There is not another sound, another breath; … but still I listen, and cannot cease to listen.

Is it indeed myself who am in this monastery? Was I, only to-day, yet in the midst of the living? Can one single day comprise so many things? This which is just ending has been so full, so strange, that I cannot well recount all that has happened in it.

And yet it was but this morning that I was at Aix, in the midst of light and noise and gayety.… The children were gambolling around me! All at once some one said: “Suppose we go to the Grande Chartreuse!” It was said just as one would say anything else. We set out, as if for an ordinary excursion, a party of pleasure. Mme. B—— had provisions in readiness, which were increased by the additions of other members of the party, and we start in the midst of lively speeches and merriment.

So long as we proceed along the valley this is all very well. The road rises and descends, running through the vineyards, skirting the rocks, while the warm breath of the south gently moves the surrounding verdure. Then, after piercing the flank of the mountain, it slopes down toward the plains of Dauphine, discovering a horizon all bathed in light.

It is after passing Saint Laurent, at the foot of the Desert, and in perceiving the entrance of the gorge, that one begins to understand something more; … it is then that jesting is silenced and gayety grows grave.

Then, on arriving at the Guiers-Mort, we become altogether dumb. Already we had ceased to laugh; we now ceased to speak, but regarded with a sort of stupefaction this road without issue, which seemed to end in chaos. The mountains rose defiantly before us, overlapping and mingling with each other, and here and there barring the way with huge masses of precipitous rock; the gigantic trees seem to rise to the clouds, and torrents from unknown heights fall as if from heaven, while the rocks crowd upon, before, around, and seem to say, “No farther shall you go.” As we come to a turn, it[713] seems as if all progress were indeed at an end; two immense blocks fallen across each other completely close the horizon.… We approach them, however, and it opens again, the rocks forming a sort of Titanic vaulted roof overhead, and falling again in the form of three bridges, one above the other, the horses continuing to climb a road which the eye cannot take in.

And whilst one is lost in these abysses, what a perfect dream of splendor begins to break overhead! Meadows of the most exquisite green seem as if suspended far above us, silvery rocks jutting out from among their black firs, gigantic oaks grasping the heights of the precipices, their crowns of verdure glittering in the wind.… It is a fantastic apparition. One has visions in one’s childhood of unknown regions, of enchanted forests guarded by genii, but one never thought to contemplate these marvels in reality.

Then, all at once, the mountains separate, the torrents disappear, and in the midst of a gorge rise battlements and spires.… It is the monastery. There it stands, guarded by these lofty sentinels, in this sombre amphitheatre, which would be desolation itself if God had not scattered there all the magical beauties of his creation.

There is not a village, not a cottage, not a wayfarer—nothing; there is La Chartreuse. No solitude can be compared to that!

On the summit of St. Bernard and of the Simplon monasteries destined for the relief of travellers present themselves to the passage of the nations. In the sandy deserts the most isolated convents find themselves in the road of the caravans; but here this road conducts to nothing—it is a silent gorge; it is the Valley of Contemplation; it is the greatest solitude that one can imagine.

And when from those heights one has seen the gradual approach of night; seen these masses of rock and of verdure enfolded in the vast shadows; and, at the summons of the monastery bell, has seen the last of the white robes descend from the mountain, he feels that it is one of those moments in a life which will never be forgotten. Then, after having stayed awhile to contemplate this scene, I rose and came to knock at this door, which has been to so many others as the gate of the tomb.… A Carthusian monk brought me to my cell, went his way in silence, and since then I have been left to my reflections.

There are, then, men who in the morning were in their homes, in the midst of their friends, in life, and stir, and the noise of the outer world.… They have climbed this mountain, they have sought this Desert, have knocked at this gate; it has closed upon them, … and for ever.

They have, as I, sat down at this table; they have gazed at the walls of their cell, and have said to themselves: “Behold henceforth my horizon.” Then they have heard the sound of these bells, the echo of these litanies, and they have said to themselves: “We shall henceforth hear no other voice.”

You see, one reads these things in the works of poets, one sees them represented in the drama; but one must find one’s self actually in a real cell, and one must sleep there, to conceive anything of the reality of a monastic life.

To awake here in the morning; to rise and eat, alone, the food which comes to you through a little wicket, like that of a prisoner;[714] to meet, when one traverses the cloister, other shadows who salute you in silence; to go from the church to the cell, from the cell to the church, and to say to one’s self that it is always and always to be the same!

Always!… All through life; or rather, there is no more life, no more space, no more time. It is the beginning of eternity. One is on the threshold of the infinite, and it seems as if all this nature had only been created to give these men a beginning of eternal repose.

Always alone! The thought crushes one. No more to receive anything from without; to nourish one’s self with spiritualities alone; to meditate, contemplate, and pray. To pray always: … to pray for those who never pray themselves; to pray for those who have shattered your life, and who, may be, have led you hither; … to pray for those who have despoiled your monastery and outraged your habit—even for the impious ones who come to insult you in your very hospitality! And for all this one thing alone suffices: faith.

A bell has rung; it is the hour of Matins. Some one knocks at my door. I open, and they conduct me to the little stall reserved for travellers. At first the obscurity is so great that it is difficult to distinguish anything. The church is empty, and none of the tapers are lighted. Then a door opens in the distance, and the monks enter in procession, each holding a long dark-lantern, of which the slanting gleams dimly lessen the darkness of the chapel. They repair to their stalls, and the Office begins.

It consists principally of a monotonous psalmody of an implacable rhythm, of which one scarcely perceives the first murmurs, and which seems as if it would never end. I gaze at these tall white figures, these motionless heads.… What has been the drama of life to each one? What changes, without and within, have led them there? What have they suffered? And do they suffer still? What has the rule of their order done for them?—and still the psalmody goes on.

At times they rise, uttering what seems to be a sort of lamentation; then they fall prostrate, with their arms stretched out before them; all the lights disappear; there is nothing but darkness and silence; it seems as if man himself were extinguished. After which the lights reappear, the psalmody recommences, and thus it continues.

When the rising sun shone upon the summits of the rocks, I rose from my pallet, exclaiming: “The light at last! Hail to the light!” I open my window and look out.… There is no other place like this; such as it was in the night, such is it in the day. In vain may the sun mount above the horizon to bring warmth into this gorge—the monastery remains cold and, as it were, insensible; in vain his rays dart upon the walls, glitter on the spires, and set the rocks on fire.… There are living men, but one does not see them, one does not hear them; only a wagon drawn by oxen crosses the meadow, followed by a monk, and some beggars are approaching the monastery gate.

Then, without guide or direction, I plunge into the forest in search of the Chapel of S. Bruno. This forest is of incomparable beauty; neither Switzerland nor the Pyrenees contain anything like it. Prodigious trees rise to an immense height, wrapping their gigantic roots about the rocks. In the midst[715] of the waters which murmur on every side unknown vegetations luxuriate, sheltering at their feet a world of ferns, tall grass, and mosses, every dewy feather and spray being hung, as it were, with precious stones, upon which the sun darts here and there rays of gold and touches of fire. There is here a wild enchantment which neither pen nor pencil ever can depict; and in the midst of these marvels rises, from a rock, the Chapel of S. Bruno. There it was that the visions appeared to him, and there he caused a spring of water to flow forth; but to me the most wonderful of all the miracles of his legend was that of his getting there at all—the fact of his reaching the foot of this desert, hatchet in hand, cutting down the trees which barred his entrance, wrestling with wild animals, the masters of this forest, and having no other pathway than the torrent’s bed; ever mounting upwards, in spite of the streams, in spite of the rocks, in spite of everything; never finding himself lost enough, but ever struggling higher and higher still. The miracle is, too, that of his having fixed himself at last upon that spot, and to have called companions around him, who constructed each his little hermitage about his own; that of having, in God’s name, taken possession of these inaccessible mountains, all of which are surmounted by a cross, and to have founded an order which spread itself over the whole Christian world, and which is still existing.

But the hour of departure has arrived. At the moment of quitting this solitude we again reflect. France and Italy lie spread out beneath our feet; … that is to say, passions, hatred, strife.… Why should we descend again? Why resume the burden of ambitions, rivalries, the harness of social conventionalities? To what purpose is it, since the end at last must come alike to all?

We look around, we reflect, and then, after having well meditated, we all descend.

At the foot of the desert we find again huts, then cottages, by and by a village. With movement and life we find our speech again, and with speech discussion. Overwhelmed until then by the wild beauty of all around us and by the majesty of its silence, the sceptics only now recommence the criticisms which were cut short the evening before: “What services do these monks render to mankind? To what purpose do they bury themselves upon those heights, when there is so much to be done below?”

I answer nothing. These are difficult questions. Later we shall know which has chosen the better part, those who act or those who pray; only I remember that whilst thirty thousand Israelites were fighting in the plain, Moses, alone on the mountain, with his arms stretched out towards heaven, implored the God of armies. When his arms fell through weariness, the Amalekites prevailed; and when he raised them, Israel was victorious; and seeing this, he caused his arms to be supported, until the enemies of Israel were overcome.

While we are debating we cross Saint Laurent, Les Echelles, and the Valley du Guiers. Here is Chambéry en fête, with its flags, its concourse of francs-tireurs, and bands of music; but although we have returned to outer life, we have brought away with us something of the solitude we have left, where it seems as if the earth ended.

Believe me, reader, and do not forget my words when you visit these lands. The sight of La Grande Chartreuse is one of the most powerful emotions here below. To whatever religion you may belong, if your soul can be moved by the thought of the life to come, you will preserve an imperishable remembrance of a night spent in this monastery, and will feel that you are not altogether the same man that you were when you entered its walls.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

The author of this volume has read carefully and seriously a large number of works, by different American, French, and English writers, devoted to an explanation of the institutions of the United States, and to the history and social condition of the country. He shows also a remarkable acquaintance with the magazines and newspapers of the United States, so far as they bear on the subjects of which he treats. His book, indeed, must have cost him years of assiduous labor.

M. Jannet gives a just and impartial exposition of the laws and political principles of our country, as also of its present social condition. Rarely, if ever, has a foreigner displayed so conscientious a study of all that goes to make up American civilization. He professes to have entered upon his study and his work without any preconceived theory—a profession not unusual with authors, and for the most part, probably, honestly made. It is one thing, however, to profess, another thing to adhere to the profession. Were it possible for authors to adhere strictly to the profession made by M. Jannet, literature and all of which it treats would certainly not suffer therefrom: But he who imagines he has attained to so just and fair a position is the least free from illusion. The position is simply unattainable, and M. Jannet is scarcely to be blamed if he has not quite reached his ideal.

Two classes of authors have written about the United States. The one sees almost everything in couleur de rose, the other in a sombre hue. M. Jannet belongs to the latter class. Throughout his volume he fastens upon every symptom that threatens the existence or the welfare of the republic. As an enumeration of these symptoms it is exact, and its perusal would do no harm to our spread-eagle orators.

M. Jannet has evidently aimed at counterbalancing the influence of writers, French writers particularly, who have exaggerated the good side of American political society. He seems fearful lest their tone of thought should have too great a preponderance in France, and influence its present transition-state too powerfully in the direction of the United States. Whether or not this was called for is not a question for us to consider. The book, regarded as an impartial exposition of the present condition of the United States, resembles the picture of an artist, the background of which is painted with a Preraphaelite exactness, while the foreground is left unfinished, and the whole work, consequently, incomplete. Had the obvious purpose of the book been proclaimed at the beginning, we should have read it with a more favorable eye.

In his last chapter, however, M. Jannet holds out some hope for the future of the American Republic. In our present commercial depression, in the recent success of the Democratic party, in the number of families who have preserved the primitive virtues and customs of our forefathers, and in the progress of Catholicity he sees a ground for this hope, and concludes his work by saying: “Men are everywhere prosperous or unfortunate,[717] according as they observe or despise the divine law. All their free will consists in choosing between these two terms of the problem of life, and all the efforts of the spirit of innovation only break against, without ever being able to destroy, the eternal bounds set by God to the ambitious feebleness of the creature. Therein lies the lesson that the young republic of the New World sends from beyond the ocean and across the mirage of its rapid prosperity to the old nations of Europe, too inclined to believe in the sophisms of the great modern error, and to mistrust their own traditions.”

M. Jannet’s work is worthy of a more extended notice, which will be given it at a later date. The book may be ordered directly from the publisher in France.

This is a new volume in the series which is intended, when complete, to include the entire life of Jesus Christ. We have already commended the preceding volume, and can only, at present, renew the expression of our concurrence in the unanimous verdict of competent judges, which awards a very high meed of praise to Father Coleridge’s work, so far as it is as yet given to the public.

It is likely to become extensive when fully completed, since the present volume is filled up with the author’s introductory remarks on the missionary life of Our Lord, and the exposition of one portion of the Sermon on the Mount—to wit, the Beatitudes. It is a work which is, strictly speaking, sui generis in our language, and indeed in all modern literature, and one hard to describe in such a way as to give an accurate notion of its quality and scope to a person who has not read some portion of its contents. The author has drawn from the most various and from the purest sources, and has himself meditated in a very attentive and minute manner upon the rich materials furnished him by the sacred lore of his studies. He proceeds leisurely, quietly, carefully, like the patient illuminator of a manuscript text, filling his pages with large and small figures, all elaborately finished. The present volume gives us a sketch of Galilee, the scene of the preaching and miracles of our divine Redeemer during his first year of public ministry, which makes at once the idea of that ministry, of its extraordinary laboriousness, its extent, and the multitude of wonderful works comprehended within its brief period, ten times more vivid than it can be made by a mere perusal of the Gospel narrative. In this respect it is especially interesting and instructive for those who are themselves engaged in missionary labors. We have a picture placed before our minds of the real nature of Our Lord’s public life and ministry, and grouped around it are other pictures, as illustrations, from the lives of the great missionary saints. When the author approaches to his principal theme in this volume—the Sermon on the Mount—he makes the whole scene and all its circumstances appear before us like a fine dioramic view. He is not, however, of that meretricious school to which Renan and Beecher have given a false and momentary éclat, as unworthy of the divine subject as the homage of another class of witnesses on whom Our Lord frequently imposed silence. The poetic, literary, and picturesque charms of Father Coleridge’s style are subservient to his theological, doctrinal, and moral exposition of sacred truths. It is the pure doctrine of the Scriptures, and of the fathers, doctors, and saints of the church, which we are invited and allured to drink from the ornamented chalice.

Whoever, after reading the title of this book, thinks that a treatise of this kind would be useful and helpful, and wishes to find such a book as may really do the service promised by the title, will probably be satisfied with the book itself. It is standard and approved, and has been well translated by Mr. Thompson, whose preface contains some excellent and timely remarks of his own.

This little book purports to be a simple sketch of the life of the Prince of the Apostles. It will serve to recall the principal events in his life, and therefore will possess a certain amount of interest for Catholic readers. The binding, type, and paper are neat and elegant. The object of the book is evidently pious, and therefore we shrink from criticising it too minutely. The style also is pleasing and readable. It is to be regretted, however, that the author did not take a little more pains with his task. It is a good thing to have plenty of books on Catholic subjects; and those who are gifted with power, and who can command the leisure, are, to a certain extent, bound to write. But they are also bound to study consistency and order, and, in sending forth their productions, to show a proper respect for those who are expected to buy them. Good-will does not excuse slovenliness, and we heartily wish that “W. D. S.” had shown a deeper sense of this truth. The fact that a book is small and easily read does not free the writer from a thorough analysis of his subject and employment of all sources of information regarding it. The present work is serviceable as an introduction to a real treatise on the position and office of S. Peter. It is nothing more; and we are sorry that it is not.

A number of the most learned Catholic theologians of Germany have combined together to prepare a complete theological library. The present volume on canon law makes the fifth thus far issued. This library is one which will be very valuable to German priests or those who read German. The names of Hergenröther, Scheeben, and other writers of similar rank who are contributors sufficiently guarantee its excellence.

These and other publications of the Herder publishing house are imported by the enterprising firm of the Benzigers. The first is a convenient and carefully edited text of the acts of the Vatican Council, to which is appended a list of all the episcopal sees and prelatures called nullius in the entire Catholic Church. The second is one portion of the magnificent collection of modern councils published at Maria-Laach, and contains the acts of British and North American councils held during the past century, or, to speak more precisely, from 1789 to 1869.

We cannot speak from personal knowledge of the merit of this translation. Readers of German literature who cannot read Calderon in the original will no doubt be pleased to find some of his great dramas in a German dress, and be sufficiently interested in them to ascertain for themselves how far the great poet has been successfully reproduced.

We have here in two volumes a miscellaneous collection of every kind of folk-lore, in prose and verse, mostly very short pieces which must be very amusing for children and others who like to entertain themselves with curious odds and ends of this sort.

This is a very thoughtful and learned treatise on the Sacrifice of the Mass, and, though not directly controversial, it is a very lucid and satisfactory vindication of the Catholic doctrine on the Holy Eucharist considered as a sacrifice.

The volume contains also essays on “Definitions of the Catholic faith, Existence of the church in relation to Scripture, Tradition as a vehicle of Christian doctrine, The Atonement and Purgatory,” and other subjects, all of them well written, and some, such as the one on “Definitions of the Catholic Faith,” occupied with discussion of questions which are frequently talked of at the[719] present, and upon which it is important to have clear and accurate notions.

We read an account a few days since of four hundred Catholic priests who four years ago were transported from Poland to Siberia by the Russian government; three hundred have died, and the others can survive but a little while. It was only a paragraph in a newspaper. The martyrs die as of old, and we scarcely hear of their sufferings. The missionary work of the church, too, is almost forgotten by her children who are living at ease and in comfort; and yet it is carried on in all quarters of the globe. Our brothers, if we be worthy to call them by this name, are toiling, suffering, dying for Christ and the souls of men in far-off countries of which we seem not to care even to know anything. Here is a book, most interesting and consoling, full of edifying facts and heroic examples, written clearly and simply. It is a history of Christianity in Cochin China and Tonking; and as these two countries form the Empire of Annam, and the history of the church is always one of persecution, of triumph through suffering, the book is entitled The Persecutions of Annam. For centuries Europeans have been excluded from this country, into the interior of which the only strangers who have penetrated have been Catholic missionaries, and they have gone at the risk of their lives. For two hundred and fifty years the apostles of the church have been laboring in Annam, and whoever will read this book will be struck with wonder at the work they have done and the sufferings they have endured. Never anywhere have there been more barbarous or cruel persecutions, and never have they been borne with more heroic fortitude and simple trust in God.

And then what a wealth of instruction in the lives of these Annamite converts! From 1615 down to our own day thousands and hundreds of thousands have received the faith, and, rather than forfeit it, hundreds and thousands have endured every torment, death itself. Their warm piety, their intelligent faith, their dauntless courage, put us to shame.

The last persecution broke out in 1858, and raged until the Christians were relieved by the arms of France, in consequence of which a treaty of peace was signed in June, 1862, which was soon followed by a decree granting religious worship; and we may hope that the soil which has drunk the blood of so many martyrs will yet become the vineyard of Christ.

But we must refer our readers to the book itself, and close this brief notice with the wish that some one of our Catholic houses in this country may republish this most interesting chapter of Catholic history.

It is refreshing in these days to meet with a non-Catholic writer like Mr. Dix, who takes his stand on Christianity and the law of Christ as the foundation of all right law and government. There is a class, and a large class, of patriots among us who seem, unconsciously indeed, to resent the idea that Almighty God had anything at all to do with the growth and development of this country. To this class of men Mr. Dix’s book will be a sharp reminder that there is a God above us who rules all things, and that religion and governments did actually exist in the world at large—and in the New World, for the matter of that—before the Mayflower touched these shores. The book deals with just what its title indicates: the American state and American statesmen. Among the statesmen dealt with are Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, and several of the historic names that have lent a lustre to Congress. But the larger and graver portion of the book deals with the constitution of the States in themselves and their relation to the States as a whole or nation. Mr. Dix is a strong and earnest advocate for his views; but his views in the present matter are almost diametrically opposed to the general feeling of Americans. “Are the United States a nation?” he boldly asks in the final chapter of the book, and his answer is “yes” and “no.” In a word, he is strongly in favor of the centralization of sovereignty as opposed to the local independence of States. As long as federalism exists, says Mr. Dix, practically, so long is the nation exposed[720] to disorder and a renewal of the civil war.

So important a question, it is needless to remark, is scarcely to be settled in a book-notice; is, indeed, beyond books altogether. It is a growth. The country and government alike are a growth, and a growth that will not be forced. They are just entering on the hundredth year of a life that has been seriously threatened, and, notwithstanding the theatrical thunder which is being heard just now of politicians resolved to make “a hit,” we cannot but look to the development of this growth with hope and confidence. At the same time, it is the part of all who are concerned to guard that growth well, to see that no weeds spring up around it, to let in light and air and freedom, and to keep off all noxious influences that would threaten the life of the parent stem. In the desire to do this, such chapters as “Christianity the Inspirer of Nations,” “Materialism the Curse of America,” and “America a Christian Power,” which seem to us the strongest chapters in Mr. Dix’s book, will be found full of eloquent suggestion and sound, even solemn, advice. The book, as a whole, will be found a very interesting one. The writer is a bold man, who certainly has the courage of his convictions, which he never hesitates to express openly. The book overruns with apt illustration and an extraordinary eloquence. Indeed, there is a fault in parts of too great eloquence, compensated for over and over again by passages full of terseness, purity, and strength.

This volume completes the first Bric-à-Brac Series. The publishers announce an extensive sale—proof only of its being suited to certain literary tastes. We have not been able to pronounce a very favorable opinion upon the merits of the series. In turning over the leaves of a college sheet the other day, we came upon an extract from the letter of a young lady at one of our fashionable seminaries, in which, counselling her sisters to high resolves and noble aims, she says: “Instead of getting a new hat this term, let us buy a Bric-à-Brac.” We think this is good evidence of the value of these volumes as literary works. They are admirably suited for boarding-school misses. But what the authors and scholars who are gossiped about would say at being brought down to this level is another question. On the whole, we would advise this young lady to buy a new hat instead. The hat will serve a useful if not a very exalted purpose in covering her head; the “Bric-à-Brac” will fill it with frivolous and untrustworthy chit-chat.

This volume treats, under distinct heads, of forty-six persons—including a majority of the poets, novelists, historians, linguistic scholars, and essayists of Scotland at the beginning of this century, with a sprinkling of English and German savants, including Goethe—in a little over three hundred small duodecimo pages. That is to say, it gives an average of seven pages to each author. These seven pages are devoted almost exclusively in each instance to trivial personal anecdotes. From this simple inventory, therefore, it will be easy to form an accurate notion of what the young lady gains mentally as an equivalent for the loss of her new hat.

Considerable space is given, however, to one or two worthies. Of these, William Godwin, the revolutionary propagandist, holds the first place, and with him incidentally his first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. This precious pair are handled with great tenderness and unction.

The rest of the volume is made up chiefly of reminiscences of the small literary stars who twinkled round Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh at the beginning of the century, and stole something from the reflection of his brightness, but who are now for the most part forgotten.

Excellent stories, all of which might have been drawn from actual life, are to be found in this volume. Like all of Oliver Optic’s books, it may be safely placed in the hands of young people. Some of the sketches, such as “Good-for-Nothings,” might be read with as much profit as amusement by grown-up persons, especially those who are continually complaining about servant-girls.

THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXII., No. 132.—MARCH, 1876.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by Rev. I. T. Hecker, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

A SEQUEL OF THE GLADSTONE CONTROVERSY.

One of the most mischievous prejudices of our day is the popular theory that the cure for all evils is to be sought in the intellectual education of the masses. Those nations, we are told by every declaimer, in which the education of the people is most universal, are the most moral, the richest, the strongest, the freest, and their prosperity rests upon the most solid and lasting foundation. Make ignorance a crime, teach all to read and write, and war will smooth its rugged front, armies will be disbanded, crime will disappear, and mankind will have found the secret of uninterrupted progress, the final outcome of which will surpass even our fondest dreams.

This fallacy, which has not even the merit of being plausible, is, of course, made to do service in M. de Laveleye’s pamphlet on the comparative bearing of Protestantism and Catholicism on the prosperity of nations.

“It is now universally admitted,” he informs us (p. 22), “that the diffusion of enlightenment is the first condition of progress.… The general spread of education is also indispensable to the exercise of constitutional liberty.… In short, education is the basis of national liberty and prosperity.”

He then goes on to declare that in this matter of popular education Protestant countries are far in advance of those that are Catholic; that this is necessarily so, since “the Reformed religion rests on a book—the Bible; the Protestant, therefore, must know how to read. Catholic worship, on the contrary, rests upon sacraments and certain practices—such as confession, Masses, sermons—which do not necessarily involve reading. It is, therefore, unnecessary to know how to read; indeed, it is dangerous, for it inevitably shakes the principle of passive obedience on which the whole Catholic edifice reposes: reading is the road that leads to heresy.”

“The diffusion of enlightenment is the first condition of progress. Education is indispensable to the exercise of constitutional liberty. Education is the basis of national liberty and prosperity.”

Enlightenment is, of course, of the mind, and means the development, more or less perfect, of the intellectual faculties; and education, since it is here considered as synonymous with enlightenment, must be taken in this narrow sense.

Progress is material, moral, intellectual, social, political, artistic, religious, scientific, literary, and indefinitely manifold. Now, it is assumed that the diffusion of enlightenment is not merely promotive, but that it is an essential condition of progress in its widest and fullest meaning. This is the new faith—the goddess of culture, holding the torch of science and leading mankind into the palace of pleasure, the only true heaven.

By conduct, we have already said, both individuals and nations are saved or perish; and we spoke of the civilized. Barbarous states are destroyed by catastrophes—they die a violent death; but the civilized are wasted by internal maladies—suis et ipsa Roma viribus ruit. They grow and they decay, they progress and they decline. At first poverty, virtue, industry, faith, hopefulness, strong characters and heroic natures; at last wealth, corruption, indolence, unbelief, despair, children too weak even to admire the strength of their fathers, too base to believe that they were noble. Public spirit dies out; patriotism is in the mouths of politicians, but, like the augurs of Rome, they cannot speak the word and look one another in the face. The country is to each one what he can make out of it, and the bond of union is the desire of each citizen to secure his own interests. The bondholders love their country, and the sans-culottes are disloyal; class rises against class, civil discord unsettles everything, revolution succeeds revolution, and when the barbarian comes he holds an inquest over the corpse. It generally happens, too, that those civilizations which spring up quickest and promise most fair are fated to die earliest; as precocious children disappoint fond mothers. If the teaching of history is a trustworthy guide, we are certainly safe in affirming that civilized states and empires perish, not from lack of knowledge, but of virtue; not because the people are ignorant, but because they are corrupt.

The assumption, however, is that men become immoral because they are ignorant; that if they were enlightened, they would be virtuous.

“The superstition,” says Herbert Spencer (Study of Sociology, p. 121), “that good behavior is to be forthwith produced by lessons learned out of books, which was long ago statistically disproved, would, but for preconceptions, be utterly dissipated by observing to what a slight extent knowledge affects conduct; by observing that the dishonesty implied in the adulterations of tradesmen and manufacturers, in fraudulent bankruptcies, in bubble-companies, in ‘cooking’ of railway accounts and financial prospectuses, differs only in form, and not in amount, from the dishonesty of the uneducated; by observing how amazingly little the teachings given to medical students affect their lives, and how even the most experienced medical men have their prudence scarcely at all increased by their information.”

It is not knowledge, but character, that is important; and character is formed more by faith, by hope, by love, admiration, enthusiasm, reverence, than by any patchwork of alphabetical and arithmetical symbols. The young know but little; but they believe firmly, they hope nobly, and love generously; and it is while knowledge is feeble and these spontaneous acts of the soul are strong that character is moulded. The curse of our age is that men will believe that, in education, to spell, to read, to write, is what signifies, and they cast aside the eternal faith, the infinite hope, the divine love, that more than all else make us men.

“The true test of civilization,” says Emerson, “is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops—no, but the kind of man the country turns out.” Is there some mystic virtue in printed words that to be able to read them should make us men? And even in the most enlightened countries what do the masses of men know? Next to nothing; and their reading, for the most part, stupefies them. The newspaper, with its murders, suicides, hangings, startling disclosures, defalcations, embezzlements, burglaries, forgeries, adulteries, advertisements of nostrums, quack medicines, and secrets of working death in the very source of life, with all manner of hasty generalizations, crude theories, and half-truths jumbled into intellectual pot-pourris; the circulating library, with its stories, tales, romances of love, despair, death, of harrowing accidents, of hair-breadth escapes, of successful crime, and all the commonplaces of wild, reckless, and unnatural life—these are the sources of their knowledge. Or, if they are ambitious, they read “How to get on in the world,” “The art of making money,” “The secret of growing rich,” “The road to wealth,” “Successful men,” “The millionaires of America,” and the Mammon-worship, and the superstition of matter, and the idolatry of success become their religion; their souls die within them, and what wretched slaves they grow to be!

In the newspaper and circulating library God and man, heaven and earth—all things—are discussed, flippantly, in snatches, generally; all possible conflicting and contradictory views are taken; and these ignorant masses, who, in the common schools, have been through the Fourth Reader, and who know nothing, not even their own ignorance, are confused. They doubt, they lose faith, and are enlightened by the discovery that God, the soul, truth, justice, honor, are only nominal—they do not concern positivists. Can anything be more pitiful than the state of these poor wretches?—neither knowing nor believing; without knowledge, yet having neither faith nor love. God pity them that they are communists, internationalists, solidaires; for what else could they be? No enthusiasm is possible for them but that of destruction.

Religion is the chief element in civilization, and consequently in progress. For the masses of men, even though the whole energy of mankind should spend itself upon some or any possible common-school system, the eternal principles which mould character, support manhood, and consecrate humanity will always remain of faith, and can never be held scientifically. If it were possible that science should prove religion false, it would none the less remain true, or there would be no truth.

What children know when they leave school is mechanical, external to their minds, fitted on them like clothes on the body; and it is soon worn threadbare, and hangs in shreds and patches. Take the first boy whom you meet, fourteen or fifteen years old, fresh from the common school, and his ignorance of all real knowledge will surprise you. What he knows is little and of small value; what is of moment is whether he believes firmly, hopes strongly, and loves truly. Not the diffusion of enlightenment do we want so much, but the diffusion of character, of honest faith, and manly courage.

Man is more than his knowledge. Simple faith is better than reading and writing. And yet the educational quacks treat the child as though he were mere mind, and his sole business to use it, and chiefly for low ends, shrewdly and sharply, with a view to profit; as though life were a thing of barter, and wisdom the art of making the most of it.

Poor child! who wouldst live by admiration, hope, and love, how they dwarf thy being, stunt thy growth, and flatten all thy soaring thoughts with their dull commonplaces—thrift, honesty is the best policy, time is money, knowledge is wealth, and all the vocabulary of a shop-keeping and trading philosophy. Poor child! who wouldst look out into the universe as God’s great temple, and behold in all its glories the effulgence of heaven; to whom morning, noon, and night, and change of season, golden flood of day and star-lit gloom, all speak of some diviner life, how they stun thy poetic soul, full of high dreams and noble purposes, with their cold teaching that man lives on bread alone—put money in thy purse! And when thou wouldst look back with awe and reverence to the sacred ages past, to the heroes, sages, saints of the olden times, they come with their gabble and tell thee there were no railroads and common schools in those days.

Is it strange that this education should hurt the nation’s highest interests by driving in crowds, like cattle to the shambles, our youths from God and nature and tilling of the soil to town and city, or, worse, into professions to which only their conceit or distaste for hard labor calls them? What place for morality is there in this Poor Richard’s Catechism—education of thrift and best policy? We grow in likeness to what we love, not to what we know. With low aims and selfish loves only narrow and imperfect characters are compatible.

Science, when cherished for itself—which it seldom is and in very exceptional cases—refines and purifies its lovers, and chastens the force of passion; though even here we must admit that the wisest of mankind may be the meanest, morally the most unworthy. But for the great mass of men, even of those who are called educated, the possession of such knowledge as they have or can have has no necessary relation with higher moral life. Their learning may refine, smooth over, or conceal their sin; it will not destroy it. The furred gown and intertissued robe hide the faults that peep through beggars’ rags, but they are there all the same. There may be a substitution of pride for sensuality, or a skilful blending or alternation of the finer with the coarser. Vice may lose its grossness, but not its evil. And herein we detect the wretched sophistry of criminal statistics,[725] which deal, imperfectly and roughly enough, with what is open, shocking, and repulsive. The hidden sins that “like pitted speck in garnered fruit,” slowly eating to the core of a people’s life, moulder all; the sapping of faith, the weakening of character, the disbelief in goodness; the luxury, the indulgence, the heartlessness and narrowness of the rich; the cunning devices through which “the spirit of murder” works in the very means of life,

—cannot be appreciated by the gross tests of numbers and averages. The poor, by statistics as by the world, are handled without gloves. In the large cities of civilized countries, both in ancient and in modern times, we have unmistakable proof of what knowledge can do to form character and produce even the social virtues. These populations have had the advantage of the best schools in the most favorable circumstances, and yet in character and morality they are far beneath the less educated peasantry. Sensual indulgence, contempt of authority, hatred and jealousy of those above them, make these the dangerous classes, eager for socialistic reforms, radical upheavals of the whole existing order; and were it not for the more religious tillers of the soil, chaos and misrule would already prevail. In Greece and Rome it was in the cities that civilization first perished, as it was there it began—began with men who had great faith and strong character, but little knowledge; perished among men who were learned and refined, but who in indulgence and debauch had lost all strength and honesty of purpose.

In the last report of the Commissioner of Education some interesting facts, bearing on the relation of ignorance to crime, are taken from the Forty-fifth Annual Report of the inspector of the State penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

“It is doubted if in any State, or indeed in any country,” says the commissioner, “forty-four volumes containing the annual statistical tables relating to the populations of a penal institution, covering nearly half a century, can, on examination, be regarded as more complete.”

The number of prisoners received into the institution from 1850 to 1860 was 1,605, of whom 15 per cent. were illiterate, 15 per cent. were able to read, and 70 per cent., or more than two-thirds, knew how to read and write; from 1860 to 1870, 2,383 prisoners were received into the penitentiary, and of these 17 per cent. were illiterate, 12 per cent. could read, and about 71 per cent. could read and write.

Of the 627 convicts who were in the penitentiary during the year 1867, 62 per cent., or five-eighths of the whole number, had attended the public schools of the State, 25 per cent., or two-eighths, had gone to private institutions, and 12 per cent., or one-eighth, had never gone to school.

But, as we have said, statistics deal with crime, and chiefly with the more open and discoverable sort, not with morality; whereas nations are destroyed not so much by crime as by immorality.

The thief is caught and sent to the penitentiary; but the trader who adulterates or gives short measure, the banker who puts forth a false or exaggerated statement, the merchant who fails with full hands, the stock-gambler who robs thousands, Crédit-Mobilier men and “ring” men generally who plunder[726] scientifically, Congressmen who take money for helping to swindle the government, getters-up of “bubble companies”—salted diamond-fields and Emma Mines—compared with whom pickpockets and burglars are respectable gentlemen—these know not of penitentiaries; prisons were not built for such as they. The poor man abandons his wife, without divorce marries another, and is very properly sent to State prison. His rich and educated fellow-citizen gets a divorce, or is a free-lover, or keeps a harem, and for him laws were not made. Even that respectable old dame Society only gently shakes her head. We must not expect too much of gentlemen, you know. The ignorant girl falls, commits infanticide, and is incarcerated or hanged—heaven forbid that we should attempt to tell what she would have done had she been educated!—at any rate, she would not have gone to prison, though her guilt would not have been less.

Has the very great diffusion of enlightenment among our people during the hundred years that we have been an independent nation made them more moral and more worthy?

“The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops—no, but the kind of man the country turns out.”

The Yankee is smarter than the Puritan—is he as true a man? Is the inventor of a sewing-machine or a patent bedstead as worthy as he who believes in God and in liberty against the whole earth with all his heart and soul, even though the heart be hard and the soul narrow? What compensation is there in all our philanthropies, transcendentalisms, sentimentalities, patent remedies for social evils, for the loss of the strong convictions, reverent belief, and simple dignity of character that made our fathers men? Do we believe in the goodness and honesty of men as they did, or is it possible that we should? What can come of beliefs in oversouls, whims, tendencies, abstractions, developments? If we were shadows in a shadow-land, this might do.

Look at a famous trial where the very aroma and fine essence of our civilization was gathered: What bright minds, keen intellects! Poetry, eloquence, romance; the culture, the knowledge, the scientific theories, of the age—all are there. And yet, when the veil is lifted, we simply turn away heart sick and nauseated. Not a hundred statistical prison reports would reveal the festering corruption and deep depravity, the coarse vulgarity and utter heartlessness that is there, whatever the truth may be, if in such surroundings it can be found at all.

In Laing’s Notes of a Traveller (p. 221) we find a most striking example of almost incredible corruption united with great intellectual culture. “In this way,” he says, “we must account for the singular fact that the only positively immoral religious sect of the present times in the Christian world arose and has spread itself in the most educated part of the most educated country in Europe—in and about Königsberg, the capital of the province of Old Prussia. The Muckers are a sect who combine lewdness with religion. The conventicles of this sect are frequented by men and women in a state of nudity; and to excite the animal passion, but to restrain its indulgence, is said to constitute their religious exercise. Many of the highest nobility of the province, and two of[727] the established clergy of the city, besides citizens, artificers, and ladies, old and young, belong to this sect; and two young ladies are stated to have died from the consequences of excessive libidinous excitement. It is no secret association of profligacy shunning the light. It is a sect—according to the declarations of Von Tippelskirch and of several persons of consideration in Königsberg who had been followers of it themselves—existing very extensively under the leadership of the established ministers of the Gospel, Ebel and Diestel, of a Count von Kaniz, of a Lady von S——, and of other noble persons.… The system and theory of this dreadful combination of vice with religion are, of course, very properly suppressed.… The sect itself appears, by Dr. Bretscheider’s account of it, to have been so generally diffused that he says ‘it cannot be believed that the public functionaries were in ignorance of its existence; but they were afraid to do their duty from the influence of the many principal people who were involved in it.’”

But we are not the advocates of ignorance. We will praise with any man the true worth and inestimable value of education. Even mere mental training is, to our thinking, of rare price. Water is good, but without bread it will not sustain life. Wine warms and gladdens the heart of man; but if used without care, it maddens and drives to destruction. We are crying out against the folly of the age which would make the school-room its church, education its sacrament, and culture its religion. It is the road to ruin. Culture is for the few; and what a trumpery patchwork of frippery and finery and paste diamonds it must ever remain for the most of these! For the millions it means the pagan debauch, the bacchanal orgy, and mere animalism.

“The characters,” wrote Goethe—who was pagan of the pagans and “decidirter Nicht-Christ”—“which we can truly respect have become rarer. We can sincerely esteem only that which is not self-seeking.… I must confess to have found through my whole life unselfish characters of the kind of which I speak only there where I found a firmly-grounded religious life; a creed, which had an unchangeable basis, resting upon itself—not dependent upon the time, its spirit, or its science.”

This foundation of a positive religious faith is as indispensable to national as to individual character, and without it the diffusion of enlightenment cannot create a great or lasting civilization. Religion ought to constitute the very essence of all primary education. It alone can touch the heart, raise the mind, and evoke from their brutish apathy the elements of humanity, especially the reason; and it is therefore the one indispensable element in any right system of national education. A population unable to read or write, but with a religious faith and discipline, has before now constituted, and may again constitute, a great nation; but a people without religious earnestness has no solid political character. Religion is the widest and deepest of all the elements of civilization; it reaches those whom nothing else can touch; but for the masses of men there can be no religion without the authoritative teaching of a church.

And now let us return to M. de[728] Laveleye. “The general spread of education,” he says (p. 23), “is indispensable to the exercise of constitutional liberty.… Education is the basis of national liberty and prosperity.”

In view of the facts that constitutional liberty has existed, and for centuries, in states in which there was no “general spread of education,” and that “the diffusion of enlightenment” is found in our own day to co-exist with the most hateful despotisms, we might pass on, without stopping to examine more closely these loose and popular phrases; but since the fallacies which they contain form a part of the culture-creed of modern paganism, and are accepted as indisputable truths by the multitude, they have a claim upon our attention which their assertion by Mr. Gladstone’s friend could not give them.

There is no necessary connection between popular education and civil liberty, as there is none between the enlightenment and the morality of a people. This is a subject full of import—one which, in this age and country, ought to be discussed with perfect freedom and courage. Courage indeed is needed precisely here; for to deny that there is a God, to treat Christ as a myth or a common man, to declaim against religion as superstition, to make the Bible a butt for witticisms and fine points, to deny future life and the soul’s immortality, to denounce marriage, to preach communism, and to ridicule whatever things mankind have hitherto held sacred—this is not only tolerable, it is praiseworthy and runs with the free thought of an enlightened and inquiring age. But to raise a doubt as to the supreme and paramount value of intellectual training; of its sovereign efficacy in the cure of human ills; of its inseparable alliance with freedom, with progress, with man’s best interests, is pernicious heresy, and ought not to be borne with patiently. In our civilization, through the action of majorities, there is special difficulty in such discussions, since with us nothing is true except what is popular. Majorities rule, and are therefore right. With rare eloquence we denounce tyrant kings and turn to lick the hands of the tyrant people. Whoever questions the wisdom of the American people is not to be argued with—he is to be pitied; and therefore both press and pulpit, though they flaunt the banner of freedom, are the servants of the tyrant. To have no principles, but to write and speak what will please the most and offend the fewest—this is the philosophy of free speech. We therefore have no independent, and consequently no great, thinkers. It is dangerous not to think with majorities and parties; for those who attempt to break their bonds generally succeed, like Emerson, only in becoming whimsical, weak, and inconclusive. It is not surprising, then, that the Catholics, because they do not accept as true or ultimate what is supposed to be the final thought and definite will of American majorities on the subject of education, should be denounced, threatened, and made a Trojan Horse of to carry political adventurers into the White House.

Nevertheless, the observant are losing confidence in the theory, so full of inspiration to demagogues and declaimers, that superstition and despotism must be founded on ignorance. In Prussia at this moment universal education co-exists with despotism. Where tyrannical[729] governments take control of education they easily make it their ally.

Let us hear what Laing says of the practical results of the Prussian system of education, which it is so much the fashion to praise.

In spite of the continued progress of education, there is even less liberty, religious, civil, and political, in Prussia to-day than when these words were written, thirty years ago.

Nothing more dazzles the eyes of men than great military success; and this, together with the habit which belongs to our race of applauding whoever wins, has produced, especially in England and the United States, where Bismarck is looked upon, ignorantly enough, as the champion of Protestantism, a kind of blind admiration and awe for whatever is Prussian. “Protestant Prussia,” boasts M. de Laveleye, “has defeated two empires, each containing twice her own population, the one in seven weeks, the other in seven months”; and in the new edition of Appleton’s Encyclopædia we are informed that these victories are attributed to the superior education of her people. As well might the tyranny of the government and the notorious unchastity and dishonesty of the Prussians be ascribed to their superior education. Not to the general intelligence of the people, but to the fact that the whole country has been turned into a military camp, and that to the one purpose of war all interests have been made subservient, must we seek for an explanation of the victories of Sadowa and Sedan.

Who would pretend that the[730] Spartans were in war superior to the Athenians because they had a more perfect system of education and were more intelligent or had a truer religion? Or who would think of accounting in this way for the marvellous exploits of Attila with his Huns, of Zingis Khan with his Moguls, of Tamerlane with his Tartars, of Mahmood, Togrul-Beg, and Malek-Shah with their Turkish hordes?

In fact, it may be said, speaking largely and in general, that the history of war is that of the triumph of strong and ignorant races over those which have become cultivated, refined, and corrupt. The Romans learned from their conquered slaves letters and the vices of a more polished paganism. Barbarism is ever impending over the civilized world. The wild and rugged north is ever rushing down upon the soft and cultured south: the Scythian upon the Mede, the Persian, and the Egyptian; the Macedonian upon Greece, and then upon Asia and Africa; the Roman upon Carthage, and in turn falling before the men of the North—Goth, Vandal, Hun, Frank, and Gaul; the Mogul and the Tartar upon China and India; the Turk upon Southern Europe, Asia, and Africa; and to-day, like black clouds of destiny, the Russian hordes hang over the troubled governments of more educated Europe. Look at Italy during the middle ages—the focus of learning and the arts for all Christendom, and yet an easy prey for every barbarous adventurer; and in England the Briton yields to the Saxon, who in turn falls before the Norman. It would be truer to say that Prussia owes her military successes to the ignorance of her people, though they nearly all can read and write. Had she had to deal with intelligent, enlightened, and thinking populations, she could not have made the country a camp of soldiers.

The Prussian policy of “blood and iron” has been carried out, in defiance of the wishes of the people as expressed through their representatives, who were snubbed and scolded and sent back home as though they were a pack of schoolboys; yet the people looked on in stolid indifference, and allowed the tax to be levied after they had refused to grant it.

“With regard to elementary instruction,” he says, “the Protestant states are incomparably more advanced than the Catholic. England alone is no more than on a level with the latter, probably because the Anglican Church, of all the reformed forms of worship, has most in common with the Church of Rome.”

If any one has good reason to praise education, and above all the education of the people, certainly we Catholics have. The Catholic Church created the people; she first preached the divine doctrine of the brotherhood and equality of all men before God, which has wrought and must continue to work upon society until all men shall be recognized as equals by the law. She drew around woman her magic circle; from the slave struck his fetters and bade him be a man; lifted to her bosom the child; baptized all humanity into the inviolable sacredness of Christ’s divinity; she appealed, and still appeals, from the tyranny of brute force and success, in the name of the eternal liberties of the soul, to God. Her martyrs were and are the martyrs of liberty; and if she were not to-day,[731] all men would accept accomplished facts and bow before whatever succeeds.

The barbarians, who have developed into the civilized peoples of Europe, despised learning as they contemned labor. War was their business. The knight signed his name with his sword, in blood; the pen, like the spade, was made for servile hands. To destroy this ignorant, idle life of pillage and feud, the church organized an army, unlike any the world had ever seen, unlike any it will ever see outside her pale—an army of monks, who, with faith in Christ and the higher life, believed in knowledge and in work. They became the cultivators of the mind and soil of Europe.

“The praise,” says Hallam, speaking of the middle ages, “of having originally established schools belongs to some bishops and abbots of the VIth century.”

Ireland is converted and at once becomes a kind of university for all Europe. In England the episcopal sees became centres of learning. Wherever a cathedral was built a school with a library grew up under its shadow. Pope Eugenius II., in a council held in Rome in 826, ordered that schools should be established throughout Christendom at cathedral and parochial churches and other suitable places. The Council of Mayence, in 813, admonishes parents that they are in duty bound to send their children to school. The Synod of Orleans, in 800, enjoins the erection in towns and villages of schools for elementary instruction, and adds that no remuneration shall be received except such as the parents voluntarily offer. The Third General Council of Lateran, in 1179, commanded that in all cathedral churches a fund should be set aside for the foundation and support of schools for the poor. Free schools were thus first established by the Catholic Church. The monasteries were the libraries where the arts and letters of a civilization that had perished were carefully treasured up for the rekindling of a brighter and better day.

As early as the XIIth century many of the universities of Europe were fully organized. Italy took the lead, with universities at Rome Bologna, Padua, Naples, Pavia, and Perugia—the sources

The schools founded at Oxford and Cambridge in the IXth and Xth centuries had in the XIIth grown to be universities. At Oxford there were thirty thousand, at Paris twenty-five thousand, and at Padua twenty thousand students. Scattered over Europe at the time Luther raised his voice against the church were sixty six universities.

To find fault with the church because popular education in the middle ages was not organized and general as it has since become would be as wise as to pick a quarrel with the ancient Greeks for not having railroads, or with the Romans because they had no steamships. Reading and writing were not taught then universally as they are now because it was physically and morally impossible that they should have been. Without steam and the printing-press, common-school systems would not now be practicable, nor would the want of them be felt. We have great reason to be thankful that the art of printing was invented and America discovered before Luther burned the Pope’s bull, else we should be continually bothered with refuting the cause-and-effect historians who would have infallibly traced both these events to the Wittenberg conflagration.

All Europe was still Catholic when gunpowder drove old Father Schwarz’s pestle through the ceiling, when Gutenberg made his printing-press, when Columbus landed in the New World; and these are the forces which have battered down the castles of feudalism, have brought knowledge within the reach of all, and some measure of redress to the masses of the Old World, by affording them the possibility and opportunity of liberty in the New. These forces would have wrought to even better purpose had Protestantism not broken the continuity and homogeneity of Christian civilization. The Turk would not rest like a blight from heaven upon the fairest lands of Europe and Asia, nor the darkness of heathenism upon India and China, had the civilized nations remained of one faith; and thus, though our own train might have rushed less rapidly down the ringing grooves of change, the whole human race would have advanced to a level which there now seems but little reason to hope it will ever reach.

But to come more nearly to M. de Laveleye’s assertion that the Protestant states are incomparably more advanced than the Catholic, with the exception of England, which in this matter is at least up to the standard of Catholic countries. In the report of the Commissioner of Education for 1874 there is a statistical account of the state of education in foreign countries which throws some light upon this subject.

The school attendance, compared with the population, is in Austria as 1 to 10; in Belgium, as 1 to 10½; in Ireland, as 1 to 16; in Catholic Switzerland, as 1 to 16; in England, as 1 to 17. In Bavaria it is as 1 to 7, upon the authority of Kay, in his Social Condition of the People in England and Europe. Catholic Austria, Bavaria, Belgium,[733] and Ireland have proportionately a larger school attendance than Protestant England. England and Wales (report of 1874), with a population of 22,712,266, had a school population of 5,374,700, of whom only about half were registered, and not half of these attended with sufficient regularity to bring grants to their schools. Ireland, with a population of 5,411,416, had on register 1,006,511, or nearly half as many as England and Wales, though her population is not a fourth of that of these two countries. “The statistical fact,” says Laing, speaking of Rome as it was under the popes, “that Rome has above a hundred schools more than Berlin, for a population little more than half that of Berlin, puts to flight a world of humbug about systems of national education carried on by governments and their moral effects on society.… In Catholic Germany, in France, Italy, and even Spain, the education of the common people in reading, writing, arithmetic, music, manners, and morals, is at least as generally diffused and as faithfully promoted by the clerical body as in Scotland. It is by their own advance, and not by keeping back the advance of the people, that the popish (sic) priesthood of the present day seek to keep ahead of the intellectual progress of the community in Catholic lands; and they might, perhaps, retort on our Presbyterian clergy, and ask if they, too, are in their countries at the head of the intellectual movement of the age. Education is in reality not only not repressed, but is encouraged, by the popish church, and is a mighty instrument in its hands, and ably used.”[250]

Professor Huxley’s testimony is confirmatory of this admission of Laing. “It was my fortune,” he says, “some time ago to pay a visit to one of the most important of the institutions in which the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church in these islands are trained; and it seemed to me that the difference between these men and the comfortable champions of Anglicanism and Dissent was comparable to the difference between our gallant Volunteers and the trained veterans of Napoleon’s Old Guard. The Catholic priest is trained to know his business and do it effectually. The professors of the college in question, learned, zealous, and determined men, permitted me to speak frankly with them. We talked like outposts of opposed armies during a truce—as friendly enemies; and when I ventured to point out the difficulties their students would have to encounter from scientific thought, they replied: ‘Our church has lasted many ages, and has passed safely through many storms. The present is but a new gust of the old tempest; and we do not turn out our young men less fitted to weather it than they have been in former times to cope with the difficulties of those times.’”[251]

“It is a common remark,” says Kay, “of the operatives of Lancashire, and one which is only too true: ‘Your church is a church for the rich, but not for the poor. It was not intended for such people as we are.’ The Roman church is much wiser than the English in this respect.… It is singular to observe how the priests of Romanist (sic) countries abroad associate with the poor. I have often seen them riding with the peasants in[734] their carts along the roads, eating with them in their houses, sitting with them in the village inns, mingling with them in their village festivals, and yet always preserving their authority.”[252]

With us, too, the masses of the people are fast abandoning Protestantism. There is no Catholic country in Europe in which the social condition of the masses is so wretched as in England, the representative Protestant country. For three hundred years, it may be said, the Catholic Church had no existence there. The nation was exclusively under Protestant influence; and yet the lower classes were suffered to remain in stolid ignorance, until they became the most degraded population in Christendom.

“It has been calculated,” says Kay, writing in 1850, “that there are at the present day, in England and Wales, nearly 8,000,000 persons who cannot read and write.” That was more than half of the whole population at that time. But this is not the worst. A population ignorant of reading and writing may nevertheless, to a certain extent, be educated through religious teaching and influence; but these unhappy creatures were left, helpless and hopeless, to sink deeper and deeper beneath the weight of their degradation, without being brought into contact with any power that could refine or elevate them; and if their condition has somewhat improved in the last quarter of a century, this is no more to be attributed to Protestantism than the Catholic Emancipation Act or the Atlantic cable.

THE SEVEN FRIDAYS IN LENT

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.

CHAPTER XIII.
THE SEARCH NEARLY OVER.

It was one of those exquisitely lovely mornings that we sometimes see in early spring. The night had been frosty, and had hurried to meet the dawn, leaving her moonlight mantle behind her, frozen to silver, on every field or hill-side. The sky was of a heavenly blue—liquid turquoise, swept with feathery dashes of pink, that set off the glistening landscape like a velvet curtain spread for the purpose. The sun was shining through a pearly mist that hung, a silver gauze veil, in the air and made everything look dreamy and vision-like. The meadows were silvered with frost; so were the hedges—every twig and thorn finished like a jewel. The trees stood up like immense bouquets of filigree against the pink and blue curtain. No wonder Franceline, who had been awake and watching the sunrise from her window, stole a march on Angélique, and hastened out to enjoy the beauty of the morning. It was impossible it could hurt her; it was too lovely to be unkind. But besides this outward incentive, there was another one that impelled her to the daring escapade. She felt an irresistible longing to go to church this morning—one of those longings that she called presentiments, and seldom rejected without having reason to regret it. It was not that she was uneasy, or alarmed, or unhappy about anything. Nothing had occurred to awake the dormant fires that were still smouldering—though she thought them dead—and impel her to seek for strength in a threatened renewal of the combat. Sir Simon’s disappearance the morning after the dinner-party, some few days ago, had not surprised her; that was his way, and this time she had been prepared for it. It was true that ever since then her father had been more preoccupied, more inseparable from his work. It was a perfect mania with him for the last three or four days. He scarcely let the pen out of his hand from morning till night. He seemed, moreover, to have got to a point where he could no longer use her as an amanuensis, but must write himself. Franceline was distressed at the change; it deprived her of the pleasure of helping him and of their daily walk together, which had of late become the principal enjoyment of her life. But he could not be persuaded to go beyond the garden gate, and then only for ten minutes to take a breath of air. He was in a hurry to get back to his study, as if the minutes were so much gold wasted. Franceline was obliged to accept this sudden alteration in his habits, with the assurance that it would not be for long; that the great work was drawing to[736] a close; and that, when it was finished, he would be free to walk with her as much as she liked, and in more beautiful places than Dullerton. This last she did not believe. No place could ever be so beautiful as this familiar one, because none would ever be hallowed by the same sweet early memories, or sanctified by the same sufferings and regrets. There was a spirit brooding over these quiet sylvan slopes that could never dwell, for her, elsewhere. She looked around her at the leafless woods that lay white and silent in the near distance, and at the river winding slowly towards them like an azure arm encircling the silver fields, and she sighed at the thought of ever leaving them. The sigh escaped from her lips in a little column of sapphire smoke; for the air was as clear as crystal, but it was cold too, and the bell was already ringing; so she drew her shawl closer and hurried on. What was that fly doing before the presbytery door? Who could have business with Father Henwick at such an unearthly hour as seven A.M.? When people live in a small place where everybody’s life is a routine as well known as their own to everybody else, the smallest trifle out of the usual way is magnified into an event. Franceline was not very curious by nature; she passed the mysterious fly with a momentary glance of interest, and then dismissed it from her thoughts. The little white-washed church was never full on week-days, its congregation being mostly of the class who can only afford the luxury of going to church on Sundays. A few kindly glances greeted her as she walked up to her place near the sanctuary. Since her health had become delicate, it was a rare occurrence to see her there during the week, so her presence was looked on as of good omen. She answered the welcoming eyes with a sweet, grateful smile, and then knelt down and soon forgot them.

We talk of magnetic atmospheres where instinct warns us of a presence without any indication from our senses. I don’t know whether Franceline believed in such influences; but her attitude of rapt devotion as she knelt before the altar, seemingly unconscious of anything earthly near her, her soul drawn upwards through her eyes and fixed on the Unseen, did not suggest that there was any human presence within reach which had power to move her. When Father Henwick had left the altar, she rose and went to the sacristy door to ask if she could see him. She wanted to speak to him about a poor woman in the village. It was not the clerk, but Father Henwick himself, who came to answer her message. He did not welcome his young penitent in his usual gracious, affectionate manner, but asked sharply “who gave her leave to be out at that hour?”

“The morning was so sunny I thought it would do me no harm to come,” replied the culprit, with a sudden sense of having done something very wicked.

“You had no business to think about it at all; you should not have come without your father’s permission. Go home as fast as you can.”

“Come this way; you can go out through the house.” Then he added in a mollified tone: “You foolish child! I hope you are warmly clad? Keep your chest well covered, and hold your muff[737] up to your mouth. Be off, now, as quick as you can, and let me have no more of these tricks!”

He shook hands with her, half-smiling, half-frowning, and, opening the sacristy door that led into the presbytery, hurried her away. Franceline was too much discomfited by the abrupt dismissal to conjecture why she was hustled out through the house instead of being allowed to go back through the church, the natural way, and quite as short. She could not understand why Father Henwick should have shown such annoyance and surprise at the sight of her. This was not the first time she had played the trick on them at home of coming out to church on a sunny morning, and it had never done her any harm. She was turning the riddle in her mind, as she passed through the little sitting-room into the entry, when she saw the front door standing wide open, and a gentleman outside speaking to the fly-man. The moment he perceived Franceline he raised his hat and remained uncovered while he spoke.

She and Clide looked at each other as they exchanged this commonplace greeting; but they did not shake hands. Neither could probably have explained what the feeling was that held them back. Franceline went on her way, and Clide de Winton entered the presbytery, each bearing away the sound of the other’s voice and the sweetness of that rapid glance with a terrible sense of joy.

Franceline’s heart beat high within her as she walked on. What right had it to do so? How dared it? Poor, fluttering heart! No bitter upbraidings of indignant conscience, no taunts of womanly pride, could make it stop. The more she tried to silence it, the louder it cried. She was close by The Lilies, and it was crying out and throbbing wildly still. She could not go in and face her father in this state; she must gain a few minutes to collect and calm herself. The snow-drops grew in great profusion on a bank in the park at the back of the cottage. Raymond was fond of wild flowers; she would go and gather him some: this would account for her delay. She laid her muff on the grass. It was wet with the hoar-frost melting in the sun; but Franceline did not see this. She stooped down and began to pluck the snow-drops. It was a congenial task in her present frame of mind. Snow-drops had always been favorites with her. In her childish days of innocent pantheism she used to fancy that flowers had spirits, or some instinct that enabled them to enjoy and to suffer, to be glad in the sunshine and unhappy in the cold and the rain. She fancied that perfume was their language, and that they conversed in it as birds do in songs and chirpings. She used to be sorry for the flowers that had no perfume, and called them “the dumb ones,” connecting their fate in some vague, pitying way with that of two deaf and dumb little children in the village. But the snow-drops she pitied most of all. They came in the winter-time, when everything was cold and dreary and there were no kindred flowers to keep them company; no roses; no bees and butterflies to make music for them; no nightingales to sing them to sleep in the scented summer nights; no liquid, starry skies and sweet,[738] warm dews to kiss them as they slept; their pale, ascetic little slumbers were attuned to none of these fragrant melodies, and Franceline loved them all the more for their loveless, lonely life. But she was not pitying them now, as, one by one, she plucked the drooping bells and the bright green leaves under the silver hedge; she was envying them and listening to them. Every flower and blade of grass has a message for us, if we could but hear it; the woods and fields are all tablets on which the primitive scriptures of creative love are written for us. “Your life is to be like ours,” the snow-drops were whispering to Franceline. “We dwell alone in cold and silence—so must you; we have no sister flowers to make life joyous, no roses to gladden us with their perfume and their beauty—neither shall you; roses are emblems of love, and love is not for you. You must be content with us. We are the emblems of purity and hope; take us to your heart. We are the heralds of the spring; we bring the promise, but we do not wait for its fulfilment. You are happier than we; you will not have the summer here, but you know that it will come hereafter, and that the flowers and fruits will be only the more beautiful for the waiting being prolonged. Look upwards, sister snow-drop, and take courage.” Franceline listened to the mystic voice, and, as she did so, large tears fell from her eyes on the white bells of the messengers, as pure as the crystal dew that stood in frozen tears upon their leaves.

M. de la Bourbonais had not heard her go out; and when she came in and handed him her bouquet, fresh-gathered, he took for granted she had gone out for the purpose, and did not chide her for the slight imprudence. Angélique was not so lenient; she was full of wrath against the truant, and threatened to go at once and inform on her, which Franceline remarked she might have done an hour ago, if she had any such intention; and then, with a kiss and two arms thrown around the old woman’s mahogany neck, it was all made right between them.

Franceline did not venture out again that day. She was afraid of meeting Clide. She strove hard to forget the morning’s incident, to stifle the emotions it had given rise to, and to turn away her thoughts from even conjecturing the possible cause of Mr. de Winton’s presence at Dullerton and at Father Henwick’s. But strive as she might, the thoughts would return, and her mind would dwell on them. She was horrified to see the effect that Clide’s presence had had on her; to find how potent his memory was with her still, how it had stirred the slumbering depths and broken up the stagnant surface-calm of her heart, filling it once more with wild hopes and ardent longings that she had fondly imagined crushed and buried for ever. Was her hard-earned self-conquest a sham after all? She could not help fearing it when she saw how persistently the idea kept returning again and again to her, banish it as she would: “Had he come to tell Father Henwick that he was free?” Then she wondered, if it were so, what Father Henwick would do; whether he would come and see her immediately, or let things take their course through Sir Simon and her father. Then again she would discard this notion as impossible, and see all sorts of evidence in the circumstances of the morning’s episode to[739] prove that it could not be. Why should Father Henwick have tried so hard to prevent their meeting, if the one obstacle to it were removed? and why should Clide have been so restrained and distant when she came upon him suddenly? If only she could ask this one question and have it answered, Franceline thought she could go back again to her state of stagnation, and trample down her rebellious heart into submission once more.

She slept very little that night, and the next morning she determined that she would go out at any risk. Sitting still all day in this state of mind was unbearable; so about eleven o’clock, when the sun was high and the frost melted, she put on her bonnet and said she was going for a walk to see Miss Merrywig. As the day was fine and she had not taken cold yesterday, Angélique made no difficulty. Franceline started off to the wood, and was soon crushing the snow-drops and the budding lemon-colored primroses as she threaded her way along the foot-paths.

For some mysterious reason which no one could fathom, but which the oldest inhabitant of the place remembered always to have existed, you were kept an hour waiting at Miss Merrywig’s before the door was opened. You rang three times, waited an age between each ring, and then Keziah, the antediluvian factotum of the establishment, came limping along the passage, and, after another never-ending interval of unbarring and unbolting, you were let in. It was not Keziah who opened the door for Franceline this morning; it was Miss Merrywig herself, shawled and bonneted, ready to go out.

“O my dear child! is it you? I am so delighted to see you! Do come in! No, no, I am not going out. That is to say, I am going out. It’s the luckiest thing that you did not come two minutes later, or you would not have found me. I am so glad! No, no, you are not putting me about the least bit in the world. Come and sit down, and I’ll explain all about it. I cannot imagine what is keeping Keziah, and she knows I am waiting to be off, and that the negus will be getting cold, though it was boiling mad, and I have only this moment put it into the flask. But what can be keeping her? It didn’t so much matter; in fact, it didn’t matter at all, only I have promised little Jemmy Torrens—you know Mary Torrens’ boy on the green?—well, I promised him I would make the negus for him myself and take it to him myself. He won’t take anything except from me, poor little fellow! You see he’s known me since I was a baby—I mean since he was—and that’s why, I suppose; and Keziah knows it, and why she dallies so long I cannot conceive! She knows I can’t leave the house unprotected and go off before she comes in—there are so many tramps about, you see, my dear. It is provoking of Keziah!”

“Let me take the negus to Jemmy,” said Franceline, when there was a break in the stream and she was able to edge in a word. “I will explain why you could not go.”

“Oh! that’s just like you to be so kind, my dear; but I promised, you see, and I really must go myself. What can Keziah be about?”

“Then go, and I will wait and keep the house until either of you comes back,” suggested Franceline.

“Oh! that is a bright idea. That is as witty as it is kind. Well, then, I will just run off. I shall find you[740] here when I return. I won’t be twenty minutes away, and you can amuse yourself looking over Robinson Crusoe till I come back; here it is!” And the old lady rooted out a book from under a pile of all sorts of odds and ends on the table, and handed it to Franceline. “Sit down, now, and read that; there’s nothing I enjoyed like that book when I was your age, and, indeed, I make a point of reading it at least once every year regularly.”

With this she took up her wine-flask, well wrapped in flannel to protect her from the scalding-hot contents, and bustled away.

“If any one rings, am I to let them in?” inquired Franceline, running into the hall after her.

“Oh! no, certainly not, unless it happens to be Mr. Langrove; you would not mind opening the door to him, would you?”

“You will be sure to hear the footsteps first and the click of the gate outside, and then run out and peep through this,” pointing to the narrow latticed window in the entry; “but you must be quick, or else they will be close to the door and see you.”

Franceline promised to keep a sharp lookout for the warning steps, closed the door on Miss Merrywig, and went back to Robinson Crusoe; but she was not in a mood to enjoy Friday’s philosophy, so she sat down and began to look about her in the queer little apartment. It was much more like a lumber-room than a sitting-room; the large round table in the middle was littered with every description of rubbish—the letters of two generations of Miss Merrywig’s correspondents, old pamphlets, odds and ends of ribbon and lace, little boxes, bags of stale biscuits that were kept for the pet dogs of her friends when they came to visit her, quantities of china cats and worsted monkeys, samplers made for her by great-grandnieces, newspapers of the year one, tracts and books of hymns, all huddled pell-mell together. Fifty years’ smoke and lamp-light had painted the ceiling all over in dense black clouds, and the cobwebs of innumerable defunct spiders festooned the cornices. The carpet had half a century ago been bright with poppies and bluebells and ferns; but these vanities, like the memory of the unrighteous man, had been blotted out, and had left no trace behind them. Franceline was considering how singular it was that anything so bright and simple and happy as Miss Merrywig should be the presiding genius of this abode of incongruous rubbish, and wishing she could make a clean sweep of it all, and tidy the place a little, when her attention was roused by a sound of footsteps. She ran out at once to look through the lattice; but she had waited too long. There was only time to shrink behind the door when the visitors had come up and the bell was sounding through the cottage. There were two persons, if not more; she knew this by the footsteps. Presently some one spoke; it was Mr. Charlton. He was continuing, in a low voice, a conversation already begun. Then another voice answered, speaking in a still lower key; but every word was distinctly audible through the open casement, which was so covered by an outer iron bar and the straggling stem of a japonica that no one from the outside would see that it was open, unless they looked very close. The words Franceline overheard had nothing in them to[741] make her turn pale; but the voice was Clide de Winton’s. What fatality was this that brought them so near again, and yet kept them apart, and condemned her to hide and listen to him like an eavesdropper? There was a pause after the first ring. Mr. Charlton knew the ways of the house; he said something laughingly, and rang again. Then they reverted to the conversation that had been interrupted. Good God! did Franceline’s ears deceive her, or what were these words she heard coupled with her father’s name? She put her hand to her lips with a sudden movement to stifle the cry that leaped up from her heart of hearts. She heard Clide giving an emphatic denial: “I don’t believe it. I tell you it is some mistake—one of those unaccountable mistakes that we can’t explain or understand, but which we know must be mistakes.”

She could not catch what Mr. Charlton said; but he was evidently dissenting from Clide, and muttered something about “being convicted on his own showing,” which the other answered with an impatient exclamation the drift of which Franceline could not seize; neither could she make sense out of the short comments that followed. They referred to some facts or circumstances that were clear to the speakers, but only bewildered her more and more.

“It strikes me the old lady does not mean to let us in at all this time,” said Mr. Charlton; and he gave another violent pull to the bell.

“There can’t be any one in the house,” said Clide, after a pause that exhausted the patience of both. “We may as well come away. I will call later. I must see her before.…”

The rest of the sentence was lost, as the two speakers walked down the gravel-walk, conversing in the same low tones.

Franceline did not move even when the sound of their steps had long died away. She seemed turned to stone, and did not stir from the spot until Keziah came back. She gave her a message for Miss Merrywig, left the cottage, and went home.

She found her father just as she had left him—busy at his desk, with books and papers strewn on the table beside him. She saw this through the window, but did not go in to him. She could not go at once and speak to him as if nothing had happened in the interval. She went to her room, and remained there until dinner-time, and then came down, half-dreading to see some alteration in him corresponding with what had taken place in her own mind. But he was gentle and serene as usual. No mental disturbance was visible on his features; at least, she did not see it. Looking at him, nevertheless, with perceptions quickened by what she had heard since they parted, it struck her that his eyes were sunk and dim, as if from overwork and want of sleep combined; but there was no cloud of shame or humiliation on his brow. Never had that dear head seemed so venerable, never had such a halo of nobleness and goodness encircled it, in his daughter’s eyes, as at this moment.

She did not tease him to come out to walk with her, but asked him to read aloud to her for an hour while she worked. It was a long time—more than a week—since they had had any reading aloud. Raymond complied with the request, but soon returned to his work.

Franceline expected that Father Henwick would call, and kept nervously looking out of the window from time to time; but the day wore on, and the evening, and he did not come. She did not know whether to be glad or sorry. She was in that frame of feeling when the gentlest touch of sympathy would have stung her like the bite of a snake. It was not sympathy she wanted, but a voice to join with her in passionate contempt for the liars who had dared to slander her father, and in indignant denunciation of the lie. She wanted to fling it in the teeth of those who had uttered it. If Father Henwick would help her to do this, let him come; if not, let him leave her alone. Let no one come near her with words of pity; pity for her now meant contempt for her father. She would resent it as a lioness might resent the food that was thrown to her in place of the cubs she had been robbed of. No love—no, not the best and noblest she had ever dreamed of—would compensate her for the absence of reverence and respect for her father.

But Clide did not suspect him. She had heard him indignantly spurn the idea. “He no more stole it than you did,” he had said. Stolen what? Would no one come to tell her what it all meant? Would not Clide come? Was he still at Dullerton? Was there any fear—or hope?—of her meeting him again if she went out? She might have gone with impunity. Clide was far enough away, on a very different errand from that which had brought him yesterday across her path.

On coming back to the Court from his abortive attempt to see Miss Merrywig, Clide found Stanton in great excitement with a telegram that had arrived for his master that instant. It was from Sir Simon, summoning him back by the first train that started. Some important news awaited him. He did not wait to see Miss Merrywig, but took the next train to London, and arrived there in the early afternoon. The news that awaited him was startling enough to justify Sir Simon’s peremptory summons. One of the detectives, whose sagacity and coolness fitted him for delicate missions of the kind, had been despatched to gather information in the principal lunatic asylums of England and Scotland. He had come that morning to tell Sir Simon Harness that he thought he had found Mrs. de Winton in one of them. Sir Simon went straight to the place, and, after an interview with the superintendent, telegraphed for Clide, as we have seen.

It was an old-fashioned Elizabethan manor-house in the suburbs of London, situated in the midst of grounds almost large enough to be called a park. There was nothing in the outward aspect of the place to suggest its real character. Everything was bright and peaceful and well ordered as in the abode of a wealthy private family. The gardens were beautifully kept; the shrubbery was trim and neat; summer-houses with pretty climbing plants rose in shady places, inviting the inmates of the fine old mansion to sit out of doors and enjoy the sunshine unmolested; for there was sunshine in this early spring-time, and here in this sheltered spot some bits of red and gold and blue were peeping through the tips of closed flower-cups. Nothing externally hinted at the discord and disorder that reigned in so many human lives within the walls.[743] The sight of the place was soothing to Clide. He had so often pictured to himself another sort of dwelling for his unhappy Isabel that it was a great relief to him to see this well-ordered, calm abode, and to think of her being a resident there. A lady-like matron received him, and conversed with him kindly and sensibly while they were waiting for the doctor to come in. The latter accosted him with the same reassuring frankness of manner.

“I hope,” he said, “that your informant has not exaggerated matters, as that class of people are so apt to do, and that you are expecting to see the right person. All I dare say to you is that you may hope; the points of coincidence are striking enough to warrant hope, but by no means such as to establish a certainty.”

“I am too much taken by surprise to have arrived at any conclusion,” replied Clide; “and I have been too often disappointed to do so in a hurry. Until I see and speak to the patient I can say nothing.”

“You can see her at once. As to speaking to her, that is not so easy. The sun is clouding over. That is unlucky at this moment.”

“Oh! I forgot that I had not explained to you the nature of the delusion which this lady is suffering from,” continued the medical man. “It is one of the most poetic fancies that madness ever engendered in a human brain. She is enamored of the sun, and fancies herself beloved of him; she believes him to be a benign deity whose love she has been privileged to win, and which she passionately responds to. But there is more suffering than joy in this belief. She fancies that when the sun shines he is pleased with her, and that when he ceases to shine he is angry; the sunbeams are his smiles and the warmth his kisses. At such times she will deck herself out with flowers and gay colors, and sit and sing to her lover by the hour, pretending to turn away her face and hide from him, and going through all the pretty coyness of love. Then suddenly, when the sun draws behind a cloud, she will burst into tears, fling aside her wreath, and give way to every expression of grief and despair. It is at such moments, when they are prolonged, that the crisis is liable to become dangerous. She flings herself on the ground, and cries out to her lover to forgive her and look on her kindly again, or she will die. Very often she cries herself to sleep in this way. I fear you have come at an unfortunate moment, for the sun seems quite clouded; however, he may come out again, and then you will get a glimpse of the patient at her best.”

He rose and led the way upstairs along a softly-carpeted corridor with doors opening on either side. Pointing to one, he motioned Clide to advance. One of the panels was perforated so as to admit of the keeper’s seeing what went on inside when it was necessary to watch the patient, without irritating her by seeming to do so or remaining in the room. At first the occupant was standing up at the window, her hands clasped, while she conversed with herself or some invisible companion in low tones of entreaty. Then, uttering a feeble cry, she turned mournfully away, laid aside the flowers that decked her long black hair, and, taking a large black cloak, drew it over her dress, and sat down in a dark corner of the room, with her[744] face to the wall, crying to herself like a child. Clide watched her go through all this with growing emotion. He had not yet been able to catch a glimpse of her face, but the small, light figure, the wayward movements, the streaming black hair, all reminded him strikingly of Isabel. The voice was too inarticulate, so far, for him to pronounce on its resemblance with any certainty; but the low, plaintive tones fell on his ear like the broken bars of an unforgotten melody. He strained every nerve to see the features. But, stay! She is moving. She has drawn away her hands from her face, and has turned it towards him. The movement did not, however, dispel his doubts; it increased them. It was almost impossible to discover any trace of beauty in that worn, haggard face, with its sharp features, its eyes faded and sunk, and from which the tears streamed in torrents, as if they were melting away in brine. The skin was shrivelled like an old woman’s—one, at least, double the age that Isabel would be now. Was it possible that this wreck could be the bright, beautiful girl of ten years ago?

“Are you my wife?” was Clide’s mental exclamation, as he looked at the sad spectacle, and then, with a shudder, turned away.

“I see you are unable to arrive at any conclusion,” said the doctor when they were out of ear-shot in an adjoining room.

“I will say nothing till I have spoken to her,” replied the young man evasively. “When can I do this?”

“I cannot possibly fix a time. She is not in a mood to be approached now; any violent shock in her present state might have a fatal result. It would, in all probability, quench for ever the feeble spark of light that still remains, and might bring on a crisis which no skill could alleviate. On the other hand, if we could apply the test at the right moment, the effect might be unexpectedly beneficial. I say unexpectedly, because, for my own part, I have not the slightest hope of any such result.”

“Has her memory quite gone, or does she recall any passages of her past life accurately?”

“Not accurately, I fancy; she seems to have some very vivid impressions of the past, but whether they be clear or not I cannot say. The balance of the mind is, I believe, too deeply shaken for clearness, even on isolated points, to survive in any of the faculties. She talks frequently of going over a great waterfall with her nurse, and describes scenery in a way that rather gave me a hope once. I spoke to her guardian, however, and he said she had never been near a waterfall in her life; that it was some picture which had apparently dwelt in her imagination.”

“He might have his own reasons for deceiving you in that respect,” observed Clide. “His name, you say, is Par…?

“Humph! When people change their names, they sometimes find it convenient to retain the initial,” remarked Clide.

He went home and desired Stanton to look out for a lodging as near as possible to the asylum. A tolerably habitable one was found without delay, and he and his valet installed themselves there at once. The very next day he received a letter from Sir Simon Harness, informing him that Lady Rebecca seemed this time in earnest about betaking herself to a better world,[745] and had desired him, Sir Simon, to be sent for immediately. The French dame de compagnie who wrote to him said they hardly expected her to get through the week.

M. de la Bourbonais had never been a social man since he lived at Dullerton. He said he did not care for society, and in one sense this was true. He did not care for it unless it was composed of sympathetic individuals; otherwise he preferred being without it. He did not want to meet and talk with his fellow-creatures simply because they were his fellow-creatures; there must be some common bond of interest or sympathy between them and him, or else he did not want to see them. When, in the early days at The Lilies, Sir Simon used to remonstrate with him on being so “sauvage,” and wonder how he could bear the dulness, Raymond would reply that no dulness oppressed him like uncongenial company. He had no sympathies in common with the people about the neighborhood, and so he would have no pleasure in associating with them. There was truth in this; but Sir Simon knew that the count’s susceptible pride had influenced him also. He did not want rich people to see his poverty, if they were not refined and intelligent enough to respect it and value what went along with it. He had studiously avoided cultivating any intimacies beyond the few we know, and had so persistently kept aloof from the big houses round about that they had accepted his determination not to go beyond mere acquaintanceship, and never stopped to speak when they met him out walking, but bowed and passed on. But of late Raymond began to feel quite differently about all this. He longed to see these distant acquaintances as if they had been so many near friends; to meet their glance of kindly, if not cordial, recognition; to receive the homage of their passing salutation. It was the dread of seeing these hitherto valueless greetings refused that prevented him stirring beyond his own gate. He marvelled himself at the void that the absence of them was making in his life. He did not dream they had filled such a space in it; that the reflection of his own self-respect in the respect of others had been such a strength and such a need to him. Up to this time Franceline had more than satisfied all his need of society at home, with the pleasant periodical addition of Sir Simon’s presence, while his work had amply supplied his intellectual wants; but suddenly he was made aware of a new need—something undefined, but that he hungered for with a downright physical hunger.

Franceline’s spirit and heart were too closely bound up in her father’s not to feel the counter-pang of this mental hunger. She could not help watching him, though she strove not to do it, and, above all, not to let him see that she was watching him. She might as well have tried not to draw her breath or to stop the pulsations of her heart. Her eyes would fasten on him when he was not looking, and she could not but see that the expression of his face was changed. A hard, resolved look had come over it; his eyebrows were always protruded now, and his lips drawn tight together under the gray fringe of his mustache. She knew every turn of his features, and saw that what had once been a passing freak under some sudden thought or puzzling speculation in his work[746] had now become a settled habit. She longed to speak; to invite him to speak. It would have been so much easier for both; it would lighten the burden to them so much if they could bear it together, instead of toiling under it apart. But Raymond was silent. It never crossed his mind for a moment that Franceline knew his secret. If he had known it, would he have spoken? Sometimes the poor child felt the silence was unbearable; that at any cost she must break it and know the truth of the story which had reached her in so monstrous a form. But the idea that her father knew possibly nothing of it kept her back. But supposing he was silent only to spare her? Perhaps he was debating in his own mind what the effect of the revelation would be on her; wondering if she, too, would join with his accusers, or, even if she did not do this, whether she might not be ashamed of a father who was branded as a thief. When these thoughts coursed through her mind, Franceline felt an almost irresistible impulse to rush and fling her arms around his neck and tell him how she venerated him, and how she scorned with all her might and main the envious, malignant fools who dared to so misjudge him. But she never yielded to the impulse; the inward conflict of lodgings and shrinkings and passionate, tender cries of her heart to his made no outward sign. Raymond sat writing away at his desk, and Franceline sat by the fire or at the window reading and working, day after day. The idea occurred to her more than once that she would write to Sir Simon; but she never did. She did not dare open her heart to Father Henwick. How could she bring herself to tell him that her father was accused of theft? It was most probable—she hoped certain—that the abominable suspicion had not travelled to his ears; and if so, she could not speak of it. This was not her secret; it was no breach of confidence towards her spiritual father to be silent, and the selfish longing to pour out her filial anger and outraged love into a sympathizing ear should not hurry her into a betrayal of what was, even in its falsity, humiliating to Raymond. It was hard to refrain from speech when speech would have been a solace; but Franceline knew that the sacrifice of the cup of cold water has its reward, just as the bestowal has. Peace comes to us on surer and swifter wing when we go straight to God for it, without putting the sympathy of creatures between us and his touch.

Mr. Langrove had never been a frequent visitor at The Lilies; but Franceline never remembered him to have been so long absent as now, and she could not but see a striking coincidence in the fact. She knew he had been one of the party at Dullerton that night; and if, as she felt certain, that had been the occasion of the extraordinary mistake she had heard of, the vicar, of course, knew all about it. He believed her father had committed a theft, and was keeping aloof from him. Did everybody at Dullerton know this? Mr. Langrove was not a man to spread evil reports in any shape. Franceline knew him well enough to be sure of that; but her father’s reputation was evidently at the mercy of less charitable tongues. She did not know that the six witnesses had promised Sir Simon to keep silence for his sake; but if she had known it, it would not have much reassured her. A secret that is known to six people[747] can scarcely be considered safe. The six may mean to guard it, and may only speak of it among themselves and in whispers; but it is astonishing how far a whisper will travel sometimes, especially when it is malignant. A vague impression had in some inexplicable way got abroad that the count had done something which threw him under a cloud. The gentlemen of the neighborhood were very discreet about it, and had said nothing positively to be taken hold of, but it had leaked out that there was a screw loose in that direction. Young Charlton had laughed at the notion of his friend Anwyll thinking of Mlle. de la Bourbonais now; and the emphasis and smile which accompanied the assurance expressed pretty clearly that there was something amiss which had not been amiss a little while ago.

Franceline had gone out for her usual mid-day walk in the park. It was the most secluded spot where she could take it, as well as warm and sheltered. She was walking near the pond; the milk-white swans were sailing towards her in the sunlight, expecting the bits of bread she had taken a fancy to bring them every day at this hour, when she saw Mr. Langrove emerge from behind a large rockery and step out into the avenue. She trembled as if the familiar form of her old friend had been a wild animal creeping out of the jungle to pounce upon her. What would he do? Would he pass her by, or stop and just say a few cold words of politeness? The vicar did not keep her long in suspense.

“Well! here, you are enjoying the sunshine, I see. And how are you?” he said, extending his hand in the mild, affectionate way that Franceline was accustomed to, but had never thought so sweet before. “Is the cough quite gone?”

“Not quite; but I am better, thank you. Angélique says I am, and she knows more about it than I do,” replied the invalid playfully. “How is everybody at the vicarage?”

“So-so. Arabella has one of her bad colds, and Godiva is suffering from a toothache. It’s the spring weather, no doubt; we will all be brisker by and by. Are you going my way?”

“And how is M. de la Bourbonais?” said the vicar presently. “I’ve not met him for a long time; we used to come across each other pretty often on the road to Dullerton. He’s not poorly, I hope?”

“No, only busy—so dreadfully busy! He hardly lets the pen out of his hand now; but he promises me there will soon be an end of it, and that the book will soon be finished.”

“Bravo! And you have been such a capital little secretary to him!” said Mr. Langrove. “The next thing will be that we shall have you writing a book on your own account.”

Franceline laughed merrily at this conceit; her fears were, if not banished by his cordial manner, sufficiently allayed to rid her of her momentary awkwardness. They were soon chatting away about village gossip as if nothing were amiss with either.

“Angélique brought home news from the market a few days ago that Mr. Tobes was going to marry Miss Bulpit; is it true?” inquired the young girl.

“Far too good to be true!” said the vicar, shaking his head. “The[748] report has been spread so often that this time I very nearly believed in it. However, I saw Miss Bulpit, and she dispelled the illusion at once, and, I fear, for ever.”

“It would be a very desirable event in some ways,” said Mr. Langrove, with a peculiar smile; “it would give her something to do and some one to look after her.”

“And it would have been a good thing for Mr. Tobes, too, would it not? He is so poor!”

“That’s just why she won’t have him, poor fellow! When he proposed—she told me the story herself, and I find she is telling it right and left, so there is no breach of confidence in repeating it—when he proposed, Miss Bulpit asked him point-blank how much money he had; ‘because,’ she said, ‘I have only just enough for one!’”

“Oh! but that was a shame. She has plenty for two; and, besides, it was unfeeling. Don’t you think it was?” inquired Franceline, looking up at the vicar. But he evidently did not share either her indignation against Miss Bulpit or her pity for the discarded lover. He was laughing quietly, as if he enjoyed the joke.

They reached the gate going out on the high-road while thus pleasantly chatting.

“Now I suppose we must say good-by,” said Mr. Langrove. “This is my way; I am going to pay a sick visit down in the valley.”

“Mind you give my compliments to the count!” said the vicar, calling after her. “Tell him I don’t dare go near him, as he is so busy; but if he likes me to drop in of an evening, let him send me word by you, and I’ll be delighted. By-by.”

“He did not dare because he is so busy!” repeated Franceline as she walked on. “How did he know papa was busy? It was I who told him so a few minutes ago. That was an excuse.”

She gave the message, nevertheless, on coming home, scarcely daring to look at her father while she did so.

“No; I cannot be disturbed at present,” was the peremptory answer, and Franceline’s heart sank again.

She told him the gossip about Miss Bulpit and Mr. Tobes, thinking it would amuse him; he used to listen complacently to the little bits of gossip she brought in about their neighbors. Raymond had the charming faculty, common to great men and learned men, of being easily and innocently amused; but he seemed to have lost it of late. He listened to Franceline’s chatter to-day with an absent air, as if he hardly took it in; and before she had done, he made some irrelevant remark that proved he had not been attending to what she was saying. Then he had got into a way of repeating himself—of saying the same thing two or three times over at an interval of an hour or so, sometimes even less. Franceline attributed these things to the concentration of his thoughts on his work, and to his being so entirely absorbed in it as not to pay attention to anything that did not directly concern it. She was too inexperienced to see therein symptoms of a more alarming nature.

M. de la Bourbonais had all his[749] life complained of being a bad sleeper; but Angélique, who suffered from the same infirmity, always declared that he only imagined he did not sleep; that she was tossing on her pillow, listening to him snoring, when he said he had been wide awake. The count, on his side, was sceptical about Angélique’s “white nights,” and privately confided to Franceline that he knew for a fact she was fast asleep often when she fancied in the morning she had been awake. Some people are very touchy at being doubted when they say they have not “closed an eye all night.” Angélique resented a doubt on her “white nights” bitterly, and Franceline, who from childhood had been the confidant of both parties, found an early exercise for tact and discretion in keeping the peace between them. The discrepancies in the two accounts of their respective vigils often gave rise to little tiffs between herself and Angélique, who would insist upon knowing what M. le Comte had said about her night; so that Franceline was compelled to aggravate her whether she would or not. She “knew her place” better than to have words with M. le Comte, but she had it out with Franceline. “Monsieur says he didn’t get to sleep till past two o’clock this morning, does he? Humph! I only wish I had slept half as well, I know. Pauvre, cher homme! He drops off the minute his head is on the pillow, and then dreams that he’s wide awake. That’s how it is. Why, this morning I was up and lighted my candle at ten minutes to two, and he was sleeping as sound as a wooden shoe! I heard him.” Franceline would soothe her by saying she quite believed her; but as she said the same thing to M. le Comte, and as Angélique generally overheard her saying so, this seeming credulity only aggravated her the more. Laterly Raymond had taken up a small celestial globe to his room, for the purpose, he said, of utilizing his long vigils by studying the face of the heavens during the clear, starry nights; and he would give the result of his nocturnal contemplations to Franceline at breakfast next morning—Angélique being either in the room pouring out the hot milk for her master’s coffee, or in the kitchen with the door ajar, so that she had the benefit of the conversation. The pantomimes that were performed at these times were a severe trial to Franceline’s gravity: Angélique would stand behind Raymond’s chair, holding up her hands aghast or stuffing her apron into her mouth, so as not to explode in disrespectful laughter. Sometimes she would shake her flaps at him with an air of despondency too deep for words, and then walk out of the room.

“I heard M. le Comte telling mam’selle that he saw the Three Kings (the popular name for Orion’s belt in French) shining so bright this morning at three o’clock. I believe you; he saw them in his sleep! I was up and walking about my room at that hour, and it so happened that I opened my door to let in the air just as the clock in the salon was striking three!”

As ill-luck would have it, Raymond overheard this confidential comment which Angélique was making to Franceline under the porch, not seeing that the sitting-room window was open.

“My good Angélique,” said the count, putting his head out of the window, “you must have opened the door two seconds too late; it was striking five, most likely, and[750] you only heard the last three strokes. I suspect you were sound asleep at the hour I was looking at the Three Kings.”

“La! as if I were an infant not to know when I wake and when I sleep!” said Angélique with a shrug. “It was M. le Comte that was asleep and dreaming that he saw the Three Kings.”

“Nay, but I lighted my candle; it was pitch-dark when I got up to set the globe,” argued M. de la Bourbonais.

“When M. le Comte dreamt that he got up and lighted his candle,” corrected the incorrigible sceptic. Raymond laughed and gave it up. But it was true, notwithstanding Angélique’s obstinate incredulity, that he did pass many white nights now, and the wakefulness was insensibly and imperceptibly telling on his health. It was a curious fact, too, that the more the want of sleep was injuring him, the less he was conscious of suffering from it. He had been passionately fond of astronomy in his youth, and he had resumed the long-neglected study with something of youthful zest, enjoying the observation of the starry constellations in the bright midnight silence with a sense of repose and communion with those brilliant, far-off worlds that surprised and delighted himself. Perhaps the feeling that he was now cut off from possible communion with his fellow-men threw him more on nature for companionship, urging him to seek on her glorious brow for the smiles that human faces denied him, and to accept her loving fellowship in lieu of the sympathy that his brothers refused him.

But rich and inexhaustible as the treasures of the great mother are, they are at best but a compensation; nothing but human love and human intercourse can satisfy the cravings of a human heart. Raymond was beginning to realize this. His forced isolation was becoming poignantly oppressive to him. He longed to see Sir Simon, to hear his voice, to feel the warm clasp of his hand; he longed, above all, to get back his old feeling of gratitude to him. Raymond little suspected what a moral benefactor his light-hearted, worldly-minded friend had been to him all those years when he was perpetually offering services that were so seldom accepted. Sir Simon was all the time feeding his heart with the milk of human kindness, making a bond between the proud, poor brother and the rest of the rich and happy brotherhood who were strangers to him. Raymond loved them all for the sake of this one. Nothing nourishes our hearts like gratitude. It widens our space for love, and enlarges our capacity for kindness; it creates a want in us to send the same happy thrills through other hearts that are stirring our own. We overflow with love to all in thankfulness for the love of one. This is often our only way of giving thanks, and the good it does us is sometimes a more abiding gain than the service that has called it forth. It was all this that Raymond missed in Sir Simon. In losing his loving sense of gratefulness he seemed to have lost some vital warmth in his own life. Now that the source which had fed this gratitude was dried up, all that was tender and kind and good in him seemed to be running dry or turning to bitterness. The estrangement of one had estranged him from all; he was at war with all humanity. Would any sacrifice of pride be too great to win back[751] the old sweet life, with its trust, and ready sympathy, and indulgent kindness? Why should he not write to Sir Simon? He had asked himself this many times, and had written many letters in imagination, and some even in reality; but Angélique had found them torn up in the waste-paper basket next morning, and had been surprised to see the fresh sheets of note-paper, which she recognized as her master’s, wasted in that manner and thrown away. He knew what he was doing, probably; it was not for her to lecture him on such matters, but she could not help setting down the unnatural extravagance as a part of the general something that was amiss with her master.

One morning, however, after one of those white nights that gave rise to so much discussion in the family, Raymond came down with his mind made up to write a letter and send it. He could stand it no longer; he must go to his friend and lay bare his heart to him, so that they might come together again. If Sir Simon’s silence was an offence, Raymond’s was not free from blame. He sat down and wrote. It was a long letter—several sheets closely filled. When it was finished, and Raymond was folding it and putting it into the envelope, he remembered that he did not know where the baronet was. If he sent it to the Court, the servants would recognize the handwriting and think it odd his addressing a letter there in their master’s absence. He thought of forwarding it to Sir Simon’s bankers; but then, again, how did matters stand at present between him and them? He might have gone abroad and not left them his address, and the letter might remain there indefinitely. While Raymond was debating what he should do he closed up and stamped the blank envelope, making it ready to be addressed; then he laid it on the top of his writing desk, and wrote a few lines to the bankers, requesting them to forward Sir Simon’s address, if they had it or could inform him how a letter would reach him.

He seemed relieved when this was done, and, for the first time for nearly a month, called Franceline to come and write for him. She did so for a couple of hours, and noticed with thankfulness that her father was in very good, almost in high, spirits, laughing and talking a great deal, as if elated by some inward purpose. Her glad surprise was increased when he said abruptly:

“Now, my little one, run and put on thy bonnet, and we will go for a walk in the park together.”

The day was cold, and there was a sharp wind blowing; but the sun was very bright, and the park looked green and fresh and beautiful as they entered it, she leaning on him with a fond little movement from time to time and an exclamation of pleasure. He smiled on her very tenderly, and chatted about all sorts of things as in the old days of a month ago before the strange cloud had drawn a curtain between their lives. He talked with great animation of his work, and the excitement it would be to them both when it was published.

“We shall go to Paris for the publication, and then I will show thee the wonderful sights of the great city: the Louvre, and the Museum of Cluny, and many antiquities that will interest thee mightily; and we will go to some fine modiste and get thee a smart French bonnet, and thou wilt be quite a little élégante!”

“Oh! how nice it will be, petit père,” cried Franceline, squeezing his arm in childish glee; “and many learned men will be coming to see you, will they not, and writing articles in praise of your great work?”

“Ha! Praise! I know not if it will all be praise,” said the author, with a dubious smile. “Some will not approve of my views on certain historical pets. I have torn the masks off many soi-disant heroes, and replaced others in the position that bigotry or ignorance has hitherto denied them. I wonder what Simon will say to it all?”

Raymond smiled complacently as he said this. It was the first time he had mentioned the baronet. Franceline felt as if a load were lifted off her, and that all the mists were clearing away.

“He is sure to be delighted with it!” she exclaimed. “He always is, even when he quarrels with you, petit père. I think he quarrels for the pleasure of it; and then he is so proud of you!”

They walked as far as the house, and then Raymond said it was time to turn back; it was too cold for Franceline to stay out more than half an hour.

An event had taken place at The Lilies in their absence. The postman had been there and had brought a letter. Raymond started when Angélique met him at the door with this announcement, adding that she had left it on the chimney-piece.

He went straight in and opened it. It was from Sir Simon. After explaining in two lines how Clide de Winton had arrived in time to save him at the last hour, the writer turned at once to Raymond’s troubles. Nothing could be gentler than the way he approached the delicate subject. “Why should we be estranged from one another, Raymond? Do you suppose I suspect you? And what if I did? I defy even that to part us. The friendship that can change was never genuine; ours can know no change. I have tried in every possible way to account satisfactorily for your strange, your suicidal behavior on that night, and I have not succeeded. I can only conclude that you were beside yourself with anxiety, and over-excited, and incapable of measuring the effect of your refusal and your conduct altogether. But admitting, for argument’s sake, that you did take it; what then? There is such a thing as momentary insanity from despair, as the delirium of a sick and fevered heart. At such moments the noblest men have been driven to commit acts that would be criminal if they were not mad. It would ill become me to cast a stone at you—I, who have been no better than a swindler these twenty years past! Raymond, there can be no true friendship without full confidence. We may give our confidence sometimes without our love following; but when we give our love, our confidence must of necessity follow. When we have once given the key of our heart to a friend, we have given him the right to enter into it at all times, to read its secrets, to open every door, even that, and above that, behind which the skeleton stands concealed. You and I gave each other this right when we were boys, Raymond; we have used it loyally one towards the other ever since, and I have done nothing to forfeit the privilege now. All things are arranged by an overruling Providence, and God is wise as he is merciful; yet I cannot forbear asking[753] how it is that I should have been saved from myself, and that you should not have been delivered from temptation—you, whose life has been one long triumph of virtue over adversity! It will be all made square one day; meantime, I bless God that the weaker brother has been mercifully dealt with and permitted to rescue the nobler and the worthier one. The moment I hear from you I will come to Dullerton, and you and Franceline must come away with me to the south. I will explain when we meet why this letter has been so long delayed.” Then came a postscript quite at the bottom of the page: “Send that wretched bauble to me in a box, addressed to my bankers. Rest assured of one thing: you shall be cleared before men as you already are before a higher and a more merciful tribunal.”

Many changes passed over Raymond’s countenance as he read this letter; but when his eye fell on the postscript, the smile that had hovered between sadness, tenderness, and scorn subsided into one of almost saturnine bitterness, and a light gathered in his eyes that was not goodly to see. But the feelings which these signs betrayed found no other outward vent. M. de la Bourbonais quietly and deliberately tore up the letter into very small pieces, and then, instead of throwing them into the waste-paper basket, he dropped them into the grate. The fire was low; he took the poker and stirred it to make a blaze, and then watched the flame catching the bits one by one and consuming them.

“It is fortunate I did not send mine!” was his mental congratulation as he turned to his desk, intending to feed the dying flame with two more offerings. But where were they? Raymond pushed about his papers, but could not find either of the letters. Angélique was called. Had she seen them?

“Oh! yes; I gave them both to the postman,” she explained, with a nod of her flaps that implied mystery.

“How both? There was only one to go. The other had no address on it,” said Raymond.

“Yes. I am a discreet woman, as M. le Comte knows, and he might have trusted me to keep a quiet tongue in my head; but monsieur knows his own affairs best,” added Angélique in an aggrieved tone.

“My good Angélique, explain yourself a little more lucidly,” said M. de la Bourbonais with slight impatience. “What could induce you to give the postman a letter that had neither name nor address on it?”

“Bless me! I thought M. le Comte did not wish me to know who he was writing to!”

“Good gracious!” exclaimed Raymond, too annoyed to notice the absurdity of the reply. “But how could the postman take it when he saw it was a blank envelope?”

“I did not let him see it; I slipped the two with my own hands into the bag,” said Angélique.

M. de la Bourbonais moved his spectacles, and shrugged his shoulders in a way that was expressive of anything but gratitude for this zeal. He hesitated a moment or two, debating what he should do. The only way to ensure getting back his letter immediately was[754] to go off himself to the post-office, and claim it before it was taken out to be stamped with the postmark, when it would be opened in order to be returned to the writer. There might be no harm in its being opened; the postmaster was not a French scholar that Raymond knew of, but he might have a friend at hand who was, and who would be glad to gratify his curiosity, as well as exhibit his learning, by reading the count’s letter.

Raymond set off at once, so as to prevent this. It was the first time for some weeks that he had shown himself in or near the town; and if his mind had not been so full of his errand, he would have been painfully conscious and shy at finding himself abroad in open daylight in his old haunts and within the observation of many eyes that knew him. But he did not give this a thought; he was calculating the chances for and against his arriving at the post-office before the postman had come back from his rounds and handed in the out-going letters to be marked, and his imagination was running on to the wildest conclusions in the event of his being too late. He walked as if for a wager; not running, but as near to it as possible. The pace and his intense look of preoccupation attracted many glances that he would have escaped had he walked on quietly at his ordinary pace. He was not a minute too soon, however, just coming up as the postman appeared with his replenished bag. M. de la Bourbonais hastened to describe the shape and color of his blank envelope, and to explain how it had come to be where it was, and was most emphatic in protesting that he did not mean the letter to go, and that he was prepared to take any steps to prevent its going. There was no need to be so earnest, about it. The postmaster assured him at once that the letter would be forthcoming in a moment, and that his word would be quite enough to identify it and ensure its being returned to him. It seemed an age to Raymond while the letters were being turned out and sorted, but at last the man held up the blank envelope, with its queen’s head in the corner, and exclaimed jubilantly: “Here it is!”

The count seized it with avidity, and hurried away, leaving the postmaster half-amused, half-mystified, at his excited volubility and warm expressions of thanks. There was no necessity to rush home at the same pace that he had rushed out, but Raymond felt like a machine wound up to a pitch of velocity that must be kept up until the wheel stopped of its own accord. His hat was drawn over his eyes, and his head bent like a person walking on mechanically, neither seeing nor hearing what might be going on around him. He was soon beyond the streets and shop-windows, and back amidst the fields and hedges. There was a clatter of horses coming down the road. M. de la Bourbonais saw two gentlemen on horseback approaching. He recognized them, even in the distance, at a glance: Sir Ponsonby Anwyll and Mr. Charlton. Raymond’s heart leaped up to his throat. What would they do? Stop and speak, or cut him dead? A few seconds would decide. They were close on him now, but showed no sign of reining in to speak. Ponsonby Anwyll raised his hat in a formal salutation; Mr. Charlton looked straight before him and rode on. All the blood in his body seemed to rush at the instant to Raymond’s[755] face. He put his hand to his forehead and stood to steady himself; then he walked home, never looking to the right or the left until he reached The Lilies.

Angélique called out from the kitchen window to know if he had made it right about the letter; but he took no heed of her, only walked in and went straight up to his room. She heard him close the door. There certainly was something queer come to him of late. What did he want, going to shut himself in his bedroom this time of day, and then passing her without answering?

Franceline was in the study, busy arranging some primroses and wild violets that she had been gathering under the hedge while her father was out. A noise as of a body falling heavily to the ground in the room overhead made her drop the flowers and fly up the stairs. Angélique had hastened from the kitchen to ask what was the matter; but a loud shriek rang through the house in answer to her question.

Raymond was lying prostrate on the floor, insensible, while Franceline lifted his head in her arms, and kissed him and called to him. “Oh! What has happened to him? Father! father! speak to me. O my God! is he dead?” she cried, raising her pale, agonized face to the old servant with a despairing appeal.

“No! no! Calm thyself! He has but fainted; he is not dead,” said Angélique, feeling her master’s pulse and heart. “See, put thy hand here and feel! If he were dead, it would not beat.”

Franceline laid her finger on the pulse. She felt the feeble beat; it was scarcely perceptible, but she could feel it.

“We must lift him on to the bed,” said Angélique, and she grasped the slight form of her master with those long, brown arms of hers, and laid it gently on the bed, Franceline assisting as she might.

“Now, my petite, thou wilt be brave,” said the faithful creature, forgetting herself in her anxiety to spare and support Franceline. “Thou wilt stay here and do what is necessary whilst I run and fetch the doctor.”

She poured some eau-de-cologne into a basin of water, and desired her to keep bathing her father’s forehead and chafing his hands until she returned. This, after loosing his cravat and letting in as much air as possible, was all her experience suggested.

Franceline sat down and did as she was told; but the perfect stillness, the deathlike immobility of the face and the form, terrified her. She suspended the bathing to breathe on it, as if her warm breath might bring back consciousness and prove more potent than the cold water. But Raymond remained insensible to all. The silence began to oppress Franceline like a ghastly presence; the cooing of her doves outside sounded like a dirge. Could this be death? His pulse beat so faintly she hardly knew whether it was his or the pulse of her own trembling fingers that she felt. A chill of horror came over her; the first vague dread was gradually shaping itself in her mind to the most horrible of certainties. If he should never awake, never speak again, never open those closed eyes on her with the old tender glance of love that had been as familiar and unfailing as the sunlight to her! Oh! what a fearful[756] awakening came with this first realization of that awful possibility. What vain shadows, what trivial empty things, were those that she had until now called sorrows! What a joy it would be to take them all back again, and bear them, increased tenfold in bitterness, to the end of her life, if this great, this real sorrow might be averted! Franceline dropped on her knees beside the bed, and, clasping her hands, sent up one of those cries that we all of us find in our utmost need, when there is only God who can help us: “O Father! thy will be done. But if it be possible, … if it be possible, … let this cup pass from me!”

There were steps on the stairs. It was Angélique come back. She had only been ten minutes away—the longest ten minutes that ever a trembling heart watched through—but Franceline knew she could not have been to the doctor’s and back so quickly. “I met M. le Vicaire just at the end of the lane, and he is gone for the doctor; he was riding, so he will be there in no time.”

Then she made Franceline go and fetch hot water from the kitchen, and busied her in many little ways, under pretence of being useful, until Dr. Blink’s carriage was heard approaching. The medical man was not alone; Mr. Langrove and Father Henwick accompanied him.

Angélique drew the young girl out of her father’s room, and sent her to stay with Father Henwick, while the doctor, assisted by Mr. Langrove and herself, attended to M. de la Bourbonais.

“Oh! what is it? Did the doctor tell you?” she whispered, her dark eyes preternaturally dilated in their tearless glance, as she raised it to Father Henwick’s face.

“He could say nothing until he had seen him. Tell me, my dear child, did your father ever have anything of this sort happen him before?” inquired Father Henwick, as unconcernedly as he could.

“Never, never that I heard of, unless it may have been when I was too little to remember,” said Franceline; and then added nervously, “Why?”

“Thank God! It is safe, then, not to be so serious,” was the priest’s hearty exclamation. “Please God, you will see him all right again soon; he has been overdoing of late, working too hard, and not taking air or exercise enough. The blade has been wearing out the sheath—that’s what it is; but Blink will pull him through with God’s help.”

“Father,” said Franceline, laying both hands on his arm with an unconscious movement that was very expressive, “do you know it seems to me as if I were only waking up, only beginning to live now. Everything has been unreal like a dream until this. Is it a punishment for being so ungrateful, so rebellious, so blind to the blessings that I had?”

“If it were, my child, punishment with God is only another name for mercy,” said Father Henwick. “Our best blessings come to us mostly in the shape of crosses. Perhaps you were not thankful enough for the great blessing of your father’s love, for his health and his delight in you; perhaps you let your heart long too much for other things; and if so, God has been mindful of his foolish little one, and has sent this touch of fear to teach her to value more the mercies that were vouchsafed to her, and not to pine for those that were denied. We seldom see things in their[757] true proportions until the shadow of death falls on them.”

“The shadow of death!” echoed Franceline, her white lips growing still whiter. “Oh! if it be but the shadow, my life will be too short for thanksgiving, were I to live to the end of the world.”

“Ha! here they come,” said Father Henwick, opening the study-door as he heard the doctor’s steps, followed by Mr. Langrove’s, on the stair.

Franceline went forward to meet them; she did not speak, but Dr. Blink held out his hand in answer to her questioning face, and said cheerfully: “The count is much better; he has recovered consciousness, and is doing very nicely, very nicely indeed for the present. Come! there is nothing to be frightened at, my dear young lady.”

Franceline could not utter a word, not even to murmur “Thank God!” But the dead weight that had been pressing on her heart was lifted, she gasped for breath, and then the blessed relief of tears came.

“My poor little thing! My poor Franceline!” said the vicar, leading her gently to a chair, and smoothing the dark gold hair with paternal kindness.

“Let her cry; it will do her good,” said Dr. Blink kindly; and then he turned to speak in a low voice to Father Henwick and Mr. Langrove.

He had concluded, from the incoherent account which Mr. Langrove had gathered from Angélique, that he should come prepared for a case of apoplexy, and had brought all that was necessary to afford immediate relief. He had recourse to bleeding in the first instance, and it had proved effective. M. de la Bourbonais was, as he said, doing very well for the present. Consciousness had returned, and he was calm and free from suffering. Franceline was too inexperienced to understand where the real danger of the attack lay. She fancied that, since her father had regained consciousness, there could be nothing much worse than a bad fainting fit, brought on by fatigue of mind and body, and, now that the Rubicon was past, he would soon be well, and she would take extra care of him, so as to prevent a relapse. Her passionate burst of tears soon calmed down, and she rose up to thank her visitors with that queenly self-command that formed so striking a part of her character.

“I am very grateful to you for coming so quickly; it was very good of you,” she said, extending her hand to Dr. Blink: “May I go to him now?”

“No, no, not just yet,” he replied promptly. “I would rather he were left perfectly quiet for a few hours. We will look in on him later; not that it is necessary, but we shall be in the neighborhood, and may as well turn in for a moment.” He wished them good-afternoon, and was gone.

“And how did you happen to come in just at the right moment?” said Franceline, turning to Father Henwick. “It did not occur to me before how strange it was. Was it some good angel that told you to come to me, I wonder?”

“The very thing! You have hit it to a nicety!” said Mr. Langrove. “It was an angel that did it.”

“Yes,” said Father Henwick, falling into the vicar’s playful vein, “and the odd thing was that he came riding up to my house on a fat Cumberland pony! Now, we all know S. Michael has been seen on a white charger, but this is the first time, to my knowledge, that an[758] angel was ever seen mounted on a Cumberland pony.”

“Dear Mr. Langrove, how good of you!” said Franceline, with moistened eyes, and she pressed his hand.

“Had you not better come out with me now for a short walk?” said the vicar. “I sha’n’t be more than half an hour, and it will do you good. Come and have early tea at the vicarage, and we will walk home with you before Blink comes back. What do you say?”

“Oh! I think I had better not go out, I feel so shaken and tired; and then papa might ask for me, you know. I shall not go near him unless he does, after what Dr. Blink said.”

“Well, perhaps it is as well for you to keep quiet. Good-by, dear. I will look in on you this evening.”

“And so will I, my child,” said Father Henwick, laying his broad hand on her head; and the two gentlemen left the cottage together.

THE FRIENDS OF EDUCATION.

To pass from the discussion of arguments to the question of motives is a most common yet most unjustifiable manœuvre of popular debate. This is usually done when the field of calm and logical reasoning has become tolerably clear. The flank movement is attempted as a final struggle against defeat otherwise inevitable. If the motive thus impugned be really indefensible; if it be, at the same time, glaring or manifest, a positive advantage is sometimes gained by a vigorous diversion from the real object of contention. But if such a motive has to be alleged—or, still worse, invented—the demonstration against it, however violent, is but a reluctant and ungracious acknowledgment of defeat and a flight from the real point at issue. The most recent instance of this sort is taking place before the American public, and has been afforded by those who endeavor to represent Catholics as opposed to free and liberal education, thereby attainting the motives of the position which Catholics have been forced to assume with regard to what are falsely called “common” schools.

This attitude of our opponents, however, we regard not without complacency. Our object is not war, but peace and good-will among citizens. We hail the present violent misrepresentation as a sign that the enemy is close to the “last ditch,” and that the discussion approaches its conclusion. When this final effort to distort the Catholic object and to asperse the Catholic character has exhausted itself and been held up to the inspection of the American people, we shall have seen the end of the “school question.” We insist upon an improvement in our educational system which is necessary to perfect its character and to satisfy the requirements of the times. The present system does not meet the wishes of a very large portion of the community, is unfair to others besides Catholics, and is out[759] of harmony with the spirit of free institutions. A system is wanted which shall at least be equal to that of monarchical countries, fair to all citizens alike, and which will relieve Catholics from the double burden of educating their own children, besides paying for a system of education of which they cannot conscientiously avail themselves.

The correctness of the Catholic position is so manifest, and is so rapidly gaining the recognition of all thoughtful classes, that those who are unwilling to allow Catholics equal rights as citizens are forced, in order to hide the truth, not only to maintain that the present system is absolutely perfect and incapable of any improvement, but to accuse Catholics of harboring ideas of which they are not only innocent, but which it would be wholly impossible for them to entertain—such as that they are afraid of the light; that they attack the present system because they are inimical to all education; and that their object is, if possible, to do away with it altogether. Accusations similar to these are daily repeated, garnished with rhetoric, and sent forth to alarm our fellow-citizens and to encourage them to turn a deaf ear to whatever Catholics may say. The weak point of this movement against us is that the people will notice that it does not deal at all with the validity of Catholic claims, and that it shirks the only question at issue. They will be led to suspect that it is emphatically a “dodge”; and the mere suspicion of this will awaken curiosity as to what Catholics really have to say—a curiosity fatal to the success of the flank attack.

In the language of those who advance the charge with which we propose to deal, education means either primary instruction in the elements of knowledge, or else higher academic culture, such as is to be furnished by colleges and universities. If, therefore, Catholics are hostile to education, in this sense of the word, they must be opposed either to the general spread of such information as is aimed at in elementary and normal schools, or to the existence and growth of the higher institutions of science and art.

We are perfectly aware that there is another meaning given to the word education, to which reference is made, simply in order to avoid obscurity.

Philosophers of the class to which Mr. Huxley belongs understand by education a certain specific course of moral and intellectual training, the aim of which is to ensure its pupils against ever being affected by “theological tendencies.” Such impressions are to be made upon childhood, and matured in more advanced stages, as will rid men of that natural but awkward habit of reasoning from cause to effect; which will free them from all hope of any life but the present, and any fear of future responsibility, in order that they may be impelled to devote themselves solely to the analysis and classification of material phenomena, since this is the only purpose of man’s existence—such a course of spiritual defloration as was practised upon the tender and noble genius of the late John Stuart Mill, the results of which, as manifested by the revelation of his biography, afford, in the words of an ingenuous, critic, “a most unpleasant spectacle.” A process of this kind is not education; it is a heartrending and lamentable destruction of[760] that which is noblest and most essential in man, and as a definition has not yet obtained a place in the English language.

If any of our readers would care to know our own ultimate definition of education, we should describe it as the complete and harmonious development of all the powers of man in reference to his true end. But for present purposes it is sufficient to adopt the ordinary sense of the word, as meaning the diffusion of knowledge by scholastic exercises in academies and colleges.

If it appears singular to enlightened Protestants to hear a demand for circumscription and discouragement of Catholics, and, if possible, the suppression of religious education, from that faction whose motto is “Liberty and Light,” we trust that it will seem none the less paradoxical to hear the charge of favoring ignorance urged with most vehemence against us by those whose boast, up to within a few years, has been “a ministry without education, and a way to heaven without grammar.”

The first demand does not in the least surprise us, coming, as it does, from a crude and undigested assumption of the principles of European radicalism. We have seen its consistency illustrated by madmen chasing, robbing, and killing one another to the cry of “liberty, equality, fraternity.” We understand what it is to be assaulted by this party, which knows not how to act except in the way of destruction, which is never at rest except in the midst of agitation, and never at peace, so to speak, except when at war.

Nor is it strange to see an attempt against Catholics made outside the field of theological controversy, inasmuch as the result of controversy for the past two centuries has tended rather to the disintegration of Protestantism than to the conversion of Catholics to the new faith. Nor is it surprising to find this assault directed against the equal rights of Catholics in education; for here some earnest but short-sighted men imagine that there is not simply ground to be gained, but that the present system is a stronghold not to be given up. It is a stronghold, truly, but rather of infidelity than of Protestantism.

But educated Protestants and heathen will marvel with us that the attack has been made on the theory that Protestantism is the born friend, and Catholicity the natural enemy of education, knowing as well as we the fatal evidence of history.

The contempt for education which, until more recent times, has always existed, to a certain extent, among the orthodox Protestants, was founded upon their erroneous doctrines of the total depravity of human nature, the consequent invalidity of human reason, and the principle of private illumination.

When Luther said, “The god Moloch, to whom the Jews immolated their children, is to-day represented by the universities” (Wider den Missbrauch der Messe), it was not simply on the ground of the universities being centres of association for boisterous and disorderly youth, or fortresses of the ancient faith, but because of that “pagan and impious science” which was taught in them.

In his furious onslaught against them Luther was sustained by his well-known hatred of anything which tended to assert the prerogatives of human nature or the[761] dignity of reason. No man was ever more intemperate in denunciation than this so-called “liberator of humanity and emancipator of human reason.” “True believers strangle reason,” said he; and he never alluded to it except in terms of most outrageous abuse. The last sermon of his at Wittenberg [253] is monumental in this respect; and his well-known reply to the Anabaptists is one of the most startling examples of his intensely idiomatic style.[254]

The feelings of the master were fully communicated to the disciples. The results were fearful. The free schools which existed in every city were overturned by the very men whom they had educated; the gymnasia were in many places wholly destroyed, in others so reduced as never to recover their former position.

At Wittenberg itself the two preachers, Spohr and Gabriel Didymus, announced from the pulpit that the study of science was not simply useless but noxious, and that it was best to do away with the colleges and schools. The upshot was to change the academy of that city into a bakery. Similar measures were carried into effect throughout the entire duchy of Anspach. The history of the Reformation by Dr. Döllinger gives a long list of the numerous scholars, rectors of high schools and colleges, who were driven into exile, and also details a minute account of many of the institutions which were destroyed.

The statements of Erasmus, as to the disastrous results of the Reformation on studies, are constant and numberless. They may be formulated in a sentence of one of his letters to Pirkheimer (1538): “Ubicumque regnat Lutheranismus, ibi litterarum est interitus”—“Wherever Lutheranism reigns, there is the destruction of letters.”

The testimony of Sturm, Schickfuss, Bucer, and others is no less forcible. Luther and Melancthon in later days seem to have been appalled by their own work, and George Major thus sums up the melancholy condition of things in his own day: “Thanks to the wickedness of men and the contempt which we ourselves have shown for studies, the schools have more than ever need of patrons and protectors to save them from ruin, and to prevent us from falling into a state of barbarism worse than that of Turks and Muscovites.”

The interesting works of the Benedictines of St. Maur of the XVIIIth century, the Bollandists, and the collections of a few other Catholic scholars have preserved nearly all the material that is left from which to construct the history of the middle ages, so thorough was the work of destruction done on libraries by the Calvinists and Huguenots. The Bodleian library is but a fragment—a few torn leaves of the literature which was weeded out of England by the enlightened zeal of the much-married father of Anglicanism.

“What mad work this Dr. Coxe did in Oxon, while he sat chancellor, by being the chief man that worked a reformation there, I have elsewhere told you,” says Anthony Wood “To return at length to the royal delegates, some of whom yet remained in Oxford, doing such[762] things as did not at all become those who professed to be learned and Christian men. For the principal ornaments, and at the same time supports, of the university—that is, the libraries, filled with innumerable works, both native and foreign—they permitted or directed to be despoiled.… Works of scholastic theology were sold off among those exercising the lowest description of arts; and those which contained circles or diagrams it was thought good to mutilate or burn, as containing certain proof of the magical nature of their contents.”

What was left undone by the royal delegates was thoroughly attended to by the Puritans, who never did their work by halves, and whose views with regard to the Bible and literature bore a close resemblance to those of the early Mohammedans in their comparative estimate of the Koran and secular writings.

For a full account of the effect of the revolution of the XVIth century on learning, people who may suspect Catholic writers of exaggeration can compare their statements with those of the learned Protestant Huber, in his exhaustive history of the universities. Even “honest Latimer,” who certainly was not a zealot for profane learning, lifted up his voice in complaint: “It would pity a man’s heart to hear that that I hear of the state of Cambridge; what it is in Oxford I cannot tell.” How it was at Oxford we have already seen. Throughout the length and breadth of the land the monastic schools, which were asylums both of mercy and learning, were destroyed; the mere list of their names, as given by the Protestant historian Cobbett, occupies one hundred and forty-five pages of his work. The present condition of the lower classes in England, which is due to their being thus deprived of means of education and assistance in distress, is the Nemesis of the Reformation. In listening to the demand that the government shall dispossess the present landlords as it despoiled the churchmen of old, we hear arguments of fearful power as to the extent of eminent domain. When it is asked why the crown and people shall not exercise for the common good the prerogative which was conceded and exercised formerly for the benefit of the crown alone, the present holders of property acquired by sacrilege may well take alarm at the progress of revolutionary ideas. And the question as to how far the people were forcibly deprived of the benefits of a trust vested for them in the church, may be decided “without constitutional authority and through blood.” God avert such a calamity from England! May the prayers of Catholic martyrs, of More and Fisher, intercede in her behalf, and save her from the consequences of that act, to prevent which, these, her truest sons, did not hesitate to offer up their lives! However, with these facts in view, it is scarcely wise for English Protestantism to assume the position of a necessary and perpetual friend of popular education. It is best to wait until the ink has become dry which has scored from the statute book of that realm the law making it felony to teach the alphabet to Catholics.

It would be gratifying to us to contrast with the conduct of the authors of Protestantism that of the great educators of Europe who laid the foundations of our civilization. A fierce and violent revolution has turned that civilization aside, and introduced into it principles of anarchy[763] and death. A shallow and ungrateful era has failed to perceive and to acknowledge its debts. It is only in the pages of scholars such as Montalembert, the Protestants Maitland and Huber, and the author of that recent modest but most charming book entitled Christian Schools and Scholars, that we begin to notice a thoughtful inquiry into the history of our intellectual development. The masters slumber in forgetfulness and oblivion. We know not the builders of the great structures of the middle ages; and people generally know almost as little of its great intellectual and social system. The history of the human race for a thousand years of most intense activity is summed up in a few unmeaning words.

Time and space fail for such a comparison. But the fact that the first Protestants found themselves educated, the fact that they found schools to denounce and to destroy, in the XVIth century, is sufficient to justify us with regard to history prior to that date.

It would also be a pleasure to describe the progress of those magnificent bodies of Catholic educators which rose, under divine inspiration, as a check to the wave of revolution, and whose successes first stimulated the action of Protestants by the wholesome influence of fear. But this also is beyond our compass. We are ready to discuss the charge that Catholics are opposed to education, independently of all reference to Protestantism, by the test of positive facts, and to stand or fall by the Catholic record in modern times.

It is not necessary to cross the ocean or to visit countries where the munificence of ages has endowed the universities of Catholic lands; as, for instance, the seven great universities of the Papal States—Ferrara, Bologna, Urbino, Macerata, Camerino, Perugia, and Rome, each containing thousands of students. Nor is it necessary to remind the reader that the great Protestant universities, and notably those of England, are, to use the expression of a distinguished Anglican prelate, “a legacy of Catholicism.” The charge that Catholics are opposed to university education is simply laughable, considering that the university is essentially a Catholic idea, and has never, even in Europe, been successfully counterfeited.

It is not necessary, although it may be instructive, to refer to the free schools of the city of Rome, which, according to the testimony of a Protestant traveller, thirty years ago surpassed even those of Berlin in efficiency and relative number. They were, before the recent seizure by the Piedmontese government, the most numerous in proportion to the population and the most varied in character of any city in the world. They presented to their scholars the choice of day or night with regard to time, and prepared them for every profession, art, and trade. This matchless variety was doubtless the result of centuries of growth; but it was also the spontaneous outcome of zeal for education, and laid not a penny of taxation upon the people. So high was the standard of gratuitous education that private schools, at the beginning of the reign of our Holy Father Pius IX., had to struggle hard in order to retain the patronage of the wealthy classes. At that time there were in Rome 27 institutions and 387 schools for free education. Of these last, 180 were for little children of both sexes. Of the remainder,[764] 94 were devoted to males and 113 to females. The total number of pupils in elementary schools amounted to 14,157, of which number 3,790 were of the infant class. Of those more advanced, 5,544 were males and 4,823 females. In elementary schools, purely gratuitous, 7,579 received education—viz., 3,952 boys and 3,627 girls.

There appears, however, in Cardinal Morichini’s report, a feature which has never yet been introduced into the American system—to wit, in schools paying a small pension there were 1,592 boys and 1,196 girls; making a total in such schools of 2,788. This last item may furnish a hint to those who are anxious to secure the attendance of poor children in our own schools; although it is scarcely practicable where common education has to be provided by taxation alone. Of these 387 schools to which we have referred, 26 belonged to religious communities of men, and 23 to religious communities of women. The rest belonged to, or were conducted by, seculars. Besides these, 2,213 children of both sexes received free instruction in special conservatories.

In addition to this system of free primary education, there was the vast system of colleges and academies connected with the university, the advantages of which were at the command of the most limited and humble means.

It would be interesting to ask some of the high-school graduates in this country the simple historical question, “Who, in modern times; have done most for free education?” General Grant has doubtlessly contributed liberally towards it; so, it is to be presumed, has Mr. Blaine; so have many other distinguished lecturers on the subject of education. But if the question is rightly answered, the date will have to be assigned much earlier, and St. Joseph Calasanctius, Venerable de la Salle, Catherine McAuley, and a hundred thousand other “Papists” will have to take precedence of our illustrious fellow-citizens. The spectacle of one Christian Brother, or Ursuline Nun, or Sister of Mercy whose life is devoted to the instruction of the poor, with no recompense but the sweet privilege of being worn out in the service of fellow-men for the sake of Jesus Christ—such a spectacle as was afforded by the gifted Gerald Griffin, or by Mother Seton in our own country, and is daily shown among us by thousands of calm, intelligent men and amiable women, in the various religious orders—this is a testimony to education which none but Catholics can produce. And yet these men and women, these bright martyrs of charity, are they whom it is thought good to attack by every means within the reach of calumny.

Let it be understood that we do not overlook the efforts made by noble men and women in the ranks of Protestantism. Though few, and insignificant in intensity of zeal when compared with the daily and common sacrifices made by Catholics, nevertheless it must be borne in mind that these isolated attempts have been ineffectual, save only in so far as they have produced imperfect copies of the great works of Catholicity. Protestantism, as such, has never prompted or organized any great attempt at general free primary education. Indeed, it might be safely challenged to produce any instance of the kind. And if the American people to-day were to be seized with remorse for its injustice[765] towards Catholics, and to propose immediately to do away with all public schools, we should object most strongly on the ground that no adequate means would then exist for the education of Protestant children. The problem of general education has never been faced by Protestantism. The system of godless education is an extremely modern and thoroughly pagan idea. If it has found favor among the leaders of Protestantism, this has been because they have accepted it as a solution of the educational problem; not having given the matter sufficient attention to observe the ruinous effect which it is producing on themselves.

From similar thoughtlessness comes their maintenance of the present system. It is a comparatively cheap solution, as far as individuals are concerned. It calls for no sacrifices. It is supposed to be sufficiently Protestant as long as the Bible is read in the schools. But if the present movement of the infidel party succeeds, and the “common” schools are reduced to purely irreligious institutions, the matter will soon force itself upon Protestant attention. We are convinced that they will perceive that Catholics have given the subject much more consideration than they supposed, and have been right throughout. Many of them will regret having misunderstood our views, and will be prepared to endorse the proposition that such schools are subversive of Christianity and demoralizing in their tendency. They will then endeavor to repair the evils which may still result from their ill-judged neglect of Catholic remonstrance. They will demand to be put upon at least an equal footing with infidels, probably with as much vehemence as Catholics have demanded an equal footing for all citizens alike. If they find themselves hopelessly debarred from this by the radical changes in the constitution which some of their number are even now proposing, they will impeach these amendments. This failing, they will find themselves in the position in which Catholics now are. Then, for the first time in history, will Protestantism have a fair chance to show how much it cares for education.

But, as already intimated, it is not necessary to cross the seas to discover testimony in rebuttal of the gratuitous slander which is urged against Catholics. Nor is there need to summon from the tomb the teachers of those who founded the so-called Reformation, nor to institute an historic comparison between the labors of Catholics and Protestants. Still less need is there to attempt to penetrate the future as to what Catholics may do for education when they are relieved of one-half of their present twofold burden.

We live in the XIXth century and in America; and in this, very age and country Catholics are doing more for education than is actually done by any other denomination, and, in proportion to their numbers and means, more than is done by all other denominations put together, which outnumber Catholics by at least four to one—Catholics, forsooth, who are impudently charged with being opposed to primary schools and collegiate training!

This assertion will doubtless sound strangely in the ears of those who have allowed themselves to remain in ignorance of the facts which we shall presently adduce. But, in view of them, it will be acknowledged that our statement is[766] the most modest that can be made, and that, if disposed to be boastful, we could increase it many fold without fear of exaggeration. Catholics in this country have, it is true, no great university such as those produced by the efforts and endowments of generations. Besides the lack of time necessary for such a development, two other causes have thus far prevented its origin. The first is the poverty of Catholics here—not simply their lack of means—but the fact that the extent of the country and the comparatively small number of very wealthy families require that educational institutions of the higher class should be plentifully distributed. Secondly, Catholic resources have actually been applied to satisfy this condition of things. We feel quite sanguine that, before the close of the century, in spite of all disadvantages, a Catholic university of the very highest character will be established here; but, without it, there exist at present, in every city of importance throughout the Union, colleges which, for scholarship, will fairly compete with the chartered universities of this country, and which, in certain localities and in special departments, will surpass their older and more pretentious rivals. Although these colleges do not approach the ideal of a university—i.e., a great city of learning, which can no more be built in a day than a great commercial metropolis—nevertheless there is no reason to be ashamed of our colleges. Scarcely one of them can be found which does not contain the children of non-Catholics, sent thither by the preference of parents and guardians. Our great academies for young ladies are recognized as possessing advantages which are without a parallel; and, as a class, the convent schools for girls are without even a rival, and contain a very large proportion of Protestant children.

Nor are Catholics lacking in efforts to provide primary education for Catholic children, although their efforts in this direction are sadly out of proportion to their necessities. In higher intellectual culture the wealthy are naturally interested. They must provide suitable education for their children. To do this in every place is a most severe tax upon them. Nevertheless, it has been their duty to accomplish this, and, at the same time, to subscribe liberally toward the education of the children of their poorer brethren.

The poorer classes, also, with less natural impulse to make sacrifices for education, exposed to the temptation of hundreds of proselytizing institutions, forced to pay also for the lavish expenditure of the public schools, have had to bear the burden of procuring the necessary instruction for their children without exposing them to sectarianism and the scorn of their religion too often openly manifested in the “common” schools. How far they have done their duty will presently be shown. Honorable men shall judge whether they have or have not valued education. But if it be suddenly discovered that they have valued it, let it be acknowledged also that they have acted as Catholics and from the deepest religious motives.

The general statistics of the Catholic Church in America are very imperfect. Nevertheless, from the Catholic Directory of 1875 a few figures may be gleaned which will abundantly sustain the statements here advanced. It is to be regretted that the statistics as[767] given in the Directory are not more complete, those of some dioceses being quite minute and exact, those of others very imperfect.

With regard to colleges and academies for higher education, there are, under Catholic direction, in the United States, at least 540, with an attendance of not less than 48,000 pupils. In dioceses of which both the numbers of institutions and their attendance have been given there are 270 institutions, with an attendance of 24,000. A mathematical computation gives for the attendance in the others the amount which we have allowed as a safe estimate—viz., a total attendance of no less than 48,000 souls. How does this appear to those who have listened hitherto to the revilers of Catholics? Are we right in repelling their charge, or are they right, who have nothing but their angry feelings with which to sustain it?

If Catholics are wanting in zeal for education, the spirit of obstruction is not apparent in their higher institutions. But, as we have said, the mass of our people are poor. What provision have they made for themselves, besides paying for the education of others?

The Catholic parochial schools are principally designed to supply the need of Catholic education for the masses. It would be wrong, however, to consider them as merely primary schools. Many of the parochial schools are really high schools, and have a course of studies equal to the best normal schools. Nevertheless, under the head of parish schools are not included any of those already mentioned as colleges or academies. In the Archdiocese of Cincinnati there are 140 parish schools, in which are educated about 35,000 children free of cost to the State. In the Archdiocese of New York there are 93 parish schools, with not less than 37,600 children. In the Diocese of Cleveland there are 100 parish schools and 16,000 children. In some places the attendance of the Catholic schools is fully equal to that of the public schools. So that in these districts Catholics not only pay for the education of their own children, but half the expenses of the public schools, and—supposing both systems to be conducted with equal economy—enough to pay for the education of all the other children as well as their own, free of cost to Protestants, Jews, and infidels. And yet Catholics are charged with being hostile to education!

In the United States we have statistics of 1,400 parochial schools, the given attendance at which amounts to 320,000 pupils. The entire number of parish schools foots up 1,700, and the total figure of attendance may be set down at 400,000 scholars. Add to this the number of 48,000 who are being educated in colleges and academies, and farther increase the sum by the probable number of children in asylums, reformatories, and industrial schools, and there will appear something very like half a million of scholars who are receiving their education at the expense of Catholics.

Taking into account Catholic numbers, Catholic means, and the time in which Catholics have made these provisions for education, we can safely challenge, not only every denomination singly, but all of them put together, to show any corresponding interest in the matter of education, whether elementary or scientific. This challenge is made, not in the spirit of pride (though certainly without shame),[768] but in the name of truth and of generous rivalry to outstrip all others in the service of humanity and our country. Let it stand as the fittest reply to the disingenuous charge that Catholics are opposed to education.

The candid reader to whom these facts are new will use his own language in characterizing the “flank movement” against Catholics, and will be disposed to credit us with honesty and consistency in our open criticism of the present hastily-adopted system of education. But we are persuaded that he will also be led, if not to make, at least to concur in, farther reflections on the facts which are here adduced. If Catholics are actually providing instruction for so vast a number of the people of the United States, is not this a very considerable saving to the public? We think it is. The average cost of education in New York City is $13 60 per child; in the State of New York, $11; in the United States and Territories, $9 26. The saving represented by such a number in our schools amounts, at the rate of New York City, to $6,800,000; at the rate of the State of New York, to $5,500,000, and at the lowest rate, to $4,630,000 per annum. In addition to this direct saving, we must be credited with the amount of our taxes for the public schools. When Catholics stand before the American people, and state the reasons why they do not consider the present educational system that prevails here to be either wise or just, they are not beggars in any sense. They ask for no favor. They demand an equitable system of disbursing the funds raised for education, so that no class of citizens shall be deprived of that for which they are forced to contribute. They would arrange it so that none could justly complain. As Catholics, we must have religion and morality (which, whatever others may think, are to us inseparable) taught in the schools to which we send our children. No time or place will ever alter our convictions on this point. What we demand for ourselves we gladly concede to others. We are ready to consult with them on a common and just basis of agreement. Nothing is wanting for a harmonious settlement except fairness on the part of our opponents. There is no flaw in our position, no evil design in our heart, nor have we the slightest disposition to drive a close bargain. Let the word be spoken. Let any of the Protestant denominations make a step forward, intimate a desire for settlement on the basis of equal justice to all, and Catholics are with them. But while we thus maintain our demand as strictly just, whether it be received or rejected, we are not debtors but creditors of the state. We not only ask our fellow-citizens, Will you stand by and see us taxed for a system of education of which we cannot conscientiously avail ourselves? but we further ask, Can you, as honest men, disregard what Catholics are doing for education? Do you want them not only to educate their own children, thereby saving you this cost, but to educate yours also?

What kind of a soul has the man or the nation who would deliberately resist such an appeal? The time will come when people will ask—as, indeed, many do ask at present—“Why is not a louder outcry made for the Catholics in the school question?” And the answer is that we feel a certainty, which nothing can shake, that the American people are intelligent[769] enough to understand Catholics after a time; and when they do understand them, they will be fair enough to do them justice.

In the meantime let the Catholic laborer pay not only for the education of his own children at the parish school, and save this expense to his rich neighbor; let him also pay for the same neighbor’s children, not merely in primary schools, but in high schools, where ladies and gentlemen (whom poverty does not drive to labor at the age when the poor man’s children have to be apprenticed) may learn French and German and music, and to declaim on the glorious principles of American liberty and of the Constitution, under which all men are (supposed to be) free and equal. We love to hear their young voices and hearty eloquence. Let these institutions be costly in structure and furnished with every improvement. Let the teachers have high salaries. Let gushing editors issue forth, to manifest to the astonished world the wisdom and deep thought which they have acquired at the expense of their humbler and self-sacrificing neighbor. But let honest and thoughtful men ponder on the meaning of American equality, and judge who are the true friends of education. The wages of the laborers will be spent, if the shallowness and crude imperfection of the present system are learned, and the spirit of equal rights among citizens peacefully preserved; though the credit will belong to those who have kept their calmness of mind and made the greatest sacrifices.

The candid reader to whom we have alluded will readily admit that Catholics are true friends of education, and are doing most for it proportionately to their means; that, instead of suspicion and abuse, they deserve respect, honor, and acknowledgment of their services.

We think, however, that our fellow-citizens will go much farther, and will, in time, endorse our statement when we affirm that Catholics at present, and as a body, are the only true friends of popular education. By this is not meant simply to say that they have not been backward in obtaining, by their intelligence and integrity, the highest positions in the country; that they count as representatives such men as Chief-Justice Taney, Charles O’Conor, a Barry at the head of the navy, a Sheridan and a Rosecrans in the army, and others of the highest national and local reputation; or that, when the Roman purple fell upon the shoulders of the Archbishop of New York, it suffered no loss of dignity in touching a true and patriotic American, well fitted to wear it in any court or academy of Europe. But we do mean that, outside of the Catholic Church and those who sympathize with our views on this subject, there is no body whose representatives are not biassed in their plan for common education by prejudice or hostility toward some other body.

With what utter disregard for the rights of conscience the infidel and atheistic faction coolly avows its purpose to enforce a secular and irreligious education upon all the people—a system known to be no less antagonistic to the spirit of our democratic institutions than hostile to the religious convictions of Catholics as well as Protestants! What loud outcries and stormy denunciations echo from certain popular pulpits when this faction demands the expulsion of the Bible[770] from the public schools! Is any person cool in the midst of this confusion? Is there any class of citizens which looks to the common good and adheres to the principle of equal regard for religious rights and education free for all? There are such persons. There is such a class. Those are they who never shrink from avowing their principles, and whose principles are always right, in spite of temporary unpopularity—the representatives of the Catholic Church of America.

When the excitement of the hour has died away, and the schemes of politicians to gain power by fastening upon the country a system fatal to liberty, and radical in its assault upon the spirit of our government, have met their just fate, then we shall receive the honor due to those who have defended the country from the danger of adopting partisan measures aimed against a certain class of citizens.

We hope to live to see the day when there will not be a child in the whole land capable of instruction who shall not receive a thorough education, fitting him to be a patriotic citizen of our country, and, at the same time, in nowise interfering with his religious duties. The present system signally fails to accomplish this. Those who so strenuously uphold its organization and attempt to make it compulsory upon all are hostile to the genius of our institutions and fanatical in their zeal. That they are not lovers of education is evident from their own ignorance of facts. That they are in earnest when they charge Catholics with hostility to education we can scarcely believe; for we hear from the same lips hints and warnings against Catholic success in education. We hear also that the Catholic Church is growing, and, unless something is done to stop her, she will convert all the Protestants in the country; and, still at other times, that she is an effete and worn-out thing which cannot live through the century in a free republic. At one time Catholics are derided as idiots; at another represented as deep and insidious conspirators. There is scarcely anything which is not affirmed or denied of them, according as it suits the mood of their revilers. If our people were cooler and more dispassionate, we should find all those calumnies answering one another. As it is, we are constrained to pay them more or less attention, though the nature of the testimony against us scarcely allows us to take up more than one point at a time.

If Catholics or Methodists or Episcopalians or Baptists can give a better and a cheaper education, we see no reason why the state should interfere with those who choose to avail themselves of it. Let the state set up any standard it may choose, or make it obligatory; Catholics will cheerfully come up to it, no matter how high it may be, provided equal rights are allowed to all. The government has a right to demand that its voters shall possess knowledge. It has no right to say how or where they shall acquire knowledge. The government is bound by public policy to promote education. This is to be done by stimulating in this department the same activity which has made Americans famous in other branches of social economy, by encouraging spontaneous action, and not by an ill-judged system of “protection” of one kind of education against another, or by creating a state monopoly. Bespeaking[771] candor and due respect on the part of those who may differ from us, we take our stand on what we conceive to be the true American ground, and are willing to abide by the consequences—fair play, universal culture, obligatory knowledge, non-interference of the state in religion, and free trade in education.

SUGGESTED BY A CASCADE AT LAKE GEORGE.

SIR THOMAS MORE.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

Time glides rapidly by, leaving no footprints on the dreary road over which it has passed, as the wild billows, rolling back into the fathomless depths whence the tempest has called them forth, leave no traces behind them. And so passes life—fleeting rapidly, noiselessly away; while man, weary with striving, tortured by cares and unceasing anxieties, is born, suffers, weeps, and in a day has withered, and, like a fragile flower of the field, perishes from the earth.

Wolsey, fallen from the summit of prosperity, continued to experience a succession of reverses. Unceasingly exposed to the malice of his enemies, he struggled in vain against their constantly-increasing influence; and if they failed in bringing about his death, they succeeded, at least, in poisoning every moment of his existence. Thus, at the time even when Henry VIII. had sent him a valuable ring as a token of amity, they forced the king to despoil the wretched man of the valuable possessions which they pretended to wish restored to him. He received one day from his master a new assurance of his royal solicitude; the next, his resources failing, he was obliged, for want of money, to dismiss his old servants and remain alone in his exile.

Cromwell, with an incredible adroitness, had succeeded by degrees in disengaging himself from the obligations he owed the cardinal, and in making the downfall and misfortunes of his master serve to advance his own interests. He had made numerous friends among the throng of courtiers surrounding the king, in obtaining from the unhappy Wolsey his recognition of the distribution which the king had made of his effects, by adding the sanction of his own seal. After repeated refusals on the part of the cardinal, he was at last successful in convincing him of the urgent necessity for making this concession, in order to try, he said with apparent sincerity, to lessen the animosity and remove the prejudices they entertained against him. But, in reality, the intention of Cromwell had been, by that manœuvre, to strip him of his entire possessions; for the courtiers, being well aware their titles were not valid under the law, were every moment afraid they might be called on to surrender the gifts they had received, and consequently desired nothing so much as to have the cardinal confirm them in their unjust possessions.

It was by means of this monstrous ingratitude that Cromwell purchased the favor of the court, began to elevate himself near the king in receiving new dignities and honors, and at length found himself saved from the fate he had so greatly apprehended at the moment of his benefactor’s downfall. Of what consequence was Wolsey to him[773] now? Banished from his archbishopric of York, he was but a broken footstool which Cromwell no longer cared to remember. He scarcely deigned to employ his new friends in having Wolsey (reduced to the condition of an invalid) removed from the miserable abode at Asher to the better situated castle of Richmond; and later, when the heads of the council, always apprehensive and uneasy because of his existence, obtained his peremptory exile, he considered this departure as completely liberating him from every obligation to his old benefactor.

Events were thus following each other in rapid succession, when, toward the middle of the day, the door of the king’s cabinet opened, and Sir Thomas More, in the grand costume of lord chancellor, entered as had been his custom.

The king turned slightly around on his chair, and fixed upon him a searching glance, as if he sought to read the inmost soul of More.

The countenance of the chancellor was tranquil, respectful, and assured, such as it had always been. In vain Henry sought to discover the indications of fear, the impetuous desires and ambitions which he was accustomed to excite or contradict in the agitated heart of Wolsey, and by which, in his turn master of his favorite, of his future, and of his great talents, he made him pay so dearly for the honors at intervals heaped upon him.

Nothing of all this could he discover! More seated himself when invited by the king, and entered upon the discussion of a multitude of affairs to which he had been devoting himself with unremitting attention day and night.

“Sire,” he would urge, “this measure will be most useful to your kingdom; sire, justice, it seems to me, requires you to give such a decision in that case.”

Never were any other considerations brought to bear nor other demands made; nothing for himself, nothing for his family, but all for the good of the state, the interests of the people; silence upon all subjects his conscience did not oblige him to reveal, though the king perceived only too clearly the inmost depths of the pure and elevated soul of his chancellor.

By dazzling this man of rare virtues with a fortune to which a simple gentleman could never aspire, Henry had hoped to allure him to his own party and induce him to sustain the divorce bill. Thus, by a monstrous contradiction, in corrupting him by avarice and ambition, he would have destroyed the very virtues on which he wished to lean. He perceived with indignation that all his artifices had been unsuccessful in influencing a will accustomed to yield only to convictions of duty, and he feared his ability to move him by any of the indirect and abstract arguments which he felt and acknowledged to himself were weak and insufficient. Revolving all these reflections in his mind, the king eagerly opened the conversation with More, but in a quiet tone and with an air of assumed indifference.

“Well! Sir Thomas,” he said, “have you reflected on what I asked you? Do you not find now that my marriage with my brother’s wife was in opposition to all laws human and divine, and that I cannot do otherwise than have it pronounced null and void, after being thus advised by so many learned men, and ecclesiastics also?”

“Sire,” replied More, “I have[774] done what your majesty requested me; but it occurs to my mind that, in an affair of so much importance, it will not be sufficient to ask simply the advice of those immediately around you; for it might be feared that, influenced by the affection they bear for you, they would not decide as impartially as your majesty would desire. Perhaps, also, some of them might be afraid of offending you. I have, therefore, concluded that it would be better for your majesty to consult advisers who are entirely removed from all such suspicions. That is why I have endeavored to collect together in this manuscript I have here the various passages of Holy Scripture bearing on this subject. I have added also the opinions of S. Augustine and several other fathers of the church, with whose eminent learning and high authority among the faithful your majesty is familiar.”

“Ah!” said the king, with a slightly-marked movement of impatience, “that was right. Leave it there; I will read it.”

“My lord chancellor,” he continued, “the House of Commons has taken some steps toward discharging my debts. What do they think of this in the city?”

“Sire,” replied More, “I must tell you candidly they complain openly and loudly. They say if the ministers had not taken care to introduce into the house members who had received their positions from themselves, the bill would never have passed; for it is altogether unjust and iniquitous for Parliament to dispose in this manner of private property. They say still farther that it has been inserted in the preamble of the bill that the prosperity of the kingdom under the king’s paternal administration had induced them to testify their gratitude by discharging his debts. If this pretext is sincere, it reflects the greatest honor on Cardinal Wolsey; and if, on the contrary, it is false, it covers his successors with shame.”

“What!” exclaimed the king, “do they dare express themselves in this manner?”

“Yes,” replied Sir Thomas; “and I will frankly say to the king that it would have been far better to have imposed a new tax supported equally by all than thus to despoil individuals of their patrimony.”

“They are never contented!” exclaimed the king impatiently. “I have sacrificed Wolsey to their hatred, whom there is no person in the kingdom now able to replace. This Dr. Gardiner torments me with questions which are far from satisfactory to his dull comprehension. Everything goes wrong, unless I take the trouble of managing it myself; while with the cardinal the slightest suggestion was sufficient. I constantly feel inclined to recall him! Then we will see what they will say! But no!” he continued, with an expression of gloomy sullenness, “they gave me no rest until I had banished him from his archbishopric of York. It was, they said, the sole means of preventing Parliament from pronouncing his condemnation. By this time he is doubtless already reconciled; he is so vain a creature that the three or four words I have said in his favor to my nobles of the north will have been worth more to him than the homage and adulation of a court, without which he cannot exist. He is pious now, they say, occupying himself only with good works and in doing penance for[775] his many sins of the past. In fact, he is entirely reconciled! He has already forgotten all that I have done for him! I shall devote myself, then, to those who now serve me!”

“I doubt very much if your majesty has been correctly informed with regard to the latter fact,” replied More. “Indeed, I know that the order compelling him to be entirely removed from your majesty’s presence is the one that caused him the deepest grief.”

“Ah! More,” interrupted the king very suddenly, as if to take him by surprise, “you are opposed to my divorce. I have known it perfectly well for a long time; and these extracts from the fathers of the church to which you refer me are simply the expression of your own opinions, which you wish to convey to me in this indirect manner.”

“Sire,” replied More, slightly embarrassed, “I had hoped your majesty would not force me to give my opinion on a subject of such grave importance, and one, as I have already explained, on which I possess neither the authority nor the ability to decide.”

“Ah! well, Sir Thomas,” replied the king in a confident manner, wishing to discover what effect his words would produce on More, “being entirely convinced of the justice of my cause, and that nothing can prevent me from availing myself of it, I am determined, if the pope refuses what I have a right to demand, to withdraw from the tyrannical yoke of his authority. I will appoint a patriarch in my kingdom, and the bishops shall no longer submit to his jurisdiction.”

“A schism!” exclaimed More, “a schism! Dismember the church of Jesus Christ for a woman!”

And he paused, appalled at what Henry had said and astonished at his own energetic denunciation.

The king felt, as by a violent shock, all the force of that exclamation, and, dropping his head on his breast, he remained stupefied, like one who had just been aroused from a painful and terrible dream.

Just at that moment the cabinet door was thrown violently open, and Lady Anne Boleyn entered precipitately. She was drowned in tears, and carried in her arms a hunting spaniel that belonged to the king.

“Here,” she cried, looking at the king—“here is your wretched dog, that has tried to strangle my favorite bird! You never do anything but try to annoy me, make me miserable, and cause me all kinds of intolerable vexations. I have told you already that I did not want that horrid animal in my chamber.”

In the meantime the dog, which she had thrown on the floor, set up a lamentable howl.

The king felt deeply humiliated by this ridiculous scene, and especially on account of the angry familiarity exhibited by Anne Boleyn in presence of Sir Thomas More; for she either forgot herself in her extreme excitement and indignation, or she believed her empire so securely established that she did not hesitate to give these proofs of it. She continued her complaints and reproaches with increasing haughtiness, until she was interrupted by Dr. Stephen Gardiner, who came to bring some newly-arrived despatches to the king.

Henry arose immediately, and, motioning Sir Thomas to open the door, without saying a word, he[776] took Anne Boleyn by the hand, and, leading her from the room, ordered her to retire to her own apartment.

He then returned, and, seating himself near the chancellor, concealed, as far as he was able, his excitement and mortification.

Sir Thomas, still more excited, could not avoid, as they went over the despatches, indignantly reflecting on the manner in which Anne Boleyn had treated the king, on his deplorable infatuation, and the terrible consequences to which that infatuation must inevitably lead.

The king, divining the nature of his reflections, experienced a degree of humiliation that made him inexpressibly miserable.

“What say these despatches?” he asked, endeavoring to assume composure. “What does More think of me?” he said to himself—“he so grave, so pious, so dignified! He despises me!… That silly girl!”

“They give an account of the emperor’s reception of the Earl of Wiltshire,” answered More. “I will read it aloud, if your majesty wishes.”

“No, no,” said the king, whom the name of Wiltshire confused still more; “give them to me. I am perfectly familiar with the cipher.” He did not intend that More should yet be apprised of the base intrigues he had ordered to be practised at Rome to assist the father of his mistress in obtaining the divorce.

Having taken the letters, he found the emperor had treated his ambassador with the utmost contempt, remarking to Wiltshire that he was an interested party, since he was father of the queen’s rival, and he would have to inform Henry VIII. that the emperor was not a merchant to sell the honor of his aunt for three hundred thousand crowns, even if he proposed to abandon her cause, but, on the contrary, he should defend it to the last extremity; and after saying this, the emperor had deliberately turned his back on the ambassador and forbidden him to be again admitted to his presence.

“I am, then, the laughing-stock of Europe,” he murmured through his firmly-set teeth.

Numerous other explanations followed, in which the Earl of Wiltshire gave an exact and circumstantial account of the offer he had made to the Holy Father of the treatise composed by Cromwell on the subject of the divorce, saying that he had brought the author with him, who was prepared to sustain the opinions advanced against all opposition. He ended by informing the king that, in spite of his utmost efforts, he had not been able to prevent the pope from according the emperor a brief forbidding Henry to celebrate another marriage before the queen’s case had been entirely decided, and enjoining him to treat her in the meantime as his legitimate wife.

Wiltshire sent with his letter an especial copy of that document, adding that he feared the information the Holy Father had received of the violence exercised by the English universities toward those doctors who had voted against the divorce, together with the money and promises distributed among those of France, especially the University of Paris, to obtain favorable decisions, had not contributed toward influencing him.

The king read and re-read several times all these statements, and was entirely overwhelmed with indignation and disappointment.

“And why,” he angrily exclaimed, dashing the earl’s letter as far as possible from him—“why have these flatterers surrounding me always assured me I would succeed in my undertaking? Why could they not foresee that it would be impossible? and why have I not found a sincere friend who might have admonished me? More!” he cried after a moment’s silence—“More, I am most miserable! What could be more unjust? I am devoted to Lady Anne Boleyn as my future wife; and now they wish to make me renounce her. The emperor’s intrigues prevail, and against all laws, human and divine, they condemn me to eternal celibacy!”

“Ah!” replied Sir Thomas in a firm but sadly respectful manner, “yes, it is indeed distressing to see your majesty thus voluntarily destroy your own peace, that of your kingdom, the happiness of your subjects, the regard for your own honor, so many benefits, in fact, and all for the foolish love of a girl who possesses neither worth nor reputation.”

“More,” exclaimed the king, “do not speak of her in this manner! She is young and thoughtless, but in her heart she is devoted to me.”

“That is,” replied More, “she is entirely devoted to the crown; she loves dearly the honors of royalty, and her pride is doubly flattered.”

“More,” said the king, “I forgive you for speaking thus to me; your severe morals, your austere virtues, have not permitted you to experience the torments of love, and that is why,” he added gloomily, “you cannot comprehend its irresistible impulses and true sentiments.”

“Nothing that is known to one man is unknown to another,” replied More. “Love, in itself, is a sublime sentiment that comes from God; but, alas! men drag it in the dust, like all else they touch, and too often mistake the appearance for the reality. To love anyone, O my king!” continued More, “is it not to prefer them in all things above yourself, to consider yourself as nothing, and be willing to sacrifice without regret all that you would wish to possess?”

“Yes,” said Henry VIII.; “and that is the way I love Anne—more than my life, more than the entire world!”

“No, no, sire!” exclaimed More, “don’t tell me that. No, don’t say you love her; say you love the pleasure she affords you, the attractions she possesses, which have charmed your senses—in a word, acknowledge that you love yourself in her, and consider well that the day when nature deprives her of her gifts and graces your memory will no longer represent her to you but as an insipid image, worthy only of a scornful oblivion! Ah! if you loved her truly, you would act in a different manner. You would never have considered aught but her happiness and her interests; you would blush for her, and you would not be able to endure the thought of the shame with which you have not hesitated to cover her yourself in the eyes of all your court!”

“Perhaps,” … replied Henry in a low and altered voice. “But she—she loves me; I cannot doubt that.”

“She loves the King of England!” replied More excitedly, “but not Henry; she loves the mighty prince who ignominiously bends his neck beneath the yoke which she pleases to impose on[778] him. But poor and destitute, her glance would never have fallen upon you. Proud of her beauty, vain of her charms, she holds you like a conquered vassal whom she governs by a gesture or a word. She loves riches, honors and the pleasures with which you surround her. She is dazzled by the éclat of the high rank you occupy, and, to attain it, she fears not to purchase it at the price of your soul and all that you possess. What matters to her the care of your honor or the love of your subjects? Has she ever said to you: ‘Henry, I love you, but your duty separates you from me; be great, be virtuous’? Has she said: ‘Catherine, your wife, is my sovereign, and I recognize no other’? Do you not hear the voice of your people saying to your children: ‘You shall reign over us’? But what am I saying? No, of course she has not spoken thus; because she seeks to elevate herself, she thinks of her own aggrandizement—to see at her feet men whom she would never otherwise be able to command.”

“Marry Anne Boleyn,” replied Thomas More coolly; “you should do it, since you have broken off her marriage with the Earl of Northumberland. If not, send her away from court.”

“I will do it! … No, I will not do it!” he exclaimed, almost in the same breath. “I shall never be able to do it.”

“That is to say, you never intend to do it,” replied More. “We can always accomplish what we resolve.”

“No, no,” replied Henry; “we cannot always do what we wish. Everything conspires against me. Tired of willing, I can make nothing bend to my will! Of what use is my royal power? To be happy is a thing impossible!”

“Yes, of all things in this life most impossible,” answered More; “and he who aspires to attain it finds his miseries redoubled at the very moment he thinks they will terminate. The possession of unlawful pleasures is poisoned by the remorse that follows in their train; and, frightened by their insecurity and short duration, we are prevented from enjoying them in quietness and peace.”

“Then,” cried Henry VIII., stamping his foot violently on the floor, “we had better be dead.”

“To-morrow!” repeated the king, as if struck with terror. “No, no, More, not to-morrow. … I would not be willing now to appear in the presence of God.”

“Then,” replied More, “how can you expect to live peaceably in a condition in which you are afraid to die? In a few hours, or at least in a few years (that is as certain as the light of day which shines this moment), your life and mine will have to end, leaving nothing more than regrets for the past and fears for the future.”

“You say truly, More,” replied the king; “but life appears so long to us, the future so far removed! Is it necessary, then, that we be always thinking of it and sacrificing our pleasures?… Later—well, we will change. Will we not have more time then to think of it?”

“Ah!” replied More sadly, “there remains very little time to him who is always putting off until to-morrow.”

As he heard the last words, the[779] king’s face grew instantly crimson. He kept More with him, entertaining him with his trials and vexations, and the night was far advanced before he permitted him to retire.

During four entire days the king remained shut up in his apartment, and Anne Boleyn vainly attempted to gain admittance.

Meanwhile, a rumor of her downfall spread rapidly through the palace. The courtiers who were accustomed to attend her levées in greater numbers and much more scrupulously than those of Queen Catherine, suddenly discontinued, and on the last occasion scarcely one of them made his appearance. They also took great care to preserve a frigid reserve and doubtful politeness, which excited to the last degree her alarm and that of her ambitious family.

The latter were every moment in dread of the blow that seemed ready to fall upon them. In this state of gloomy disquiet every circumstance was anxiously noted and served to excite their apprehensions. They continually discussed among themselves the arrival of the despatches from Rome, the nature of which they suspected from the very long time Sir Thomas More had remained with the king. Then they refreshed their memories with reflections on the inflexible severity of the lord chancellor, his old attachment for Queen Catherine—an attachment which the elevation of More had never interrupted, as they had hoped would be the case. Finally, the sincerity of his nature and the estimation in which he was held by the king made them, with great reason, apprehend the influence of his counsel. Already they found themselves abandoned by almost all of those upon whose support they had relied. Suffolk, leagued with them heretofore, in order to secure the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey, now regarded them in their disgrace as of little consequence to one so closely related as himself to his majesty by the princess, his wife. The Duke of Norfolk, justly proud of his birth, his wealth, and his reputation, could not believe the power with which the influence of his niece had clothed him in the council by any means bound him to engage in or compromise himself in her cause. In the meantime they realized that they would inevitably be compelled to succumb or make a last and desperate effort, and they resolved with one accord to address themselves to Cromwell, whose shrewdness and cunning, joined to the motives of self-interest that could be brought to bear on him, seemed to offer them a last resort.

Cromwell immediately understood all the benefit he would be likely to derive from the situation whether he succeeded or failed in the cause of Anne Boleyn, and determined, according to his own expression, to “make or unmake.” He wrote to the king, demanding an audience. “He fully realized,” he wrote, with his characteristic adroitness, “his entire incapacity for giving advice, but neither his devoted affection nor his sense of duty would permit him to remain silent when he knew the anxiety his sovereign was suffering. It might be deemed presumptuous in him to say it, but he believed all the difficulties embarrassing the king arose from the timidity of his advisers, who were misled by exterior appearances or deceived by the opinions of the vulgar.”

The king immediately granted him an audience, although his usual custom was to remain entirely secluded and alone while laboring under these violent transports of passion. He hoped that Cromwell might be able to present his opinions with such ability as would at least be sufficient to divert him from the wretchedness he experienced.

Cromwell appeared before him with eyes cast down and affecting an air of sadness and constraint.

“Sire,” he said, as he approached the king, “yesterday, even yesterday, I was happy—yes, happy in the thought of being permitted to present myself before your majesty; because it seemed to me I might be able to offer some consolation for the anxieties you experience by reminding you that nothing should induce you to pause in your efforts to advance the interests of the kingdom and the state. But to-day, in appearing before you, I know not what to say. This morning Lady Boleyn, being informed that I was to have the happiness of seeing your majesty, sent for me and charged me with the commission of asking your majesty’s permission for her to withdraw from court.”

“What!” exclaimed Henry, rising hastily to his feet, “she wishes to leave me?—she, my only happiness, my only joy? Never!”

“I have found her,” continued Cromwell, seeming not to remark the painful uneasiness he had aroused in the king’s mind—“I have found her plunged in a state of indescribable grief. She was almost deprived of consciousness; her beautiful eyes were weighed down with tears, her long hair hanging neglected around her shoulders; and her pale, transparent cheek made her resemble a delicate white rose bowed on its slender stem before the violence of the tempest. ‘Go, my dear Cromwell,’ she said to me with a tremulous voice, but sweet as the soft expiring notes of an æolian lyre—‘go, say to my king, to my lord, I ask his permission to retire this day to my father’s country-seat. I know that I am surrounded by enemies, but, while favored by his protection, I have not feared their malice. But now I feel, and cannot doubt it, I shall become their victim, since they have succeeded in prejudicing my sovereign against me to such an extent that he refuses to hear my defence.’”

“What can she be afraid of here?” cried the king. “Who would dare offend her in my palace?”

“Who will be able to defend her if your majesty abandons her?” replied Cromwell in a haughty tone, feigning to forget the humble demeanor he had assumed, and mentally applauding the success of his stratagem. “Has she not given up all for you? Every day she has wounded by her refusals the greatest lords of the realm, who have earnestly sued for her heart and hand; but she has constantly refused to listen to them because of the love she bears for you—always preferring the uncertain hope of one day becoming yours to all the brilliant advantages of the wealthiest suitors she has been urged to accept. But to-day, when her honor is attacked, when you banish her from your presence, she feels she will not have the courage to endure near you such wretchedness, and she asks to be permitted to withdraw from court at once and for ever!”

“For ever?” repeated the king.[781] “Cromwell, has she said that? Have you heard her right? No, Cromwell, you are mistaken! I know her better than you.” And he turned on Cromwell a keen, scrutinizing glance.

“She said all I have told you,” replied the hypocrite, with the coolest assurance, raising his head haughtily. “Would I dare to repeat what I have not heard? And your majesty can imagine that my devotion has alone induced me to become the bearer of so painful a message; for I could not believe, your majesty had ceased to love her.”

“Never!” cried the king. “Never have I for one moment ceased to adore her! But listen, dear Cromwell, and be convinced of how wretched I am! Yesterday I received from Rome the most distressing intelligence. I had written the pope a letter, signed by a great number of lords of my court and bishops of the kingdom, in which they expressed the fears they entertained of one day seeing the flames of civil war break out in this country if I should die without male heirs, as there would be grounds for contesting the right of my daughter Mary to the throne on the score of her legitimacy. But nothing can move him.”

Here the king rose, furiously indignant. “He has answered this petition,” he cried, walking with hurried strides up and down the floor; “and how?… By my faith, I can scarcely repeat it.… That he pardons the terms they have used in their letter, attributing them to the affection they bear for me; that he is under still greater obligations to me than they have mentioned; that it is not his fault if the affair of the divorce remains undecided; that he has sent legates to England; that the queen has refused to recognize them, and appealed from all they have done; that he has tried vainly in every possible way to terminate the affair amicably; and, furthermore, ‘You will, perhaps, be ready to say,’ he writes, ‘that, being under so many obligations to the king as I am, I should waive all other considerations and accord him absolutely everything he asks.’ Although that would be sovereignly unjust, yet he can conclude nothing else from their letter; that they reflect not on the queen having represented to him, that all Christendom is scandalized because they would attempt to annul a marriage contracted so many years ago, at the request of two great kings and under a dispensation from the pope—a marriage confirmed by the birth of several children! And what else? Let me see:… That if I rely on the opinion of several doctors and universities, he refers, on his part, to the law of God upon the sanctity and unity of marriage, and the highest authorities taken from the Hebrew and Latin writers; that the decisions of the universities which I bring forward are supported by no proofs; he cannot decide finally upon that, and, if he should precipitate his judgment, they would no longer be able to avert the evils with which it is said England is threatened; that he desires as much as they that I may have male heirs, but he is not God to give them to me; he has no greater wish than to please me as far as lies in his power, without at the same time violating all the laws of justice and equity; and, finally, he conjures them to cease demanding of him things that are[782] opposed to his conscience, in order that he may be spared the pain of refusing! Mark that well, Cromwell—the pain of refusing! Thus, you see, after having tried everything, spent everything, and used every possible means, what remains now for me to hope?”

“All that you wish,” replied Cromwell; “everything without exception! Why permit yourself to be governed by those who ought to be your slaves? Among all the clergy who surround you, and whom you are able to reduce, if you choose, to mendicity, can you not find a priest who will marry you? If I were King of England, I would very soon convince them that the happiness of their lives depended entirely upon mine! Threaten to withdraw from the authority of Rome, and you will very soon see them yielding, on their knees, to all your demands.”

“Cromwell,” said Henry VIII., “I admire your spirit and the boldness of the measures you advocate. From this moment I open to you the door of my council. Remember the kindness and the signal favor with which I have honored you. However, your inexperienced zeal carries you too far; you forget that the day I would determine really to separate myself from the Church of Rome, I would become schismatic, and the people would refuse to obey me. Moreover I am a Catholic, and I wish to die one.”

“What of that?” replied Cromwell. “Am I not also a Catholic? Because your majesty frightens the pope, will he cease to exist? Declare to him that from this day you no longer recognize his authority; that you forbid the clergy paying their tithes to, or receiving from him their nominations. You will see, then, if the next day your present marriage is not annulled and the one you wish to contract approved and ratified.”

“No,” said the king. “It is a thing utterly impossible; the bishops would refuse to accede to any such requirements, and they would be right. They know too well that it is essential for the church to have a head in order to maintain her unity, and without it nothing would follow but confusion and disorder.”

“Well! who can prevent your majesty from becoming yourself that head?” exclaimed Cromwell. “Is England not actually a monster now with two heads, one of them wanting a thing, and the other not? Follow the example given you by those German princes who are freeing themselves from the yoke which has humbled them for so many years before the throne of a pontiff who is a stranger alike to their affections and their interests! Then everything anomalous will rectify itself, and your subjects cease to believe that any other than yourself is entitled to their homage or submission.”

“You are right, little Cromwell!” cried Henry VIII., this seductive and perfidious discourse flattering at the same time his guilty passion and the ambition that divided his soul. “But how would you proceed about executing this marvellous project, of which a thought had already crossed my own mind?—for, as I have just told you, the clergy will refuse to obey me, and I shall then have no means of compelling them.”

“Your consideration and kindness[783] make you forget,” replied Cromwell adroitly, afraid of wounding the king’s pride, “the statutes of præmunire offer you means both sure and easy. Is it not by those laws they have tried Wolsey before the Parliament? In condemning him they have condemned themselves, and have made themselves amenable to the same penalties. You have them all in your power. Threaten to punish them in their turn, if they refuse to take the oath acknowledging you as head of the church; and do it fearlessly if they dare attempt to resist you.”

“Well, little Cromwell,” said Henry VIII., slapping him familiarly on the shoulder, “I observe with great satisfaction your coolness and the variety of resources you have at command. You see everything at a glance and fear nothing. I have made all these objections only to hear how you would meet them. Here, take these Roman documents, read them for yourself, and you will be better able to appreciate their contents; while I go and beg Anne to forget the wrongs I so cruelly reproach myself with having inflicted on her.”

Saying this, Henry VIII. went out, and Cromwell followed him with his eyes as he walked through the long gallery.

An ironical smile hovered over his thin and bloodless lips as he watched him. “Go, go,” he murmured to himself, “throw yourself at the feet of your silly mistress, and ask her pardon for wishing her to be queen of England. They are grand, very grand, these kings, and yet they find themselves very often held in the hollow of the hand of some low and crafty flatterer! ‘Despicable creature!’ they will say. Yes, I am despicable in the eyes of many; and yet they prepare, by my advice, to overthrow the pillars of the church, in order to enrich me with its consecrated spoils.”

He laughed a diabolical laugh; then suddenly his face grew dark, and a fierce, malignant gleam shot from his eyes. “Go,” he continued—“go, prince as false as you are wicked. I, at least, am your equal in cunning and duplicity. You were not created for good, and the odious voice of More will call you in vain to the path of virtue. My tongue—ay, mine—is to you far sweeter! It carries a poison that you will suck with eager lips. The son of the poor fuller will make you his partner in crime. He will recline with you on your velvet throne, and perfidious cruelty will unite us heart and soul!… Go, seek that fool whom you adore and who will weary you very soon, and the vile, ambitious father who has begotten her. But, for me! … destroy your kingdom, profane the sanctuary, light the funeral pyre, and compel all those to mount it who shall oppose the laws Cromwell will dictate to you! Two ferocious beasts to-day share the throne of England! You will surfeit me with gold, and I will make you drunk with blood! You shall proclaim aloud what I shall have whispered in your ear! Ha! who of the two will be really king—Henry VIII. or Cromwell? Why, Cromwell, without doubt; because he was born in the mire. He has learned how to fly while the other was being fledged beneath the shadow of the crown! You have been reared within these walls of gold,” continued Cromwell, surveying the magnificent adornings of the royal chamber; “these exquisite perfumes, escaping from fountains and flowers, have always surround you.[784] You have never known, like me, abandonment and want, suffered from cold and hunger in a thatched cottage, and imbibed the hatred, fostered in those abodes of wretchedness, against the rich; but I have cherished that rage in my inmost soul! There it burns like a consuming fire! I will have a palace. I will have power and be feared. Servile courtiers shall fawn at my feet, adulation shall surround me. I would grasp the entire world, and yet the cry of my soul would be, More, still more!”

Saying this, Cromwell threw himself into the king’s arm-chair, and, pushing contemptuously from him the papers he had taken to read, abandoned himself entirely to the furious thirst of avarice and ambition that devoured him.

The curfew had already sounded many hours, and profound silence reigned over the city. Not a sound was heard throughout the dark and winding streets, save the boisterous shouts of some midnight revellers returning from a party of pleasure, or the dreary and monotonous song of a besotted inebriate as he staggered toward his home.

In the mansion of the French ambassador, however, no one had retired; and young De Vaux, impatiently waiting the return of M. du Bellay, paced with measured tread up and down the large hall where for many hours supper had been served.

Weary with listening for the sound of footsteps, and hearing only the mournful sighing of the night-wind, he at length seated himself before the fire in a great tapestried arm-chair whose back, rising high above his head, turned over in the form of a canopy, and gave him the appearance of a saint reposing in the depths of his shrine. For a long time he watched the sparks as they flew upward from the fire, then, taking a book from his pocket, he opened it at random; but before reaching the bottom of the first page his eyes closed, the book fell from his hands, and he sank into a profound sleep, from which he was aroused only by the noise made by the ambassador’s servants on the arrival of their master.

M. de Vaux, being suddenly aroused from sleep, arose hastily to his feet on seeing the ambassador enter.

“I have waited for you with the greatest impatience,” he exclaimed with a suppressed yawn.

“Say, rather, you have been sleeping soundly in your chair,” replied M. du Bellay, smiling. “Here!” he continued, turning toward the valets who followed him, “take my cloak and hat, and then leave us; you can remove the table in the morning.”

Obedient to their master’s orders, they lighted several more lamps and retired, not without regret, however, at losing the opportunity of catching, during the repast, a word that might have satisfied their curiosity as to the cause of M. du Bellay having remained at the king’s palace until so late an hour.

“Well, monsieur! what has been done at last?” eagerly inquired young De Vaux as soon as they had left.

“In truth, I cannot yet comprehend it myself,” replied Du Bellay. “In spite of all my efforts, it has been impossible to clearly unravel the knot of intrigue. This morning, as you know, nothing was talked of but the downfall of Anne Boleyn. I was delighted; her[785] overthrow would have dispensed us from all obligations. Now the king is a greater fool about her than ever, and, unless God himself strikes a blow to sever them, I believe nothing will cure him of his infatuation. As I entered, his first word was to demand why I had been so long in presenting myself. ‘Sire,’ I replied, ‘I have come with the utmost haste, I assure you, and am here ready to execute any orders it may please you to give!’”

“‘Listen,’ he then said to me. ‘I have several things to tell you; but the first of all is to warn you of my determination to arrest Cardinal Wolsey. I am aware that you have manifested a great deal of interest in him; … that you have even gone to see him when he was sick; … but that is of no consequence. I am far from believing that you are in any manner concerned in the treason he has meditated against me. Therefore I have wished to advise you, that you may feel no apprehension on that account.’ I was struck with astonishment. ‘What! sire,’ I at last answered, ‘the cardinal betray you? Why, he is virtually banished from England, where he occupies himself, they say, only in doing works of charity and mercy.’ ‘I know what I say to you,’ replied the king; ‘his own servants accuse him of conspiring against the state. But I shall myself examine into the depths of this accusation. In the meantime he shall be removed to the Tower, and I will send Sir Walsh with instructions to join the Earl of Northumberland, in order to arrest Wolsey at Cawood Castle, where he is now established.’”

“Is it possible?” cried De Vaux, interrupting M. du Bellay. “That unfortunate cardinal! Who could have brought down this new storm on his head? M. du Bellay, do you believe him capable of committing this crime, even if it were in his power?”

“I do not believe a word of it,” replied M. du Bellay, “and I know not who has excited this new storm of persecution. I have tried every possible means to ascertain from the king, but he constantly evaded my questions by answering in a vague and obscure manner. I have been informed in the palace that he had seen no person during the day, except Cromwell, Lady Boleyn, and the Duke of Suffolk. Might this not be the result of a plot concocted between them? This is only a conjecture, and we may never get at the bottom of the affair. But let us pass on to matters of more importance. The mistress is in high favor again. The king is determined to marry her, and has proclaimed in a threatening manner that he will separate himself from the communion of Rome, and no more permit the supremacy of the Sovereign Pontiff to be recognized in his kingdom. He demands that the King of France shall do the same, and rely on his authority in following his example.”

“What!” cried De Vaux, astounded by this intelligence. “And how have you answered him, my lord?”

“I said all that I felt authorized or could say,” replied Du Bellay; “but what means shall we use to persuade a man so far transported and subjugated by his passions that he seems to be a fool—no longer capable of reasoning, of comprehending either his duty, the laws, or the future? I have held up to him the disruption of his kingdom, the horrors that give birth to a war of religion, the[786] blood that it would cause him to spill.”

“‘I shall spill as much of it as may be necessary,’ he replied, ‘to make them yield. They will have their choice. Already the representatives of the clergy have been ordered to assemble. Well! they shall decide among themselves which is preferable—death, exile, or obedience to my will.’

“Whilst saying this,” continued M. du Bellay, with a gloomy expression,… “he played with a bunch of roses, carelessly plucking off the leaves with his fingers.”

“But what has been able to bring the king, in so short a time, to such an extremity?” asked De Vaux, whose eyes, full of astonishment and anxiety, interrogated those of M. du Bellay.

“His base passions, without doubt; and, still more, the vile flattery coming from some one of those he has taken into favor,” replied Du Bellay impatiently.… “I tried in vain to discover who the arch-hypocrite could be, but the king was never for a moment thrown off his guard; he constantly repeated: ‘I have resolved on this; I will do that!’ … I shall find out, however, hereafter,” continued Du Bellay; “but at present I am in ignorance.”

“No; but it seems he has been very much exercised on account of the cordial reception Chancellor Duprat gave Campeggio when he passed through France. ‘That man has behaved very badly toward me,’ he said sharply. ‘I was so lenient as to let him leave my kingdom unmolested, after having hesitated a long time whether I should not punish him severely for his conduct; and, behold, one of your ministers receives and treats him with the utmost magnificence!’

“I assured him no consequence should be attached to that circumstance, and pretended that Chancellor Duprat was so fond of good cheer and grand display he had doubtless been too happy to have an opportunity of parading his wealth and luxury before the eyes of a stranger.

“He then renewed the attack against Wolsey. ‘If that be the case,’ he exclaimed, ‘this must be a malady common to all these chancellors; for my lord cardinal was also preparing to give a royal reception in the capital of his realm of York; but, unfortunately,’ he added with an ironical sneer, ‘I happen to be his master, and we have somewhat interfered with his plans.’ He then attacked the pope, then our king; and finally, while the hour of midnight was striking, exhausted with anger and excitement, to my great relief, he permitted me to retire. Now,” added M. du Bellay, “we will have to spend the rest of the night in writing, and to-morrow the courier must be despatched.”

PRUSSIA AND THE CHURCH.

II.

In February, 1848, Louis Philippe was driven from his throne by the people of Paris, and the Republic was proclaimed. This revolution rapidly spread over the whole of Europe. The shock was most violent in Germany, where everything was in readiness for a general outburst. Most of the governments were compelled to yield to the popular will and to make important concessions. New cabinets were formed in Würtemberg, Darmstadt, Nassau, and Hesse. Lewis of Bavaria was forced to abdicate. Hanover and Saxony held out until Berlin and Vienna were invaded by the revolutionary party, when they too succumbed. On the 13th of March the Vienna mob overthrew the Austrian ministry, and Metternich fled to England. Italy and Hungary revolted. Berlin was held all summer by an ignorant revolutionary faction. In September fierce and bloody riots broke out in Frankfort.

Popular meetings, secret societies, revolutionary clubs, violent declamations, and inflammatory appeals through the press kept all Germany in a state of agitation. Occasional outbreaks among the peasantry, followed by pillage and incendiarism, increased the general confusion.

It was during this time of wild excitement that the elections for the Imperial Parliament were held. To this assembly many avowed atheists, pantheists, communists, and Jacobins were chosen—men who fully agreed with Hecker when he declared that “there were six plagues in Germany—the princes, the nobles, the bureaucrats, the capitalists, the parsons, and the soldiers.” The parties in the Parliament took their names from their positions in the assembly hall, and were called the extreme left, the left, the left centre, the right centre, the right, and the extreme right. The first three were composed of red republicans, Jacobins, and liberals. To the right centre belonged the constitutional liberals; and on the right and right centre sat the Catholic members, the predecessors of the party of the Centrum of the present day. The extreme right was occupied by functionaries and bureaucrats, chiefly from Prussia. The Parliament of Frankfort, in the Grundrechte, or Fundamental Rights, which it proclaimed, decreed universal, suffrage, abolished all the political rights of the aristocracy, the hereditary chambers in all the states of Germany, set aside the existing family entails, and, though nominally it retained the imperial power, degraded the emperor to a republican president by giving him merely a suspensive veto.

While this Parliament was sitting the Catholic bishops of Germany assembled in council at Würzburg, and, at the conclusion of their deliberations, drew up a Memorial as firm in tone as it was clear and precise in expression, in which they set forth the claims of the church.

“To bring about,” they said, “a separation from the state—that is to say, from public order, which necessarily reposes on a moral and religious foundation—is not according to the will of the church. If the state will perforce separate from the church, so will the church, without approving, tolerate what it cannot avoid; and when not compelled by the duty of self-preservation, she will not break the bonds of union made fast by mutual understanding.

“The church, entrusted with the solemn and holy mission, ‘As my Father hath sent me, so send I ye,’ requires for the accomplishment of this mission, whatever the form of government of the state may be, the fullest freedom and independence. Her holy popes, prelates, and confessors have in all ages willingly and courageously given up their life and blood for the preservation of this inalienable freedom.”

In virtue of these principles the bishops, in this Memorial, claimed the right of directing, without any interference on the part of the state, theological seminaries, and of founding schools, colleges, and all kinds of educational establishments; of exerting canonical control, unfettered by state meddling, over the conduct of their clergy, as well as that of introducing into their dioceses religious orders, congregations, and pious confraternities, for which they demanded the same rights which the new political constitution had granted to secular associations. Finally, they asserted their right to free and untrammelled communication with the Holy See; and, as included in this, that of receiving and publishing all papal bulls, briefs, and other documents without the Royal Placet, which they declared to be repugnant to the honor and dignity of the ministers of religion.

The Frankfort Parliament decreed the total separation of church and state, and was therefore compelled to guarantee the freedom of all religions. This separation was sanctioned by the Catholic members of the Assembly, who looked upon it as less dangerous to the cause of religion and morality than ecclesiastical Josephism. In the present conflict between the church and the German Empire the Catholic party has again demanded, and in vain, the separation of church and state. In rejecting their urgent request, Dr. Falk declared that the leading minds in England and America are already beginning to regret that their governments have so little control over the ecclesiastical organizations within their limits.

Whilst the representatives of the German people at Frankfort were abolishing the privileges of the nobles, decreeing the separation of church and state, and forgetting the standing armies, the governments were quietly gathering their forces. Marshal Radetzky put down the Italian rebellion, Prince Windischgrätz quelled the democracy of Vienna, and General Wrangel took possession of Berlin, without a battle. Russia, at the request of Austria, sent an army into Hungary to destroy the rebellion in that country, and the disturbances in Bavaria and in the Palatinate were suppressed by Prussian troops under the present Emperor of Germany. The representatives of the larger states withdrew from the Frankfort Parliament, which dwindled, and finally, amidst universal contempt and neglect, came to an end at Stuttgart, June 18, 1849.

But the liberties of the church[789] were not lost. In Prussia, as we have seen, a better state of things had begun with the imprisonment of the heroic Archbishop of Cologne in 1837. In the face of the menacing attitude of the German democrats and republicans, Frederick William IV. confirmed the liberties of the Catholic Church by the letters-patent of 1847.

The constitutions of December 5, 1848, and January 31, 1850, were drawn up in the lurid light of the revolution, which had beaten fiercest upon the house of Hohenzollern. The king had capitulated to the insurgents, withdrawn his soldiers from the capital, and abandoned Berlin, and with it the whole state, for nine months to the tender mercies of the mob. He was forced to witness the most revolting spectacles. The dead bodies of the rioters were borne in procession under the windows of his palace, while the rabble shouted to him: “Fritz, off with your hat.”

It is not surprising, in view of this experience, that we should find in the constitution of 1850 (articles 15 to 18 inclusive) a very satisfactory recognition of the rights of the church. Why these paragraphs granting the church freedom to regulate and administer its own affairs; to keep possession of its own revenues, endowments, and establishments, whether devoted to worship, education, or beneficence; and freely to communicate with the Pope, were inserted in the constitution, we know from Prince Bismarck himself. In his speech in the Prussian Upper House, March 10, 1873, he affirmed that “they were introduced at a time when the state needed, or thought it needed, help, and believed that it would find this help by leaning on the Catholic Church. It was probably led to this belief by the fact that in the National Assembly of 1848 all the electoral districts with a preponderant Catholic population returned—I will not say royalist representatives, but certainly men who were the friends of order, which was not the case in the Protestant districts.”

The provisions of the constitution of 1850 with regard to the church were honorably and faithfully carried out down to the beginning of the present conflict. Never since the Reformation had the church in Prussia been so free, never had she made such rapid progress, whether in completing her internal organization or in extending her influence. The Prussian liberals and atheists, who had fully persuaded themselves that without the wealth and aid of the state the Catholic religion would have no force, were amazed. The influence of the priests over the people grew in proportion as they were educated more thoroughly in the spirit and discipline of the church under the immediate supervision of the bishops, unfettered by state interference; the number of convents, both of men and women, rapidly increased; associations of all kinds, scientific, benevolent, and religious, spread over the land; religious journals and reviews were founded in which Catholic interests were ably advocated and defended; and all the forces of the church were unified and guided by the harmonious action of a most enlightened and zealous episcopate.

This was the more astonishing as the Evangelical Church, whose liberties had also been guaranteed by the constitution of 1850, had shown itself unable to profit by the[790] greater freedom of action which it had received. In fact, the Evangelical Church was lifeless, and it needed only this test to prove its want of vitality. It was a state creation, and in an age when the world had ceased to recognize the divine right of kings to create religions. It was only in 1817 that the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches of Prussia, together with the very name of Protestant, were abolished by royal edict, and a new Prussian establishment, under the title of “evangelical,” was imposed by the civil power upon a Protestant population of nearly eight millions, whose religious and moral sense was so dead that they seemed to regard with stolid indifference this interference of government with all that freemen deem most sacred in life. Acts of parliament may make “establishments,” but they cannot inspire religious faith and life; and it was therefore not surprising that, when the mummy of evangelicalism was put out into the open air of freedom by the constitution of 1850, it should have been revealed to all that the thing was dead.

Nevertheless, the Prussian government continued to act toward the Catholic Church with great justice, and even friendliness, and the war against Catholic Austria in 1866 wrought no change in its ecclesiastical policy. Even the opening of the Vatican Council caused no alarm in Prussia; on the contrary, King William, as it was generally believed at least, was most civil to the Holy Father; and Prince Bismarck himself at that time saw no reason for apprehension, though he had been the head of the ministry already eight years. To what, then, are we to attribute Prussia’s sudden change of attitude toward the church? Who began the present conflict, and what was its provocation?

This is a question which has been much discussed in the Prussian House of Deputies and elsewhere. Prince Bismarck has openly asserted in the House of Deputies within the past year that the provocation was the definition of papal infallibility by the Vatican Council on the 18th of June, 1870, and subsequently the hostile attitude of the party of the Centrum toward the German Empire.

Herr von Kirchmann, a member of the German Parliament and of the Prussian House of Deputies, a national liberal, and not a Catholic, but in the main a sympathizer with the spirit of the Falk legislation, has recently discussed this whole subject with great ability, and—as far as it is possible for one who believes in the Hegelian doctrine that “the state is the present god”—also with fairness.[255]

To Prince Bismarck’s first assertion, that the definition of papal infallibility was the unpardonable offence, which has been so strongly emphasized by Mr. Gladstone and re-echoed with parrot-like fidelity by the anti-Catholic press of Europe and America, Herr von Kirchmann makes the following reply:

It seems almost needless to remark that there is no necessary connection between the doctrine of Papal infallibility and that of the essential organization of the church; that the jurisdiction of the Pope was as great, and universally recognized as such by Catholics, before the Vatican Council as since; and consequently that it is not even possible that the definition of 1870 should make any change in his authoritative relation to, or power over, the church. His jurisdiction is wider than his infallibility, and independent of it; and the duty of obedience to his commands existed before the dogma was defined precisely as it exists now; and therefore it is clearly manifest that the Vatican decree cannot give even a plausible pretext for such legislation as the Falk Laws.

Neither the Vatican Council, then, nor the Catholics of Prussia have done anything to provoke the present persecution. To find fault with the German bishops for accepting the dogma of infallibility, after having strongly opposed its definition by the council, would be as unreasonable as to blame a member of Congress for admitting the binding force of a law the passage of which he had done everything in his power to prevent. Their duty, beyond all question, was to act as they have acted. This was not the offence: the unpardonable crime was that the church, as soon as she was unloosed from the fetters of bureaucracy, had grown too powerful. We doubt whether any more forcible argument in proof of the indestructible vitality of the church can be found than that which may be deduced from the universal consent of her enemies, of whatever shade of belief or unbelief, that the only way in which she can be successfully opposed is to array against her the strongest of human powers—that of the state. A complete revolution of thought upon this subject has taken place within the last half-century. Up to that time it was confidently held by Protestants as well as infidels that, to undermine and finally destroy the church, it would be simply necessary to withdraw from her the support of the state; that to her freedom would necessarily prove fatal. The experiment, as it was thought, had not been satisfactorily tried. Ireland, indeed, had held her faith for three hundred years, in spite of all that fiendish cruelty could invent to destroy it; but persecution has always been the life of the faith. In the United States the church had been free since the war of independence, but of us little was known; and, besides, down to, say, 1830 even the most thoughtful and far-sighted among us had serious doubts as to the future of the church in this country.

But with the emancipation of the Catholics in Great Britain, the new constitution of the kingdom of Belgium, and the completer organization[793] of the church in the United States, the test as to the action of freedom upon the progress of Catholic faith began to be applied over a wide and varied field and under not unfavorable circumstances. What the result has been we may learn from our enemies. Mr. Gladstone expostulates for Great Britain, and reaches a hand of sympathy to M. Emile de Laveleye in Belgium. Dr. Falk, Dr. Friedberg, and even the moderate Herr von Kirchmann, defend the tyrannical May Laws as necessary to stop the growth of the church in Germany; and at home the most silent of Presidents and the most garrulous of bishops, forgetting that the cause of temperance has prior claims upon their attention, have raised the cry of alarm to warn their fellow-citizens of the dangerous progress of popery in this great and free country. Time was when “the Free Church in the Free State” was thought to be the proper word of command; but now it is “the Fettered Church in the Enslaved State,” since no state that meddles with the consciences of its subjects can be free.

If there is anything for which we feel more especially thankful, it is that henceforth the cause of the church and the cause of freedom are inseparably united. We have heard to satiety that the Catholic Church is the greatest conservative force in the world, the most powerful element of order in society, the noblest school of respect in which mankind have ever been taught. Praised be God that now, as in the early days, he is making it impossible that Catholics should not be on the side of liberty, as the church has always been; so that all men may see that, if we love order the more, we love not liberty the less!

“I will sing to my God as long at I shall be,” wrote an inspired king; “put not your trust in princes.” No, nor in governments, nor in states, but in God who is the Lord, and in the poor whom Jesus loved. From God out of the people came the church; through God back to the people is she going. We know there are still many Catholics who trust in kings and believe in salvation through them; but God will make them wiser. The Spirit that sits at the roaring Loom of Time will weave for them other garments. The irresistible charm of the church, humanly speaking, lies in the fact that she comes closer to the hearts of the people than any other power that has ever been brought to bear upon mankind.

Having shown that the oppressive ecclesiastical legislation of Germany was not provoked by the church, and that its only excuse is the increasing power of the church, Herr von Kirchmann reduces all farther discussion of this subject to the two following heads: 1st. How far ought the state to go in setting bounds to this power of the Catholic Church? and 2d. What means ought it to employ?

In view of the dangers with which every open breach of the peace between church and state is fraught for the people, it would have been advisable, he thinks, from political motives, to have tried to settle the difficulty by a mutual understanding between the two powers; nor would it, in his opinion, be derogatory to the sovereignty of the state to treat the church as an equal, since she embraces in her fold all the Catholics of the world, who have their directing head in the Pope, whose sovereign ecclesiastical power cannot, therefore, as a matter of fact, be called in question.

That Prussia did not make any effort to see what could be effected by this policy of conciliation may, in the opinion of Herr von Kirchmann, find some justification in the fact that the government did not expect, and could not in 1871 foresee, the determined opposition of the Catholics to the May Laws of 1873. At any rate, as he thinks, the high and majestatic right of the state is supreme, and it alone must determine, in the ultimate instance, how far and how long it will acknowledge any claim of the church. Thus even this statesman, who is of the more moderate school of Prussian politicians, holds that the church has no rights which the state is bound to respect; that political interests are paramount, and conscience, in the modern as in the ancient pagan state, has no claim upon the recognition of the government. English and American Protestants, where their own interests are concerned, would be as little inclined to accept this doctrine as Catholics; in fact, this country was born of a protest against the assumption of state supremacy over conscience; and yet so blinding and misleading is prejudice that the Falk Laws receive their heart-felt sympathy.

Though Herr von Kirchmann accepts without reservation the principles which underlie the recent Prussian anti-Catholic legislation, and thinks the May Laws have been drawn up with great wisdom and consummate knowledge of the precise points at which the state should oppose the growing power of the church, he yet freely admits that there are grave doubts whether the present policy of Prussia on this subject can be successfully carried out. That Prince Bismarck and Dr. Falk had but a very imperfect knowledge of the difficulties which lay in their path, the numerous supplementary bills which have been repeatedly introduced in order to give effect to the May Laws plainly show. Where there is question of principle and of conscience Prince Bismarck is not at home. He believes in force; like the first Napoleon, holds that Providence is always on the side of the biggest cannons; sneers about going to Canossa, as Napoleon mockingly asked the pope whether his excommunication would make the arms fall from the hands of his veterans. He knows the workings of courts, and is a master in the devious ways of diplomacy. He can estimate with great precision the resources of a country; he has a keen eye for the weak points of an adversary. His tactics, like Napoleon’s, are to bring to bear upon each given point of attack a force greater than the enemy’s. He has, in his public life, never known what it is to respect right or principle. With the army at his back he has trampled upon the Prussian constitution with the same daring recklessness with which he now violates the most sacred rights of conscience. Nothing, in his eyes, is holy but success, and he has been consecrated by it, so that the Bismarck-cultus has spread far beyond the fatherland to England and the United States. Carlyle has at last found a living hero, the very impersonation of the brute force which to him is ideal and admirable; and at eighty he offers incense and homage to the idol. We freely give Prince Bismarck credit for his remarkable gifts—indomitable will, reckless courage, practical knowledge of men, considered as intelligent automata whose movements[795] are directed by a kind of bureaucratic and military mechanism; and this is the kind of men with whom, for the most part, he has had to deal. For your thorough Prussian, though the wildest of speculators and the boldest of theorizers, is the tamest of animals. No poor Russian soldier ever crouched more submissively beneath the knout than do the Prussian pantheists and culturists beneath the lash of a master. Like Voltaire, they probably prefer the rule of one fine Lion to that of a hundred rats of their own sort. Prince Bismarck knew his men, and we give him credit for his sagacity. Not every eye could have pierced the mist, and froth, and sound, and fury of German professordom, and beheld the craven heart that was beneath.

Only men who believe in God and the soul are dangerous rebels. Why should he who has no faith make a martyr of himself? Why, since there is nothing but law, blind and merciless force, throw yourself beneath the wheels of the state Juggernaut to be crushed? The religion of culture is the religion of indulgence, and no godlike rebel against tyranny and brute force ever sprang from such worship. So long as Prince Bismarck had to deal with men who were nourished on “philosophy’s sweet milk,” and who worshipped at the altar of culture, who had science but not faith, opinions but not convictions, amongst whom, consequently, organic union was impossible, his policy of making Germany “by blood and iron” was successful enough. But, like all great conquerors, he longed for more kingdoms to subdue, and finding right around him a large and powerful body of German citizens who did not accept the “new faith” that the state—in other words, Prince Bismarck—is “the present god,” just as a kind of diversion between victories, he turned to give a lesson to the Pfaffen and clerical Dummköpfe, who burnt no incense in honor of his divinity. In taking this step it is almost needless to say that Prince Bismarck sought to pass over a chasm which science itself does not profess to have bridged—that, namely, which lies between the worlds of matter and of spirit. Of the new conflict upon which he was entering he could have only vague and inaccurate notions. Nothing is so misleading as contempt—a feeling in which the wise never indulge, but which easily becomes habitual with men spoiled by success. To the man who had organized the armies and guided the policy which had triumphed at Sadowa and Sedan what opposition could be made by a few poor priests and beggar-monks? Would the arms fall from the hands of the proudest soldiers of Europe because the Pfaffen were displeased? Or why should not the model culture-state of the world make war upon ignorance and superstition?

Of the real nature and strength of the forces which would be marshalled in this great battle of souls a man of blood and iron could form no just estimate. “To those who believe,” said Christ, “all things are possible”; but what meaning have these words for Prince Bismarck? The soul, firm in its faith, appealing from tyrant kings and states to God, is invincible. Lifting itself to the Infinite, it draws thence a divine power. Like liberty, it is brightest in dungeons, in fetters freest, and conquers with its martyrdom. Needle-guns cannot reach it, and above the deadly roar of cannon it rises godlike and supreme.

Men who have unwrapt themselves of the garb and vesture of thought and sentiment with which the world had dressed them out, who have been born again into the higher life, who have been clothed in the charity and meekness of Christ, who for his dear sake have put all things beneath their feet, who love not the world, who venerate more the rags of the beggar than the purple of Cæsar, who fear as they love God alone, for whom life is no blessing and death infinite gain, form the invincible army of Christ foredoomed to conquer. “This is the victory which overcometh the world—our Faith.”

Who has ever forgotten those lines of Tacitus, inserted as an altogether trifling circumstance in the reign of Nero?—“So for the quieting of this rumor [of his having set fire to Rome] Nero judicially charged with the crime, and punished with most studied severities, that class, hated for their general wickedness, whom the vulgar call Christians. The originator of that name was one Christ, who in the reign of Tiberius suffered death by sentence of the procurator, Pontius Pilate. The baneful superstition, thereby repressed for the time, again broke out, not only over Judea, the native soil of the mischief, but in the City also, where from every side all atrocious and abominable things collect and flourish.”[258]

“Tacitus,” says Carlyle, referring to this passage, “was the wisest, most penetrating man of his generation; and to such depth, and no deeper, has he seen into this transaction, the most important that has occurred or can occur in the annals of mankind.”

We doubt whether Prince Bismarck to-day has any truer knowledge of the real worth and power of the living Catholic faith on which he is making war than had Tacitus eighteen hundred years ago, when writing of the rude German barbarians who were hovering on the confines of the Roman Empire, and who were to have a history in the world only through the action of that “baneful superstition” which he considered as one of the most abominable products of the frightful corruptions of his age.

That the Prussian government was altogether unprepared for the determined though passive opposition to the May Laws which the Catholics have made, Herr von Kirchmann freely confesses. It was not expected that there would be such perfect union between the clergy and the people; on the contrary, it was generally supposed that, with the aid of the Draconian penalties threatened for the violation of the Falk Laws, the resistance of the priests themselves would be easily overcome. These men love their own comfort too much, said the culturists, to be willing to go to prison and live on beans and water for the sake of technicalities; and so they chuckled over their pipes and lager-beer at the thought of their easy victory over the Pfaffen. They were mistaken, and Herr von Kirchmann admits that the courage of the bishops and priests has not been broken but strengthened by their sufferings for the faith.

This is indeed admirable; and it may, we think, be fairly doubted whether, in the whole history of the church, so large a Catholic population has ever, under similar trials, shown greater strength or constancy. Of the peculiar nature of these trials we shall speak hereafter; the present article we will bring to a close with a few remarks upon what we conceive to have been one of the most important agencies in bringing about the perfect unanimity and harmony of action between priests and people to which the Catholics of Prussia must in great measure ascribe their immovable firmness in the presence of a most terrible foe. We refer to those Catholic associations in which cardinals, bishops, priests, and people have been brought into immediate contact, uniting their wisdom and strength for the attainment of definite ends.

Such unions have nowhere been more numerous or more thoroughly organized than in Germany, though their formation is of recent date. It was during the revolution of 1848, of which we have already spoken, that the German Catholics were roused to a more comprehensive knowledge of the situation, and resolved to combine for the defence of their rights and the protection of their religion. Popular unions under the name and patronage of Pius IX. (Pius-Vereine) were formed throughout the fatherland, with the primary object of bringing together once a week large numbers of Catholic men of every condition in life. At these weekly meetings the questions of the day, in so far as they touched upon Catholic interests, were freely discussed, and thus an intelligent and enlightened Catholic public opinion was created throughout the length and breadth of the land. In refuting calumnies against the church the speakers never failed to demand the fullest liberty for all Catholic institutions.

On the occasion of beginning the restoration and completion of the Cathedral of Cologne, the most religious of churches, the proposition that an annual General Assembly of all the unions should be held was made and received with boundless enthusiasm. The first General Assembly took place at Mayence in October, 1848; and thither came delegates from Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, and all the other states of Germany, whose confidence and earnestness were increased by the presence of the Catholic members of the Parliament of Frankfort. For the first time since Luther’s apostasy the Catholics of Germany breathed the air of liberty. The bishops assembled at Würzburg, gave their solemn approbation to the great work, and Pius IX. sent his apostolic benediction. Since that time General Assemblies have been held at Breslau, May, 1849; Ratisbon, October, 1849; Linz, 1850; Mayence, 1851; Münster, 1852; Vienna, 1853; Linz, 1856; Salzburg, 1857; Cologne, 1858; Freyburg, 1859; Prague, 1860; Munich, 1861; Aix-la-Chapelle, 1862; Frankfort, 1863, and in other cities, down to the recent persecutions.

These assemblies represented a complete system of organization, in which no Catholic interest was forgotten. Every village and hamlet in the land was there, if not immediately, through some central union.[799] We have had the honor of being present at more than one of these assemblies, and the impressions which we then received are abiding. Side by side with cardinals, bishops, princes, noblemen, and the most learned of professors sat mechanics, carpenters, shoemakers, and blacksmiths—not as in the act of worship, in which the presence of the Most High God dwarfs our universal human littlenesses to the dead-level of an equal insignificance, but in active thought and co-operation for the furtherance of definite religious and social ends. The brotherhood of the race was there, an accomplished fact, and one felt the breathing as of a divine Spirit compared with whose irresistible force great statesmen and mighty armies are weak as the puppets of a child’s show.

We have not the space to describe more minutely the ends, aims, and workings of the numberless Catholic associations of Germany; but we must express our deep conviction that no study could be more replete with lessons of practical wisdom for the Catholics of the United States. Organization is precisely what we most lack. Our priests are laborious, our people are devoted, but we have not even an organized Catholic public opinion—nay, no organ to serve as its channel, and make itself heard of the whole country. Many seem to think that the very question of the necessity of Catholic education is still an open one for us; and this is not surprising, since we have no system of Catholic education. Catholic schools, indeed, in considerable number, there are, but there is no organization. The great need of the church in this country is the organization of priests and people for the promotion of Catholic interests. Through this we will learn to know one another; our views will be enlarged, our sympathies deepened, and the truth will dawn upon us that, if we wish to be true to the great mission which God has given us, the time has come when American Catholics must take up works which do not specially concern any one diocese more than another, but whose significance will be as wide as the nation’s life.

A STORY WITH TWO VERSIONS.

Yes, sir, this is Brentwood. And you are of the race, you say, though not of the name. Clarkson, sir? Surely, surely. I remember well. Miss Jane Brent—the first Miss Brent I can recall—married a Clarkson. So you are her grandson, sir? Then you are right welcome to me and mine. Come in, come in. Or, if you will do me the honor, sit here in the porch, sir, and my Kate will bring you of her best, and right glad will we be to wait again on one with the Brent blood in him.

None of the name left? Ah! Mr. Clarkson, have you never heard, then? But you must have heard of James Brent. Surely, surely. He lives still, God pity him! What’s that? You want to hear the story out? Well, sir, no man living can tell you better than I, unless it be Mr. James’ self. Settle yourself comfortably, Mr. Clarkson, and I’ll tell you all.

Yes, this is Brentwood. ’Twas your great-great-grandsire founded it, two hundred years back, he and his brother—James and William. They began the work which was to grow and grow into foundries and factories, and the bank that was to ruin all. But I’m telling the end afore the beginning. The next two brothers built the church you see there, sir, down the road; and the next two after them added the tower and founded the almshouses; and then came the fourth James and William Brent, and one of them was an idiot, and the other was and is the last of the name.

I was twenty years older than Mr. James, and, before ever he came into business, had served with his father. I watched him grow up, and I loved him well. But from the first I knew he was different from the rest of his race. He was his mother all over again—a true Mortimer, come of nobles, not of townsfolk; all fire and sweetness and great plans for people’s good and happiness, but with little of the far-sighted Brent prudence. He was just as tender of Mr. William as if he had had all the wits of himself, and used to spend part of every day with him, and amuse him part of many a night when the poor gentleman could not sleep.

Their father died just when they came of age. They were twins, the last Brent Brothers, sir; and ’twas a great fortune and responsibility to fall full and with no restraint into such young hands. Mr. James seemed like one heart-broken for nigh a year after, and carried on everything just as his father had done, till we all wondered at it; then he saw Miss Rose Maurice, and loved her—as well indeed he might—and after that things changed. She was as simple in all her ways as she was beautiful, and would have thought my cottage good enough, so long as he was in it with her. But he!—well, sir, I know he has kissed the very ground she trod on, and he didn’t think a queen’s palace too fine for her.[801] As soon as ever he saw her he loved her and set his soul to win her; and the very next day he began a new home in Brentwood. Where is it? Alack! alack! sir. Wait till ye must hear. Let’s think, for a bit, of only the glad days now.

You could not call it extravagance exactly. It set the whole town alive. So far as he could, he would have none but Brentwood folk to work upon the place where his bride was to dwell. And he said it was time that so old a family should have a home that would last as long as they. Ah! me, as long as they!

Of course there was a city architect and a grand landscape gardener; but, oh! the thoughtfulness of him whom we were proud to call our master. There, in the very flush of his youth and love and hope, he took care of the widows and the little children; contrived to make work for them; was here and there and everywhere; and there was not a beggar nor an idler in Brentwood—not one. The house rose stately and tall; he had chosen a fair spot for it, where great trees grew and brooks were running, all ready to his hand; and that city man—why, sir, ’twas marvellous how he seemed to understand just how to make use of it all, and to prune a little here and add a little there, with vines and arbors and glades and a wilderness, till you didn’t know what God had done and what he had given his creatures wit to do. And in the sunniest corner of the house—Brent Hall, as they called it—Mr. James chose rooms for Mr. William, who was pleased as a child with it all, and used to sit day by day and watch the work go on.

All the time, too, the Brent iron-foundries were being added to and renovated, till there was none like them round about; and the town streets were made like city streets, and the town itself set into such order as never before; and when all was ready—’twas the work of but three years, sir—when the house was hung with pictures and decked with the best; in the spring, when the grass and the trees were green, and the flowers were blooming fair, then he brought her home. And when I saw her—well, sir, first I thought of the angels; but next (if I may say it; and I wot it is not wrong)—next I thought of our Blessed Lady. There was a great painting in the Hall oratory—by some Spanish painter, they said. Murillo? Yes, sir, that is the name. It looked like Mrs. James Brent, sir. Not an angel, but a woman that could suffer and weep and struggle sore; and, pure and stainless, would still remember she was of us poor humans, and so pity and pray for us.

We had been used to have Mr. Brent come into our houses, and to see him in the poorest cottages and the almshouses, with smiles and cheery words and money; but Mrs. James gave more than that, for she gave herself. I’ve seen those soft hands bind wounds I shrank from; and that delicate creature—I’ve seen her kneeling by beds of dying sinners, while her face grew white at what she saw and heard, and yet she praying over ’em, and, what’s more, loving ’em, till she made the way for the priest to come. And she laid out dead whom few of us would have touched for hire, and she listened to the stories of the sad and tiresome, and her smile was sunshine, and the very sight of her passing by lifted up our minds to God. Her husband[802] thwarted her in nothing. What was there to thwart her in? He loved her, and she should do what she would in this work which was her heart’s joy.

Then we had been used to see Mr. James in church regular, weekday Mass and Sunday Mass; but Mrs. James was there any time, early mornings and noons and nights. I fancy she loved it better than the stately Hall. After she came, her husband added the great south transept window from Germany, and the organ that people came miles to hear; and he said it was her gift, not his. The window picture is a great Crucifixion and Our Lady standing by. You’ll understand better, Mr. Clarkson, ere I finish, what it says to Brentwood folk now.

The first year there was a daughter only; but the next there came a son. After that, for six long years there were no more children, but then another son saw the light. What rejoicings, what bonfires, what clanging of bells, there was! But ere night the clanging changed to tolling and the shouts to tears; for the child died. And when Mrs. James came among us again, very white and changed and feeble, we all knew that with Mr. James and Mr. William, we were seeing the last Brent Brothers, whatever our grandchildren might see.

However, she was spared, and Mr. James took heart of such grace as that, and said it would be Brent and Son, which sounded quite as well when one was used to it. And to make himself used to it—or to stifle the disappointment, as I really think—he began the Brent Bank. There had been a Brent Bank here for years past, and to it all Brentwood and half the country round trusted their earnings. Only a few really rich people had much to do with it, but men in moderate circumstances, young doctors and lawyers with growing families, widows, orphans, seamstresses, the factory people, laborers, thought there was no bank like that. Mr. James’ kind spirit showed itself there as elsewhere, and nobody felt himself too insignificant to come there, if only with a penny.

Often and often I sit here and wonder, Mr. Clarkson, why it all was—why God ever let it be—the shame and the sorrow and the suffering that came. I know Mr. James was lavish, but, if he spent much on himself, he spent much on others too; and he made God’s house as beautiful as his own. For a time it looked as if God’s blessing was on him; for he prospered year by year, and, except for his child’s dying and his wife’s frail health, his cup of joy seemed running over.

By and by came a year—you may just remember it, sir—a year of very hard times for the whole country. Banks broke, and old houses went by the board, and men were thrown out of work, and there was a cry of distress through all the land. But Brentwood folk hadn’t a thought of fear. Still, in that year, from the very first of it, something troubled me. Master was moody now and then; went up to the city oftener; had letters which he did not show to me, who had seen all his business correspondence and his father’s for thirty years and more. Sometimes he missed Mass, and presently I noted with a pang that he did not receive the Blessed Sacrament regular as he used. And Mrs. James was pale, and her eyes, that once were as bright and clear as sunshine, grew heavy and dark, and she looked[803] more and more like the picture in her oratory; but it made one very sad somehow to see the likeness.

The hard times began at midsummer. The Lent after there was a mission of Dominican friars here. I was special busy that week, and kept at work till after midnight. One evening, about eight, Mr. James came hurriedly into the office and asked for the letters. He turned them over, looked blank, then said the half-past eleven mail would surely bring the one he wanted, and he should wait till then and go for it himself. For five minutes or so he tried to cast up some accounts; then, too nervous-like to be quiet longer, he said: “I’ll go and hear the sermon, Serle. It will serve to fill up the time.” And off he went.

The clock struck the hour and the half-hour, and the hour and the half-hour, and I heard the half-past eleven mail come in, and, soon after, Mr. James’ step again, but slow now, like one in deep thought. In he came, and I caught a glimpse of his face, pale and stern, with the lips hard set. He shut himself into his private room, and I heard him pacing up and down; then there came a pause, and he strode out again. He seemed very odd to me, but he tried to laugh, as he put down two slips for telegrams on my desk. “Which would you send?” said he.

One was, “Go on. I consent to all your terms.” The other was, “Stop. I will have nothing more to do with it, no matter what happens.”

Something told me in my heart that, though he was trying to pass this off in his old way like a joke, my master—my dear master—was in a great strait. I looked up and answered what he had not said at all to get an answer, with words which rose to my lips in spite of myself. Says I: “Send what Mrs. James would want you to send, sir.” And then his ruddy, kind face bleached gray like ashes, and he gave a groan, and the next minute he was gone.

Though my work was done for that night, I would not leave the bank; for I thought he might come back. And back he did come, a full hour after, steady and grave and not like my master. For, Mr. Clarkson, the bright boy-look I had loved so, which, with the boy-nature too, had never seemed to leave him, was all gone out of his face, and I knew surely I never should see it there again. He wrote something quickly, then handed it to me, bidding me send telegrams to the bank trustees as there ordered. The slip which bore my direction bore also the words, with just a pencil-line erasure through them, “Go on. I consent to all your terms.” So, for good or for ill, whichever it might be, the other was the one he must have sent.

These telegrams notified the trustees of a most important meeting to which they were summoned, and at that meeting I had, as usual, to be present. Perhaps his colleagues saw no change in him; but I, who had served him long, saw much. O Mr. Clarkson, Mr. Clarkson! whatever you may be—and you are young still—be honest. For, sir, there’s one thing of many terrible to bear, and it’s got to be borne here or hereafter by them as err from uprightness; and that thing is shame. I’d seen him kneel at the altar that morning, and she beside him, bless her! That’s where he got strength to endure the penance[804] he had brought upon himself; else I don’t know how he ever could have borne it or have done it.

They sat there about him where they had often sat before, those fifteen country gentlemen, some of whom had been his father’s and his uncle’s friends, and some his own schoolmates and companions. And he stood up, and first he looked them calm and fearless full in their faces, and then his voice faltered and stopped, and then they all felt that it was indeed something beyond ordinary that was coming.

Don’t ask me to tell my master’s shame as he told it, without a gloss or an excuse, plain and bald and to the point. I knew and they knew that there was excuse for his loving and lavish nature, but he made none for himself.

Well, there’s no hiding what all the world knows now. He had let himself be led away into speculation and—God pity and forgive him!—into fraud, till only ruin or added and greater sin stared him in the face; then, brought face to face with that alternative, he had chosen—just ruin, sir.

There was dead silence for a space, till Sir Jasper Meredith, the oldest man there, and the justest business man I ever met, said gravely: “Do you realize, Mr. Brent, that this implies ruin to others than to you?”

He was not thinking of himself, though this trouble would straiten him sorely; he was thinking, and so was my master, and so was I, of poor men, and lone women, and children and babies, made penniless at a blow; of the works stopped; of hunger and sickness and cold. Mr. James bowed his head; he could not speak.

Then I had to bring out the books, and we went carefully over them page by page. It was like the Day of Judgment itself to turn over those accounts, and to read letters that had to be read, and to find out, step by step, and in the very presence of the man we had honored and trusted, that he had really fallen from his high place. He quivered under it, body and soul, but answered steadily every question Sir Jasper put to him; spoke in such a way that I was sure he as well as I thought of the last great day, and was answering to One mightier than man. And presently, when they had reached the root of it—well, Mr. Clarkson, it was sin and it was shame, and I dare not call it less before God; yet it was sin which many another man does unblushingly, and had he persisted in it—had he only the night previous sent that message, “Go on”—it was possible and probable that he could have saved himself. Yet, if I could have had my choice then or now, I would rather have seen him stand there, disgraced and ruined by his own act and will, than have had him live for another day a hypocrite.

But Sir Jasper said never a word of praise or blame till the whole investigation was ended; listened silently while Mr. James told his plan to sell all he owned in Brentwood, pay what debts he could, and then begin life over again abroad, and work hard and steadily to retrieve his fortunes, that he might pay all and stand with a clear conscience before he died. Then Sir Jasper rose and came to him, put his two hands on Mr. James’ shoulders, and looked him straight in the eyes. “James Brent,” he said, “I knew your father before you, and your father’s father, but I never honored them more, and I[805] never honored you more, than on this day when you confess to having disgraced your name and theirs, but have had the honesty and manliness to confess it. Disgrace is disgrace; but confession is the beginning of amendment.”

That was all. There was no offer of money help; all Sir Jasper could offer would have been but a drop in the ocean of such utter ruin. There was no advice to spare himself before he spared his neighbor; Sir Jasper was too just for that. But after those words I saw my master’s eyes grow moist and bright, and a gleam of hope come into his face. My poor master! my poor master! Thank God we cannot see the whole of suffering at the beginning!

The intention was not to let the news get abroad that night. Mr. James went home to tell his wife and children—how terrible that seemed to me!—and I sat busy in the office. It was the spring of the year. Fifteen years ago the coming month he had brought his bride home in the sunshine and the flowers. This afternoon darkened into clouds, and rain came and the east wind. I lighted the lamps early and went to my work again. Presently I heard a sound such as I never heard before—a low growl, or roar, or shout, that wasn’t thunder or wind or rain. It grew louder; it was like the tramp of many feet, hurrying fast, and in the direction of the bank. Then cries—a name, short, distinct, repeated again and again: “Brent! Brent! James Brent!”

I went to the window. There they were, half Brentwood and more, clamoring for the sight of the man they trusted above all men. I flung the window up and they saw me.

“Halloo, there, Joseph Serle!” cried the leader, a choleric Scot who had not been many years among us. “Where’s our master?”

And then the Scot cries again: “Halloo, Joseph Serle, there! Speak us true, mon, or ye’ll hang for’t. Is our money safe?”

What could I say? Face after face I saw by the glare of torches—faces of neighbors and friends and kin—and not one but was a loser, and few that were not well-nigh ruined. And while I hesitated how to speak again that woman spoke: “Where’s James Brent? Has he run, the coward?”

That was too much. “He’s home,” cried I, “where you and all decent folk should be.”

“Home! home!” They caught the word and shouted it. “We’ll go home too. We’ll find James Brent.” And the tide turned towards the Hall.

I flew down the back-stairs to the stable, mounted the fleetest horse, and galloped him bareback to Brent Hall; but, fast as I rode, the east wind bore an angry shout behind me, and, if I turned my head, I saw torches flaring, and the ground seemed to tremble with the hurrying tramp of feet.

I don’t know how they bore it or how I told ’em. I know I found them together, him and her, and she was as if she had not shed a tear, and her eyes were glowing like stars, bright, and tender, and sad, and glad all at once. I had hardly time to tell the news, when the sound I had dreaded for ’em broke upon us like the rush and the roar of an awful storm. On they came, trampling[806] over the garden-beds, waving their torchlights, calling one name hoarse and constant—“Brent! Brent! James Brent!”

And then she looked at him with a look that was more heavenly than any smile, and said only: “James, my place is by your side, and I will keep it.”

He put his hand quick over his eyes like one in great awe, smiled with a smile more sad than tears, then opened the hall door and stood out before the crowd—there where many a man and woman of them had seen him bring his young bride home. And the sudden silence which fell upon them his own voice broke. “My friends,” he said, “what would you have of me?”

Straight and keen as a barbed arrow, not from one voice, but from many, the question rose, “Is our money safe?” And after that some one called: “We’ll trust your word, master, ’gainst all odds.”

I had thought that scene in the bank was like the Judgment Day; but what was this? He tried to speak, but his lips clave together. Then I saw her draw a little nearer—not to touch him or to speak to him; she did not even look at him, neither at the people, but out into the darkness, and up and far away; and her very body, it seemed to me, was praying.

“Is our money safe?” It was like a yell now, and James Brent made answer: “My friends, I am a ruined man.”

“Is our money safe?” Little children’s voices joined in the cry. My God, let Brentwood never hear the like again!

My master held out his hands like any beggar; then he fell down upon his knees. “I confess to you and to God,” he said, “there is not one penny left.”

Mr. Clarkson, I am Brentwood born and bred. I love my master, but I love my place and people too. We are a simple folk and a loving folk. It is an awful thing to shake the trust of such. They had deemed their honor and their property for ever safe with this one man, and in an hour and at a word their trust was broken, their scanty all was gone, their earthly hopes were shattered. Mr. Clarkson, sir, it drove them wild.

That day had set on Brent Hall fair and stately; the morrow dawned on blackened ruins. The grounds lay waste; the fountains were dry; pictures which nobles had envied had fed the flames; fabrics which would have graced a queen stopped the babbling of the brooks; and in front of Brent Bank hung effigies of the last Brent Brothers, with a halter about the neck of each.

He had planned—my master, my poor master!—to retrieve all. Why could it not be? God knows best, but it is a mystery which I cannot fathom. That night’s horror and exposure brought him to the very gates of death; and when he rose up at last, it was as a mere wreck of himself, never to work again. His wife’s dowry went to the people whom he had ruined and who had ruined him. They lived until her death, as he lives still, on charity.

And that is all? No, Mr. Clarkson, not quite all. He was brave enough, since he could not win back his honor otherwise, to stay among us and gain a place again in the hearts he had wounded sore. Sometimes I think he teaches us a[807] better lesson, old, and alone, and poor, than if he had come to build his fallen home once more. I think, sir, we have learned to pity and forgive as we never should have done otherwise, since we have seen him suffering like any one of us; as low down as any one of us.

JAMES BRENT’S VERSION.

He has told you the story, then, my boy, has he? And you are the last of us, and you have my name—James Brent Clarkson. The last? Then I will tell you more than he could tell you. Do not shrink or fancy it will pain me. I would like to let you know all, my boy—not for my sake; but you say you are only half a Catholic, and I would have you learn something of the deep reality of the true faith.

The night I waited for the half-past eleven train I had been stopped on my way to the bank by a crowd at the church door, and I heard one man say to another: “They’re dark times, neighbor—as dark as our land’s seen these hundred years.” And his mate answered him: “Maybe so, Collins; maybe so. But Brentwood don’t feel ’em much. I believe, and so does most folks, that if all other houses fell, and e’en the Bank of England broke, Brent Brothers would stand. It’s been honest and true for four generations back, and so ’twull be to the end on’t.” Then the crowd parted, the men went into the church, and I passed down the street.

“Honest and true for four generations back, and so ’twull be to the end on’t.” The words haunted me. At last, in desperation, to rid myself of the thought, I went to church also. Going in by a side door, I found myself in a corner by a confessional, quite sheltered from view, but with the pulpit in plain sight. There, raised high above the heads of the people, the preacher stood, a man of middle age, who looked as if he had been at some time of his life in and of the world; his face that of one who has found it almost a death-struggle to subdue self to the obedience and the folly of the cross. He seemed meant for a ruler among his fellows. I wondered idly what he was doing there in the preacher’s frock, speaking to the crowd.

He was telling, simply and plainly, of our Lord’s agony in the garden. But simple and plain as were his words, there was something in the face and voice which drew one into sympathetic union with this man, who spoke as if he were literally beholding the load of our sin lying upon the Lord’s heart till his sweat of blood started. And when he had painted the scene to us, he paused as hearing the awful cry echo through the stillness that reigned in the crowded church, then bent forward as if his eyes would scan our very hearts, and spoke once more.

I cannot tell you what he said, but before he ended I knew this: my sin cost our Lord’s agony; added sin of mine would be added anguish of his. The choice lay before me. When I showed Serle those two despatches, the one “Stop,” the other “Go on,” I held there what would be my ruin for time or for eternity.

There is a world unseen, and mighty; its powers were round me that night like an army. Hitherto I had been deceiving myself with the plea of necessity of others’ interests to be considered, of my honor to be sustained. That night[808] another motive rose before me, but it was of an honor put to dishonor—the Lord of glory bowed down to the earth by shame.

The letter must be answered before morning, so pressing was my need. I decided to go to the telegraph office, and by the time I reached it my mind must be made up. But, in the street, I came face to face with the preacher I had heard that night. The moon was near the full. We two looked straight at each other, passed, then turned as by one impulse, and faced again. They who fight a fight to its end, and conquer, but only with wounds whose scars they must bear to their graves, sometimes gain a great power of reading the souls of those who are fighting a like contest, and know not yet if it will end in victory or defeat. Some fight like mine I felt sure that priest had fought. “What would you have, my brother?” he asked.

“Answers to two questions, father,” I replied. “If a man has done wrong to others, and can only repair it by added wrong, shall he disgrace his own good name for ever by avowal, or shall he sin? And if his fall involves the suffering of his innocent wife and children, may he not save himself from shame for their sake? It is a matter which may not wait now for confession even. Answer as best you may, for the love of God.”

I fancied that the stern face before me softened and grew pale, and in the momentary stillness I understood that the Dominican was praying. Then he answered, few words and firm, as one who knew:

“To choose disgrace is to choose the path our divine Lord chose. To involve our dearest in suffering is to know his anguish whose blessed Mother stood beneath his cross.”

Then, after one more slight, intense silence, “My brother,” he said earnestly, “I do not know your life, but I know my own. To drink the Lord’s cup of shame to its dregs—with him—is a blessed thing to do, if he gives a sinner grace to do it.”

Tell me a thousand times that you have no faith yourself; that to love God passionately is a dream, a delusion, unworthy of our manly nature; that to choose shame is folly, to choose suffering is a mad mistake—what shame could atone for my sins or give back to the poor the means of which my folly had robbed them? What can your words count with those who have once tasted the bitter sweetness of the Lord’s own chalice? Suddenly, standing there, I knew what it means to love God more than houses or lands, wife or children; to have him more real to the soul than they to the heart; to be willing and glad to forsake all for him; to know I had one more chance left to do his will, not Satan’s; and to make my choice. Having brought his agony on him, there was nothing more I could do but bear it with him.

My boy, though you came on my invitation, you chose the twilight in which to come to me, that I might hide my shame at meeting you. Such shame died dead in two awful nights and days: First, confession before the priest of God; then to colleagues and friends; then to my wife and to my son—oh! that stings yet; then to an angry throng, whose trust I had betrayed, whose hopes I had blasted, whose love and reverence I had turned to hate and scorn. I have seen my home in ruins, my effigy hung up and hooted at in the public square, my name become a byword, my[809] race blotted out. I am an old man now, and still they tell my story in Brentwood; each child learns it; strangers hear of it. Yet, if the power were mine to alter these twenty years of humiliation, I would not lose one hour of suffering or shame.

You ask me why? Thirty-five years ago I stood here, the centre and the favorite of this town, and I set myself to work my own will, to gain glory for me and mine. My wife, my name, my home, were my idols. It seemed an innocent ambition, but it was not for God, and it led me into evil work. You told me that since you came of age you have been but once to confession. It is by the light of that sacrament that what seems to you the mystery of my life is read. For a Catholic—whether striving after perfection, or struggling up from sin to lasting penitence—has for pattern the life of Jesus, the doing all in union with him, after his example. What is the sacrament of penance but the bearing of shame, though in the presence of a compassionate priest, with him who, when he could have rescued us at the price of one drop of his most precious blood, chose to die in ignominy, bearing before the world the entire world’s disgrace? My boy, if in any way, by the love of our common name, I can influence you, go back to confession. It is the very sacrament for men who would be upright, and loyal, and strong, and true; or who, having fallen, would humbly and bravely bear for Christ’s sake the disclosure and the penalty.

My penance—given by God, mark you—was heavy, men think. Was it heavier than my sin? They do not know everything. All my life I had been helped, guarded, upheld; and for such to fall is a deadlier sin than for others. The infinite love of God bore with me and saved me. And as, day by day, like the unremitted lashes of a scourge, suffering fell to my portion, I tell you that a strange, an awful sweetness mingled with the anguish. I knew it was the hand of God that smote me, and that he smote here to spare hereafter.

Oh! do not look at me. Stop! Turn your face away! I thought all such shame was dead, but there are moments when it overwhelms me with its sting. Did I say or dare to think that God loves me? Wait, wait, till I can remember what it means!

Yes, I know now. Through all that night, while the torches glared, and wrathful faces looked curses at me, and lips shouted them, ever through all I saw, as it were, One sinless but reputed with the wicked; stripped of his garments as I of my pride; made a spectacle to angels and to men; mocked, reviled, scourged, crucified; and through the wild tumult I heard a voice say, as of old to the repentant thief on the cross: “This day thou shalt be with me.” And through all my heart was answering to his most Sacred Heart, “I, indeed, justly; for I receive the due reward of my deeds: but this man hath done no evil.” How could I wish to be spared a single pang or lose one hour of shame with him? What part could any Christian take but to suffer with him, having made him suffer? And when one has said “with him,” one has explained all. But, somehow, people do not always seem to understand.

Understand? Ah! no. It is a story, not of two versions, but of many. Some called James Brent a[810] fool, and some a madman, and some said he should have saved his honor and his name at all hazards; and some, that he had no right to entail such suffering on his household. But there is one light by which such stories should be read, that is truer than these. When time is gone, and wealth is dust, and earthly honor vanishes like smoke, then, by the standard of the cross of Christ, wealth, and pomp, and pleasure, and business shall be duly tried. Shun humiliation here as we will, there shall be after this the judgment, when the Prince of Glory, who pronounces final sentence, will be he who, while on earth, chose for his portion a life of suffering and a death of shame.

ANTI-CATHOLIC MOVEMENTS IN THE UNITED STATES.

Like commercial panics, periodical outbursts of irreligious fanaticism seem to have become regular incidents in the history of the United States—occurrences to be looked for with as much certainty as if they were the natural outgrowth of our civilization and the peculiarly-constituted condition of American society. Though springing from widely different causes, these intermittent spasms have a marked resemblance in their deleterious effects on our individual welfare and national reputation. Both are demoralizing and degrading in their tendencies, and each, in its degree, finally results in the temporary gain of a few to the lasting injury and debasement of the multitude. In other respects they differ materially. Great mercantile reverses and isolated acts of peculation, unfortunately, are not limited to one community or to the growth of any particular system of polity, but are as common and as frequent in despotic Asia and monarchical Europe as in republican America. Popular ebullitions of bigotry, on the contrary, are, or, more correctly, ought to be, confined to those countries where ignorance and intolerance usurp the place of enlightened philanthropy and wise government. They are foreign to the spirit of American institutions, hostile to the best interests of society, and a curse to those who tolerate or encourage them. The brightest glory of the fathers of the republic springs, not so much from the fact that they separated the colonies from the mother country and founded a new nation—for that is nothing strange or unheard-of in the world’s history—but that they made its three millions of inhabitants free as well as independent: free not only from unjust taxation and arbitrary laws, but for ever free to worship their Creator according to the dictates of their conscience, unawed by petty authority and unaffected by the shifting counsels of subsequent legislators.

From this point of view the Revolution appears as one of the grandest moral events in the records of human progress; and when we reflect on the numerous pains, penalties,[811] and restrictions prescribed by the charters and by-laws of the colonies from whence our Union has sprung, it challenges our most profound admiration and gratitude. This complete religious equality, guaranteed by our fundamental law, has ever been the boast of every true American citizen, at home and abroad. From the halls of Congress to the far Western stump-meeting we hear it again and again enunciated; it is repeated by a thousand eloquent tongues on each recurring anniversary of our independence, and is daily and weekly trumpeted throughout the length and breadth of the land by the myriad-winged Mercuries of the press. This freedom of worship, freedom of conscience, and legal equality, as declared and confirmed by our forefathers, has become, in fact, not only the written but also the common law of the land—the birthright of every native-born American, the acquired, but no less sacred, privilege of every citizen by adoption. Whoever now attempts to disturb or question it, by word or act, disgraces his country in the eyes of all mankind, and defiles the memory of our greatest and truest heroes and statesmen.

So powerful, indeed, were the example and teachings of those wise men who laid broad and deep the foundations of our happy country that, during the first half-century of our national existence, scarcely a voice was raised in opposition or protest against the principle of religious liberty as emphatically expressed in the first amendment to the Constitution. A whole generation had to pass away ere fanaticism dared to raise its crest, until the solemn guarantees of our federal compact were assailed by incendiary mobs and scouted by so-called courts of justice. The first flagrant instance of this fell spirit of bigotry happened in Massachusetts, and naturally was directed against an institution of Catholic learning.

In 1820 four Ursuline nuns arrived in Boston and established there a house of their order. Six years later they removed to the neighboring village of Charlestown, where they purchased a piece of ground, and, calling it Mt. St. Benedict, erected a suitable building and reduced the hitherto barren hill-side to a state of beautiful cultivation. In 1834 the community had increased to ten, all ladies of thorough education and refinement. From the very beginning their success as teachers was acknowledged and applauded, and their average attendance of pupils was computed at from fifty to sixty. Of these, at least four-fifths were Protestants, the daughters of the best American families, not only of New England, but of the Middle and Southern States. Though it was well known that the nuns had ever been most scrupulously careful not to meddle with the religious opinions of their scholars, and that not one conversion to the church could be ascribed to their influence, the fact that a school conducted by Catholic religious should have acquired so brilliant a reputation, and that its patrons were principally Protestants of high social and political standing, was considered sufficient in the eyes of the Puritan fanatics to condemn it.

Its destruction was therefore resolved on, and an incident, unimportant in itself, occurred in the summer of 1834 which was eagerly seized upon by the clerical adventurers who then, as now, disgraced so many sectarian pulpits. It appears that an inmate of the convent,[812] a Miss Harrison, had, from excessive application to music, become partially demented, and during one of her moments of hallucination left the house and sought refuge with some friends. Her brother, a Protestant, having heard of her flight, accompanied by Bishop Fenwick, brought her back to the nunnery, to her own great satisfaction and the delight of the sisterhood. This trifling domestic affair was eagerly taken up by the leaders of the anti-Catholic faction and magnified into monstrous proportions. The nuns, it was said, had not only driven an American lady to madness, but had immured her in a dungeon, and, upon her attempting to escape, had, with the connivance of the bishop and priests, actually tortured her to death. Falsehoods even more diabolical were invented and circulated throughout Boston. The following Sunday the Methodist and Congregational churches rang again with denunciations against Popery and nunneries, while one self-styled divine, a Dr. Beecher, the father of a numerous progeny of male and female evangelists, some of whom have since become famous in more senses than one, preached no less than three sermons in as many different churches on the abominations of Rome. All the bigotry of Boston and the adjacent towns was aroused to the highest pitch of frenzy, and threats against the convent were heard on every side.

To pacify the public mind the selectmen of Charlestown, on the following day, the memorable 11th of August, appointed a committee to examine into the truth of the charges. They waited on the nuns, and were received by Miss Harrison, who was alleged to have been foully murdered. Under her personal guidance they searched every part of the convent and its appurtenances, till, becoming thoroughly satisfied with the falsity of the reports, they retired to draw up a statement to that effect for publication in the newspapers. This was what the rabble dreaded, and, as soon as the intention of the committee became known, the leaders resolved to forestall public sentiment by acting at once.

Accordingly, about nine o’clock in the evening, a mob began to collect in the neighborhood of Mt. St. Benedict. Bonfires were lit and exciting harangues were made, but still there were many persons reluctant to believe that the rioters were in earnest. They would not admit that any great number of Americans could be found base and brutal enough to attack a house filled with defenceless and delicate women and children. They were mistaken, however; they had yet to learn to what lengths fanaticism can be carried when once the evil passions of corrupt human nature are aroused. Towards midnight a general alarm was rung, calling out the engine companies of Boston, not to quell any fire or disturbance, but, as was proved by their conduct, to reinforce the rioters, if necessary. The first demonstration was made by firing shot and stones against the windows and doors of the main building, to ascertain if there were any defenders inside; but, upon becoming satisfied that there were none, the cowardly mob burst open the gates and doors, and rushed wildly through the passages and rooms, swearing vengeance against the nuns.

Trusting to the protection of the authorities, the gentle sisters were taken by surprise. The shots of their assailants, however, awakened[813] them to a sense of danger. Hastening from their beds, they rushed to the dormitories, aroused the sleeping children, and had barely time to avoid the fury of the mob by escaping through a back entrance in their night-clothes. Everything portable, including money and jewelry belonging to the pupils, was laid hold of by the intruders, the furniture and valuable musical instruments were hacked in pieces, and then the convent was given to the flames amid the frantic cheers of assembled thousands. “Not content with all this,” says the report of Mr. Loring’s committee, “they burst open the tomb of the establishment, rifled it of the sacred vessels there deposited, wrested the plates from the coffins, and exposed to view the mouldering remains of their tenants. Nor is it the least humiliating feature, in this scene of cowardly and audacious violation of all that man ought to hold sacred, that it was perpetrated in the presence of men vested with authority and of multitudes of our fellow-citizens, while not one arm was lifted in the defence of helpless women and children, or in vindication of the violated laws of God and man. The spirit of violence, sacrilege, and plunder reigned triumphant.”

The morning of the 12th of August saw what for years had been the quiet retreat of Christian learning and feminine holiness a mass of blackened ruins; but the character of Massachusetts had received even a darker stain, a foul blot not yet wiped from her escutcheon. It was felt by the most respectable portion of the citizens that some step should be taken to vindicate the reputation of the State, and to place the odium of the outrage on those who alone were guilty. Accordingly, a committee of thirty-eight leading Protestant gentlemen, with Charles G. Loring as chairman, was appointed to investigate and report on the origin and results of the disgraceful proceeding. It met in Faneuil Hall from day to day, examined a great number of witnesses, and made the most minute inquiries from all sources. Its final report was long, eloquent, and convincing. After the most thorough examination, it was found, those Protestant gentlemen said, that all the wild and malicious assertions put forth in the sectarian pulpits and repeated in the newspapers, regarding the Ursulines, were without a shadow of truth or probability; they eulogized in the most glowing language the conduct of the nuns, their qualifications as teachers, their Christian piety and meekness, and their careful regard for the morals as well as for the religious scruples of their pupils. They also attributed the wanton attack upon the nunnery to the fell spirit of bigotry evoked by the false reports of the New England press and the unmitigated slanders of the anti-Catholic preachers, and called upon the legislative authorities to indemnify, in the most ample manner, the victims of mob law and official connivance.

But the most significant fact brought to light by this committee was that the fanatics, in their attack on Mt. St. Benedict, were not a mere heterogeneous crowd of ignorant men acting upon momentary impulse, but a regular band of lawless miscreants directed and aided by persons of influence and standing in society. “There is no doubt,” says the report, “that a conspiracy had been formed, extending into many of the neighboring towns; but the committee are[814] of opinion that it embraced very few of respectable character in society, though some such may, perhaps, be actually guilty of an offence no less heinous, morally considered, in having excited the feelings which led to the design, or countenanced and instigated those engaged in its execution.” Here we find laid down, on the most unquestionable authority, the origin and birth-place of all subsequent Native American movements against Catholicity.

But the sequel to the destruction of the Charlestown convent was even more shameful than the crime itself. Thirteen men had been arrested, eight of whom were charged with arson. The first tried was the ringleader, an ex-convict, named Buzzell. The scenes which were enacted on that occasion are without a parallel in the annals of our jurisprudence. The mother-superior, several of the sisters, and Bishop Fenwick, necessary witnesses for the prosecution, were received in court with half-suppressed jibes and sneers, subjected to every species of insult by the lawyers for the defence, and were frowned upon even by the judge who presided. Though the evidence against the prisoner was conclusive, the jury, without shame or hesitation, acquitted him, and he walked out of court amid the wildest cheers of the bystanders. Similar demonstrations of popular sympathy attended the trials of the other rioters, who were all, with the exception of a young boy, permitted to escape the penalty of their gross crimes.

Even the State legislature, though urged to do so by many of the leading public men of the commonwealth, refused to vote anything like an adequate sum to indemnify the nuns and pupils for their losses, amounting to over a hundred thousand dollars. The pitiful sum of ten thousand dollars was offered, and of course rejected; and to this day the ruins of the convent stand as an eloquent monument of Protestant perfidy and puritanical meanness and injustice.

The impunity thus legally and officially guaranteed to mobs and sacrilegious plunderers soon bore fruit in other acts of lawlessness in various parts of Massachusetts. A Catholic graveyard in Lowell was shortly after entered and desecrated by an armed rabble, and a house in Wareham, in which Mass was being celebrated, was set upon by a gang of ruffians known as the “Convent Boys.” A couple of years later the Montgomery Guards, a regular militia company, composed principally of Catholic freeholders of Boston, were openly insulted by their comrades on parade, and actually stoned through the streets by a mob of over three thousand persons.

As there were no more convents to be plundered and burned in the stronghold of Puritanism, the war on those glories of religion was kept up in a different manner, but with no less rancor and audacity. Taking advantage of the excitement created by such men as Lyman Beecher and Buzzell, a mercenary publisher issued a book entitled Six Months in a Convent, which was put together by some contemptible preacher in the name of an illiterate girl named Reed, who, the better to mislead the public, assumed the title of “Sister Mary Agnes.” “We earnestly hope and believe,” said the preface to this embodiment of falsehood, “that this little work, if universally diffused, will do more, by its unaffected simplicity, in deterring Protestant parents from educating[815] their daughters in Catholic nunneries than could the most labored and learned discourses on the dangers of Popery.” Though the book was replete with stupid fabrications and silly blunders, so grossly had the popular taste been perverted that fifty thousand copies were sold within a year after its publication. The demand was still increasing, when another contribution to Protestant literature appeared, before the broad, disgusting, and obscene fabrications of which the mendacity of “Sister Mary Agnes” paled its ineffectual fires. This latter candidate for popular favor, though it bore the name, destined for an immortality of infamy, of Maria Monk—a notoriously dissolute woman—was actually compiled by a few needy and unscrupulous adventurers, reverend and irreverend, who found a distinguished Methodist publishing house, not quite so needy, though still more unscrupulous, to publish the work for them, though very shame compelled even them to withhold their names from the publication. And it was only owing to a legal suit arising from this infamous transaction many years after that the fact was revealed that the publishers of this vilest of assaults on one of the holiest institutions of the Catholic Church was the firm of Harper Brothers. True to their character, they saw that the times were favorable for an assault on Catholicity, even so vile as this one; and true to their nature again, they refused to their wretched accomplice her adequate share in the wages of sin. Though bearing on its face all the evidences of diabolical malice and falsehood, condemned by the better portion of the press and by all reputable Protestants, the work had an unparalleled sale for some time. The demand might have continued to go on increasing indefinitely, but, in an evil hour for the speculators, its authors, under the impression that the prurient taste of the public was not sufficiently satiated with imaginary horrors, issued a continuation under the title of Additional Awful Disclosures. This composition proved an efficient antidote to the malignant poison of the first. Its impurity and falsehoods were so palpable that its originators were glad to slink into obscurity and their patrons into silence, followed by the contempt of all honest men.

Just ten years after the Charlestown outrage the spirit of Protestant persecution began to revive. Premonitory symptoms of political proscription appeared in 1842, in the constitutional conventions of Rhode Island and Louisiana, and in the local legislatures of other States; but it was not till the early part of 1844 that it became evident that secret measures were being taken to arouse the dormant feeling of antipathy to the rights of Catholics, so rife in the hearts of the ignorant Protestant masses. New York, at first, was the principal seat of the disorder. Most of the newspapers of that period teemed with eulogistic reviews of books written against the faith; cheap periodicals, such as the Rev. Mr. Sparry’s American Anti-Papist, were thrust into the hands of all who would read them by the agents of the Bible and proselytizing societies; and a cohort of what were called anti-papal lecturers, of which a reverend individual named Cheever was the leader, was employed to attack the Catholic Church with every conceivable weapon that the arsenal of Protestantism afforded.

The popular mind being thus prepared for a change, the various elements of political and social life opposed to Catholicity were crystallized into the “American Republican” party, better known as the Native Americans. On the 19th of March, 1844, the new faction nominated James Harper for mayor of the city of New York, and about the same time William Rockwell was named for a similar office in Brooklyn. The platform upon which these gentlemen stood was simple but comprehensive: the retention of the Protestant Bible and Protestant books in the public schools; the exclusion of Catholics of all nationalities from office; and the amendment of the naturalization laws so as to extend the probationary term of citizenship to twenty-one years. The canvass in New York was conducted with some regard to decency; but in the sister city, the Nativists threw off all respect for law, their processions invaded the districts inhabited mainly by adopted citizens, assailed all who did not sympathize with them, and riot and bloodshed were the consequence. In Brooklyn the Nativist candidate was defeated, but Harper was elected triumphantly by about twenty-four thousand votes. The ballots that placed such a man at the head of the municipality of the American metropolis were deposited by both Whigs and Democrats, though each party had a candidate in the field. The former contributed upwards of fourteen thousand, or three-fourths of their strength; their opponents somewhat less than ten thousand.

But the action of the city politicians was quickly repudiated and condemned throughout the State. On the 13th of April the Whigs assembled in Albany and passed a series of resolutions denouncing in unequivocal terms the tenets of the Native Americans; and in two days after, at the same place, and in, if possible, a more forcible manner, the Democracy entered their protest against the heresies and evil tendencies of the persecuting faction. Still, the “American Republicans” showed such signs of popular strength in various municipal elections that year that the lower classes of politicians, of all shades of opinion, who dared not openly support them, were suspected of secretly courting their friendship. The nomination of Frelinghuysen with Henry Clay at the Whig presidential convention of May 1, 1844, was well understood at the time to be a bid for Nativist support, and eventually defeated the distinguished Kentucky orator.

It is difficult to imagine how far the madness of the hour might have carried ambitious political leaders and timid conventions, had not the scenes of sacrilege and murder which soon after disgraced the city of Philadelphia, and stained its streets with innocent blood, sent a thrill of horror throughout the entire country.

Philadelphia had followed, if not anticipated, the example of New York in sowing broadcast the seeds of civil strife. Early in the year secret Nativist societies were formed; sensational preachers like Tyng, in and out of place, harangued congregations and meetings; cheap newspapers were started for the sole purpose of vilifying Catholics and working upon the baser passions of the sectarian population of the country. The motives of those engineers of discord were the same as those of their New York brethren, and their method of attack[817] equally treacherous and cowardly. One of the principal charges against their Catholic fellow-citizens was that they were hostile to free schools and education generally. To this unjust aspersion Bishop Kenrick, on the 12th of March, publicly replied in a short but lucid letter, in which he said:

“Catholics have not asked that the Bible be excluded from the public schools. They have merely desired for their children the liberty of using the Catholic version, in case the reading of the Bible be prescribed by the controllers or directors of the schools. They only desire to enjoy the benefit of the constitution of the State of Pennsylvania, which guarantees the rights of conscience and precludes any preference of sectarian modes of worship. They ask that the school laws be faithfully executed, and that the religious predilections of the parents be respected.… They desire that the public schools be preserved from all sectarian influence, and that education be conducted in a way that may enable all citizens equally to share its benefits, without any violence being offered to their conscientious convictions.”

So deliberate and emphatic a denial had no effect on the wretched men who tyrannized over the second city in the Union, except that it was resolved to substitute brute force for reason, and to precipitate a collision with their comparatively weak victims. Accordingly, on the 5th of May, a Nativist meeting was held in Kensington. The design of the managers of the meeting was evidently to provoke an attack; for, finding the place first selected for the gathering unmolested, they deliberately moved to the market-house, in the actual presence of several adopted citizens. This trick and the insulting speeches that followed had the desired effect. A riot took place, several shots were fired on both sides, and four or five persons were more or less seriously wounded. The Nativists retreated, and made an unsuccessful attempt to burn a nunnery.

The most exaggerated reports of this affair were immediately circulated through Philadelphia. The next day the Nativists, fully armed, assembled and passed a series of resolutions of the most violent character. Preceded by an American flag, which bore an inscription as malicious as it was untrue, they attacked the Hibernian Hose Company, destroyed the apparatus, and broke the fire-bell in pieces. Twenty-nine dwellings were burned to the ground, their hapless occupants, mostly women and children, fleeing in all directions amid the insults and shots of their savage assailants. The citizens were now thoroughly aroused, the military, under Gen. Cadwalader, was called out, and Bishop Kenrick addressed a public admonition to his flock to preserve peace, and, notwithstanding the provocation, to exercise forbearance. But the demon of fanaticism, once let loose, could not be easily laid. Rioting continued throughout the day and far into the night. Early on Wednesday morning S. Michael’s Church, the female seminary attached to it, and a number of private houses in the neighborhood were ruthlessly plundered and destroyed. “During the burning of the church,” said one of the Philadelphia papers, “the mob continued to shout; and when the cross at[818] the peak of the roof fell, they gave three cheers and a drum and fife played the ‘Boyne Water.’”

The burning of S. Augustine’s Church took place on the evening of the same day. This building, one of the finest in the city, was peculiarly endeared to the Catholic inhabitants as having been one of their oldest churches in Philadelphia. Many of the contributors to its building fund were men of historic fame, such as Washington, Montgomery, Barry, Meade, Carey, and Girard. It had adjoining it extensive school-houses and a commodious parsonage, and the clock in its tower was the one which had struck the first tones of new-born American liberty. But the sacred character of the building itself, and the patriotic memories which surrounded it, could not save it from the torch of the Philadelphia mob.

“The clock struck ten,” wrote an eye-witness, “while the fire was raging with the greatest fury. At twenty minutes past ten the cross which surmounted the steeple, and which remained unhurt, fell with a loud crash, amid the plaudits of a large portion of the spectators.” A very valuable library and several splendid paintings shared the fate of the church.

But bad as was the conduct of the rioters, that of the authorities was even worse. The militia, when ordered out, did not muster for several hours after the time appointed, and when they did arrive they were only passive, if not gratified, spectators of the lawless scenes before them. When S. Michael’s was threatened, the pastor, Rev. Mr. Donohue, placed it under the charge of Capt. Fairlamb, giving him the keys; yet the mob was allowed to wreak its vengeance on it undisturbed. The basement of S. Augustine’s was occupied by some armed men who had resolved to defend it at all hazards; but on the assurance of Mayor Scott and the sheriff that they had troops and police enough to protect it, it was agreed, in the interests of peace, to evacuate it. This had scarcely been done when the militia and civic guard fell back before a thousand or more armed ruffians and left the church to its fate. For nearly sixty hours the rioters were left in undisputed possession of the city; everything the Catholics held sacred was violated; men were dragged out of their homes, half-hanged and brutally maltreated, when not murdered outright; the houses of adopted citizens were everywhere plundered, an immense amount of property was destroyed, and over two hundred families left desolate and homeless, without the slightest attempt being made to enforce the law. How many fell victims to Nativist hate and rage on this occasion has never been known, but the killed and wounded were counted by scores.

An attempt to outrival Philadelphia in atrocity was made in New York a few days after, but the precautionary steps of the authorities, the firm attitude assumed by the late Archbishop Hughes, and the resolute stand taken by the Catholic population, headed by Eugene Casserly—who was at that time editor of the Freeman’s Journal—together with some young Irish-American Catholic gentlemen, so impressed the leaders of the Nativists that all attempts of an incendiary nature, and all public efforts to sympathize with the Philadelphia mob, were abandoned. Nativism staggered under the blow given it by its adherents[819] in Philadelphia, and soon sank into utter insignificance as a political power.

Another decade, however, passed, and we find it again rejuvenated. This time it assumed the name of the Know-nothing party, and extended its ramifications through every State in the Union. Its declaration of principles contained sixteen clauses, as laid down by its organs, of which the following were regarded as the most vital: 1st. The repeal of all naturalization laws. 2d. None but native Americans for office. 3d. A Protestant common-school system. 4th. Perpetual war on “Romanism.” 5th. Opposition to the formation of military companies composed of “foreigners.” 6th. Stringent laws against immigration. 7th. Ample protection to Protestant interests. Though partly directed, apparently, against all persons of foreign birth, this new secret society was actually only opposed to Catholics; for many of the prominent members in its lodges were Irish Orangemen and Welsh, Scotch, and English unnaturalized adventurers who professed no form of belief.

Like their predecessors of 1844, the Know-nothings employed a host of mendacious ministers and subsidized a number of obscure newspapers to circulate their slanders against Catholics, native as well as adopted citizens; but they also added a new feature to the crusade against morality and civil rights. This was street-preaching—a device for creating riots and bloodshed, for provoking quarrels and setting neighbor against neighbor, worthy the fiend of darkness himself. Wretched creatures, drawn from the very dregs of society, were hired to travel from town to town, to post themselves at conspicuous street-corners, if possible before Catholic churches, and to pour forth, in ribald and blasphemous language, the most unheard-of slanders against the church. As those outcasts generally attracted a crowd of idle persons, and were usually sustained by the presence of the members of the local lodge, the merest interruption of their foul diatribes was the signal for a riot, ending not unfrequently in loss of life or limb.

The first outrage that marked the career of the Know-nothings of 1854 was the attack on the Convent of Mercy, Providence, R. L., in April of that year. Instigated by the newspaper attacks of a notorious criminal, who then figured as a Nativist leader, the rowdy elements of that usually quiet city surrounded the convent, pelted the doors and windows with stones, to the great alarm of the ladies and pupils within, and would doubtless have proceeded to extremities were it not that the Catholics, fearing a repetition of the Charlestown affair, rallied for its protection and repeatedly drove them off. In June Brooklyn was the scene of some street-preaching riots, but in the following August St. Louis, founded by Catholics and up to that time enjoying an enviable reputation for refinement and love of order, acquired a pre-eminence in the Southwest for ferocious bigotry. For two days, August 7 and 8, riot reigned supreme in that city; ten persons were shot down in the streets, many more were seriously wounded, and a number of the houses of Catholics were wrecked.

On the 3d of September of the same year the American Protestant Association of New York, an[820] auxiliary of the Know-nothings, composed of Orangemen, went to Newark, N. J., to join with similar lodges of New Jersey in some celebration. In marching through the streets of that city they happened to pass the German Catholic church, and, being in a sportive mood, they did not hesitate to attack it. A mêlée occurred, during which one man, a Catholic, was killed and several were seriously injured. The evidence taken by the coroner’s jury showed that the admirers of King William were well armed, generally intoxicated, and that the assault and partial destruction of the church were altogether wanton and unprovoked. Early in the same month news was received of a succession of riots in New Orleans, the victims, as usual, being Catholics.

But the spirit of terrorism was not confined to one section or particular State. The virus of bigotry had inoculated the whole body politic. In October people of all shades of religious opinion were astounded to hear from Maine that the Rev. John Bapst, S. J., a clergyman of exemplary piety and mildness, had actually been dragged forcibly from the house of a friend by a drunken Ellsworth mob, ridden on a rail, stripped naked, tarred and feathered, and left for dead. His money and watch were likewise stolen by the miscreants. Father Bapst’s crime was that, when a resident of Ellsworth some time previously, he had entered into a controversy about public schools.

Yet, in the face of all these lawless proceedings, the Know-nothing party increased with amazing rapidity. “Without presses, without electioneering,” said the New York Times, “with no prestige or power, it has completely overthrown and swamped the two old historic parties of the country.” This was certainly true of New England, and notably so of Massachusetts, where, in the autumn of 1854, the Know-nothings elected their candidate for governor and nearly every member of the legislature. In the State of New York Ullman, the standard-bearer of the new army of persecution, received over 122,000 votes, and, though defeated in the city, it was more than suspected that the Democrat who was chosen as mayor had been a member of the organization. In many other States and cities the power of the sworn secret combination was felt and acknowledged.

Its influence and unseen grasp on the passions and prejudices of the lower classes of Protestants were plainly perceptible in the halls of Congress and in the executive cabinet. In the Senate William H. Seward was the first and foremost to denounce the so-called American party. As early as July, 1854, in a speech on the Homestead Bill, he took occasion to remark:

“It is sufficient for me to say that, in my judgment, everything is un-American which makes a distinction, of whatever kind, in this country between the native-born American and him whose lot is directed to be cast here by an over-ruling Providence, and who renounces his allegiance to a foreign land and swears fealty to the country which adopts him.”

The example of the great statesman was followed by such men as Douglas, Cass, Keitt, Chandler, and Seymour, while Senators Dayton and Houston, Wilson, the late Vice-President, N. P. Banks, and a number of other politicians championed the cause of intolerance[821] as has since been confessed, for their own selfish aggrandizement as much as from inherent littleness of soul.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts was completely controlled by the Know-nothings. Their governor, Gardiner, had not been well in the chair of state when he disbanded all the Irish military companies within his jurisdiction. These were the Columbian, Webster, Shields, and Sarsfield Guards of Boston, the Jackson Musketeers of Lowell, the Union Guard of Lawrence, and the Jackson Guard of Worcester. The General Court, too, not to be outdone in bigotry by the executive, passed a law for the inspection of nunneries, convents, and schools, and appointed a committee to carry out its provisions. The first—and last—domiciliary visit of this body was made to the school of the Sisters of Notre Dame in Roxbury. It is thus graphically described by the Boston Advertiser, an eminently Protestant authority: “The gentlemen—we presume we must call members of the legislature by this name—roamed over the whole house from attic to cellar. No chamber, no passage, no closet, no cupboard, escaped their vigilant search. No part of the house was enough protected by respect for the common courtesies of civilized life to be spared in the examination. The ladies’ dresses hanging in their wardrobes were tossed over. The party invaded the chapel, and showed their respect—as Protestants, we presume—for the One God whom all Christians worship by talking loudly with their hats on; while the ladies shrank in terror at the desecration of a spot which they believed hallowed.”

Still, the work of proscription and outrage went on in other directions. Fifteen school-teachers had been dismissed in Philadelphia because they were Catholics; the Rev. F. Nachon, of Mobile, was assaulted and nearly killed while pursuing his sacred avocations; a military company in Cincinnati, and another in Milwaukee, composed of adopted citizens, were disbanded, and on the 6th and 7th of August, 1855, the streets of Louisville ran red with the blood of adopted citizens. In this last and culminating Know-nothing outrage eleven hundred voters were driven from the polls, numbers of men, and even women, were shot down in the public thoroughfares, houses were sacked and burned, and at least five persons are known to have been literally roasted alive.

A reaction, however, had already set in. Men of moderate views and unbiassed judgments began to tire of the scenes of strife, murder, and rapine that accompanied the victories of the Know-nothings. The first to deal it a deadly blow, as a political body, was Henry A. Wise, of Virginia, in his noble canvass of that State against the combined Whig and Nativist elements in 1855; and to the late Archbishop of New York, in his utter discomfiture of State Senator Brooks, is justly due the merit of having first convinced the American people that the so-called American party was actually the most dangerous enemy of American laws and institutions, the advocate of spoliation and persecution under the guise of patriotism and reform.

The decline of Nativism, though not so rapid as its growth, was equally significant, and its history as instructive. In 1856 a national convention was called by the wreck of the party to nominate Fillmore for the presidency, after overtures[822] had been made in vain to the Republicans and Democrats. Fillmore was so badly defeated that he retired into private life and lost whatever little fame he had acquired in national affairs as Taylor’s successor. Four years later Bell and Everett appeared on the Know-nothing ticket, but so far behind were they in the race with their presidential competitors that very few persons cared to remember the paucity of their votes. Gradually, silently, but steadily, like vermin from a sinking ship, the leaders slunk away from the already doomed faction, and, by a hypocritical display of zeal, endeavored to obtain recognition in one or other of the great parties, but generally without success. Disappointed ambition, impotent rage, and, let us hope, remorse of conscience occasionally seized upon them, and the charity of silence became to them the most desired of blessings. Perhaps if the late civil war had not occurred, to swallow in the immensity of its operations all minor interests, we might have beheld in 1864 the spectre of Nativism arising from its uneasy slumber, to be again subjected to its periodical blights and curses.

From present appearances many far-seeing persons apprehend the recurrence in this year of the wild exhibitions of anti-Catholic and anti-American fanaticism which have so often blotted and blurred the otherwise stainless pages of our short history; that the centennial year of American independence and republican liberty is to be signalized by a more concerted, better organized, and more ramified attack on the great principles of civil and religious freedom which underlie and sustain the fabric of our government. We trust, sincerely hope, that these men are mistaken. But if such is to be the case; if we Catholics are doomed once more to be subjected to the abuse of the vile, the slander of the hireling, and the violence of an armed mob, the sooner we are prepared for the contingency the better. If the scenes which have indelibly disgraced Boston and Philadelphia, Ellsworth and Louisville, are to be again rehearsed by the half-dozen sworn secret societies whose cabalistic letters disfigure the columns of so many of our newspapers, we must be prepared to meet the danger with firmness and composure. As Catholics, demanding nothing but what is justly our due under the laws, our position will ever be one of forbearance, charity, and conciliation; but as American citizens, proud of our country and zealous for the maintenance of her institutions, our place shall be beside the executors of those grand enactments which have made this republic the paragon and exemplar of all civil and natural virtues, no matter how imminent the danger or how great the sacrifice. In lands less favored Catholic rights may be violated by prince or mob with impunity, but we would be unworthy of our country and of its founders were we to shrink for a moment from the performance of our trust as the custodians of the fundamental ordinance which guarantees full and absolute religious liberty to all citizens of the republic.

LOUISE LATEAU BEFORE THE BELGIAN ROYAL ACADEMY OF MEDICINE.[260]

How is the name of Louise Lateau to be mentioned without immediately calling up all the tumulta which that name has provoked? Books of science and philosophy, official reports, academic discourses, reports of visits, feuilletons, conferences, pamphlets, articles in journals, every kind of literary production has been placed under contribution to keep the public informed about the stigmatisée of Bois d’Haine. For a year, however, these studies have betaken themselves to a region that might be called exclusively scientific, and have even received a kind of official consecration from the recent vote of the Royal Academy of Medicine.

It may be of service to the reader who cannot occupy himself with special studies to give a brief exposition of the affair of Bois d’Haine in itself, to show the different interpretations of it that have been attempted, and to indicate clearly the actual phase of the question from a scientific point of view.

As early as about the middle of 1868 vague rumors were heard of strange events which were taking place in a little village of Hainault. Every Friday a young girl showed on the different portions of her body corresponding to the wounds of our Saviour Jesus Christ red stains from which blood flowed in greater or less abundance. It was also said that on every Friday this young girl, ravished in ecstasy, remained for several hours completely unconscious of all that was passing around her. Such were the principal facts. Over and above these rumor spread the story of certain accessory incidents, some of which, though true, were distorted, while others were pure fancy. Thanks to the daily press, the young girl soon became known to the general public, and the name of Louise Lateau passed from mouth to mouth. Here and there one read among “current events” that large crowds rushed from all sides, from Belgium and from without, to assist every Friday at the scenes which were being enacted in the chamber at Bois d’Haine. Some journals profited by the occasion to deliver themselves anew of declamations against “Catholic superstitions, the stupidity of the masses, and the intriguing character of the clergy”; while even many men of good faith were of opinion that the story told of Louise Lateau might indeed be true, but ought to be attributed to some trickery or another of which either the girl or her family was culpable.

Happily for the public, a light came to clear up this chaos of versions, suppositions, and diverse[824] and contradictory opinions. The Revue Catholique of Louvain reproduced by instalments, beginning in 1869, a study by Prof. Lefebvre on these extraordinary events. Some time after, this study appeared in the form of a volume. Here is how the eminent physician expresses himself on the origin of his study:

After having examined the events of Bois d’Haine in all their phases; after having put to the proof the sincerity of the young girl in a thousand different ways and by means of a variety of tests, the eminent Louvain professor pronounced the facts of the stigmatization and ecstasy to be real and free from deception. Passing, then, to the interpretation of the events themselves, the author thus concludes:

I do not hesitate to say that the appearance of this book was a veritable event, and that it marked an important halting-place in the study of the question of Louise Lateau. By those who knew the calm and reflective spirit of M. Lefebvre, and the independence of his character and convictions, the fact of the real existence of the extraordinary events taking place at Bois d’Haine was no longer called in question; and if some doubt still remained, it regarded only the sense in which those events were to be interpreted. Was it, then, true that the union of stigmata and ecstasies belonged to no known malady? Was it true that they could find no place in the classification of diseases, under a new title, with physiological proofs to accompany them?

Notwithstanding the immense credit allowed to the science of M. Lefebvre, doubt still hovered around this question, and I make bold to say, in the honor of the progress of science, that such doubt was legitimate. A loyal appeal was made to the savants of the country and of foreign countries, urging them to go and study the facts at Bois d’Haine[825] and publish their opinion. Soon a study on Louise Lateau, made by a French physician,[262] came to confirm still further the medical study of M. Lefebvre. Then a German savant, M. Virchow, seemed to accept as true the conclusions of the Belgian doctor by that famous phrase that the events of Bois d’Haine must be considered either as a trick or as a miracle.

Meanwhile, certain persons seemed still reluctant to accept facts which a hundred different witnesses affirmed in the face of the world. Among the reluctant are to be ranked, first of all, those who are of bad faith—with whom there is no reason to trouble; others who, for philosophic motives, seemed to accuse the witnesses of those scenes of sacrificing the interest of science to that of their religious convictions. Nevertheless, M. Lefebvre’s book continued to make headway. I do not say that it did not meet with some attacks here and there, and certain objections in detail; but throughout the country no publication of any pretension to seriousness affected either to deny the facts or to give a natural explanation of them. This state of things continued up to July, 1874. At this epoch Dr. Charbonnier, a physician of Brussels, presented to the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine a work entitled Maladies et facultés diverses des mystiques. Louise Lateau.

M. Boëns, on his part, submitted to the same learned body, in the session of October 3, 1874, a new production, entitled Louise Lateau, ou les mystères de Bois d’Haine dévoilés.

II.

The events of Bois d’Haine continued to occupy public attention. The scenes of the stigmatic flows of blood and of the ecstasies were presented every Friday. It was even stated that from the middle of 1871 Louise Lateau had taken no sort of nourishment. The Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine, whether because it dreaded to enter upon a question which involved, beyond the scientific side, a side purely philosophic, or whether also because a fitting and favorable opportunity of taking up the question of Louise Lateau was not presented, remained mute as to the events of Bois d’Haine.

The almost simultaneous presentation of two works treating on the very subject indicated clearly that the question was ripe. Moreover, in the session of October 3, 1874, the chief medical body of the country, conformably with usage, appointed a special committee to make a report on the works read in its sessions. This committee consisted of MM. Fossion, president; Mascart and Warlomont, colleagues.

The important report of the committee was read in the session of the 13th of February by M. Warlomont. That gentleman to show how the study of M. Charbonnier’s work necessitated an examination into the affair at Bois d’Haine, said:

MM. Charbonnier and Boëns were the first in our country who undertook to find fault with the conclusions of M. Lefebvre’s book, and to explain by scientific data the events of Bois d’Haine. M. Boëns, almost immediately after the reading of a portion of his work, withdrew it, and was able by this means to escape the report of the committee. Was this disdain for the judgment of his confrères on the part of the distinguished physician of Charleroi, or was it want of confidence in the solidity of his own arguments? I know not. I state a fact and continue.

There remained, then, for the committee to examine the work of M. Charbonnier. This memoir is voluminous. The theory of the author is substantially as follows: The absence of aliment and the concentration of the faculties of the soul towards one object have been the primary and indispensable conditions of ecstasies and stigmata. As far as abstinence is concerned, it is perfectly compatible, if not with a state of health, at least with the maintenance of life. “The question of abstinence,” says the author, “is the most important, because without it nothing happens. It being well explained, there is no longer anything supernatural in any of the physiological and pathological phenomena of the mystics.”[264]

But how is this abstinence compatible with life? By the law of the substitution of functions and organs.

“The organs,” says the author, “are conjointly associated (solidaires) one with another, working for the common health; so that when an organ, for one cause or another, cannot adequately fulfil its functions, another immediately supplies its place.”

Of the ecstasy, according to M. Charbonnier, “abstinence is the principal, contemplation the secondary, cause.” We cannot, indeed, enter into all the details furnished by the author of this strange theory. In order to arrive at a judgment regarding it, we know of nothing better than to cite the conclusions of the reader of the report on the work itself:

If the theory advanced by M. Charbonnier, based on such doubtful physiological facts, finds no weight with the learned representative of the Academy of Medicine, it is not because he himself admits the conclusions arrived at in the study of M. Lefebvre on Louise Lateau. For him, indeed, the events taking place at Bois d’Haine, apart from the question of fasting, which has not been positively established, and which, on that account, rightly passes beyond scientific discussion,[267] are exempt from all fraud and deception. But let M. Warlomont himself speak:

And now for the chief part of the report. It is that in which the learned academician attempts to give a physiological explanation of the facts. For him ecstasies are a species of double life, of a second condition, such as may be presented in ordinary and extraordinary nervous states, as well as in others: (a) in consequence of material injury to the brain; (b) during the existence of well-determined neurotic disorders; (c) under the influence of certain special appliances (magnetism, hypnotism); (d) spontaneously, without the intervention of any external provocation (as somnambulism or extraordinary neurotic affections).

After having examined each of these points in detail, the author thus continues:

So far for the ecstasies. Passing[828] next to the production of stigmata, the report admits in principle the theory of Alfred Maury. That is to say, the imagination plays the principal rôle in the production of these phenomena. But to meet the brilliant member of the Institute, he calls to his aid the physiological laws and most recent discoveries, in order to show how the imagination can, by the irritation of certain given parts, provoke a veritable congestion of those parts, and then a hemorrhage.

But M. Warlomont goes still farther. He says that not only are stigmata and ecstasies capable of explanation when taken apart from one another, but that by their union they constitute what in pathology is called aggregate of symptoms. According to this, stigmata and ecstasies would constitute an altogether unique morbid state, to which the professor gives the following name and definition: “Stigmatic neuropathy is a nervous disease, having its seat in the base of the medulla oblongata, the first stage of which consists in the paralysis of the vaso-motor centre, and the second in its excitation.” Presented in this way, the report of the distinguished member of the Academy was not only a report, but a veritable original work. Thus this book, wherein the author had joined loyalty of procedure to elegance of style and deep erudition, produced a profound sensation. The theory which he advances might well leave certain doubts with the reader relative to the solidity of the bases on which it leans, but by its method it exercised a real fascination on the mind. M. Warlomont’s conclusions were, as far as the interpretation of the facts went, diametrically opposed to those of the book which M. Lefebvre had published several years before, and it was not without a very great curiosity that the public awaited the reply of the latter.

The reply was not long in coming. M. Lefebvre’s discourse occupied, so to say, exclusively the sessions of May 29 and June 26. After having rendered due homage to the courtesy and science of the distinguished reader of the report, the Louvain professor hesitated not to sustain the first conclusions advanced in his book, and to demonstrate the small foundation of the theory of his adversary on this question. It is to be regretted that the limits at my disposal do not allow me to enter into all the physiological details and pathological considerations on which M. Lefebvre builds his conclusions. I regret it the more because the brilliant words of the orator exercise a very special[829] impression by the clearness of their exposition, the logic of their reasoning, and the exquisite charm which they give to even the driest questions.

First, as to the stigmatic hemorrhages, we cannot be astonished, after having followed the proofs which the learned orator gives us, to find him lay down the following conclusions:

Regarding ecstasies, the orator, after having examined the different states with which the reader of the report to the Academy compared the ecstasies of Louise Lateau, concludes by saying:

After examining this question, the orator concludes in the negative. In finishing his beautiful discourse he says:

M. Crocq spoke after M. Lefebvre. Like M. Warlomont, the learned Brussels professor believes that the interpretation of the facts positively established about Louise Lateau belongs to pathological physiology. The theory of M. Crocq differs but little from that of M. Warlomont. He attaches more importance to abstinence than the learned reader of the report, and thus comes nearer to M. Charbonnier; he believes, also, that the bleeding is altogether caused by a rupture of the capillaries. Apart from these small distinctions, it may be said of him, as of M. Warlomont, that he is of opinion that the imagination, by its influence on the nervous system, is the principal cause of the ecstasies and stigmata. Here are the rest of his conclusions:

If we had to advance our own opinion on this important question, we should say that, after the report in which M. Warlomont had treated his subject with so much method and science, there remained few new arguments which could be applied to the physiological theory of the phenomena of mystics. It should be considered, however, no small advantage for the latter physician to feel himself supported by M. Crocq, who had brought to the debates the weight of his profound erudition and vast experience.

III.

By all impartial judges the case might be regarded as understood. It was so in effect. The different orators who succeeded each other in the tribune of the Academy had brought to their respective discourses the strongest possible array[831] of facts and of arguments. I shall astonish no one, then, by saying that M. Warlomont could not allow the victorious discourse of his colleague of Louvain to pass without some observations. It is impossible for us here to give a résumé of his discourse. In the main it added no new proof to the substance of the debate, and confined itself to the criticism of certain details.

It is enough for us to say that in this discourse the learned reader of the report to the Academy gave new proof of the brilliancy of his mind and the adroitness of his gifts.

M. Lefebvre, on his side, felt himself to be too much master of the situation to need emphasizing his triumph any further. This is what he did in the session of October 9, 1875. Without precisely entering into the heart of the debate, he brought out more strongly certain of the arguments which he had already used; he employed them to refute some of the assertions made in the discourses of his adversaries, held up certain inaccuracies, and concluded, as he had the right to do, by the following words, which give an exact idea of the state of the question:

After certain remarks made at the same session by MM. Vleminckx, Crocq, Lefebvre, Masoin, Boëns, the general discussion closed. The printing of M. Charbonnier’s memoir was decided on and a vote of thanks to the author passed. With this should have ended the task of the Academy; and those who had hoped for a physiological interpretation of the facts of Bois d’Haine, as the outcome of these discussions, were in a position to felicitate themselves on the result; for by its absolute silence the Academy allowed a certain freedom of choice.

But during the session of July 10, 1875, which a family affliction prevented M. Lefebvre from assisting at, two members proposed orders of the day on the discussion of Bois d’Haine. Nevertheless, by a very proper sentiment, which the distinguished president, M. Vleminckx, was the first to advance, those orders of the day were not carried at that date.

The same resolutions, the small foundation for which, after the discourses which had been made, every impartial mind ought to recognize, were again brought up in the session of October 9.

M. Vleminckx, having induced the authors of the orders of the day to modify their wording in such a manner as to render them acceptable, M. Fossion proposed the following form, more soothing than its predecessors:

M. Laussedat, after some preliminary remarks, finally proposed the order of the day pure and simple, which was adopted.

The bearing of this vote will escape the mind of no one. In setting aside the orders of the day which pretended that what had been positively established in the question of Bois d’Haine might be solved by science, the Academy has fully confirmed the conclusions of M. Lefebvre’s book.

Meanwhile, in ending, let us return to Bois d’Haine, to that young girl who has become more than ever the object of the veneration of some, the study of others, and the wonder of all.

Since 1868 Louise Lateau presents the phenomena weekly of the bloody stigmata and the ecstasies, to which later on was added abstinence from food.

Her first and chief historian, M. Lefebvre, after having watched the young girl, affirms since 1869: She, whom a certain portion of the public considers as a cheat or an invalid, really presents the phenomena which are reported of her. These phenomena are exempt from trickery, and it is impossible to explain them by the laws of physiology and pathology. We omit the question of fasting, which remains to be studied.

Seven years after the appearance of the first phenomena, at the time when the commotion which they produced had, so to say, reached its height, the leading learned body in Belgium examined the mysterious scenes in the humble house of Bois d’Haine, and, through MM. Crocq and Warlomont, made an inquiry into the reality and sincerity of the facts, and brings in a verdict that the facts are real and free from all fraud.

Finally, this same Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine, by its vote, avows in the face of the world that, if it ought not to recognize a supernatural cause in the facts about Louise Lateau, as little can it demonstrate their natural origin and physiological genesis.

ST. JEAN DE LUZ.

Few towns are set in so lovely a frame as St. Jean de Luz, with its incomparable variety of sea, mountain, river, and plain. In front is the dark blue bay opening into the boundless sea. On the north are the cliffs of Sainte Barbe. At the south are the Gothic donjon and massive jetty of Socoa, behind which rises gradually a chain of mountains, one above the other, from wooded or vine-covered hills, dotted here and there with the red-and-white houses of the Basque peasantry and the summer residences of the wealthy merchants of St. Jean de Luz, till we come to the outer ramparts of La Rhune with its granite cliffs and sharp peaks, the Trois Couronnes with their jagged outline, and still farther on a long, blue line of mountains fading away into the azure sea. It is from La Rhune you can best take in all the features of the country. To go to it you use one of the modest barks that have replaced the sumptuous galleys of Louis Quatorze, and ascend to Ascain, a pretty hamlet, from which the summit of La Rhune is reached in two hours. It is not one of the highest in the Pyrenean chain, being only three thousand feet above the sea, but it is an isolated peak, and affords a diversified view of vast extent. To the north are the green valleys of Labourd, with the steeples of thirty parishes around; Bayonne, with the towers of its noble cathedral; and the vast pine forests of the mysterious Landes. To the west is the coast of Spain washed by the ocean. East and south are the mountains of Béarn and Navarre, showing peak after peak, like a sea suddenly petrified in a storm.

Such is the magnificent frame in which is set the historic town of St. Jean de Luz. It is built on a tongue of land washed by the encroaching sea on one hand and the river Nivelle on the other. The situation is picturesque, the sky brilliant, the climate mild. It seems to need nothing to make it attractive. The very aspect of decay lends it an additional charm which renewed prosperity would destroy. The houses run in long lines parallel with the two shores, looking, when the tide is high, like so many ships at anchor. At the sight of this floating town we are not surprised at its past commercial importance, or that its inhabitants are navigators par excellence. Its sailors were the first to explore the unknown seas of the west, and to fish for the cod and whale among the icebergs of the arctic zone. In the first half of the XVIIth century thirty ships, each manned by thirty-five or forty sailors, left St. Jean de Luz for the cod-fisheries of Newfoundland, and as many for Spitzbergen in search of whales. The oaks of La Rhune were cut down for vessels. The town was wealthy and full of activity. Those were[834] the best days of ancient Lohitzun. But though once so renowned for its fleets, it has fallen from the rank it then occupied. Ruined by wars, and greatly depopulated by the current of events, its houses have decayed one after another, or totally disappeared before the encroachments of the sea. Reduced to a few quiet streets, it is the mere shadow of what it once was. Instead of hundreds of vessels, only a fishing-smack or two enliven its harbor. And yet there is a certain air of grandeur about the place which bespeaks its past importance, and several houses which harmonize with its historic memories. For St. Jean de Luz was not only a place of commercial importance, but was visited by several of the kings of France, and is associated with some of the most important events of their reigns. Louis XI. came here when mediating between the kings of Aragon and Castile. The château of Urtubi, which he occupied, is some distance beyond. Its fine park, watered by a beautiful stream, and the picturesque environs, make it an attractive residence quite worthy of royalty. The ivy-covered wall on the north side is a part of the old manor-house of the XIIth century; the remainder is of the XVIIth. The two towers have a feudal aspect, but are totally innocent of feudal domination; for the Basque lords, even of the middle ages, never had any other public power than was temporarily conferred on them by their national assemblies.

It was at St. Jean de Luz that Francis I., enthusiastically welcomed by the people after his deliverance from captivity in Spain, joyfully exclaimed: “Je suis encore roi de France—I am still King of France!” It likewise witnessed the exchange of the beautiful Elizabeth of France and Anne of Austria—one given in marriage to Louis XIII. and the other to Philip of Spain amid the acclamations of the people.

Cardinal Mazarin also visited St. Jean de Luz in 1659 to confer with the astute Don Luis de Haro, prime minister of Philip IV., about the interests of France and Spain. The house he inhabited beside the sea still has his cipher on the walls, as it has also the old Gobelin tapestry with which his apartments were hung. He was accompanied by one hundred and fifty gentlemen, some of whom were the greatest lords in France. With them were as many attendants, a guard of one hundred horsemen and three hundred foot-soldiers, twenty-four mules covered with rich housings, seven carriages for his personal use, and several horses to ride. He remained here four months. His interviews with the Spanish minister took place on the little island in the Bidassoa known ever since as the Isle of Conference, which was never heard of till the treaty of the Pyrenees. All national interviews and exchanges of princesses had previously taken place in the middle of the river by means of gabares, or a bridge of boats.

It was this now famous isle which Bossuet apostrophized in his oraison funèbre at the burial of Queen Marie Thérèse:

“Pacific isle, in which terminated the differences of the two great empires of which you were the limit; in which were displayed all the skill and diplomacy of different national policies; in which one statesman secured preponderance by his deliberation, and the other ascendency by means of his penetration![835] Memorable day, in which two proud nations, so long at enmity, but now reconciled by Marie Thérèse, advanced to their borders with their kings at their head, not to engage in battle, but for a friendly embrace; in which two sovereigns with their courts, each with its peculiar grandeur and magnificence, as well as etiquette and manners, presented to each other and to the whole universe so august a spectacle—how can I now mingle your pageants with these funeral solemnities, or dwell on the height of all human grandeur in sight of its end?”

The marriage of Louis XIV. with the Spanish Infanta, to which the great orator refers, is still the most glorious remembrance of St. Jean de Luz. The visits of Louis XI., Francis I., and Charles IX. have left but few traces in the town compared with that of the Grand Monarque. The majestic presence of the young king surrounded by his gay, magnificent following, here brought in contrast with the dignity, gloom, and splendor of the Spanish court, impressed the imagination of the people, who have never forgotten so glorious a memory.

Louis XIV. arrived at St. Jean de Luz May 8, 1660, accompanied by Anne of Austria, Cardinal Mazarin, and a vast number of lords and ladies, among whom was the Grande Mademoiselle. They were enthusiastically welcomed by the ringing of bells, firing of cannon, and shouts of joy. Garlands of flowers arched the highway, the pavement was strewn with green leaves, and Cantabrian dances were performed around the cortége. At the door of the parish church stood the clergy in full canonicals, with the curé at their head to bless the king as he went past. He resided, while there, in the château of Lohobiague, the fine towers of which are still to be seen on the banks of the Nivelle. It is now known as the House of Louis XIV. Here he was entertained by the widowed châtelaine with the sumptuous hospitality for which the family was noted. A light gallery was put up to connect the château with that of Joanocnia, in which lodged Anne of Austria and the Spanish Infanta. Here took place the first interview between the king and his bride, described by Mme. de Motteville in her piquant manner. From the gallery the Infanta, after her marriage, took pleasure in throwing handfuls of silver coin to the people, called pièces de largesses, struck by the town expressly for the occasion, with the heads of the royal pair on one side and on the other St. Jean de Luz in a shower of gold, with the motto: Non lætior alter.

The château of Joanocnia, frequently called since that time the château of the Infanta, was built by Joannot de Haraneder, a merchant of the place, who was ennobled for his liberality when the island of Rhé was besieged by the English in 1627, and about to surrender to the Duke of Buckingham for want of supplies and reinforcements. The Comte de Grammont, governor of Bayonne, being ordered by Richelieu to organize an expedition at once for the relief of the besieged, issued a command for every port to furnish its contingent. St. Jean de Luz eagerly responded by sending a large flotilla, and Joannot de Haraneder voluntarily gave the king two vessels, supplied with artillery, worthy of figuring in the royal navy. For this and subsequent services he was ennobled.[836] His arms are graven in marble over the principal fire-place of the château—a plum-tree on an anchor, with the motto:

This château, though somewhat devoid of symmetry, has a certain beauty and originality of its own, with its alternate rows of brick and cream-colored stone, after the Basque fashion, its Renaissance portico between two square towers facing the harbor, and the light arches of the two-story gallery in the Venetian style. Over the principal entrance is a marble tablet with the following inscription in letters of gold:

The letter L and the fleur-de-lis are to be seen as we ascend the grand staircase, and two paintings by Gérôme after the style of the XVIIth century, recalling the alliance of France and Spain and the well-known mot of Louis XIV.:

All the details of the residence of the royal family here, as related by Mme. de Motteville and Mlle. de Montpensier, are full of curious interest. The former describes the beautiful Isle of Conference and the superb pavilion for the reunion of the two courts, with two galleries leading towards France and Spain. This building was erected by the painter Velasquez, who, as aposentador mayor, accompanied Philip IV. to the frontier. This fatiguing voyage had an unfavorable effect on the already declining health of the great painter, and he died a few weeks after his return.

During the preliminary arrangements for the marriage Louis led a solemn, uniform life. Like the queen-mother, who was always present at Mass, Vespers, and Benediction, he daily attended public services, sometimes at the Recollects’ and sometimes at the parish church. He always dined in public at the château of Lohobiague, surrounded by crowds eager to witness the process of royal mastication. In the afternoon there were performances by comedians who had followed the court from Paris; and sometimes Spanish mysteries, to which Queen Anne was partial, were represented, in which the actors were dressed as hermits and nuns, and sacred events were depicted, to the downright scandal of the great mademoiselle. The day ended with a ball, in which the king did not disdain to display the superior graces of his royal person in a ballet compliqué. Everything, in short, was quite in the style of the Grand Cyrus itself.

The marriage, which had taken place at Fontarabia by procuration, was personally solemnized in the parish church of St. Jean de Luz by the Bishop of Bayonne in the presence of an attentive crowd. The door by which the royal couple entered was afterwards walled up, that it might never serve for any one else—a not uncommon mark of respect in those days. A joiner’s shop now stands against this Porta Regia. The king presented the church on this occasion with a complete set of sacred vessels and ecclesiastical vestments.

The church in which Louis XIV. was married is exteriorly a noble building with an octagonal tower, but of no architectural merit within. There are no side aisles, but around the nave are ranges of galleries peculiar to the Basque churches, where the separation of[837] the men from the women is still rigorously maintained. The only piece of sculpture is a strange Pietà in which the Virgin, veiled in a large cope, holds the dead Christ on her knees. A rather diminutive angel, in a flowing robe with pointed sleeves of the time of Charles VII., bears a scroll the inscription of which has become illegible.

Behind the organ, in the obscurity of the lower gallery of the church, hangs a dark wooden frame—short but broad—with white corners, which contains a curious painting of the XVIIth century representing Christ before Pilate. It is by no means remarkable as a work of art; for it is deficient in perspective, there is no grace in the drapery, no special excellence of coloring. The figures are generally drawn with correctness, but the faces seem rather taken from pictures than from real life. But however poor the execution, this painting merits attention on account of its dramatic character. The composition represents twenty-six persons. At the left is Pontius Pilate, governor of Judea, seated in a large arm-chair beneath a canopy, pointing with his left hand towards the Saviour before him. In his right hand he holds a kind of sceptre; his beard is trimmed in the style of Henri Quatre; he wears a large mantle lined with ermine, and on his head a toque, such as the old presidents of parliament used to wear in France.

Below Pilate is the clerk recording the votes in a large register, and before him is the urn in which they are deposited.

In front of the clerk, but separated from him by a long white scroll on which is inscribed the sentence pronounced by Pilate, is seated our Saviour, his loins girded with a strip of scarlet cloth, his bowed head encircled by luminous rays, his attitude expressive of humility and submission, his bound hands extended on his knees.

In the centre of the canvas, above this group, is the high-priest Caiaphas standing under an arch, his head thrown back, and his hands extended in an imposing attitude. He wears a cap something like a mitre, a kind of stole is crossed on his breast, his long robe is adorned with three flounces of lace. His face is that of a young man. The slight black mustache he wears is turned up in a way that gives him a resemblance to Louis XIII. It is evidently a portrait of that age.

At the side of Pilate, and behind Christ, are ranged the members of the Jewish Sanhedrim, standing or sitting, in various postures, with white scrolls in their hands, which they hold like screens, bearing their names and the expression of their sentiments respecting the divine Victim. Their dress is black or white, but varied in form. Most of them wear a mosette, or ermine cape, and the collar of some order of knighthood, as of S. Michael and the S. Esprit. They are all young, have mustaches, and look as if they belonged to the time of Louis Treize. On their heads are turbans, or toques.

Through the open window, at the end of the pretorium, may be seen the mob, armed with spears, and expressing its sentiments by means of a scroll at the side of the window: “If thou let this man go, thou art not Cæsar’s friend. Crucify him! crucify him! His blood be on us and on our children.”

The chief interest of the picture[838] centres in these inscriptions, which are in queer old French of marvellous orthography. At the bottom of the painting, to the left, is the following:

The sentiments of the high-priests and elders, whose names we give in the original, are thus expressed:

This picture is analogous to the old mysteries of the Passion once so popular in this region, in which the author who respected the meaning of the sacred text was at liberty to draw freely on his imagination. It was especially in the dialogue that[839] lay the field for his genius. However naïve these sacred dramas, they greatly pleased the people. A painting similar to this formerly existed in St. Roch’s Church at Paris, in which figured the undecided Pilate in judicial array, Caiaphas the complacent flatterer of the people, and the mob with its old rôle of “Crucify him! crucify him!”

We must not forget a work of art, of very different character, associated with the history of St. Jean de Luz. It is a curious piece of needle-work commemorating the conferences of the two great statesmen, Cardinal Mazarin and Don Luis de Haro, and evidently designed by an able artist, perhaps by Velasquez himself. It is a kind of courte-pointe (it would never do to call it by the ignoble name of coverlet!) of linen of remarkable fineness, on which are embroidered in purple silk the eminent personages connected with the treaty of the Pyrenees, as well as various allegorical figures and accessory ornaments, which make it a genuine historic picture of lively and interesting character. This delicate piece of Spanish needle-work was wrought by the order of Don Luis de Haro as a mark of homage to his royal master. He presented it to the king on his feast-day, May 1, 1661, and it probably adorned the royal couch. But the better to comprehend this work of art—for such it is, in spite of its name—let us recall briefly the events that suggested its details.

Philip IV. ascended the Spanish throne in 1621, when barely sixteen years of age. His reign lasted till 1665. He had successively two ministers of state, both of great ability, but of very different political views. In the first part of his reign the young monarch gave his whole confidence to the Count of Olivares, whose authority was almost absolute till 1648. But his ministry was far from fortunate. On the contrary, it brought such humiliating calamities on the country that the king at length awoke to the danger that menaced it. He dismissed Olivares and appointed the count’s nephew and heir in his place, who proved one of the ablest ministers ever known in Spain. He was a descendant of the brave Castilian lord to whom Alfonso VII. was indebted for the capture of Zurita, but who would accept no reward from the grateful prince but the privilege of giving the name of Haro to a town he had built. It was another descendant of this proud warrior who was made archbishop of Mexico in the latter part of the XVIIIth century, and was so remarkable for his charity and eloquence as a preacher.

Don Luis not only had the military genius of his ancestor, but the prudence of a real statesman, and he succeeded in partially repairing the disasters of the preceding ministry. He raised an army and equipped a powerful squadron, by which he repulsed the French, checked the Portuguese, brought the rebellious provinces into subjection, and effected the treaty of Munster; which energetic measures produced such an effect on the French government as to lead to amicable relations between the two great ministers who, at this time, held the destiny of Europe in their hands, and to bring about a general peace in 1659.

It was with this object Cardinal Mazarin and Don Luis de Haro agreed upon a meeting on the Ile des Faisans—as the Isle of Conference was then called—which led to the treaty of the Pyrenees.

As a reward for Don Luis’ signal services, particularly the peace he had cemented by an alliance so honorable to the nation, Philip IV., in the following year, conferred on him the title of duke, and gave him the surname de la Paz.

It was at this time Don Luis had this curious courte-pointe wrought as a present to the king. He was the declared patron of the fine arts, and had established weekly reunions to bring together the principal artists of Spain, some of whom probably designed this memorial of his glory. It was preserved with evident care, and handed down from one sovereign to another, till it finally fell into the possession of the mother of Ferdinand VII., who, wishing to express her sense of the fidelity of one of her ladies of honor, gave her this valuable counterpane. In this way it passed into the hands of its present owner at Bayonne.

On the upper part of this covering the power of Spain is represented by a woman holding a subdued lion at her feet. In the centre are Nuestra Señora del Pilar and S. Ferdinand, patrons of the kingdom, around whom are the eagles of Austria, so closely allied to Spain. And by way of allusion to the Ile des Faisans, where the recent negotiations had taken place, pheasants are to be seen in every direction. Cardinal Mazarin and Don Luis de Haro are more than once represented. In one place they are presenting an olive branch to the powers they serve; in another they are advancing, side by side, towards Philip IV., to solicit the hand of his daughter for Louis XIV. Here Philip gives his consent to the marriage, and, lower down, Louis receives his bride in the presence of two females who personify France and Spain. The intermediate spaces are filled up with allusions to commerce with foreign lands and the progress of civilization at home. Not only war, victory, and politics have their emblems, but literature, beneficence, and wealth. But there are many symbols the meaning of which it would require the sagacity of a Champollion to fathom.

This is, perhaps, the only known instance of a prime minister directing his energies to the fabrication of a counterpane. Disraeli, to be sure, has woven many an extravagant web of romance with Oriental profusion of ornament, but not, to our knowledge, in purple and fine linen, like Don Luis de Haro. We have seen one of the gorgeous coverlets of Louis XIV., but it was wrought by the young ladies of St. Cyr under the direction of Mme. de Maintenon; and there is another in the Hôtel de Cluny that once belonged to Francis I. The grand-daughter of Don Luis de Haro, the sole heiress of the house, married the Duke of Alba, carrying with her as a dowry the vast possessions of Olivares, Guzman, and Del Carpio. The brother-in-law of the ex-Empress Eugénie is a direct descendant of theirs.

Opposite St. Jean de Luz, on the other side of the Nivelle, is Cibourre, with its solemn, mysterious church, and its widowed houses built along the quay and straggling up the hill of Bordagain. Prosperous once like its neighbor, it also participated in its misfortunes, and now wears the same touching air of melancholy. The men are all sailors—the best sailors in Europe—but they are absent a great part of the year. Fearless wreckers live along the shore, who brave the greatest dangers to aid ships in distress.[841] In more prosperous days its rivalry with St. Jean de Luz often led to quarrels, and the islet which connects the two places was frequently covered with the blood shed in these encounters. The convent of Recollects, now a custom-house, which we pass on our way to Cibourre, was founded in expiation of this mutual hatred, and very appropriately dedicated to Notre Dame de la Paix—Our Lady of Peace. The cloister, with its round arches, is still in good preservation, and the cistern is to be seen in the court, constructed by Cardinal Mazarin, that the friars might have a supply of soft water.

The Basques are famed for their truthfulness and honesty, the result perhaps of the severity of their ancient laws, one of which ordered a tooth to be extracted every time a person was convicted of lying! No wonder the love of truth took such deep root among them. But had this stringent law been handed down and extended to other lands, what toothless communities there would now be in the world!

THE ETERNAL YEARS.

II.
THE PULSATIONS OF TIME.

The deduction we arrive at from the argument which we have laid down is that the history of the world is a consistent one, and not a series of loose incidents strung together. It is as much this morally, it is as truly the evolution and unwinding of a high moral law and of a great spiritual truth, as the life of the plant from the seed to the ripe fruit is the development of a natural growth. This last is governed by laws with which we are only partially acquainted; whereas the moral law and the spiritual truth are revealed to us by the divine scheme of creation and redemption. There is nothing existing, either in the natural or in the spiritual law, and especially in this last, which is not more or less, in one way or in another, by assertion or by negation, a revelation of the divine Being.

He reveals himself directly by his volitions and indirectly by his permissions. And we can only be one with him when we have learnt to accept both and to submit to both; not in the spirit of quietism or fatalism, but as actively entering into his intentions, accepting what he wills, and bearing what he permits. There is no harmony possible between the soul and God until we have arrived at this; and the history of the world is the history of man’s acquiescence in, or resistance to, the supreme will of God. The first disruption of the will of man from the will of God, in the fall of man, wove a dark[842] woof into the web of time; and every act of ours which is not according to the will of God weaves the same into our own lives, because it is a rupture of the law of harmony which God has instituted between himself as creator and us as creatures. Were that harmony unbroken, man would rest in God as in his centre; for, being finite, he has no sufficiency in himself, but for ever seeks some good extrinsic to himself. The same applies to all creation, whose ultimate end and highest good must always be some object beyond, and above itself; and that object is none other than God, “quod ignorantes colitis,”[270]—the finite striving after the Infinite. Thus the whole divine government of the world is a gradual unfolding of the divine Will, according as we are able to receive it. And the degree of receptivity in mankind, at various periods of the world’s history, and in different localities, accounts for the variety in the divine dispensations, and for the imperfection of some as compared with others. The “yet more excellent way”[271] could not be received by all at all times. The promise was given to Abraham. But four hundred and thirty years elapsed before its fulfilment, for the express purpose of being occupied and spent in the institution of the law as a less perfect dispensation, and which was given because of transgressions—“propter transgressiones posita est”[272]—thus showing the adaptive government of God: the gradual building up of the city of the Lord, whose stones are the living souls of men, which are “hewed and made ready,”[273] but so that there shall be “neither hammer, nor axe, nor tool of iron heard” while it is building. For God does not force his creature. He pours not “new wine into old bottles,” but waits in patience the growth of his poor creatures, and the slow and gradual leavening of the great mass. A time had been when God walked with man “at the afternoon air”;[274] and whatever may be the full meaning of this exquisitely-expressed intercourse, at least it must have been intimate and tender. But when the black pall of evil fell on the face of creation, the light of God’s intercourse with man was let in by slow degrees, like single stars coming out in the dark firmament. The revelations, like the stars, varied in magnitude and glory, lay wide apart from each other, rose at different intervals of longer or shorter duration, and conveyed, like them, a flickering and uncertain light, until the “Sun of Justice arose with health in his wings,”[275] and “scattered the rear of darkness thin.” The degree of light vouchsafed was limited by the capacity of the recipient; and that capacity has not always been the same in all ages, any more than in any one age it is the same in all the contemporary men, or in each man the same at all periods of his life. It is thus that we arrive at the explanation of an apparent difference of tone, color, and texture, so to speak, in the various manifestations of God to man. The manifestation is limited to the capacity of the recipient; and not only is it limited, but to a certain extent it becomes, as it were, tinged by the properties of the medium through which it is transmitted to others. It assumes characteristics that are not essentially its own. For so marvellous is the respect with which the Creator[843] treats the freedom of his creature that he suffers us to give a measure of our own color to what he reveals to us, so that it may be more our own, more on our level, more within our grasp; as though he poured the white waters of saving truth into glasses of varied colors, and thus hid from us a pellucidity too perfect for our nature. And thus it happens that to us who dwell in the light of God’s church, with the seven lamps of the seven sacraments burning in the sanctuary, the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob hardly seems to us the same God as our God. We see him through the prism of the past, amid surroundings that are strange to us, in the old patriarchal life that seems so impossible a mode of existence to the denizens of great cities in modern Europe.

This is equally true throughout the history of the world. It is also true of every individual soul; and it is true of the same soul at different periods of its existence. He is the same God always and everywhere. But there is a difference in the kind of reception which each soul gives to that portion of divine knowledge and grace which it is capable of receiving and which it actually does receive. For they are “divers kinds of vessels, every little vessel, from the vessels of cups even to every instrument of music.”[276] They differ in capacity and they differ in material; and the great God, in revealing himself, does so by degrees. He has deposited, as it were, the whole treasure of himself in the bosom of his spouse, the church; but the births of new grace and further developed truth only come to us as we can bear them and when we can bear them. The body of truth is all there; but the dispensing of that truth varies in degree as time goes on. God governs in his own world; but he does so behind and through the human instruments whom he condescends to employ. And as, in the exercise of his own free-will, man chose the evil and refused the good, so has the Almighty accommodated himself to the conditions which man has instituted. Were he to do otherwise, he would force the will of his creature, which he never will do, because the doing it would have for result to deprive that creature of all moral status and reduce him to a machine. From the moment that we lose the power of refusing the good and taking the evil, from the moment that any force really superior to that which has been put into the arsenals of our own being robs us of the faculty of selection, we lose all merit and consequently all demerit. The Creator, when he made man, surrounded him with the respect due to a being who had the power of disposing of his own everlasting destiny. Nor has he ever done, nor will he do, anything which can entrench on this prerogative. The whole system of grace is a system divinely devised to afford man aid in the selection he has to make. There lies an atmosphere of grace all around our souls, as there lies the air we breathe around our senses. The one is as frequently unperceived by us as the other.[277] We are without consciousness as regards its presence, as we[844] are without direct habitual consciousness of the act of breathing and of our own existence, except as from time to time we make a reflective modification in our own mind of the idea of the air and of the fact of our inhaling it. We are unconscious that it is the divine Creator who is for ever sustaining our physical existence. We are oblivious of it for hours together, unless we stop and think. It is the same with the presence of grace.

And though “exciting” grace, as theology calls it, begins with the illustration of the intellect, it does not follow that we are always by any means conscious of this illustration. It is needless to carry out the theological statement in these pages. What we have said is enough to bring us round to our point, which is that the action of grace on the individual soul, and the long line of direct and indirect revelations of God’s will from the creation to the present hour, though always the same grace and always the same revelation, receive different renderings according to the vehicle in which they are held—much as a motive in music remains the same air, though transposed from one key to another. Not only, therefore, does man, as it were, give a color of his own to the revelation of God, but he has the sad faculty of limiting its flow and circumscribing its course, even where he cannot altogether arrest it. We are “slow of heart to believe,” and therefore is the time delayed when the still unfulfilled promises may take effect. Our Lord declares that Moses permitted the Hebrews to put away their wives, because of the hardness of their hearts; “but from the beginning it was not so.”[278] God’s law had never in itself been other than what the church has declared it to be. The state of matrimony, as God had ordained it, was always meant to be what the church has now defined. But man was not in a condition to receive so perfect a law; and thus the condition of man—that is, the hardness of his heart—had the effect of modifying the apparent will of God, as revealed in what we now know to be one of the seven sacraments. The Hebrews were incapable of anything more than a mutilated, or rather a truncated, expression of the divine will, as it was represented to them in the law of Moses on the married state. Nor could we anywhere find a more perfect illustration of our argument. In the first place, it is given us by our Lord himself; and, in the second, it occurs on a subject which, taken in its larger sense, involves almost every other, lies at the root of the whole world of matter, and of being through matter, and may be called the representative idea of the creation. Now, if on such a question as this mankind, at some period of their existence, and that a period which includes ages of time, and covers, at one interval or another, the whole vast globe, could only bear an imperfect and utterly defective rendering, how much more must there exist to be still further developed out of the “things new and old” which lie in the womb of time and in the treasures of the church, but which are waiting for the era when we shall be in a condition to receive them! The whole system of our Lord’s teaching was based on this principle. He seems, if we may so express it, afraid of overburdening his disciples by too great demands upon their capacity.[845] He says with reference to the mission of S. John the Baptist: “If you will receive it, he is Elias that is to come,”[279] and in the Sermon on the Mount he points out to them the imperfection of the old moral code, as regarded the taking of oaths and the law of talion. Now, the moral law, as it existed in the mind of God, could never have varied. It must always have been “perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.” But it passed through an imperfect medium—the one presented by the then condition of mankind—and was modified accordingly.

We hold, therefore, in what we have now stated, a distinct view of the way in which God governs the world; not absolutely, not arbitrarily, but adaptively. And where we see imperfection, and at times apparent retrogression, it is the free will of man forcing the will of God to his own destruction, “until he who hindereth now, and will hinder, be taken out of the way.”[280]

If this be true of God’s direct revelations of himself, and of his moral law as given from time to time to mankind, according as, in their fallen state, they could receive it—if, in short, it be true of his direct volitions—it is also true of his permissions. If it hold good of the revelations of his antecedent will, it holds good of the instances (so far as we may trace them in the history of the world) of his consequent will; that is, of his will which takes into consideration the facts induced by man in the exercise of his own free will, which is so constantly running counter to the antecedent will of God. The divine permissions form the negative side of the revelation of God. They are his permissive government of the world, not his direct government. The direct government is the stream of revelation given to our first parents, to the patriarchs and lawgivers of Israel, and now, in a more direct and immediate way, through our Blessed Lord in his birth, death, and resurrection, by the church in the sacraments, and through her temporal head, the vicar of Christ.

Even now, when he has consummated his union with his church, and that she is the true organ of the Holy Ghost, and thus the one true and infallible medium and interpreter of God’s direct government of the world, he also governs it by the indirect way of his overruling providence. The events which occur in history have ever a double character. They have their mere human aspect, often apparently for evil alone; and they have their ultimate result for good, which is simply the undercurrent of God’s will working upwards, and through the actions of mankind. Events which, on the face of them, bear the character of unmitigated evils, like war, have a thousand ultimate beneficial results. War is the rude, cruel pioneer of the armies of the Lord; for where the soldier has been the priest will follow. Persecutions kindle new faith and awake fresh ardor. Pestilence quickens charity and leads to improvements in the condition of the poor. Nor do we believe that it is only in this large and general, unsympathetic, and sweeping manner that God allows good to be worked out of evil. We have faith in the intercession of the Mother of Mercy; and as ultimate good may arise to whole races of mankind out of terrible calamities, so, we are[846] persuaded, there is a more intimate, minute, and loving interference to individual souls wherever there is huge public calamity. The field of battle, the burning city, the flood, and the pestilence are Mary’s harvest fields, whither she sends her angels, over whom she is queen, with special and extraordinary graces, to gather and collect those who might otherwise have perished, and, in the supreme moment which is doubtless so often God’s hour, to win trophies of mercy to the honor and glory of the Precious Blood.

Unless we believe in God’s essential, actual, and unintermittent government of the world, we cannot solve the riddle of the Sphinx, and her cruel, stony stare will freeze our blood as we traverse the deserts of life. If we believe only in his direct government, we shall find it chiefly, if not solely, in his church; and the area is sadly limited! If we acknowledge his essential providence in his permissions, if we make sure of his presence in what appears its very negation, then alone do we arrive at the solution of life’s problems; and even this, not as an obvious thing, but as a constant and ever-renewed act of faith in the under-flowing gulf-stream of divine love, which melts the ice and softens the rigor of the wintry epochs in the world’s history. If we admit of this theory, which is new to none of us, though dim to some, we let in a flood of light upon many of the incidents described in the Old Testament, and specially spoken of as done by the will of God, but which, to our farther-advanced revelation of God, read to us as unlike himself. The light of the later interpretation has been thrown over the earlier fact; but in the harmony of eternity, when we are freed from the broken chord of time, there will be no dissonant notes.

There can be no more wonderful proof of God’s unutterable love than the way in which he has condescended to make the very sins of mankind work to his own glory and to the farther revelation of himself. From the first “felix culpa” of our first parents, as the church does not hesitate to call it, down to the present hour—down even to the secret depths of our own souls, where we are conscious of the harvests of grace sprung from repentant tears—it is still the great alchemist turning base metal in the crucible of divine love into pure gold.

It is one of the most irrefragable proofs of the working of a perpetual providence that can be adduced.

Granted that there are no new creations, but that creation is one act, evolving itself by its innate force into all the phenomena which we see, and into countless possible others which future generations of beings will see, nothing of this can prevent the fact that the moral development of the status of mankind, the revelations of divine truth, and consequently of the Deity, through the flow of ages, has ever been a bringing of good out of evil which no blind, irresponsible law could produce. There is no sort of reason why evil should work into its contrary good, except the reason that God is the supreme good, and directs all apparent evil into increments of his glory, thereby converting it into an ultimate good. We must remember, however, that this does not diminish our culpability, because it does not affect our free-will. It does not make evil another form of good. It is no pact with the devil. It is war and victory,[847] opposition and conquest. It is justice and retribution, and it behooves us to see whether we are among those who are keeping ourselves in harmony with the eternal God in his direct government of the world; in harmony (so far as we know it) with his antecedent will; or whether we are allowing ourselves to drift away into channels of our own, working out only the things that he permits, but which he also condemns, and laying up for ourselves that swift devouring flame which will “try every man’s work of what sort it is.”

We have thus arrived at two different views of God’s government of the world—his direct government and his indirect or permissive government. We now come to what we may call his inductive teaching of the world—the way in which truths are partially revealed to us, and come to us percolating through the sands of time, as mankind needs them and can receive them.

Our Lord himself gives us an example of this inductive process when he speaks of “the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob” as being “not the God of the dead, but of the living,” thus showing that the Jews held, and were bound to hold, the doctrine of immortality by an inductive process. The teaching of the old law was symbolic and inductive. The histories of the Old Testament are of the same character. They are written with no apparent design. They are the simple account of such incidents as the historian thought himself bound to record; acting, as he did, under the divine impulse, which underlay his statements without fettering his pen. He was not himself half conscious of the unspeakable importance of his work. Consequently, there is no effort, hardly even common precaution and foresight, in his mode of chronicling events. He glances at incidents without explaining them, because while he wrote they were present to his own experience, and would be to that of his readers. A writer in our day would allude to a person having performed a journey of fifty miles in an hour’s time without thinking it necessary to explain that people travel by steam. In another part he would advert to railroads, and the rapidity of locomotion as their result, equally without a direct reference to the individual who effected fifty miles in an hour. To the reader of three thousand years hence the one incidental allusion will explain and corroborate the other, and thus, by internal evidence, prove the authenticity and consistency of the history. Unintentional coincidences crop up as the pages grow beneath his hand, and to the careful student of Scripture throw light unlooked for on the exactitude and veracity of the narrative. And the substratum of the whole of the Old Testament history is the gradual growth of one family out of all the families of mankind, into which, as into a carefully prepared soil, the seed of divine truth was to be sown. Through all the variety of the Old Testament writers the same underlying design exists; and though this was a special stream of revelation unlike any that now exists or that is now required (for reasons which are obvious to every Catholic who knows what the church is), yet they form an indication of the way in which the divine Creator is for ever governing the world and preparing it with a divine foresight for his ultimate purpose. The Holy Ghost[848] speaks now through a direct organ, which organ is the church. Formerly God spoke through historic events and multitudinous incidents in connection with one race of people. But this very fact authorizes us to believe that the same character of government exists throughout the whole universe in a greater or less degree, and that God is preparing the way for the ultimate triumph of the sacred Humanity and of his spouse the Church, on the far-off shores of sultry Africa, in the inner recesses of silent China, among the huge forests which skirt the Blue Mountains, or amid the glittering glories of the kingdoms of ice.

There is nothing more depressingly sad, more deeply to be regretted, and more difficult to explain than the almost hopeless narrowness of most people in their appreciation of divinely-ordained facts. We live like moles. We throw up a mound of dusky earth above and around us, within which we grope and are content. The treasures of sacred lore, the depths of spiritual science, the infinite variety of Scriptural information, with the divinely-pointed moral of every tale, are things which most of us are content to know exist, and to think no more about. The very lavishness with which God has given us all that we want for the salvation of our souls seems to have stifled in our ungenerous natures the longing to know and to do more. When the Evangelist said that the world would not hold the books that might be written on the sacred Humanity alone, he must have had an intuition, not so much of the material world and material volumes, as of the world of narrowed minds and crippled hearts who would be found stranded on the shores of our much-vaunted civilization and progress.

Few things are more remarkable in the tone and character of modern Catholic writers than the small amount of use they make of Scripture: so strangely in contrast with the old writers, and with even the great French spiritual authors of a century and a half ago. Their pages are rich with Scriptural lore. Their style is a constant recognition of the government and designs of God as shown to us in our past and present, and as we are bound to anticipate them in the future. In our time this has given place to emotional devotion; a most excellent thing in its way, but only likely to have much influence over our lives when it is grounded on solid theology and directed by real knowledge. No doubt it is so in the minds of the authors themselves; but we fear it is rare in those of their ordinary readers, who thus drink the froth off the wine, but are not benefited by the strengthening properties of the generous liquid itself. Nor will they be until they have made up their minds to believe and understand that conversion is not an isolated fact in their lives, but a progressive act involving all the intellect, all the faculties, be they great or small (for each one must be full up to his capacity), and all the heart, mind, and soul. The whole man must work and be worked upon in harmony; and we must remember that it is work, and not merely feeling, consolation, emotion, prettiness, and ornament, but an intellectual growth, going on pari passu with a spiritual growth, until the whole vessel is fitted and prepared for the glory of God.

We think we may venture to say[849] that few things will conduce more to this than the study of the divine Scriptures under the light and teaching of the Catholic Church. In them we find a profound revelation of the character of God. We are, as we read them interpreted to us by the lamp of the sanctuary, let down into awful depths of the divine Eternal Mind. We watch the whole world and all creation working up for the supreme moment of the birth of Jesus; while in the life of our Blessed Lord himself we find, condensed into those wonderful thirty-three years, the whole system of the church—the spiritual fabric which is to fill eternity, the one God-revealing system which is finally to supersede all others.

Unhappily many persons are under the delusion that narrowness and ignorance are the same as Christian simplicity, and that innocence means ignorance of everything else, as well as of evil. These are the people who are afraid to look facts in the face, and to read them off as part of the God-directed history of the world. These are they to whom science is a bugbear. They hug their ignorance as being their great safeguard, and wear blinkers lest they should be startled by the events which cross their path. Grown men and women do it for themselves and attempt it for their children, and meanwhile those to whom we ought to be superior are rushing on with headlong daring, carrying intellectual eminence, and originality, and investigation of science, all before them; while we, who should be clad in the panoply of the faith, and afraid of nothing, are putting out the candles and shading the lamps, that we may idly enjoy a shadow too dense for real work.

And yet is not the earth ours? Is not all that exists our heritage? To whom does anything belong if not to us, the sons of the church, the sole possessors of infallible truth, the only invulnerable ones, the only ever-enduring and ever-increasing children of the light? The past is ours; the present should be ours; the future is all our own. Our triumph may be slow (and it is slower because we are cowards), but it is certain. Are we not tenfold the children of the covenant, the sons of the Father’s house, the heirs of all? We alone are in possession of what all science and art must ultimately fall back upon and harmonize with. There is no success possible but what is obtained, and shall in the future be obtained, in union with the church of God. Have we forgotten, are we ever for a moment permitted to forget, that the church of God is not an accident, nor a cunningly-devised, tolerably able, partially infirm organization, but that she is the spouse of the God-Man, the one revelation of God, perfect and entire, though but gradually given forth; that all the harmonies of science are fragments of the harmony of God himself, of his pure being, of the Qui Est; and that the harmony of the arts is simply the human expression of the harmony of the Logos, the human utterances of the articulations of the divine Word, as they come to us in our far-off life-like echoes from eternity?

Even the great false religions of the past, and of the present in the remote East, are but man’s discord breaking the harmony of truth while retaining the key-note: the immortality of the soul and the perfection of a future state in the deep thoughts of Egypt, the universality[850] of God’s providential government of the world in Greek mythology, the union of the soul with God in Brahminism, and the One God of Mahometanism. Each has its kernel of truth, its ideal nucleus of supernatural belief, which it had caught from the great harmony of God in broken fragments, and enshrined in mystic signs. Even now, as we look back upon them all, we are bound to confess that they stand on a totally different ground from the multitudinous sects of our day, which break off from the one body of the church and drift off into negation or Protestantism. Far be it from us to insinuate that any, the lowest form of Christianity, the weakest utterance of the dear name of Jesus, is not ten thousand fold better than the most abstruse of the old Indian or Egyptian religions. Wherever the name of Jesus is uttered, no matter how imperfectly, there is more hope of light and of salvation than in the deepest symbols of heathen or pagan creeds. It may be but one ray of light, but still it is light—the real warming, invigorating light of the sun, and not the cold and deleterious light of the beautiful moon, who has poisoned what she has borrowed.[281] Nevertheless, and maintaining this with all the energy of which we are capable, it is still true that each one of the great false religions, which at various times and in divers places have swayed mankind, was rather the overgrowth of error on a substantial truth than the breaking up of truth into fragmentary and illogical negation, which is the characteristic of all forms of secession from the Catholic unity of the church. The modern aberrations from the faith are a mere jangle of sounds, while the old creeds were the petrifaction of truth. The modern forms of faith outside the church are a negation of truth rather than a distortion. Consequently, they are for ever drifting and taking Protean shapes that defy classification.

They have broken up into a hundred forms; they will break up into a thousand more, till the whole fabric has crumbled into dust. They have none of the strong hold on human nature which the old religions had, because they are not the embodiment of a sacred mystery, but rather the explaining away of all mystery. They are a perpetual drifting detritus, without coherence as without consistency; and as they slip down the slant of time, they fall into the abyss of oblivion, and will leave not a trace behind, only in so far that, vanishing from sight, they make way for the fuller establishment of the truth—the eternal, the divine, spherical truth, absolute in its cohesion and perfect in all its parts.

The hold which heathen and pagan creeds have had upon mankind conveys a lesson to ourselves which superficial thinkers are apt to overlook. It is certain they could not have held whole nations beneath their influence had not each in its turn been an embodiment of some essential truth which, though expressed through error, remains in itself essentially a part of truth. They snatched at fragments of the natural law which governs the universe, or they embodied in present expression the inalienable hopes of mankind. They took the world of nature as the utterance neither of a passing nor of an inexorable law, but of an inscrutable Being, and believed that the mystical underlies[851] the natural. Untaught by the sweet revelations of Christianity, their religion could assume no aspect but one of terror, silent dread, and deep horror. Their only escape from this result was in the deterioration that necessarily follows the popularization of all abstract ideas, unless protected by a system at once consistent and elastic, like that which is exhibited in the discipline of the Catholic Church. They wearied of the rarefied atmosphere of unexplained mystery. They wanted the tangible and evident in its place. Like the Israelites, they lusted after the flesh-pots of Egypt; and their lower nature and evil passions rebelled against the moral loftiness of abstract truth. The multitude could not be kept up to the mark, and needed coarser food. The result was inevitable. But as all religion involves mystery, instead of working upward through the natural law to the spiritual and divine law, they inverted the process, and grovelled down below the natural law, with its sacramentalistic character, to the preternatural and diabolic. Mystery was retained, but only in the profanation of themselves and of natural laws, until they had passed outside all nature, and, making a hideous travesty of humanity, had become more vile and hateful than the devils they served.

Thus the Romans vulgarized the Greek mythology; and that which had remained during a long period as a beautiful though purely human expression of a divine mystery, among a people whose religion consisted mainly in the worship of the beautiful, and who themselves transcended all that humanity has ever since beheld in their own personal perfection of beauty, became, when it passed through the coarser hands of the Romans, a degenerate vulgarity, which infected their whole existence, in art and in manners, quite as effectually as in religion. Then Rome flung open her gates to all the creeds of all the world, and the time-honored embodiments of fragmentary but intrinsic truth met together, and were all equally tolerated and equally degenerated. All!—except the one whole and perfect truth: the Gospel of Salvation. That was never tolerated. That alone could not be endured, because the instinct of evil foresaw its own impending ruin in the Gospel of peace.

It was a new thing for mankind to be told that a part of the essence of religion was elevated morality and the destruction of sin in the individual. Whatever comparative purity of life had co-existed with the old religions was hardly due to their influence among the multitude, though it might be so with those whose educated superiority enabled them to reason out the morality of creeds. While the rare philosopher was reading the inmost secret of the abstract idea on which the religion of his country was based, and the common pagan was practising the most degraded sorcery and peering into obscene mysteries, without a single elevation of thought, suddenly the life of the God-Man was put before the world, and the whole face of creation was gradually changed.

But as the shadows of the past in the old religions led up to the light, so shall the light of the present lead up to the “perfect day.”

SEARCH FOR OLD LACE IN VENICE.

One is almost ashamed to mention Venice now, or any other of those thousand-and-one bournes of hackneyed travel and staples of hackneyed books. There is probably no one claiming a place in a civilized community who does not know Venice almost as well as do her own children, and who could not discourse intelligently of the Bridge of Sighs, the Doge’s Palace, and the Rialto Bridge, of St. Mark’s and the brazen horses. Still, when one has read multitudinous poems about gondolas and gondoliers, and any amount of descriptions of the Grand Canal, with its palaces of various styles of architecture, and some few dramas about the grand and gloomy, the secret and awful, doings of ancient Venetian life, even then there are nooks in the place and incidents in the doings which escape notice. A traveller arriving at Venice is hardly surprised at the water-street, with which pictures have already made him familiar, but the mode of entering a covered gondola—crab-fashion—is not so familiar, and he generally butts his head against the low ceiling, eliciting a laugh from his gondolier and the good-humored bystanders, before he learns the native and proper way of backing into his seat. So, too, in rowing slowly and dreamily about from church to church, full of artistic marvels or wonderful historical monuments, he feels to a certain degree at home. He has seen all this before; the present is but a dream realized. But there are now and then unexpected sights—though, it must be confessed, not many—and of course such are the most interesting, even if they are by no means on a level with those more famous and more beautiful.

From Venice to Vicenza is but a short distance by rail, and Vicenza boasts of Roman ruins, and mediæval churches, and a Palladian theatre; but on our day’s trip there, in early spring, we certainly dwelt more on the aspect of the woods and plains, with their faint veil of yellow green already beginning to appear, the few flowers in the osteria garden, and the box hedges and aloes in the cemetery. The beauty of the Venetian and Lombard plains lies more in their mere freshness than in their diversity; it is entirely a beauty of detail, a beauty fit for the minuteness of Preraphaelite art rather than for the sweeping brush of the great masters of conventional landscape painting. But coming from Venice every trace of verdure was grateful to the eye, and we felt as one who, having been confined in a beautiful, spacious room, filled with treasures and scented with subtle perfume, might feel on coming suddenly into the fresh air of a prairie. By contrast, the suggestion of fresh air and open space draws us at once to our subject—a search after old lace in one of the cities known to possess many treasures in that line.

Like all other industries in Venice, the sale of lace thrives chiefly on the fancy of the foreign visitors. The natives are generally too poor to buy much of it, and, indeed, much of what is in the market is the product of forced sacrifices made by noble but impoverished families of Venetian origin. It is a[853] sad thing to see the spoils of Italy still scattered over the world, as if the same fate had pursued her, with a few glorious intervals of triumph and possession, ever since the barbarian ancestors of her forestieri rifled her treasure-houses under the banners of Celtic, Cimbrian, and Gothic chieftains. What Brennus, Alaric, and Genseric began the Constable of Bourbon and the great Napoleon continued by force; but what is still sadder is to see the daily disintegration of other treasure-houses whose contents are unwillingly but necessarily bartered away to rich Englishmen, Americans, and Russians. Pictures, jewelry, lace, goldsmith’s work, artistic trifles—precious through their material and history, but more so through the family associations which have made them heirlooms—too often pass from the sleepy, denuded, dilapidated, but still beautiful Italian palace to the cabinet or gallery or museum of the lucky foreign connoisseur, or even—a worse fate—into the hands of men to whom possession is much, but appreciation very little.

While at Venice we were so lazy as never to go sight-seeing, which accounts for the fact that we missed many a thing which visitors of a few days see and talk learnedly about; and if the business activity of an old lace-seller had not brought her to the hotel, our search after lace might never have been made. She brought fine specimens with her, but her prices were rather high, and, after admiring the lace, she was dismissed without getting any orders. But she came again, and this time left her address. We wanted some lace for a present, and fancied that the proverbial facility for taking anything rather than nothing, which distinguishes the Italian seller of curiosities, would induce her to strike some more favorable bargain in her own house, where no other customer would be at hand to treasure up her weakness as a precedent.

It was not easy to find the house. Many intricate little canals had to be traversed (for on foot we should probably have lost our way over and over again); and as we passed, many a quaint court, many a delicate window, many a sombre archway, and as often the objects which we, perhaps too conventionally, call picturesque—such as the tattered clothes drying on long lines stretched from window to window; heaps of refuse piled up against princely gateways; rotten posts standing up out of the water, with the remnants of the last coat of paint they ever had, a hundred years ago; gaudy little shrines calculated to make a Venetian popolana feel very pious and an “unregenerate” artist well-nigh frantic—met our sight. At last the house was reached, or at least the narrow quay from which a calle, or tiny, dark street, plunged away into regions unknown but inviting. Our gondolier was wise in the street-labyrinth lore of his old city, and up some curious outside stairs, and then again by innumerable inside ones, we reached the old woman’s rooms. Of these there were two—at least, we saw no more. Both were poor and bare, and the old lace seller was wrinkled, unclean, good-humored, and eager. She talked volubly, not being obliged to use a foreign tongue to help herself out, but going on with her soft, gliding, but quick Venetian tones. Travelling in Italy and coming in contact with all classes of the people is apt sadly to take down one’s scholarly conceit in knowing the language of Dante[854] and Petrarch; for all the classicism of one’s school-days goes for very little in bargaining for lace, giving orders in a shop or market, or trying not to let boat-and-donkey-men cheat you to your face. There is this comfort: that if you often cannot understand the people, they can almost invariably understand you (unless your accent be altogether outrageous), which saves John Bull and his American cousin the ignominy of being brought an umbrella when they have asked for mushrooms, and actually taken the trouble to give a diagram of that vegetable.

The prices were kept so obstinately above our means that all purchase of lace was impossible; but the old woman was untiring in displaying her stores of antique treasures, and we felt sufficiently rewarded for our expedition. She herself was worth a visit; for, like many ancient Italian matrons, and not a few nearer home, she was one of that generation of models whom you would have sworn has endured from the days of Titian and Vandyke, immortally old and unchangeably wrinkled. You see such faces in the galleries, with the simple title “Head of an old man”—or old woman, as the case may be—attributed to some famous painter; and these weird portraits attract you far more than the youth, and beauty, and health, and prosperity of the Duchess of Este, the baker’s handsome daughter, or the gorgeous Eastern sibyl. Again, you do not care to have any allegorical meaning tacked on to that intensely human face; you would be disgusted if you found it set down in the catalogue as “a Parca,” a magician, or a witch. You seem to know it, to remember one which was like it, to connect it with many human vicissitudes and common, though not the less pathetic, troubles. She is probably poor and has been hard-working; wifehood and motherhood have been stern realities to her, instead of poems lived in luxurious houses and earthly plenty; her youth’s romance was probably short, fervid, passionate, but soon lapsed into the dreary struggle of the poor for bare life. Chance and old age have made her look hard, though in truth her heart would melt at a tender love-tale like that of a girl of fifteen, and her brave, bright nature belies the lines on her face. Just as women live this kind of life nowadays, so they did three and five hundred years ago; so did probably those very models immortalized by great painters; so did others long before art had reached the possibility of truthful portraiture.

Our old friend the lace-seller, though she has given occasion for this rambling digression, did not, however, at the time, suggest all these things to our mind.

If she herself was a type of certain models of the old masters, her wares were also a reminder of famous people, scenes, and places of Venice. They were all of one kind, all of native manufacture, and, of course, all made by hand. In a certain degenerate fashion this industry is still continued, but the specimens of modern work which we saw were coarse and valueless in comparison with those of the old. There were collars and cuffs in abundance, such as both men and women wore—large, broad, Vandyked collars like those one sees in Venetian pictures; flounces, or rather straight bands of divers widths, from five to twenty inches, which had more probably belonged to albs and cottas. They suggested[855] rich churches and gorgeous ceremonial in a time when nobles and people were equally devoted to splendid shows, prosperity and loftiness, and a picturesque blending of the religious and the imperial. Chasubles stiff with gems and altars of precious stones seem to harmonize well with these priceless veils, woven over with strange, hieroglyphic-looking, conventional, yet beautiful forms; intricate with tracery which, put into stone, would immortalize a sculptor; full of knots, each of which is a miniature masterpiece of embroidery; and the whole the evident product of an artist’s brain. This lace has not the gossamer-like beauty of Brussels. It is thick and close in its texture, and is of that kind which looks best on dark velvets and heavy, dusky cloths—just what one would fancy the grave Venetian signiors wearing on state occasions. It matches somehow with the antique XVth and XVIth century jewelry—the magnificent, artistic, heavy collars of the great orders of chivalry; it has something solid, substantial, and splendid about it. Such lace used to be sold to kings and senators, not by a paltry yard measure, but by at least twice its weight in gold; for the price was “as many gold pieces as would cover the quantity of lace required.” Now, although this princely mode of barter is out of fashion, old Venetian “point” is still one of the costliest luxuries in the world, and the rich foreigners who visit Venice usually carry away at least as much as will border a handkerchief or trim a cap, as a memento of the beautiful and once imperial city of the Adriatic. The modern lace—one can scarcely call it imitation, any more than Salviati’s modern Venetian glass and mosaic can be so called—seems to be deficient in the beauty and intricacy of design of the old specimens; it is so little sought after that the industry stands a chance of dying out, at least until after the old stock is exhausted and necessity drives the lace-makers to ply their art more delicately.

Some modern lace, the English Honiton and some of the Irish lace, is quite as perfect and beautiful, and very nearly as costly, as the undoubted specimens the history of which can be traced back for two or three hundred years. But from what we saw of Venetian point, the new has sadly degenerated from the old, and exact copying of a few antique models would be no detriment to the modern productions. To the unlearned eye there is no difference between Venetian glass three or four hundred years old, carefully preserved in a national museum, and the manufactures of last month, sold in Salviati’s warerooms in Venice and his shop in London. Connoisseurs say they do detect some inferiority in the modern work; but as to the lace, even the veriest tyro in such lore can see the rough, tasteless, coarse appearance of the new when contrasted with the old.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Mr. Buckley is a Methodist minister, who seems to be a sensible, honest, and straightforward person, strong in his convictions, ardently religious, and yet abhorring the excesses of credulity and irrational enthusiasm. The substance of his pamphlet was delivered by him as an address before a meeting of Methodist ministers, and is principally directed against some pretences to miraculous powers and wonderful cure-working within his own denomination. So far as this goes, his effort is quite successful, particularly in regard to a certain Rev. Mr. Platt, who professes to have been cured of an obstinate infirmity by the prayers, accompanied by the imposition of hands, of a lady by the name of Miss Mossman. His particular object led him, however, to advance some general propositions respecting real and supposititious miracles, and to sustain these by arguments and appeals to so-called facts, real or assumed, having a much wider range and application than is embraced by his special and immediate purpose. As an argumentum ad hominem, his plea may have been quite sufficient and convincing to his particular audience; but as addressed to a wider circle in the form of a published pamphlet, it appears to be somewhat deficient in the quality and quantity of the proofs alleged in support of its great amplitude and confidence of assertion. It is also defective in respect to the definition and division of the subject-matter. To begin with his definition of miracle: “A true miracle is an event which involves the setting aside or contradiction of the established and uniform relations of antecedents and consequents; such event being produced at the will of an agent not working in the way of physical cause and effect, for the purpose of demonstration, or punishment, or deliverance.” This definition errs by excess and defect—by excess, in including the scope or end as a part of the essence; by defect, in excluding effects produced by an act of divine power which is above all established and uniform relations of antecedents and consequents. This last fault is not of much practical importance in respect to the question of the miracles by which a divine revelation is proved, or of ecclesiastical miracles; because those which are simply above nature, called by S. Thomas miracles of the first order—as the Incarnation and the glorification of the body of Christ—are very few in number, and are more objects than evidences of faith. The first error, however, confuses the subject, and opens the way to a summary rejection of evidence for particular miracles on the à priori ground that they have not that scope which has been defined by the author as necessary to a true miracle. It is evident that God cannot give supernatural power to perform works whose end is bad or which are simply useless. But we cannot determine precisely what end is sufficient, in the view of God, for enabling a person to work a miracle, except so far as we learn this by induction and the evidence of facts which are proved. Mr. Buckley affirms positively that the end of miracles was solely the authentication of the divine legation of Christ and his forerunners in the mission of making known the divine revelation. Consequently from this assumption, he asserts that miracles ceased very early in the history of Christianity. He also professes to have “shown, by the proof of facts, that miracles have ceased. If the great Reformation in Germany, Switzerland, and Scotland, if Methodism, had no miracles; if the missionaries of the Cross [i.e., Protestant] are powerless to work them; and if the best men and women of all branches of the [Protestant] church are without this power, then indeed must they have ceased.” No one will dispute the logical sequence or material truth of this conclusion, so far as it does not extend beyond its own premises. He has made it, however, a general conclusion, and[857] promises to prove it by “conclusive and irresistible proof.” He is therefore bound to prove that miracles had ceased from an early epoch in the universal church, including the whole period before the XVIth century, and in respect to all Christian bodies except Protestants from that time to the present. In respect to the former period, his whole proof consists in a statement that no person of candor and judgment who has read the ante-Nicene fathers will conclude it probable that miracles continued much beyond the beginning of the IId century, and in the assertion “that they have ceased we have proved to a demonstration.” In respect to supposed miracles during the latter period in the Catholic Church, the proof that none of them are true miracles is contained in the statement that “the opinion of the Protestant world is settled” on that head. Very good, Mr. Buckley! Such logical accuracy, united with the intuitive insight of genius, is a conclusive proof that the “assistances which our age enjoys” have amazingly shortened and simplified the tedious processes by which “that indigested heap and fry of authors which they call antiquity” were obliged to investigate truth and acquire knowledge. The reverend gentleman tells us that “I have for some years past been reading, as I have found leisure, that magnificent translation of the ante-Nicene fathers published by T. & T. Clark, of Edinburgh, in about twenty five volumes. To say that I have been astonished is to speak feebly.” Probably the astonishment of Origen, Justin Martyr, and Irenæus would be no less, and would be more forcibly expressed, if they could resume their earthly life and peruse the remarkable address before us. If its author will read the account of the miracles of SS. Gervasius and Protasius given by S. Ambrose, the City of God of S. Augustine, the Ecclesiastical History of Ven. Bede, and Dr. Newman’s Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles, we can promise him that he will experience a still greater degree of astonishment than he did on the perusal of the ante-Nicene fathers. Mr. Buckley appears to be in bona fide, and is probably a much better man than many whose knowledge is more extensive. The hallucination of mind which produces in him the belief that he stands on a higher intellectual plane than Clement of Alexandria and Cyprian in ancient times, or Petavius, Kleutgen, Bayma, and “Jesuits” in general, is so simply astounding, and the credulity requisite to a firm assent to his own statements as “demonstrations” is so much beyond that which was, in the olden time, shown by believing in the “phœnix,” that he must be sincere, though very much in need of information. We cannot help feeling that he is worthy of knowing better, and would be convinced of the truth if it were set before him fairly. It is plain that he has no knowledge of the evidence which exists of a series of miracles wrought in the Catholic Church continuously from the times of the apostles to our own day, and which cannot be rejected without subverting the evidence on which the truth of all miracles whatsoever is based. The number of these which are considered by prudent Catholic writers to be quite certain or probable is beyond reckoning, though still very small in comparison with ordinary events and the experiences of the whole number of Catholics in all ages. Those of the most extraordinary magnitude are relatively much fewer in number than those which are less wonderful, as, for instance, the raising of the dead to life. Nevertheless, there are instances of this kind—e.g., those related of S. Dominic, S. Bernard, S. Teresa, and S. Francis Xavier—which, to say the least, have a primâ facie probability. One of another kind is the perpetually-recurring miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of S. Januarius. The miraculous and complete cure of Mrs. Mattingly, of Washington, is an instance which occurred in our own country, and which, among many other intelligent Protestants, John C. Calhoun considered as most undoubtedly effected by miraculous agency. We mention one more only—the restoration of the destroyed vision of one eye by the application of the water of Lourdes, in the case of Bourriette, as related by M. Lasserre. We are rather more cautious in professing to have demonstrated the continuance of miracles than our reverend friend has been in respect to the contrary. We profess merely to show that his demonstration requires a serious refutation of the arguments in favor of the proposition he denies, and to bring forward some considerations in proof of the title which these arguments have to a respectful and candid examination. Moreover, though we cannot pretend[858] to prove anything, hic et nunc, by conclusive evidence and reasoning, we refer to the articles on the miracle of S. Januarius, and to the translation of M. Lasserre’s book, in our own pages, as containing evidence for two of the instances alluded to, and to the works of Bishop England for the evidence in Mrs. Mattingly’s case.

Besides those supernatural effects or events which can only be produced by a divine power acting immediately on the subject, there are other marvellous effects which in themselves require only a supermundane power, and are merely preternatural, using nature in the sense which excludes all beyond our own world and our human nature. Other unusual events, again, may appear to be preternatural, but may be proved, or reasonably conjectured, to proceed from a merely natural cause. Here is a debatable land, where the truth is attainable with more difficulty, generally with less certainty, and where there is abundant chance for unreasonable credulity and equally unreasonable scepticism to lose their way in opposite directions. Mr. Buckley summarily refers all the strange phenomena to be found among pagan religions to jugglery and fanaticism. Spiritism he dismisses without a word of comment, implying that he considers it to be in no sense preternatural. We differ from him in opinion in respect to this point also. We have no doubt that many alleged instances of preternatural events are to be explained by natural causes, and many others by jugglery and imposture. We cannot, for ourselves, find a reasonable explanation of a certain number of well-proved facts in regard to both paganism and spiritism, except on the hypothesis of preternatural agency. The nature of that agency cannot be determined without recurring to theological science. Catholic theology determines such cases by referring them to the agency of demons. Mr. Buckley is afraid to admit that the alleged “miracles were real and wrought by devils.” “If so,” he continues, “we may ask, in the language of Job, Where and what is God?” We answer to this that God does not permit demons to deceive men to such an extent as to cause the ruin of their souls, except through their own wilful and culpable submission to these deceits. It makes no difference whether the delusion produced is referred to jugglery or demonology in respect to this particular question.

Mr. Allies dedicates this volume, in very beautiful and appropriate terms, to Dr. Newman, who, he says in classic and graceful phrase, having once been “the Hector of a doomed Troy,” is now “the Achilles of the city of God.” The particular topic of the book is the relation of Greek philosophy to the Christian church. A remarkable chapter on the foundation of the Roman Church, in which great use is made of the discoveries of archæologists, precedes the treatment of the Neostoic, Neopythagorean, and Neoplatonic schools, with cognate topics. One of the most interesting and novel chapters is that on Apollonius of Tyana, whose wonderful life, as related by Philostratus, the author regards as a philosophic and anti-Christian myth invented by the above-mentioned pagan writer, with only a slight basis of historical truth. Mr. Allies has studied the deep, thoughtful works of those German authors who give a truly intelligent and connected history of philosophy, and his work is a valuable contribution to that branch of science, as well as to the history of Christianity. One of the most irresistible proofs of the divine mission and divine personality of Jesus Christ lies in the blending of the elements of Hellenic genius and culture, Jewish faith, and Roman law into a new composite, by a new form, when he founded his universal kingdom. A mere man, by his own natural power, and under the circumstances in which he lived, could not have conceived such an idea, much less have carried it into execution. The most ineffably stupid, as well as atrociously wicked, of all impostors and philosophical charlatans are those apostate Christians who strive to drag Christianity down to the level of the pagan systems of religion and philosophy, and reduce it to a mere natural phenomenon. Mr. Allies shows this in a work which combines erudition with a grace of style formed on classic models, and an enlightened, fervent Catholic spirit, imbibed from the fathers and doctors of the church. At a time when the popular philosophy is decked in false hair and mock-jewels, as a stage-queen, it is[859] cheering to find here and there a votary of that genuine philosophy whose beauty is native and real, and who willingly proclaims her own subjection and inferiority by humbly saying, Ecce ancilla Domini.

A very large number of the most highly gifted and learned Catholics throughout Christendom, both clergymen and laymen, are at present employed in writing for the reviews of various classes which have existed for a greater or lesser period of time within the present century. Much of the very best literature of the age is to be found in their articles, and a very considerable part of this is of permanent value. In solid merit of matter and style, and in adaptation to the wants of the time, the best of these periodicals have improved steadily, and we may say of some of them that they hardly admit of any farther progress. The advantage of such periodicals is not only very great for their readers, but almost equally so for those who are engaged in contributing to their contents. The effort and practice of writing constantly for the public react upon the writers. Each one is encouraged and instructed in the most useful and effective method of directing his studies and giving verbal expression to their results, so as to attain the practical end he has in view—that of disseminating and diffusing knowledge over as wide an extent as possible. The combination of various writers, each having one or more specialties, under a competent editorial direction secures variety and versatility without prejudice to unity, and corrects the excesses or defects of individuality without checking originality, thus giving to the resulting work in some respects a superiority over that which is the product of one single mind, unless that mind possesses the gifts and acquisitions in modo eminenti which are usually found divided among a number of different persons. To conduct a review alone is a herculean task, and Dr. Brownson has accomplished a work which is really astonishing in maintaining, almost by unaided effort, through so many years, a periodical of the high rank accorded by common consent to the one which bore his name and will be his perpetual monument. That, at the present juncture, a new review is necessary and has a fine field open before it; that in its management ecclesiastical direction and episcopal control are requisite for adequate security and weight with the Catholic public; and that full opportunity for efficient co-operation on the part of laymen of talent and education is most desirable, cannot admit of a moment’s doubt. It is therefore a matter of heart-felt congratulation that the favorable moment has been so promptly seized and the vacant place so quickly occupied by the gentlemen who have undertaken the editing and the publishing of the American Catholic Quarterly. It is probably known to most, if not all, of our readers that the editors are Dr. Corcoran, professor in the Ecclesiastical Seminary of Philadelphia; Dr. O’Connor, the rector of that institution; and Mr. Wolff, who has long and ably edited the Philadelphia Catholic Standard. It would be difficult to find in the United States an equally competent triad. The publishers, who have already the experience acquired by the management of a literary magazine and a newspaper, will, we may reasonably hope, be able to sustain the financial burden of this greater undertaking in a successful manner, if they receive the support which they have a right to expect, by means of their subscription list. The first number of the new review presents a typographical face which is quite peculiar to itself and decidedly attractive. Its contents, besides articles from each of the editors, are composed of contributions from three clergymen and two laymen, embracing a considerable variety of topics. The clerical contributors are the Right Reverend Bishops Lynch and Becker, and the Rev. Drs. Corcoran, O’Connor, and McGlynn. The lay contributors are Dr. Brownson, John Gilmary Shea, and Mr. Wolff. The names of F. Thébaud, Dr. Marshall, and General Gibbon are among those announced for the next number. We extend a cordial greeting with our best wishes to the American Catholic Quarterly Review.

The Indian question continues to be one of the most troublesome in our national politics. Its only real solution—and we believe this to be President Grant’s opinion—is to Christianize the Indians. The task is undoubtedly a hard[860] one, but it would be far less so if wolves in sheep’s clothing had not been sent among them. The only successful attempt at civilizing the Indians has been made by Catholic missionaries. But under the administration of the Indian Bureau, the utter rottenness of which has been so recently exposed, missions and reservations have been thrown to this religious agency and that without the slightest regard for the wishes of those who, it is to be supposed, were most to be benefited by the operation—the Indians themselves. In this way flourishing Catholic missions were turned over to the Methodist or other denominations, and the representations of the missionaries, as well as of the chiefs and tribes themselves, were of no avail whatever to alter so iniquitous a proceeding. This little manual gives a brief sketch of the status of Catholic Indians and working of the Bureau of Indian Missions. It contains also an earnest appeal to the Catholic ladies of the United States from the “Ladies’ Catholic Indian Missionary Association of Washington, D. C.,” urging contributions and the formation of similar associations throughout the country to aid in sustaining the Catholic Indian missions.

A CORRECTION.

I have just received, through the Catholic Publication Society, the following card from Mr. Gladstone:

Mr. Gladstone is right in disclaiming the words imputed to him in this instance. They are, on investigation, found to be the words of the Rev. Dr. Schaff. The Messrs. Harper, the American publishers of Mr. Gladstone’s tracts, are largely responsible for the mistake, by having inserted in their publication a tract of Dr. Schaff, paged in common, and all covered by the outside title of “Rome and the Newest Fashions in Religion. Gladstone,” and by the title-page giving the authorship “By the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone.” To a writer making selections as needed from different portions of this book the mistake was easy and natural; and though the authorship of Dr. Schaff’s History of the Vatican Decrees containing the passage in question is given, it is not so given as easily to reach the eye, and is obscured by the introduction of Dr. Schaff’s tract into a volume under Mr. Gladstone’s name, and by paging Dr. Schaff’s History in common with Mr. Gladstone’s Vaticanism. On page 83 of this publication of the Messrs. Harper the “irreverent words” are found. I am only too much gratified at Mr. Gladstone’s disowning them, and hasten, on my part, to make this correction through your columns, in which my reply to Mr. Gladstone on Maryland Toleration first appeared, and to beg his acceptance of this amende honorable.

In a notice, which appeared in last month’s Catholic World, of certain works published by Herder, Freiburg, it was stated that the publications of that house are imported by the firm of Benziger Bros. Mr. Herder has a branch house in St. Louis, Missouri, where all his publications may be procured.

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Queen Mary: A Drama. By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co. 1875.

[2] It is proper to state that the present criticism is not by the writer of the article on Mr. Tennyson in The Catholic World for May, 1868.

[3] The preceding article was ready for the printers before a copy fell into our hands of Mary Stuart—a drama by Sir Aubrey de Vere—a poem which it had not been our good fortune to have read before. The public would seem to have exhibited an appreciation of this work we should scarcely have expected from them, for it is, we believe, out of print. For ourselves, we must say that for poetical conception, appreciation and development of the several personages of the drama, it appears to us to be very much superior to Queen Mary.

[4] The title of captal (from capitalis) was formerly a common one among Aquitaine lords, but was gradually laid aside. The Captals de Buch and Trente were the last to bear it.

[5] In the Journal of the Sisters of Charity of that time we read:

“Jan. 22.—M. Vincent arrived at eleven o’clock in the evening, bringing us two children; one perhaps six days old, the other older. Both were crying.…”

“Jan. 25.—The streets are full of snow. We are expecting M. Vincent.”

“Jan. 26.—Poor M. Vincent is chilled through. He has brought us an infant.…”

“Feb. 1.—The archbishop came to see us. We are in great need of public charity! M. Vincent places no limit to his ardent love for poor children.”

And when their resources are exhausted, the saint makes the following pathetic appeal to the patronesses: “Compassion has led you to adopt these little creatures as your own children. You are their mothers according to grace, as their mothers by nature have abandoned them. Will you also abandon them in your turn? Their life and death are in your hands. I am going to take your vote on the point. The charity you give or refuse is a terrible decision in your hands. It is time to pronounce their sentence, and learn if you will no longer have pity on them.”—Sermon of S. Vincent to the Ladies of Charity in 1648.

[6] The Earl of Castlehaven’s Review; or, His Memoirs of His Engagement and Carriage in the Irish Wars. Enlarged and corrected. With an Appendix and Postscript. London: Printed for Charles Brome at the Gun in St. Paul’s Churchyard. 1684.

[7] This was the title given at one time by the French courtiers to Frederick I.

[8] Their first condition for a suspension of arms was a payment to them of £25,000 per month. These were in large part the same forces who afterwards sold their fugitive king for so many pounds sterling to the Parliament, violating the rights of sanctuary and hospitality, held sacred by the most barbarous races. It is curious to observe the supreme boldness with which Macaulay and the popular writers of the radical school essay to gloss over the dishonorable transactions affecting the parliamentary side in this contest between the King and Commons. The veriest dastards become heroes; and the first canting cut-throat is safe to be made a martyr of in their pages for conscience’ sake and the rights of man.

[9] Apol. vii.

[10] Fundam. Phil. lib. vii. c. 7.

[11] Phil. Fundam. lib. vii. c. 7.

[12] Italian proverb: “If not true, it deserves to be true.”

[13] Written during the Pope’s exile, 1848

[14] The Secret Warfare of Freemasonry against the Church and State. Translated from the German, with an Introduction. London: Burns, Oates & Co. 1875. (New York: The Catholic Publication Society.)

[15] S. Mark xiii. 22.

[16] “Vos ergo videte; ecce, prædixi vobis omnia.”—Ib. 23.

[17] “Videte, vigilate, et orate: nescitis enim, quando tempus sit.”—Ib. 33.

[18] “Vigilate ergo … ne, cum venerit repente, inveniat vos dormientes.”—Ib. 35, 36.

[19] “Quod autem vobis dico, omnibus dico: Vigilate!”—Ib. 37.

[20] “Sine parabola autem non loquebatur eis; seorsum autem discipulis suis disserebat omnia.”—S. Mark iv. 34.

[21] “Vobis datum est nosse mysterium regni Dei: illis autem, qui foris sunt, in parabolis omnia fiunt.”—Ib. 11.

[22] “Nescitis parabolam hanc; et quomodo omnes parabolas cognoscetis.”—Ib. 13.

[23] “Nisi venerit discessio primum, et revelatus fuerit homo peccati, filius perditionis, qui adversatur et extollitur supra omne, quod dicitur Deus, aut quod colitur ita ut in templo Dei sedeat, ostendens se, tamquam sit Deus.… Et nunc quid detineat, scitis, ut reveletur in suo tempore. Nam mysterium jam operatur iniquitatis, tantum ut qui tenet nunc, teneat, donec de medio fiat. Et tunc revelabitur ille iniquus (ὁ άνομος), quem Dominus Jesus interficiet spiritu oris sui, et destruet illustratione adventus sui cum; cujus est adventus secundum operationem Satanæ in omni virtute, et signis et prodigiis mendacibus, et in omni seductione iniquitatis iis, qui pereunt; eo quod caritatem veritatis non receperunt, ut salvi fierent. Ideo mittet illis Deus operationem erroris, ut credant mendacio, ut judicentur omnes, qui non crediderunt veritati, sed consenserunt iniquitati.”—2 Thess. ii. 3-11.

[24] “Spiritus autem manifeste dicit, quia in novissimis temporibus discedent quidam a fide, attendentes spiritibus erroris et doctrinis dæmoniorum; in hypocrisi loquentium mendacium, et cauteriatam habentium suam conscientiam.”—1 Tim. iv. 1, 2.

[25] “Hoc autem scito, quod in novissimis diebus instabunt tempora periculosa: erunt homines seipsos amantes, cupidi, elati, superbi, blasphemi, parentibus non obedientes, ingrati, scelesti, sine affectione, sine pace, criminatores, incontinentes, immites sine benignitate, proditores, protervi, timidi, et voluptatum amatores magis quam Dei, habentes speciem quidem pietatis, virtutem autem ejus abnegantes.”—2 Tim. iii. 1-5.

[26] “Venient in novissimis diebus in deceptione illusores, juxta proprias concupiscentias ambulantes.”—2 Peter iii. 3.

[27] “In novissimo tempore venient illusores, secundum, desideria sua ambulantes in impietatibus. Hi sunt, qui segregant semetipsos, animales, Spiritum non habentes.”—S. Jud. 18, 19.

[28] “Filioli, novissima hora est, et sicut audistis, quia Antichristus venit, et nunc Antichristi multi facti sunt: unde scimus, quia novissima hora est.… Hic est Antichristus qui negat Patrem et Filium.”—1 S. John ii. 18, 22.

[29] “Et omnis spiritus qui solvit Jesum, ex Deo non est; et hic est Antichristus, de quo audistis, quoniam venit, et nunc jam in mundo est.”—Ib. iv. 3.

[30] “Si quis habet aurem, audiat.”—Apoc. xiii. 9.

[31] “Hic sapientia est. Qui habet intellectum computet numerum bestiæ.”—Ib. 18

[32] Histoire de la Révolution Française, v. ii. c. 3.

[33] The Secret Warfare of Freemasonry, p. 123.

[34] Ibid. 124.

[35] Those in this country who respect religion, law, and the peace of society should not be imposed upon by the aspect of Freemasonry here. The principles and modes of acting of the society are those we have described. The application of them depends wholly on time, place, and circumstances. The ordinary observer sees nothing in the members of the craft here but a number of inoffensive individuals, who belong to a soi-disant benevolent association which, by means of secret signs, enables them to get out of the clutches of the law, procure employment and office, and obtain other advantages not possessed by the rest of their fellow-citizens. But then the innocent rank and file are the dead weight which the society employs, on occasion, to aid in compassing its ulterior designs. Here there are no civil or religious institutions which stand in their way, and their mode of action is to sap and mine the morals of the community, on which society rests, and with which it must perish. Of what it is capable, if it seems needful to compassing its ends, any one may understand by the fiendish murder of William Morgan. This murder was decided on at a lodge-meeting directed by Freemason officials, in pursuance of the rules of the craft, and was perpetrated by Freemasons bearing a respectable character, who had never before been guilty of a criminal action, who were known, yet were never punished nor even tried, but died a natural death, and who do not appear to have experienced any loss of reputation for their foul deed. (See Mr. Thurlow Weed’s recent letter to the New York Herald.)

[36] Before we proceed to expose the even yet more hideous loathsomeness of this vile association, a few words of explanation are necessary. In all we write we have in view an organization—its constitution and motives—and that only. The individual responsibility of its several members is a matter for their own conscience; it is no affair of ours. We believe that the bulk of the association, all up to the thirtieth degree, or “Knights of the White Eagle,” or “Kadosch,” are in complete ignorance of the hellish criminality of its objects. Even the Rosicrucian has something to learn; although to have become that he must have stamped himself with the mark of Antichrist by the abandonment of his belief in Christ and in all revealed religion. But the vast majority, whose numbers, influence, and respectability the dark leaders use for the furtherance of their monstrous designs, live and die in complete ignorance of the real objects and principles of the craft. We ourselves know an instance of an individual, now reconciled to the church, who was once a Master Mason, and who to this moment is in utter ignorance of them. They are sedulously concealed from all who have not dispossessed themselves of the “prejudices of religion and morality.” The author of the work to which we are indebted for almost all our documentary evidence mentions the case of one who had advanced to the high grade of Rosicrucian, but who, not until he was initiated into the grade of Kadosch, was completely stunned and horrified by the demoniacal disclosures poured into his ears. Most of the Freemasons, however, have joined the body as a mere philanthropic institution, or on the lower motive of self-interest. Nor is it possible to convince these people of the fearful consequences to which they are contributing. Of course, but few of these, it is to be hoped, are involved in the full guilt of the “craft.” Every Catholic who belongs to it is in mortal sin. For the rest, we cannot but hope and believe that an overwhelming majority are innocent of any sinister motives. But it is impossible to exonerate them entirely. For, first, the “craft” is now pursuing its operations with such unblushing effrontery that it is difficult for any but illiterate people to plead entire ignorance; and next, no one can, without moral guilt, bind himself by terrible oaths, for the breaking of which he consents to be assassinated, to keep inviolable secrets with the nature of which he is previously unacquainted. It cannot but be to his everlasting peril that any one permits himself to be branded with this “mark of the beast.”

[37] Secret Warfare of Freemasonry, pp. 51, 52.

[38] Ib. p. 65.

[39] Ib. 207.

[40] Ib. pp. 196-8.

[41] This journal, at the time of the first initiation of the Prince of Wales into the “craft,” in an article on that event, heaped contempt and ridicule on the whole affair. A recent article on the young man’s initiation as Master may satisfy the most exacting Mason.

[42] The writer refers to the highest grades.

[43] Secret Warfare of Freemasonry, pp. 232, 233.

[44] Utopia. By Sir Thomas More.

[45] A sort of divan, not unusual in the East at the present day. The sultan, when receiving a visit of ceremony, sits on a sort of sofa or post-bed. Traces of it were also found in the “palaces” of Ashantec.

[46] “The new spirit made its appearance in the world about the XVIth century. Its end is to substitute a new society for that of the Middle Ages. Hence the necessity that the first modern revolution should be a religious one.… It was Germany and Luther that produced it.”—Cousin, Cours d’hist. de la philos., p. 7, Paris, 1841.

[47] “Non a prætoris edicto, ut plerique nunc, neque a duo decim Tabulis, ut superiores, sed penitus ex intima philosophia haurienda est juris disciplina.”—Cic., De legib. lib. i.

[48] Cic., de fin. bon. et malor. i. 11.

[49] Plato, Des lois, liv. i.

[50] “Illud stultissimum (est), existimare omnia justa esse, quæ scripta sint in populorum institutis et legibus.”—De legibus.

[51] “Neque opinione sed natura constitutum esse jus.”—Ibid.

[52] “Sæculis omnibus ante nata est, (ante) quam scripta lex ulla, aut quam omnino civitas constituta.”—Ibid.

[53] “Quidam corum quædam magna, quantum divinitus adjuti sunt, invenerunt.”—S. Aug., Civit. Dei, i. ii. c. 7.

“Has scientias dederunt philosophi et illustrati sunt; Deus enim illis revelavit.”—S. Bonavent., Lum. Eccl., Serm. 5.

[54] The two following paragraphs are taken freely from the treatise De legibus, passim.

[55] The following paragraph is also taken from Cicero.

[56] “Erat lux vera quæ illuminat omnem hominem venientem in hunc mundum.”—S. Joan., i. 9.

[57] “Et vita erat lux hominum … in tenebris lucet, et tenebræ eam non comprehenderunt.”—Id.

[58] Cont. gent. iv. 13.

[59] V. Lassalle, Das System der erworbenen Rechte, i. 2, not. à la pag. 70.

[60] Considerat. sur la France.

[61] Arbeiter Programm., v. Ferd. Lassalle.

[62] Du suffrage universel et de la manière de voter. Par H. Taine. Paris: Hachette, 1872.

[63] Bergier, after Tertullian.

[64] De Maistre, Princip. générat.

[65] Reflections on the Revolution in France.

[66] Corresp. entre le Comte de Mirabeau et le Comte de la Marck. Paris: Le Normant. 1851.

[67] Politique. l. i. c.

[68] De civit. Dei. 19.

[69] De rebus publ. et princip. institut., l. iii. c. 9.

[70] Reflections on the French Revolution.

[71] “Universa propter semetipsum operatus est Dominus.”—Proverbs xvi. 4.

[72] Polit., vii. 2.

[73] Id. ibid. c. 1.

[74] Aristotle knew no other state than the city.

[75] Isaias xxxiii. See also the words of Jesus to Pilate: “Tu dicis quia Rex ego sum.”

[76] “Dabo legem in visceribus eorum.”—Jer. xxxi.

[77] Viri protestantici ad summum Pontificem appellatio.—Londini, Wyman et fil, 1869.

[78] M. Em. Montaigut, in the Revue des Deux Mondes.

[79] M. Le Play.

[80] De Maistre, Considerat. sur la France.

[81] Fundam. Phil., book vii. ch. 6.

[82] Sicut punctum se habet ad lineam, ita se habet nunc ad tempus. Si imaginemur punctum quiescere, non poterimus imaginari ipsum esse causam lineæ: si vero imaginemur ipsum moveri, licet in ipso nulla sit dimensio, nec aliqua divisio per consequens, per naturam tamen motus sui relinquitur aliquid divisibile.… Illud tamen punctum non est de lineæ essentia; quia nihil unum et idem realiter omnimodis indivisibile potest simul in diversis partibus ejusdem continui permanentis esse.… Punctum ergo mathematice imaginatum, quod motu suo causat lineam, necessario nihil lineæ erit: sed erit unum secundum rem, et diversum secundum rationem; et hæc diversitas, quæ consistit in motu suo, realiter est in linea, non identitas sua secundum rem.… Eodem vero modo instans, quod est mensura mobilis sequens ipsum, est unum secundum rem, quum nihil pereat de substantia ipsius mobilis, cuius instans est mensura inseparabilis, sed diversum et diversum secundum rationem. Et hæc ejus diversitas est tempus essentialiter.

[83] Quia motus primus unus est, tempus est unum, mensurans omnes motus simul actos.—Opusc. 44, De tempore, c. 2.

[84] Stans et movens se non videntur differre secundum substantiam, sed solum secundum rationem. Nunc autem æternitatis est stans, et nunc temporis fluens; quare non videntur differre nisi ratione sola—De tempore, c. 4.

[85] Ista non possunt habere veritatem secundum ea, quæ determinata sunt. Visum est enim, quod æternitas et tempus essentialiter differunt. Item quæcumque se habent ut causa et causatum, essentialiter differunt; nunc autem æternitatis, quum non differat ab æternitate nisi sola ratione, est causa temporis, et nunc ipsius, ut dictum est. Quare nunc temporis et nunc æternitatis essentialiter differunt. Præterea nunc temporis est continuativum præteriti cum futuro; nunc autem æternitatis non est continuativum præteriti cum futuro, quia in æternitate non est prius nec posterius, nec præteritum, nec futurum, sed tota æternitas est tota simul. Nec valet ratio in oppositum, quum dicitur quod stans et fluens non differunt per essentiam. Verum est in omni eo quod contingit stare et fluens esse; tamen stans quod nullo modo contingit fluere, et fluens, quod nullo modo contingit stare, differunt per essentiam. Talia autem sunt nunc æternitatis, et nunc temporis.—Ibid.

[86] Summa Theol., p. 1, q. 46, a. 2.

[87] Novitas mundi non potest demonstrationem recipere ex parte ipsius mundi. Demonstrationis enim principium est quod quid est. Unumquodque autem secundum rationem suæ speciei abstrahit ab hic et nunc; propter quod dicitur quod universalia sunt ubique et semper. Unde demonstrari non potest quod homo, aut cœlum, aut lapis non semper fuit.—Ibid.

[88] Sicut enim si pes ab æternitate semper fuisset in pulvere, semper subesset vestigium, quod a calcante factum nemo dubitaret, sic et mundus semper fuit, semper existente qui fecit.—Ibid.

[89] Et hoc utile est ut consideretur, ne forte aliquis quod fidei est demonstrare præsumens rationes non necessarias inducat, quæ præbeant materiam irridendi infidelibus existimantibus nos propter eiusmodi rationes credere quæ fidei sunt.—Ibid.

[90] Uno modo dicitur æternitas mensura durationis rei semper similiter se habentis, nihil acquirentis in futuro et nihil amittentis in præterito et sic propriissime sumitur æternitas. Secundo modo dicitur æternitas mensura durationis rei habentis esse fixum et stabile, recipientis tamen vices in operationibus suis; et æternitas sic accepta propria dicitur ævum: ævum enim est mensura eorum, quorum esse est stabile, quæ tamen habent successionem in operibus suis, sicut intelligentiæ. Tertio modo dicitur æternitas mensura durationis successivæ habentis prius et posterius, carentis tamen principio et fine, vel carentis fine et tamen habentis principium; et utroque modo ponitur mundus æternus, licet secundum veritatem sit temporalis: et ista impropriissime dicitur æternitas; rationi enim æternitatis repugnat prius et posterius.—Opusc., De tempore, c. 4.

[91] See The Catholic World, May, 1875, page 234 et seq.

[92] Deus aut prior est mundo natura tantum, aut et duratione. Si natura tantum; ergo quum Deus sit ab æterno, et mundus est ab æterno. Si autem est prior duratione, prius autem et posterius in duratione constituunt tempus; ergo ante mundum fuit tempus: quod est impossibile.—Summa Theol., p. 1, q. 46, a. 1.

[93] Deus est prior mundo duratione: sed per prius non designat prioritatem temporis, sed æternitatis. Vel dicendum, quod designat prioritatem temporis imaginati, et non realiter existentis; sicut quum dicitur: supra cœlum nihil est, per supra designat locum imaginarium tantum, secundum quod possibile est imaginari dimensionibus cælestis corporis dimensiones alias superaddi.—Ibid.

[94] Fundam. Philos., book vii. ch. 10.

[95] See The Catholic World, November, 1874, p. 272, and January, 1875, p. 487.

[96] A new interest attaches to this church, in the eyes of American Catholics, since it has been made the Title of the Cardinal-Archbishop of New York.

[97] There is a vague tradition among the Penobscot Indians in Maine that a Jesuit father crossed from the head-waters of the Kennebec to the valley of the Passumpsic, east of the Green Mountains, at an earlier date.

[98] Hist. Maryland, vol. ii. p. 352.

[99] History United States, vol. i. p. 238.

[100] Id. p. 241.

[101] Id. p. 244.

[102] Id. p. 247.

[103] History United States, vol. i. p. 248.

[104] Chalmers’ Annals, vol. i. pp. 207, 208.

[105] Story, Com. on the Constitution, sec. 107.

[106] Sketches of the Early History of Maryland by Thomas W. Griffith, pp. 3, 4.

[107] Bancroft, Hist. U. S., vol. i. p. 238.

[108] The Brit. Emp. in America, vol. i. pp. 4, 5.

[109] Hist. Md., p. 232.

[110] Father Andrew White’s Narrative, Md. Hist. Soc., 1874, p. 32.

[111] Sketches, etc., p. 5.

[112] Davis’ Day-Star of Am. Freedom, p. 149.

[113] History of Maryland, p. 24.

[114] Bozman’s History of Maryland, p. 109.

[115] History of United States, vol. i. p. 241.

[116] History of Maryland, p. 24.

[117] Maryland Toleration, p. 36.

[118] History of Maryland, p. 33.

[119] History of United States, p. 257.

[120] Maryland Toleration, p. 40.

[121] Day-Star of American Freedom, p. 36.

[122] Day-Star of American Freedom, p. 38.

[123] History of Maryland, vol. ii. p. 85.

[124] History of the United States, p. 252.

[125] Day-Star of American Freedom, p. 138.

[126] Rev. Ethan Allen says this continued until 1649, when Kent was erected into a county.—Maryland Toleration, p. 36.

[127] Day-Star of American Freedom, p. 143.

[128] Id. p. 160.

[129] The document at length, with the signatures, is given in numerous histories of Maryland, and will be found in Davis’s Day-Star of American Freedom, p. 71.

[130] Kent’s Commentaries on Am. Law, vol. ii. pp. 36, 37.

[131] Reprinted from advance sheets of The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Edited, with preface, notes, and illustrations, by the Rev. Alex. B. Grosart; now for the first time published, by Moxon, Son & Co., London. These works will fill three volumes, embracing respectively the political and ethical, æsthetical and literary, critical and ethical, writings of the author, and, what will interest American readers especially, his Republican Defence.

[132] Afterwards Father Faber of the Oratory. His “Sir Launcelot” abounds in admirable descriptions.

[133] “For us the stream of fiction ceased to flow,” (dedicatory stanzas to “The White Doe of Rylstone”).

[134] See his sonnet on the seat of Dante, close to the Duomo at Florence (Poems of Early and Late Years).

[135] “Evening Voluntary.”

[136] A Song of Faith, Devout Exercises, and Sonnets (Pickering). The dedication closed thus: “I may at least hope to be named hereafter among the friends of Wordsworth.”

[137] It may be well to remark here that in this century the word domestic was familiarly used to designate one who was attached to the house and fortunes of another.

[138] Mme. Louise, Duchess of Angoulême, and mother of Francis I.

[139] By the statutes of præmunire, all persons were forbidden to hold from Rome any provision or power to exercise any authority without permission from the king, under penalty of placing themselves beyond his protection and being severely punished.

[140] Wolsey’s customary designation of Anne Boleyn.

[141] This corresponded to the court of marshalsea in England.

[142] During the memorable conclave at which Pius IX. was elected, this office was held by Monsignor Pallavicino, who caused to be struck, according to his right, a number of bronze and silver medals with his family arms quartering those of Gregory XVI. Above his prelate’s hat on the obverse were the words Sede Vacante, and on the reverse the inscription Alerames ex marchionibus Pallavicino sacri palatii apostolici præfectus et conclavis gubernator 1846.

[143] It dates from the year 1535, when Paul III. permitted his majordomo Boccaferri to assume on his coat-of-arms, as an additament of honor (in the language of blazonry), one of the lilies or fleurs-de-lis of the Farnese family. If the subject prefer to do so, he may bear the Pope’s arms on a canton, carry them on an inescutcheon, or impale instead of quartering them.

[144] While writing this, we hear of the elevation to the purple of the majordomo Monsignor Pacca, whom we have had the honor, when a private chamberlain to the Pope, of knowing and of serving under. He was one of the most popular prelates at the Vatican for his urbanity and attention to business. He is a patrician of the bluest blood of Beneventum and nephew to the celebrated Cardinal Pacca, so well known for his services to Pope Pius VII. and for his interesting Memoirs.

[145] The grated prison for such offenders was a chamber deep down among the vaults of the Cellarium Majus of the Lateran.

[146] This office still exists, and is one of the important charges at the papal court which is always held by a layman. It was hereditary in the famous Conti family until its extinction in the last century, when it passed, after a considerable interval, on the same condition into that of Ruspoli as the nearest representative of that ancient race.

[147] Ambassadors and foreign ministers accredited to the Holy See claim the right of presentation or of access through the Cardinal Secretary of State.

[148] It is well to observe that briefs are not sealed with the original ring, which does not go out of the keeper’s custody except the Pope demand it, but with a fac-simile preserved in the Secreteria de Brevi. Since June, 1842, red sealing-wax, because too brittle and effaceable, is no longer used; but in its stead a thick red ink, or rather pigment, is employed.

[149] In England, by a similar fiction, the king (or queen) is imagined to preside in the Court of King’s Bench.

[150] The first convent of the Dominicans in Rome, at Santa Sabina on the Aventine, was in part composed of a portion of the Savelli palace, in which Honorius, who belonged to this family, generally resided, so that their founder could not help remarking the misbehavior of the loungers about the court. He did not go out of his way to find fault.

[151] There was a somewhat similar office of very ancient institution at the imperial court of Constantinople, the holder of which was called Epistomonarcha.

[152] Peter Filargo was a Greek from the island of Candia, which may account for his love of what at a pontiff’s table corresponded to the symposium of the ancients—a species of after-dinner enjoyment, when, wine being introduced, philosophical or other agreeable subjects were discussed.

[153] The special significance of this title given to Cardinal McCloskey is that his predecessor in the see of New York and its first bishop, Luke Concanen, who was consecrated in Rome on April 24, 1808, was a Dominican, and had been for a long time officially attached to the convent and church of the Minerva, which was the headquarters of his order.

[154] See The Catholic World, August, 1875, p. 625.

[155] See The Catholic World, September, 1874, p. 729.

[156] The Catholic World, March, 1874, p. 766.

[157] See the two articles on “Substantial Generations” in The Catholic World, April and May, 1875.

[158] See The Catholic World for February, 1874, pp, 584. 585.

[159] See The Catholic World, May, 1874, p. 178.

[160] In the Aristotelic theory, a third kind of movement, ratione termini, was admitted—that is, movement towards dimensive quantity, as when an animal or a tree grows in bulk. But bodies acquire greater bulk by accession of new particles, and this accession is carried on by local movement. Hence it seems to us that the motus ad quantitatem is not a new kind of movement.

[161] S. Thomas explains this point in the following words: Quum magnitudo sit divisibilis in infinitum, et puncta sint etiam infinita in potentia in qualibet magnitudine, sequitur quod inter quælibet duo loca sint infinita loca media. Mobile autem infinitatem mediorum locorum non consumit nisi per continuitatem motus; quia sicut loca media sunt infinita in potentia, ita et in motu continuo est accipere infinita quædam in potentia.—Sum. Theol., p. 1, q. 53, a. 2. This explanation is identical with our own, though S. Thomas does not explicitly mention the infinitesimals of time.

[162] Music of Nature.

[163] This was an anachronism in costume which in our day would not be pardonable, but it was common enough until within half a century ago. The queen of James I., Anne of Denmark, insisted upon playing the part of Thetis, goddess of the ocean, in a “monstrous farthingale” (in modern speech, a very exaggerated crinoline.)

[164] Puttenham, Art of Poesie, pub. in 1589, quoted in Ritson.

[165] Probably some coarse lace or net

[166] The Complete Angler, or the Contemplative Man’s Recreation.

[167] Harmless

[168] Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England.

[169] Penny Magazine, 1834.

[170] This word has no English equivalent; it means the casting out of the heart—a hyperbolical manner of expressing the most excessive nausea.

[171] The Council of Trent decreed nothing on the subject of the authority of the church: that of the Vatican had to supply the omission. The struggle with Protestantism on this subject reached its last stage in the definition of the dogma of Papal Infallibility decreed by the church assembled at the Council of the Vatican.

[172] In its numbers of April 22 and May 16 last the Unità Cattolica passed a high eulogium on the work of Father Hecker. “There is in this work,” says the Abbé Margotti, “a great boldness of thought, but always governed by the faith, and by the great principle of the infallible authority of the Pope.”

[173] “A Song of Faith.” 1842. Besides that poem, my father published two dramatic works, viz. Julian the Apostate (1823) and The Duke of Mercia, 1823. In 1847, his last drama, Mary Tudor, was published. He was born at Curragh Chase, Ireland, on the 28th of August, 1788, and died there on the 28th of July, 1846.—A. de Vere.

[174] Dr. Schenck said: “It had been a maxim that the fool of the family should go into the ministry, and he was sorry to say that there were many of those who had groped their way into it. It had been stated that a minister would often pay twice before he would be sued.… Rev. Dr. Newton said that he would stand a suit before he would pay twice. The speaker replied that he was glad there was some pluck in these matters” (Report in the Philadelphia Press).

[175] Short for Frederika.

[176] From the German.

[177] Father Faber’s Bethlehem.

[178] London: Pickering, 1875. This pamphlet has been already translated into German under the title Anglicanismus, Altkatholicismus und die Vereinigung der christlichen Episcopal-Kirchen. Mainz: Kirchheim. 1875.

[179] Father Schouvaloff (Barnabite), April 2, 1859.

[180] Gladstone, Vaticanism, p. 110.

[181] Second Edition, with a Letter of Mgr. Mermillod, a Special Preface, and an Appendix. London: Washbourne.

[182] Gladstone, Vaticanism, p. 94.

[183] We are authorized by Father Tondini to remark that, for the purpose of his argument, he has confined himself to speaking of the non-popular election of bishops; but in case any one should say that Mr. Gladstone referred not to bishops only, but also, and very largely, to clergy, besides that Mr. Gladstone’s expressions do not naturally lead the reader to make any exception for himself, Father Tondini is able to show that even with respect to the inferior clergy Mr. Gladstone’s statement is inaccurate.

[184] In the appendix to the second edition of The Pope of Rome, etc., will be found a prayer composed of texts taken from the Greco-Sclavonian Liturgy, where are quoted some of the titles given by the Greco-Russian Church to S. Peter, and, in the person of the great S. Leo, even to the Pope. This appendix is also to be had separately, under the title of Some Documents Concerning the Association of Prayers, etc., London, Washbourne, 1875.

[185] See “Future of the Russian Church” in The Catholic World, 1875 (amongst others).

[186] Expostulation, p. 30.

[187] “More than once,” says Father Tondini in a note on this subject—“more than once, in reading defences of the Catholic Church, written with the best intentions, we could not resist a desire that in the ‘Litanies of the Saints,’ or other prayers of the church, there might be inserted some such invocation as this: A malis advocatis libera nos, Domine.’—‘From mischievous advocates, O Lord! deliver us.’ We say this most earnestly, the more so that it applies also to ourselves. Many a time, when preparing our writings, we have experienced a feeling not unlike that of an advocate fully convinced of the innocence of the accused, but dreading lest, by want of clearness or other defect in putting forth his arguments, he might not only fail to carry conviction to the mind of the judges, but also prejudice the cause he wishes to defend. Never, perhaps, is the necessity of prayer more deeply felt.”

[188] With regard to the powers of the sovereign over the episcopate we quote the following from the London Tablet for March 27, 1875: “Among other tremendous stumbling-blocks against the claims for the Church (of England) by the High Church party a candid writer in the Church Herald is ‘sorely staggered by the oath of allegiance, according to which we have the chief pastors of the church declaring in the most solemn manner that they receive the spiritualities of their office only from the queen, and are bishops by her grace only.’”

In connection with the foregoing we cannot refrain from citing a passage from Marshall, which is as follows: “Any bishops can only obtain spiritual jurisdiction in one of two ways—either by receiving it from those who already possess it, in which case their (the English bishops’) search must extend beyond their own communion, or by imitating the two lay travellers in China of whom we have somewhere read, who fancied they should like to be missionaries, whereupon the one ordained the other, and was then in turn ordained by him, to the great satisfaction of both.”

[189] See Contemporary Review for July.

[190] Since writing the above we happened to see the following case in point, in the Church Times of September 10, 1875, in which a clergyman, signing himself “a priest, not of the Diocese of Exeter,” writes a letter of remonstrance against the violent abuse heaped by “a priest of the Diocese of Exeter” against the late learned and venerable Vicar of Morwenstow, Mr. Hawker, who, on the day before his death, made his submission to the Catholic Church. From this letter, which contains many candid and interesting admissions, we quote the following: “In these days, when we have among us so many dignitaries and popular preachers of the Established Church who in their teaching deny all sacramental truth, while others cannot repeat the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds without a gloss, and others again boldly assert that ‘the old religious ideas expressed in the Apostles’ Creed must be thrown into afresh form, if they are to retain their hold on the educated minds of the present generation, it appears monstrous that a clergyman whose faithful adhesion to the Prayer Book during a ministry of forty years was notorious should be denounced as a ‘blasphemous rogue and a scoundrel’ because he held opinions which are considered by some individual members of either church as denoting ‘a Roman at heart,’ or, in the exercise of a liberty granted to everyone, thought fit to correspond with influential members of the Church of Rome.”

[191] Expostulation, page 21; iv. “The third proposition.”

[192] “Cooks and controversialists seem to have this in common: that they nicely appreciate the standard of knowledge in those whose appetites they supply. The cook is tempted to send up ill-dressed dishes to masters who have slight skill in, or care for, cookery; and the controversialist occasionally shows his contempt for the intelligence of his readers by the quality of the arguments or statements which he presents for their acceptance. But this, if it is to be done with safety, should be done in measure.”—Gladstone, Vaticanism, pp. 82, 83.

[193] In the German edition of Father Tondini’s pamphlet, the abstract of this document is given in the original German, as it is to be seen in the Bonner Zeitung of June 15, 1871.

[194] S. Cyprian (so confidently appealed to by the Old Catholics), speaking of Novatian, and, as it were, of Dr. Reinkens’ consecration, says: “He who holds neither the unity of spirit nor the communion of peace, but separates himself from the bonds of the church and the hierarchical body, cannot have either the power or the honor of a bishop—he who would keep neither the unity nor the peace of the episcopate.”—S. Cyprian, Ep. 52. Compare also Ep. 76, Ad magnum de baptizandis Novationis, etc., sect. 3.

[195] “Je suis entré dans une de ces lignées ininterrompues par l’ordination que j’ai reçue des mains de Mgr. Heykamp, évêque des vieux Catholiques de Deventer.”—Lettre Pastorale de Mgr. l’Evêque Joseph Hubert Reinkens, Docteur en Théologie. Paris: Sandoz et Fischbacher, 1874, p. 11.

[196] Programma of Old-Catholic Literature, libr. Sandoz et Fischbacher. Paris.

[197] “Pastoral Letter” (Programma, etc.), p. 7.

[198] Silbernagl (Dr. Isidor), Verfassung und gegenwärtiger Bestand sämmtlicher Kirchen des Orients. Landshut, 1865, pp. 10, 11.

[199] See The Catholic World, January-April, 1875.

[200] See The Pope of Rome and the Popes of the Orthodox Church, 2d ed., pp. 97, 98. Washbourne, London.

[201] King, The Rites, etc., p. 295. Quoted in The Pope of Rome, etc., p. 98. See also for what concerns the election of the Russian bishops the Règlement ecclésiastique de Pierre le Grand, avec introduction, notes, etc., par le R. P. Cæsarius Tondini. Paris: Libr. de la Soc. bibliographique.

[202] “The idea,” says Polevoi, “that spiritual matters do not appertain to the authority of the sovereign was still so deeply rooted in men’s minds that, in the very first session of the Spiritual College, some members dared (osmelilis) to ask the emperor: ‘Is then the Patriarchal dignity suppressed, although nothing has been said about it?’ ‘I am your Patriarch!’ (Ya Vash Patriarkh!) angrily (gnevno) exclaimed Peter, striking his breast. The questioners were dumb.”

“This account of Peter’s coup d’état,” adds Father Tondini, “was printed at St. Petersburg in the year 1843, and, be it observed, not without the approbation of the censors.” See Pope of Rome, etc., p. 107.

[203] “These principles have, by the constant aggression of curialism, been in the main effaced, or, where not effaced, reduced to the last stage of practical inanition. We see before us the pope, the bishops, the priesthood, and the people. The priests are absolute over the people; the bishops over both; the pope over all.…”—Vaticanism, p. 24.

[204] See French manifesto.

[205] See London Tablet, August 21.

[206] See Annales Catholiques, September 25.

[207] See London Tablet, Aug. 21.

[208] We wonder that it does not occur to Dr. von Döllinger’s disciples to make some calculation, from the number of changes his views have undergone during the last five years, as to how many they had better be prepared for, according to the ordinary rule of proportion, for the remaining term of his probable existence—e.g., four changes in five years should prepare them for eight in ten, and for a dozen should the venerable professor live fifteen years more. They should, further, not forget to ascertain, if possible, for how long they themselves are afterwards to continue subject to similar variations in their opinions; for one would suppose they hope to stop somewhere, some time.

[209] Echo Universel.

[210] See Annales Catholiques, 23 Septembre, 1873. Paris: Allard.

[211] Ernest Naville (a Protestant), Priesthood of the Christian Church.

[212] The bell of S. Louis’ Church, Buffalo, N. Y.

[213] Among the Spanish subjects in the colonies, there was a class corresponding to the Loyalists of the American Revolution. One of these was Don Miguel Moreno, a magistrate belonging to a most respectable colonial family, and the honored father of His Eminence the present Archbishop of Valladolid, who was born in Guatemala on Nov. 24, 1817, and is therefore, in a strict sense of the word, the first American who has been made a cardinal.

[214] Message of December 2, 1823.

[215] It is curious to contrast the tedious trials that Rome endured before being able to appoint bishops to independent Spanish America, with her ease in establishing the hierarchy in the United States. Yet the Spaniards and Loyalists, who sometimes forgot that political differences should never interfere with religious unity, might have found a precedent for this aversion in the case of their northern brethren. In a sketch of the church in the United States, written by Bishop Carroll in 1790, it is said that “during the whole war there was not the least communication between the Catholics of America and their bishop, who was the vicar-apostolic of the London district. To his spiritual jurisdiction were subject the United States; but whether he would hold no correspondence with a country which he, perhaps, considered in a state of rebellion, or whether a natural indolence and irresolution restrained him, the fact is he held no kind of intercourse with priest or layman in this part of his charge.”—B. U. Campbell “Memoirs, etc. of the Most Rev. John Carroll,” in the U. S. Catholic Magazine, 1845.

[216] He was translated by Leo XII. in 1825 to the residential see of Città di Castello.

[217] Cardinal Wiseman has made a slip in saying (Last Four Popes, p. 308) that the refusal to receive Mgr. Tiberi gave rise to “a little episode in the life of the present pontiff.” Tiberi went as nuncio to Madrid in 1827, consequently long after Canon Mastai had returned from Chili. It was in the case of the previous nuncio, Giustiniani that a “passing coolness,” occasioned the apostolic mission to South America.

[218] Artand (Vie de Léon XII.) indicates in a note to p. 129, vol. i., the sources whence he obtained these views of the late Prime Minister, which are given in full.

[219] In 1836 Mgr.—afterwards Cardinal—Gaetano Baluffi, Bishop of Bagnorea, was sent to this country as first internuncio and apostolic delegate. He published an interesting work on his return to Italy, giving an account of religion in South America from its colonization to his own time: L’America un tempo spagnuola riguardata sotto l’aspetto religioso dall’ epoca del suo discoprimento, sino al 1843. (Ancona, 1844.)

[220] Dublin Review, vol. xxiv., June, 1848. The full title of this rare work (of which there is no copy even in the Astor Library) is as follows: Storia delle Missioni Apostoliche dello stato del Chile, colla descrizione del viaggio dal vecchio al nuovo monde fatto dall’ autore. Opera di Giuseppe Sallusti. Roma, 1827, pel Mauri.

[221] This was Gen. Bernard O’Higgins, a gentleman of one of the distinguished Irish families which took refuge in Spain from the persecutions of the English government. He was born in Chili of a Chilian mother. His father had been captain-general of what was called the kingdom of Chili, and was afterwards Viceroy of Peru. The younger O’Higgins was a very superior man, taking a principal part in asserting the independence of his native land, of which he became the first president; but unfortunately he died in 1823, a few months before the arrival of the apostolic mission.

[222] Palma boasts of its ancient title of Muy insigne y leal ciudad, and that its habitants have been distinguished “en todos tiempos por su filantropia con los naufragos”—a specimen of which we give.

[223] In the southern hemisphere January comes in summer.

[224] Cordova was formerly the second city in the viceroyalty. It had an university, erected by the Jesuits, which was once famous. An ex-professor of this university wrote a book which has been called “most erudite,” but which is extremely rare. There is no copy in the Astor Library, although it is an important work for the information it gives about religion in South America under Spanish rule. The title is Fasti Novi Orbis et ordinationum Apostolicarum ad Indias pertinentium breviarium cum adnotationibus. Opera D. Cyriaci Morelli presbyteri, olim in universitate Neo-Cordubensi in Tucumania professoris. Venetiis, 1776.

[225] Pio IX. Por D. Jaime Balmes, Presbitero, Madrid, 1847.

[226] The Annuario Pontificio of 1861 called it Americano Ispano-Portoghese, but the name was since changed to the present one.

[227] This clergyman came to the notice of the Pope from the fact that an uncle of his, a very worthy man, had been one of Canon Mastai’s great friends in Chili, and was named and confirmed Archbishop of Santiago, but resigned the bulls. His nephew was made an apostolic prothonotary in 1859. It was reported that Mgr. Eyzaguirre gave eighty thousand scudi to the South American College out of his own patrimony. We have enjoyed the pleasure of a personal acquaintance with him.

[228] Protestantism and Catholicism in their bearing upon the Liberty and Prosperity of Nations. A study of social economy. By Emile de Laveleye. With an introductory letter by the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P. London: 1875.

[229] The Old Faith and the New, p. 86.

[230] Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 220.

[231] Minas in Evangeline, probably as a guide to the pronunciation. Haliburton also gives this spelling, but it is now abandoned for the old Acadian French form.

[232] They even went so far as to deliberate whether these people could be considered human beings or not; but the church, always the true and faithful guardian of the rights of humanity, immediately raised her voice in their favor, and was first to render, by the mouth of Pope Paul III., a decision which conferred on them, or rather secured them, all their rights.

[233] Campeggio, before he became cardinal, had been married to Françoise Vastavillani, by whom he had several children. We are more than astonished at the ignorance or bad faith of Dr. Burnet, who takes advantage of this fact to accuse the cardinal of licentiousness.

[234] This young man carried also the letters from Henry VIII. to Anne Boleyn, which had been referred to the cardinal during the course of the trial. They are still to be seen in the library of the Vatican.—Lingard’s History of England.

[235] Gentilism: Religion previous to Christianity. By Rev. Aug. J. Thébaud, S.J. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co. 1876.

[236] It is, however, something more than a hypothesis. The confirmation it receives from the fact that since the prevalence amongst so large a portion of mankind of an uniformity of rite and dogma, and the universality of brotherhood occasioned thereby, what seemed to be obstacles have become means of intercommunion, to such an extent that the whole World has become, as it were, one vast city, gives it the force of a demonstration.

[237] Gentilism, p. 67.

[238] Gentilism, p. 65.

[239] Gentilism, p. 110.

[240] Gentilism, p. 124.

[241] Ib. pp. 152, 153.

[242] S. Matthew xvi. 4.

[243] 3 Kings xix. 11, 12.

[244] Deuteronomy xxxiii. 27.

[245] In the Cité Mystique of the Blessed Marie d’Agreda there are one or two passages which indicate a belief that the Blessed Virgin was more than once admitted to the Beatific Vision before her Assumption. Of course the assertion is not of faith. Possibly it may admit of a more modified explanation. On the other hand, Our Lady being equally free from original as from actual sin, it is more rash to attempt to limit her privileges than to suppose them absolutely exceptional.

[246] Romans xi. 34.

[247] In other words, theirs is a more imperfect being than ours; though whether its imperfection is to exclude all idea of their having a fuller development whereby and in which they will be indemnified for their sinless share in fallen man’s punishment is still an open question.

[248] We say liberalism, but we might say Freemasonry; for, as we all know, Masonry is merely organized liberalism.

[249] The Idea of a University, p. 469.

[250] Notes of a Traveller, pp. 402, 403.

[251] Lay Sermons, p. 61.

[252] The Social Condition, etc., vol. i. p. 420.

[253] The following language amply sustains our assertion: “Des Teufels Braut, Ratio die schöne Metze, eine verfluchte Hure, eine schäbige aussätzige Hure, die höchste Hure des Teufels, die man mit ihrer Weisheit mit Füszen treten, die man todtschlagen, der man, auf dass sie hässlich werde einen Dreck in’s Angesicht werfen solle, auf das heimliche Gemach solle sie sich trollen, die verfluchte Hure, mit ihrem Dünkel, etc, etc.”

[254] “Aber die Wiedertaufer machen aus der Vernunft ein Licht des Glaubens, dass die Vernunft dem Glauben leuchten soll. Ja, ich meine, sie leuchtet gleich wie ein Dreck in einer Laterne.”

[255] Der Culturkampf in Preussen und seine Bedenken—“Considerations on the Culture-Struggle in Prussia”—von J. H. von Kirchmann. Leipzig, 1875.

[256] Culturkampf, pp. 5-7. For an account of the Falk Laws and persecution of the church in Germany, see Catholic World for Dec., 1874, and Jan., 1875.

[257] Page 9.

[258] Tacit. Annal., xv. 44.

[259] Culturkampf, pp. 16-19.

[260] The above article is a translation of one which appeared in the Revue Générale of Brussels, December, 1875, and was written by Dr. Dosfel. In The Catholic World, November, 1871, a complete analysis of Dr. Lefebvre’s work on Louise Lateau, quoted so largely in the discussion before the Academy, was given. The article now presented to our readers gives a calm, impartial statement of the case of Louise Lateau as it stands to-day before the scientific investigation of the Academy.—Ed. Cath. World.

[261] Louise Lateau. Etude médicale. Par Lefebvre. Louvain: Peeters.

[262] Dr. Imbert-Gourbeyre, in his work, Les Stigmatisées.

[263] Bulletin of the Academy for the year 1875. Third series, Book ix., No. 2, p. 145.

[264] Maladies et facultés diverses des mystiques. Par le Dr. Charbonnier, p. 10, et suiv.

[265] The same work.

[266] Report of M. Warlomont, Mémoires de l’Académie de Médecine, p. 212.

[267] Professor Lefebvre had himself declared that, to invest the matter with a rigorously scientific character, the question of abstinence ought to be the object of an inquiry analogous to that which has established the reality of the ecstasy and of the stigmatization.

[268] Vascular tumors.

[269] White blood corpuscles.

[270] Acts xvii. 23.

[271] 1 Cor. xii. 31.

[272] Gal. iii. 19.

[273] 3 Kings vi. 7.

[274] Genesis iii. 8.

[275] Malachias iv. 2.

[276] Isaias xxii. 24; or, as it may be translated: “The vessels of small quality, from vessels of basins even to all vessels of flagons.”

[277] Suarez holds that grace is not always perceptible. There are moments when we are conscious of the distinct action of grace, by the direct perception of its effects in our soul. These are the exceptions, which are multiplied with increasing holiness, until they become the rule, and heroic sanctity is perfected in all its parts.

[278] S. Matthew xix. 8.

[279] S. Matthew xi. 14.

[280] “Tantum ut qui tenet nunc, teneat, donec de medic fiat.”—2 Thessalonians ii. 7.

[281] It is injurious to sleep in the light of the moon; and it produces rapid putrefaction in dead fish, etc.

Visited at	AND CONFIRMED.
_______________	_____ _________
_______________	_____ _________
_______________	_____ _________

Catholics.	Protestants.
Lord Baltimore. Mr. Green. Mr. Clarke. Mr. Fenwick. Mr. Bretton. Mr. Manners. Mr. Maunsell. Mr. Peake. Mr. Thornborough—9.	Lt.-Gov. Stone. Mr. Price. Mr. Vaughan. Mr. Conner. Mr. Banks. Mr. Browne—6.

Catholic.	Protestant.
The executive, Lord Baltimore, The Assembly, 2.	None.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

CONTENTS.

POETRY.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XXII., No. 127.—OCTOBER, 1875.

MR. TENNYSON’S QUEEN MARY.[1]

“O VALDE DECORA!”

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

CHAPTER IX.

QUESTIONS CONCERNING THE SYLLABUS. DOCTRINAL AUTHORITY OF THE SYLLABUS. FROM LES ETUDES RELIGIEUSES, ETC.

SIR THOMAS MORE. A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

I.

THE BIRTH-PLACE OF S. VINCENT DE PAUL

LORD CASTLEHAVEN’S MEMOIRS.[6]

A SWEET SINGER: ADELAIDE ANNE PROCTER.

THE COLPORTEURS OF BONN.

EARLY PERSECUTIONS OF THE CHRISTIANS.

THE UNREMEMBERED MOTHER.

DURATION.

THE STARS.

WILLIAM TELL AND ALTORF.

S. PHILIP’S HOME.[13]

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS RECEIVED.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XXII., No. 128.—NOVEMBER, 1875.

FREEMASONRY.[14]

SIR THOMAS MORE. A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

II.

IS SHE CATHOLIC?

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

CHAPTER X. Alarming Symptoms.

ÆSCHYLUS.

A PRECURSOR OF MARCO POLO.

A PARAPHRASE, FROM THE GREEK.

THE LAW OF GOD AND THE REGULATIONS OF SOCIETY. SUMMARY CONSIDERATIONS ON LAW.

I.—THE MODERN STATE.

II.—MODERN LIBERTY.

III.—DIVINE ORIGIN OF LAW.

IV.—NATURAL LAW ACCORDING TO PAGAN PHILOSOPHERS.

V.—INFLUENCE OF PANTHEISM ON MODERN LAW.

VI.—HAS THE GENERAL WILL RULED SINCE 1789?

VII.—DOES UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE EXPRESS THE GENERAL WILL?

VIII.—IS THE GENERAL WILL COMPETENT TO MAKE LAWS?

IX.—CONSEQUENCES OF THE SECULARIZATION OF LAW.

X.—CHRISTIAN DEFINITION OF NATURAL LAW.

XI.—CONTINUATION: THE END OF SOCIETY ACCORDING TO THE NATURAL LAW.

XII.—CHRISTIAN LAW.

XIII.—CONCLUSION.

DURATION.

II

AN INCIDENT OF THE REIGN OF TERROR.

STORY OF THE LOCKET.

THE CHARITIES OF ROME.

SONG.

PROGRESS VERSUS GROOVES.

TRACES OF AN INDIAN LEGEND.

FINDING A LOST CHURCH.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XXII., No. 129.—DECEMBER, 1875.

MR. GLADSTONE AND MARYLAND TOLERATION.

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

CHAPTER XI. A DINNER AT THE COURT, WITH AN EPISODE.

RECOLLECTIONS OF WORDSWORTH.[131] BY AUBREY DE VERE, ESQ.

PART I.

PART II.

SIR THOMAS MORE. A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

III.

SINE LABE CONCEPTA

VILLAGE LIFE IN NEW HAMPSHIRE.

THE PALATINE PRELATES OF ROME.

MAGGIORDOMO.

MAESTRO DI CAMERA.

UDITORE.

MAESTRO DEL SACRO PALAZZO.

POWER, ACTION, AND MOVEMENT.

NOT YET.

SONGS OF THE PEOPLE.

PIOUS PICTURES.

SUMMER STORMS.

THE KING OF METALS FROM THE FRENCH.

THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.

THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXII., No. 127.—OCTOBER, 1875.

QUESTIONS CONCERNING THE SYLLABUS.
DOCTRINAL AUTHORITY OF THE SYLLABUS.
FROM LES ETUDES RELIGIEUSES, ETC.

SIR THOMAS MORE.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXII., No. 128.—NOVEMBER, 1875.

SIR THOMAS MORE.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

CHAPTER X.
Alarming Symptoms.

THE LAW OF GOD AND THE REGULATIONS OF SOCIETY.
SUMMARY CONSIDERATIONS ON LAW.

THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXII., No. 129.—DECEMBER, 1875.

CHAPTER XI.
A DINNER AT THE COURT, WITH AN EPISODE.

RECOLLECTIONS OF WORDSWORTH.[131]
BY AUBREY DE VERE, ESQ.

SIR THOMAS MORE.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

THE KING OF METALS
FROM THE FRENCH.

THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXII., No. 130.—JANUARY, 1876.

YULE RAPS.
A CHRISTMAS STORY.

THE APOSTOLIC MISSION TO CHILI.
A CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF PIUS IX.

THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXII., No. 131.—FEBRUARY, 1876.

CHAPTER XII.
THE BARONET IS RELIEVED.—A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY.

SIR THOMAS MORE.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

MADAME’S EXPERIMENT.
A SAINT AGNES’ EVE STORY.

CHAPTER I.
OUR IMPRESSIONS.

THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXII., No. 132.—MARCH, 1876.

CHAPTER XIII.
THE SEARCH NEARLY OVER.

SIR THOMAS MORE.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.